Issue 75 | Spring 2017 by Atlantis

Spring 2017 | Issue 75

AtLant s a creative magazine

Editor's Note Dear Readers, Creative magazines exist to spark conversations and change the world. They allow voices to be heard: voices from all backgrounds, cultures, religions, and political affiliations. As a writer myself, I know that the presentation of unique voices that would otherwise remain unheard is exactly what I want to see happen. I can only imagine that those who submit their fiction, nonfiction, poetry, photography, and art to Atlantis want the same thing. Atlantis is dedicated to publishing to all forms of art. This means publishing content even if some editors disagree with the meaning behind it. Atlantisâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s constitution emphasizes the importance of diversity; without it the magazine could not be whole. Over the past seventy-four issues, we have published many pieces that have sparked passionate responses in readersâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;issue number seventy-five is no different. We welcome this exchange of ideas, as it enriches and strengthens our capacity for empathy, understanding, and critical thinking as publishers, readers, writers, and human beings. Part of being an undergraduate magazine means that we are a learning community for both editors and readers. We as a staff learned a lot putting this issue together about ourselves as individuals, editors, and staff members working together. There is a piece in this issue that sparked controversy among the staff, but without it we would not have had necessary conversations about artistic freedom. Without this piece, we would have had a less-diverse magazine. Without this piece, the world might not change. And that is the very reason Atlantis is here. Creative magazines are part of this world to make a difference. I hope that Atlantis issue number seventy-five will allow new conversations to happen, people to be heard, and the world to change. Your new Editor in Chief, Carey Shook

Staff

Carey Shook Editor In Chief

Kyle Maples Fiction Editor

Kenneth Thies Sales Coordinator

Becka Jackson Managing Editor

Mason Hamberlin Nonfiction Editor

Lindy Schoenborn Photography Editor

Logan Prochaska Layout Editor

Nikki Kroushl Copy Editor

Raja Jalernpan Web Editor

Tally Pavel Art Editor

Chantai Thomas Features Editor

Contents Fiction

Art

Sleep Deprivation Patricia Patterson

Amor Aeternus Ashley Nordquist

Holland Road Caroline Kelly

Record Andrew Alekseev

Photography

Portrait Emily Elizabeth Brown

...and the earth kept turning Thomas Reenberg

Spring Hunter Reeves

Barren Autumn River Bondurant

At Night Myrthe Biesheuvel

Untitled Jubal Strube

Poetry

Fences Colin Schmidt

too, america 08 you Robert Selden

Barcode Sara Izzi

Pacific Temptations Erika Alatorre

Cheese Sandwiches 30 Grilled Victoria Migneco

Shower R.E Hengsterman

Untitled

Nonfiction

Nicole Amato

Features

Walk Through the Applewood 09 AAustin Suther 25 Hundred Tally Marks 19 Two Joseph Angel 35

The Career Path Less Traveled Calvin Shomaker

Susanna Erinn Seifert

tuesday evening Jesse Sawyer

The Things We Never Did Luke Webber To My Father Erinn Seifert How to Grieve in the South Mackenzie Kirkman

Cover Photograph: Cameron Smit in Isla Vista, California by Erika Alatorre

...and the earth kept turning. Photography by Thomas Reenberg

Sleep Deprivation Fiction by Patricia Patterson

It starts in the shoulders. They slacken and descend into your core until you can no longer feel the gravity that keeps you upright. Next are the toes. You wiggle them around in your shoes and wonder why you confine them to closed-toed prison. You concentrate on feeling. The ground becomes sky, and you are walking on a tightrope in the form of a cloudy sky with grass for clouds and miles of weightlessness under your feet. You forget what you had for dinner last night, whether you brushed your teeth in the morning, what excuse you gave your friends for not showing up to lunch. (You scheduled last Wednesday.) You say you’re sorry, but don’t really know why you are sorry, or if you are even sorry at all. You apologize for apologizing and later forget your mistakes. You save your worry for tomorrow because you have exhausted away your worry for the day. This is when your vision blurs. You rub your eyes, red with the strain of sight, and the mirror reflects a zombier you, a you without white space—the expanse between your pupils and your cornea. You learn to squint at the sun and cough so you don’t have to look anyone in the eyes and explain your predicament. You explain anyway. You say it’s the allergies. They keep you up at night. They make you watery-eyed and crazed for a moment of relief, a moment without sneezing. You don’t look them in the eyes when you explain. They don’t reprimand you for staring down at the tiles on the floor and tracing the lines with the tip of your shoe, or for memorizing the texture on the walls. You bang your forehead against a table and whisper, “I’m not crazy.” You tell them that you hate the way your voice gets all nasally when you strain to speak in the morning. You tell them how much you hate the bridge of your nose, how the jagged edges graze

your pillow at night. How you hate the sound of your own breathing, but it keeps you alert. It keeps you grounded. You count your inhales, your exhales, but soon lose track of what number signified what exhale (or was it an inhale?), and you begin to hate the capacity of human memory. It’s not big enough, you think. You look around for the pencil you lost. You look under the desk, on top of the dresser, and in between cracks. You can’t remember misplacing it. How could that be possible? But it is. It has happened before, and you know it has. It has something to do with muscle memory or intuition. Something about a ghost-like memory makes you feel the lingering traces of your own past experiences. That feeling. It tingles in the back of your brain, reminding you that those distant memories are not completely dormant. They sting your brain as if to say, “Here I am.” The feeling burns faintly in the back of your mind. You know it’s true, that you have been this way before. It must be true, because you recognize your own habits even if you don’t remember doing them. You are very much familiar, yet still unacquainted, with the feeling of your past self experiencing memories that you can no longer recall. xxx This part seems mechanical, like an elastic string pulling you out of bed and forcing you upward, straightening the length of your body from your spinal cord to your toes. You walk toward the kitchen, gazing too long into the abyss that has become the sink, full of dishes. The sight of your own filth drives you mad. The elastic string in your back pulls you toward the front door, and it is then that you know what you must do. You go for a walk outdoors. The

string stays with you, holding your body upward still and supporting your weight as you walk. With each step, your feet sink into the accumulation of leaf litter and whatever grass remains below it. You imagine your feet leaving imprints in the ground, but the soil is too far below your feet, and no indentations are made. You pray for something permanent, something lasting. If all imprints in sand are temporary and must eventually fade by way of rain or time, then what can last forever? Certainly not me, you think. No amount of you can leave a lasting trace on this earth. The thought depresses you, and you wonder why you even thought it in the first place. You walk further into the woods. A bird flies above your head. You search for a flock of similarly colored birds for the lonely bird to join, but there are none. Perhaps he has no family. Does he have a name? Does he have anyone to call him by his name? You know nothing about birds, aside from sounds and feathers. You know nothing about bird etiquette or bird habits, so you assume that birds are generally polite to one another. Perhaps if he has no family, another will adopt him. Perhaps birds are unprejudiced creatures. You like to think this is true. You feel the way your bare toes graze the forest ground, as if the earth could tear the skin from the soles of your feet. How sharp the branches of a tree are, how they could cut the flesh from your cheeks. You cry out to the string, but it has gone away. The string is no longer with you. You don’t remember when you last noticed feeling it on your back, guiding you through the woods. You don’t remember where you lost it. Now you are aware of raw movement and how it feels to walk alone. You are aware of life without the string. Your back is lighter, your steps nimbler. You are afraid of falling, of living without the string. You learn to walk on your own again. The trees form dark shadows on your face as you trudge deeper into the woods. The lightheaded feeling returns, and you begin to see speckled dots in the open air. You whisper to yourself again. This time, the whispers are words of encouragement. “I’m going to be okay,” you say.

The voice in your head repeats, “I’m not crazy.” You begin to believe the voice in your head, even though it feels thousands of miles away from your body. The voice speaks to your soul like the faint murmur of a distant background noise, a feeling twice removed. Your pupils dilate as the light fades from the earth, and you figure it is time to make your way back home. You retrace your steps but make a wrong turn and end up in someone else’s backyard. You apologize to the neighbors for invading their property. They tell you not to worry, that it wasn’t an invasion. You shake your head and murmur curses to yourself as you go. The neighbors’ toddler son runs after you. You memorize the clumsy rhythm of his feet pounding on solid ground. His hair is sloppy, sticking upwards, sideways, and straight down, obstructing his vision. He glances up at you with a toothy grin. “Here, miss,” he says. “I picked it myself.” He hands you an apple from his apple tree, and you don’t know how to properly express the gratitude you feel in your heart. New warmth swells in your chest. You stutter. He runs home with his arms outstretched like a parachute, and you yell a “thank you” after him. You wish you had the energy to open your eyes so wide like he had. You pray for alertness. The apple is sweet, free of pesticides. The juice runs down your chin, but you don’t wipe it away. It grows sticky on your chin and lingers there. You smile without reason.

Amor Aeternus 7

Art by Ashley Nordquist

you too, america Poetry by Robert Selden

you too, america, with your jingoistic zealotry and authoritarian tolerance, you too can be scorched with flames fanned by Neroâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s song echoing off the rooftops, you too can be buried in the ashes falling from Vesuvian shadows and become a mummified nation, and you, too, will be lost to history, taught to children who are barely listening.

A Walk Through the

Feature by Austin Suther Ringo, a forest imp, steps out of his treehouse on a fine morning. The atmosphere of his surroundings come to life: tall trees with plump red apples hanging from their branches, lush vegetation, and clear blue skies. Ringo’s neighbor—a bipedal llama named Al Pacone—stands outside of his own house, enjoying the morning. It’s a perfect day for an adventure. Ringo is a video game character controlled by you, the player, and the land he lives in—Applewood—is digital. It all comes from the mind of Garrett Thompson, who’s combined his talents as an artist, composer, programmer, and writer to develop his first video game: Applewood. Thompson, twenty-one, is from Burgaw, North Carolina. His beginnings are humble; he grew up on his family’s farm, where his grandparents kept cows and horses and his parents kept goats and chickens. The farm was surrounded by a forest, and similarly, Thompson found himself surrounded by animals and nature for much of his childhood. Still, he preferred the comfort of the great indoors. “Growing up in the woods comes with the natural phobia of going outside and being devoured by insects,” says Thompson, “which is why I developed habits that had me staying indoors a lot, like using the computer. That’s sort of why I got into video games.” Applewood is an adventure-platformer, meaning the game revolves around jumping and landing with precision, but with meaning—and a journey. “Unlike other platformers, the emphasis is more on exploration and storytelling,” says Thompson. “It’s an experience with a lot of push. It has a lot of energy to it.” Applewood’s main mechanics revolve around solving puzzles by throwing objects such as apples and gears, depending on the environment. Should the player happen upon other creatures with harmful intent, he must be creative to defeat them—not combative. There is no death in Applewood, only outwitting an opponent. Cleverness is the heart of the game. “It’s never just punching the bad guy,” says Thompson. “It’s at the very least cerebral, and at the very most, non-confrontational entirely.” The game is calm and serene, like the forest Thompson grew up knowing. In fact, his memories of the peaceful farm life inspired many of the visuals of the game.

Applewood’s imagery didn’t come about until Thompson took Two-Dimensional Design at UNCW for his computer science major. It was in that class that he started to create something tangible—something he could build upon—and he combined his digital art with coding to create his final project for the class, which turned out to be Applewood. While the game’s original state was rough due to his inexperience, over the years Thompson’s artistic abilities have flourished, and, consequently, Applewood’s art has improved. “It was super ugly,” says Thompson. “But I’ve learned a lot in the past two years of developing the game, in terms of making it look better. And thanks to computers, I don’t need to keep a steady hand.” Applewood’s art is charming and humble, just like Thompson’s childhood. Japanese game developer Daisuke Amaya (of Cave Story fame) is Thompson’s artistic inspiration, and they share a similarity: they are artistically independent, and handle most of— if not all of—their game’s work. “[Amaya’s] art style is very expressive, but minimalist,” says Thompson. “And I always liked it because it was visually appealing but still managed to make something that was distinct enough to be played in game form.” Where traditional artists may restrict themselves to canvas and paint or paper and charcoal, Thompson uses computer programs—four primary and twenty on-and-off—to create his pixel masterpiece. During the earlier stages of development, Thompson also sought to learn a more difficult technique called “parallax,” an effect used in many two-dimensional games. Parallax requires advanced coding skills—something Thompson lacked starting out— but he was determined to master the technique for the creation of his game. “[Parallax] gives the illusion of depth in the background,” says Thompson, “by creating layers of different images and having them scroll past the player at variable rates.” With parallax, the game’s world feels more alive; clouds roll by independently from the player’s movements, and tree branches sway in the background. It lends a degree of realism to an otherwise virtual world. In addition to creating all of Applewood’s art, Thompson also composes all of Applewood’s music. He cites Celtic music in general and the music of games like The Legend of Zelda in specific as

inspiration, but typically, Thompson draws from a range of different source material (some of which may not be considered music at all) to put together his game’s soundtrack. “Sometimes, just listening to forest noises can inspire you,” says Thompson. “You hear a pattern in those noises and want to try to represent that in music.” Applewood’s soundtrack is crafted to invoke a naturalistic feel, and with the more practical aim of helping guide the player’s experience. When he’s writing the game’s score, Thompson tries to match the pace of the music to the way that he wishes a player to act. If the sequence requires fast-paced platforming, the tempo will be faster and more insistent; if you’re exploring the town Ringo lives in, the music meanders, slower and melodic. Thompson also plays music outside of his work on Applewood—not just for inspiration, but for fun. He has experience with the ocarina, which he often plays with his roommates, who are also musicians.Though he claims he isn’t good at it, he’s just being humble; his experience with real instruments has helped him create video game music that sounds authentic and polished. Every good video game needs music and art, but it’s easy to forget about the importance of cohesive writing when it comes to building a successful playing experience. Thompson says that Applewood’s script goes through many drafts as the gameplay develops further, which requires story concepts to be scrapped or changed. It’s like

writing a novel; it calls for brainstorming and what-ifs, and from there he conceptualizes the other assets surrounding the game. This script development process is what helped Applewood grow from its first build, which was only five minutes long, into a full-fledged, immersive adventure. Of course, it isn’t uncommon for Thompson to scrap what he is making, but he says it’s the reality of a game developer: constant reiteration. Applewood’s debut isn’t far, though; he hopes to finish the game by the end of 2017 and release it in early 2018. Just like Applewood is designed to be an adventure for the player, it has also been an adventure for Thompson. He’s learned a lot since he first embarked on this journey and has developed as both an artist and an individual as a result. And as for the advice he’d give anyone just starting out on their own voyage into the art of game development, Thompson offers this: “If you’re reading this and you want to make games, and you’re like ‘I really like games, I want to see if I can make one, I just don’t think I can,’ stop thinking that! Just go out there and pick up one of the many free game engines and just start trying to make something. It doesn’t matter if it’s good; your first try isn’t going to be good, but the most important thing is that you go out and make something, and you try to make the thing you want to do, because if you don’t, you never will. That’s what I’ve learned from doing this.”

Photo and logo provided by Garrett Thompson

Follow Thompson and the Applewood adventure on Twitter: @ApplewoodGame

In hindsight, it’s the things we never did that stand out the most to me now. The missed

The

Things We Never Did

opportunities.

By Luke Webber

Riley was always working on music; he just loved creating. I loved working with him, too, but on my days off, I just wanted to chill and be lazy and would pass up the chance.

September 19, 2015. It was a gray, rainy day. I worked at a beach bar at the time.

Two girls came in and sat at the bar. One of them looked oddly familiar, but I wasn’t sure how I recognized her.

I don’t know why it mattered at the time. But on a slow day like this, anything could be entertaining. I texted my friend Kiwi.

I looked back up at the girls, smiling to myself. Something about my oblivious innocence in that moment made me laugh.

My phone vibrated with a response from kiwi.

Nothing made sense. I needed fresh air. my brain was reeling.

We had just talked the day before. He couldn’t be gone. As I ran out the back door, the hall felt too long.

I stood out back in the rain for several minutes, not knowing much of anything. Not feeling much of anything...

Empty...

I stood there in silence, staring down at the pavement.

...Alone.

I crouched down to look closer at the pieces of broken glass and saw the gray sky reflected in their surface.

A small pile of glass caught my attention.

I saw all the chances we had to create amazing art together, to build, to learn and develop as friends, as brothers. All the missed opportunites reflected in glass.

I saw a lifetime of missed opportunities in that heap of shattered glass.

I became overwhelmed with emotion. filled with regret, and yet, invigorated to embrace life and seize every opportunity, in honor of Riley. He had always asked me to create with him, so now it was time.

When I walked back inside, the girls still sat at the bar. But they appeared distant to me, as if a great space lay between us.

I stood up from the pavement. the rain had slowed some, and the sun had begun to break through the clouds.

Now, I try to focus on the things Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m doing to honor Riley, rather than the things we never did.

These days, I try do as much as possible with the time I have. To create at any given opportunity.

The Things We Never Did Nonfiction by Luke Webber

1/31/1996-9/19/2015

Record Art by Andrew Alekseev 14

Holland Road Fiction by Caroline Kelly

As I run and slide past foxholes and try not to fall on my ass on this ice, I shout to the men in the holes: Santorini’s third platoon rifle squad; a couple of guys from second platoon’s heavy weapons squad, who have rifles drawn in lieu of ammunition for their bazookas; and second platoon’s mortar guys, led by Holley since Sergeant Lynn “misplaced” his left arm “somewhere out there in that white hell, think you could find it for me, Doc?,” as he’d joked to me when I reached him yesterday. When I run into a little clearing, a cove that would normally seem protected but is now deadly because of the close trees, I see two enlisted men and one of the lieutenants hunched over a body on the ground. In a makeshift machine gun nest a few feet away, Branson sprays rounds across the field without the assistance of a second gunner. Because he’s the second gunner. Because Adler, A-gunner, is that heap of discolored Army-issue fatigues on the ground, with the foot of one busted Corcoran next to Lieutenant Perry’s knee. Oliver holds Adler’s head in his lap. I crouch on the frozen ground next to the shaking body of Technician Fourth Grade Peter Adler with the eyes of the other men on me, and I am still staring at the mess of what was once his chest. “How we doing, Adler?” I say, forcing a calm tone. “You tried to be a hero out here on the line?” He tries to smile and blood bubbles at his mouth. “Remember... those hot days in Louisiana, Doc? ...Richard.” “Wish we were back there, Adler.” I press harder against his neck, hoping to find and block the spurting artery, my stiff fingers becoming warm as I do so. “Wish we were crawling through those pig guts under the barbed wire again.” “Ye-yeah.” Peter has been with me since the beginning. He slept on the bunk above me in Basic; he half-dragged me up those damn hills in Louisiana we had to run, one arm protectively around my shoulder, saying, “Come on Richard, come on. You’ve got it.” He lightened everything. I hold my hand to his neck to stanch the blood flow. There are still great, flashing spectacles of light crackling over us and exploding all around, and these men do not move from his side, and there is no better testimony to how beloved Adler is in Fox Company than this. “How many Krauts you bet are dead on their line thanks to you doing your job?” I brace both hands on his

neck and turn to look up at the lieutenant. “Where’s the chaplain?” I whisper. “We sent word down the line to radio one of them,” Perry says. “But they’ve got as much work as you, Doc.” Adler shuts his eyes. I do not look away again. “No,” he says. The air smells metallic. We all brace ourselves, bodies bent over him as another concussion from a Kraut 88 rocks us. “No, no. No. No, I don’t—I don’t, Doc, I can’t—no—” Death upon death. Lord, make me as brave as Adler. Make me brave enough to look away from death when it comes to me. To be more than it. “All right, all right,” I say. “All right, Adler.” “You don’t have to think about that,” murmurs Oliver, his voice quiet and measured and as soothing as a basin of steaming water. “Think of home. Milwaukee, ain’t it? Not so different from here, huh?” Perry says, “Your folks are probably digging their way out of a blizzard, too.” “That’s right, see, it ain’t so far when you think of it like that.” I shake sulfa powder on the neck wound while Adler looks past me with a glassy expression. I realize a moment later what he was watching. One of the enlisted guys moves closer to the lieutenant to make room and another man slides in next to me. He might have been me, for all our lack of weaponry, had it not been for the absence of a Red Cross armband on his left arm. “So, you’re Adler,” he says, scooting closer on his knees and putting one hand on Adler’s side. “I wish we could have met sooner.” “You don’t look old enough... t-to be a chaplain.” Adler’s chest heaves and he still tries to smile. “I could say you don’t look old enough to be at war.” Adler laughs in a gurgling way that makes me taste bile in my own mouth, and I use the unraveled bandage in my hand to wipe the blood from his chin. “Your friend on the radio told me you’re a Presbyterian, Peter,” the chaplain says. He reaches for Adler’s hand lying in the snow and takes it and grips it tightly. “In the first chapter of the letter of Paul to the Philippians, he says to these saints at Philippi, ‘I will rejoice, for I know that through your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ, this will turn out for my deliverance.’” I look up at the chaplain, who does seem exceptionally young for this particular post, and watch as he holds his

Portrait Art by Emily Elizabeth Brown

unopened Bible against his chest with one hand and squeezes Adler’s with the other. “He says, ‘...with full courage now as always Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death.’” A pause, and even the mortar rounds seem to be have been silenced. Snow falls onto the chaplain and Adler’s hands and dusts our eyelashes. My father would weep if he could hear this. “I am sure you know, Peter, that the death of the body is not truly death, not for those who are being called home. Home to glory.” Adler swallows hard, but he is still, not thrashing about, not screaming for home. The cavity of warm blood in which my hands are immersed is the only part of him not turned blue with cold. I don’t think the chaplain realizes, as he murmurs, “Grace and peace of the Lord Jesus go with you, brother,” that Adler is no longer breathing.

known, and I listened to the life humming beyond the double-paned window by my arm. It was an arduous task to sit still inside the chapel while there was still light outside. Last night I passed by Lieutenant James, the regimental chaplain, giving communion in what is now Adler’s clearing. It was the first time I’d seen his younger counterpart with him, the one who quoted Philippians and wove some nice words about glory today. His eyes were closed while the wind whipped through the trees. Seeing them had made me think of my first communion at the Holland Road chapel when I was nine. It wasn’t as exciting an event at our little Presbyterian church as first communion was for my Catholic friends, but my mother had prayed about that morning so often that I guess it all meant something. It was June, and the light of almost-noon had streamed through the colored glass in the arched windows, and the white cloth draped across the table of the sacraments had been stained indigo and xxx red. After taking the bread, and “doing this in How many remembrance of Him,” I had taken the On Wednesday evenings, when the cup. Maybe I wasn’t ready for the feel crickets do you think light was deep blue in winter and the of the cold silver, but it slipped in my are chirping? How wind howled down from Quebec, and hand, and the red wine—I’m not sure many different songs in the summer, when the air smelled now how that church’s budget deficit are they singing? strongly of pine and the yellow sunset still could afford even the cheapest brand of lingered in the sky at nine o’clock at night, my wine—spilled across my hand as I tried to mother would hold my hand tightly as we walked down catch the fake silver cup before it bounced across the the cracked sidewalk to the chapel at the head of Holland wood floorboards. Road. I had a pair of navy-colored galoshes that I wore on wet Still, the light. The light that looked as fresh as dawn, not days, and I’d stray as far as I could while still in her grasp to midday, shining on the dew-speckled plants in the garden just land myself in a snow bank or puddle. For a brief spell in the beyond the stained-glass window, enchanted me more than summer, somewhere between the end of June and the middle partaking of the body and blood of Christ. I think I must have of August, I wasn’t made to wear that green cable-knit sweatforgotten where I was as the minister graciously passed his er over my church suit. I wore that sweater in the winter, handkerchief to me, and my mother took it instead and wiped too, under a wool coat so itchy I yelled more than once that I my hands with it. Would Jesus really mind if I was accidenwould rather freeze. On those summer nights, though, passtally a sacrilegious child toward one of His holy sacraments ing under flickering street lamps, I came to know intimately while such a day was singing outside the church? And hadn’t every crack and structural weakness in the roads of Caspar, all my Sunday School lessons up until that significant morning Maine. I listened for the frogs singing in the reeds every time been teaching me to sing? we rounded the bend by Salt Pond, and I kept my ears tuned “‘...with all humility and gentleness, with patience,’” my to the flapping of wings overhead. My mother turned it into minister had given as the benediction that day, “‘bearing with a game: How many crickets do you think are chirping? How one another in love...’” many different songs are they singing? And, What’s the name I do not want to bear any more. of that bird, the one who’s calling now? It’s a kinglet. Can’t you tell? xxx “To the saints and faithful brethren,” the minister of the little Presbyterian chapel would say to open each sermon, My unofficial report to Captain Walsh was brief and conwhich was perhaps the only passage I knew from memory cise. We had sent six men to the aid station, and two, Cofrom the Epistle to the Colossians. chrane and Emerson, would likely be moved even farther “Listen now, Richard.” My mother would put her hand over back to the rear echelons. We had lost one man, I told Walsh, my own restless hands, picking at loose splinters in the pew. though I knew Lieutenant Perry had already briefed him on I always listened to the rhythm of the minister’s voice, all of this. I guess I didn’t want to accept Adler’s death until I which sounded like every other New England voice I’d ever heard the words come from my own mouth. It isn’t custom-

ary for a company medic to make this kind of report to the battalion executive officer, but four of the casualties today had been with us since the beginning, and Walsh knew and loved each of them as I did. As I do. Anyway, I felt sure the night would not pass until I had looked him in the eyes. The morning’s fog has cleared when I step out of the battalion tent, and the stars are bright and sharp over the treetops. The whole forest is awash in shades of white and black and gray. I take a cigarette out of the pack of Lucky Strikes tucked in my breast pocket and strike a match with a shaking hand. The lighter I found in Normandy I’ve long since lost. It probably got picked up by one of the other guys, or fell out of my jacket while running and is in the hands of a Kraut now. Well, I imagine he needs it as much as I do. This war has set the tobacco industry flourishing. “Got a light?” I turn around. The chaplain is standing outside Walsh’s tent with an unlit cigarette in his mouth. His name’s Whitley, I think. He comes over to me and I light his cigarette with the match I was about to shake out. “Didn’t take chaplains to be smoking men,” I say, tucking my numb hands under my arms. “Chaplains are sinners too.” “Yeah, but they have to try harder than the rest of us not to be.” He grins around the cigarette. “‘Of all these, I am the worst.’” “That’s gonna get annoying,” I say. Aside from the low conversation in Walsh’s tent and Whitley breathing shakily in the cold, I’m listening to the quiet. “You know, quoting scripture in ordinary talk.” “Old habit. Hard to break.” “Isn’t there a proverb about that?” “Probably,” he answers, laughing a little. After a moment, he adds, “Adler was right, earlier. About me being young for this job.” “You were right, too,” I say, lowering the cigarette. “If boys can volunteer to kill and be killed at eighteen, hell, younger if they’re willing to lie, then there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to help their souls on the way home to...” “Glory,” he supplies. I gesture with the cigarette. “Glory, that’s right. Well, if they didn’t get it here, huh?” Whitley follows my gaze towards the tree line, which seems almost peaceful under the deception of soft, bright snow. “How do you hold onto it, Richard? ...Doc.” “Hold onto what?” He seems to be thinking, and after a moment says, “I don’t know. Not important, I guess.” “Come on, Whitley,” I say, thumping him on the back. “Come with me to check the line. Someone might need you.” “Hope not.”

My eyes scan the black tree line as we trudge along. The Krauts are dug in as deep as we are, and from what I’ve heard coming down the ranks from battalion, they aren’t keen to haul their asses across open terrain and into our side of the Bois Jacques. The space around me that was so full and deafening earlier is hollow, like an empty skeleton house that’s had all its furniture moved out. Whitley stops at a foxhole to talk to the guys huddled in it, and while I wait, arms wrapped around myself for warmth—as if this could make a difference—I look at the broken trees. Everything touched by war is a casualty. “It’s quiet,” Whitley says, coming over to me. “Keep going?” “That’s right.” I lead the way on the worn path through the edge of the forest that’s already becoming covered with light snow. “Keep going; don’t stop.” I hear him jog to catch up with me. “I remembered. About how you hold onto it?” “Yeah?” “I just...” He hesitates, and I turn, and his ruddy cheeks are the only color in the night forest. “My dad was a medic, like you, in the Great War. And I knew from him, you know, all the stories—all about the modern weapons, what... well, what warfare turned into because of them.” I watch him without speaking. There’s nothing down the road of retrospective thought for a soldier. “I was ready for that, but I wasn’t expecting even the forest, you know, the trees—for the whole landscape, really, to be so danger—” “All right,” I say. I reach for his shoulder. “God, or the Army, didn’t let you become a chaplain because tree bursts and these shit woods make you feel a little desperate inside, a little philosophical about it all. Every soldier knows how to do that. Not all of them remember how to talk to God when those trees are getting shelled to splinters.” Whitley, taller than me and looking as lost as a newborn deer on the side of the highway between Caspar and Bangor, bites his lip and looks at me uncertainly. I shrug and walk on through the falling snow. “You gotta help them talk to God. You gotta talk to Him for them when they can’t.” “That’s not theologically cor—” “I don’t care if it’s not theologically correct, and neither do they!” I cut in, gesturing with my ungloved hands. “They’re not asking for that. They’re just trying to not think about home. Now let’s go. I got a couple of guys in second platoon with trench foot developing.” I hear him behind me, his boots cutting a trail next to my footprints and breaking up the crisp new layer of snow. We continue on this way through the darkest hours of the night, which somehow, unaccountably, remains peaceful until dawn.

Two Hundred Tally Marks Feature by Joseph Angel The news station is empty. Everyone has gone home. Almost everyone, that is, apart from Taylor Wallace, played by actress Mikaela Fleming, who smiles as she walks across the office floor before making her way to the anchor desk. This is the final shot of principal photography on the comedic, student-made mockumentary On the Air, filmed early one April morning. What was left of the set is now gone as dawn approaches for the cast and crew. Tyler Ferraro, one of the film’s codirectors, however, still has a long road ahead. The film held its world premiere at UNCW’s Lumina Theatre on August 24th. Ferraro and codirector Kenneth Fryer sat in the back as a crowd of almost three hundred watched the final shot play out in front of them. “It was traumatizing,” says Tyler Ferraro about seeing the film with its audience. “Like the first two minutes, no one laughed.” However, after those minutes passed, joke after joke made the movie-goers crack up. “I was like freaking out, but once the first laugh hit, and the second laugh hit… it was really, really cool to hear people laughing at stuff that was supposed to be funny. There were even times when people missed a joke because they were laughing at the previous joke,” he says. Ferraro considers himself a filmmaker. “Whether that means I’m going to be working as a production assistant or I’m directing it, that’s all filmmaking,” Ferraro says. “First and foremost, I consider myself a director. I happen to enjoy the amount of creative freedom you get with that.” Ferraro made his directorial debut during his sophomore year at UNCW with the short found-footage film “Flash of Light,” about a haunted apartment building, made in collabo-

ration with UNCW’s Flicker Film Society. The film had been an idea of his for some time; his goal was to achieve a long take, as seen within his favorite film, Children of Men. “I always wanted to shoot something like that. And I just thought… kind of like Blair Witch, like putting a handheld [camera], like first person would make the audience feel more in the action. And doing it all in one take kind of amplified that.” Flash became a trilogy within Flicker, with Ferraro assisting on the final installment, “Flash of Light: Flash Forever.” Since his work on “Flash of Light,” Ferraro has also worked on the short films “(S)hitman,” a film of a hit gone wrong, as its behind-thescenes camera operator, and “The Revenge of Kate Munroe,” a tale of an actress taking revenge, as its script supervisor. Both short films were made in part with UNCW. On the Air began in September 2015 when Wes Elder, eventual producer for On the Air, was in charge of creating some sort of narrative project for TealTV, the television station on UNCW’s campus. On the Air was originally developed as a web series. Elder brought in his former roommate and filmmaker, student Kenneth Fryer, to help direct the project, and as the web series developed into a feature film, Ferraro joined the crew. “From then on out, Kenneth and I kind of threw in little pointers on the script and that kind of stuff,” Ferraro says. On the Air was on a five-week production schedule, putting the finish date around late April, which meant finals time for much of the cast and crew. Ferraro relaxed when he could between his classes. “Oh, yeah, I almost always fall asleep in screening classes,” he says. Despite

fatigue, Ferraro perseveres, saying, “Because I’m just in that mode. I’m in that ‘go-go-go’ mode, so I don’t have time to schedule in ‘Oh, be tired.’” Luckily for Ferraro, his restlessness didn’t end with the spring semester, and his momentum kept him going well beyond the school year. While discussing his foray into Los Angeles, California, where he completed an internship at Bow and Arrow Entertainment over the summer, Ferraro mentioned his black notebook. In this notebook is his system of tracking his progress within his film career. “It’s a book of tally marks. And each tally mark is a time I applied to anything in entertainment. Any film position, internship, yada, yada, yada. Anything,” Ferraro says. “Every time I applied, I put a ‘No.’ Or I put a tally mark and the tally mark means ‘No.’” His determination can be seen by the number of tallies that have been made so far. “So, over the summer… I applied for a bunch of internships and positions. I think I applied to two hundred,” he said. “So that’s two hundred completely separate cover letters, two hundred times I sent my resume.” After all he’s done up to this point, Ferraro has one piece of advice to offer aspiring filmmakers: “Get involved and don’t get discouraged.”

Photo provided by TealTV.

Susanna Poetry by Erinn Seifert It happens like this: our shoulders rub against one another, smooth as glass, side by side in the dark. We are young, bone-thin and bursting with song, recently set free to the world. A fog dances over the waves breaking on shore. We are certain we have put it there with our clouds of tobacco breath, steady and full as her hand in mine when no one is looking. The dune grasses tangle and untangle without effort. Somewhere up the boardwalk, our friends drink warm beers and talk of spiders floating down from the sky like black stars. A man stumbles across the beach, backlit by the moon and just as lonely. He pauses; we go still as salt pillars. He lurches forward again and we breathe. The sand shifts beneath us, and Susanna hums in my ear, the warm notes like a line of ants crawling up my body: impossibly light, but I can focus on nothing else. Across town, her mother fingers the silver silk of her aging hair. Today, she began a sudden worry that all her life she has never truly known love. Her husband comes home and feathers a kiss against her ear, says Hi honey and goes to shower. Susanna kicks sand up with her feet and untangles her hand from mine. Freckles wash her shoulders in flecks of dark. She pushes wild, curly hair from her forehead, wiping away the salt-sweat of her brow. She swallows the entire world in one breath.

Barren Photography by Autumn River Bondurant 22

The Career Path Less Traveled

Feature by Calvin Shomaker

Career paths are often as unpredictable as the lives of those who choose to venture down the daunting and vast trails of adulthood. Like life, careers are never static or fixed. There is no official start or finish line. They are dynamic, developing works in progress, constantly being altered and born anew. This is especially true for the eclectic, the artistic, and the innovative. “I unfortunately had chosen three pretty ridiculous things,” writer David Gessner says of his early 20s, reminiscing from the comfort of his office on a Friday afternoon. He wears sneakers, blue jeans and a ball cap, and his chest is hair visible and dark like his mustache. “Ultimate Frisbee, writing, and political cartooning,” he continues. “I got a real healthy dose of what it meant to work at some things not regarded as normal.” His transformation from an amateur writer and nationally competitive Ultimate Frisbee player into a distinct and recognizable literary voice for Cape Cod and a new kind of environmentalist emphasizing immersion and wildness, Gessner says, helped him form the necessary muscles of nonconformity good writers need. In his youth, Gessner faced pressures from both society and his father during a struggle to find a community of like-minded writers, to be persistent, and to have his work appreciated. Now the Chair of the Department of Creative Writing at UNCW, Gessner is a bestselling and award-winning author of nine books and numerous essays, though the hard times spent forging his career taught him valuable lessons he now aims to pass on to his readers and students. Born in 1961, Gessner grew up in the Boston suburb of Worcester, a short drive from Cape Cod, where he first got “the nature bug.” In high school, he was a cartoonist for the school newspaper before becoming the editorials editor. Opinionated stories, he says, just came bursting out of him. “I suddenly readjusted and said, ‘maybe I don’t want to be a cartoonist, maybe I’ll be a writer,’” says Gessner. After graduating high school, Gessner began college at Harvard, his father’s alma mater, in 1979 and drew cartoons for the newspaper there. Tests in the English department were in essay form, and Common Core was nonexistent, so he did well enough to relish the college experience. “I partied a lot and played Ultimate Frisbee and drew political cartoons,” Gessner says. “I was not academically very disciplined or studious… I had this dream that I was going to be this great writer, but because of those ambitions, and because of the pressure of thinking what I put down on the page has to be great, I pretty much paralyzed myself and didn’t write much at all.” In 1983, Gessner graduated from Harvard and applied for political cartooning jobs, but he didn’t hear back from anyone. When offers came from the two best Ultimate Frisbee teams in the Boston area, he knew that was where he’d be living, though it wouldn’t stop him from getting back down to Cape Cod every now and then for his nature fix. That same year, Gessner started his first “clunky and unwieldy” at

tempt at a novel. At the time, he didn’t show his work to anyone, including his girlfriend. “I was doing it,” he says. “I was writing every day, but I just didn’t have a community. My community was Ultimate players and carpenters, not writers.” The choice to play Ultimate Frisbee rather than finding a legitimate career did not sit well with his father, an old-fashioned businessman whose favorite phrase was “no bullshit.” “It was pretty rough during my twenties,” Gessner says about his father’s discontent. “It was pretty much straight on, ‘What the hell are you doing?’” At age twenty-seven, Gessner sent his first novel out to five big publishers. He received four rejections, but the fifth was a personal rejection with the words, “You are a writer of considerable talent.” That was the first affirmation of his passion, “the first little breath of air,” he says. After moving back to Cape Cod to write another novel, Gessner began keeping a lot of journals and nature notes separate from his new project. Gradually, the natural world found its way into his fiction. At age thirty, soon after moving back to Worcester with his girlfriend, he found out he had testicular cancer. He quit playing Ultimate, decided it was time to put away “childish things,” and was accepted to graduate school at the University of Colorado in Boulder all in the same year. Once radiation helped him defeat cancer, Gessner’s path renewed as he left Worcester, Massachusetts—a place he called “the anti-Boulder”—for Eldorado Springs, Colorado, a fresh landscape for any regionalized Easterner or artist beginning a journey down an unknown path or two. “I felt kind of reborn out there,” Gessner says. “I turned, finally after three apprentice novels, to writing nonfiction, and that’s when I got my first book accepted.” A Wild, Rank Place was the title of Gessner’s graduate school thesis and how Henry David Thoreau once described Cape Cod. Published in 1997, A Wild, Rank Place is derived from Gessner’s personal journals and describes his love of Cape Cod. It also focuses on the difficulties of losing his father to lung cancer. On one of his last days alive, having not said anything coherent in days, Gessner’s father suddenly sat up in his hospice bed, very cleareyed, and said to his son, “Make sure you get the facts down.” That was when Gessner knew his nonfiction work had to become a book. Return of the Osprey: A Season of Flight and Wonder, his third published book, was about ospreys, a kind of fish hawk that had been wiped off Cape Cod by a pesticide called DDT. The ospreys were returning to Cape Cod and served as a thematic parallel to his own newly regained health. Return of the Osprey was named one of the top ten best nonfiction books of the year by The Boston Globe, which proclaimed it was “among the classics of American nature writing.” No doubt, Gessner appreciates the praise, but he is not a writer who will happily confine his work to any one category or genre. “I kept being called a nature writer,” Gessner says, “which started

pissing me off, because sure I had the natural world in there, but I was writing a lot about people and about my father and about regions.” Sick of Nature, his fourth book, he calls his declaration of independence from the nature genre. In it, he wrestles with labels and the stereotypes of being a called a nature writer in an era more and more detached from preservation and the values of wildness. Four more books followed, with topics ranging from Cape Cod and osprey migration to new environmentalism and the BP oil spill, before Gessner was decorated with accolades from the 2015 release of All The Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West, his ninth book. All The Wild That Remains was named a Southwest Book of the Year, a Best Amazon Nonfiction Book, a Smithsonian Best History Book, and a Kirkus Best Book of 2015. It also made Gessner a NewYork Times bestseller. Finally, after years of doubt and figuratively banging his head against to wall for a breakthrough, the national recognition proved that choosing the less-traveled path was making all the difference. “A big turning point for me was reading Edward Abbey in Desert Solitaire,” Gessner says, “where you had this character who was grumpy and opinionated and funny… What I try to do is bring humor, and bring what I liked in personal essays, into the nature essay, and it’s kind of two unlikely things mixing—humor and nature—but they’re really not that unlikely… I wanted to bring that into nature writing, more comedy, more directly human drama.” All The Wild That Remains is in some ways a Western book for Easterners, Gessner says. The book addresses drought, water, climate change, beetle infestation, and life in the West with insight into the lives of Stegner and Abbey, two iconic Western writers. Stegner won a Pulitzer Prize and founded the creative writing program at Stanford University, where Abbey was awarded a fellowship in Stegner’s name. Abbey was an environmental author and park ranger who was on the FBI’s watch list for criticizing the military draft. Gessner says people who knew him as the Ultimate Frisbee player in his twenties would say he was more like the blunt-tongued, cigar-smoking Abbey. As he has gotten older, with his path becoming more defined, he says he is most admiring of Stegner’s teaching qualities and his quote, “Largeness is a lifelong matter.” “I love the idea of getting outside of ourselves into a bigger world, a biocentric world, rather than an anthropocentric world,” Gessner says. “As a reader, it helps to have a human guide pointing me beyond the human.” This July, Gessner is releasing his tenth book, Ultimate Glory: Frisbee, Obsession, and My Wild Youth, a book with a more humanizing story about the Ultimate Frisbee community. “It’s a community with a great kind of chip on its shoulder and inferiority complex,” Gessner says. “Ultimate stands in as a metaphor for writing, because it’s the kind of thing when some businessman at a cocktail party asks you what you do and you tell him you play Ultimate Frisbee, the reaction is about the same as when you tell him you want to be a writer. It’s hard to throw yourself into something that the world doesn’t take seriously.” Looking back, Gessner says he likes what his father’s criticism did to his ambition. Though perfectionism hindered him momentarily, Gessner’s odd path instilled in him a hunger for something greater. “I think that ambition is something that people don’t talk enough about,” Gessner says. “It’s got its downsides, like not being happy where

you are, but its upside is pushing you to some place more… It’s something that anybody who wants to be really good at something has to wrestle with.” When teaching a class or writing, Gessner tries to stress cures for sicknesses that held him back in his early twenties. His cures include momentum, speed, not being too much of a perfectionist, pushing ahead, revising, and battling doubts. “I stress activity and momentum above everything else,” Gessner says. “You have to get better to be able to look back and say something is bad, so keep pushing it ahead.” Gessner said the best thing he did was start writing every day. He still finds time daily to get down to the writing shack he built among the trees near the marsh behind his house when he was fifty. It gives him close-tohome wildness, he says, or “domestic wildness,” like seeing Jupiter and Mars form a triangle with the moon from his shack on a clear-skied night, the cosmos undistorted by manmade light. Gessner’s next two publications are expected to be a collection about living in North Carolina and a novel about Cape Cod. Photo provided by Calvin Shomaker

Untitled

Photography by Jubal Strube

To My Father Nonfiction by Erinn Seifert

Lately, I have been learning: how to prepare an artichoke, what a squirrel’s belly looks like, where exactly Thailand is, how to thaw a frozen pipe, the details of sitting shiva, how to plan a road trip when you’re not rich. Lately, I have been living a life that no longer touches edges with yours. The internet tells me that in 2013 there was a set of twins born eighty-seven days apart from each other. They both survived, though the doctors admitted it was something like a miracle. In my home, nearly 1,500 miles away from your home, I’m watching a girl work on an artichoke—slice off the top and bottom, peel the leaves outward like petals, squeeze lemon straight into the heart—and all I can think about is how fast things seem to change, how fast two people bound by blood can put an unwilling distance between them. A year ago: watching a python curl around a dead rabbit, squeezing imaginary life out of it as a girl squeezed my hand in hers, and I thought about calling you, but didn’t. Two years ago? I think we at least spoke during the holidays. Five? I sat on the wooden floor of your bedroom for hours while you showed me pictures of you and Mom, the lake wind whipping her then-blonde hair around her face and you grinning like an idiot in love. Which you were. Which is why I’m here. Which doesn’t explain why I’m here and you’re there and those two places feel as far apart as Thailand and the moon. As far apart as eighty-seven days must feel to two people who were together from the very be-

ginning of everything. I’ve been thinking more about you lately because I’ve been thinking about the girl who’s working on the artichoke—how I’ve never felt such tenderness toward someone, how the way her shoulder blades move as she slices through the stalk drives forth a hunger in me like the revving of a truck, how I want her slicing vegetables in front of me forty years from now while I pour wine and set the table and keep changing the song before it’s finished. How you’ve never met her and likely never will. I’ve been thinking more about you lately because time is passing and things change so, so quickly and

twins are born three months apart and squeezing lemon straight into the heart feels like an unnecessary punishment, even if it makes the artichokes better. You would say different, though—that the lemon in the heart, no matter how piercing and sour it may seem, is entirely necessary. The girl cutting the artichokes, the one with green eyes like Mom’s? Her mom died a little over a year ago. I think this at least five separate times in my head before I tell it to her out loud: I love the way that you always say “Mom” when you talk about her—never “my mom,” just “Mom,” as if she’s the

only one in the entire world. To love someone that much and not be able to see them or speak to them again. And I’m sitting here, while you’re sitting there, and I’m learning all kinds of things that you don’t even know I know. There is no discernable point for when our lives split apart like the over-ripened peel of a banana, browned and curled in at edges which used to touch, and that makes it difficult to find a place to meet again, I know. But lately, I have been learning. And I just wanted you to know that.

Fences Photography by Colin Schmidt 28

Barcode Photography by Sara Izzi

Grilled Cheese Sandwiches Poetry by Victoria Migneco

I eat my grilled cheese sandwiches burnt side facing me and perfectly toasted side facing the world. The shack is decrepit, crumbling, and beautiful. We can create a world if we want to; any time, any existence. I see stars, and planes, and planets. It is time to understand the old and wise people. I give my mother a bouquet of dandelions. Night falls because of a cloud; do not blame the sun. You cannot stop the progress. The sand on the side of the highway meant salty lips and burnt noses. They differ, both sea and landâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;not that I find that strange. Every family has that glue that is peeled away after a doctor visit. A person hides the identity of a magazine. I did not see the tears, but I heard them in his voice and that was more terrifying. A fast life is burned to death. Lazy dust particles floating down, down, up, downâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;catching the white light and letting it glow. Rain droplets have a race on the car window. The word beautiful is always a difficult word to spell. She is the shadow of your worst performance. Roars, screams, cheers, drown and disappear as I dive. We spend the whole day looking for lighthouses. Slow; time moves slow here. Light transmits through the eyes of someone looking at the sky. This little low-temperature pace moves on and on.

Spring Art by Hunter Reeves

tuesday evening Poetry by Jesse Sawyer

“i have sprinkles in my foot,” you whisper. as you push yourself up on just your right leg, i watch you unfurl your arms—a sail trying to make it out of irons. “what?” i ask, picking myself up off your bedroom floor as i hold my arms out for you, just in case. i catch the pinkness on your cheeks instead— raspberries from the sun only visible when the screen wears thin. “it’s what i used to tell my mom when i was little,” you say. i feel those sprinkles in my chest.

Pacific Temptations Photography by Erika Alatorre 34

How to Grieve in the South Nonfiction by Mackenzie Kirkman

1. When someone dies in the South, you will have one of two things happen: you will have copious amounts of food made for you, or you will have to make food and bring it to someone. Bringing food is easy; you make a casserole (or rather, your mom does) with chicken, broccoli, and Food Lion-brand Velveeta cheese. It’s easy, the kind of thing where you throw it all in a pan and bake it, the kind that’s a meal in and of itself because grieving people can’t bear to spoon out more than one meal at a time. You bring it to people that have tissues hanging from their pockets and tears staining their clothes, and you tell them, “I’m sorry” (like you’d done it, but you probably didn’t), and they say, “Thank you,” even though those phrases don’t make much sense together, and you’ll leave once you’ve loitered long enough to seem polite. Inevitably, though, someone you care about will die, and you’ll be receiving the food, which is deceptively harder. 2. Get up early in the morning and put on your best clothes. They don’t have to be black, at least not yet, but they have to be nice, conservative, clean. A dress, maybe? Did your school have a dress code? Do you remember the rule about your skirt and how it had to at least reach your fingertips? Or how shoulder straps have to be three fingers wide? It’s a lot like that; you don’t want to look shameful when guests come. 3. Before anyone else is up, go eat breakfast; enjoy some coffee and the last time you’ll be alone for the day. 4. Go open the house. Unlock all the doors like the death knocked your family back to the ’50s. Set out boxes of tissues strategically; swipe a few for yourself. 5. Don’t complain. It doesn’t matter how sad you are. You’ve got to be polite to the guests because they’re being nice, and they want to tell you they’re sorry. 6. Once you’ve opened the house, go sit on the couch. You can watch the television, but try to keep it appropriate, family friendly, happy. No one can die. Everyone should be showing up now. Your family will wake up and mull about, straightening things and biting conversations short so their voices don’t get shaky in the middle of the sentence. 7. They’ll ask you if you want to eat—at least that choice is up to you—unless an elderly woman made

the food; then she’ll decide how much you’re having herself. Be careful: if you don’t eat it all, it will be taken as an insult that will be politely critiqued once the funeral is done. 8. If the dead person was old, say, your grandfather, expect a bunch of old people to show up: relatives, service buddies that wear their veteran hats even now, old friends, and neighbors. You probably won’t know them, but regardless, they’ll say they remember you. They’ll tell you that you’re attractive. Thank them. Tuck the tissues deeper in your pocket. 9. When your friends show up, don’t laugh with them. If you’re a teenager or younger, it probably wasn’t their choice to come—their mothers made them. Remember how you called them late one night and told them you knew your grandfather would die. How you sobbed on the phone for an hour. Don’t get angry about their hesitance—you wouldn’t want to go either. But never forget that they didn’t hang up on you until you were ready. Notice for the first time that the past few years of chemo and midnight hospital runs to see your grandfather have changed you in some way you can’t comprehend right now. 10. When they leave, breathe a sigh of relief. Go back to the couch. 11. If you’re the youngest grandchild, everyone will talk to you. The closer—biologically—you are to the deceased, the more apologies you’ll get. Make sure to accept them all. 12. Go to the bathroom on the second floor when you need to cry. The one across the hall from the bedroom you like to stay in. The one with the claw-foot tub you hated, and the seashell-shaped sink. Cold water will keep your face from puffing up. Dry your face with one of the many washcloths from the counter. On the counter, covered in dust, is the Waterpik your grandmother bought when you got braces. Wonder to yourself why she’s kept it out, alone on this table for all these years. Dust it off and go back downstairs. 13. Act like you feel better. When they get upset, comfort them—after all, for these three days, you’re their host. Your own pain must be delayed two days longer. 14. If grandpa didn’t attend church frequently (or didn’t become best friends with the pastor), it will be

obvious. Regardless of your feelings on religious sermons, enjoy this part. Notice how the pastor fidgets in the chair: he won’t be able to keep you and your cousins straight; he’ll have to take notes constantly. Don’t ask him if he thinks the dead person’s going to Hell for not listening to him for hours and hours each week. Don’t point out how they were too sick to attend; it will make everyone cry, and you still have days to spend there. You will spend hours with the pastor asking for funny stories or ones that show the person’s true character. Tell some, don’t talk over everyone, bite your tongue when someone gets a story wrong, but correct the pastor when he remembers yours incorrectly. Only correct him once, though— everyone knows. Try to tell stories; you will regret it if you don’t. Your stories will always be yours, and that will be a comfort someday. And while it may seem impossible, you might laugh. Laugh at stories of your grandfather’s clothing choices in the ’70s: those blueand-red-checkered bell-bottoms you saw in a picture. Or that stupid Halloween mask he wore every year to scare you—the one your grandma handed to you gently a few nights ago, which is now hidden in your closet because, honestly, it still scares you. Heck, even laugh at how he always grabbed your grandmother’s butt when he thought no one was looking. 15. When the pastor leaves for the night, giving blessings as he heads to his car, it will be late. Go to the kitchen. Straighten up the food that’s been brought. Try to put away the casseroles. (You can tell they’re all chicken, but the other ingredients have formed into a seasoned mush by now.) Put away the Watergate salad, potato salad, coleslaw, macaroni and cheese, fried chicken, pasta salad, and pot roast. The cakes (all of them— there will be a lot) can stay out with the flowers on the table. Most of this will be thrown away in a few days; there’s only so much a grief-stricken family can eat. 16. Go home in silence, shower, sleep. Get up the next morning and do it all again. 17. When you can go outside, if it’s summer, the buzzing of cicadas will remind you of what the inside of your head feels like. It could be comforting. It might be frightening to relate to that. 18. By the last day, it will just be the family. Wear black— it’s time for the funeral. Or if you have a white dress that your grandfather always thought was pretty, wear that. 19. The nice men in the good suits will come in hearses. Pile in; don’t complain when you're squished between people. Don’t complain when the air conditioning is

broken, even if it’s July-in-the-Great-Dismal-Swamp kind of hot. Take tissues when they’re shoved in your face. Try not to cry loudly in such a confined space—it could annoy your cousins. 20. The grave site is going to feel like some sort of parade. Sad eyes will follow you to the tent-covered chairs. Don’t look at them. Understand that sometimes people hold your hand for their sake, not yours. Even if it is the summer and it’s hot, grasp their hand until they’re ready to let go. Watch the coffin lower to the ground and listen to the bugles playing “Taps.” Say a silent prayer of gratitude that your grandmother didn’t request the 21-gun salute. You have to watch this happen, or the past three days haven’t had much of a point. 21. Thank the men that hand your grandmother a flag. This is a hard day for them, too. The job of honoring dead soldiers is never a lighthearted one, and they already have to live as soldiers themselves. Feel the lump growing in your throat, see the uncle you haven't spoken to in years finally standing by your father again, see your great-uncle sitting on someone else’s gravestone in torn-up jeans and a T-shirt, see others fan themselves and dab their eyes. If you’d like to, you can cry now, but once you start, you won’t stop for a while. Never wear that pretty white dress again. 22. When it’s over, don’t feel sad; after all, you’ve had four days, or you should have if they weren’t spent on everyone else. Your mother will ask, “Are you feeling all right?” Your dad will tell you, “Go to the beach with your friends—your birthday is coming up, after all.” Your cousin will ask you if you saw that new show, what you thought about it. Grandma won’t say anything. 23. If you feel like you’re very similar to your grandmother, it may help her, and you, to go for a visit. 24. Pack clothes, a book or two, and little things to keep you entertained. Prepare for the environment; try to think of things that both you and your grandmother could enjoy. Drive over hoping for the best, but try not to disillusion yourself. 25. The house will feel weird. Try not to comment on it. If you’ve ever moved out of a home, you might note that it feels similar. That it feels as though there should be boxes half-filled and disordered. But there aren’t—just things that linger behind once their owner is gone. The beat-up chair grandpa slept in while “watching” the news, the chair he sat in on the porch. You didn’t notice how much you associated him with chairs until now. You could become hyper-aware of

things that belonged to your grandfather. Do not—this is important, mind you—do not comment on them. 26. Your grandmother will try to make small talk if she’s up for it. If she’s doing housework or cooking, offer to help, but don’t fight her when she won’t allow you to. She’ll say something like, “How was the beach?” Say, “It was great, Grandma.” If your birthday just passed, she’ll say something like, “I can't believe how old you've gotten. I haven’t gotten any older; how did you?” Laugh at the joke she tells you every birthday. Point out that you probably aren’t that old if you’re still a teenager, especially if you’re not even eighteen yet. Realize she is getting older. She’ll say, “But you're so mature.” Smile at her; thank her. If silence falls over you and the conversation stops, take it in stride: read a book or ignore her protests and help her. More than likely, she won’t fight you for long. Let her tease you for being bad at peeling potatoes, but resist her help. Sometimes you have to do these things yourself. Dinner might feel like breathing. When something as obvious as a person is missing, it’s hard to consider that you’re drinking and eating. Grandma will make too much; she’ll do this for a while. Put the third plate away before she notices that she set it out again. You will become too caught up in the absence. That’s okay. Tell your grandma, “This is delicious.” “Well, it's nothing fancy,” she’ll say. But she means thank you. That night, you can watch TV with her. Whatever show she might like to see. Chat with her about why you like it or why she likes it. Ask her if maybe tomorrow she might like to get out of the house. Go get dinner, or go to town and shop, for nothing really, just window-shopping. Don’t be surprised if she says no; hide whatever sadness you might feel from staying in the half-empty house all day. She’ll ask you if you’re going to bed when she is. It might do you good to stay up.

She’ll pause on the stairs and say, “It’s okay to miss your grandfather.” Listen to her slipper-clad feet climb the stairs. And realize that knowing you’re not alone is the last, painful step of grieving before you can heal; then climb the steps behind her.

Shower

Photography by R.E Hengsterman

At Night Art by Myrthe Biesheuvel

Untitled Photography by Nicole Amato

Contributors Erika Alatorre was born in Los Angeles, CA and grew up in Wilmington. She has a passion for anything photography- and film-related. She loves to shoot almost anything, but surfing/skating has always been her main subject. Check out her Instagram, @ErikaAlatorre, to view more of her content. Andrew Alekseev is an art student at UNCP. He is stretching a four-year education into six or seven years, mostly out of fear, and his passions include cheap beer and schmedium-fit T-shirts. Joseph Angel is currently a film major at UNCW. Born and raised in High Point, NC, Joseph attends UNCW to fulfill his filmmaking aspirations. He’d like to thank his parents for their constant support in his endeavors. Myrthe Biesheuvel was born in the Netherlands, where she completed a year of intense classical drawing at the Wackers Academy in Amsterdam. In August she was offered the great opportunity to relocate to Charlotte and study the arts at UNCC. Myrthe has a deep love for illustrative art and painting. Autumn River Bondurant is a sophomore studying communication studies and Spanish at UNCW. She recently invested in a Canon Rebel T6i and has fallen in love with photography. She’s just having a good time experimenting and living life. Emily Elizabeth Brown is an upcoming graduate at UNCW majoring in studio art. While art has always been a passion of hers, she plans to pursue a career in graphic arts. She loves to look at things such as the human figure and break them down into shapes and forms that one might not see at first glance. Urban art and expressionism are both movements that inspire her work.

R.E Hengsterman is a writer and film photographer who deconstructs the human experience through photographic images and words. He currently lives and writes in NC. You can see more of his work at REHengsterman.com and find him on Twitter at @rehengsterman. Sara Izzi is a junior studying film and communication studies at UNCW. She has been going around and taking pictures of things from the age of twelve. She loves to travel and spends most of her time outdoors. Her spirit animal is a sloth. In her free time, she likes to try to grow veggies on her small apartment patio (so far, not much luck). Caroline Kelly is a junior at UNCG majoring in English who loves John Steinbeck and war stories. Mackenzie Kirkman is a student of fiction and theatre who realized too late she’d rather write nonfiction. She is bitter about not being able to write happy stories. Almost as bitter as the coffee she drinks to replace sleep. Victoria Migneco is a freshman studying marine biology and environmental science at UNCW. She loves the ocean, tea, and sharks. She strongly believes that Converses are the greatest footwear known to all humankind. Ashley Nordquist is a junior art major at UNCP. Her artwork involves a hybrid process of combining traditional and digital tools. Inspiration for her work comes from a variety of concepts such as Japanese culture, cybernetics, nature, and life experiences. Patricia Patterson studies English and creative writing at UNCW. If she were to be reincarnated one day, she would like to come back as a goldfinch.

Thomas Reenberg is a film studies and accounting major at UNCW. Photography and videography have always been hobbies; he plans to turn these hobbies into a career. He shoots on digital, 35mm, and 120. Hunter Reeves is a senior at UNCW graduating this May with degrees in English and psychology. She hopes to go to grad school to be a speech therapist in a year. Most importantly, she has a cat named Toast and a hermit crab named Oceania Demetria Pearl, and they have their own Instagram. Jesse Sawyer is a synesthetic poet and photographer who hails from Charleston, SC. Her favorite hobbies include exploring new places and thinking only about metaphors and cats. Colin Schmidt is a human being who likes maps, music, big rocks, and potatoes cooked in many different ways.

are sports, nature, photography, and music. After graduation, he hopes to make a living as a writer, teacher, or coach. Jubal Strube is working on his BFA in photography at UNC. He loves photography; he picked up his first camera at the age of eleven and hasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t put it down since. Austin Suther is a junior at UNCW majoring in professional writing and minoring in journalism. He is an aspiring video game journalist. Luke Webber is a junior majoring in professional writing at UNCW. His story started as an essay, but after some encouragement from others he decided to turn it into a graphic novella.

Erinn Seifert is currently a student at UNCW. She is working on a BFA in creative writing with a concentration in nonfiction. Robert Selden is an okay guy with a lot of opinionsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;none of which should be inquired about. He spends most of his time planning the next great art heist but occasionally writes poetry on the side. Calvin Shomaker is a UNCW senior from Wilkesboro, NC majoring in English with a concentration in professional writing and a minor in creative nonfiction. His main passions

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Spring 2017 | Issue 75

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