Yale Daily News Magazine | Wallace Prize 2023

WALLACE PRIZE 2023

MASTHEAD EDITOR'S NOTE

Magazine Editor in Chief

Abigail Sylvor Greenberg

Managing Editors

Margot Lee

Idone Rhodes

Associate Editors

Michelle Ampofo

Ana Padilla Castellanos

Kinnia Cheuk

Gavin Guerrette

Wilhelmina Graff

Zack Hauptman

Hannah Han

Audrey Kolker

Harper Love

Isabel Maney

Olivia Wedemeyer

Creative Director

Catherine Kwon

Design Editor

Christy Lau

Clarissa Tan

Photography Editors

Gavin Guerette

Yasmine Halmane

Tenzin Jorden

Tim Tai

Giri Viswanathan

Illustration Editors

Jessai Flores

Ariane de Gennaro

Editor in Chief & President

Lucy Hodgman

Publisher

Olivia Zhang

This special issue of the Yale Daily News Magazine showcases the winning works from the 2023 Wallace Prize. The Prize is awarded to previously unpublished fiction and nonfiction writing by Yale undergraduates.

In each genre, an anonymous panel of academics, writers, and editors reads student submissions and selects standout entries. The panel also decides how to grant ranked prizes and divides a monetary award among winners. The pieces in this issue stood out to the judges for their originality, clarity of voice, and overall excellence. The Wallace Prize depends deeply on the generosity and wisdom of our judges, who volunteered their time in evaluating the 100+ submissions we received. We are so thankful.

Thanks also to all of the students who entered, and to our production & design team for their inspired (and speedily-delivered) layout and illustrations. Enjoy!

FIRST PRIZE | FICTION

Moira

Jobs for Writers hadn’t existed before Moira was in her mid-twenties, out of work and in something like love with men who never called their mothers. She liked loud music and spicy curries, cloudy springtime, and Christmas (secretly). She had graduated college a few years prior with more B’s than A’s and so much debt it felt made up. Mostly she just missed her mother. So Moira did what people do in that time of life where everything is an attempt to waste time or save money. She moved into an apartment with cracked walls in a city far enough from home to feel like an accomplishment. On weekends, she went to flea markets with girls who fashioned personality out of thrifted sweaters and the details of sex they didn’t yet know to be degrading. Years later Moira would search their names and find that one of them had gone blind and the other had married rich. It struck her as the kind of thing to write about.

It was through the boyfriend of one of these girls that Moira had learned of jobs for Writers in a new division of the private equity behemoth Writ Large. “Easy money,” he said, adjusting his baseball cap that read THE CAPE in big dumb letters. “Easy money.” This would have meant something to Moira if this person didn’t already possess the particular penchant for describing everything as “Easy money.” Maybe it’s some sort of tick, Moira thought to herself. Like Tourette’s, but for aspiring Republicans. Though the boyfriend had likely only mentioned this to Moira so as to curry favor with the girlfriend, Moira found herself noticing postings, advertisements, and emails from Writ Large. It reminded her of the way you start to see all of the other people who wear glasses when you

start wearing them yourself. Moira hadn’t worn glasses since middle school when she faked a bad score on an eye exam only to wear the chunky brown and black frames that had started to connote “serious intellect” amongst academically below average seventh grade girls. On Fridays, though, when the group convened with their corresponding male group to swim in Lisa G.’s indoor pool, Moira noticed that the glasses everyone was “blind without” had mysteriously vanished. Not privy to the plan ahead of time, Moira absconded hers in the basement guest room, even though they had cost more than one hundred and fifty dollars since the optometrist was “outof-network.” These days Moira sometimes confused tall women on the street for the kind of long-haired men she’d be attracted to. “I’m either going blind or gay,” Moira wrote in an email to her mother. “Both seem like an inconvenience.”

When Moira interviewed for the job, she had to do little more than list books she’d never read and refer to herself as a “poet.” It was all true enough. About half the books she claimed to love she had at least considered buying, and one day Moira would write a poem. In fact, she would have already written hundreds if she weren’t cursed with the compulsion to look at herself in the mirror every time she started writing. Perhaps, Moira thought, this behavior could be solved with serious psychiatric intervention. But the last time she saw a shrink he had told her she belonged to a different emotional era and tried to sell her a CD of Christians chanting in Tibet.

“If you want therapy to work, you have to scare them a little.” Moira’s friends told her

as they sipped on whiskeys. “I tell mine I’m going to cut out my tongue if my parents keep calling, and now I’m on 10mg of Diazepam.”

“Easy money,” said the boyfriend. He was on pills too.

Writ Large had offices in San Francisco, New York, Shanghai, London, and a vanity outpost in Leviathan, New Hampshire because founder and CEO Dashel Ward was nostalgic. It was rumored that he was born to Christian fundamentalists who disowned him when he, at age seven, wrote an ontological response to Rene Descartes so brilliant it disproved the existence of God entirely. By 21 he had a PhD in Mathematics, a MacArthur for experimental fiction, and a keen understanding of what people were becoming increasingly incapable of. More than once, Time called him “prophetic.”

The new division was part of an expansion into “personal exchange.” Via teleconsultation, clients could speak with “input analysts” about a situation or event which they lacked the words to describe. Most requested things they could say for birthday toasts, corporate meet and greets, dates. Writers, on the fifth floor, wrote the stories. Directors, on the eleventh, instructed clients on how to perform them. Within a week of her interview, Moira had a cubicle and a paycheck and a Director named Gina who wore grey suits and drank gin with lime.

“The most important thing is that you never write stories that actually happened to you. Did onboarding talk to you about mental health resources?”

“No.”

ELLA ATTELL Illustrated by Catherine Kwon

Ella Attell is a rising senior from Cleveland, Ohio. She studies English and is a big fan of her mom and dad.

“Some Writers find it difficult to separate their lived experiences from the fictional stories, which ultimately belong to the client.”

Moira thought of the time she’d shown her mother a poem in progress about a daughter and mother whose heads were conjoined.

“You hate it.”

“No…I just didn’t know you found me so suffocating.”

Moira scrapped the poem immediately.

“But obviously clients can only purchase fictional stories.” Moira nodded accordingly, thinking more about the bit of red nail polish on her index finger that she was desperate to scrape off. Gina mistook Moira’s distraction for contemplation and decided then that Moira was someone to be privileged with the kind of information Gina had spent years acquiring.

“I’m sure you know why what we do has to be fiction.” Moira didn’t. “If it’s fiction, it can be anyone’s story. Doesn’t matter who wrote it, belongs to the reader. We’re in the vessel making business. Handle with care.”

***

In her first few months as a Writer, Moira mostly wrote for high school seniors applying to college and middle-aged women entertaining their friends. Matt. P wants to convey his deep love of philanthropy, soccer, and women’s rights. Samantha L. hopes to impress dinner party guests with stories of travel and adventure…Near death preferred. At the end of year one, Moira got a small raise and a different cubicle and a pain in her left temple that wouldn’t go away unless she sat in the supply closet with the lights off for no less than twelve minutes.

When the weather improved, Moira played tennis with Katrina and Solomon, who reported to a different Director. They played on public courts a few blocks from the office, exchanging only pants and grunts like some brutalist concerto until the almost

summer light turned the court to charcoal. Only once did they extend the evening to dinner. Underdressed and unfamiliar to each other, their odd trio was invisible to the sea of first dates, finely dressed women, and men with big watches bellowing from the dim bar. With the conversation painfully sparse, they let themselves listen to the neighboring tables, joking that they had probably supplied half the freshly laundered yuppies with their takes on politics and love for the evening. When they shared a taxi uptown, Moira noticed the way Solomon angled his knee to touch Katrina’s and realized then that she had mistakenly interrupted what would turn into a happy, uncomplicated life. As Moira exited the car, they all thanked one another for a great evening and promised to do it again. From then on, Moira preferred to drink with Gina.

“Being client facing isn’t what you think it’s cracked up to be when you’re in your twenties.” Gina finished her drink and gestured for another. “Who would have thought?!” Moira knew better than to respond. When Gina drank, she liked to direct her questions into the ether, like some kind of drunken confessional. The first time this happened, at Moira’s first holiday party, she’d taken Gina’s questions seriously. “What am I doing here?” Gina had crooned as she slunk down the side of the bathroom wall, the way prettier girls did in movies. Moira kneeled down in the shoes she’d worn to her college graduation, dabbing Gina’s booze inflated face with a monogramed cocktail napkin. For the rest of the night, Moira wondered the same thing. ***

Siddharth Y. wants a first date story that casually asserts his ample income and sexual history…Dominance over other men? Include sense of humor.

Nancy G. is meeting her fiancé’s family… requests explanation of her own parents' absence…avoid father’s alcoholism and mother’s job as housecleaner.

Chris H. expects to encounter a former love interest…needs “life changing” expe-

rience. Chris should seem different than he was at time of break up.

The longer Moira worked at Writ Large, the harder it became to imagine doing something else. She tried to write poems on the weekends but found herself preoccupied with the smell of an electrical fire in her building or the infinite loop of deep-sea fishing videos she watched to fall asleep. One day she skipped work altogether with the intention to write one thousand poems about computers, but ended up getting drunk in a hotel bar instead. She lost and gained weight, started swimming, quit swimming and started running, made promises to write a poem a day, took day trips upstate, started smoking again, made promises to write a poem every other day, took up yoga, went vegan, quit yoga, bought a pasta machine, tried a poem a week, dated men with beards, adopted a cat called Clyde, tried to write a word a day, got promoted, and fell in almost love with a carpenter who liked to have sex in a replica of his childhood bed that he made by hand. They broke up when he got drunk at a bad party and introduced her to his friends as the best poet they’d never read.

“I’ve never met someone who would rather live in constant misery than do the thing they say they want to do.”

His critique was neither unfounded nor the totality of why the relationship, like all of Moira’s relationships, ended. While other women might worry for their partner’s sexual loyalty, Moira worried for verbal fidelity. How could she trust what men, or anyone told her, when she knew of all the words in circulation that had been written by someone else.

Moira considered staying at the party after he’d left with a girl who once called Writ Large a fascist conglomerate but left instead to see the sequel of a movie she hadn’t watched the first time. When she got home, she smoked two Marlboro Lights out of her window and drafted a story for a Stacy B. who wanted her parents to think she’d found God. Moira decided it would involve a baptism in the ocean.

It was around this time that Moira started getting meandering voicemails from her mother in the middle of the day and night.

“You’re probably asleep, but the Ellermans’ cat keeps getting loose…They must be getting a divorce.”

“I had a little accident at the store. Nothing to worry about.”

“The papaya went busted last Tuesday. Big old busted lady. Please send back my hat when you can.”

“It’s Mom, just saying hello.”

“The evergreens were singing that song you like.”

For a woman who worked for thirty years in customer service for a refrigerator installation company, her words had become lyrical enough to give Moira pause. So she requested time off and boarded a flight for home, receiving an automated “Condolence” email from Writ Large before she landed. The email, a mistake in the system, turned out to fate a rapid decline in her mother’s health. But for six weeks, Moira played house: organizing mortgage papers, tending to the garden, washing her mother’s hair in the kitchen sink. They ate big omelets with potato and onion for dinner and fell asleep in the same bed to old Barbara Streisand movies. There wasn’t much to talk about. Only once did they fight when Moira went down to the basement and found bins of silverware her mother had been taking from restaurants for months. The discovery had startled Moira into the realization that though she loved the woman she was taking care of, her mother had long left the building.

The funeral was small and costly. Moira hadn’t requested an open casket but the funeral home had made a mistake, dressing Moira’s mother in a dress she would have never worn, painting her lips a brownish mauve. Though Moira and her mother had been a world of two, it was now impossible for Moira to ignore that the rest of the world didn’t know her mother. Worse,

it was content to confuse her for a woman who would wear a paisley dress and purple lipstick on her deathbed. “You could at least take off the lipstick,” the neighbor urged her. So Moira submerged the edge of her napkin in a glass of seltzer and blotted the color from her mother’s lips, shrieking like a child when she stood back and realized she’d wiped the mouth clean off.

“It happens sometimes because of the embalming chemicals,” a pimply faced funeral home employee offered with little consolation.

“And you’re responsible for this?” Moira demanded.

“I just drive the hearse.” He smiled too big. People with big smiles shouldn’t work near the dead, Moira thought to herself.

Gina had offered to refer Moira to the best eulogy Writer she knew, someone in the San Francisco office who had a family of four boys and a wife from Switzerland, but Moira had declined. At her mother’s request, there’s wasn’t a eulogy, perhaps a final gift to her daughter who would never be able to write something so important with the fallen, broken-down words she knew. So twenty five ordinary people took sips of white wine that was neither good nor bad and apologized to Moira for a crime no one had committed.

When Moira returned to the office after her mother’s death, she found it nearly impossible to meet deadlines. Suddenly, Jennifer K.’s request for an envy-inducing story about her truthfully dull honeymoon didn’t seem so urgent. Instead of writing at work she started wandering around the office, taking food from the communal fridge, and sending emails to her mother’s old address about how much she blamed her for loving her more than anyone else in the world could.

Only you knew me before I could talk, before I could deceive and manipulate. I’d rather live forever with you in silence than in constant approximation with the living. Why are you punishing me for what I can’t control? I DIDN’T CHOOSE YOU… I wonder all the time when your words

stopped meaning what I thought they did.

Eventually Gina called Moira to the eleventh floor for what Moira secretly hoped would be termination. Instead, Moira found Gina hovering next to a distinguished man in a navy suit, a silvery scar snaking just underneath the starched cuff of his white shirt.

“Moira, I think you’ve met Dr. Paul Schreiber before.”

“No, I have not.”

“Really? Well, Dr. Schreiber is the newly appointed director of Writ Large’s reorganization team.”

As if on cue, he stood.

“I’m sure you’re wondering what that even means.” He smiled gently to reveal just the bit of a gap between his two front teeth. “I’m a shrink, and I report to Dashel Ward.”

“Great.”

“And now you’re wondering why the onstaff psychologist would ever be placed at the helm of corporate restructuring.” Moira didn’t have the heart to tell him that she wasn’t wondering anything at all.

“Writ Large, as you know, is a for-profit corporation, but as Dashel Ward likes to say, it’s also a cooperative for people.” Gina adjusted her skirt so the bulge of her stomach resubmerged behind the waistband. “Naturally, Writ Large at its best demands a keen understanding of its people, does that make sense?” Moira nodded and tried to furrow her brow in a way that conveyed thoughtfulness. “So it was both a natural and ingenious decision for Mr. Ward to put me in charge of redesigning who does what around here.” He smiled to fill the silence. “It’s come to my attention that you recently lost your mother. My sincerest apologies.” Moira detonated a smile of her own. “Thank you.”

“We want you to know that Writ Large doesn’t see your decline in performance

as cause for termination.” Moira looked to Gina who looked away. Suddenly, the room felt like ambush. “In fact, we think your recent personal experience, along with your strong record to date, puts you in the unique position to lead a team of your own.” Moira looked again at Gina who fixated on something outside the window.

“Gina will be stepping down from her position as Director, and we’d like you to assume her role.” Again, Moira tried to meet Gina’s gaze but could only locate the sweat pooling underneath her arms, turning the grey polyester a sickly purple.

“Additionally, we’re redesigning teams around thematic strengths. Solomon and Katrina, who I believe you know well, will be co-Directors of Celebration. They will take vows, declarations of love, as well as a new focus we’re calling ‘little joys,’ small words or gestures people can purchase daily on our digital platforms. No need for input analysts. Customers ask and the app delivers.

“And my team?” Dr. Schreiber tilted his head, exposing the thin rivers of vein and muscle below his almost raw red skin. Moira imagined intense workouts and searing hot showers as a part of his morning routine, the punishment and reward system which exhausted his body enough to lubricate his mind.

“Grief.” ***

On her first day as Director, Moira moved into Gina’s old office. She set up an orange scented diffuser to quiet the near sour stench of hangover sweat and vanilla that had fermented in the space for years. She reviewed the files of the new recruits who would write words of comfort that they themselves hardly believed. Most of them were recent liberal arts grads with tiny craters in their noses where rings used to be. Some brought creative writing portfolios, others video footage of their performances as Portia or King Richard. She listened to them lie through their teeth about how important it was to “facilitate” “commu-

nication” in the “post-digital hyperspace.” She didn’t tell them that they would mostly be writing words of mourning that funeral goers and inept husbands would parrot to the grieving or that whatever creative vision they had for themselves would likely die upon Writ Large’s offer letter. They wouldn’t know until they were in Moira’s seat that she had been instructed to select Writers who would lose someone close to them soon just as Gina had been instructed to find people who had already given up on themselves. She didn’t tell them any of this. Instead, Moi ra sat with her chin on her gently clasped hands and listened intently to the words that already meant almost nothing.

The Body Talks Back

AVERY MITCHELL Illustrated by Catherine Kwon

Avery Mitchell is a senior in Trumbull College from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. When she’s not staring at the blank page, she likes to woodcut, dance to house music, and sing in the Yale Glee Club. Next year, she’ll move to the UK to start an apprenticeship at a bespoke bookbindery. She’d like to thank Prof. Anne Fadiman, Prof. Adam Sexton, and her family.

“My clients are either masochists or pussies,” says Tat Tito. His greenand-white trucker hat bobs behind his customer’s belly. The gun purrs. I roll around a bit on my chair. The pause is filled with bass-heavy music: Sade, 112, Montell Jordan. Medical smells—soap, alcohol, bleach—singe my nostrils. Buzzbuzz, buzz, buzz. “Which one are you?” I ask the man on the black salon recliner. “I’m a masochist,” he says. He turns his face to mine, baring his teeth, grinning somewhat.

Tito’s tapered fingers, gloved, matte-black, clasp the sport-taped tattoo gun. It’s small and translucent like a supersized Nanoflash HexBug. There’s a rustle of thin plastics, a blue film over everything: the work surface, the iPad, the chair. He finishes a line and pivots to his station. The clustered needle-tip (disposable) dips into the thimble-shaped ink cap (disposable), one of five, each filled with a black ink of crescendoing opacity (20, 40, 60, 80, 100).

Tito turns back to the arm of the client and glances at me, over the belly. His eyes are like a cow’s, brown, heavy-lashed and heavy-lidded, sleepy. His cheeks are round like a toddler’s. He smiles, his two front teeth criss-crossing each other. He’s tatted from head to toe. A spider leg tickles his chin from below and wiggles when he laughs. The blue lightning-bolt on the left side of his nose reminds me of Saint Nick, laying his finger there, a right jolly old elf.

Showoff Ink & Artistry is a tattoo shop on southern State Street in New Haven, Connecticut. There are five artists here. Ash is Tito’s fiancée. She owns the place and was featured on the TV show Spike’s InkMaster in 2016. They have a baby, Brooks, the youngest of Tito’s three children. Scott is Tito’s best buddy, his “brother.” Together, they are the “Three Musketeers,” having worked together in one shop or another for over a decade. Beck is the newcomer, a “tatter tat” (like tater tot). She learned to ink inhouse, practicing on oranges and pigskin.

The needle jiggles across the client’s leathery skin. Skin, Tito tells me, is variable. A man’s skin may be rough, a woman’s soft. An old person might be papery, a young one juicy. The canvas is flesh, and the art is permanent. “It’s just like a paintbrush,” he says. “Yeah,” I respond, “a paintbrush that bleeds.”

****

Which am I, a masochist or a pussy?

Every time I get a vaccine, I cry. It’s an uncontrollable reflex. My mother tells the story. When she was a baby, she hated shots. She would writhe and flail and screech and claw. She was big for her age. We had to hold her down on the table, with the help of two nurses. Jesus Christ, that haunts me.

I was a saturnine child. My mother used to braid my hair in two halves. She twisted and yanked; I shrieked and moaned. Once

she’d finished, I’d march to the mirror, assess the damage, and come back wailing about there was one bigger than the other, one loop out of place, one strand of hair left out. The premise of wearing something unalterable and not-quite-right sowed the seeds of my particularity. An intolerance for the imperfect permanent.

I’m a pincher and a picker. I pinch the podgy parts of me, between my thighs, on my hips, below my chin. I do it until I bruise, as if the assault would force the fat to dissolve. I pick my nails, pimples, and scabs (and my nose, in private, I’ll admit it here. If you’ve read this far, congratulations). I pick at peeling paint in public places. I hate the idea of a permanent body tracker, something that warps when you gain weight and fades when you neglect it. Something that itches and peels.

Lots of things can ruin a tattoo. Water, sun, salt. Anatomy is fickle, and as things stand, I’m skittish around my own body. So, pussy, I guess. Pussy until proven otherwise.

****

The Ancient Egyptians took things literally. Mummy—here’s some food for your coffin so you can eat when you’re dead. Gods— have some wine, throw a party or something. They approached tattoos with the same matter-of-factness. Pregnant women received blue dots on their bellies, matrices of permanent pockmarks. The navy

nets protected the fetus during growth and saved the mother during childbirth. Today, the mummified tattoos are warped and blurry. They’ve almost removed themselves, five millenia postmortem.

This style of tattoo was achieved by “tapping,” an incredibly painful process. The needles were thick and blunt. They were attached to a wooden club, part hairbrush, part nail bat. The tattooist dipped the prongs in a soot-saliva solution. Then, the tattooist tapped the club with a mallet, lodging the ink knock by knock, puncturing rather than piercing.

Nowadays, tattoo needles resemble fountain pen nibs. The well beneath the needle feeds the ink, slowly, to the tip. The needle penetrates the skin, and the ink is deposited, not injected. Capillary action, the force which makes water creep up the xylem of a tree, sucks the ink below the epidermis, to the dermis. If the ink enters the underlying subcutaneous fatty tissue, it disperses, “blowing out” the sharp line of a well-placed tattoo. The tattooist walks a tightrope between the surface and undersurface. During a tattoo session, this process happens anywhere from 500 to 3,000 times per minute.

This assault provokes an inflammatory immune response. White blood cells charge to the site of the break-in. Macrophages are search-and-destroy blood cells, globular in appearance. They eat foreign matter for breakfast. When they find the ink, they swallow it. They try to digest the ink with enzymes intended for organic material (bacteria and viruses), but the enzymes can’t handle the ink’s many plastics, salts, and metals. The macrophage waits, keeping the ink in place.

Once in a while, a macrophage dies and disintegrates. For a moment, the pigment is free. The lymphatic system carries trace amounts away. Then, a new macrophage comes along. It slurps up the loose ink and lives its life in much the same way as its predecessor. Through this system of capture-release-recapture, the tattoo is frozen, slowly fading.

Tito coats the canvas with “glide” (vaseline) to smooth out his line. The needle bounces on the surface of the skin. He’s using a 7M cartridge (7 needles, Magnum formation) to shade the white of an eye. He drowns the outline with ink, buffing the needle head in shallow circles. He takes a perforated sheet of paper towel from a stack on the corner of the plexiglass carttop, and folds it once, twice, thrice, into a square pad. He squirts the corner with a wash bottle, then wipes the white ink down and away. The skin he leaves behind is slightly lighter and puffier than before. Blood floods the vacancy.

There’s theater here. I play the role of a repressed art student. I’m certainly dressed for it, my backpack lying inconsiderately in the aisle, my prairie skirts swishing and getting stuck in the wheels of my chair. Black-and-white Puerto Rican resistance flags flutter over sparkly boxes of needles. The tattooists crouch like gargoyles on their swiveling stools. “Straight lines, crooked spines,” Scott says, half mantra, half abdication. Cackles bubble up organically.

“Stay calm, you’re stabbing my arm!”

Showoff is full of strange objects. I roll across the white tile floor on my chair. There’s a cluster of framed pyrographs above the street-facing window. They all have the same antecedent: “Tattoo removal kit.” The answer: a saw, a knife, a gun. Permanent, then. I see two identical porcelain busts with traditional tattoo script across the cranium: “blood sweat tears'' below the right eye, “see no evil” above the left, and across its chest in full-banner brilliance, “PHRENOLOGY.”

Tito completes the piece, a heavily shaded Angel of Death on the client’s wrist, and walks him over to a pull-down passport backdrop. He holds a camera in one hand and a folded towel in the other. The seams of the tattoo are leaking. “Ruh, roh, we’ve got a bleeder!” Maribel, the receptionist, brings extra napkins.

Minimize pain. Minimize time. Maximize safety. At the end of the day, it’s medical. The memorabilia barely masks the atmosphere of the shop, which is that of a doctor’s office. It’s sterile, and it has to be. The open floor plan and bright overhead lights remind me of subdivided post-op rooms. Holding beds for the maimed.

I grew up in a tattooless household. Fifty years ago, this would have been standard. But now, half of Americans under 40 have tattoos. Do these proportions drop when Americans are cut down to Midwesterners, then to Wisconsinites, then to Milwaukeeans, then to Fox Point dwellers?

I remember snow on the lakefront, everyone wrapped up in sweaters, sweats, socks, stockings, mittens, muffs, and puffball hats. If our next-door neighbor Mr. Dugan had a tattoo on his head, I wouldn’t’ve known. He swaddled his bald noggin with a crocheted cap.

I drew on my skin with gel pens during math class (blue-green mermaids and crushes’ codenames), then skipped showers to see how long it would last. I gave henna to all my friends (rich sienna mandalas and wibbly spirals), then collected data on rates of fading. I got my ears pierced (four lobes, two helixes), then developed three major infections over a six-year period, twice requiring antibiotics. I’ve tested the taboo of permanence—how long can this last?

There was one outlier. Before I was born, an aqua-violet butterfly lit down on my grandma’s right shoulder blade. The butterfly melted through the prairie summers, drowned beneath sunspots and swatches of burnt skin. My grandma was a bit of a taboo-buster, piercing her lobes with a candle-fired sewing needle and a raw potato. But this complicated the premise of permanence—what if the marking seemed passé, or looked decrepit?

I knew, even as a child, that the butterfly was dated. Fads flash and burn right out. Barbed wire ‘round the bicep? Early nineties. Lace ‘neath the boob? 2018-19. Butter-

fly, o’er the shoulder, upon the rump? Late nineties. At the turn-of-the-century, tattoos had no moniker or type. They were just tattoos, found on the bodies of sailors, convicts, and circus freaks. These origins were class-based (lower, middle), gender-bound (male, most definitely), and wealth-poor (a flash tag wouldn’t set you back more than a few bucks).

But that was before the fad economy came to the fore. The subversive tattoo craze of the Victorian gentry trickled into the papers. Winston Churchill’s mother had a snake done around her wrist. Sailor Jerry started working on the backs and bellies of ‘Nam vets out of his Honolulu shop, riffing on Japanese motifs. Ed Hardy carried Jerry’s torch all the way to $1,500-per-hour sessions and a box-store clothing line.

I’ve seen people with perfectly symmetrical tattoos, reflected across the central axis of their spine. I’ve seen people with only blueline work, their porcelain bodies turned into delftware vases. Surely, if they can be so intentional about their most sacred canvas, I can be as well. I can pick a style and stick to it.

bis of his own aunt (this was a technical endeavor—two iridescent wings emerging from the labia minora onto the majora, antennae shooting up from the clitoris, or “button” as he prefers to call it, which was pierced with a double-balled bar like the bulbous eyes of a butterfly). °°°°

There’s no such thing as black, we printmakers and painters know. Blacks are made of a deep blue color, touched with red and tinged with yellow. Reds and yellows are reabsorbed by the body much more quickly than blues. As the capture-release-recapture trundles on, black fades to blue. Blue persists.

Ink-mixing is one tool in a tattooist’s arsenal against this extended bodily breakdown. Large corporations control the market for cheap, well-wearing inks: World Famous Ink, Eternal Ink, Intenze Ink.

The tattooist's other tool is the gun. The straighter the needle, the more precise the incision, the more persistent the poking, and the easier the repair, the more control the tattooist has over the quality of the resulting tattoo.

not fully autoclavable (a ridiculous word which means that the machine is disinfectable by insertion into an autoclave machine). These advancements ushered in the epoch of the pen. Tattoo pens operate on a cartridge system—when you need a new type of needle, you can simply pop the one you’re using into the trash and push in a new one from the stockpile. They’re smooth to hold and easy to use. But they’re not very customizable, and if the machine breaks down, it needs to be shipped to the manufacturer like a cellphone. ****

Tito was born in Jayuya, Puerto Rico, an inland village. The jungle licked the back porch with rustling, wet leaves. He remembers getting lost back there. “What did you see?” Plantain trees, chickens, and iguanas, iguanas everywhere. “What did you hear?” Birds calling, men from the neighborhood strumming guitars in the kitchen, children clamoring for candy as a parade passed by.

On Showoff’s website, Tito proclaims: “My style is untouchable, my designs are unrepeatable, and I’m just a savage when it comes to my craft.” His specialties are “colorless photorealism” and “custom freehand lettering.” He creates dark-shaded sleeves, featuring lots of tongues and eyes. He builds up the tattoo slowly, with passes of gray, white, and black. He tattoos with a pen and adheres to the New School aesthetic.

He tells me tales of disaster. Each tale is predicated with a pointed “when I was just starting out” to emphasize that this would never happen now. Clients passing out, puking on their open wounds. Dick tattoos (one especially imaginative iteration replaced the head of the penis with an eyeball, the scrotum with a bag of nuts, and the pelvis with angel wings. The whole masterpiece sat under a banner reading “ONEEYED WILLY”). Even a tattoo on the pu-

The original tattoo machine descended from Thomas Edison’s rotary operated stencil pen, patented in 1877. The patent used two electromagnetic coils to produce an oscillating magnetic field, which agitated a punching needle. Some guy named O’Neill saw that contraption and thought, gee, my skin needs that!

Modern coil machines are heavy and jittery, but strong and easy to fix yourself. To change the needle, however, you need to tear down the tattoo machine, re-fit the trappings, rebuild it, and re-tune it. To clean it, you need to spray disinfectant on a rag and rub around the knobs and springs. Alcohol applied directly to the frame will erode it. It’s clunky but easy to understand once you take it apart and put it back together a few times.

The rotary machine came around in the 70s. This machine was lighter, quieter, if

His mother birthed him in a shack, completely alone. His father, an alcoholic policía, was out with his buddies. There were no phones back then. The medics found her sitting in the front yard, cradling little Tito in her arms. He laughed, “she tried to keep me inside because she thought her guts were coming out.”

They left Puerto Rico when Tito was five to join family in Connecticut. He lived “like a ping pong ball” between West Bridgeport and South Norwalk, in and out of foster homes. His mother followed him up with five more babies and postluded his father with two more partners. It took her a while to escape endless cycles of physical abuse, alcoholism, and pregnancy. “We grew up together,” he says, “I watched her grow up.”

Tito and I share Milwaukee. My tale is about suburbia, community theater, honor roll, and Friday night takeouts. His story is about a seven-year-old who made a habit of punching Tito in the face. One fine morning, the kid approached and absently went in for the daily blow. Tito caught his fist, turned it back, punched the bully’s face

with it, “beat his ass,” and chased him off school property. This ended the cycle but hatched a bug that lay its eggs beneath Tito’s skin. He started picking fights, becoming the bully he’d beaten. This, Ash says, is the origin of “fighter” Tito. He’s reframed it now. He goes to Muay Thai on Thursdays and Sundays to learn to take more punches than he throws.

He returned to Connecticut. At the age of fifteen, he became an apprentice to a local tattooist. He met Scott over Facebook, courted him with compliments, and secured his partnership by forcing him to tattoo a Puerto Rican guitar on Tito’s wrist while Scott was “high out of his mind.” The guitar looks horrible now, totally blown out. They worked in the back of a barber shop and saved up enough to finance their first hole-in-the-wall, a baby monitor serving as a substitute for a security system. Then, they worked at another store named Forever Customs for less than a decade. Five years ago, they started Showoff.

Tito still worries about losing what he’s built. He goes to abandoned factories with Scott to look for ghosts. He mentions the deaths of previous clients (including the bearer of the ONE-EYED WILLY tattoo) without much sentimentality. He refers to his transgender sister with an irreverent smattering of “he” and “she” pronouns—I find out later that she committed suicide years ago.

I collect impressions of Tito’s home life through his Instagram stories. He drops his eldest daughter Jaida at middle school, blasting “Barbie Girl” by Aqua, the windows rolled down to embarrass her. His middle son Maddox films a 30-minute live stream of Tito’s Muay Thai class, his podgy finger hovering at the top of the frame, tracking Tito’s bouncing body, whispering, “That’s my dad. This is my dad. That’s my dad.” In the bathtub, Tito’s branded hands clutch baby Brooks high above his head, like Simba. ****

Once upon a time, tattooists fixed their own machines, mixed their own inks, and

invented their own styles. Ye Olde Tattooist was a craftsman, his hands deep in the means of a tattoo’s production. Bold, black lines and saturated color: these were the keys to corporeal longevity. If the tattooist packed more ink into the skin, the body wouldn’t break the tattoo down as quickly. If the tattooist pulled a clean line encompassing the whole design, the tattoo bled and blurred less.

Nowadays, this approach is classified as American Traditional, or Old School. They look simple, but these designs have nowhere to hide. The dominant linework must be impeccable: any wiggles will draw focus.

Think: pirate tattoos. You’ve got your nautical charms: your anchors, sharks, and swallows, amulets to protect against the rough seas. You’ve got your pin-ups: your boobs, butts, and batted eyes, ladies left ashore, oft remembered, never forgotten. You’ve got your zoomorphic varieties: your snakes, dragons, and panthers, your wolves, foxes, and moths, your lions, tigers, and bears, oh my, oh my, oh my!

Stippling, the little dot-dot-dots, should be visible to the naked eye. The saturated colors should be about as far from the natural palette of earthly paradise as colors can be. The overall effect should be 2-D—no layering, hatching, or other funny business in the 3-D department. The resulting image should be legible on first glance. Gah! You should say. That’s a horse, all right!

I admire Traditional tats because they require no explanation. They’re part of a long tradition that hasn’t died yet. They sing themselves. They focus more on the body than the art.

****

Tito arrives thirty minutes after the 11am opening. He carries an army green rucksack and satchel. He’s sleepy and peaceful after his two-puff morning. The client comes in, and he shouts, with a voice like crackling gravel, “Heyyy!” or “My Man!”

He makes physical contact before the gloves go on, shaking their hand, patting their shoulder.

As he works, he digresses: “The tattoo belongs to the customer, but sometimes, I don’t want it to walk out the door. You wish you could frame it and keep it… which is weird.” The shop is decorated with many empty frames, painted black to melt into the wall. Are they waiting for someone?

It doesn’t take long for our conversation to foray into client relations. His stance is firm: “An artist is only as valuable as they price their work.” By this metric, Tito is worth $180 hourly. Is this a lot? A little? He contextualizes it in market-speak, invoking housing prices, sales tax, inflation. It’s about “putting food on the table on my end.” It’s about “older artists charging way less than they should.”

If I wasn’t there, I’m sure he would put his airpods in immediately. I slowly realize that Tito is an introvert, and his career is, inherently, the bane of his existence. His perfect day would be spent at home, on the couch, hanging out with his kids and Ash, smoking weed, watching TV. The pandemic was a joyful time to him. He still wears his KN-95 in Walmart because he enjoys anonymity. In his public life, he is ogled. I am placing strain upon him.

He’s a flake. And he’s anxious. But aren’t we all? I certainly am, so I can’t comment.

Which am I, a masochist or a pussy?

I’ve lived the last few weeks of my life on the verge of trial by fire. Expecting blood, preparing for pain. Quite literally setting up for a war of the flesh. Thinking about it more. Thinking about it again. Denial feels like its own form of masochism.

I’ve studied my blank forearm, its startling paleness, its splattered moles and freckles. If nothing else, it will be a more interesting forearm than it is now.

I don’t care. I’ll let it speak for itself. I’ll let it be loud.

At this point, I need to get it off my mind. I need a tattoo.

****

After a few weeks of observing, I’m set up at my own station. I get a stack of paper towels, a pair of black gloves, a popsicle stick with a glob of petroleum jelly, and a blue gun in a blue baggie.

It’s unclear whether Tito will teach me, or if I’m meant to teach myself. I brought my orange from the Yale dining hall. I fondle it until I find the smoothest and flattest region. I pick a stencil from the flash folder. How am I supposed to transfer this? Should I get it wet? I abandon that project and attempt turn on the gun. There’s a small display, a USB-C charger pickup, and a single button. Like an early iPhone. This shouldn’t be hard. I press the button. Nothing.

Tito smells the stress hormones sublimating off my skin and appears beside me. In a flash, he squirts “STENCIL STUFF,” a creamy plasma, onto the orange, massages it, slaps it, presses the stencil onto it, and with his other hand, holds the button on the gun down until it buzzes to life. Then, he disappears.

The orange is a forgiving client. I draw tester lines on the surface, surprised at the skittishness of the gun, the unpredictability of the peel’s topography. I wobble and accidentally tip the ink cap over (three times). I try stabilizing my hand with the table, my other hand, even the orange itself. It’s no use. I gouge the skin. Citrus juice runs down my hands and sparkles in the air.

It’s important to forget the needle, I decide. Pretend that you are stroking the skin with your finger, imagine the direct connection of your body to the orange’s, that’s the only way to do it. Tito materializes again. “Uh, oh,” he cries. “Refund!”

Finally, I scrounge up the courage to progress to the next stage of my plan. “Tito, I’d love to schedule a tattoo with you.” Maribel calls from across the room, “He’s free on Friday.” “What time?” “11:30.” “That works for me.” “11:30, Friday…” Tito mumbles as he works. “Okay, okay.”

I send him Pinterest screenshots and a few of my own sketches. Days pass in silence, and my embarrassment grows. Does he think my idea is stupid? Does he wish I would leave him alone? I’m not sure I want a tattoo from him, anyways.

Friday rolls around. I show up two minutes late, fashionably. Maribel gives me a pitying look from behind the desk. “I think he forgot.” She walks me over to Tito, who hunches at the drawing table, sketching on his iPad. “Tito,” she says, “did you forget about her?” He’s drawing up a sleeve— someone else’s sleeve. “Shit, I did, can I text you this weekend? How’s Saturday? Sunday? Monday?” “Fine, fine,” I say, secretly stung. A week passes in silence. I shoot him another text, reiterating my deadline. He sends a screenshot of his iPhone dock, with 1,003 unopened messages. “My phone gives me anxiety,” he types. “My goal is to get you tattooed this week.” I offer him Thursday, Friday, Saturday.

Unintentionally final goodbyes echo. “Bye homie!” said Scott. “See you soon!” Maribel murmured. “Alright mama, take it easy!” hollered Tito.

What do I have now? A Google Drive folder full of old stories and corny jokes—slippery things that sail away when the thought of the needle returns.

And maybe I felt like we had a contract. A physical transaction, with insecurities all tied up in it. Yes, I felt ready to overcome the body with Tito by my side. I was prepared to overlook the stretch marks and smile through the scraping.

We never touched.

I overhear the man behind the big black counter. He tells a customer that “you really shouldn’t drink the night before getting tattooed.” Alcohol thins the blood, making you prone to bruising and poor healing. Shit. Too late.

I’m on the other side of town today, on a mission to get a Traditional tattoo. The hallway stretches back into darkness. Small chambers branch off on either side. There’s no music. There are only sounds of guns on flesh, grinding, gnawing, amplified by the fact that they’re hidden from view. The grunge aesthetic is more of a prerogative, see: the “CASH ONLY” sign. I flutter from fight to flight. The man comes out from behind the counter and gives me a chocolate chip cookie in a plastic bag. I wait two hours for an unnamed tattooist in an unmarked room.

My target emerges, tatted but hatless, spectacled, a mere parody of a friend I once knew. He grins with ink-blackened gums, inviting me to pick from a book of knives, boobs, and bombshells. I gave him one directive: “HORSE.” Why a horse? I like horses. He shows me a singular sketch: an equine head with flowing linework and a heart-shaped, flaring nostril.

The gun is an iron-spring monstrosity, a real coil machine. Heavy and rusted (or stained with orange ink), it hangs over the tatter’s hand like a claw. There’s a sort of multimeter on the table. It has a red-blinking calculator display and a set of toggles and cranks. He pauses to consider, nay, imagine, what wattage the ensuing violence shall require. He cranks it up to 120. I don’t know what that signifies, but it seems high. A fat, warped cord runs from the console. The cord has an alligator clip on the end with rubber finger pads. He pinches the clip and attaches it to two exposed metal bars exposed within the gun. It leaps to life, hissing, growling, droning, bombinating. The shorn hair-stubs on my forearm stand up in fright.

At that moment, that very moment, my phone buzzes in my lap. It’s Tito:

Hey! Are you around today by chance? If you want I can take you now

Sorry again it’s been slammed over here :(

The stencil has been transferred, the inks mixed, the caps filled. There’s no turning back (a weak mental crutch of mine—whenever I get myself stuck in a commitment, I can’t use my voice to get out of it). I gape like a beached grouper and tell myself those infamous last words: it’s gonna be okay.

He looks me dead in the eye: “You ready?” I chirp my consent. First contact: a shock, served without restraints. If I leap, the line will go astray. I see the needle enter my skin, and I mean really enter it. Tito skated on the surface. This dude digs. It’s like the inner muscles of my forearm are being punched with teeny tiny fists. He pulls my skin taut with black acrylic nails and fights for control of the canvas which, to my surprise, is spasming without my consent. My body is jumping out of its skin! With shoulders hunched, elbows raised, he forces the tendons into submission. He keeps control of that long, wandering line until its terminus. My body fights back. It trembles and twitches.

At one point, I smell a fart. At another, his sweat dribbles onto my skin before he can catch the droplets with a rag. The whole ordeal is very… hardcore.

After he renders the outline, he starts to shade. Everything that happens after this point is unspoken, improvisatory, and because I have become mute with fear, out of my control. I watch as he fills ink caps with purple and yellow ink, my two least favorite colors, the colors of the Vikings football team, nemesis of the Green Bay Packers. He scrapes the needle across my skin. Once one hair is purple, the whole mane has to be. I watch in horror as my flesh transforms. He sucks up some red ink and renders the eye of the horse bloodshot, forever. He’s just making an image, whereas I am

watching something permanent assemble itself upon me. Something I’ll live with for, his website guarantees, “99 years insured.”

Once he’s finished, he bundles me up in Saran Wrap, pats me on the shoulder, and says to come back in five minutes for a picture. Where am I meant to go? It’s night outside, I’m the only client left, and nobody wants to chat. I notice an ATM in the back. I forgot— this place is cash only! I’ve lost my debit card. I try my credit cards. My PIN guesses are I N C O R R E C T. I run across the street to the bank. It closed ten minutes ago. I call my mom. I call my dad. They transfer money onto my international currency card. The ATM rejects it. I’m out $300 to a man who’s just given me the most pain I’ve ever known. I begin to cry. I’m on the roadside after dark, snot-sobbing and wrapped in plastic like a piece of leftover meatloaf.

I hang my head and beg. We settle on a $240 Venmo transaction and $80 cash, a $20 overcharge to cover the cash-payout in the tattooist’s future. I take my horsey home, shaking in my Uber. In the morning, I shower, wash the tattoo with gold Dial soap, poke the swollen flesh, and thrice fail to achieve a bubble-less application of Tegaderm bandage.

The artist posts a photo of my horse on his Instagram. The caption reads:

My first tattoo of a horse. I colored it from memory. Thanks Amber [not my name]!

Which am I, a masochist or a pussy?

A review of my first time:

Painful, and I didn’t know the guy, but I don’t regret it, and I’m glad I got it over with.

Coconut Cake

MAIA SIEGEL

Illustrated by Catherine Kwon

Maia Siegel's writing has been published in Poetry London, The Bennington Review, Rattle, The Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. She is a sophomore Humanities major in Pierson College.

She took the small, white pill. She looked at his pleading face, so large and angular, and hoped it would start to shift around in her eyes. It did not. This was not one of those pills, one that would mutilate anything outside of her. The pill was meant to scrape out a mistake, a liquid exchange he wanted to take back. He stayed perfectly still, tank-like, until she swallowed.

The room was small and undecorated and he had brought her a small banana yogurt to eat. This was an essential step of the pill-taking process. The banana yogurt had to be eaten, all of it had to be inside her, coating her insides like some housing plaster. Building up floors inside her. With her first spoonful, she felt it clinging to her jaw, hanging there with a sort of chemically sweet claw. She sat the spoon back down.

He left for class, a military history lecture, and told her he would rush back if she called and was throwing up or feverish or any of the other possible bodily horrors printed on the pill box. But only for that.

What if I call you just because I want you to rush back to me? she asked. What if I urgently want you to peer at me, from a great distance? He said no. He said: only call if there is puke in the toilet.

She nodded like a soldier. She sat and tapped her foot and thought about throwing up the pill. Maybe it would feel like a great, important change. Like a werewolf, a growing-odd from within. Coursing through her body, there was an unnatural addition of a natural thing. She had

added a masculine component, blocked a feminine course. She was altering the very make-up of herself, forcing blood out. Forcing everything out, at once. A military excavation. Maybe the pill had reached the very center of herself. Maybe the pill had started stripping her walls, her extra floors, crashing her elevators.

She was going out. She was not going to hold herself captive to that pill, that crusting banana yogurt, that bare room. She was going to get herself a proper breakfast, eggs and sugared bread and strawberries with a mound of whipped cream poised on top. He had given her that artificial paste, that banana yogurt, maybe because he hadn’t wanted the pill to work. Maybe he didn’t want it to go down all the way. Maybe he wanted her to protect his mistaken exchange, to document it, to inscribe it into herself. She would spite him. That pill would dissolve into her very fiber. That pill would expand its contents all the way into her feet. That pill would war with the feminine procedures of her insides and it would win. It would defy procedure. It would create new filing systems inside her, create new specifications for her interior. That pill would reupholster the old leather of herself, put down blue velvet.

She got dressed in a silk olive-colored dress. She would be uniform today. Regimented. She put her hair in a low bun. And then stepped outside, not even putting away the yogurt-covered spoon, the pill box. She liked them sitting there on the table, something for him to tend to when he returned. Non-urgent, like houseplants.

The street to the nice restaurant nearby was long and impersonal, and she marched along it as if she was just one in an army of other women dissolving small white pills, waiting for the procedural turnover to occur. A parade march was what exactly, she wondered. A group dance. A tap routine. A stretch of the calves. Everyone on the street was walking as if no internal turnover was occurring. Fakers! She knew. Perhaps many more pills were inside the walkers of this street, dissolving into brain stems and neural pathways, quickening hands and stilling feet-tapping and opening and closing internal bleeding and holding off boys from flinging themselves off buildings. And goading them on, too. The pills weren’t innocent.

Her pill was likely one of the least innocent on the street. It was dissolving into complicity. Just by being a place to dissolve into, a holding into which chemicals and powders and liquids could disappear, she was complicit. She went into the restaurant and sat down and looked at the menu like it was a complicated map. It was past breakfast. The menu was for lunch now. She felt the image of her vindication crumble. She stared, determined, at the food of everyone else. As if claiming it. A girl resolutely spooned lobster bisque into her mouth. A boy clawed at mussels in a clear white wine sauce, a lunch choice too mature for that age. A man loosely stabbed at pasta, dragging it onto the tablecloth when he took a bite.

She ordered the mussels. The mussels and a glass of white wine and a slice of coco-

nut cake. She ordered it all in one breath, as if directing an army. She stared at her reflection in the restaurant window. Her hair was clawing out of her bun, hanging over her temples like limp tree branches. She imagined herself aged, how her face would fall from its invisible clothing line clips. She could look earthy and distinguished, then. Sometimes she looked at her face and saw the older version staring back, fleshier, hurried. She imagined herself like her great-aunt, maybe, wearing roomy dresses, naming her child after a deceased pet rabbit. Eating brown bread and pickles. Unpeeling an artichoke like a marvelous secret.

She wanted better secrets than that. And a more hardened face, one that had made decisions in a solemn and unsacred tone.

She wanted a pet rabbit that stayed alive and alive and alive. And a tight, tight dress made of jersey.

She wanted to stare back at her oldness, which seemed like it would, soon enough, tap her on the shoulder as if giving her back a scarf she dropped. She would coerce herself into not breaking her eyes away. No, she did not want to have shame for her future-self, its need to move around in large swathes of fabric. She would understand, she knew. She would wear low heels like her great-aunt and be quiet about it. And the rabbit would die and she would be able to keep its name.

But here came those mussels, opening their mouths to her like baby birds. She looked down at the bowl, at how the shells revealed themselves like shy tulips. She plucked the meat, vulturous. Her teeth were too lazy to grab on. She felt the first body, shriveled like an ear, slide down her throat. Joining the expansive heart of the pill, its insides now out. She plucked more,

more. Embryonic shrivels, yellowing sinews: she ripped at them with a procedural duty. The white wine sauce was translucent, shining. She felt herself perfectly placed in the restaurant. She felt herself perfectly dressed for her day, this day for

herself alone. She would not face his angular head, its plastic hardness. No, instead she would approve of each table, each primly waiting for its sitters. Like ferris wheel boxes. She sat before her bowl as if someone might be taking a photograph.

And next to the mussels, a glass of wine. Sitting expectant. She grabbed the stem like it was a flower she wanted to pick, like she was ripping it from the table. The wine was sour and she forced herself to like it. She felt her head expand, warming into a sort of dizzied vagueness. She felt something rise inside her and sit back down. She felt it wobble.

And the cake! She lifted her fork in celebration. Its whiteness seemed impossible. It was rimmed with frills, beautiful linkages of icing. She admired her wrist as her fork sank into the cake, how it was balletic and bird-like. Veined and scrappy and thin. The cake tasted like chalk. The cake tasted like fancy shampoo. The cake tasted like holding a pill in your mouth too long.

She felt the lurch again. She felt the something inside her stand up and stomp. She felt it roll around like a marble. She felt it toss itself into its own hands.

She held the table. Her fingers looked like the fingers of a doll, so far away from her. They looked so stubby, so useless. She would never grab onto anything with a grip that would hurt. She looked at the other tables in the restaurant. They were each on their own ride. They were all going up, up.

Her mouth hinged over the cake. It was so white. It was so. The something inside her had had enough. She was stomped through. Up, up, up. Her mouth flared open and her eyes retracted and everything left her, storming every gate she had erected. It happened so easily, like an eye roll she hadn’t meant. She felt like a dog on the street. She kept her eyes down, she forced them to look at her production.

The cake was no longer white. It was the color of her, here she was. Her vindication,

all her efforts. Here they were, in physical form. She sat, saw how small her protests would always be. How her attempts at living in a considered way would never graduate into anything but attempts. She wanted to make her voice low over a marble desk. She wanted to wear a pencil skirt that was made of a fabric you couldn’t pinch through, one that didn’t swish when she walked. She wanted to point at two photographs and instantly know which one held a secret out of frame. It was impossible for her to say these things, these small flashes of a life. They amounted to a glance, a gesture. They were not a guide to anything she could get up and walk to.

The coconut cake sat still like an accusation. It said: nothing inside her would change now. She had already been exchanged, mistaken. She felt the jumping something inside her like a friend. She forced herself to imagine a hand, shaking in greeting with the something. She imagined becoming business partners. She imagined a mutual tight, curt nod. She felt the redundancy of another swallowing, another chalked spoon, another eye roll of her gut. She wanted a noble, harrowing drama. She would never get one; all her dramas would be awkward, undetected. Curdled like a half-awake can, left in the fridge.

She called him. What army was he memorizing right now? What small deaths? Here was one, here was something to learn.

Can you come, she asked. It’s outside of me now.

Never Sick

MIYE SUGINO

Illustrated by Catherine Kwon

On displacement from roles

When we are both tired, Halmeoni gives me a foot massage. “Today I work so hard,” she tells me one day, knuckling the bottom of my foot. “I cook kalguksu for next week so your mama can just—relax. And then I clean. Whole house.” She slaps my heel for emphasis. Her hair catches the light in small curls.

This has become our routine while she is visiting: each night we sink onto the couch and she chats, one story unfurling into the next, while I quietly accept foot massages from my grandmother. She pauses as her eyes meander across the room, trailing a storyline only she can see. Her white head hunches over my feet. It is in this brief stillness that I suddenly become aware of my breathing, the world churning around me, and I sense that there is something horribly off about this scene.

“Halmeoni, you shouldn’t be working so much. You’re our guest,” I say. What I mean to say is that this reversal of roles feels wrong: a granddaughter should be giving her grandmother a foot massage.

“I am happy,” she replies, swatting at the air. “This. Do you enjoy?” Halmeoni presses into the ball of my foot, drawing out the tension. Her papery skin shifts over her knuckles, over her veins.

“I enjoy,” I say, smiling tightly.

A memory passes through me: I am six; I am complaining that I walked all day and my feet hurt so bad and I want the hardest foot massage she can give. She pretends to oblige, cradling my feet in her hands. What do we know about the proper placement of things, when we have displaced ourselves from our roles for so long?

“I enjoy.” English is my first language, yet it always seems to break around her. ***

On displacement from country

Halmeoni and her husband came to America with three hundred dollars, a Japanese camera, and degrees from South Korea’s most renowned universities—which held little significance to their prospective employers. For two weeks, they stayed in a church basement and thanked God for free rent.

Like most educated Korean immigrants, Halmeoni’s husband matriculated into assembly line manual labor. His arms, soft and suited only for turning pages, shuddered as he hauled package after package. During breaks he kept going because he was already falling behind. Faster, faster— how his limbs whirled like machinery.

By some chance—God is so good, she professes—Halmeoni escaped the pipeline to manual labor and landed an office job. Her job: to transcribe tapes. Her qualifications: having majored in law at South Korea’s most renowned women’s university, but more specifically, possessing the ability to type.

Halmeoni typed words she couldn’t understand, typed faster than any other transcriptionist. It was easier that way, she discovered, to empty out her mind.

Each night after Halmeoni and her husband finished work, they took turns stepping on each other’s backs until they creaked. Winced, then breathed in their moments of quiet. They were at home as long as they couldn’t hear anything.

Later on, Halmeoni won the transcriptionist award of the year at her firm. She proud-

ly reiterated the supervisor’s reasons for picking her.

She work hard.

She never sick.

She never complain. ***

On displacement from natural environment

Halmeoni is the first to notice when my sister’s pet gecko loses its survival instincts. It happens one day when Halmeoni flicks the tank to see if it’ll flinch, and its eyes stay dispassionate and open.

“Why is it not hiding?” she asks.

“There’s nothing to hide from, Halmeoni. It knows that.”

“Oh, so gecko is smart.”

I recall its first months with us, crouched within an artificial cave. On month three it made a run for it, skittering into the depths of our couch. I had never seen it run so desperately.

Now the gecko has stopped scratching at the walls. It eats when we feed it, sleeps when we switch the lights off. In the dark, its eyes glint like pennies.

It doesn’t belong here, I realize. A gecko should be outside. But it is here, with us, confined in an artificial desert where its survival instincts—to hunt, to flee—are displaced by endless hours to contemplate other ideas. It has moved up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but perhaps not towards self-actualization. Perhaps it knows that this 24” x 12” tank is where it will die. This gecko’s misery is distinctly human.

Miye Sugino is a first-year student in Grace Hopper. She grew up in Los Angeles and Tokyo.

On displacement from home

I was born in a cloudless suburb in Illinois that we just call Chicago, because it’s close enough and we can’t bother to remember the real name. In English class we learn that telos—doing what makes you excellent and fulfills your potential, or in other words, finding your place in the world—makes life worth living.

When I explain to a classmate that I am 50% Korean, 50% Japanese, and 100% American, he squints at me and laughs.

“No, you’re not.”

“What?”

“That’s 200% total—completely, mathematically impossible.”

I say nothing. I am thinking of the gecko without its place in the world. ***

On displacement from language

Before dinner, Halmeoni and I pray that my great-grandmother—her mother—will die in March, when it is warmer. But we both know she won’t last past this December. She has stopped speaking, stopped eating. Her body is shutting down. On Skype, Halmeoni pens fat letters in Korean on paper and lifts it up to the webcam because her mother can no longer hear.

Have you eaten?

A nod.

What did you do today?

A nod.

In Halmeoni’s hands, the paper is smooth and cold as the computer screen between them.

***

On displacement from family

In all of my photos with my great-grandmother, I am straining to smile. In my four visits to South Korea, I couldn’t hold one conversation with my great-grandmother: all I could say in Korean was hello, goodbye, and thank you. My great-grandmother had

the same photos taped on her balcony wall. This balcony is where she stepped out every morning to pray for me, long before I ever knew her, Halmeoni tells me. I wouldn’t know otherwise.

It is after my great-grandmother dies that I realize I don’t completely believe that she is gone. Because we have always been an ocean apart, I can still press my phone against my cheek and imagine that she is still there, just on the other side. Momentarily disconnected. ***

On displacement from body

“So warm,” Halmeoni says after I ask her how my great-grandmother’s funeral was. I hadn’t gone: my great-grandmother had died right before all the holidays in late December, so last-minute plane tickets to South Korea were sold out.

“It was so cold in Korea. At first I was thinking, my mom worked so hard. I was asking God why my mom must die in cold season with no plane tickets? But on funeral day, weather was warm enough to eat outside.”

“I said thank you very much, God. It was very warm compared to what I expected.”

I realize then that Halmeoni believes that dying is a kind of moving. An easy transit: earth to heaven, body to spirit. But how did she remain grateful? It seemed radical to me, even transcendent. How did she resist the instinct of defeat, eyes dispassionate and open?

How do you move forward if you have no place to move from? ***

On displacement from time

On the couch, Halmeoni unfurls another story.

“I used to want to be lawyer. Your harabeoji wanted to be doctor.” In Korea back then, women went to law school to become secretaries. In America, her college degree was illegitimate.

“It was the times,” she says. As a mother she had never told her children about this dream that escaped her; and yet somehow, she notes, her daughter is now a lawyer, her son a doctor. God is good.

“When you have grandchildren you will give them foot massage too, yes?”

I grimace at the thought of giving a six-year old a foot massage—somehow it is outrageous unless I am on the receiving end— and she cackles at that.

“I am happy,” Halmeoni says. She smiles, a flash of teeth stained yellow. Her expression then softens with such tenderness, I feel an urge to hold her close. ***

For my birthday, Halmeoni reads every pre-written card at Target and buys the one that is closest to what she wants to say. She slips in a few extra dollars, apologizing for not being so good with words.

But there are no words for what we want to say to each other. How do we create a new rhetoric when it is one born of loss? When do we stop speaking in absences and become full?

I take her hand in mine. This, I think, is a new language emerging from the residues of displacement—where words fall short but we keep reaching and reaching and reaching. There is so much in what we do not say.

SECOND PRIZE | FICTION

Dino Farm

ANN ZHANG Illustrated by Catherine Kwon

Ann Zhang is a junior in Benjamin Franklin College. She grew up in St. Louis, Missouri and is majoring in Computer Science and Film & Media Studies.

Afew months ago, I petitioned to take time away from Yale and help my mother get rid of the dinosaurs. I was tired of my classes, tired of waiting each semester, with dread or hope, for the New England cold to arrive and then recede. Meanwhile, my mother needed an extra pair of hands with farm chores.

Come fall, my classmates’ Instagram stories burst to life, boasting campus landmarks and reunions of similarly dressed friends. I packed a twenty-inch suitcase with my laptop and charger, a short story anthology, toiletries, and no more than twelve changes of clothes. My mother did the same. Then we loaded our stuff into the back of her car and took turns driving away from Missoula, past mountains and brown cows and vibrant splashes of greenery.

I drove a little over half of the five-hour journey, during which my mother closed her eyes and swayed like a ragdoll in the passenger’s seat. My mother was nearing one full year of searching for a job. The longer you searched, the harder it got, she told me, because the recruiters would wonder why none of the other recruiters had already snatched you up. To make things worse, my mother was looking older and older, losing her definition. Nobody wanted to watch a woman age beyond fifty. When my mother took interviews over video call, she used four thumbsized strips of transparent tape to pull back her cheekbones and her jowls.

Her unemployment was the reason we were selling the family farm. My father was the one to suggest it: I was hardly home anymore, and my sister, Tilly, had never cared much for the dinosaurs. Tilly would rather have kept a dog or a cat, a warm-blooded animal, something to curl up in her lap and scratch at doors when she disappeared behind them.

So my mother reached out to a broker, who asked us to supervise various health inspec-

tions and refurbishings, all the necessary steps to prepare the farm for the next stage of its life. She got choked up whenever we talked about saying goodbye.

***

I wrote my college essay about the passing of one of the oviraptors, Lucius. The summer before my sophomore year of high school, Lucius settled into a far corner of his enclosure, where I would visit and feed him eggs.

My mother had warned me against disturbing an animal’s diet, but my intellectual curiosity was overwhelming. I wanted Lucius to try all kinds of eggs before he died: fried, scrambled, hard-boiled, poached. I wanted to see if he would eat carefully enough to tell the difference between them.

The other oviraptors, sensing an air of morbidity around Lucius, were giving him a wide berth. Like humans, oviraptors walk on two legs, so it was like watching elementary schoolers on the playground, making a game of avoiding the class reject.

Small, quick dinos like the oviraptors are the brightest ones, followed by the bigger carnivores, and then finally the sweet, lackadaisical herbivores. My essay took a moment here to meditate on the perplexing beauty of dinosaur intelligence, of apple-sized brains in one-hundred-foot bodies. It troubled me to think that the smarter a type of dinosaur was, the more conniving its personality was likely to be.

Each morning of the week before Lucius died, I woke before sunrise and prepared an egg to deliver him at feeding time. While my father distributed the oviraptors’ routine breakfast of raw eggs, nuts, and seeds, I presented Lucius with his latest scrumptious dish. Lucius trembled, rustling his feathers as he knelt to take

the egg in his mouth. He always swallowed it in one go, but afterward, his face would grow thoughtful. He must have tasted something out of the ordinary.

It was rare to see a dinosaur die since most of them lived at least fifty years, some of them past one hundred. To finish off my essay, I wrote a few more lines about Lucius lying alone in the corner, myself coming to rescue him from isolation during his final stretch. The implication was that I would be a very considerate member of the campus community.

At the end of the spring semester, one of my closest friends told me that I was a bummer to be around. I had proposed rooming together during the next academic year, and after a series of evasive texts, they were looking into my eyes and declining the offer.

I was emotionally exhausting. I did not contribute enough to our group dynamic. Much of what I said was just too much. They brought up several examples of my lines of philosophical questioning: what keeps you going on a day-to-day basis? Really? We were sitting in a tomato-red booth of the campus cafe, attracting stares. My friend promised that they loved me dearly despite these caveats. Whew, I said.

In life, my friend was in a very good place. They might have been right about happy people being better off in the company of happy people. Sad people, they lightly suggested, should stick to their kind. I didn’t want to be a bad roommate, but I couldn’t figure out how to be better. I bought birthday presents, asked others about themselves, remembered personal details. Only twice had I mentioned the worry that plagued my recent existence: that the last time I felt genuine, childlike joy was when I was dat-

ing a girl who couldn’t stop talking about how her arms were too small for her body.

T-Rex, she called herself. I informed her that a T-Rex’s power was concentrated in its massive head instead of its arms. She laughed, then took offense. When she was breaking up with me, she brought up this conversation again. She said, I can’t believe you told me I have a big head, what a horrible thing to say. I did not apologize then. Later I did, though I’m not sure if I meant it or if I just wanted her to forgive me.

I used to think about this girl with every ounce of my energy, but these days I’ve been trying to kick the habit. Some nights I dream about her coming back to me. Other nights I dream of a T-Rex closing its teeth around my body, the resounding crunch, going wherever I’m meant to go in the end.

***

I spent half of my days at the farm with my mother and the other half alone. My mother and I worked side by side to refill the dinosaurs’ food and water, which was easily a two-person job. Afternoons, we would drive half an hour to the nearest superstore for groceries and cook pastas at sunset. To walk off dinner we strolled around the enclosures, keeping an eye out for fencing panels that called for repair, particularly by the ankylosauruses.

My mother and I’s relationship had vastly improved ever since I began losing friends. An hour before I pressed submit on my petition to take leave from school, I laid my head in her lap and curled the excess parts of my body behind her, weeping as she combed her fingers through my knotted hair. Before then we would barely touch: maybe a hug if I was about to leave home for a while.

Three times a week, we carried a bowl of purple grapes to the patio and FaceTimed my father for life updates, plus Tilly whenever she bothered to pick up the phone. A brontosaurus was having a baby, we shared. A state champion tennis player was taking my sister to the homecoming dance. My mother did two interviews last week. I was off Lexapro.

I used my alone time to make banana bread and watch TV on weekdays. If I felt upset, I would hop into our caged loader and take a joyride of shoveling up the colossal turds produced by larger dinos. This poop therapy only happened when I got to thinking about the past, reviving feelings of bitterness or pointless reminiscing that should have expired long ago. I wondered if I would be

better off in New Haven, making out with Tinder dates or foraging for friends who might like me, but after driving around and washing my hands in the sink, I felt better about spending time with the dinos, counting down our final days together.

In early November, my mom received a job offer from a firm in Pittsburgh. She accepted it with the caveat of delaying her start until Tilly’s graduation. Without the farm, there would soon be nothing tying her to home except history. My father, who was working remotely these days, would accompany her to Glacier National Park, one of many items on my mother’s bucket list, which had been lengthening since she downloaded TikTok on her iPad. Afterward they would rent a truck and drive our belongings across the Midwest.

After getting the phone call from Pittsburgh, my mother and I bought champagne and a miniature cheesecake to devour at the kitchen table. It was only ten in the morning. Neither of us cared much for drinking, but we both felt it was the right thing to do.

My mother started to tear up a couple sips into her first glass. Extending her fork for more cheesecake, she requested that I consider trying to be less like her. I asked in what sense. Her voice shook: before we came to the farm, she was sad to watch me losing color, terrified that she wouldn’t be able to save me. My mother said, why do you think so much about yourself, but only so brutally? You and I have this same problem. Tilly and your dad, they find it easy to be kind.

When I was in high school, I hated hearing her make such presumptuous statements, but I let this one slide. Weren’t we supposed to be talking about Pittsburgh? I smiled and took the penultimate slice of cheesecake. My mother closed her eyes. Yes, we were. Before we returned to our different places in the world, we should try to start changing our minds.

***

For Thanksgiving break, my father and Tilly decided to pay their respects to the farm. My dad wanted to see the baby brontosaurus, who was learning to stand. The general idea was to celebrate the baby’s birth, my mother’s employment, and the holiday, all in unison.

With two more faces at the dining table, we feasted on hot turkey and assorted vegetables that my mother and I had spent the afternoon preparing, topped off with pecan

pie from Missoula. We chatted about Tilly’s college prospects and my mother’s intention to get more involved with the parents’ council now that she had the time to do something fun. After dinner we refrigerated the leftover turkey, and in keeping with our routine, my mother and I led our visitors around the dino enclosures. Even Tilly looked a little nostalgic to see them in person. Next week the broker was coming by with the buyers for one last inspection.

If I were to write another story about dinosaurs, I would focus on how the different kinds make their living. Back in the glory days, carnivores sat at the top of the food chain. A scarce number of them hunted vast herds of herbivores. Being one of the big guys sounds like a good deal until you realize that the tree-huggers lived much longer on average, while T-Rexes died at twenty in the wild. Then you had thieves like the raptors, or evaders such as pterosaurs, who fished and pilfered. Given the prosperity of modern-day birds, it might seem that pterosaurs and their progeny fared the best, but roaming around the farm, I felt that the question of survival had become obsolete. Every dinosaur had its place.

Tilly suggested naming the baby Jeff, after our broker. Jeff had assured us that a capital gains tax would apply to the new offspring as well. We could hear chatter from the neighboring pens, sometimes a distant roar. Stars glimmered amidst a sky fading from black to indigo near the horizon.

One of the brontosauruses was pacing around the edge of the enclosure, shaking dust from the ground where my family stood. The four of us shivered in trappers and knee-length jackets. The baby, huddled between its mother’s legs, was a shadow to us. As the mother lifted her wrinkled neck toward the sky, her green eyes gleamed electric, reptilian, facing nowhere in particular. I knew that there was probably not a single grievance in that relatively small head of hers: her body knew all it needed to know, nothing more. I wanted to be just like her.

In the Delta

ELISE WILKINS Illustrated by Catherine Kwon

Elise Wilkins is a sophomore in Silliman majoring in Environmental Studies. She is originally from Nashville, Tennessee. Elise loves doing jigsaw puzzles and trying out new dessert recipes.

The Mississippi Delta has always smelled of wet soil. The Delta itself is the shared flood plain between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers. It encloses the northwestern region of the state of Mississippi, and its location makes the Delta land known for its richness. The fertility of the Delta has been used for many centuries, but the origins of the Delta we have today date back to the 18th century, with the hands of enslaved black people and the orders of plantation owners. For those who tirelessly worked the land for no share of the crops they harvested, the Delta definitely smelled of wet soil, but it also smelled of pain. This pain was passed down through generations, since even after the abolition of slavery, the majority-black population struggled to find success. Pain is embedded deep within the Delta’s history, but that pain has inspired music that touches the soul, with Blues legends like B.B. King having been born and raised in the Delta. The Delta has turned its collective suffering into a culture that celebrates the commitment to persevere, one that is alive with community. One such community is a town situated in its very heart, a town called Hollandale.

Sitting between fields of cotton and corn, Hollandale is a small town comprised of 2.21 square miles of land. Hollandale has exactly one grocery store, one school, one bank, and one cemetery. In 2021, there were 2,277 inhabitants of Hollandale. There are fewer now. But one inhabitant has lived in Hollandale for 74 years, a woman name Shirley Ann Jenkins. Shirley has seen Hollandale change throughout the years. Shirley was around when there were two schools instead of one (before the white school was torn down). Shirley remembers when bath time consisted of a metal tub in the backyard where she bathed in the same water as her siblings. Shirley spent her teenage summers in the fields, when summer break was meant for picking cotton. Shirley left Hollandale briefly for college and when she returned, she worked as a math teacher for decades. In her 74 years in Hollandale, Shirley has gotten to know the town quite well, just as the town has gotten to know her. The residents of Hollandale call her by many names. Old students of hers call her Mrs. Connors (her name from her first marriage). Younger students call her Mrs. Jenkins (from her second). Her friends and siblings call her Shirley or Shirley Ann. Church members call her Pastor.

My mom and uncle, who are no longer residents of Hollandale, call her Mother. And I, who have only been a visitor to Hollandale, call her Nana.

Nana’s house, where she has lived for over fifty years, sits on Rosenwald Street. It is the quintessential Hollandale home, standing one-story high like every other house in town. Bricks of earthy gray and brown shades cover the house, except for a small wooden section on the left, which was added on after the initial build. At the front of the lawn, which is kept nicely cut even when the grass in brown, there is a crooked yellow mailbox. And where the lawn meets the house, there are three pillars supporting the awning over the path to the front door, where Nana often sits to read and wave at neighbors.

There is not a building in Hollandale that you can walk into without being greeted by its unique smell. The grocery store has a strong odor of spoiled meat. But Nana still goes there every week, first quickly grabbing whatever groceries she needs from near the deli section before moving onto the aisles, where she’ll stop to talk to a man in a black apron who’s stocking the canned green beans–he’s an old childhood friend. In Hollandale, a quick trip to the grocery store can easily turn into

an hour-long venture. It can often take Nana ten minutes to walk the hundred feet from her car to the front door depending on who she runs into in the parking lot.

The convenience store at the sole gas station (which surprisingly enough sells the best catfish I’ve ever tasted) smells of hot grease and cigarette smoke. The store is always loud, with people talking while buying snacks or coffee or lottery tickets.

Each place has a smell handcrafted by Hollandale. A smell that lets you know exactly where you are. And Nana’s house is no different. The scent engulfs you when you open the door, whisking you inside with the promise of good conversation.

The kitchen table lends itself well to these conversations. A white table cloth with embroidered details usually covers the rectangular table, which is as high as the kitchen counter. Six chairs surround its perimeter, and Nana keeps a bowl of walnuts on the center of the table, ready to be cracked over casual chats. Friends who happen to be driving by will stop to say “hi.” They’ll say that they only have a few minutes. That they’re just stopping by. But they always end up staying for longer. Hollandale says, “Forget where you’re going. This is where you’re supposed to be.” While many visitors come and go from the house on Rosenwald Street, the most frequent was my great aunt Jean.

As Nana’s older sister, Aunt Jean was one of a few Hollandale residents who had been there longer than Nana. These conversations with Aunt Jean had been a staple since Nana’s childhood. Their talks often consisted of the same topics. They shared familial

updates. Aunt Jean would talk about her son Anthony’s success as the manager of a restaurant and Nana would talk about a new research paper that my mom had published. After discussing their kids, they always made sure to talk about how their grandchildren were doing in school. They also gave updates on their old classmates. One of them was sick. Well a lot of them were sick, but a new one became sick since the last time they talked. Soon, discussion about the sick turned into discussion about those who had passed on. This was a topic on which there was never a shortage of conversation. They talked about an old friend’s wife, who had died two days ago. He had lost his wife and his son within a year. A town away, there was the high school football player that died on the field after breaking his neck during a play. In Leland, a town 20 miles from Hollandale, two children drowned after the car they were in rolled into a creek. These stories haunt me, but to Nana and Aunt Jean, death is just the daily news. I wonder what Aunt Jean would’ve thought if she knew that she would be next.

After their conversations, Nana would usually drive Aunt Jean home, because she didn’t drive, and they would bid each other goodbye until a few days later when Hollandale would bring them together again.

While many embrace the attributes of life in Hollandale, for some, Hollandale leaves no room to breathe. To my mother, Hollandale was restrictive. The smells of each building were so distinct that she could not pretend she was anywhere else. To Mommy, Hollandale smelled like poverty and stagnation, and a destiny that threatened to confine her to the same 2.21 square

miles for the rest of her life. She needed more. She graduated high school as valedictorian and received a full scholarship to a college in Washington, D.C., a city that smelled of promise. To her, D.C. promised a medical degree, which led her to a job as a physician in Nashville, Tennessee–a place that is nothing like Hollandale.

Aunt Jean’s funeral was a rare occasion for which Mommy returned to Hollandale. Only a few weeks had passed from learning that her aunt had contracted COVID-19 to making the six-hour drive from Nashville to Hollandale for the funeral. For Mommy, that trip showed her how much Hollandale had deteriorated since she left. The white house across the street from Nana’s was gone, having been replaced with cigarette butts and empty chip bags. There had been reports of a recent shootout in the grocery store parking lot. And when Aunt Jean’s casket was being interred, it was clear that the only place that is always growing in Hollandale is the cemetery.

To Mommy, Hollandale is a place to escape from. So when Nana comes to visit her in Nashville, she always makes sure to point out a new apartment complex for seniors. She takes her to the nearby church for social events. She schedules Nana’s doctor appointments and has the prescriptions ordered to the pharmacy in Nashville. She sets up a table in the house for Nana to read her daily scriptures. Every gesture is an act of persuasion. Nana understands Mommy’s intention, but she doesn’t pay it much attention. She knows that at some point she will miss the smell of wet soil. She knows that she’ll eventually hear the Delta calling out to her, saying “It’s time to come home; the rivers haven’t run dry.”

HONORABLE MENTION | NONFICTION

Thyroid not Included

ELLIE ATLEE Illustrated by Catherine Kwon

“I’m dying!” I announced as I slammed my car door closed, my mother running towards me from the home office in our backyard.

“Don’t say that! That is not funny! Eleanor!” she snapped back.

“Well, it could be true,” I grumpily responded, suddenly understanding that no one else would find me very funny anymore. My brother sighed in disgust at my incredibly brave, spirited joke, as he extricated his long legs from our tiny electric car.

“Come on, Ellie,” he warned me, “be nice to Mom.”

I was flabbergasted. I was the one who had the tumor, and somehow it was my responsibility to ensure that my mother was okay? Here I was cracking jokes, letting this life setback just roll off of me, and I was the villain? She had crossed our backyard by then and met me with a desperate hug, clutching at my shoulders. I feebly patted her back as she crooned, “Are you okay? What did she say? How did it happen?” I decided to let her questions run their course before I attempted to address any of them. I guess that was the wrong choice because she pulled away from me and arched, “Well? Did you even ask any questions?” My mother has always been convinced that I don’t ask doctors enough follow up questions.

“I don’t know, she said she won’t be able to tell whether it’s a tumor or cyst or what until after the ultrasound.” I dopily said, staring back through one eyelid already swollen and strained, a stye that had brought me to the doctor’s office in the first place.

Here’s how my week had been going before the appointment: I had gone to an outdoor flea market with my friends and gotten my rather fat finger stuck in a corroded silver ring, just as a trio of gorgeous models drifted by. My friend Chela was rendered completely useless, as her peals of laughter had only alerted the beautiful group to my pathetic situation, as my other friend Sophie gripped the ring and pulled. The beautiful group had tried not to laugh, and I couldn’t blame them. I too would have laughed. Still, I hated getting caught in situations like these. I knew that group of obviously contracted models would never cross paths with me again, but in my town it’s unprofessional to be caught in such an embarrassing position in front of beautiful people.

After the flea market, Sophie, Chela and I had waddled home with our thrifted buys, only for me to discover in the mirror that my third stye of the year was quietly developing. Under my top eyelid was a pink protrusion, and the overwhelming urge to scratch my eye seeped into my pudgy fingers, twitching. I steeled myself against the countertop and blinked rapidly, willing tears into my eyes. A theater kid, I had done this before. The natural saline didn’t cause much relief so I started the tap and ran my face under it.

The next morning, I awoke in my sunny yellow room, adorned with the decorations of my childhood that my parents had insisted I keep up, and found I couldn’t open my right eye. I rushed to the bathroom across my landing, and gasped at the reflection in the mirror. A monster! In my tattered sleepshirt and disheveled hair, I inspected the throbbing red bump that had glued my eye shut. Prone to styes and patient zero of the pink eye epidemic at my high school, I was

accustomed to strange eye afflictions. This, however, was a whole new beast. I pulled out my phone and dialed up my pediatrician. The kind nurse informed me I would have to wait three days before I could see Dr. Sloninsky, and had I tried a hot compress? Amateur. Hot compresses make styes worse.

And so I spent the next three days huddled inside my home, refusing to go anywhere and sneering at my family when they delicately inquired after the reddish pinkish golf ball that was my right eye. ***

A thing I learned when my doctor tried to hide her concern over the bulging goiter on my neck: doctors are bad actors. “What is this?” she said, far too attentively.

“Oh, it’s just, like, been there.” Suddenly I was gripped with the initial concern this strange mass had at first brought me, when I had pointed it out to my best friend, Chela, at lunchtime at school. “Oh, hmmm, honestly, it’s probably nothing,” she had said, her two fingers lightly jabbing at my jugular, and I had taken her advice.

“This is quite a bump,” Liliana Sloninsky murmured, “How long has this been here?”

“A couple months I think?”

“You should really watch for bumps like these and come in to see me,” she said. I was staring at the baby scale, the changing-table-like contraption that I must have been laid down against as an infant in this very office. She had held my tiny limbs, trying to work around my wailing tantrums on that table. Dr. Sloninsky stopped in-

Ellie Atlee is a sophomore in Stiles, majoring in Film and media studies and History.

specting my neck and stepped back. We looked at each other.

“Alright, well, I will give you a prescription for that eye, and then we’ll set up an appointment with the imaging center downstairs for an ultrasound with your neck, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Do you have any questions for me?”

“No, thank you.”

“Okay.”

“Actually, how long will the stye medicine take to set in?”

She sighed, glad I had released her, “just a couple of days, don’t you worry.”

“Okay thank you.”

It took twenty minutes or so for me to tell my brother in the car what Dr. Sloninsky said in the office. He gripped the steering wheel with his large hands and I discovered that he, too, is a terrible actor. “Hmm, well, it’s probably standard protocol for her to get concerned. Let’s call mom.” ***

It took another six months to get a surgery date because in between the time my concerned doctor had tapped on my bulging neck and the time I was being wheeled out of pre-op in a hairnet, a global pandemic hit. My life continued incredibly normally during these interim months, the only apparent difference being that I now wore scarves and high necked sweaters despite the hot Los Angeles weather, newly insecure over the goiter that hadn’t bothered me before winter break. Luckily, no one was spending much time outside, so I was able to sequester myself in my house and spend long periods craning my head at my reflection in my bathroom mirror, poking at the protruding mass to the side of my jugular. My stye had subsided weeks ago, and all that remained of it was a matching hard ball, a miniature of my neck lump, that was largely covered by my heavy eyelids. No longer so apparent, I mostly forgot about it, and my attention shifted to the ginormous, overwhelming protuberance next to my trachea. It flabbed and flopped as I spoke, and

I couldn’t touch my jaw to my clavicle anymore. Not that I crunched my neck in such a matter often before the growth, but now I couldn’t fall asleep sitting up as comfortably. On top of it all, my friends and family were lying to me.

“It’s hardly noticeable,” they would assure me, staring down at the testicular-like abnormality.

And so on my personal gurney ride to the operation room I was overjoyed. Nice Dr. Ramirez was going to smooth down my neck, clipping and manicuring it back to normalcy. In the operation room, Martin the anesthesiologist told me he was giving me the “martini of sedatives,” in his luxurious Australian accent, and I knew I was in good hands. The overheard LED lights blurred and brightened, buzzing as I slipped into a restorative slumber. ***

It was to my dismay later that day that I discovered a stitched monstrosity stretched across my neck. Martin and Dr. Ramirez had swindled me! She had joked before the surgery, “Excited to get this out, huh?” and gone and disfigured me! The nurse noticed my collecting tears, and promised me, “It will fade with time. And eventually it will be just a little white line.”

“How long does that usually take?” I asked, nonchalantly.

“A year? Maybe a year and a half. It depends on how much sunscreen you wear, which you really should wear daily with your skintone.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. A year? A year in which my senior photos, prom pictures, and major public appearances would take place once this silly pandemic wrapped up? Far too outraged to even address the unsolicited dermatological advice, I sat back in my hospital bed, and let a singular, stoic tear slide down my cheek. Then I pulled out my phone and took a couple pictures for evidence. This was the worst day of my life. The tear didn’t really show up in the phone camera, so I scrunched my face in anguish. Better. You could see better that my throat hurt, and I was still high, and my neck was a bloodied, bruised mess. I sat and waited for my father to be allowed into the lobby to take me home. I didn’t even get

wheeled out of the hospital. They made me walk out on my own.

At least Martin’s martini still clouded my brain. The whole car ride home I was convinced the sky was pink and had always been pink. I stared out in wonder through the tinted window at the midday sky that pulsed a rosy hue. ***

Almost two years later, my scar still smudges my neck. Albeit, I didn’t wear much sunscreen. I don’t mind it so much now. Once the stitches came out, and the crusty red line of blood had chipped away, it turned into a neat pink line. It has flattened into my collar, and I can barely feel it as I rub my now smooth, concave neck. I don’t particularly miss my thyroid, and it feels strange that an entire organ can be removed from my body without much consequence.

Only after my thyroid was gone did I start to tell people that I had had a tumor. I was sort of forced to explain the hickey-like mark that would cause raised eyebrows, insinuating jokes. Everyone always feels like an asshole when I tell them it was a cancer scare.

“It’s totally okay! It was all fine! Took my thyroid out and we’re good. If you have to get cancer, thyroid cancer is the cancer to get!” I always rush to explain, but it never helps.

My siblings have thankfully come around to the humor of it all, making jokes like, “all those still with their thyroids and thyroid isthmuses get dessert!” My mother, though, just grimaces. Her own mother had succumbed to the c-word just months before my first doctor’s visit, slowly and painfully wasting away on the second floor of our house until a final fall on the walkway of our front yard had broken her hip. My grandmother took a long time to die, not because she wanted to live, but because my mother could not bear to let her go yet. Maybe this is why I was never afraid of death. When my grandmother finally went, she was at peace. It was the years of pain, asking for pillows to ease her bones, straining to straighten her scoliotic shoulders, her shuffling down to the kitchen to overdose on her hospice morphine that were so hard. I feared most the extended act of dying, not the actual death. Honestly, I really just didn’t want to shave my head. I think I would have done it though, for my mother.

HONORABLE MENTION| NONFICTION

1111 River Road

MICHAELA WANG Illustrated by Catherine Kwon

Michaela Wang is a member of the Class of 2025 in Berkeley College. She majors in Anthropology and is involved in the Education Studies Program. She loves writing about places, Asian America, immigration, and food. You can read her work in the Yale Daily News, the Yale Herald, and her secret diary which she keeps very, very hidden in her room.

My grandparents lived in 1111 River Road, an unassuming apartment complex nestled along the Hudson River across from Manhattan. The old, three-level complex was sandwiched between two larger condominiums that surged higher and higher each time we visited. While the bigger and prettier buildings accommodated the mass exodus of city dwellers seeking out better school systems and lower rent, middle-income Asian immigrants called 1111 River Road home way back since the 50’s. Despite the rapid modernization that enveloped it, 1111 River Road never bothered to remodel, even though it was readily losing value. It stood firm in its dirtied white brick walls, ripping purple rugs, window air conditioners, and underequipped gym. It found confidence in the old ways amidst a changing society, very much like my Dá Dá (grandpa).

Facing the Hudson River, which was the complex’s main and only selling point, we gained sweeping views (and aromas) of the Hudson River. Well-advertised in the realtor’s pamphlet, the riverfront seemed less of a romantic date spot than a historical case study of industrialization. The river smelled of salt, sewage, and the urine of the homeless person sleeping next to it. Ships packed with rainbow-colored cargo containers sounded their penetrating horns as they ducked underneath the George Washington Bridge. If you got close enough, you could hear the symphony of cars beeping on the GW, but Mom never let me get too close. At that time, I had a tendency of putting everything that interested me in my mouth, and you shouldn’t do that, especially with the Hudson River.

But when Mom wasn’t around, Dá Dá almost always broke her rules. We both possessed a

fascination with small animals, and while the Hudson River wasn’t the most conducive to our naturalist investigations, we attempted to catch small yú yú (fish) in the brackish water. Often, we only got bottle caps and broken beer bottles in our net. Because of age, he lacked speed, while I lacked precision.

A sprawling playground sat right next to the parking lot, replete with seesaws and twisting slides more elaborate than the ones at my elementary school. Dá Dá would hoist me up to reach the monkey bars, supporting my waist up as I swung from one bar to the next. He made me feel like a contestant on a fitness show competition, even though he was holding most of my weight. We played until sundown, when Háo Póu (grandma) stumbled out onto the playground in her house slippers to call us back for dinner, making sure we knew that we had interrupted her cooking and that because of us the texture of the potatoes would suffer. Maybe to her desire, Hurricane Sandy destroyed much of the playground, so the designers decided to rip it out, fill it with concrete, and expand the parking lot. That image forever stuck with me, awaking me to the ugly truth of growing up.

In order to get to 1111 River Road, we navigated through hilly, narrow streets, past the block spilling over with taquerías and Korean barber shops. Mom made sure to lock our doors when stopped at a red light, but I loved looking out at the suspicious $5 massage advertisements and the dishwashers breakdancing at the bus stop.

Pulling into our designated parking spot, my sister and I peered through the car window, searching for Dá Dá, who would stand behind the screen door with his hands behind his back, waiting. Almost always, he was

there. My sister and I would rush out the car, abandoning my mom with the coolers of food and paperwork, to find Háo Póu’s short but elegant figure holding open the door. We allowed her to smother us in her red lipstick before politely shimmying out of her grasp, stumbling up the stairs, and swinging upon the always-unlocked door.

Most of the time, Dá Dá was already at the door ready to greet us, or in the kitchen tending to the braised beef he knew was my favorite. But there were times when he was lying on the couch, snoring. At first, my sister and I thought it was funny to tickle him awake. But when we saw how he woke up, dazed and confused by the surroundings before him, we realized that he wasn’t taking naps because he ate a bit too much for lunch and knocked out with C-SPAN playing on the TV; it was because he felt lethargic throughout the day, but still wanted to present his most energetic self to us.

Dá Dá was a tall, lanky man, who in his youth was referred to as a “Taiwanese Indiana Jones.” As a middle-income-earning designer who came from nothing, he leveraged his looks to court my grandmother, a highly connected daughter of a Taiwanese senator. I struggled to envision him in his youth, which age seemed to obscure, like rain forming rust on the apartment buildings’ white walls. His silver gray hair swept to the right into a side part, but several pieces always stood up at the top of his head. He walked with his head thrust forward and his elbows pinned to his thin waist, his forearms flailing left and right with each step. His frailty led him to suffer several falls during his last several years—once at Costco, the CVS, and in the laundry room—so Mom tried to immobilize him. Due to a lack of movement and appetite

suppression, he had lost a lot of weight; when the sun backlit his thin white collared shirt, I could see his boney jagged frame.

I often found him looking out into the distance, back hunched, swaying forwards and backwards in his chair in a seemingly dazed stupor. We attributed this to his chronic fatigue, but when I grew older I realized that he was looking for something in the distance, imagining what could be.

On almost every visit, Dá Dá would hide small gifts behind the pillows of the couch, yelling “surpry!” when we whisked up the pillow from its place. Sometimes, he’d go to the local Party City to buy random little trinkets that he thought were absolutely darling, like keychain cameras or squishy balls that ended up in the small crevices of our cars. He also handmade stationery and trinkets for us, including an origami flower pencil or a clay watering pot with fake flowers and moss, both of which I keep with me at home. I didn’t necessarily need any of these things, but it was the feeling of surprise, of being gifted that filled me with so much gratitude. Surprises ultimately became a language between us.

The apartment itself was “cozy” at best, large enough for two people but too small for family gatherings––which made them all the more tight-knit, albeit heated. The floors had a crisscross wood pattern that masked the layers of dust above it, the single bathroom with an old white tile and one of those crystal knobs that sometimes didn’t spin. Magnets from all over the world adorned the old off-white refrigerator, which we dug through for Breyers Neapolitan and cans of Coco Cola. It was so odd how this building favored the color white, as if it wanted to showcase a gradual decay.

The living room hybridized different cultures and eras. My grandparents purchased the scratched leather couches at a second-hand store nearby, but the numerous pillows that adorned it displayed beautiful floral embroidery they brought back from Taiwan. Next to the dust-covered radio sat an aqua blue ceramic vase containing fake flowers from the discount craft store. Behind the cheap leather couch stood a tall, glass bookshelf containing small trinkets my grandfather collected as an artist from Taiwan, as well as family heirlooms like magnanimous horse statues alongside ugly birthday cards we designed for them. At the throne of the living room stood the flat-screen television, which my parents gifted them from a Black Friday sale.

We’d watch hours of tennis, basketball, baseball, and football together until our Cokes turned flat. My grandparents were big American sports fans––immersed in the lives of Xiǎo wēil ián m sī (Selena Williams) and the Boston Celtics or “sewteek,” as Dá Dá would cheer. It was the only time they understood America more than I did. Watching your favorite tennis player or basketball team score induced a collective glee that transcended any cultural or linguistic barriers.

When the adult figures had to prepare dinner or fill out paperwork, my sister and I basked lazily on the couch, indulging in hours of Disney Channel and Nickelodeon banned at home. I understand now how this deeply contradicted the Confucian approach to elders, who should be exalted and taken care of. Dá Dá Háo Póu let it go, using teenage breakup scenes as background music while they wrote their wills and signed financial statements to pay for my private school tuition.

Bored of TV, my sister and I ventured into our grandparents’ bedroom, a history textbook on our familial lineage we never spoke about. One side of the room contained heavy-duty wire racks stacked with suitcases and paper boxes, as if my grandparents were still unpacking. The mystery of the boxes irked me, until the day I left the door open while taking out the trash. My mom scolded me, conceding that these boxes contained paintings, jewelry, and silk dresses enough to pay for my sister and I’s undergraduate and graduate school. What I originally thought reflected a neglect for interior design turned out to be a high-stakes preservation project to keep valuable heirlooms in the US.

Next to the queen-sized bed sat a nightstand full of picture books. My sister and I fondly flipped through them, gripping our mouths with our hands on the sight of early pictures of our Mom. Dá Dá designated each photo book to an era of their collective lives: the decade they spent in the Dominican Republic waiting for US citizenship, the year my mom arrived in the States for college, their move and the opening and eventual closure of their gift card store. Making fun of my mother’s awkward fashion, my sister and I were so blind to the fastness of life. One minute you are designing corporate logos around the globe, the next you are looking out onto an unentertaining parking lot of a poorly-urbanized New Jersey, unable to move, seeking for what could be.

There comes a point in almost every grandchild’s life where grandparents suddenly become uncool. For me, that happened as soon as I entered middle school. The activities that could once entertain me for afternoons no longer interested me, and as I exposed myself to the operations of a “normal” American families, I started growing impatient with the language barrier, with the constant explaining of American norms, with holding my grandfather’s hand as we crossed the street because he needed support. There was no longer anything for me in that small, old apartment. It was embarrassing, actually; having my grandparents around me reinforced my foreignness.

That’s why I don’t quite remember the last time I kissed Dá Dá Háo Póu goodbye, walked down that purple rug, into the car, past the taquerias and barbers, and down those winding, twisty roads. I surmise that I felt eager to leave after having sat in my grandfather’s office for several hours trying to finish up homework, declining Dá Dá’s offer to dine at the local Wendy’s.

At my grandfather’s funeral several months later, located several blocks away from 1111 River Road next to a strip of diners, I refrained from looking at my grandfather’s cremated face. It was my first week at a new school, and other obligations like homework, friendships, social status had flooded my life. My sister and I had convinced my dad to leave early so that we didn’t have to be there to watch my mom and Háo Póu kiss him goodbye. After the funeral, my sister and I refused to help move my grandmother out of the apartment, preoccupied with schoolwork, or maybe just a reluctance to face our unrecognizable selfishness. These scenes would play on and on in my mind later on. I never saw 1111 River Road again.

I want to tap that girl on the shoulder and tell her to turn around, open the door, and embrace her grandfather one more time. To tell him in her best Mandarin that she loved him and so deeply appreciated all the adventures, sports games, and surprises. To go into that bedroom and take one deep inhale of her grandfather’s blanket, that soft detergent smell that put her to sleep when he held her at the park. To take one, last long gaze at this life, this disorganized, hybridized, but brimming life that they’ve created just for her and the ones that come after her. And when she gets back into the car, to turn around and watch them wave goodbye on their porch, an image setting forever in her mind. At some point, the car has to turn around the bend. People go, and places fall apart.

HONORABLE MENTION | NONFICTION

Too Much Shit

MADISON HAHAMY Illustrated by Catherine Kwon

Madison Hahamy is a junior from Chicago, Illinois majoring in English and in Human Rights. She previously wrote for the Yale Daily News and served as Senior Editor for The New Journal.

We stared at the kitchen silently.

It was an overwhelming, horrifying, disastrous, catastrophic mess: precariously stacked wine glasses, Starbucks mugs, a cheese grater, five Tupperware, nine water bottles, countless stray knives, shards of glass (the byproduct of a bumpy move), three sets of silverware, the fine china, the good but not necessarily fine china, a stack of bowls with a clear lid sticking out the top, a green lid (no container), and an orange container (no lid). That was one counter. Another housed a jumble of whisks, mashers, and serving dishes, and a table in the corner contained two bags of Fairy dishwasher tablets (one Platinum and the other Platinum Plus), paper plates, ceramic bowls, pots, pans, and more glass serving dishes balanced on top of a lid that hopefully fit with something somewhere.

Leslie, the on-site manager hired by the moving company to supervise our unpacking and organizing, seemed apologetic and slightly panicked. She scanned our faces before settling on Mary’s. Looking positively delighted, Mary rocked on her heels, clapped twice, and, for the first time since entering the kitchen, spoke. “It’s fantastic!”

***

Professional home organizing is not for everyone. It’s a physically demanding job; organizers are often expected to carry boxes,

haul glassware, and move furniture. It can be monotonous, with hours spent in the same room positioning and repositioning the same objects over and over again. It can be frustrating, as customers frequently make requests the organizer knows their clients will regret (and then, two hours later, they’re forced to redo entire sections of the home because the customer did indeed regret said choices). In other words, professional home organizers need to be strong. They need to be patient, they need to love their work, they need to smile easily and be slow to anger. In other words, they need to be Mary.

I first met Mary Draper at her home in the East Rock neighborhood of New Haven, which, as you might expect of the house of a professional organizer, was meticulous. It wasn’t sterile—there were pictures on tables, books on shelves, and throw pillows on couches. But everything had a place. The slate blue blanket, though thrown over the sofa, still looked as if its exact drapery had been scrutinized multiple times before the final position was chosen.

Mary’s mind worked similarly. Whenever she went off on a tangent in our conversations, she would somehow always find her way back to my original question and tie the entire discussion together. She spoke deliberately and with confidence, her thoughts neatly labeled and stacked into uniform containers. My thoughts, especially after arriving ten minutes late to our scheduled interview due to a faulty

bike lock and some inopportune rain, were more akin to the scattered chaos of the aforementioned kitchen.

Mary’s affinity for systems and neatness is not new—a career as a professional organizer, she said, always seemed inevitable. While other kids wreaked havoc on their bedrooms and playsets, she spent her childhood happily unknotting balls of yarn and arranging her crayons in color sequence. Her penchant for neatness was a point of contention with one of her younger sisters (Mary was the oldest of six), as the two shared a bedroom but not organizing habits. In fact, her sister’s messiness bothered Mary so much that she divided their room in half. (“Her closet was on my side,” she added, laughing. “My answer to that was ‘jump.’”) Though her skills were not appreciated by her sister, they were welcomed by her parents, who put her to work folding clothes, labeling shelves, and tidying up the home. “I was born into a family that needed me to do those things,” she said, “and I was good at it.”

After graduating from college, Mary left small-town Illinois for New York City, where she managed continuing education programs at PricewaterhouseCoopers, an accounting firm. The job, according to Mary, put her organizational skills to good use (she was, of course, happy to oblige).

There was a marriage, a baby, and then, after a move to Redding, Connecticut, a divorce. Mary and her son, who was 15 years old

at the time, soon moved to New Haven to nurture his interest in natural history and expose him to life in a bigger city. She briefly worked as an administrator in the academic emergency department at Yale University (“the worst job of my whole life”) until 2014, when she founded her professional organizing business, Morning Light.

In between working at Yale and founding Morning Light, Mary and her son volunteered at the Yale Peabody Museum, scraping the tissue away from dinosaur bones. It was an art. It was also, she acknowledges, a job perfect for someone who would end up removing the gunk from people’s homes and lives, leaving gleaming, spotless structures in her wake.

***

The house was a 7,000-square-foot, pastel-green colonial in Massachusetts. The clients were a very angry family from Israel subjected to an overseas corporate move (husband’s promotion) that had left belongings broken. Mary and her three Morning Light “contractors” (Gretchen, Sharon, and I) were damage control hired by the moving company. I’d planned to shadow Mary for the day, but she thought it would be “more fun” to hire me. “It’s not brain surgery,” she said when I told her she might want to look at my dorm room before making that decision. Normally, Mary hires contractors after a rigorous process that includes a resume screening, a thirty-minute interview, a contract, a training, a background check, and a reference call. I was hired in less than twelve seconds.

The job started at 9 AM, which meant we left New Haven at 6:15 in the morning—a time that, Mary said, accounted for all potential traffic jams, wrong turns, and Google Maps miscalculations that we might face. I was haggard; Mary was perky. I had hoped to use the ride there as a chance to talk with her about what to expect and observe Mary in her pre-job preparation but was unfortunately so tired and carsick that I settled on asking my prewritten questions through half-closed eyes.

A professional organizer, I learned, usually charges anywhere from $60 to $150 per

hour—higher depending on the location, gas prices, and the number and experience level of the contractors. Hiring an organizer is expensive, but so is the cost of running an organizing business, especially where insurance is concerned (the cost of breaking an antique vase is steep). Organizers can, she said, make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, though most in that range are in big cities and have an entire team. About half of Mary’s jobs—including the one we were driving to—are corporate moves, where she isn’t hired directly by the homeowners but instead paid by the employer. Corporate jobs, she says, are much easier than her regular, local ones. “These people move a lot, so have gotten rid of tchotchkes and extra stuff,” Mary added. In contrast, she described her other jobs —which can vary from organizing someone’s mail biweekly to decluttering a home after a death or messy divorce— as an often therapeutic process for people seeking solutions to problems much larger than a disorganized room.

Mary wears clothes that reflect the physical nature of the work, which, though she is 64 years old, has given her the athletic build of someone at least two decades younger. That day, her outfit was comprised of black jogging pants, a black, long-sleeve shirt, and a boxcutter attached to an elastic bracelet. She carried a tote bag filled with vegan snacks (chocolate-covered chickpeas were a crowd-pleaser) and bottles of water (so she never has to ask clients to use their supply). The car trunk was filled with clear, plastic bins and small, stackable containers from Bed Bath & Beyond, which Mary takes to almost every job, just in case.

We arrived at exactly 9 AM.

The rules for the staff, including me, were as follows: don’t do anything if you think it will hurt you. Take a break whenever you need to. Follow your gut.

My gut—though still suffering from residual carsickness—was fine.

I didn’t touch a mug and ignite a dormant passion for home organizing, but I also didn’t break anything or do such a bad job that Mary needed to redo my section. (However, the first thing Leslie asked me

to do was put a serving dish in the butler’s pantry; I stood there for two minutes before working up the courage to ask her what exactly a butler’s pantry was.) For six hours, I shelved books, sorted wine glasses by rim size, stacked silverware, and reunited stray board game pieces. Sometimes I worked alone, shuttling kitchen supplies from the island to the pantry or folding towels and old dance costumes relegated to the back of a storage closet. Sometimes I joined Mary while she unpacked the home office or carried boxes into the basement (which, despite being forty years my senior, she lifted more deftly than I ever could). She navigated the home with comfort and ease, pausing only briefly before setting each object down in its final resting place and smiling with her entire face at the perfect result. Each time I moved an item, I’d spend the next minute or so tinkering with its position—Mary, I noticed, never looked back.

She’d whisper a torrent of advice as we worked: Carry cardboard boxes, so they don’t scratch the floor. Don’t throw anything away without permission. Books look best one inch away from the shelf’s edge.

There were moments, like when I finished hanging the wine glasses or finished arranging the Monopoly money by ascending numerical value, when I felt proud of my work. The family’s lives, whether they knew it or not, were easier because of me.

But mostly, I felt angry.

I felt angry that this family had lived in this house for almost a week before we came to unpack and not one person had managed to put the silverware away, instead waiting for a sleep-deprived college student to do it for them. I was angry that they never completely looked me in the eye when they surveyed my handiwork and nodded their approval. I was angry that they asked Mary to clean the top of a shelf when she was shorter than both parents. I was angry that the husband asked Sharon to move a couch on her own while he stood and watched. (“He couldn’t move his own fricken La-Z-Boy?” Mary commented on the drive home.) I was angry at the family’s anger—a few of their dozens of glasses broke, so the moving company had to tell their onsite manager to abandon a trip back

home to hurricane-ravaged Florida, intended to see if her house was destroyed.

But most of all, I was angry at how much stuff they had, and I was angrier at how much they threw away. I was so angry that when Mary and I later ventured into the garage in search of a box to replace the bin that the husband said he didn’t need for storage (and later did need) and I saw in the trash an unopened box containing a pen engraved with the Hebrew and Arabic words for peace, I took it for myself.

It’s currently sitting on my desk. I haven’t opened it yet. ***

On March 21, 1947, seven patrol officers from the 122nd Police Precinct broke a window and climbed into the second-story bedroom of a home owned by brothers Homer Lusk Collyer and Langley Wakeman Collyer. Law enforcement had received an anonymous tip that one of the pair had died. After five hours of digging, they found Homer’s body. Eighteen days later, they found Langley, partially decomposed. It took so long to find him because the brothers were hoarders; the officers had to dig not through dirt but through the more than 140 tons of objects that surrounded them. Homer died from starvation. They suspect that Langley had died around two weeks earlier, crushed by the weight of a lifetime of things.

Hoarding is not a new concept. In the Divine Comedy, Dante relegates hoarders, often corrupt Catholic Church officials, to the fourth circle of Hell, and in Greek mythology, King Midas is introduced as a hoarder of gold. Hoarding was historically considered an act of greed—there wasn’t enough to go around, so taking more for yourself almost certainly meant that someone else would have less.

Now, hoarding is classified as a mental illness, a shift that recognizes that the disorder is not caused by greed but rather influenced by stress, genetics, and even injuries. There is, however, another key difference between the hoarders of ancient literature and the hoarders of now—accumulating

massive amounts of objects has never been easier. The world now consumes over 100 billion tons of material each year, including 400 million tons of plastic. The average American house contains 300,000 objects, with 1 out of every 10 of those households renting a storage unit, of which there are over 50,000 facilities throughout the United States (more than the number of Starbucks and McDonald’s in the country, combined). Every American is not considered a hoarder (most aren’t), but we all nevertheless have too much shit. And those of us who don’t keep most of it in our homes waste a mind-boggling amount. Americans throw out 12 million tons of furniture annually and 11.3 million tons of garments (which comes out to over 2,000 pieces of clothing per second). On average, an American produces five pounds of trash per day, or a little under one ton yearly.

Furniture, clothing, and just about everything can now be made more quickly and cheaply than in the past. More people can afford more products, which is a plus, but cheapness and speed mean that quality suffers. Clothes that should last a decade instead last a few months. The longevity of furniture is measured in years rather than centuries. Worse quality leads to more waste, more waste leads to more demand, etcetera etcetera.

Too. Much. Shit.

Though professional organizers seek to declutter a client’s home, their job is born out of and entirely reliant on this culture of excess, an irony Mary acknowledges. “There would be no job for organizers unless we have consumerism,” she said.

***

Mary divides her clients into two categories—“very very nice” and “nice but not personable.” Most clients, she says, fit into the former. They’re just grateful to have the help. A small number are in the latter, including the Massachusetts clients. When I told Mary about my own feelings of animosity towards them and asked if she ever felt similarly, she was steadfastly diplomatic, acknowledging that she certainly

has jobs she enjoys more than others. But when I asked if the wealth of the client, or the way she is treated, ever affects her interest in taking on a job or completing it to the best of her ability, Mary strongly disagreed with the premise of my question—that she is in a position to judge. “If I’m offering a service, part of what my service is is not to be judgmental,” she said. “So, I just have to trust that what I’m doing is supportive and helpful to people, and it seems to be. People aren't going to ask you into their homes unless they need some sort of help.”

This lack of judgment extends beyond clients’ personalities to their objects, which are often weird, hilarious, and deeply private. She sees love notes, correspondence with therapists, briefcases filled with money. Once, she entered a closet with so many “personal items” (she later clarified that she meant sex toys, specifically dildos of all shapes, colors, and sizes, as well as a stack of BDSM contracts) that she had to leave to compose herself. She walked to a different room to find one of her contractors folding dozens of thongs. “I was laughing hysterically,” Mary said (laughing hysterically again as she recalled the moment). “I said it’s time for lunch because I’m losing it.”

But when Mary speaks about her clients, even the ones with amusing items, she is never derisive. There is always a baseline of respect. The home, to her, is “a sacred palace” where people go to nurture, to rejuvenate, to be in the company of loved ones. The physical space is connected to our emotional well-being—when we take care of our home, we take care of ourselves. Mary may not consider herself a therapist, but she does understand that her job gives so much more to people than just a clean home. It gives them relief. It gives them peace. And it teaches them to treat their house with the level of regard Mary believes it deserves.

***

There is one figure most responsible for the public’s widespread exposure to the field of home organizing: a 4-foot-7, soft-spoken Japanese woman named Marie Kondo. Indeed, whenever I told my friends I was profiling a professional organizer, they

would almost always respond with “Oh! Like Marie Kondo!” (This refrain became so common that I started prefacing my explanation of Mary’s job by asking people if they’ve watched Kondo’s shows.) She is most famous for her 2019 Netflix series, Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, where she teaches overwhelmed clients her KonMari Method of organizing, which involves gathering all of one’s items in a particular category together and asking the now-famous question: Does it spark joy? Instead of figuring out what to throw away, Kondo’s method does the opposite—focuses on what should be kept.

Mary thinks this is bullshit. (Though she says so in much nicer terms.) She cites the example of laundry detergent—it doesn’t “spark joy” but it’s still a necessary household item. Though the two share a deep appreciation for the home (Kondo spends a few minutes near the start of each episode kneeling and thanking the home for its protection), Mary ultimately sees Kondo as a brand created by a marketing team, capable of giving good overall organizing tips but not realistic advice tailored to the individual needs of each client. For instance, though Kondo encourages mass decluttering, Mary would never tell a client to get rid of most of their clothing. Doing so, she says, only creates more waste and leads to the kept clothes wearing out quickly from frequent use. “One has to be careful that it’s not just another marketing ploy and use common sense,” she said.

While Mary relies on the system of consumerism to sustain her business, Marie Kondo and similar shows actively capitalize on it, earning money not just from in-person organizing but also from their books, shows, and brands.

The Home Edit, another popular home organizing show that spotlights organizers Clea Shearer and Joanna Teplin, promises to “rainbowfy” homes, emphasizing beauty just as much as, and sometimes even more than, functionality. (In one episode, a contractor described her vision for Reese Witherspoon’s closet as “not utilitarian, but purely for like a visual effect.”) Almost all of Shearer and Teplin’s clients on the show

(including Witherspoon) find them from the Home Edit’s Instagram page, which boasts 6.6 million followers. And their feed is indeed enticing, square after square displaying colorful closets and refrigerators exploding with fresh produce kept in elegantly labeled containers.

Realistically, that type of system is impossible. According to Mary, people’s wardrobes are often mostly black, since the color can easily pair with almost anything else, and most refrigerators do not have room for dozens of bins, nor are they constantly stocked with the amount of fresh produce necessary to keep those containers filled. “If you see the Kardashians’ Instagram, nothing is real,” Mary said, referring to the boxes of apples, oranges, and drinks that fill their pantry in photos, rather than “real food.”

Still, Mary has clients who ask for a similar aesthetic, doubtless because they’ve seen it on television or social media. She obliged one client who, she recalls, was less concerned about how livable her home was than how it might appear to relatives and visitors. While the ultimate design looked “like it should go in a magazine,” it came at a price—Mary spent over $1,000 on bins, none of which, she said, was necessary. “All the organizing supplies are just more stuff, and I do not recommend getting more stuff unless there’s a good need for it,” Mary added.

***

When Mary dropped me off in front of my dorm at the end of the organizing job, she handed me a sealed envelope and, before I could open my mouth to ask what it was, quickly drove away. Inside was $240 in 50s and 20s—compensation for my day as a contractor. It was more cash than I’d ever held in my life (and given my expedited hiring process, which did not involve a background check or tax forms, was likely the only feasible method of payment). I generally enjoy receiving money unexpectedly, except in this case I had told Mary days earlier that journalistic ethics forbade me from accepting payment. I thought Mary had agreed, albeit reluctantly, to the arrangement.

I decided to deal with the problem by donating the payment to Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services (IRIS), a nonprofit Mary loves so deeply that she organizes their warehouse yearly for free. It is an especially moving choice of a cause given her line of work. Mary’s clients have too much—the refugees that IRIS helps often arrive with not enough.

But then I got busy and stressed, so instead of donating right away, the envelope of cash ultimately became partially submerged on my desk under an empty white folder with a tear in the corner, a crumpled piece of paper advertising how to track my absentee ballot, a knotted necklace, an unused earring pouch, a broken charger, four paperback books, and a plastic tiara with golden fringes.

An overwhelming, horrifying, disastrous, catastrophic mess. One day, I came home from class and had enough. I recited the Hebrew blessing over my room and kissed my Mezuzah (for extra protection), then grabbed a Swiffer, a trash bag, and a package of alcohol wipes, and went to work. I stacked the books on my desk (one inch from the edge), I recycled the paper and threw away the tiara. I filled the bins under my bed (carrying, not dragging them across the hardwood floor). I went to the IRIS website and donated the money.

Under the envelope was the (still unopened) pen. Weeks earlier, I had saved it from certain death, but this wasting away, doomed to a life at the bottom of a constantly rotating pile of objects, seemed a worse fate.

Nevertheless, I decided to keep it.

I know Marie Kondo and Clea Shearer and Joanna Teplin and probably Mary Draper as well are shaking their heads and telling me that I’m assigning sentimental value to a meaningless item. They’re right. But in a world of 300,000+ object homes, of people crushed by the weight of hundreds of tons of stuff, of kitchens with five spatulas and multiple sets of china, I’m keeping my pen.

We all have too much shit anyway. What’s one more thing?