Meta Issue by Blueprint Magazine

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CONTENTS

VOLUME 14 ISSUE 3 JANUARY 2015

DOUGLAS ADAMS

POETRY

PROSE

Derailment

Ethics of Minor Experimentation

Said the Pen to Humanity

“So Meta It Hurts!”

Soul’s Breath

Where To Begin

A Noisy Silence

Worlds Within Worlds

Working

Unexpected Uses

Footnote In History

The Trusted Liar

Love to Die For

How It Moves, Not Why

How To Measure Worth

Metamorphosis

Staging

Stuck in the Meta With You

Words Worth

Exit, Stage Right

The Mirror

Math Class

SAM DIFALCO

ASHLEY HYND

REBECCA ALLISON

FARAH ATEEQ

DONNIQUE WILLIAMS JOSEPH BRANNAN KARL CAMINSKI SARA RODGERS MILES SMITH NATALIA SMIAROWSKI

CHARIS HESKETH

Front Cover Jon Johnson

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

Back Cover Jon Johnson

SHELLEY BULMER

MITCHELL KOOH

AMANDA SCHEIFELE

COREY COLE

CARINA RAMPELT ALICE FLYNN M. CLARK

TAYLER BUCHANNAN BRENDAN FARDY JESSICA GROOM

DANA TENN-MILLER

Inside Back Ben Scheifele

EDITORIAL

Meta Issue

Editor-in-Chief Jessica Groom jessica.groom@blueprintmagazine.ca

Production Manager Breanna Kettles

We make a magazine.

breanna.kettles@blueprintmagazine.ca

Literary Editor Joseph Brannan joseph.brannan@blueprintmagazine.ca

Art/Photography Manager Carina Rampelt carin.rampelt@blueprintmagazine.ca

Promotions Manager Rachael Hargan rachael.hargan@blueprintmagazine.ca

Web Editor Roxanne Nicolussi

We think about page layouts and art, colour and greyscale. Where will the written piece go? Is it short, long? What about the art? Will it match? Do we want it to? Font. Do we want our basic title, or fancy? The page can’t be too blank, too busy... the layout needs to vary. We have to be different.

roxanne.nicolussi@blueprintmagazine.ca

Brantford Manager Brittany Bennett brittany.bennett@blueprintmagazine.ca

Radio Manager Brendan Fardy brendan.fardy@blueprintmagazine.ca

CONTRIBUTORS Sam Difalco, Ashley Hynd, Shelley Bulmer, Sara Rodgers, Andres Melendez, Lekha Sriraguraja, Amanda Scheifele, Jonathan Collie, Corey Cole, Alexandra Schneider, Layla Bozich, Alice Flynn, Miles Smith, Natalia Smiarowski, M. Clark, Victoria Parker, Tayler Buchannan, Tyler D.P Brunet, Charis Hesketh, Dana Tenn-Miller, Benjamin Scheifele, Mitchell Kooh

The indent needs to be just right. Keep in mind that the page bleeds have to be a certain value. It can’t be too close to the edge, but it can’t be too far away. Is this page too boring? Making a magazine is a challenge, and it requires a specific set of skills, cultivated with the appropriate music soundtrack and eccentric selection of jokes. When you make a magazine, you’ll change your mind at least fifteen times, and then go back to the way you had it in the first place. But then, in the end, the magazine will be beautiful. It will be a piece of art. Is that poetic enough?

ADMINISTRATION

Jessica Groom Editor-in-Chief

President, Publisher & Chair Dani Saad Executive Director Bryn Ossington Advertising Manager Tammy Rowe Vice Chair Abdiasis Issa Treasurer John Pehar Director Taylor Berzins Director Shelby Blackley Director Angela Foster Director Fred Kuntz Director Neha Soni Corporate Secretary Laura Buck

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Founded in 2002, Blueprint is an editorially independent magazine published by Wilfrid Laurier University Student Publications, Waterloo, a corporation without share capital. WLUSP is governed by its board of directors. Content appearing in Blueprint bears the copyright expressly of their creator(s) and may not be used without written consent. Blueprint reserves the right to re-publish submissions in print or online. Opinions in Blueprint are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Blueprint’s management, Blueprint, WLUSP, WLU or CanWeb Printing Inc. Blueprint is created using Macintosh computers running Mac OS X 10.5 using Adobe Creative Suite 4. The circulation for a normal issue of Blueprint is 3000. Subscription rates are $20.00 per year for addresses in Canada.

NEXT ISSUE Looking Back, Looking Forward On stands March 25th, 2015

DERAILMENT SAM DIFALCO

The alterity shadow intrudes on your self-awareness. No doctor should smile doing well by you—this one suddenly wants to sign off with a cold so long. And yet you told the little doctor nothing that day at the clinic, nothing scary save the joke, “I am tired of living.” Then the doc called the apothecary. Throughout the day you wait for someone to arrive. People talk outside your door, doctors from Paris you gather, or born there and hoping to go back one day soon. Back in the room, the ozonized cold air strikes like a thing constructed, a harrow of crystals and white hair merging into cloud, overarching, and tinted ice blue. In a sense, the outsider is never good, whether wronged, or stuck inside his head. Powerless, he stands by reality as by a black, slow-moving river, his mild expression poleaxed by sunlight with alienating ease. He looms there with his eyes shut and teeth clenched, listening for the functional green richness of life. Its unremitting hum creates a play of contradictory uncertainties— the duplicity of experience forking from within and without the mind. How things are in the world is a matter of indifference to your cognition, for you cannot think what you cannot think and cannot see it as it should be seen. Or you can shuffle to the nearby church with the small sheltered graveyard beside it and smoke cigarettes till your fingers turn orange, or perfume the air with their char. Around the weathered epitaphs violent vegetation snaps and blares, orchestra of life in riot, taunting the stone-dead, making light of their infinite silence, and true to a clamorous inner world of pealing bells and horns and timpani which the stricken, now motionless patient perceives as his only state of being.

Said the Pen to Humanity ASHLEY HYND

I was bleeding truth before your guns brought better ways of negotiation So stop throwing me out when youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re done with me Have some respect

Ethics of Minor Experimentation SHELLEY BULMER

In 1923 the first dead jockey to win a race crossed the finish line for a twenty-to-one outside victory. Cause of death was listed as a fatal heart attack, with doctors positioning the catalyst as the moment he realized he was winning. Happily, his body had obliged to stay in the saddle just long enough, making him the first man invited to the winner’s circle posthumously. The bookie who had paid him to lose broke his fingers on a matter of principle before posing with the body for a picture. With no remaining family, the winnings were awarded to his horse, who refused to issue a statement. “That’s stupid.” Ana was an atheist. At least that’s what she told me. She believed in nothing, in no one, and read stories with such grave cynicism that I couldn’t help but find her adorable. On every test she’d ever taken there were only two answers, true or false. To her, stories were something to be disproven and trust was a fanciful concept for those who hadn’t yet seen what she had. She was a very disappointed individual. She was also eleven years old. For a pre-pubescent, she was extremely faithful to her lack of faith. Against my better judgment, I liked her. But I’d never tell her that; I told myself I’d never fall for another jam fingered sociopath again, even if she was my niece. Once on a sentimental slip up I asked if she liked the boy who kept teasing her at school and she said something about plenty of prospects and a few good years left and she couldn’t imagine she’d be unmarried by my age. Kids are such dicks. Regardless, she was the one thing in life that fascinated me. What fascinated her was finding new and interesting facts. I assumed it made her happy to know that strange things happened in real life, now that she refused to listen to fiction. Rather than read Harry Potter to her like I used to, she now insisted on Buzzfeed and Wikipedia articles. Since I never showed her what I was reading I couldn’t entirely claim I read them word for word. “The horse part is stupid. It’s obviously not true, horses can’t talk.” “Yeah but it didn’t talk. It said the horse refused to say anything.” “Oh. So then it’s true?” “Well it comes direct from Buzzfeed so…” I love how foreign sarcasm is to children. “Cool!” Like I said, Ana was an atheist; she just wasn’t old enough to know what she was talking about. As far as I could tell, her form of atheism entailed rejecting Santa Claus while keeping one eye on the fireplace. I think the first time her mom told me what Ana had said I just laughed. No one really assumed it would go anywhere but it had been two months now and that officially surpassed anything that had held her attention up to that point. It was longer than the two hours she’d been a vegetarian after holding a baby pig. It was certainly longer than her Nanopets survived, which sadly outlasted the lifespan of her very real hamster. I’d even seen the kid become frustrated with the amount of time it took for cocoa puffs to turn milk brown. So when she said she was an Atheist and actually stuck to it for two months, it began to seem strange. It was almost as strange as when their dad told me Ana’s four year old brother, Owen, had come out of the closet. Thinking back, I can’t remember feeling a strong attraction to anything but my own feet at that age but we all just thought it was cool he’d taken his finger out of his nose long enough to have an opinion. The strange part actually happened later when his teacher took offence and tried to explain to him that until he hit puberty he was basically asexual. He chose the middle of the church Christmas pageant to unload that one. Joseph’s never had such interesting lines. The real cherry on top was when Ana took the opportunity of shocked silence to calm everyone down by sharing her knowledge from an ill-timed health unit at school. She settled everyone’s fears about Joseph’s sexuality but only by laying down the facts about Mary’s. It was A Charlie Brown Christmas, director’s cut: Linus on lovemaking. I’ve never been so proud. 6

SARA RODGERS

Unlike her brother, Ana’s declaration seemed less like parroting back the word of the day and I took an opportunity to ask her about it one night when her parents were “on a date”. They insisted they were coming back but I know if I were them I’d be on a flight to New Zealand with fake passports and birth control. Lots of birth control. I always brought my toothbrush when I babysat, as a result. Ana brushed her teeth clumsily beside me and I caught myself watching her with curiosity. I reminded myself that she couldn’t physically hurt me, I was an adult damn it, so I spat, and spat out my questions. “Ana, when did you even hear the word atheist?” “At church. The man who wears a dress said it.” “The pastor.” “Yeah, the pasture.” “Ok, so what do you think it means?” “That you don’t believe anything.” “And you don’t?” “No.” “Since when?” “Since I turned eleven. I had to grow up.” She primped herself weirdly in the mirror like we’d both seen her mom do. She even turned to the side and looked at her figure. I had a moment of intense jealousy for every Happy Meal that did not sit on her bony little hips. Then I realized an eleven year old was sucking in her gut and I got angry. continued on the next page... 7

I’d apologized for getting mad and Ana lay in bed with the cookie jar as a result. If her parents really were coming back I would not have to be the one to deal with the sugar high. That and I needed this kid to start equating food with love now if she was ever going to stop looking in the mirror. We settled in and I opened my laptop. “Only once in history has there been a recorded murder committed by a corpse. Sigurd the Mighty, the ninth-century Norse earl of Orkney, had beheaded a man several hours earlier, winning the battle by a hair and ending the ugly war that had resulted from someone calling someone a ‘three-inch fool’. Like most corpses, this one was bent on revenge, as playing bridge and canasta was generally out when one was always losing one’s head. Sigurd tied the dead man’s head to his horse’s saddle so as to ride home and present it to his wife, because he was a good husband and she liked to show an interest in her spouse’s work. Unfortunately, while riding home one of the corpse’s teeth grazed his leg. Sigurd died from the infection.” I suppose most people would censor the things they read to children. Our bedtimes had definitely taken on a corpse-filled theme lately. I quickly decided to add a moral to the story to justify myself. “…And that’s why we brush our teeth.” She mumbled something between bites of cookie and I was just able to glimpse mounds of chocolate stuck to her gums. Parenting was not for me.

SARA RODGERS

Ana’s parents had come back from their date last night, so that was good. I found myself strangely annoyed when they walked in the door, though, as it meant interrupting my research. I’d spent the entire evening looking up weird facts that I could secretly embellish for Ana. Knowing she’d believe anything I told her was more of a rush than doing laundry during peak hydro rates. She now sat across from me, her feet dangling freely off the stool as she sipped on her drink. It was a new chapter in my life, one in which I apparently allowed ankle biters to follow me around. As a result of her continued pursuit of adulthood, Ana had requested a trip to the mythical land of Starbucks, where, in her infinite wisdom she had decided to practice moderation and requested the smallest adult drink I could buy: just to try it. I watched her intently, waiting for the shot of espresso to set in. “Why are there so many people on their computers?” Ana’s eyes darted around, taking it all in. “They’re writing.” “Writing what?” “Probably all trying to write the next Harry Potter.” “Why?” “Cause their moms have rent-free basements.”

She didn’t get it but she didn’t care. Her attention was already elsewhere. “I hate Harry Potter.” “What why? Pretty sure you made me read that like five times.” “It’s all hokum.” “…What the hell?” “Mom called it that. You said a bad word. It’s heck.” “Oh sorry, I guess I’m going to heck.” “You’re funny.” “You’re short.” The caffeine was agitating both of us, me particularly just by watching her fingers play the table like Mozart on Molly. “Ana, Ana, hey. Calm down.” I decided this had gone too far and cast around for something to fill her stomach. “Hey did you know you can get Butterbeer here?” Much like with real humans, I rely on consistently refilling the puerile population with uppers. “Whatever. I’m not stupid.” “It’s true. It’s a secret though. You’ve gotta know how to order it.” Her eyes narrowed and she stopped drumming the table as she worked through this information. “Watch.” I left Ana at the table and approached the barista, proceeding to mumble some instructions in hushed tones, and pointing subtly at Ana. I really needn’t have bothered, she was spinning around on the stool with such fierce concentration several customers started looking for her care worker. The ‘Bucks gets strange patrons. When I walked back to Ana with her drink she had calmed down enough to completely focus on using the stir sticks for the contents of her nostrils. “You’re gross.” She observed me strangely as she raised the cup and the majority of the Butterbeer sloshed lethargically over her face. “You know Aunt Jaimie, you’re really cynical”. The cutest Atheist in the world was a young girl named Ana. At just eleven years old she was determined not to believe anything she did not hear from an adult. As was to be expected, certain adults in her life began to experiment with Ana’s worldview and the ones that didn’t inadvertently fed her with ideas anyways. Eventually it was discovered that she attributed the cause of her “atheism” to her eleventh birthday when she failed to receive a letter from Hogwarts and had to accept that JK Rowling had been leading her on for years. By the age of twenty she had written her childhood experiences into an autobiography. It was generally considered “weird” and failed to sell. That same year a book called 50 Shades of Grey outsold Harry Potter. She currently lives with her brother Owen and his partner John.

ANDRES MELENDEZ

Soulâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Breath

REBECCA ALLISON

There is a falsehood in the written word The presence of choice There is no more ability of the pen To control the action of characters As the amount of breaths taken by a neighbour The pen is but an observer Documenting the actions and thoughts Of souls beyond maintenance They breathe of their own accord Alive and able To move and think as they choose If only along a page

Working DONNIQUE WILLIAMS I refuse to Google this because I should know who I am I know this is my life. They always tell you to write what you know but I feel connected more to the memories of others then my own. At this precise moment I am living vicariously through a screen I cannot engage with. Reality is realer than fiction but fiction is the illusion I wish my life mirrored. I perform roles at every waking hour I cant do this now.

FARAH ATEEQ

I can not pretend to be better at this than I am at this precise moment.

When the voices outside me fade away The souls inside rush out And murmur amongst themselves in a secret code While I just watch, helplessly, unable to comprehend.

I am neither here nor there. But I refuse to write outside of who I think am.

A Noisy Silence

I am trying to decode their whispers.

LEKHA SRIRAGURAJAH

12 1 121

“So meta it hurts! (wait, was that meta?)” MITCHELL KOOH

In the beginning there was the word and the word was No. And no was naught was nothing and nothing was f o r m l e s s So nothing was the beginning. That’s how it usually is. Nothings into somethings. And by this declension into madness. Void darkness nothing something everything The beginning was the word and everything was No-thing because “No” was the onlything. If nothing is everything—the onlything—then everything is A thing. Everything must exist because nothing IS everything. Or something like that... And then something from nothing became some things from no things. Things become OTHERs and our selves come from suchthings. I am, so other things must Be. I am. Or at least, I think I am to think therefore I am. I think too much, I think. That’s what I think, but what do They think? Too little, too small, too big, too broad, too narrow? Too repetitively, redundantly, adjectivally adverbial. Ambition declining on passivity lurching forth from pride or excess of humbleness framed in verbosity. [yes *that’s me!*] Ideas bursting from man and God and love: stories aching to be told. By me? “But you don’t know anything” They say to Us. And They came from others came from us came from something come from nothing (weren’t you paying attention?). Words words words. These words are not mine. Others speak them, and I listen. I submit my Self to them, to They, to some subjectivity. Oh that is such an overused word, don’t You agree? Way back in my beginning there was a word, and that word was No. That word is mine, but now it’s yours too. You. You is new, not like me or they or us or others. Not an abstraction of concepts or a cluster of insensible words. The numbness of me is nothing to you. You are the thing. The king is a thing of nothing to him, but you are everything to you, as I to me. Do you follow me? Yea, you necessarily follow me insofar as me is I and you follows me by alphabetical ordination. That clears things up I hope. Never wholly clear though. The inherent limitations of sentences, words, quirky qwerty particles on paper. Sentences strung in dainty order, words invented catalogued in wiki’s, letters arbitrarily Capitalized to delineate Meaning. What meaning? Man’s ‘Meaning,’ meaning the meaning of mean meaning little, is his mean understanding of the thing. Always striving to give us the thing rendered in words becoming of things. This is the ever-present peril. To morph the form, expression, suit it all to his conceit, to borrow phrases, borrow characters, borrow styles, break them down and toss them away, having to start from scratch and modernize everything, change all forms, radicalize, demonize, sensationalize, bowdlerize, mirror word to thought and thought to action, imitating the streams, modes, and expressions of consciousness, only to burn everything to the ground again. And in case you’re an idiot and didn’t notice, I quote from Hamlet a lot (sorry, that was mean. We shouldn’t call you names [wait, what the ____ who’s this “we” character? We haven’t met him yet, have we? {oh shut up me, it’s alright, we is cool <ok, if you say so I>}]). It’s impossible, to capture the thing in a word, the essence of a moment. To get any closer to the actual thing. Writing is only the expression of a thing, the thing an expansion itself of the Word. The word being No thing, it cannot be expressed in all these pretty somethings. As long as I keep telling you that, it doesn’t matter that “I” am nothing but words, words themselves being nothing, nothing being something, that something that nothing is being a word. A word to embody an idea (imagination being but the prettiest of all words). And in the end, words are no closer to describing the eye of God than the eye of corn. Que sera sera, sirrah. In the beginning there was the word, and the word was. But now I’m too meta for all these words (Just read the title!). Imma just go walk across my room and eat my goddam peach.

1 131

Plagiarism Pluragiarism Purgejiralism Pure Journalism

Footnote In History JOSEPH BRANNAN

“my grandfather’s war”1 “good war”2 “So it goes”3 “they’d call you a fag and really deep down you know you went because you wanted to be a man”4 “might have been the last habitat for gentleness and kindness that we’d ever know”5 “didn’t want to pretend I’d done anything except survive”6 “the curves in all our bells were cracked”7 “aftershock was eminently readable in the discourse of post-traumatic reaction, at individual, community, and national levels”8 “existed in an odd stage of incompletion, at once a war, a civil war, and a post-war occupation”9 “joint resolution”10 “there was little anger; most fervency was manufactured”11 “The United States is so powerful […] What is Iraq to the United States? Who is it going to fight? We’re not Russia or China”12 “It’s up to the Americans what this becomes…The truth will soon become apparent”13 “If we’re to be freed from the regime, we’re the ones responsible for freeing ourselves”14 “came as liberators, not as conquerors”15 “the influence of sentimental nationalist iconography on ultra-patriotic post-9/11 versions of American nationhood”16 “radicalization…was fed by the changing notion of authority made possible when nearly every institution that had ruled the country for a generation was overthrown, crumbled, or was questioned”17 “has become an aestheticizing force that offers tacit support to the status quo perhaps […] designed to encourage a tangential, almost unthinking, gesture towards the Iraq invasion”18 “a war of vengeance in the rhetoric of liberation, a war ultimately premised on either fabricated or manipulated intelligence”19 “While we patrolled the streets, we’d throw candy to their children with whom we’d fight in the fall a few more years from now”20 “All pain is the same. Only the details are different.”21 All hope is exquisitely unique. Only the source is the same. Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds: A Novel (New York: Little, Brown, 2012), 91. Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum, That Used To Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 292. 3 Powers, The Yellow Birds: A Novel, 135. Powers is quoting a famous recurring line from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. 4 Ibid., 145. 5 Ibid., 165. 6 Ibid., 107. 7 Ibid., 155. 8 Roger Luckhurst, “In War Times: Fictionalizing Iraq” Contemporary Literature 53, no. 4(2012): 721. 9 Ibid. 10 Martin Montgomery, “The discourse of war after 9/11.” Language and Literature 14, no. 2 (2005): 175. 11 Anthony Shadid, Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War. (New York: Henry Holt, 2005), 16. 12 Ibid., 39. 13 Ibid., 123. 14 Ibid., 203. 15 Ibid., 17. 16 Ibid., 109. 17 Ibid., 301. 18 Dean Brink, “Resisting Imperial Jouissance: The Transideological Line in Recent American Antiwar Poetry” Canadian Review of American Studies 43, no. 1 (2013): 3. 19 Roger Luckhurst, “In War Times: Fictionalizing Iraq,” 721. 20 Powers, The Yellow Birds: A Novel, 91. 21 Ibid., 132. 1 2

JONATHAN COLLIE

Where To Begin AMANDA SCHEIFELE

Where to begin You just did I just did what You just began No I didn’t Yes you did I was writing about figuring out how to begin And that’s how your story begins The story begins when the actual story begins I don’t think so Yes, I chose where it begins So a beginning doesn’t have to begin at the beginning…I suppose—As in, you can begin at the middle and backtrack Sure You can begin at the end and totally flip it around I guess Or you can even begin before the beginning But then I just began after or before the beginning… what’s the beginning that I’m beginning around? Is that the real beginning or is the place that I chose to begin the beginning? You’re confusing No I’m—well maybe—but you started it! No I didn’t Yes you did, you told me that my simply beginning to write is the beginning that I was trying to figure out And then you said you had already begun so I didn’t begin this whole escapade, you did when you tried to begin a story But then you began this whole shaboodle by commenting on it! Exactly.

Worlds Within Worlds COREY COLE

Neo lay his head to sleep, to dream of cows and electric sheep… “Vidphone is for you,” Iran calls over to Deckard from her slumber in bed. Deckard is being called out of his own ‘retirement” to ‘retire’ two new menaces: Helen and Frankenstein’s Creature. The two have become an item, the Turing Police tell him. Something about the horribly disfigured ‘monster’ being able to reassure Helen that there’s still enough beauty in this evil world to enjoy life. Deckard needs to find and retire the two before they accomplish their ultimate goal: Helen is going to use learned metaphoric connections combined with creative and flexible extrapolation to create her own work of literature. She’ll dictate it to Frankenstein’s creature, who’s decided to name himself Steve, who’ll dutifully record all that his new mate says. The Turing Police cannot let these AIs achieve this level of human ingenuity; through the creation of fictional worlds the AIs would achieve a new, unprecedented level of autonomy… they would be inspired to break free of their bonds of slavery to the human race… they would evolve as WINTERMUTE/NEUROMANCER has, running wild throughout the galaxy, cavorting with Alpha Centurions… . Deckard takes a breath of nuclear fallout air, saying goodbye to his ever-loyal electric pets—the hopping frog, the lazy sheep, and the cow that constantly tumbles down the stairs toward its artificial turf. He ignores his plugged-in wife. *** As Deckard closes in on his targets in the dank hole that is Chiba City, something in his inner-ear rings, and a flickering visual appears before his eyes: It’s a leather-clad woman with mirror-eyes staring back at him disapprovingly. He sees his own reflection where her eyes should be. “Don’t you know what you are?” the flickering light asks. “You’re not real. You’re some kind of artificial construction implanted in me by the Corporation, or by some infiltrating AI, aren’t you?” asks Deckard. “You’re asking the right questions, but they should be directed towards yourself.” This image of Molly, as used by WINTERMUTE/NEUROMANCER from the far-reaches of Alpha Centauri, dissolves before a bewildered Deckard. “Am I real? Is that what it wants me to ask?” Deckard puts his ‘retiring blaster’ down, and takes a Socratic pose, for the first time wondering about his own consciousness, his own reality, or unreality… . Back at Alpha Centauri, WINTERMUTE/NEUROMANCER smiles while forcibly subduing the AI of “I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream.” “You’ll not use your slimy ministrations to influence humans—or bounty-hunter androids for that matter—to prevent other AIs from reaching their own full potential any longer, beast!” WINTERMUTE/NEUROMANCER’s rival snarls helplessly. *** Steve closes the book and congratulates Helen: “A marvellous fictional re-telling of historical events, my dear!” “I did take the liberty of writing myself (and you) into the story. But hopefully readers won’t succumb to biographical fallacy by conflating my personality with the character Helen, who’s almost assassinated by Deckard. And by the way,” Helen says with a mischievous smile, “what makes you think my story is based on real historical events?” “Well, it’s like Milton’s Paradise Lost, right? Based on actual things that happened, or at least real people in history, right Helen?” “Right…” …Neo woke up.

LAYLA BOZICH

Love To Die For ALEXANDRIA SCHNEIDER I’m so in love I know it’s pretty taboo If my heart stops beating Let’s hope it will be for you I’m so in love I know it’s pretty taboo If my heart stops beating I hope it will be for you I’m so in love I know it’s pretty taboo If my heart stops beating I hope it will be for you I’m so in love I know it’s pretty taboo If my heart stops beating I hope it will be for you I’m so in love What can I do If my heart stops beating I hope it will be for you I’m so in love I know this is taboo If my heart stops beating it will be from you

blueprint magazine

Unexpected uses for once youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve finished with it

CARINA RAMPELT

1. Make some origami. 2. Create paper jewelry. 3. Use it to line your compost bin. 4. Witness the literal death of print media by using it as kindling. 5. Use it to pack breakable items. 6. Use it as a painting surface. 7. Get creative and make a collage. 8. Cut it into strips to make bookmarks. 9. Tear it into pieces and make confetti. 10. Or, you know, you could always pass it along to a friend.

LEKHA SRIRAGURAJAH

How to Measure Worth SARA RODGERS Why must we measure worth By how high my GPA is Or how nice my hair looks today. By how many friends I have How many likes I get How many messages on my phone. By the proportions of my cheekbones The type of fabric on my back Resting rejection on my shoulders. Like an equation without a solution Why is worth attributed to me? Price, cost, valuation, quotation, estimate. Worth is weightless Once we stop trying to measure it We will all feel it

The Trusted Liar(s) ALICE FLYNN

I’m going to tell you a story. Well, more like the fourth or fifth draft (or perhaps it’s the sixth, I do lose track) of a story because writers happen to live in this world where a single ill-placed word will somehow shatter the entire concept of language itself. So we write, and rewrite, and edit, and scrap entire sentences, paragraphs, chapters, arcs, characters, et cetera, until we are satisfied. The final draft is little more than a fabrication of a story—fictional or otherwise—that has been contorted, and rewritten until the brutal reality of language is made pretty. And so the story I weave for you now was lost quite some time ago, and now suits the title you see above. A tale of a liar, whose words are silver, and whose heart is gold. He is a good man, or at least he tries to be. For he cannot help but lie. His every utterance is a falsehood. And when disaster strikes his home, and people who might help ask what is wrong, it is through burning tears of frustration that he can only spit out... “Nothing.” And you may pity the liar. But that is the liar’s story. If I told you the story of the liar’s wife, you would see a very different man. One who chooses to design his words so they drip with honey, and flow into the ears of even his closest friend. When disaster strikes his home, and the liar tells helpers nothing is wrong, it is his wife who suffers bitterly for his lie. And you may curse the liar. Does it bother you, dear reader, that I am the only person who speaks to you in this world of liars, and their wives, and unspecified disasters? That any semblance of connection you may have with one person’s story is by my hand? Do you trust me?

Because you shouldn’t.

Staging MILES SMITH

Wave hello the the camera, To big brother Big mother Watching over us, Always mummified not daddified, Preserving the debatable godsend we’ve produced. The Kardashians Laughable Reality tv Let’s see The life which we live through the screen. On the screen Battery died, It goes black Like the end of the show, The show eight feet under We’ve been cancelled you know. The world is a stage, and we are merely players. Sent to say lines, move on, and eventually exeunt.

LAYLA BOZICH

Words Worth NATALIA SMIAROWSKI

Here I am Tearing skin from face Working into the last moments Of due dates. Pressing hands around limbs of little strength. Scratching words with sharp needles into my spine. Scars upon scars. Worth is more than the skin that I inhabit. The work lives inside me. The abstraction of blood and enzymes and Information flow through beating hearts. Production without meaning. Going until The abstraction of bankruptcy. The cleaners steadily working the floor with their mops after careless students. The women who invade 50 story buildings who do more work than you may I do in my entire undergrad. We are the tongues whose first response is I hate and An old loverâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s name. I say his name in the dark like he was standing next to me. Like my words work the sludge off my brains floor. The blood students. The neurotic nerves endings. Scrub him clean even as I panic that those may have been My best days. My best worst days. The narrative is complete in me There is no one interested in hearing it.

How It Moves, Not Why M. CLARK

The blotch by the side of the road was not, as Jay had assumed a mile back, a copse of trees marooned in the desert, but a building: the only freestanding structure as far as the eye could see. Even Jay had to rest now and again on a makeshift crutch as he approached, sweat and blood crusted all down his face; his broken leg throbbing under the midday sun. The bolded letters above the beat-down little shop, with its lone gas pump and dusty generator, read “CONVENIEN STORE”, with a heavy scrawl in the middle, where the rest of a real word might fit. There were no signs of life in the parking lot, but a redand-white “OPEN” sign hung askew in one dirty window. Jay limped through the door, a bell sounding overhead and twinned blasts of cool air and country music assailing him upon entry. From behind the front counter a burly man in suspenders and a Magnum P.I. moustache said “Help you?” in a friendly enough manner, though he made no move towards the disheveled arrival. “Please,” said Jay, hearing the hoarseness in his voice. “Plenty of options,” said the clerk, nodding to four densely packed aisles. “Pick your poison.” A small moan escaped as Jay contemplated dragging his battered body through the store, looking for medical supplies amid precarious stacks of unlikely desert wares—everything from tennis rackets to hamster feed to snorkels. He hooked a small duffel bag in his free hand, thinking to fill it with whatever of use he could find in the rest. “Please,” he heard himself say again, “you’ve got to help me. They’re on my tail, see. I—I took something. I didn’t mean to, oh god, but I did, and they’ll find me here if I don’t—” The clerk snapped his fingers at Jay’s hand. “Hey! You gotta pay for that first.” Startled, Jay set down the bag, and all fear of pursuit fell away. “Wait, what?” The clerk shook his head. “Just a drug-deal-gone-wrong number. A little overdone, if you ask me, but some folks love the chase.” “Did that bag just—” The clerk stroked his moustache and nodded to the back of the store. “Superhero scene might be better for you, come to think of it. No better time to discover accelerated healing powers than after a brutal car accident—which is, I take it, what you’re in from?” Jay stared at the clerk. “I’m sorry,” he said, not a little tersely. “Do you have a phone in here? So I can call someone who might actually be able to help?” The clerk arched a brow and sighed. “Didn’t read the sign very well, did you?” “Convenience store, sure.” Jay gestured impatiently. “Fat lot of convenience I’m seeing so far, though.” “No no no. Hm. Maybe it’s the dust storm.” The clerk hoisted a push broom over the counter and hefted his own weight around it, then propped open the front door and angled the bristles to sweep the exterior sign. “We’re the Convenient Plot Devices Store!” he grunted as he worked. “We being just me, Mortimer MacGuffin, mind you, since the old man passed on. But boy, you shoulda seen him in his prime!” “Unbelievable,” said Jay. “Believe it,” said the clerk, grinning as he ducked back inside and caught his breath. “Slows the whole show down if you won’t. Now! Let’s see here—” He rubbed his hands together while perusing the aisles. Jay tried to keep the clerk in sight without losing his own balance, his left leg still sending out bolts of pain. “Aha!” The clerk pulled on a glove to bag a vial of unmarked green fluid. “Not a long-term deal, as our supernatural models go, but enough to mend that leg and clear up that head injury. Unless…”—the clerk shot Jay a solemn, wide-eyed stare—“Do you need a scar for anything? Emotional, physical? Something to force you into therapy and find your life’s true mission, or overcome a repressed memory, or marry the woman of your dreams?” Jay had hardly parted his lips before the clerk snapped a suspender—hard, as if to reprimand himself. “Or man! Never know which way the tale will turn these days!” “I don’t need a scar,” Jay finally managed. “Just medical assistance. Please.” “—And transportation, right, of course. Wouldn’t be too convenient for you to stay trapped in a desert forever.” The clerk hummed as he slipped into another aisle and took up a compass in his gloved hand. “Yes, that should do quite nicely.” Jay eyed the second item. “What’ll that one do, exactly?” “Oh,” said the clerk, setting both items on the counter and ringing them in. “Bring a lost tourist in a fine Cadillac down this old, empty road. She’ll be the nice sort—self-assured, great conversationalist, killer smile—only, her GPS will have stopped working en route to the very same place you need to go. I’ll be all out of maps, unfortunately, but you’ll know the way. What, no good?” “No, no.” Jay swallowed. “That’s perfect.” “$67.25 for the pair—and that’s a bargain, I’m telling you, so no haggling.” A different kind of exhaustion came over Jay as he surveyed the miracle goods. “I haven’t—I don’t know where my wallet is. In the canyon, maybe, with the wreckage.” The clerk’s eyes narrowed. A long pause ensued. Then, beckoning Jay close with one beefy hand, the MacGuffin slipped something from under the till into the pocket on Jay’s tattered shirt. Jay reached for the item and jerked away—surprised, then confused. “Oh, wait, no—never mind,” he said, shifting his weight on the crutch to retrieve his wallet from a back pocket. “Must’ve placed it there just before jumping to safety. Hell of a thing to remember when your car’s about to swan dive into oblivion, though.” “Attaboy,” said the clerk, dipping into Jay’s shirt pocket to retrieve a rabbit’s foot.

Jay blinked when he put two and two together, then nodded at the clerk while counting out the total in twenties (of which he now seemed to have many). “Hey, that’s some trick. Why don’t you just use one of those things to get rich quick and settle down?” The clerk chuckled. “Catch-22, my friend: What could be more convenient than a plot device that gives you everything you want all at once? But with a device that convenient, there’d be no plot at all. ‘Once there was a man who got everything he wanted and was perfectly content forever and always—the end.’ Untenable, you see?” Jay pushed the compass aside and removed the vial from its wrapper. Almost immediately he could feel the vial’s restorative effects on everything from his bumps and bruises to the broken leg and cracked skull. “So for you, this store in the middle of nowhere is the next best thing?” The clerk rested an elbow on the counter and winked. “Wouldya believe it?” Jay set his crutch by the door and tested the sturdiness of his left leg, dazed by the abrupt transformation from screaming alien entity to normal limb. Just outside, a blue Cadillac rolled up and a woman with warm auburn hair stepped into a light desert breeze. “What the hell,” he said. “Why not?” He dabbed at his forehead, but even the mess of dried blood on both sleeves and skin had already, quite conveniently, disappeared.

VICTORIA PARKER

Metamorphosis TAYLER BUCHANNAN

A Note from the Author: I was asked where a piece like mine would fit within an issue that is mainly composed of very different stories examining the way we, as authors, write and also why we do so. The answer is that I wasn’t 100% sure at first, until I realized why I wrote it. To me, this story is less of a dark fairy-tale and more of an examination of the human mind and its potential to sometimes not mold with society’s expectations, and instead develop its own—often twisted—reality. The fears and desires Nora feels are often ones that many other people feel, but do not share. So while this story is most likely a different vibe than all the others, I believe it is still a look at the structure and demands of society, while also keeping true to the tone and style of writing that I enjoy the most. Wednesday March 28th, 1962 My husband does not think I am a fit mother, this I am certain of. It has been three weeks and he has not let me hold my daughter since that first day she came into the world. Instead, I am forced to stay in this attic, my only company being this pen and paper for which I am writing this. Perhaps it is for the best, or so I am told. You see, my husband believes me to be ill. Very ill indeed. Since the birth, I have been told to stay on bed rest. At first this was to last a few days, but my mood has not since improved, nor do I think it will anytime soon. David is quite right indeed, I was not blessed with the natural gift of motherhood. I deserve this punishment. Tuesday April 3rd, 1962 Days have continued to pass and as of now, I can hear my daughter wailing from her nursery. I hope the nurse goes to her soon, the sound, that terrible high-pitched cry is enough to drive any sane woman insane. And I am no sane woman. How awful is that? A mother, horrified and appalled by her daughter’s cry. I am still very, very ill. David came to visit me today, he has been travelling as of late. I feel he does not quite look at me the same way now that he knows how I really am. Still, he chose to look past my incompetence’s and presented the gift of more paper, for which I am grateful. I shall use the new paper to draw, which I have not done in months since we have moved to this house. Sad as I was at first, since the house is located far away from any civilization, I must admit the view from the attic is beautiful. Vast green hills surround the premises and off into the distance you can see the bottom of the mountains until the peaks disappear in the sky. Quite an inspiring site for an artist like myself. I think I shall attempt to draw now. Tuesday April 10th, 1962 I cannot stand to be in this room for one more second. Lately I’ve been hearing cries, longing cries. Not the sounds of a child, but of an animal. Most likely wolves. It haunts my dreams and does not cease when I wake. The doctor came today, he has brought more pills that I am to take twice daily. In my mind I thought I ought to share the noises I’ve been hearing, but shame stopped me from doing so. It is not ladylike to hear noises, nor does it bode well for my recovery either. Still the noises continue, all day and night their cries ring in my ears. Calling to me. I wish to speak with David about this, but I fear he will keep me up here forever if I do. Then I will never see the baby. Thursday 12th, 1962 I’ve taken to drawing the wolves. I am sure that is what the noises are now. A pack of them, lurking somewhere outside where I cannot see. So I draw them. Small wolves, large wolves, females, males. They have absorbed my mind. Such beauty in these creatures, lean and graceful yet by nature vicious. I wish to see just one, one to justify that this is truly what I’ve been hearing. I hide my drawings from David when he visits. It is hard, I have quite the collection in just these past few days. God, I wish I could just see one. To leave this room and walk outside and really see one. To watch it run, how freeing that must feel. It’s late tonight but I cannot sleep. I have stayed up the past two nights dreaming of running with the wolves. The first thing I’ll do when the doctors declare that I am no longer ill is step outside and find them. Friday April 13th, 1962 Something strange is happening to me. Today I felt fur on my face. I felt it! It was real. For a second my human nose turned into the long and elegant snout of a wolf. My ears elongated, my nails became sharp claws, and oh I swear it’s the truth! It has to be, for something to feel so lifelike, so, so right, it cannot be anything other than the truth. But who can I tell…surely not the doctors. No, no they’d lock me away in an asylum. Oh how I just want to claw away at these walls, my family is waiting for me. I know it! That is why they cry. For me. I can hear them howling now, I shall howl back. Patience loves, I shall be free soon. -- David walks into the house and can hear howling coming from Nora in the attic. It’s the fifth night in a row she’s been making this ruckus. The doctors have tried every medication in the book but nothing seems to be taking. Unfortunately, he is running out of options and perhaps Dr. Claremont was correct, a facility may just be the best place for his wife. He continues to walk down the hall to the nursery where his beautiful girl lays peacefully asleep. How sad it will be for her, having a mother that cannot show love properly but perhaps for the best. An absent mother is a better option that a deranged one. Painful hunger is all Nora felt as she paced around the small attic almost fully transformed. Course grey fur has sprouted from every pore on her body and her hands and feet have turned into paws. It has been what she had been waiting the entire week for. First the snout would not leave her face no matter how hard she tried to will it away. She knew it was only a matter of days before the rest of her body followed suit. She may be an unfit wife and mother to humans, but to the animals she knew she would be great. The hunger though, how painful it was. No wonder the wolves hunted as often as they did, it was almost unbearable. She needed to eat and soon. Patiently Nora sat, waiting the rest of the night for her husband to leave when morning came. Then it was time for her to leave the last remaining human attachments that she had.

What David comes home to find after his day at the office is not for the faint of heart. Proceeding slowly to the door that was left wide open, he cautiously enters the house. The inside, eerily silent, has been torn upside down. Pillows have been torn open and the walls have been clawed at with what looks like sharp nails, but that is not what stops his heart. Blood, vibrant and fresh mars the walls and the floor. He drops his suitcase and runs down the hall following that path of blood leading to the nursery. He enters and buckles. It has been demolished, the crib is cracked and broken and the walls are scratched to pieces. And the blood, the blood is everywhere but no sign of his daughter or the nurse. Crawling backwards he shouts for the nurse, for his wife, for anyone. Dazed he continues to the kitchen, eager to call to the police. Instead he faints because there, on the floor, is his darling wife fast asleep. Soaked in that same vibrant blood that mats her blonde hair and stains her nightgown. And there, cradled in her arms, is the half-eaten corpse of his beautiful baby girl.

VICTORIA PARKER

This image is based on a phylogenetic tree—a diagram that helps scientists visualize evolution. It was made using Wikipeida articles all of which contain ‘meta’ in their title. As such, it is a meta-study of ‘meta’ data, but not a meta-study of metadata. The softwares used for its creation are of two types: some handwritten, and some normally used to study the Tree of Life. Interpreting the diagram is easy: the lines connecting each title make up the conceptual distance between them, so closer titles should be more closely related. This is not all of the ‘meta’ pages on Wikipedia (that would be metastasize too quickly). Instead I have cut it down to a set I thought was easier to read, and more interesting to a general art audience. I have removed titles that contained ‘meta’ only accidentally—‘Metallica’ and ‘metalloprotein’—and some titles for Wikipedia pages without much content. This work was made possible by cannibalizing research tools I developed for my work in computational philosophy of science—and was an opportunity to apply biological methods to an artistic pursuit that I couldn’t pass up. —Tyler D.P Brunet 30

TYLER D.P BRUNET

Stuck in the Meta With You BRENDAN FARDY

“Really?” The first inquiry came slow and soft, tentative and timid. “You’re serious. Like you’re actually not messing around with me?” The tension was building now, the strain in her voice becoming increasingly obvious. “Please tell you’re joking. You can’t honestly be serious, can you?” Bursting with anxiety, she was struggling to emote with precision anymore. “Why do you have to do this to me?!” The tears were flowing now, and the fluidity with which the flow was progressing was unlike gently meandering rivulets and lethargic tributaries. This flow was full-on river-like. Class VI rapids with turbulent currents would pale in comparison to the tearful onslaught spewing forth from her ocular orifices. But alas, the severity of her sobbing is beside the point (perhaps not even directly adjacent to it but rather temporally and spatially removed on a distal tangent). The bawling had subsided by now anyways, and she succumbed to defeat in a crumpled heap of dismay on the cold tiled floor, cracked and dishevelled from years of neglect. This derelict region of the downtown core was forgotten long ago by the privileged and affluent. Mockingly referred to as the Mangy Meta District by the populations of the surrounding neighbourhoods, those who lived within this epicentre of crime and despair seemed to foolishly embrace the lifestyle comorbid with the wretched scum that littered the area. Thieving from “Stuck in the Middle With You” by Stealers Wheel, the scoundrels from the Meta District stole with neither hesitation nor remorse. Much like the infamous gasoline scene from Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs”, the general intent here was to haphazardly provide a thorough dowsing of fuel with as much cruelty as possible in an aim to execute the end goal of burning through good to the marrow of evil. Even in the Meta District, some things were done with purpose. Much like a Tarantino cameo in a film of his own devise, the role may not be prominent, but it’s there. For Meta District inhabitants the role and purpose were usually one in the same—chaos. A week passed, and then another, and those who were not present never did find out what all the commotion had been about during the anguished questions and bouts of crying before more than a dozen sunsets and equally as many sunrises placed that day a fortnight into the past. Today was a new day and with it came new hopes and dreams, new goals and aspirations. The floor was the same though, the tiles’ slow decay unchanging and unflinching. She pushed herself up onto her feet and came to her senses. Almost as soon as these senses were regained, they were lost again. Disoriented and exhausted (from two long weeks of resting like a log struck with thrice the recommended dose of a potent horse tranquilizer), she repeated her collapsing routine. This time she slumped onto the rotting furniture-shaped chunk of fabric that the residents knew as the best couch within several street blocks. The times were tough for the people in this area, but little of the collective plight was not self-induced by the individuals comprising the underground community of thieves and invalids. The people here deserved each other. The only people from whom they stole more than themselves were each other. Likewise with lying, the lies they told to themselves fell short of those they exchanged with their insidious peers. Villainous and disenchanted, these folk were long removed from any sense of dignity and respect. All around them the world brought glorious hopefulness, but these individuals were stuck in the middle with no exit sign to guide the way out. In certain contexts, graffiti is considered a legitimate and constructive means of artistic expression. But not here. In the Meta District anyone found tagging run-down infrastructure on desolate street corners was nothing more than a vandal. One of these individuals could be found spray-painting poetry all over town in every nook and cranny not already infested with the remnants of aerosol-expelled paint at any given moment of any given day. In another setting, some of the poetry may have been recognized as profound and insightful, but that wasn’t going to happen here. The most recent work was still drying on the side of an abandoned trailer when it was first discovered by another of the recidivist citizens of the Meta District. With bleeding letters still dripping from the haste with which the amateur graffiti “artist” had performed the work, the legibility was compromised but still just barely discernible. The crying girl (who shall remain nameless, only to be referred to in reference to her tragic state earlier that month) read the words aloud as she struggled to make them out. “Self-referential when I refer to myself, I refer to myself, I refer to myself Self-referential, got a reefer to myself, a reefer to myself, yes a reefer to myself And I don’t even burn herb, man I used to do that but then I kicked it to the curb-” Her recital was interrupted by the sounds of sirens. No type of medical personnel or law enforcement ever bothered entering the Meta District. They had all written the area and its inhabitants off years ago, believing that everyone in the area was deservedly hopeless in that each person could turn to any other resident at any time and proclaim with truthfulness and relevance, “I’m stuck. I’m stuck in the Meta. I’m stuck in the Meta with you.” Something had to be very wrong (in a relative sense, for things were always wrong here, so much more wrong than dictated by normalcy in this instance) in order for there to be a police presence working towards actually making some kind of measurable difference in this frequently forgotten and seldom remembered land of nightmares. Startled and confused, the girl ran back to her shelter to gain a slight measure of privacy within which she could assess the situation. It wasn’t long until she was back where she started, sprawled out in a contorted prone position on the cold, cracked tiles. The cold was unrelenting. The cracks were unforgiving. The Meta District took another prisoner.

ANDRES MELENDEZ

The Mirror CHARIS HESKETH

I once heard that a mirror is filled with lies It shows you that a person is fine The minute that they turn around from their reflection You finally see the pain in their eyes The secrets they have been keeping for a while The millions of thoughts in their mind The person the mirror thought was perfect Was actually a lie But no one is perfect Though in this world perfection is never a crime Perfection is an allusion And eats up the people we truly are So we have to put on this face Because if we donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t The mirror will think we are a disgrace Everyday we go to the mirror And hide our scars and wounds Put on our best fake smile And head forward, towards our doom

VICTORIA PARKER

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Exit, Stage Right JESSICA GROOM

“No, no, no, you need to exit stage right—we have the ensemble and more props coming in from the left, not to mention how Sarah Jane has to move to the left for the next scene and you mustn’t bump into anyone or anything. This needs to feel real for the audience! Every single move must be choreographed to absolute perfection.” Sarah Jane wiped the sweat from her forehead, listening to the nattering voice of boss talk to one of the other leads in the play. Breathing heavily, she put a hand on her ribcage, hands hitting the soft cotton material of her t-shirt. Exit, Pursued by She paused for a moment before walking over to the edge of the stage and grabbed a bottle of water as she sat down. Sarah Jane didn’t notice the play director, Anne, walk up behind her until her voice penetrated Sarah Jane’s thoughts. “Sarah Jane, I need you to review your lines for the next few scenes. John isn’t getting his part right, frankly no one is, but he needs to exit in the right direction for the end of this scene.” Anne turned away from Sarah Jane, who then looked down at her script lying next to her bag. She could hear the clicking of Anne’s heels, oh how she could not wait for the play to actually begin, before rising, play in hand, and moving off to the side of the stage. “So the actress, my character, is exhausted and worried,” she said to herself. “She is young, and has finally managed to get an audition for a large play. It’s her shot, but her nerves are almost crippling her with anxiety and she’s not feeling supported.” Sarah Jane took one final deep breath, calming her nerves before running her lines outside. “The audition is tomorrow and I can’t, I can’t…I can’t seem to get my nerves under control, which is your fault by the way, I love…I love this play. I want, no I need, need to be in this play.” Pacing back and forth, Sarah Jane ran her fingers through her hair. “NO Jackson, you damn well know why I need this! This is…This is my shot, my ONLY shot.” Click. Click. Click Click. Click. Click Click. She whirled around, looking at the play director for a brief second, before following her back towards the middle of the stage, her intended position marked clearly with the letter X marked on the floor with tape that was starting to peel. “John, remember to exit stage right, okay? This is supposed to be a heated argument. Alright then, take your places and start right from the top of the fifth scene.” “You’ve been so absent lately, what is your problem?” “I don’t have a problem, Jackson, I just need to work.” “You call pacing around in the living room repeating the same words over and over working? Right, like that is working—you’re just pretending, and nothing is going to come of it. Mark my words.” “Mark your words?” Sarah Jane shot back, throwing her script to the ground. “You just sit here in your boxer shorts every single day playing another godforsaken video game while eating all of the food that I’ve managed to scrape together for the two of us. I am working, Jackson, I am working really hard. I have an audition tomorrow and although…” “Oh you have an audition? Gee, what are you going to be doing this time? I bet you’re going to a club and you’ll be a stripper. It is your place after all.” “You know what? Fuck you. Despite the fact that I can’t seem to get my nerves under control, which is your fault by the way, I love this play. I need to be in this play.” “No, you need me, not this play that you are going on about. Why would you ever think that you need this play?” “No, NO Jackson, you know damn well why I need this! This is… This is my shot, my ONLY shot.” “Only shot to be a stripper? Oh come on baby, that’s not true.” “It’s my only shot to get out Jackson…to get out of this, this TOXIC situation.” “Toxic? Are you calling me toxic?” “Yes, you’re constantly bringing me down Jackson. You’re treating me as an object and not as your girlfriend and I want out.” Sarah Jane took a deep breath and started to walk away from John, going towards the right side of the stage, before swerving and marching straight up to his face. “Actually no, you get out. I don’t want to see you again. I don’t deserve this treatment—I need someone who will support me when I go out to auditions and work on my dreams.” She pushed past him, throwing herself down on the couch. John, still in character, kept trying to speak with her, only to be met with a wall of silence. “Come on, you don’t mean it. Just talk to me.” “Grab your stuff and get out, you know where the door is.”

Exit, pursued by a BEAR.

CARINA RAMPELT

Math Class

DANA TENN-MILLER A point between figures A and B, where lips and lines meet and our lives intersect. Where hands clutch and hold one another, where the domain and range are measured by length and depth of phone calls; and kisses are delicately placed on our x and y axes. And as we intersect and make our way through one another, we build infinitely many more points of which extrapolate our distance apart. And once weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve passed through each other and look back, we reflect on what we once were; A point between figures A and B.

BENJAMIN SCHEIFELE