Creative Writing Student Portfolio 2020-2021

PORTFOLIO OF STUDENT WRITING

2020-2021

1

TABLE OF CONTENTS See If They Will Not Live Again.........Araxie Cass......................3-4 Dumb River.....................Caitlyn Klum........................................5-6 Summer of the Almost Always Never....Athena Hallberg.........7-8 Half Life................................................Jason Lalljee.........................9 Goodybe, Koryõ Inn..............Serin Lee....................................10-11 Prodigal......Eli Timoner.............................................................12-13 Physical Education......Alexa Perlmutter........................................14 The Tall Man's Garden............Evan Williams...............................15

2

Sergei Parajanov, The Color Of Pomegranates, 1969

SEE IF THEY WILL NOT LIVE AGAIN ARAXIE CASS (AB’22)

One hundred years after my family fled the Armenian Genocide, I went to Armenia for the first time on a family vacation. This land of grassy slopes, ancient stone churches, and blazing summer sun was unfamiliar to me, but it drew me in like no other place I had been before. One day, our guide, Hayk, and his dad invited us over for coffee. We talked about painting over tiny cups of coffee, dark and thick with fine grounds. One cup led to another, and a year later I was in Armenia again to help my mom, Anahit, with a photography and writing project documenting stories of nonviolent resistance in two regions of the country under military threat. It was in cups of coffee that I learned the stories of a tiny unrecognized republic called Artsakh1, the border villages of Tavush province in Armenia, and what it means to live a life of resistance in a conflict zone.2

Originally, the project aimed to show the beauty and history of Armenia to the world. But as we traveled through Tavush and Artsakh, people started asking us to tell their stories. Since the Armenian Genocide, one of the weapons used against Armenians is the denial of the facts of our existence.3 In an act of resistance, people invited us to drink coffee and listen.

I. Azerbaijan was our home When we first walked into Ruzanna Avagyan’s office, she was finishing a meeting with an older man who sat on the other side of her wooden desk. She wore a businesslike blue dress and spoke in Russian, in a tone that sounded like she was giving him instructions before he left. Saro,4 our translator, guide, and all-purpose friend, introduced us, and Ruzanna asked whether we liked sugar in our coffee.

Once we were all seated around the table next to the desk with our tiny white cups, Ruzanna explained to us that her client’s name was Sasha and he had come to her about the loss of his refugee paperwork. We started off asking questions about the refugee organization that she ran. Between statistics and sips of coffee, she began to unravel the story of how she came to Artsakh.

“I was nineteen years old when my family left Sumgait,” she told us. “They went to Stepanakert and I went to Yerevan.”

As Ruzanna spoke, I looked at her, as if to keep some semblance being included in the conversation..

Her words were unintelligible to me, so I found myself trying to read her half smiles, the lilt of her speech, and the deep, slightly sad look of her brown eyes.5 Then I looked at Saro, who translated, delivering the story edited and annotated for me to better understand.

“She didn’t see the bad things I saw,” he said, and his eyes darkened for an almost imperceptible moment, before he returned to his authoritative tone, making sure we had our history straight. “Until 1988, we can say, it 1 Artsakh is the ancient Armenian name for the region. It is also known as Nagorno-Karabakh, an amalgamation of Russian and Azeri words.

2 Folktales have no barriers and can pass through centuries from generation to generation and can live as long as a nation lives. - Hayk Kachatryan, Queens of the Armenians 3 Sometimes it seems almost amusing that the Armenian Genocide is still denied when the evidence is written so clearly in the letter from my mother’s great uncle after he survived the Turkish army (where Armenians were forced to dig their own graves) and in the photographs of our crucified ancestors we saw as children and in the splinters and wounds that still divide my family. I used to find it baffling how all the reliable sources said that the border between Armenia and Artsakh was not there, when I had driven across it.

4 Saro’s full name, Sarasar Saryan, literally translates to “mountain mountain mountain,” and is perhaps the best illustration of Artsakh’s national motto, We Are Our Mountains.

5 Armenians like to say that you can always recognize Armenian eyes (hye achker), because they carry so much sadness.

3

was normal.”

“Our neighbors told us that the pogroms were an answer to the Karabakh movement,” Ruzanna continued. “Our neighbors were very polite with us. We knew each other well. My father was an electrician and he was very close with them and they respected him very much. He made a khorovats grill on their balcony for them, and thanks to their good relations, my family and some other Armenians didn’t suffer as much. Our building was long and had seventeen Armenian families. My neighbor told me that because of our friendship, no one was killed in our building. A group of hooligans came, but our neighbors defended us and sent them to another house. The town became bloody, and we realized we couldn’t stay. Our neighbors helped us get out, and we left on February 29th.”

She and Saro went back and forth confirming the dates. My notes are full of scribbled dates and numbers, proof that their experiences were real. 6

“There were Soviet soldiers,” she continued. “But they did nothing while the Azeris were killing Armenians.

The bandits were mostly from other places, not Sumgait, but Azeris from Agdam or Armenia. My father told me that there was a woman in the family who was nine months pregnant, who was killed by being burned alive. First they cut her open and took the baby out, and then they burned her. They said it would be like this for all Armenians.”

“My family was saved because we could speak good Azerbaijani,” said Ruzanna.

“Baku Armenians have a recognizable accent,” Saro explained, as if remembering a story of his own. “They would get on the busses and take everyone who had the Armenian accent. Some Azeris were killed in Armenia because of their accent too.”

“My family went to Baku first, then came back to Sumgait to get our property,” Ruzanna said. “After that I went to Moscow with other Armenian activists to meet Gorbachev. We wanted to build a second Sumgait. We liked Azerbaijan; it was our homeland. It was a multinational republic, and we had autonomy there. We waited for Gorbachev, but after 3 days his deputy came and told us, ‘Why did you raise a panic? If you don’t want to live in Sumgait, go to Baku.’”

“Some Armenians went to Baku and they were killed there,” Ruzanna continued. “We were moved to a village called Putyatina in Russia. All ten of us went there, but I returned with my sister to Yerevan,7 because the village life wasn’t for us. We were city people.”

The statement seemed almost mundane, like something you’d find in a conversation about where to buy a house, not a story of fleeing from ethnic cleansing.

“After I came to Yerevan,” Ruzanna said, “I was an activist, and I helped to organize a hunger strike for Artsakh to unite with Armenia.8 After a month, we returned to Sumgait, thinking that maybe we could continue our life.

But my family got a phone call in Sumgait saying that they would be killed because I was an activist. So they came to Stepanakert, and tried to exchange flats with Azeris who were forced to leave Artsakh. But because of my activism, they couldn’t make the exchange, so they lost all their property in Sumgait. On September 2, 1991, Artsakh declared independence. There was a “vrezh”9 group of Sumgaitis in the war, and my husband was in it. During the war, more refugees died than local people. Some said it was a compliment. We felt like heros.”10 6 When international groups and experts discuss the Artsakh conflict, no one ever mentions the Baku and Sumgait massacres. The refugees from these massacres are not recognized as refugees. On paper, it is as if they didn’t happen.

7 Armenia’s capital and largest city. One of the three cities on earth I have spent enough time in to know my way around comfortably.

8 A woman...remains in her logical role...as caregiver and mediator, activist and public speaker...skillfully [waging] the struggle of the oppressed. - Zabel Yesayan, leader in the Armenian Revolutionary and Feminist Movements, 1911 9 Vrezh means “revenge” in Armenian. After the Genocide, people started naming their children Vrezh because surviving was revenge.

10 I do not say that we must take up the swords...in order that we alone may live on the land. But I do say we must learn self-preservation in order that the Turks and Kurds may not annihilate us. - Raffi, Armenian nationalist writer, 1881

4

DUMB RIVER CAITLYN KLUM (AB’21) Disappointed Child I can’t open the umbrella in my dream. Can’t put my paper boat in the shallow end, my teeth in anything cold, my hamster, or sister, in the wild.

I can’t scrape beauty from a web, or ever leave that wreckage behind me.

Half my name is alone in heaven.

I am visited without permission, yet I’ll never sleep.

I find lost figures bent in my bathtub, or on the last smeared subway car, or squeamish in a white asylum, or slipping on their blood.

It is inappropriate to laugh my particular laugh.

It is inappropriate to spit to wound, to touch a flame to the center of a flower, to pray like composing a letter, to speak and not be heard, to overfeed a big, fat catfish.

I’m in love— I think. I ache like all angles at once.

What others calls shy is a begging for impossible speed, for languid evenings, for one more time.

The word “bone” repeated and its hollow shudder.

No one knows to dust for angels, and we never wholly come home, or learn how to keep company, or put missing in its place.

The taste of sole arugula, bitter oil in peanut butter, tincture of metal, cold water, chocolate on an early morning tongue.

How fast this sun nosedives!

Heat, warm mucus in each ear.

I can’t hold enough of you to remember— know that I try all wet, fertile spaces and am careful not to squander breath for memories.

I can’t imagine singing well, or living a long life. No matter, there will always be swimmers kicking up water in the deep end.

5

The Gardener I love a song but cannot weather its singer.

Call me little river, dumb river, thing. I ride the night train so often it becomes an ocean, bruise-black, like a fighter becomes the beat, becomes the bottom of the sea.

When I play my lyre, I hit one string en route to another, each rugged sound rushing to rid the note. That’s why I build my home, warm, sexed, and unfeeling.

Can you tell me about spring, now?

Number each sprout emerging like a small surrender from under your great big gardening boots.

6

THE SUMMER OF THE ALMOST ALWAYS NEVER ATHENA HALLBERG (AB’21)

Then it was the day of the apocalypse. We went to the final service in the morning. Before it started, people milled around talking about all the things they would do in Heaven. Roy was telling anyone who would listen, “I always knew I would live to see the end of the world. I’m just shocked it took so damn long!”

When the service began, our leader stood at the front of the church and gave his speech, as the collection plate went round and round. I don’t remember his name. He wasn’t from town, but he had family who was, a sister, I think. But I remember his booming voice and eyes flashing without disappointment. “Save yourself! Give up all wealth. Don’t hold back. If you are holding back, then you are holding back from God. After today it will be too late! Only true believers will be saved, honest people who speak the truth. As they say in Revelations only those will be saved who follow the lamb for ‘in their mouth no lie was found, for they are spotless.’ I follow the lamb and you must follow me.”

Our leader kept reminding us, “It’s tonight. It will happen at Midnight.”

Midnight, it will happen at midnight, we all seemed to think as one.

I remember that evening, sitting around with other End-of-the-Worlders at someone's house. I'm sure it was chosen because the owners had a VHS player. They only had The Sound of Music, which we watched over and over again. A group of us kids crowded around the TV set close enough to touch it, while the adults moved about passing between the kitchen and the living room. We ate pizza and birthday cake, even though it wasn't anyone's birthday.

It was six o'clock. Six hours left. Then it was seven. An old man was crying. He had been trying to convince his daughter for weeks, but there was still hope she might convert before the end. His face was ugly and strained, the tears running down his wrinkles and catching in his beard. I had never seen anyone that old cry before.

Then it was eight, where was my father in all this? I can't see him. I don't remember. Roy was telling anyone who would listen that he had given up smoking and drinking. He wanted to be clean before going to Heaven, but other people were smoking and cigarette smoke clouded the air.

It was ten, the movie crooned “Edelweiss, Edelweiss, Bless my homeland forever!” It was almost time. Some people wouldn't stop talking. Others couldn't seem to say a word. One woman was talking in the high screech of the crows we sometimes saw outside our house, “First day I get to heaven I’ll give my departed Jack a big kiss in our house of marbled gold.”

It was eleven o'clock, and the movie had started up again. We wouldn't have time left to finish it.

Then it was almost midnight – half an hour left – Someone proposed a toast. “To the End!” A man said and champaign glasses clinked.

twenty minutes –

ten – a woman was singing a song about the land of milk and honey. Her voice was high and out of tune, “Nights we all will dance!” It was hard to hear the movie.

7

Five– Four

– THREE – TWO

– ONE!

Then it was midnight – the end of the world. We listened to hear the sounds of bombs or zombies pounding down the door or fire and earthquakes in the streets. There was no meteorite plummeting to Earth or volcanic eruptions or anything else that would make us go the way of the dinosaurs. There was nothing. We were silent. Only the movie crooned along. I looked to my father, but I couldn't read his face. He was standing next to Mrs. Carrow who was saying that maybe the clocks were running fast or maybe it would be midnight mountain time. “Heaven is the city on high after all.” He wasn’t saying much, just the occasional “Yes” and “um-hmm.”

Another hour passed. Roy started drinking and people started to leave. It wasn’t long before Roy was red in the face. He was screaming about “That Damn Thief!” Our leader wasn’t at the party he claimed he needed to prepare for the end completely alone in private prayer. A woman had tried calling his home phone multiple times, but he didn’t answer his phone. A man I didn’t know helped my father lead Roy out. A few minutes later we heard Roy’s car start, and my father came back. He didn’t say a word. The von Trapps escaped to Switzerland yet again. When the movie finished, no one turned it back on. I curled up on a sofa in a ball and waited for whatever would come next.

After two hours, most people were gone. The woman who talked about her mansion of gold, kept insisting that this was just a test of our faith, that it would happen any minute, but no one was listening. She tried to call our leader’s home phone again, but he didn’t answer. By then no one expected him too. My father told me, “Come on, Danny, we're going home.” We didn't speak during the car ride.

The next morning, he didn't go back to work. He just sat in a lawn chair in our backyard and watched the traffic go by. He sat out there for hours. By that point, everyone knew the leader of the movement had skipped town. I watched my father through the living room window, and I felt an insane urge to get my toothbrushes. I wanted to tap him on the shoulder and lay them all out before him. I wanted to explain that they were soldiers and aliens and monsters. I wanted to tell him that they could be all those things, even though I knew and would never forget that they were just toothbrushes. We could still be happy and free. I wanted to tell him that he wasn't trapped, that we could go anywhere. I wanted to tell him so much more. That we could still sing and eat strawberry ice cream. But I didn't say any of that. I didn't even go outside. He sat out there for hours, then finally he stood up and came back inside and started to make dinner.

We hardly ever spoke of that summer again.

8

HALF LIFE JASON LALLJEE

(AB’21)

You tell her you were in Whole Foods when it happened. That’s when you heard about it, at least, and that was the more important part of it. You, balancing the cans of sun-dried tomatoes in one hand, the shopping cart cradled absentmindedly by the other. The cell phone was sandwiched between your shoulder and ear, so that when you heard the news, you became frozen there, like the woman in that Klimt painting craning away from a kiss.

Your fingers were the first to unfreeze. They unfurled, letting the cans drop, the tile denting the metal.

He kept rambling over the phone, desperate to explain himself as you kneeled against the linoleum, hastily picking up the tomatoes and returning them to the shelf. You shifted them to the back, where no one could see them, obscuring them with a line of untouched cans that you swept toward yourself in a single motion, like a magician vanishing coins under cups.

You don’t ask Naomi why she wants you to relive this moment. It’s about color, you think, journalists like color. And if you’re being honest, it’s nothing like the type of landmines she could be walking you through.

“What did you do next?” she asks.

“I called my lawyer,” you say, after sipping your cortado. You don’t tell her that before that, you left the Whole Foods without buying anything, and hung up on Aaron without saying something of consequence. You don’t tell her that you got in your car and drove aimlessly along the Long Island Sound, blurring past the ocean and cemeteries and skeletal swaths of trees, cobwebbed with Christmas lights they were either too early or too late for. You don’t tell her you eventually pulled into a car wash off the I-95, becoming engulfed in a clamor of hot water jets and rubber tongues. How, glancing through th fretwork of soap and sponge, you felt like you were being masticated.

9

GOODBYE, KORYÕ INN The Double Image I used to imagine falling asleep in my dream, even if in that darkness I was merely entering the country behind my mother’s eyes. Now I live between the window and cutting board, where spring makes its reports. I thought the rain was supposed to protect me from greening things. But like it, I have never quite arrived—like grasses I am only recovered, recovering, or recovered from. So I try to let mothers go, since one is supposed to come out of a wound slowly, catch it on a day when its reflection is no longer changing. We are windowless interiors.

I shiver in fear of the one who lives there— in my dream I played truant; in the mirror, I failed to appear.

I can never fit into the size of my life before the end of a poem, before she returns and tucks my smooth body into the back of a taxi. We move together as the stillness of Gwangju rises to greet us, its ashen hands a waving cordon as we reach higher ground.

She lays me out with my shoes and my folded shirt so I will not be too cold, and the white fabric unfurls and tosses and dresses me in the wind. The sun is higher now, c ontracts shadow— a plane blows spring frost over cut grass— I think this time I might choose experience, I say, and hear the silent height reply with fields opening into houses, small and feeling.

10

SERIN LEE

(AB’21)

When the Snow Comes, Consider Family The first word that bubbles up is champagne.

“Pretty is as pretty does”—I liked the sound that sparkling made. Other times we were very civil, did not disturb one another.

Shot through with orange, the leaves in his shadow come now and are gone, lost to the month’s material.

One day I hope to wear them, so light I will not know I have them on. It is cold because we are waiting on narrative.

Contract your muscles and hold them to the task of taking inventory; otherwise, the day outpaces time. Magpie beauty sweeps a whole house, shelters the every day.

I could not love the automatic women, though I tried. The shape of their waiting is a hand that gives and a hand that receives, one turning over the other in thinning light.

To turn over the onions, too, and have them be roses or the cerebral sky. From these cards I cannot know when there will next be flowers, but take off your clothes to better smell the lavender. Consider the hour as it whitens, and its green ray— to cry about nothing is not nothing.

We are prescribed something simpler: memory, the world in eight days, and painted windows—all unfolding onto the sidewalk, delicately undecided like pavement blossoms after rain. The light changes: it is midwinter; it is time for me to go. Father has taken the picture, and whichever page you open, there you are.

11

PRODIGAL ELI TIMONER (AB’22)

Mother nature had been gracious this year - we got all the way to December unscathed. But she has finally turned on us. It’s so cold my silk red scarf has me underdressed. Cold dead toes inside my go-go boots, out of juice and a little too loose on rye shots, after I got the call, this night does not have to go well to go right. The bus will take me back to the warmth, that’s all I ask, though I whisper secretly my hopes for a pillow and a bigger closet, for more time in my memories, for a ride to some distant home I have always known but has never been seen or heard aloud.

A place can be sterile and unsterile, neither and absolutely both. The medical tile floor sweats out slush, the corners collect layer-cakes of mud, piss, and bleach, and we sit on regularly cleaned benches. This is the ugly truth of the terminal, revealed in the exacting holy light of the fluorescent tracks. The light of God or scientific man burns past my retinas so brightly I stand and move for the dim and beckoning corner with the water fountain.

With every clack of my boots, a head turns. The passengers stare unmasked and unashamed, sleeping or belching or staring at their hands. Some sit neatly. Some sit stretched-legged across the aisle, muddy rubber soles in the seat designed for conversation, for a friend. Their eyes track me as I pass. Who’s they? You’d be surprised, even the bus driver, paid to shuttle people from dead-end to dead-end, to underpaying jobs or to Grandmother’s house for the holidays, who sees all the rest of them all in the exacting light of the terminal, he spends a moment too long with his eyes, at my face, my concealed head, glassy eyes, angular starved cheeks, bony broad shoulders tight in a maxi dress, down my chest, down to my waist, down there for much too long. I bend for the faucet, for a chorus of eyes, for a steadying sip of water.

We travel over snowy fields, through rolling green hills with gurgling streams and wildlife, then red rock land where water dries up, sand pits, salt flats, rubble mountains and dead beds where fish lived once when this desert was covered in ferns and snakelike roots born out of rich mud. Every treeless mile, another mile closer to the gaggle of loose ends that awaits: seventy people whose texts I haven’t returned (and dozens more who were sent to voicemail), old bosses waiting for the day I come crawling back again, my dad and my sister and her husband and child, the appearances I’ll have to answer for with an identity talk and a new language of pronouns (the alien singular alienating they), an estate to settle, and a funeral to arrange.

I shut my eyes. The vibrations of the motor, the uneven road, oscillate me to sleep. On the bus, I dream of my mother, beyond the bright fluorescent ads for Jesus and the brothels surrounding Vegas. ~~~

In my dream I descend down to Earth, approaching what at first seems like a memory, then like a dream I had before— until I descend below the clouds of faulty memory, diving beneath the veil of what I thought had happened to reveal a world that might have happened and never will. Here, in this dream, I am with her. My mother and I walk through the hazy beauty of late afternoon sun, down a street of my childhood, brushing past bougainvillea bushes with their thorny, bright pink paper-delicate flowers encroaching onto the sidewalk. Golden hour. The shallow canyon of whitewashed stucco homes reflects soft pink light and laughter back at each other. Windows lit by candles and pendant lamps are opened to the street below, a trumpeter trumpets, kids yap, voices meet each other with great excitement and then receded into the gentle warm sounds of full-hearted contentment. The city around us is full of unknown friends, one drink in, savoring precious moments of hope and reunion, prepared to descend far into the night. Our steps crunch on the pink paper flowers. Mama and I, our silks blowing in the wind, walk in step. “Where we going, Mama?” I ask.

We walk in silence, down several blocks past the park until we are not walking anymore. Before us, on a side street strung with string lights and sycamore trees, my mother’s surprise for me. An unassuming Spanish Revival with a thick warm wooden door, worn tiles descending to the street, with a balcony and a set-back lot. In the yard, a big live oak tree, otherwise sage and sagebrush, lavender and succulents, arranged 12

to cascade down to the sidewalk below. Mr. Bob¬—my little niece Sonya got to name the dog—sits, paws crossed, in the big arched window. A house. “Would you believe it?” she asks excitedly, putting a hand around my torso and squeezing. ~~~

I wake up and my phone is ringing. It’s daytime. I gasp at the name. I haven’t even pulled into LA and the LA I had nearly succeeded in forgetting pulls me back from the depths. Voicemail:

Hey bitch! You didn’t tell me you were back in LA?! I was gonna call you anyways —Ari it’s Rafi’s voicemail, you have anything you wanna say? … okay I’ll tell hi- I mean them— Ari says you need to get your ass over to the Beatback, we miss you. I was gonna call you anyways just to hear your growl, but now you’re in town and you know we have to fuck shit up. I have so much to tell you, I wanna tell you in person. Swing by when you get the chance love, okay? Bring your pedals, your club fit, and a bottle of champagne, we’re celebrating. You better not send me to voicemail again. Okay? I miss you... Anyways, call me, bye.

I don’t have the energy to talk to Olivia Hendricks; last time I did, it ended with a Jazzmaster flying out the second story window at my head, her humming over me shouting “Don’t ever fucking talk to me again or it will be your ass out the window.” That was two years ago, when I decided to leave the high rents and strike out looking for a scene I could afford. She sounds the same as ever. She used to dress in thigh-highs, her hair pinned back with two little strands framing the sides of her face, the way they all do now. She’s the kind that could kick a cat with a laugh, and you’d think she was funny with some spunk. Ari, her disgraced socialite armpiece, is still hanging around. Olivia still kept tabs on me, but obviously not that good of tabs; the least she could have done is give her condolences. I delete the voicemail and silence my phone.

Off the bus I’m greeted by a warm, dusty air, the same dusty air that greets you in January same as June.

The pit falls from my throat to the stomach floor with a thud and I know it’s a real homecoming. I know it’s a real homecoming when home has died and everything is the same, the same stupid people calling, the same stiff air. My teeth start chattering and I think of my teeth chattering, but thinking about my teeth chattering makes it impossible to stop my teeth from chattering. Paradoxically, so does thinking about my teeth not chattering. The shivers rattle me, shake my brain, and tickle my spine. It feels as if flames lick my ankles with their tongues so icky I kick my feet practically out of my soles, practically into the guts of the people walking past, skipping so jerkily I’m practically galloping down the street. No more — I stop thinking entirely, wash my brain completely so I am not even thinking about not thinking — complete mind-over-matter, new age hippie spiritual command. An old trick my mother taught me.

Though I have given a reason for people to stare at me, no one stares - here, no one really cares whether or not I kick my soles or gallop down the street. No one really cares whether I squeal, or tear my hair out, or send my fist through a wall, or mourn, or wail so loud for her that it kills the insects and shatters the skyscrapers above. Only if it’s their ears in which I squeal, or their hair torn, or their walls punctured, or their uncovered heads pierced by falling glass daggers from the collapsing skyscrapers above, will they look down to see me, collapsing below in a burst of noise so inconveniently. But I know they wouldn’t look, so I don’t do any of those things.

13

PHYSICAL EDUCATION ALEXA PERLMUTTER (AB’21)

The day before our meeting, I went on my longest run yet: twenty-four miles. I had joined a local D.C. running group that summer, and I would meet them at the Iwo Jima memorial every Saturday morning for my weekly long runs. Often, I would run to the monument from my mom’s apartment so when I got there, I would already have done six or seven miles. “Stealth miles,” the 30-somethings in the group called them, praising my dedication to the marathon. Then, we would run another twelve or so miles together around the city, exploring parts of D.C. and Northern Virginia I had never visited as a kid. We ran around the airfields at Reagan National Airport, through muddy trails in Rock Creek Park, and in hilly suburban neighborhoods in Arlington and the Palisades.

My pace group was made up of men and women of all ages, some nearing fifty, and I was the youngest by at least five years. My runs in Chicago had been solitary and gave me the time and safety to think about my dad in private, but my runs with the group were loud and filled with raucous laughter as we swapped stories. We grew comfortable with each other, willing to share private parts of ourselves in the shared intimacy of running: sometimes it’s easier to talk to people when you don’t have to look at them, when you can keep your eyes trained ahead and hear their steps and breathing match the beat of your own. On our twenty-four-mile run, I found myself talking about my dad and how nervous I was to meet him the next day. I was heartened by the stories that my running partners shared about their own struggles with family. Whereas friends my own age struggled to empathize with my situation, it seemed as if these older people each had an equally outrageous story. I finished the run feeling light and full.

14

THE TALL MAN'S GARDEN EVAN WILLIAMS (AB’22) The Tall Man is a gardener without thumbs. Every morning he walks into his garden and says hello to the soil. He rakes at it with four straightened fingers until a small hole forms, into which he plants a glove with the thumb cut off. Then he sweeps soil over the hole and drips a little water on top.

Every night before bed, the tall man goes into his garden to say goodnight to the soil and wish it luck.

He really is a very good gardener, that tall man, always dreaming of something sprouting. A garden of thumbless selves, maybe.

Someone should love the tall man.

How much love he has imagined.

15

Please do not copy or distribute the contents of this document without written permission from the Program in Creative Writing. Contact crwrshared@gmail.com with questions.

16