The Wasp - Volume I Spring 2018

The American Studies Center Student Journal University of Warsaw Volume I Spring 2018 ISSN: 2450-5676

wasp /wɒsp/ AmE /wɑsp/ noun [C] 1 a black and yellow flying insect which can sting you: There’s a wasps’ nest in that old tree! 2 when translated into the language of the country where the weather is schizophrenic and where even refugees do not wish to go (see: Poland), it becomes an osa – a place where all meanings collapse: Yesterday, I spent an amazing day at OSA! (here: an abbreviation for Ośrodek Studiów Amerykańskich, English: American Studies Center)

LILLA ORLY Editor-in-chief ALEKSANDRA BARCISZEWSKA NATALIA OGÓREK Associate editors KAMILA MARIA WYSZYŃSKA PAWEŁ PAŃCZYK DTP BASIA SZUKAŁA PR ALEKSANDRA DĄBROWA Illustration: page 47

KLAUDIA WYPYCH Illustration: page 13

JACEK CYGAN Illustration: page 43

KLAUDIA WANAT Illustrations: pages 39, 44

TERESA BAKALARSKA Illustrations: pages 36, 37

ANITA MAJEWSKA Illustration: page 4 Caricatures: pages 48-51

MATEUSZ BOCZKIEWICZ Illustration: page 33

MAGDALENA KRZEMIŃSKA Front and back cover Illustrations: pages 6, 21/22

MAŁGORZATA DUDO Illustration: page 20/21

MARTA RAPACKA Caricatures: pages 48-51

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And I Still Can See True Death But Through My Fears Lilla Orly 4 ARTICLES FICTION Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Between a Footbridge and a Trolley What if the Evil Queen Had Instagram?

Filip Kalinski Jacek Cygan 6 42 Notes on Melancholic Anatomy To End Gerrymanderying, Use State Constitutions Aleksandra Barciszewska Marcelina Przespolewska 10 44 Danse Macabre Blanche DuNoire Lilla Orly Aleksandra Grabowska 20 46 Falling Apart Mateusz Boczkiewicz 32 POETRY Fix It Teresa Bakalarska 36 Spider Teresa Bakalarska 37 Moloch Sofiya Voytukhova 38 In Memory of Charles Olson Sofiya Voytukhova 39 The next issue’s theme: Lean, Mean Drama Queen: Attention, Scandal, and Everything in Between We’re still recruiting!

If you’re interested in writing for The Wasp, please contact us: thewaspjournal@gmail.com Facebook: facebook.com/thewaspjournal American Studies Center: asc.uw.edu.pl The WASP | Volume I | Spring 2018

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And I Still Can See True Death But Through My Fears ‘‘‘Diane, I’ve never seen so many crawling, winged insects in my life,’ Agent Dale Cooper spoke gravely into his tape recorder, the stale taste of that morning’s coffee from the Double R still on his breath. At his feet was a girl’s carcass wrapped in plastic, the opaqueness and the pleats of the material nearly identical to the bounded corpse that had transformed his life previously. Inside the sheathe, hundreds of the stingered creatures buzzed angrily, their bodies percussing against the shield that kept them contained.

‘We’re going to have to open it sooner or later, Coop,’ Harry spoke up, he placed his hands on his hips as his face betrayed his words. Agent Cooper nodded and lifted the corner of the bundle held beneath the weight of the body.

Before the flap could even fall to the ground, the wasps bottlenecked at the gap of freedom they were permitted and sped out into the cold air fiendishly. The cadaver had no face; where features would normally have peaked and valleyed was a smooth area of skin. The thing’s hands clung to a magazine. As the last of the peevish pests cleared, the title was revealed, The Wasp.”

Love him or hate him, Lynch is one of the most notable American directors to date. So much so, that his surname is worthy of nominalization in the same way that Orwell or Kafka’s patronymics have molded into apparatuses of substantive language. Something Lynchian is synonymous to the unfathomable dark, to the sinisterly macabre, to the eerily sensual. It evokes the uncanny feeling of meeting yourself in a dream, or realizing those around you are speaking backwards. It’s the darkness in the woods that promises what is unseen is so much worse than anything that ever will be seen. Such an aura of frightening unearthliness is gospel in our book.

This issue’s piece of the month is a trial of ethical boundaries. “Between a Footbridge and a Trolley,” by the moral ponderer, Filip Kaliński, puts one of many lives on the line to consider if killing in any way, shape, or form is permissible. In breaking down both sides of the good vs. bad ratio to their human components, Kaliński demonstrates the trouble in slapping a dollar sign before one’s existence. Not a tale that lets the reader sit comfortably in their seat, the challenge is projected from the protagonist to the squirming spectator for an afterglow of principle analysis.

Meanwhile, just follow the zigs and the zags of the black and white floor, down the red curtain draped corridor, past the statue and furniture, grasp this issue tightly, and we’ll see you in another 25 years more…

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Lilla Orly All-nonsense Editor-in-Chief subsisting from printed word to printed word. Enamored by the grim cavities of a too saccharine existence, and tracing half-truths in negative space. Digs meandering routes and gnarly tunes as well as the concept of an ever-expanding universe.

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FICTION

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Piece of the month

Between a Footbridge and a Trolley Filip Kaliński

We cannot understand what a cognitive dissonance is, nor do we want to. You might want to judge me, I am sure that, from your point of view hiding behind those white cleanly ordered pages, it is easy. I don’t blame you. As a matter of fact, I envy you. You are still able to speculate, to create your own ideas of TRUTH, to create your own ideas of possible MOTIVES. It’s convenient… I envy you this CONVENIENCE. Still, at the same time, I solely believe that those who are being judged by you don’t care what you think, if you were operating in the same conditions they did, you might have done the same thing or even worse. Don’t even for a second let yourself think that you might make a better choice or that there is one.

War is good business, regardless of what one might think about it. Whether it’s just or unjust, whether it’s motivated by social inequality, different religious beliefs, or political systems. There is always a good dime in it. To kill for yourself is murder. To kill for your government is heroic.

To kill for money is just as ideologically clean. They do it because it’s their job. These people are professional soldiers. Are they better or worse than the so-called regular army? I’d say neither are better or worse, but at least these men won’t hide behind abstract ideas. They are killers, rapists, and looters. Just not zealots. The rise of private military companies changed the face of New Zanzibar Land, forever. From that point on, the new regime was born—the regime of capitalism. The world has never before seen this proportion of social inequality. It was not about race, and the only God was the one printed on money. I like to think that the real God would have found this world both sad and funny, which makes it even funnier when you realize that comedy is based in misery. We live in a world where everything has a price.

***

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To Jasper Stuart it seemed as if he had walked through this concrete corridor for the millionth time. Long, twinkling lamps placed on the walls made it look as if it was endless. Was he destined for this never-ending journey? From behind the horizon, a big glassy door started to appear. Through the glass, Jasper could already see a brightly lighted room paved with white, cold tiles. There was also something else, a certain “furniture,” to name it playfully. Jasper always pretended not to recognize it, but he knew exactly what it was. When he entered the room he could finally see it… a cross-shaped bed.

“Good morning, Grimm. Not good to see you again,” he whispered, as if he was afraid someone might hear him.

Jasper walked around the bed, gently touched the pillow and then set up to loosen the belts on the cross’s arms. He performed all his actions quickly but precisely, as if everything he touched in the room burned his hands. At the same time, one could easily conclude that it wasn’t the first time he had done it. When he finished working on the bed, he then placed his gaze at the solid steel case standing in the corner of the room. Knowing exactly what was inside, Jasper slowly walked to it. Out of the pocket of his scrubs, the young doctor pulled out a magnetic card and placed it in the slot.

“Aren’t you supposed to wait for me before you take the chemicals?” said an older man who had just appeared behind Jasper.

“Judge Coldwell! You startled me! I’m sorry, you’re right,” said Jasper, trying to avoid looking the old man right in the eyes.

“I know what you feel, you are emotionally torn and think you are a bad person, but you are not,” Judge Coldwell grabbed Jasper’s arm, pulled the sleeve of his scrubs and asked, pointing at the tattoo of a snake curled around the rod, “What is it?”

“It’s the Rod of Asclepius.”

“Exactly! It is the symbol of your creed. ‘Do no harm,’ right? Except this time, it is not about taking the life of one person; it is about not letting him spill the blood of dozens. YOU ARE A GOOD PERSON! A HERO, EVEN! You will stop the spreading of the disease. He is not even a human, this… this thing is a terrorist. You’ve watched TV, you know what he has done?! Remember Jasper… collateral damage can be justified, if the gain outweighs the cost.”

They had to stop the conversation as two masked guards entered the room dragging a prisoner with them. “Can we proceed?” asked one of them. Judge Coldwell only nodded in approval, then he looked at Jasper and pointed his hand at the steel case. While the guards fought with the prisoner, trying to strap him to the cross-shaped bed, the young doctor pulled out a medium-sized syringe and a vial full of yellow, transparent liquid. With the young prisoner already strapped to the “Grimm,” the procedure started. Stuart could not stop looking at the prisoner. A young man, probably in his twenties, seemed more like a student, but certainly not a dangerous zealot. Jasper stood there, surrounded by this tornado of thoughts, waging a battle he would wage for what seemed to be the millionth time. It always looked exactly the same, there was no victory nor defeat. But then why did he always feel like he had lost a little bit of his soul? In his mind, he heard someone saying his name, louder with each repetition…

Jasper, Jasper…Jasper…Jasper.

“Jasper! Please don’t make me repeat myself,” said Judge Coldwell, “Are you ready for the injection?”

“Yes, yes, I am, sir!” Jasper wasn’t sure how this had happened, but the syringe was already filled with the liquid.

“Good, then let’s get to work. John Mill, for spreading anarchy, for stealing, and for attempt-

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Piece of the month ed murder on a PMC officer, I hereby sentence you to death by lethal injection. Do you have any last words?” The prisoner kept quiet. “Doctor, please proceed.”

Stuart put the needle in the prisoner’s vein and looked away.

“If you are about to release me from this fucking joke of a world, then at least have the decency to look me in the eye. You might think you’re doing something good, but so did I.” Stuart looked into the prisoner’s eyes, but at that point he was already gone. Jasper did not question anything and was not sure of anything, well maybe except for one thing… he wouldn’t be getting a lot of sleep that night. *** The following week was supposed to bring Jasper a fresh start. Unfortunately, no matter how good the justification, murder is always murder. He sat there in the cantina of Merciful Heart Hospital sipping strong, black coffee, hoping that maybe today, he would really keep his promise to his creed, “First, do no harm.” But the voices in his head kept repeating the same phrase over and over: “… collateral damage can be justified, if the gain outweighs the cost…”

“Hey dude, you okay?” asked a mysterious man sitting in front of Jasper.

“Who… How long have you been sitting here?”

“I dunno, a couple of minutes. You seemed to be walking with your head in the clouds, man.

Didn’t even bother to notice a fellow doctor?”

“I am very sorry, the last couple of days were rather harsh. You must be new here. My name is Jasper.”

“Phil Cassidy is the name, and I know who you are, as a matter of fact, Jasper. It is not a coincidence that I am sitting here,” the tone of his voice changed dramatically.

“I’m sorry but I don’t follow,” he said, confused.

“You see, you are a brilliant surgeon. A man full of passion. A man who never turns his back on those who need him. I’ve got five patients here. Pretty much all terminal. Good people who will not survive if they don’t find a donor and, get this, they all have the same blood type. Convenient, ain’t it? In this line of work, it seems obvious that we can’t save everyone; it’s the same story in this situation. Except, I think I can save four out of five.”

“Sounds like a pretty good deal to me, but why would you come with this to me?”

“Because, I, in order to save four, need to sacrifice one. I would literally have to wait it out until this girl’s heart stops beating.” Phil pulled a photo out of his pocket and showed it to Jasper. “She will die sooner than the rest of them, of that I’m sure. I would just have to stop giving her any medication. I would literally have to secure her death in order to save more lives. But I think there is a way to save all of them.”

“What is this? Some kind of trolley dilemma riddle? At this point, you could pretty much find someone with the blood type you need and harvest their organs.”

“Exactly my point!” Phil smiled, his gaze suggesting Jasper had connected the dots.

“What are you, fucking stupid?! Get the hell out of my sight before I report you!”

“Oh, shut up! I know you also work at the prison. I have already found a suitable candidate.”

Cassidy put his records on the table. “Just look at it!”

“Robert Sacco Vanzetti. Sentenced to death by hanging for first-degree murder and spreading socialist propaganda,” Jasper read. “I remember this case. This man confessed, but there were too many unsolved questions. The only reason he got sentenced was because his lawyer was found to have destroyed evidence; the ‘but’ here is that the execution will take place in half a year and, from what I understand, those people don’t have that much time.”

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“No, they don’t. Still, there is a way to save those people. You just have to make sure that a tiny little bit of arachis oil will land in Vanzetti’s next meal. I already took the liberty of making sure that he will become an ‘honorable donor.’”

“There is no way. You are straight out of your goddamn mind, dude. I’m leaving!” Jasper stood up and decided to leave, only to be grabbed by Phil.

“Think about it. One person, who will die anyway, on one side, and five innocent people on another. Imagine it as if they were standing on the scale. We all know what you would really do in this prison. You are the angel of death, and I know you hate it. You were chosen based on your psychological profile. They made you a killer because they knew you are obedient. How do you feel about that?”

“I exist and I find it nauseating,” his voice seemed to break a little and his eyes became watery.

“You are a doctor because you wanted to save people, not to strip them of their lives. But this time, you might actually do some good. I know that the only strip of tape that keeps your mind from collapsing is based on the idea that you are following the law. I’m sure you struggle because you know deep in your heart that this grotesque martial law is faulty. That is why we have to oppose it. Of course, we will pay for it one way or another but, right now, in this situation, the only thing you can do is to execute your free will. You can either kill one person already destined to die and save five people—people who have families praying for them, people who have possible happy futures.

Will you keep your hands clean and close your eyes for the suffering of the innocent?

Remember, that at this point, with this information, no matter what you choose, you already are a killer. We are just talking about proportions.”

So, what is YOUR choice?

Filip Kaliński World champ in creativity (Destination Imagination) from a small town of Giżycko. Always looking for another great story. Generally speaking, self-righteous artist and whisky lover.

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Notes on Melancholic Anatomy Aleksandra Barciszewska

Chapter 1: Top Notes

Right in the center on the bedside table was a picture of a man and woman dearly holding a golden lab puppy—the apple of their eyes, the quasifruit of their loins—enclosed in a black ion-plated sterling silver frame. The canine offspring’s name was Hope, the woman’s Maria, the man’s not important—Maria cut him off shortly after the picture was taken. In the morning, when the mucus in the corner of her eyes would blacken the sanity till it was wiped with a hem of her ripped sleeping tee, Maria would still glide her fingertips over the shadow cast upon Hope’s long-gone fur. She would mourn a bit till her face was covered with leftovers of the brain’s resistance toward the sunlight. Hope was the most devoted life companion she had ever had. The tiny, insignificant fact hidden in-between the memories of Hope was the sad truth—Hope was just a sequence of pixels found in a lifestyle magazine in her doctor’s waiting room.

All the keepsakes around the living room—a “Love You to the Moon and Back” mug given by her first boyfriend, chandelier inherited from her favorite aunt, abstract painting from her best friend, Stephen King book collection from her professor—were a misconstrued reality of signifiers. At first, her parents would try amending God’s faulty design by interpreting the reality and translating the world into the language of care, but, at some point, it had become hurtful for Maria. Discovering layers of invisible contradictory meaning behind the already welcomed message would leave her flabbergasted, filled with non-assimilative confusion and hostility.

She was all unaware of her peculiar condition, but till she was nurtured and overseen by her parents, it really didn’t matter. When the blackest hour on the family clock struck, the cuckoo bird had to spread its wings and commence an adult life. When death did Maria and her mom part, the humongous pickle was the father’s sole snack—without Rose, he couldn’t bear the responsibility, nor did he want to deal with such burden by himself. He had to let her go. As the last shadow of care, he engaged in the script Maria’s mind would write. The only safety net that he weaved was an emergency number he wanted her to have. It was to be used only in the situation of utmost desperation, incomprehensible heaviness, and excruciating hopelessness that caused blackouts.

Day 8,920 Sitting on the front porch, Maria was recalling and trying not to remember the dark day her mother was taken down by the Secret Service, just a few weeks before. Sighs of hate mixed with rage had been fueling the planned assassination of the President each day. The house was covered with blueprints of buildings near the routes the President’s car would take; constant phone calls from her associates; target practicing at the firing range; following each mention of possible rally he would participate in. Yet, Maria only connected the dots when she found her father with tear-filled eyes, watching the news, inhaling the smell off her mother’s favorite pashmina shawl.

After that incident, he was never the same. In order to get close to Rose, he wanted to continue her life work and finish what she started, so he had to be institutionalized in a maximum-security facility. The 6’5” tall, athletic-build, dark-haired Secret Service agent who fell in love with Maria—and the one who deprived the girl of her caregiver—gave her his number in case of any danger, threat, or disturbance. A broken shell of a man who sacrificed himself to protecting the President, he was simply unable to build a life with Maria, but he promised to be there for her

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whether she ever needed him. An unfulfilled romance left upon her measly heart a blunt-force trauma; an hourglass-shaped imprint destined to engrave the loss with grains of sand sliding from one vessel into the other. The sequence of numbers was the sole string that provided the necessary tightening of neurons to lead her chief project called “life.”

The number on a yellowed remnant of a paper was safely located inside an oval wood chest—a family heirloom, scarlet letter of a gruesome past—and buried amongst scrapbooks with all TV appearances of her mother. There were many times when the numbers were introduced onto her cellphone keyboard, but in-between the first digit and the green-phone button, the catastrophe imploded into the kernel, dusted with hope for a better tomorrow.

Day 10,220 A theatrical preamble to the bus 209 that would take her, each day, downtown, the vehicle begot nectarous exhausts that frayed the baby hair creeping out erect on her maroon-tainted hair. Squinting a bit to spot the awaited transportation, on the other side of the street Maria noticed a man in a navy uniform slitting the throat of an approximately 80-year-old man trying to inhale the last breaths of his pain-spiked existence. When the old man dropped dead, he was dragged by his loafer-encrusted feet to a FedEx delivery van, and the bloodstain spatter on the driveway was then quickly washed with a garden hose. The scene was quick; a second after the last red drop mixed with water reached the nearest drain hole, birds were chirping again, a boy was chasing soap bubbles his sister was making, the bus came.

Maria stepped into the vehicle, greeted Hank and observed a few newly appeared wrinkles, and took her regular seat—the one next to hers was taken by a man most women would call ‘handsome.’ Probably of Hispanic descent, the man’s dark skin corresponded well with his white long-sleeve shirt revealing jet black chest hair and a gold necklace with a cross pendant. After he welcomed her with a smile, he engaged in pretending not to notice the human being clearly fascinated with his George Clooney eyes. He thoroughly scraped out the dirt from under his nails, twisted and untwisted a leather bracelet on his wrist at least twenty times, and adjusted unruly hair strands at least a dozen times.

“It’s my stop,” he said with a velvety soft voice that ignited a dangerous albeit pleasurable disturbance in Maria’s body. “I’m sorry we didn’t have more time,” he kissed her cheek, and just as he was heading toward the exist, she grabbed his wrist, took off the bracelet and whispered, “We will.” As he left and the bus recommenced its journey, she inhaled the smell of sweat and Paco Rabanne perfume off of it. Later that day, she was watching the news and the George Clooney– eyed news reporter recalled an incident in the Middle East, phantom-caressing the void once inhabited by genuine leather.

Day 4,062 Understanding that Frank Adelstein did not shove her into the locker, poured pig’s blood all over her head, and called her nafka was outside her comprehensive capabilities. A dozen of witnesses in the headmaster’s office contradicting her memories gave her a piercing headache and introduced the rush of confusion she thought she had bid farewell already.

“I understand that you believe that this actually happened, Maria,” the headmaster’s tone was polite and overly sympathetic, while the students were clearly perplexed they had to participate

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in such a bizarre situation, but they followed the lead and nodded with compassion, “but you cannot insist that this happened. It’s not a conspiracy, sweetie, and no one wants to hurt you.

Your parents told me about your condition and—” “What condition? I don’t understand why you’re all lying to me, I did nothing wrong!”

“Maria, you exaggerate certain things. Not on purpose, I know that, but you have to remember—” “I’m not exaggerating anything. I still have bruises on my elbows to prove he did shove me there. And ruined my favorite sweater with the blood!”

“Could you all leave now, please? Thank you,” she asked the students and got up from her chair to close the door behind them and sit right next to Maria. “I think it’s perhaps better if you go home now, what do you think? You’ve been through a lot. I’m going to call your parents and we’ll figure something out.”

When the parent went to the meeting with the headmaster, Maria was on pins and needles, anxious to hear the verdict—she wondered what kind of punishment there was for a person speaking the(ir) truth. She hid in the closet, clutching to the red Santa sweater once stained with pig’s blood, praying to God and begging him to provide her with tranquility that would stop the storm in her mind. The moment they came back, they didn’t say a word; her mother gave her a long, putting-the-world-back-together hug. It was Maria’s last day at school; from that moment on, she was homeschooled by her mother.

Day 12, 553 A piece of a shattered window on the kitchen floor glistened in the sunlight, waiting to get stuck in the sole of Maria’s left foot. The incident was yet another proof of the neighbors’ reluctance toward accepting her living there. The super in the building constantly laughed at her suspicions accompanied by clear proofs, but she knew better—the Gellers were the ones who wrote obnoxious words on her door, stole the anticipated Christmas card from her fiancé, poisoned her dog, and broke into her apartment one day. She carefully collected all the pieces of glass, cleaned the blood, and put a Band-Aid on the wound.

She just got back home from visiting her mother’s grave—it was just a few days after the 10th anniversary of Rose’s death. The conversation with her mother was full of resentment, bitterness, broken dreams, and wasted hopes until she noticed—somewhere through the eyelashes soaking wet with salty-tasting tears—a funeral procession to an empty spot in the far left corner of the cemetery. Oddly intimate and quiet, the ceremony comprised of only three presumable family members and the funeral home staff. Maria observed the quick and sterile burial from afar, and after everyone had left, she decided to come closer and pray for the deceased.

Inside a lonely peony bouquet lying on the ground, she found a picture of a man. Even though it had been years since she had last seen him, Maria recognized her father’s face—a slightly aged version of the man who raised her was vaguely smiling from the photograph. She didn’t know why no one even bothered to call her and inform her. True, she hadn’t been on good terms with his father’s family, nor had she visited him throughout the years—the facility actually forbade all visitations and any contact—but still, it wouldn’t have been such a hassle to simply call her. Yet, even if no one officially told her about the funeral or the circumstances of his death, Maria knew.

It was no coincidence—her father killed himself on the very same day Rose died because he just couldn’t bear the sad, deserted world without her. She couldn’t blame him. Rose also meant the world to her and even though that maddening passion eventually got her killed, it helped her build a serene, safe universe for Maria.

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Apprehending the death of her father meant losing that last string that connected her to Rose, and that broke Maria into thousands of pieces. The sand beneath her feet loosened and she couldn’t keep balance. The rush of burning blood in her veins made her collapse on the ground, radiating with helplessness and yearning to drown in the six-feet-under embrace. The voice trapped inside her lungs caused excruciating pain that made her tremble with nausea. Still holding to the bouquet, she found herself on the bus, going back home. The glass, the blood, the Band-Aid. The number. Some 2s, some 0s, a 5, a 7, more 2s. Green phone. The person you are calling is currently unavailable. Please try your call again later. The number, the glass, the blood. The person you are calling is currently unavailable. A 2, the glass, a 0, more blood, more 2s, the number.

The 2, the 0. More blood.

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Chapter 2: Heart Notes “I love you more than you can imagine,” he said while gliding his thumb across her lower lip, fondling the surface to prepare it for a passionate kiss to come.

“Not sure whether I should be happy or insulted you underestimate the power of my imagination,” she smiled lazily, closed her eyes, and slowly sucked his finger. *** “It doesn’t matter what you did, honey. I love you with all my heart and that’s the only thing that matters to me, you hear me?” her mother whispered.

“Even if I become a serial killer, a criminal… a Republican?”

“Yes, even then,” she laughed and hugged her even more. *** “I do,” he responded.

“Do you take this man to—” “I do, I do!” she wrapped her arms around her husband-to-be’s neck. *** The affection Sylvia encountered throughout her entire life nourished her body and created an addict hungry for more. Literally. The love from her first boyfriend left her satiated for a month. Her family’s unconditional love was an IV gradually delivering sustenance that kept her alive. A junkie that she’d become, she distilled particles of love that resuscitated her feeble heart back into its biological duty.

When her parents were informed of structural irregularities in their daughter’s heart, they did not comprehend the gravity of the statement. An abortion was not an option—they had been trying to conceive for more than five years, and they were not ready to waste the only opportunity they had ever gotten. Their unborn child’s heart was of an unnaturally small size and built of a perplexingly alien tissue. The doctors had never seen such an unstable structure—whenever the ultrasound machine was on, the heart would slowly disintegrate, threatening the fetus’ existence. Yet, when the father was gently caressing the baby bump, or when the mother would talk to the baby, it would come back to its previous state. The remedy was none; no one knew how to stabilize the matter, nor was it clear of what kind of particles it was even comprised. As long as the fetus, baby, later a teenager, an adult obtained sufficient amount of care and love, the heart preserved its overall structure.

However attentive the grooming of the organ was for every family member, from time to time, Sylvia’s heart would rot on its own. Not enough care, illusive affection, fake friendship, any kind of a breakup—they would cause annihilation to its structural design. Thankfully, the injuries were not permanent; the heart would always work to mend its fractures to function properly.

Remodeling was hurtful and arduous, yet it always restored the default settings it came with. The substances used to reconstruct the valves, aortas, atriums, and ventricles were extracted from surplus reactants from the chemical processes in other parts of the body. Yet, at some point in her life, when the scarring was deemed insufficient and frail, Sylvia’s heart was ignited to use

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the unprocessed cellulose in her system to build strong bridges from one unharmed tissue to another. These paths recreated the original design most accurately, building a paper heart that would survive mild aches, yet crumbled and ruptured under blows of strength higher than 10.5 kilotorment per second/20.75 solitudebytes per hour.

Up till Sylvia met Jonathan, her husband, her attitude toward men was purely physical. She estranged herself from the favorite vanilla and tasted all kinds of flavors of sexual endeavor—sadistic relations with casual subs, three-couple swinger family, student orgies, masochistic nature she discovered with her father’s co-worker, many gangbang parties with complete strangers at the local swingers’ club—yet no sexual arrangement provided necessary substance to alleviate the frailness of her heart.

Yes, they provided care and pleasure it needed, but they all lasted less than a heartbeat. Even a tender look from her mother and a simple ‘I’m proud of you’ nourished the soul for much longer.

The enslavement ended one day when, minding her own business at a coffee shop, she accidentally spilled café macchiato on a gentleman seated right next to her table.

“Thank God!” exclaimed the man, surprisingly relieved and amused.

“I’m sorry?”

“Unusual name, but I’ll take it. I’m Jonathan. Thanks for ruining this shirt, I couldn’t get rid of it myself,” still smiling, he raised his eyebrows and pointed to the seat next to his to invite her to join him. He’s obviously deranged; I wonder what our children will look like, Sylvia thought.

“Yeah, I’m actually from one of these fashion makeover shows, you know? We spotted you and your ghastly shirt some time ago and thought this way might be easier to slightly suggest you need a new outfit,” she replied and took the seat. “I’m Sylvia, by the way.”

“Nice to meet you. But I kinda liked ‘Sorry’ more, so original. I guess we’ll just have to name our firstborn that.” The conversation lasted till she noticed she had to go to work—only an hour before her shift stopped—and when he realized he had to pick his grandmother up from the airport—only after the poor woman had already been waiting for three hours at the arrival gate.

His peculiar sense of humor, unquestionable intelligence, selflessness, genuine goodness, dark eyes resonating with warmth and sparkling brighter than the 1.00 CTTW diamond engagement ring he bought for her five months later, strong arms that would glue all the pieces back together when he held her—all this and more made her fall head over heels in love with him. Their marriage constituted at least the ninety-seven percent of all the aliment her heart needed. His presence was enough to rebuild damages caused by the natural passage of time, and the tenderness he resonated with supplied her with strength to survive the remodeling process.

Yet, the foolish trust in the love-trumps-all approach did not take into consideration Mother Nature’s mischievous plan. The sturdy cellulose bridges between the tissue started to thicken, ossify, and secede. With each pump, the heart expelled into the bloodstream splinter-like needles that Sylvia would later find escaping through the skin—in the left-hand index finger while holding hands with Jonathan, on her cheek while it was being kissed by him, on her left thigh when shaving legs, stuck in the neck while putting on her mother’s necklace. Not at all in pain, she was ashamed of being a human hedgehog that would shed splinters.

Jonathan was always supportive and helped her pluck the runaways, laughing it off the way only he could. Making love to her, though, was the most challenging endeavor. At first, after a passionate evening that started on the kitchen sink and ended on the bathroom floor, he would spend hours to remove all the splinters from his body. However, since they were recognized by her wife’s system as benign objects, he decided to leave them be and sink right under his skin; it was supposed to be yet another level of intimacy between them. Little did he know that these seemingly harmless needles would amass around his heart like a fortress hindering all the love that pumped into his veins.

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With each passionate touch culminated with newcomers in his bloodstream, Jonathan distanced himself from Sylvia. An inexplicable hatred pulled him away from her—if, once, she was the catalyst of affection, she turned into a despised, if unconscious, memory of his annihilation. He didn’t know why the yearning for her presence stopped; why her voice caused turbulence that shattered his bones; why the smell of her skin—the sole dream that created sweet abyss, in which he eagerly indulged, from time to time—made him nauseous; why the depth of her eyes no longer impressed him, nor incited the fire that would leave anxiety and doubts in ashes.

“What’s the matter? Did I do it again? I’m sorry, I can’t contr—” “It’s nothing. I just need to finish this project and you keep distracting me,” he didn’t have to finish it for another two weeks.

“You keep pushing me away, Jonathan. I know it’s not the most, what’s the word, convenient, easy way of living, but I thought we sort of accepted it. The way I am. The way we are,” she felt like a dog that had chewed on the owner’s shoes, got a treat for whatever reason, but now was locked in a basement without water and food for God knows how long. “Has something changed? Talk to me, please.”

“Would you just leave me alone? Everything’s fine. If you actually had any interest in what I do for a living you would know I’m just fucking busy right now,” the conversation was over.

It didn’t last too long; an ordinary Sunday afternoon saw the demise of whatever was left of the man Sylvia once loved. After finishing and putting away Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment back on the shelf, Jonathan just collapsed in front of the dark brown 5-tier bookshelf he had built for Sylvia some months before. When the last limb was laid by the unexpected force upon the burgundy high-pile rug, Sylvia was running errands—which meant she was walking aimlessly in the neighborhood, trying to forget about yet another unsuccessful attempt to pry the door to his love open. Ready for round two, she opened the front door and sensed an unusual serenity around the house. A motionless dummy facing the entrance, Jonathan greeted her for the last time with a faint resemblance of resentment.

She just stood there frozen, unable to make the slightest move, observing the sunlight on his palm reaching out to her.

Sylvia didn’t understand what exactly happened. During the autopsy, doctors found a teeny tiny splinter clogging an artery in his brain. It led to a severe stroke and was the direct cause of death. Yet, that was not the most astonishing discovery. Upon examining his body, the surgeons recovered a paper-mâché form from his chest—by such extensive contact with his wife’s body’s debris, his heart absorbed it and reconfigured into an entity entirely unknown to medical professors around the globe. They preserved it for further examination, but Sylvia couldn’t live with knowing that his heart—the victim of her passion and devotion—was locked inside such cold, sterile environment; she broke into the facility and stole it.

When the memory of their journey together was still vibrantly engraved upon her memory, the paper display on the living room mantle would remind her of the punishment she would receive repeatedly each morning, each evening, each breath. Yet, when the needles punctured the past till it became a vague image from someone else’s movie, Sylvia eventually forgave herself. And then, one day, a rancid smell resembling decomposed flowers in an algae-encrusted vase woke her up. Like a dog on a leash, she was led by the odor to the living room. On the mantle, she spotted a fleshy fist-sized object that was ogling her with affection. Pumping hastily the non-existent blood and beating fast with unrestrained happiness—just the way as it had been for nearly thirty-five years—Jonathan’s heart was finally free from the shackles of Sylvia’s love.

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Chapter 3: Base Notes Nonsensical sounds transformed into suffering were the current state of affairs. The body had always been her multi-purpose tool that never failed. A quarter-drunk tooth brushing at 4 a.m.; half-asleep relevé for a tomato soup in a grocery store; fully conscious love-making during the cataclysm caused by her father’s unanticipated death. The palms always followed the path sketched by her mind; her mind would never fail to acknowledge the underlining urges the palms yearned to fulfill. Yet, she knew it was going to happen eventually. A grotesque execution of a faulty genetic blueprint. Forever neglected, an annoyingly high-pitched whisper would sometimes remind her that it was more than inevitable. Repressed and banished to the most damp, cobwebbed corners of her brain, she simply muffled the possibility of losing herself to herself, and when it finally started happening, Monica was unarmed and simply petrified.

She remembered too well when the dust of oblivion took her grandmother. Shaky hands, forgotten keys, lost route to the house, misspoken words, and the ever-present absence on her grandma’s once beautiful face. No one was to blame, though, and that pissed Monica off. It took three years for the disease to finally have taken its toll, painting the loss with ashes and slime of disbelief. The memories like grenade splinters would remind the family of a genetic hazard—possibly life-threatening, possibly benign piece of explosive in their guts. Schrödinger’s feline companion purring and not purring with a whimsical annihilation thrust and not thrust between neurons was the family pet bribed with caress and lamb cuts in gravy. Yet, cat people know that these furry balls are mischievous creatures. So, each time Monica would fail to recall the name of that actor from that film, the title of that song heard on the radio, and all the other thats that never evolved to become tangible concepts, the whiskered beast would sharpen its teeth, ready to bite and devour what was to come. “It doesn’t matter,” “Whatever,” “I didn’t like it that much, anyway” became the forced periods of the answers to the questions she would pose when no one was looking.

“I don’t like it.”

“Okay. So what would you rather eat then, grandma?”

“It’s all wrong. Just all wrong.”

At some point, for her grandma, everything was wrong until it just stopped being anything; right or wrong, hot or cold, now or later. The blurry cloud of the time running out would strike Monica each time she passed her a fork, turned on grandma’s favorite radio station, told her about the math class she was failing, or made up excuses why Monica’s mother wouldn’t want to come by. The disproportionally heavy burden was placed on a 17-year-old back in a form of a five-foot-long redwood cross sewn into her spine and disguised beneath clothes she made out of grandma’s old wardrobe—a way of providing comfort to the discomfort Monica felt upon receiving signals of her grandma’s pain.

“Don’t you just love the way the Sun wakes up and appears, all of a sudden, from nowhere?” he asked while wrapping his left arm tightly around her waist, when the two were savoring the dawn on a sandy beach, surrounded with empty bottles of beer, and sea shells arranged in a vague remembrance of a shape. He might have been her brother, lover, or her mother’s murderer she had caught red-handed and wanted to deliver to the police station but granted him his last wish to see the sunrise. As much as terrifying not knowing was, she was more embarrassed with not recognizing his sloppy hair strands free falling upon the forehead, puppy hazel eyes, Iron Maiden T-shirt, and his breath radiating with alcohol and cigarette smoke. Ashamed and flabber-

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gasted, she ran away to the bus stop and let it take her to places engraved in her body’s memory, deeper than in the frail brain that fooled her for the very first time.

A half dozen eggs. A cheerful song playing on the radio. Sugar, salt, flour, and baking powder safely sealed in glass containers. A milk carton. A bowl. A fly buzzing by the window. An empty look on Monica’s face.

“Mom, can you remind me how to make pancakes?”

“How to make what?”

“Pancakes, mom.”

“The pancakes you’ve been making your entire life and taught me how to make them?”

“Yes. I—I can’t remember, mom, I’m sorry.”

All the remodeled fractures whispered onto her memories would later tell Saint Peter—the prime forensic anthropologist hired full-time at the Pearly Gates—about the gradual abusive relationship she’d had with her past. When the Sunrise Boy caught her off guard, she bought a diary where she promised herself she would write all the time to remember who she was. A few days later, when she finally realized it was a one-time hook-up, she forgave herself and castigated for panicking. Yet, when the instances turned into habits, when she no longer could explain them with promiscuity and alcohol, she dug out the pad and meticulously noted everything— conversations with her mother, a B movie she hated, how she would make tea, the usual route in the grocery store, each pet her neighbors had, the way in which she liked to paint her nails, the usual route in the grocery store again, how she made coffee, more conversations with her mother.

“Can you stop that?”

“Stop what?”

“You’re always scribbling in that notebook and it’s getting annoying. I’m giving you my best moves down there and it’s really distracting.” She was in her late 30s when she met Peter online, and he seemed like the safest option to have a casual relationship with—a jock-type individual happily married to his high school sweetheart dumber than a box of rocks, feeling kind of sexually dissatisfied due to his wife’s lack of libido. Strictly casual arrangement, the relation was based on giving each other enough pleasure to find its way to her diary and not sufficient to make Monica want to love him. She wrote down the scent of his skin, the way each inch of him tasted, what he did to her that made her feel satiated, what she did that got him begging for more—non omnis moriar of their shared joie de vivre.

“That’ll be $13.79.”

“I’m sorry, could you repeat that?” the hand was too slow, the pen too heavy, and Monica was getting panicked she didn’t get to note the overly courteous cashier’s words exactly as they were spoken.

“Excuse me?”

“You were talking too fast. Could you, please, repeat what you said about the 2-for-1 promotion on supplements?”

“You said you’re not interested,” the too polite smile was gone, replaced by obvious agitation.

“I know, I’m sorry. I need to write that down.”

“Freak,” muttered the cashier, yet loud enough for Monica to hear.

“I’m sorry.”

“Are you paying or not?”

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The very same puff of air that hit the very last candle on the birthday cake on her 45th birthday was the ultimate blow that dispersed her untied shoelaces, first kisses, baths she drew, pens that ran out of ink, her mother’s embrace, and every other memory lodged in that part of the brain that, all of a sudden, surrendered. Like a recap by the end of a movie, glimpses, snippets, flashbacks from her past were getting rewound while Monica was a passive observer trying to catch these soap-bubbles floating just slightly out of her reach. And she didn’t know how to press ‘play’ again.

Each day she would stand in front of the mirror above the sink in her bathroom decorated with paisley-patterned blush tiles, artificial flower buds glued to a V-shaped vase, and half-empty bottles of cosmetics just to recite, carefully and with reverence, “My name is Monica. I’m an architect. I’m 45. My mother’s name is Caroline. I love her very much. I like eating risotto. I like decaf macchiato. I’m allergic to penicillin.” Later, she would slowly read out loud her notes from the previous day, telling herself a story of a woman that no longer existed.

Each entry in her diary, with each subsequent day, was getting scarcer and less conscious.

The woman was painted with fewer details and her life started resembling more and more a science-fiction film. The heroine was moving further away from the reader, until the reader could no longer identify with her. She was an alien construct that seemed unreasonable. The steps the heroine took were of a drunken gazelle trying to run away from a lion. The horns weighed the poor prey down. The lion’s claws already felt the taste of the juicy flesh ripped from the bones.

“My name is Monica. I’m an architect. My mother’s name is Caroline. I like eating risotto. I like decaf macchiato. I’m allergic to penicillin.”

Each opened door revealed faces that sought out the familiar and got struck with an uncertainty of a smile smudged over her face. Each person bore resemblance to resemblance that resembled the once familiar familiarity of a family she unveiled with each touch of a hand, each blink, each tear shed over the imminent. Each morning was a surprise. A cri de coeur of a 17-yearold resuscitated only to be smothered with a goose-feather pillow to remain silent forever. “My name is Monica. My mother’s name is Caroline. I like decaf macchiato. I’m allergic to penicillin.”

Each touch was a revelation. Brushing her hair made sparks of novelty. Buying a bus ticket was an adventure. Saying ‘hi’ was the entire conversation she would have with the neighbor, until the consonant became hollow, until the vowel shrank to the length of an expiration. “My name is Caroline. I’m allergic to Monica.”

Each heartbeat was a tune for her astray thoughts to wander on the ceiling. Each breath fueled the merry-go-rounds her palms involuntarily reproduced on her thighs. Each word became nonsense. The world became a frightening place. The body became a frightening place. The mind became a blank sheet of paper—stimulating to a creative soul, destructive to a rock.

“My name…” It doesn’t matter, whatever. I didn’t like it that much, anyway.

Aleksandra Barciszewska Former editor-in-chief. ASC-survivor. Vampiric psychoanalyst by nature. Extracting the sexual from the mundane, rejecting reality for the sake of the very-tale of momentary satiation of the urges for creation.

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Danse Macabre Lilla Orly

Oliver couldn’t be sure how long the woman had been laying there. His first thought upon viewing her prostrate body at the foot of a grave was not alarm or concern, but a sort of disbelieving reluctance verging on annoyance; this was not something he needed right now. For a millisecond he grappled with the sliver of conscience he possessed, wondering if he should simply leave the scene as though the collapsed figure was nothing more than a curious bundle of leaves he spotted out of the corner of his eye. But some moral authority—though it’s far more likely that it was merely an overwhelming curiosity—led the function of extending and contracting the muscles of each leg, resulting in his approach to the woman. Now that he had been standing over the individual of questionable vitals for several minutes, he wasn’t sure he was going to be of much help at all. As he stood looking down at the body, his mind was wandering through the etiquette of such a bizarre situation. Had Oliver been in the company of an acquaintance or family member, or even simply another person strolling about the graveyard, he felt he would have behaved along the lines of a more socially acceptable script. Rushing to the woman’s side, performing all of the necessary steps to affirm consciousness and trying to regain it. He watched the good samaritan phantasm step out from his corporeal organism and lean down, pressing his translucent fingers against a carotid artery in the woman’s neck, leaning into her face listening for any sign of respiration before finally executing the heroic and very theatrical task of manual reanimation. In reality, Oliver was suffering from the ancient ancestor of all hangovers witnessed on this terrestrial plain. He blamed the weakness that constrained every muscle fibre and the slow functioning of all the folds in his brain for his being so unamiable.

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The night prior, he had balanced daringly with one foot on a threelegged barstool in some dive in the desert; an atrocious scene that the regular Wednesday crowd put down to be a sad man in distress. The entire evening, Oliver’s voice grew in intensity the more glasses he knocked back and slammed down onto the counter. This resulted in the quick progression to the sloppy scene at ten-thirty. What was humorous about the whole situation was that Oliver was not at all a drinker. He had never turned to the serum to cope with his problems. The desperate search for a quick-fix method of coping was an exception that matched the exceptional situation it wished to remedy. Oliver’s father had died unexpectedly; a tragedy Oliver only learned of a year after the fact. Oliver would have never guessed that the man who was ephemerally present in his childhood due to chronic cold-feet and commitment issues would have croaked before the two had come to terms with their non-existent relationship.

Oliver, not a softie by any means but a personality phobic of loose ends had post-it notes lying around his apartment with made-up words and abstruse doodles he thought he would someday compile into some bizarre confessionary scrapbook; a novelty that his father would pour over, understanding every nonsensical detail through a provisional language translated

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over years of repression. When the news of the passing finally processed, Oliver had snatched up every last post-it from its place on his fridge, under his pillow, above the front-door frame, placed them all in a metal trash bin and set them alight. When the fire died down—even though Oliver wished it would burn forever—he stared at the ash as though it had just given Oliver the strongest insult he had ever heard. He grabbed an empty mayonnaise jar sitting on a shelf nearby and poured the sentimental ash into the container.

He had driven for a day and a half at times painfully sober, and at others dreadfully intoxicated, the mayonnaise jar and its benighted grey contents residing in the passenger seat like some brain-dead animal. When he had finally reached the graveyard in the south of Nevada he was surprised to learn from the sign outside the far-too ornate frontgate that the burial ground was a sort of exclusive area for believers in casual resurrection. Welcome to the Cold Creek Resting Place, the sign read, a temporary home for the temporarily departed. The caption beneath a comically intricate diagram explained how the acidity of the dirt combined with the distance to the core of the Earth along with hundreds of other obstinate, astrological, and extraterrestrial factors made this point the perfect site for effortless resurgence. Oliver was confused in his subsiding artificial stupor but not surprised that his father would be a member of such a fanatical group.

The population of the graveyard was currently sixteen—the second digit freshly painted over a sheer coating of white paint that poorly obscured the five beneath. Oliver wondered if the addition of only one member had been too hasty a decision considering the yet-to-bedetermined corpse by his feet. He was still mulling over how the whole situation could have been avoided had he simply turned around and left after placing the mayonnaise jar on his father’s grave, instead of pondering and reminiscing on memories that weren’t there. Then, Oliver began to consider if the woman was a prime example of a failed resurrection before quickly deducing that she was far too muck-free to have heaved herself up and out from sixfeet under. Besides, all of the dates on the tombs that displayed female names were too archaic to represent the up-to-date clothes the woman was wearing.

Eventually, the reticently cooperative voice in his head suggested manyfold that the least Oliver could do was pull out his phone and call for someone with the true moral morale to resolve this plight. He reached for the inside pocket of his crackled leather jacket and twiddled his fingers in its emptiness. This void excited him, he figured that if his phone wasn’t on his person he was free to turn from the ghastly site and conveniently forget the incidental human while on the way to his beat-up Jeep. Unfortunately, his dry fingers made contact with the sleek screen belonging to the grounding weight in his right pant-leg pocket.

He pulled the virtual ball-and-chain from its orifice and the screen lit up. Oliver began to laugh hysterically; there was no service. As his mirth subsided the petrified face of the thing beneath him, whose features were becoming less person-like by the second criticized him rather vocally though silent. He had been at the graveyard for over an hour; ten uncomfortable minutes standing before the grave of his father, half-heartedly praying to a deity whose formalities were beyond Oliver, and the remaining time spent in the company of the carcass.

Suddenly, a sobriety that was foreign to Oliver even in periods of dry spells washed over him and a resolute decision unveiled itself seductively in his mind, the flourish and curve of each letter oozing sensuality and the plump, erotic punctuation mark signalling the climax of the catchphrase: Bury her. ***

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Oliver figured that what he had done was only half-wrong. If the out-there calculations of the revival zealots were true then he had actually acted in favour of the woman’s future—at this point Oliver had no other option but to believe that the woman had, in fact, crossed over (an alternate truth would mean his action was more criminal than considerate). His filthy hands were coated in coffee-ground-colored dirt leaving an uncomfortable layer of grime between his palms and the steering wheel. On his slow trudge back to his Jeep, Oliver had stopped to dry-heave a few times and wet-heave a couple more, watching the already sparse contents of his stomach splatter onto the colorful leaves of the autumnal forest floor. The tranquility of the actually breathtaking scenery felt inappropriate and off-putting to Oliver. Though he’d grown up on the outskirts of a busier town, accustomed to the general presence of greenery that the occupants of the active avenues sought solace in, he had always yearned for fast-moving bodies and the promise of something around every corner.

What that something was, Oliver never really knew, because even ten years after moving to Chicago, he felt he’d tried every possible lifestyle and experience that could conceivably fill the criteria of this faceless something. Returning to a nationally protected area of wildlife, Oliver was once again confronted with the antithetical metropolitan negative exposing the hollowness behind his facade. At least in the bustle of traffic and glint of high-rise buildings he could fool himself into believing that he was a part of it all, or that even if he wasn’t quite yet, then the city would throw a welcoming arm around his shoulder and lead him to it. Mountainous terrain, on the other hand, though towering with a similar awesomeness to the skyscrapers of Chicago, was merciless, wise, and held no sympathy for Oliver or his outlook on life. It seemed to Oliver that the sierras grouped around him were whispering to each other of their antecedence of height as the first to loom over man and give him insight on the minisculinity of his being. The mountains saw the skyscrapers as the ungrateful, childlike retort of man challenging their preeminence.

For the forty miles that Oliver drove as a dissenter through the panorama cocktail party, he tried to shake off the agrestal scrutiny and figure out his next steps. Though, originally, Oliver had planned to make a beeline back to the windy city after his sentimental exudation at the graveyard, the stained hands that clung to the wheel seemed to turn south of their own accord, steering Oliver to Las Vegas. For some time, the stretch of unchanging, desolate land on either side of the car became the only sort of setting Oliver could recall, until he cruised under an unimpressive overpass that marked his bisection into a place of a more animate population. The robust, tan houses lined up uniformly to his right signalled, if not Oliver’s return to normalcy, then at least his encroachment of it. He searched in urgency for the run-down asphalt and winking sign of a fast-food drive-thru, settling for the first double-arch that glided into his perimeter.

After rolling down his window he called out a series of random numbers and grappled for loose change between his car seats to pay for the triple order of double quarter pounders and supersized fries with sickly sweet milkshakes to wash the horrifying amount of food down.

Oliver, sitting in his rain-blanketed car occupying a slot in a largely empty parking lot, forcefed himself with his still revoltingly soiled hands while staring out blankly at the torrential downpour. Each french-fry reached his mouth slightly less contaminated than the one before as the grease combined with the dirt that slipped off of his fingers—Oliver fooled himself into thinking that the mineral particles crunching and crackling between his molars were just salt. When the rain had stopped and the only remnants of the junk-food was the mud-smudged carton packaging and the rumbling indigestion already burning his esophagus, Oliver started the car and pulled out of the barren lot that had served as his site of contemplation.

Two streets over, in a white bungalow with a beige roof lived Oliver’s godfather, Randy. Randy had been the closest friend of Oliver’s father. He was a retired, pot-bellied cop with a sincerely

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good heart. As a child, Randy had had more contact with Oliver than the actual individual that linked the two together. It was Randy who had shown up to Oliver’s kindergarten graduation and it was Randy that had picked Oliver up from school when his mom had had her car-crash.

After a period of taste-testing various sports had passed and Oliver no longer had the need to practice passing, catching, or snatching a ball with anyone, Randy had faded to the stand-in paternal caricature Oliver only remembered from the torso-down.

When Randy opened his front-door Oliver could already see the apprehensive look indicating he was ready to close it again at any mention of a commodity, solicitation, or religion. Randy’s pot-belly had worsened, dripping disdainfully over the unnecessary belt looped at the hips of the dark-wash jeans he was wearing. He was now sporting a well-groomed mustache that was out-of-place with his disheveled mullet and weary eyes. Oliver was surprised to see that the dark chocolate brown of his hair was still natural after quickly inspecting the fibres for an additional, unnatural coating.

“Can I, uh, help you?” Randy asked, his right hand pressed against the part of the doorframe above his head and his left hand on his hip, his fingers disappearing into the excess, hanging fat.

“Yeah. Hi, Randy. It’s Oliver? We played ball together when I was a kid?”

“Shiiiit, Oliver? What in the hell happened to you? Now I don’t mean to sound rude, but you look just tragic.” Oliver had forgotten that his crud covered appearance was out of the ordinary for spectators.

“Oh, yeah. My car got stuck up by Cold Creek. I had to push it out of the mud.”

“Cold Creek, eh. So you, uh, heard then,” Randy said, hanging his head.

“Yeah, yeah. I heard. Just this week actually.”

“This week? Aw, kid, I’m sorry. You know I wanted to be the one to tell you but your mom refused to give me your number. Said you had other stuff going on in your life. I’m not too good with the Facebook and all so I didn’t know how to get a hold of you.”

“It’s alright. I think it’s better that I found out this way,” Oliver sincerely wasn’t upset with his mother for hiding the death from him. To her, his father’s death had happened ages ago. “If I had to organize the funeral it would have been kind of a shit-show. How was it, by the way?”

“The funeral? There was no funeral. Believe me, I tried to organize something. But that bimbo of his was marked as next-of-kin and skipped town after she found out there was no will. Their relationship was pretty tumultuous, you know. I told him that’s what you get when you catch ‘em fresh out of the frier, they’re real slick creatures then. I would know, having had two teenage brats of my own. You remember Cindy and Paula, dontcha? You all used to play in our backyard when you were kids.”

“Vaguely,”Oliver answered mulling over his father’s domestic life.

“They’re grown and got their own little ones now. Phew…” after shaking his head Randy glanced up at Oliver apologetically. “Look at me, getting all ahead of myself and skipping all the pleasantries, as usual. Why don’t you come on in and we’ll get you cleaned up.”

Looking in the wide mirror above the bathroom sink, Oliver realized just how appalling he looked. Nevertheless, the mud and sweat caked in his hair as well as all of the otherwise invisible creases of his face weren’t disgusting enough to motivate any sprucing up in the name of self-presentation. He ran the shower at a scathing temperature that soon fogged up the mirror to Oliver’s satisfaction. He slipped on the fresh though dejectedly outdated clothing that Randy had pulled from the bottom shelf of his closet, “Can’t remember the last time I could slide my keester into these duds, so they should do you just fine,” he’d commented.

Next, Oliver unwillingly splashed cold water across his face and watched the dirt copulate with the liquid in the sink, seeing a reflected, shadow version of himself trickle down the drain.

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He exited the bathroom in a dramatic puff of steam and was startled when he almost walked right into Randy who was holding a cup of coffee.

“My bad there, Olly. I was wondering what was taking you so long and was just about to bring you some joe.” They went into the living room and sat on the couch. The seat was the only piece of lounging furniture in the room, a dusty rose two-seater from the 70’s that meant the two had to sit side-by-side at a distance that wasn’t yet close or far enough to be a comfortable gap. Their proximate position meant that both stared down at the coffee table upon which their steaming mugs glanced back in transposed chagrin.

“So, you got a girl?” Randy inquired after several minutes of silence.

“I’ve had a few,” Oliver lied. Aside from the odd hookup in college, Oliver had never had a girlfriend or considered being in a relationship. Always waiting for everything in his life to come to him, Oliver hadn’t ever purposely sought out for the things in life that were supposed to provide structure and meaning.

“Right, right. And none of ‘em stuck?”

“Ah, it just didn’t seem to work out,” Oliver answered, tossing his hand to emphasise his blasé approach. His face remained expressionless throughout their entire exchange.

“Well you know, it doesn’t always just work out. You have to roll up your sleeves and put in some elbow grease if you want everything running smoothly. Colleen and I really put in a lot of effort on both our ends to keep the marriage going ‘til the girls were out of the house. After that it was ‘nice doin’ business with ya,’ and we went our separate ways. I still love Colleen, sure.

But we’re both better off now.” Oliver sipped on his muddy coffee, feeling his stomach turn as the texture reminded him of the earth he had dug up a couple hours before. When he put the mug down on the table he swore he could see the features of the woman who was now barely six-feet under.

“You see her?” Randy asked.

“Huh?” Oliver exclaimed turning to look at Randy for the first time since they sat down.

“Do you see your mother often?” Randy repeated, not catching on to Oliver’s unease.

“Oh yeah, every once in awhile. Since I moved to Chicago we talk once a month and I go to visit her for Easter or Christmas.” Oliver had always had a fairly good relationship with his mom. After her husband left her, Karen’s ideal of a two parent, two-sibling suburban family was warped, and Oliver remained as the sole surviving porcelain figurine among the ashy rubble of her charred dreams. Being a teen in the bra-burning age of feminism but clinging to some of the wide-eyed, girly marriage fantasies she acquired growing up in a highly Catholic, Southern household, she fought fiercely to become the perfect single-mom. She signed him up for every sport imaginable—a feat that no doubt took a toll on her tottering checkbook—and insisted he sit at the fold-up kitchen table to do his homework—should he need any help, which he never did—while she squeezed past to rush between stations of chopping, boiling, and garnishing their hearty dinner.

Though Oliver was doted on and spoiled subsistence-wise, he almost felt as though he was a part of some social-aid project. In truth, Oliver not only didn’t need any help with his homework, he was urged by his teachers to skip ahead a grade. The many sporting matches he attended only brought him physical exhaustion as he pushed himself beyond the capabilities of his weak muscles and wiry frame, the source of his endurance being his mother’s fervently expectant expression in the sea of faces among the bleachers. When all of the extra-curricular measures of success were cast aside at the end of the day and he lay in bed in his flannel pajamas wishing that his mother would just lay next to him as he fell asleep, she stood at the doorway, gave him a curt goodnight, and shut off the lights.

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When Karen had her car accident Oliver was in his freshman year of high school. He had already begun shifting his interests from what his mother expected of him to achieve as a longterm expression of gratitude, to things he was genuinely enthusiastic about. This involved slight backlash on the part of his mom, who believed that her efforts would be wasted should Oliver even slightly veer off the path she had painstakingly mapped out. It was during a period when communication between parent and child were at a minimum and the last altercation concluded on a particularly profane ad hominem that the disaster occurred. Oliver was pulled out of class by a counselor; an uncommon occurrence that at first caused Oliver to worry that he would be charged with some petty high school crime as a result of someone stashing weed in his locker. The councilor wordlessly, but with a pained expression—an unattractive fold of the chin as the lips pressed together to make a hard line, a look Oliver could still recall in his adulthood— led Oliver to the office where a phone receiver hung loose from its hook.

“Hey, buddy,” Randy’s gruff voice greeted from the other end, “Your mom’s been in an accident.

She’s alright, don’t worry. I’m coming to pick you up in a bit.” In a physiological reaction, Oliver’s heart pounded and his palms began to sweat before he even understood the words that were spoken to him. When Randy arrived in his patrol uniform Oliver had been sitting in a seat in the office, jiggling his leg and feeling younger than he ever had in his whole life. Randy apologized profusely when his police car started with a wail that Oliver mistook for the screeching infant-self inside of him.

The hospital was a scene that was strongly incongruous with the current dilemma in Oliver’s life. The patients were more of a geriatric sort and the general tempo and atmosphere of the Vista Medical Center was lethargic and content. His mother was awake and upset when he entered the room. “Oliver you need to tell them that I have to get some sleep,” his mother demanded in an angry delirium. Before they’d entered, Randy had explained that aside from a broken pelvic bone, Oliver’s mother had also experienced severe head trauma. Until they were certain that she was stable, she was not permitted to fall asleep. This resulted in curious conversations with his mother that caused Oliver to not only fear what their future would look like together, but also frightened into being a primordial superstition that his mother had become altered, possessed.

In the following weeks Oliver went back and forth from his place to the hospital. Randy insisted that Oliver stay with him but Oliver desired nothing more than to be alone. Randy gave Oliver rides between home and the hospital, often stopping at some fast-food joint to indulge in grease-based meals that were otherwise off-limits for Oliver. In the transcendentally sequestered setting of the hospital Oliver sat by his mother’s side, keeping meandering conversation while she was awake and staring at her pale, sun-spotted skin when she was put into a medically induced coma for the swelling in her brain.

After a month, Karen’s pelvic bone had healed significantly and her conscious state had returned to some level of normality. Oliver pushed her wheelchair out into the overcast November day, an irritatingly optimistic yellow balloon tied to the right handle of the chair. Randy leaned against his van in the parking lot, beaming at the pair of them. “Here comes Karen G!” he announced, stretching his arms in a wide gesture.

It wasn’t until now, sitting in Randy’s dispiriting living room that Oliver grasped how little he knew about the proxy parent of his childhood. Placed on bookless bookshelves and other surfaces were plain picture frames—some still bearing the blackened glue of price tags—with photos of Randy alongside his legitimate family. There were knick knacks and bowling trophies that somehow didn’t seem to suit the image of Randy that Oliver had nurtured over the years.

Beside the television leaned a plaque thanking Randy for his thirty-five years of service.

“Yeah, mom’s alright,” Oliver continued. “I’ve noticed she’s been becoming less and less mobile

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by the year. Since her insurance ran out we couldn’t really afford the physiotherapy anymore.

She’s keeping positive, you know how she is. I hired a Polish cleaning girl who tidies up at her place every so often. But you know, there’s a bit of a language barrier. Though, I suppose mom likes it that way.”

“No one to disagree with her,” Randy chuckled.

Oliver reached for his coffee cup and realized it was empty when he brought it up to his face.

Startled, he couldn’t recall when he had taken the last sip of the drink but tried to remain collected in the presence of Randy, not wishing to seem anymore odd than he already did.

“Thanks for the coffee, Randy,” Oliver said after their conversation lulled to a point of acceptable parting.

“Hey, any time, Ol. You know you’re like family,” Randy said, shaking Oliver’s hand as they stood up from the couch. “You sure you’re ok?”

“Yup. Fine,” Oliver smiled back feeling the dried dirt crackle at his hairline as his eyebrows lifted.

When Randy closed the door behind Oliver it was dusk outside. A fuzzy glow was emanating from the strip, causing all surrounding areas to look particularly dull. Oliver got behind the wheel of his car and placed his hands in the instructional diagram of mud he’d left earlier. He drove through the streets of unremarkable dwellings and headed for the shrill fluorescence of gluttony, greed, and indulgence.

Parking on the side of the street in a manner that was probably illegal, Oliver hopped out of his car and headed for the first bar with a flashing sign that read, “It’s always Happy Hour somewhere!” He plunked down on the pleather cushioned barstool and ordered the first drink that came to his mind.

“You gotten your hands dirty recently?” a voice to Oliver’s left piped up.

“Excuse me?” Oliver challenged over-confidently to mask his paranoia as he glanced down at his red-raw, but clean fingernails. He took his time to swivel to the owner of the statement. It was a man, probably in his early thirties but with leathery skin and severe crow’s feet aging him at least another decade. The whites of his eyes were jaundiced causing the teal blue of their irises to appear washed out and sickly. He was sneering up at Oliver, his plump lips curled and his stained teeth gleaming. The man wasn’t poorly dressed by any means, but the burgundy velvet pants and the billowing button up shirt somehow seemed off-kilter.

“I said have you gotten your hands dirty recently? You look like a guy who works a killer nineto-five and needs a little downtime. Maybe even a little TLC,” the man said lifting his hands in pointer-fashion with the proposition and staring down his nose at Oliver.

“Sure,” Oliver said turning his head to receive his drink and thank the barman. He tilted his head back to let the surprisingly weak alcohol trickle down his throat.

“That’s why you’re here. Las Vegas. You know what vega means?”

“Try me.”

“By Oxford dictionary standards it’s a grassy valley. But in my book, it’s the less popular definition; the bottom, the pit, the grave.” The last word made Oliver wince—he hoped unnoticeably.

He was getting sick of this local’s spiel. “Think about it. People come down here from all over just to unleash that something within themselves, release their inhibitions. They throw money away, throw social constructs away, they throw away virtue and they redefine sin. If that’s not beautiful I don’t know what is,” the man shook his head in an awestruck hilarity, sipping from his drink to reinvigorate his instrument before stepping back on his metaphorical soap box. “I see these types everyday. Schmucks, most of them. But it’s my job to recruit the best of the best and invite them to the most exclusive mausoleum of marauders. And you, my friend have got it, I could see it in you from across the room. That something.”

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“Is this the part where you hand me some flyer for a strip club?” Oliver finally spoke up with a tone of overpowering irritability.

“Nah, we’re not about any of that stuff. Much too commercial for our breadth of business.”

The man stood up from his barstool and peeled the left side of his jacket out to remove a small business card. He leaned in to Oliver while placing the black card on the bar.

“Don’t think too hard,” he smirked and patted Oliver on the back before leaving.

Oliver looked down at the thick, velvet looking card that seemed to swallow all the remaining dim light in the bar. When he flipped it over the card read, Catacomb, Midnight-Midnight. *** After swilling his way through the drink menu so that the ratio of blood to alcohol in his system was more or less even, Oliver stumbled out of the bar and onto the lively street. There were hoards of bachelor and bachelorette parties, families with children struggling to safely relocate back to their hotels, and business men with their ties unknotted and shirts unbuttoned waving champagne bottles in the air. Oliver at home, yet out of place all at once, hobbled through the crowds trying to walk off the intemperance; however, the fresh air wasn’t helping at all. It seemed to Oliver that the more his metabolism processed the alcohol, the more everything around him seemed to whirl at a pace with which he could not keep up. Though his neck remained motionless, his head pirouetted and plunged, weighing more than the rest of his body. He toppled onto the sidewalk, his cheek skidding on the pavement.

Coming to, Oliver felt much more sober than he had only moments before and the headache that had already threatened to pound its way through his inebriated state had faded to a pleasant tapping that thrummed and soothed his veins. He jerked his various limbs and extremities to make certain that none of the pain was strong enough to signify something fractured, and slowly began lifting himself off the ground. A small blood stain marked the spot where his cheek had rested, the almost-arrow shape of it causing him to look up at the structure before him. The building was shorter than the rest of the casinos. A medium, cinderblock construction with darkened windows shielded by ornate grates, and crowned by mock-turrets. At ground level were a set of stairs not leading up, but down to a burgundy door surrounded by vanity-style bulbs whose slow, ebbing light seemed much colder than the loud, neighboring glare screaming for attention. Above the door was a swooping, inappropriately pink neon: Catacomb.

Oliver clunked down the steps feeling the shock of the hard steps shooting through his ankles up to his knee caps, but his eyes remained locked on the seering rose-colored letters. They lingered, imprinted on his pupils as he stepped through the door to a pitch black hall. He stuck out his left hand, following the path that the wall led him along. Suddenly, the end of the corridor seemed to darken, not lighten, and produce a sensuous, flushed tone. The sound of voices louder than a murmur but softer than a whisper throbbed from the color and Oliver moved forward with more vivacity. Finally, the color began to envelope him and he was released into the source of its hue; Oliver felt like he had been delivered through some carnal passage.

On the other side was an old-fashioned looking club. The stage was tall and the ceiling above it was high, with long, red curtains hanging lavishly from the imperceivable height. Before the stage were round tables with seating for two, nearly every chair occupied except for the one closest to Oliver. Though no one was smoking, an impenetrable, misty veil hung in the air making the gleaming surfaces of everything seem to sparkle dreamily like a Lynchian film. Oliver placed himself in the vacant seat and, almost immediately as he did so, an androgynous looking individual stuck a leg out from stage right and sauntered to the bull’s eye of the spotlight bleaching

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the hardwood. They sported black-and-white pinstripe cigarette pants, a white ruffled shirt, and a black, sharply-tailed coat overtop. They looked out over the crowd of people with a satisfied, knowing smirk, their lips painted in a fuchsia hue that was also smeared across both cheeks.

“Ladies...Gents…” they began, the intonation of their voice not making it any easier to distinguish between two categories of gender. “It is midnight.” At this declaration the crowd cheered in a polite, conducted manner and ceased in a sudden slash, no echo remaining—Oliver fathomed he could see the sound waves dropping in mid air. “At this time of high night, we begin our high jinks. I hope each and every one of you is aware that you’re among some truly retched folk tonight.” They took a moment to chuckle to themselves, “But I digress, the show must go on! Not a minute can be spared! I present to you our first act of the night. A truly debaucherous burlesque for your entertainment only,” with a wild hee-haw they scuttled off the stage with their coattails flailing behind them. The light that lingered from some unidentifiable source above the audience faded so that onlookers had the impression they had misplaced their bodies and the sole possessions remaining were their eyes—the only evidence of their existence the fact that they were perceiving the horrors before them.

In the tapered spotlight stood a dwarf wearing a sheer, shimmering fabric that seemed to pour like liquid over the stunted limbs and limp breasts. The music playing was a psychotic string ensemble similar to orchestral tuning at an accelerated pace. The dwarf swerved her hips never once missing a beat in the arrhythmic composition. When she turned around a grotesque hunch in her back towered above her bald head, obscuring it from view. The hump held the leading role in the act. Its craggy texture and pallid color were compounded in an unusual erotic charge.

Though Oliver couldn’t see the other audience members he sensed that his arousal wasn’t unmatched throughout the esoteric throng.

The spectacle continued, each act more daunting and provocative than the one previous.

A burly, impossibly hairy man had sensuously depilated every last bristle on his body. A large, ancient looking woman pulled at all the folds and wrinkles of her body gathering them into a great bundle of epidermis and tying it behind herself, denuding the silhouette of what she may have looked like in her youth. Throughout all of this, Oliver felt he would rupture, experiencing a rush of fluids, heat, and pleasure never known to the nerves in his body. He was riddled with joy, excitement, and dread for whatever would come next, for whatever could possibly top the phenomena he was lucky enough to hold witness to. When the applause died down after a pair of hopelessly entangled siamese twins took their final bows, the unisexual being cantered back onto the stage.

“I know all of you have been enjoying yourselves beyond anything in your wildest dreams. But the time has come for our frightening finale. A new act we have unearthed just for those in attendance tonight. Please welcome to the stage, the phenomenal Philomèle.” With an extended arm, the person traipsed off the scene as the heavy velvet curtains were drawn apart.

Centerstage stood a woman, completely nude. She had dark, waist-length hair that stuck together in clumps, the strands intermittently exposing purple nipples erect on surprisingly pert breasts. Her swollen blue lips were slightly parted in an expectant pout and her high cheek bones glistened with a sickly sudor. Her eyes were concave and bloodshot, the sclera of the right eye crimson. Her overall countenance and mien were hideous; she was the most beautiful being that Oliver had ever seen. She had begun to pendulate raising her arms and lowering them fluidly. In one of these singular lifting motions she shed the epidermis from her hips up, uncovering the peachy dermis beneath embroidered with capillaries. Next she cast off the skin of her lower half and quickly moved onto the next layer of her membrane. The fat underneath was amber and irregular, catching the gleam of the spotlight at the crest of every mound. Oliver moved to the

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edge of his seat in anticipation as she shifted off this knotty sheet, unveiling the merlot-coloured, fibrous muscle tissue. At this moment, the room was once again filled with the rose chromaticity that had invited him into the venue from the beginning. In the illumination, Oliver noticed that the other spectators had disappeared and that what he was viewing was his own, private show.

Looking back to the girl he was alarmed to see that she had moved closer down-stage and was twirling a loose string of muscle around her index finger, waiting for Oliver’s full attention.

She got on her hands and knees and crawled in a feline manner up to Oliver who was now standing immediately before the stage, staring up in awe. When her face was at the same level as his, she smiled, the bands of her face stretching tight. She gently placed the cord of herself into Oliver’s hand. She gave an assertive nod and Oliver tugged the strand. In an euphoric maneuver, her final, protoplasmic sheath unravelled as she moaned in sheer delight. Her skeleton was a stark white. The osseous being crawled once again towards Oliver, leaning in close, the upper and lower rows of ivory teeth disjoining in a skeletal pucker. Oliver pressed his lips to the rigid mouth presented to him.

When he opened his eyes it was dark around him, with only a vague light coming from above.

Oliver glanced down at his watch. It was midnight. The stench of soil and decay flooded his nostrils. The discordant cry of a banshee sounded from overhead causing Oliver’s head to snap up. At a tremendous height, dwarfed by the distance, Oliver saw the woman who had danced for him. She continued to frolic around the grave stomping in impish glee, loosening bits of earth that tumbled down onto Oliver, occasionally throwing an accentuating clump of dirt with her clawed hands. Oliver fell to his knees and let the dirt gather around him glimpsing his beloved Drosera until she evanesced among the granules of dust filling his vision.

Lilla Orly All-nonsense Editor-in-Chief subsisting from printed word to printed word. Enamored by the grim cavities of a too saccharine existence, and tracing half-truths in negative space. Digs meandering routes and gnarly tunes as well as the concept of an ever-expanding universe.

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The WASP | Volume I | Spring 2018

Falling Apart Mateusz Boczkiewicz

Although the light was blinding her, she knew he was there, watching. It wasn’t hurtful, it was just blinding, which felt kind of weird at the time. She was very angry with that feeling and with him. He lied to her. So many times. Turned out that he was lying from the beginning.

“Why are you crying?” he asked. The voice was physical, she felt it touching her skin, as soon as it pierced through the flow of light. Unpleasant and unfair. Sticky. She knew how to deal with it by then, too many times it touched her without warning.

“I’m not crying,” she said through gritted teeth.

“There are tears falling down your cheeks and all around your eyes.”

“And yet, I’m not crying.”

And so they sat there. As the world was falling apart around her (she felt it, but she couldn’t see it). She knew that all the friends she created were going down to that rift somewhere near the stable, which she had built for Baanqui and all of her sidekicks. Trees and flowers were burning, or maybe melting, it wasn’t certain. The sun roses didn’t like it at all. In fact, they were dying. Everything was dying. Attempts to help were only making it worse. New trees had grown dark, twisted, and half rotten, very unpleasant to newcomers, which only made fixing harder. Creatures were getting worse and worse, not like the ones she used to create. At first, at least.

The early ones were nice. They were just like she wanted them—colorful, funny, and friendly.

Company was what she needed and they provided it. True friends.

“Why are you crying?”

Yes, the first ones were just like he said they would be, so she just created them. You can do it if you want, you can have friends, you know. That’s what he said, “If you want.” She wanted.

So the world got filled with creation, as thought came to life. People around her recognized her friends as weird and childish, they didn’t want to play and often got mad with her for creating new things.

In spite of all this suffering, she would really like to see that man getting chopped by tentaxes.

They were created for the first time when she got very angry with the very same man, so it was extra special. Angry things were nasty, but there was not a lot of ‘em. People didn’t like stuffangries and asked her to not get into that kind of mood VERY politely. But, now, everything went down. The more she was screwing around with ‘fixing’ the more tentaxes would arise from this weird, violet river or something. And there were other things too, but they were all new and she didn’t have names for them. Even trees acted like stuffangries and started rooting and smashing people. A vicious circle of her attempting to control her little world had begun. Not only did her thingies and stuffies and viewies get destroyed, but they started to hurt people from outside. No likey. Na-ah…

“Why are you crying, little one?”

“Don’t call me that!”

His voice materialized in front of her, brutally assaulting what was left of (let’s say) her comfort zone. Again. No likey. Blackie-sticky voice.

“Tell me, why are you crying, little one?”

“Don’t call me that, don't call me that… DON’T DON’T DON’T!!! STOP!” Aaaand it exploded. She hated him for everything he did and said. All of this because of his actions, and her trust-stupidity combo.

“I’m dying real soon, am I?” “Yes.”

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Most of things just shattered up like glass and the light stopped. A few stuffies and corpses were still around, but the rest was darkness. She could see him then. His muscles were shining from underneath a white and tight long-sleeve shirt, his white trousers were perfect, and his white mask immaculate. Yes, he made her destroy the world. But now…wasn’t he the only one left for her?

“Will you stay with me? I’m scared…”

“Of course, my little one.”

“Just don’t say anything, I don’t want you to make things worse again.”

“I can’t get any worse, little one.”

“Don’t…”

“Will she be ok?” the woman asked. She was all red and wet, after long hours of weeping.

“I'm sorry, we have literally no idea what is happening. Her brain and heart are working in a sleeplike state, like she has been asleep the whole time. She just doesn’t respond, doesn’t move or react.

For now, I can’t tell you anything else. We will keep her alive and hope for the best.”

The man embraced his wife as she sobbed, “My little one.”

Mateusz Boczkiewicz “Hey, I’m Batman.”

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POETRY

Fix It

Teresa Bakalarska

hello, I’m a machine with gears of organs that sing and creak through blood and other necessary oils; I’ve read this many times in press: “the human brain is a wonderful mechanism” I guess, it probably is still, I get mad; because look at this stupid ant - yes – it is me, trying to understand 3D of the world, emotions, and tax returns, the truth of facemasks (do they really work?) and maybe, also, your lymphatic streams? philosophy does not cut it for me (or do they cut too deep to look under the surface?) nor VHS we watched in bio about fish - yes – I’ve started writing a manual for the Earth, and - yes – it ended where it begun roundness and all that jazz (I gulped a glass out of the sea, it tastes like sprite for anyone who’s asking; absurd of branding, can I get a retweet?) look, irony is that you don’t get uncertainty of the matter before you agree with certainty (it might be for the better, though, since I’m still scared of one day owning a shower, because it might need to be fixed)

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Spider

Teresa Bakalarska

I caught a spider in my glass and looked at it why was there spider in my glass instead of milk? up close it looked just as dark as me and by morning it was gone I also should escape to weave myself in the distant fear

Teresa Bakalarska A human, crisp, professional whiner. Writes everything from poetry through prose to god-awful rap lyrics.

Thinks that Buffy The Vampire Slayer is the greatest achievement of humanity.

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Moloch

Sofiya Voytkukhova

__|__/_ allansmedlrowseahidaspipear means all here words disappear orange is green is orange is green orange with orange green is what we eat __________ three tree leaves three tree leaves ____|\_ violet dragon-flies around violet flowers violet drags on fly a round violet flower s violet on drag round a flies flowers debris 76 69 6F 6C 65 74 20 64 72 61 67 6F 6E 2D 66 6C 69 65 73 20 61 72 6F 75 6E 64 20 76 69 6F 6C 65 74 20 66 6C 6F 77 65 72 73 20 76 69 6F 6C 65 74 20 64 72 61 67 73 20 6F 6E 20 66 6C 79 20 61 20 72 6F 75 6E 64 20 76 69 6F 6C 65 74 20 66 6C 6F 77 65 72 20 73 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 0A 6F 6E 20 64 72 61 67 20 76 69 6F 6C 65 74 20 72 6F 75 6E 64 20 61 20 66 6C 69 65 73 20 66 6C 6F 77 65 72 73 20 0A 62 75 74 20 73 74 61 79 73 20 75 6E 74 6F 75 63 68 65 64 20 74 68 65 20 76 69 6F 6C 65 74 20 0A 37 36 20 36 39 20 36 46 20 36 43 20 36 35 20 37 34 20 32 30 20 36 34 20 37 32 20 36 31 20 36 37 20 36 46 20 36 45 20 32 44 20 36 36 20 36 43 20 36 39 20 36 35 20 37 33 20 32 30 20 36 31 20 37 32 20 36 46 20 37 35 20 36 45 20 36 34 20 32 30 20 37 36 20 36 39 20 36 46 20 36 43 20 36 35 20 37 34 20 32 30 20 36 36 20 36 43 20 36 46 20 37 37 20 36 35 20 37 32 20 37 33 20 32 30 20 37 36 20 36 39 20 36 46 20 36 43 20 36 35 20 37 34 20 32 30 20 36 34 20 37 32 20 36 31 20 36 37 20 37 33 20 32 30 20 36 46 20 36 45 20 32 30 20 36 36 20 36 43 20 37 39 20 32 30 20 36 31 20 32 30 20 37 32 20 36 46 20 37 35 20 36 45 20 36 34 20 32 30 20 37 36 20 36 39 20 36 46 20 36 43 20 36 35 20 37 34 20 32 30 20 36 36 20 36 43 20 36 46 20 37 37 20 36 35 20 37 32 20 32 30 20 37 33 20 32 30 20 32 30 20 32 30 20 32 30 20 32 30 20 32 30 20 32 30 20 32 30 20 32 30 20 30 41 20 36 46 20 36 45 20 32 30 20 36 34 20 37 32 20 36 31 20 36 37 20 32 30 20 37 36 20 36 39 20 36 46 20 36 43 20 36 35 20 37 34 20 32 30 20 37 32 20 36 46 20 37 35 20 36 45 20 36 34 20 32 30 20 36 31 20 32 30 20 36 36 20 36 43 20 36 39 20 36 35 20 37 33 20 32 30 20 36 36 20 36 43 20 36 46 20 37 37 20 36 35 20 37 32 20 37 33 20 32 30 20 30 41 20 36 32 20 37 35 20 37 34 20 32 30 20 37 33 20 37 34 20 36 31 20 37 39 20 37 33 20 32 30 20 37 35 20 36 45 20 37 34 20 36 46 20 37 35 20 36 33 20 36 38 20 36 35 20 36 34 20 32 30 20 37 34 20 36 38 20 36 35 20 32 30 20 37 36 20 36 39 20 36 46 20 36 43 20 36 35 20 37 34 20 32 30 20 30 41 0A

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In Memory of Charles Olson Sofiya Voytkukhova

the time in hours is measured heart be its pulse vibrate beat tremble strain try fluctuate make road longer cardiac rythm revives stop i l e n c e

Sofia Voytukhova A logophile who tries to come to terms with their own voice and balance facts with value.

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ARTICLES

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: What if the Evil Queen Had Instagram?

Jacek Cygan

7:00 a.m. You wake up, complain how tired you already are, and check the time on your smartphone. Oh, you touched it, so why don’t you catch up with your backlog from the night and check the latest news feed.

But wait a second, apart from Facebook, you need to dedicate some time to Snapchat, Twitter, and Instagram as well. You don’t know how, but the first 30 minutes of your morning is over. Some researchers show that the application mentioned last is the most time-consuming amongst the youth of today, no matter which country they reside in.

Just take a quick look at some facts—it has over 800 million active monthly users, and almost 60% of them are under 30 years old. Moreover, the strongest and most active group, those who check Instagram a couple of times per day, are teenagers between 13 and 17 years old. Still, it is not as popular and universal as Facebook, but very few teens spend as much time on Facebook as they do on Instagram. There are so many pictures to check out and posts to comment on.

It leads to a simple conclusion—the younger one is, the bigger part of one’s life is uploaded on the Internet and shared with people that don’t even know the said individual. What is obvious is that text posts are too lengthy and old-fashioned; no one has enough time to read them all. However, photographs of your the newest outfits or your Starbucks coffee? That’s something. Capture it to make it real. Post it to make it influential.

Knowing the foregoing facts, one statement can be made clear—the youngsters of the 21st century are more self-absorbed than ever before. The sense of who you are and what you present turned the wrong way and became digital, allowing Internet users to observe and judge one’s lifestyle, appearance, and ideology. That’s some kind of a trigger. It pushes teenagers to put larger emphasis on their digital ‘me’ instead of taking care of their real happiness, attitude, and fulfillment. It doesn’t matter how you

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look in the mirror; what matters is how a picture makes you look. The level of personal exhibition is growing at an exponential rate and traps its followers in a bubble where everything is superficial, attention-seeking, and premeditated. Scientists are terrified but certain—the development of the so-called ‘expressive individualism’ and time spent on social media increases narcissism and negatively affects self-esteem. This was confirmed, for example,

by Wilson, Fornasier, and White in 2010. The delusional self-image blots out the real viewpoint and forces users to care about numbers, not people.

I believe that some of you have the same feeling right now—God, why? However, the presence of social media, and especially Instagram, is too vivid and bright to overlook. Even my parents joined Instagram, and they’re in their fifties! So, how can inexperienced and vulnerable teens be protected from it when it’s impossible to miss? The old saying “if you’re not online, you’re dead” is more alive than one may expect. People have the natural need to fit in, to belong, and to feel appreciated. And Instagram lets them achieve that, seemingly, of course. In fact, it sets in motion the comparison mechanism, based mostly on numbers and figures. The cost becomes the quality, which can be described and listed in the same way as the hardware of the newest laptop or camera. A circle of friends turns into an audience while conversations are substituted by shallow comments and likes. It is so easy to characterize people these days; all you have to do is count their followers and talk about their popularity.

One’s personality steps down.

Well, to answer the question at hand—what if the Evil Queen had Instagram? In my opinion, she would have been too busy checking the analytics of her profile and choosing the perfect lighting for everyday selfies than to chase after Snow White, which would eventually ruin the entire plot of the fairytale. Thank God that Disney didn’t live in the digital era. Maybe, instead of the apple, the empathetic princess would have been touched by the wave of Internet hatred?

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This is not the end of social media chit-chat in The Wasp. We cannot end this topic without a quick discussion about the pros of Instagram, describing how to get a job and earn money on social media. It’s time to deliberate if our generation is blessed or cursed to live in the digital era.

To be continued, Jack.

Jacek Cygan They say I cannot do all the things at once? Watch me. Young, ambitious, and a bit of a crazy social media researcher, constant Netflix watcher, and hater of silence. Multitasking student, member of the ASC Student’s Union, still developing his graphic design abilities at another department.

Keep my family safe, friends happy, and provide me with some coffee and a nice playlist—then, I can chase after my dreams till the last breath.

Source Wilson, K., Fornasier, S., & White, K. M. (2010, April). Psychological predictors of young adults' use of social networking sites.

Cyberpsychol Behav Soc Netw. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20528274 The WASP | Volume I | Spring 2018

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To End Gerrymandering, Use State Constitutions Marcelina Przespolewska

A counterattack to the assault on voting rights is underway. In January 2018, Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down partisan gerrymandering, or redrawing district lines, in an attempt to exert a political influence, simultaneously challenging a statewide manipulation of votes. Undeterred by the limited role of federal law, the state’s high court blasted the utterly undemocratic exploitation of the electorate. It is critical to recognize, however, that such a case catapults the matter far beyond state boundaries. In an eminently skillful way, the court purveyed a paradigm for eradicating political gerrymandering. It is, in fact, a paradigm dictated by the laws entrenched not in federal but state jurisprudence. Pennsylvania, using its own constitution, ingeniously forged a standard that others will, and should, follow.

From the very beginning, the record on striking gerrymandering has been transparently perplexed. In Davis v. Bandemer, the U.S. Supreme Court found political redistricting triable under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. But even though the court determined such claims justiciable, it ultimately failed to set a standard for a juridical intervention. To complicate things further, in Vieth v. Jubelirer the justices ruled that no legal limit exists on partisan gerrymandering.

Consequently, the supreme law of the land hasn’t provided an effective solution to prevent politicians from

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tampering the democratic process. When the Pennsylvania Supreme Court transcended the limits of federal jurisprudence, however, the matter of gerrymandering once more permeated the entire country. In a backlash to the GOP, the state’s high court threw out the congressional map drawn in 2011, directing lawmakers to devise new district lines. If the Republican-controlled state legislature manufactures a new plan as gerrymandered as the previous one, the court will itself draw nonpartisan district boundaries for the upcoming midterm elections. The decision, pertaining exclusively to Pennsylvania, is precisely based on a provision entrenched in a state document. In the opinion, the court stated that the 2011 plan “clearly, plainly and palpably” violated the Free and Equal Elections Clause of the Pennsylvania Constitution. Such a provision provides each individual with an absolute right to a just electoral process and an equally counted vote. Underlying those claims there is an articulate fact that any negligence of those freedoms deprives people from their constitutional right.

Indeed, the 2011 congressional map generated an unprecedented “efficiency gap,” consequently creating a system intended to curtail the power of the ballot. In detail, the efficiency gap is a measure of “wasted votes”

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produced through the practice of “cracking” (reallocating like-minded voters into several districts in order to diminish their consolidated influence) and “packing” (clustering such voters in one district in an effort to temper their capacity in others). Such methods let partisan lawmakers choose particular voters for purely political reasons, and the effect of those techniques is highly disturbing. In 2012, for example, Republicans won 49.2% of the state vote, whereas Democrats earned 50.8% of the Pennsylvania electorate. Despite the fact that state constituency split roughly in half between the two major parties, Republicans won thirteen congressional districts, while Democrats managed to win only five. As a result, the will of the people didn’t translate into their adequate representation, and the right to vote granted by the Free and Equal Elections Clause was, in fact, violated.

It is crucial to note that, as Justice Debra McCloskey Todd put it, the provision “has no federal counterpart.” In other words, state regulations protect the right to vote more widely than federal law. As Professor of Law Joshua A. Douglas explains, “Unlike the U.S. Constitution, which merely implies the right to vote, virtually all state constitutions explicitly enumerate this right. We simply need state judges who are willing to construe broadly and independently these state constitutional grants of the right to vote.” Such a development in election law puts state jurisprudence at the forefront in the fight against partisan redistricting. Under those circumstances, it is state courts that should spearhead the battle and allow the American people to exercise their indispensable right.

Throughout history, state legislators have been redrawing congressional maps in an attempt to bolster their political strength. In order to reelect its incumbent candidates, a party in power would decide the shape of a particular district. Such a concerted effort to disenfranchise people from their fundamental right is a direct threat to a democracy. Gerrymandering is not just a detail in the midst of political chaos. It is a pivotal point deciding the future of general welfare. However, gerrymandering is not inevitable, nor should it be confined to the extent of federal law. With the U.S. Supreme Court struggling to determine the limits of redefining district boundaries, the scope of the matter needs to be addressed through the means fixed in state jurisprudence. It is, therefore, necessary that state courts take a nonpartisan effort and irresistibly follow in Pennsylvania’s footsteps.

Sources League of Women Voters, et al. v. the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, et al. – 159 MM 2017. Retrieved from http://www.pacourts.us/assets/ opinions/Supreme/out/J-1-2018majorityopinion.pdf?cb=1 Davis v. Bandemer, 478 U.S. 109 (1986). Retrieved from https://supreme. justia.com/cases/federal/us/478/109/ Vieth v. Jubelirer, 541 U.S. 267 (2004). Retrieved from https://supreme. justia.com/cases/federal/us/541/267/opinion.html Stracqualursi, V., & Bradner, E. (Ferbuary 13, 2018). Pennsylvania governor vetoes Republican-redrawn congressional map. CNN. Retrieved from https://edition.cnn.com/2018/02/13/politics/pennsylvania-gov-veto-redrawn-congressional-map/index.html Douglas, J. (January 23, 2018). What’s the best way to fix our broken democracy? Lean on state courts and constitutions. The Los Angeles Times.

Retrieved from http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-douglas-pennsylvania-redistricting-20180123-story.html Douglas, J. (August 6, 2015). State Constitutions: The Next Frontier in Voting Rights Protection. American Constitution Society for Law and Policy. Retrieved from https://www.acslaw.org/acsblog/state-constitutions-the-next-frontier-in-voting-rights-protection

Marcelina Przespolewska A political science nerd, among other things.

Ceaselessly contemplates details of policy while drinking unreasonable amounts of coffee. Finds her own equilibrium in art and books. And Netflix.

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Blanche duNoire Aleksandra Grabowska

Many of us associate A Streetcar Named Desire with the picture directed by Elia Kazan—its iconic music theme, its eroticism, and that seductive gaze from Marlon Brando. No doubt that after over 50 years from its premiere, the first picture that comes to our minds when A Streetcar is mentioned, is Brando as Stanley—the handsome man leaning against the wall, wearing a white T-shirt that fits obscenely close to his muscular body. But what is often forgotten, or at least overshadowed, is Blanche.

Blanche with Vivian Leigh’s face—feisty, yet delicate. For the audience back then, Leigh was associated mainly with another iconic portrayal of the Southern belle— Scarlett O’Hara from Gone with the Wind. Let’s stop here for a moment and take a look at women of the South; characters created by men for whom these women were the embodiments of the disappearing world of their childhood.

Women who go crazy and die.

Blanche DuBois in Tennessee William’s A Streetcar Named Desire is a Southern belle. Yet another notable belle is Rose from Faulkner’s Rose for Emily, who you can remember from American literature lectures. The Southern belle is a uniquely Southern phenomenon and may simply be described as, “a stock character representing a young woman of the American Deep South’s upper socioeconomic class.” She has her origin based on the Victorian model of a woman as an angel of the house.

Both Blanche and Rose are the last representatives of the old aristocracy that tries to survive in the modern world.

This is visible not only in their origin but also in the way they dress, their knowledge and skills. They represent the culture—the men they have affairs with, the North, the South, and nature. As Esther Merle Jackson argues while writing about A Streetcar Named Desire: “The extreme polarization of relationship between Blanche and Stanley could also be read as a critical struggle between [two different] ways of life—as the struggle between Blanche’s traditional, civilized, artistic, and spiritual self and Stanley’s modern, primitive, physical, and animalistic other.” Emily, on the other hand, fulfills the Victorian idea mainly by her devotion to the house. Yet, traces of Victorian-gaze could be noticed in the way she is portrayed.

In Faulkner’s story Emily is voiceless. The narrator of Rose for Emily is a male member of a local community and his knowledge suggests that he knows the history of the town as well as Rose’s family. He is the omniscient voice of the rural South, of the old world that is pushed into oblivion, the one that carries confederate values—the

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men’s world. Her madness is in the eyes of the beholder: the town and the men. When her father dies, she is still described as “an angel,” but one that starts to lose her charm and beauty. She cuts her hair in what may be the first sign of a downfall; she is deprived of one of the most important features of femininity—the hair. Her troubles start with the death of a “proper” male guardian, her father. When Rose’s father died she behaved in a suspicious way, but, in the eyes of the inhabitants of the town, she is not crazy, yet. The main trigger for Emily’s madness is a romance with a Yankee, Homer Barron. Romance is a symbol of the influence of Northern values and she, as a character that represents the South, cannot survive. The moment of transcendence, of overstepping Southern values, is when the sentence is signed. That type of behavior cannot be accepted among the Southern set of values; thus, in the Southern gaze, she must be punished for her insubordination and betrayal. As a consequence, both Emily and Blanche go crazy. They must go crazy. There is no other way.

Blanche goes mad after the rape, but signs of insanity, or at least imbalanced mental state, are visible from the first scene. She is a fallen woman traumatized by the death of her husband as well as his homosexuality. Lack of a male guidance leads to downfall. Her name has a French origin and her identity through her name sets the binary conflicts between body and mind, nature and culture. According to Bert Cardullo, “Blanche’s name links her not only to the purity of the Virgin Mary, but also to the reclaimed innocence of Mary Magdalene, who was cured of her sexual waywardness by Jesus, just as Blanche was suddenly cured of hers when she remarked to Mitch, ‘Sometimes—there is God—so quickly!’” ‘Blanche’ means ‘white,’ connoting virginity. Blanche is portrayed almost child-like in her loneliness and helplessness, but, at the same time, the reader has no doubt she is a prostitute.

Both stories may be read as an ancient tragedy in which the decision had been made before the action even started. Blanche takes a streetcar to Elysian Fields, a place (according to ancient beliefs) one passes through before entering the final resting place. Throughout the play she bathes very often and changes cloths as though she is imitating the ancient ritual of preparing her body for a

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funeral. Rose and Blanche are relics, strange characters with a touch of irreality. They are memories of the past and, as Tennessee Williams said, “Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.” Rose and Blanche are characters created by memories and emotions. Faulkner develops the character of Emily and events in her life not only to tell a shocking story but also to portray his view on the Antebellum South. Emily is a figure of the world that struggles with change. Both Faulkner and Williams, by creating those two female characters, shared with their audiences a reflection on the post-Civil War South, the place where they were born and raised.

It is important for us to remember that Blanche and Rose were characters created by male authors of Southern origin. In a place as specific as the American South, where values and standards are stopped in time, there is no place for a woman who is sexually free. The symbolic influence of Northern values is the romance and betrayal—something that cannot be accepted. Liberated women have to be punished. That is why they finally go crazy.

They must go crazy, there is no other way. They have to die the same as the old South must die.

Sources Buzacott, L. (n.d.). “The Women, the Indomitable, the Undefeated”: The Mammy, the Belle, and Southern Memory in William Faulkner. doi:10.14264/uql.2016.159 Oklopčić, B. (n.d.). Southern Belle (De)constructed. Americana. Retrieved from http://americanaejournal.hu/vol4no2/oklopcic Simmons, R. W., & Jackson, E. M. (1966). The Broken World of Tennessee Williams. Books Abroad, 40(2), 207. doi:10.2307/40120668

Aleksandra Grabowska If she was not an ASC student, she would be in a morgue. As a child she wanted to be a pathologist and a writer. She loves glitter, Clark Gable, and Virginia Wool’s novels. In life she follows Oscar Wild’s advice: “you can never be overdressed or overeducated.”

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Contributors

Teresa Bakalarska A human, crisp, professional whiner. Writes everything from poetry through prose to god-awful rap lyrics. Thinks that Buffy The Vampire Slayer is the greatest achievement of humanity.

Aleksandra Barciszewska Former editor-in-chief. ASC-survivor. Vampiric psychoanalyst by nature. Extracting the sexual from the mundane, rejecting reality for the sake of the very-tale of momentary satiation of the urges for creation.

Jacek Cygan They say I cannot do all the things at once? Watch me. Young, ambitious, and a bit of a crazy social media researcher, constant Netflix watcher, and hater of silence. Multitasking student, member of the ASC Student’s Union, still developing his graphic design abilities at another department.

Keep my family safe, friends happy, and provide me with some coffee and a nice playlist—then, I can chase after my dreams till the last breath.

Aleksandra Dąbrowa 5th year student of ASC, addicted to science-fiction movies and TV series.

Can’t live without Adobe After Effects and Photoshop. Future motion designer and creative web developer.

Mateusz Boczkiewicz “Hey, I’m Batman.”

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Małgorzata Dudo ASC overstayer. Trivia collector.

Author of many unfunny jokes.

Aleksandra Grabowska If she was not an ASC student, she would be in a morgue. As a child she wanted to be a pathologist and a writer. She loves glitter, Clark Gable, and Virginia Wool’s novels. In life she follows Oscar Wild’s advice: “you can never be overdressed or overeducated.”

Anita Majewska Addicted to basketball, drawing, and Netflix. I think with images.

If I look depressed, I probably just ran out of hummus.

Filip Kaliński World champ in creativity (Destination Imagination) from a small town of Giżycko. Always looking for another great story. Generally speaking, self-righteous artist and whisky lover.

Natalia Ogórek Singing is her biggest passion, but she does not connect her future with it.

Lover of TV series and Marvel. 70% funny, 50% weird, 100% organized.

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Lilla Orly All-nonsense Editor-in-Chief subsisting from printed word to printed word. Enamored by the grim cavities of a too saccharine existence, and tracing half-truths in negative space. Digs meandering routes and gnarly tunes as well as the concept of an ever-expanding universe.

Paweł Pańczyk Graphic designer and emotional experience seeker. Just be yourself!

Marcelina Przespolewska A political science nerd, among other things. Ceaselessly contemplates details of policy while drinking unreasonable amounts of coffee. Finds her own equilibrium in art and books. And Netflix.

Marta Rapacka 2nd year BA student. Apart from being utterly in love with TV series, she loves spending her free time discovering mysteries of Adobe Photoshop. Coerced into accepting the new goal of her existence, namely being The Very First Caricaturist of The Wasp—an honorable title she proudly bears and exploits (see: above and below).

Basia Szukała Travel girl who always keeps a weather eye on the horizon. In love with chocolate and pineapple. Play her Hans Zimmer or reggaeton. Do not disturb while she is taking photos and you will get lots of hearts.

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Sofia Voytukhova A logophile who tries to come to terms with their own voice and balance facts with value.

Klaudia Wanat A creative, amateurish artist, mainly relying on her imagination.

In huge love with animals, concerts, and hair dyeing. Takes on new challenges. Biggest wish: explore the whole world and be a happy owner of a mini pig.

Klaudia Wypych 22-year-old who loves music, drawing, and cats. Favourite things to do? Playing the guitar, singing, and watching some good TV shows while eating pizza.

Kamila Maria Wyszyńska Studies Graphic Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. American Studies is her second faculty. Loves to travel. Wants to live and create across the world.

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