The Colton Review: Volume 16 by The Colton Review

THE COLTON R EV I EW a journal of art and literature

Vol. 16

0 Letter from the Editors “ Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”–Mary Oliver Any form of creativity is an inherently vulnerable act. There is a piece of the creator inside every work of fiction or art, and sharing a part of oneself to the world requires trust. For that reason, as the staff of The Colton Review, we are honored to have received so many submissions this year from faculty and students across our campus. Many of the works we have read—and that you will soon read—are deeply personal. Even the lightest of the pieces demonstrates an intimate attention to those components of life that are so easily overlooked—the quiet moments of joy, of uncertainty, of growth. We are so honored that our campus community trusted us to read, respect, and care for their creative work. Without that gift, this journal would not exist. Each and every year, we strive to be worthy of the trust we’ve been given as editors and designers, and we are proud of the improvements we made this year to our production process. Our staff is the largest it has been in recent years, with freshwomen and seniors alike taking part in shaping and steering our publication. We’ve installed a more thorough and collaborative proofreading process, and as a result, we can say with certainty that this edition has come from a place of love, openness, and collaboration. Although many of the pieces in this year’s publication deal with the harder parts of life, our meetings were always filled with laughter. We thank you again for sharing, for reading, for writing. We hope you learn as much reading this journal as we learned creating it. Warmly,

The Colton Review Staff

0 KEY Please use this key to navigate the works published within the journal. The symbol in the top right of the page indicates the type of work and whether it has received an award.

Symbol

Type of Work

Poetry

Poetry Winner

Prose

Prose Winner

Art

Art Winner

The Women

by Kate Polaski

he is orange juice being sipped through a curly straw. she is slightly misshapen stars painted on her Converse. she is the solar system model hung meticulously on her ceiling. she is watercolor stained hands and hair drawn back into a messy bun. she is art. she is a shovel throwing up dirt in a garden and a cat curled up on her lap. she is the A scrawled on top of the test she was sure she would fail. she is lemonade poured into a mason jar, perfectly sharp and perfectly sweet. she is a pair of hands kneading a floury pie crust and a flower peeking through fresh snow. she is hope. she is bruised hips and scarred wrists. she is microphone feedback through an empty room. she is bloody knuckles and a can of mace in her back pocket. she is thighs that jiggle when she dances and eyes that cry when she hurts. she is truth. she is leggings covered in sawdust and a leather jacket hung on a rack. she is deep red hair dye stained on a pillowcase. she is the whirring of a saw creating and a surprised sharp laugh. she is bright lights flashing on a darkened stage and the memories of when those lights weren’t there. she is joy. she is the words scrawled on a protest sign, not in anger but in passion. she is a carefully thought-out but messily-wrapped Christmas gift. she is kind, gentle words for those she loves and those who have wronged her alike. she is hair curled and makeup done, and the movie night with friends she dressed up for. she is peace. she is a windowsill full of succulents, all with different names. she is hugs without restraint and celebrations with no reason. she is the rainbow-beaded necklaces being thrown from a parade float. she is encouraging sticky notes and handwoven friendship bracelets from the fourth grade. she is love. We are polished painted nails and broken bitten ones. We are every tone of skin and every color of the rainbow. We are flower crowns and metal ones, too; torn jeans and long flowing skirts. We are stars in the sky and blades of grass growing from the Earth. We are soft curves and sharp angles, celestial bodies and earthly ones. We are art and hope and truth and joy and peace and love. We are one. We are many.

What Had Bloomed In Her Head Ana Ramirez | photography/digital imaging

First Day

by Ashley Hogan

spy a balloon, round and red, bobbing on the end of a string, the string tied to a little wooden chair, the balloon nodding earnestly above a table where my nametag waits, slickly laminated. This is Mrs. Henry’s room. This is the room where Bobby Dutton will wet himself, where Bethany Strickland will cock her hips and say, “You can’t play,” where lunchtime will smell of bologna and apples, and milk and magic marker will stain the carpet. Where I will learn how to line up the letters in my name and how to keep a friend and how to lose one. Here a teacher will praise me for the first time, and here I will shrink for the first time under a teacher’s disappointment. I will learn how to be a good student, a tidy person with tidy feelings that do not leak out in embarrassing floods like Bobby Dutton’s accident. I untie the balloon and grasp its woolly string, letting it guide me into this sunny, strange place where my mother will leave me. But after a moment, I forget. I reach to pick a pencil from a pretty yellow pile, and let the balloon go, watching as it bounces against the ceiling and pops. It pops, and every head turns to watch me retrieve the sad, limp string from the floor, their own balloons held fast, held faster. I stand wishing they would all break free, that the blue, the orange, the purple, and the green would float and rise and pop, pop, pop. Then a girl with uneven braids and steady brown eyes, a girl who feels my loss as surely as if it had nested in her own heart, steps forward and holds hers out to me. “We’ll share it,” she says, and she lets me hold the string, my fingers fisted beneath hers. I do not smile, only look up at her balloon, as plump and white as a star, and grasp it tightly, certain that I won’t let go this time, certain that this bright bubble promises something joyful.

Tree Hugger

Corinne Zibell | photography

los arbustos (top) en el vecindario

(bottom)

Kristen Viera | photography

The Nose Knows

Huma Hashmi | stoneware clay and glaze

Sansepolcro

by Olivia Slack

erves shook me to my core in the days before I left to spend three months away from everything I’d ever known. How would these months change me? The unknown scared me more than I admitted. Now from my bedroom window in little, happy Sansepolcro, I can see the tiled roofs, my eyes hopscotching across them to the distant mountains. Am I already different? September seems so long ago, and so does North Carolina. At night we do passeggiata, and we have nowhere to be except here and now. The chill of the evening air hits our tongues along with our gelato until we’re shivering and run back up the back steps of the palazzo to look out our windows again. By the time November comes, I can almost imagine that I’m an entirely different person from the one that left the airport. It turns out language barriers are sometimes beneficial— it’s easy to grow unburdened by others’ expectations when you can’t even understand what the people around you expect. Sometimes in the afternoons the sky turns from azure to silver. These times when it rains, we leave the windows open so that we can hear the pitter-patter of the droplets on the tiles and the rush of the sky opening up just as my heart has to Sansepolcro, and to myself in a way that it never had before.

Mrs. Eaves Hotel

Leah Jensen | digital media

0 Peppermint and Cloves by M. Christopher

t always starts with the same dream. Blinding strobe lights and the foul stench of sweat throw me off balance. A black silhouette knocks into my side, causing the heel of my boot to squeak against the sticky floor. As I regain balance, a cold splash of my overpriced Bombay Collins falls from the lip of the glass, and I curse. I grip the glass tighter, determined not to waste the money I was supposed to use on groceries. The cool condensation glides down my fingers and reminds me to try to breathe despite the chaos surrounding me. A flash from a strobe light blinds me, etching black spots on my inner eyelids. I try to blink the spots away. The drunken conscience in the back of my mind tells me to find Erica’s contagious laugh or catch a waft of Bianca’s migraine-inducing perfume. To my misfortune, I’m surrounded only by drunken wails and the odor of alcohol lingering on strangers’ breath. A faceless figure then grabs my wrist and pulls me toward them. My heart beats faster as the soft musk of peppermint falls around me. Then I wake up. I immediately recognize my popcorn-textured ceiling, and my eyes try to focus on each unique bump highlighted by the dim lamp. I squeeze the muscles in my forearm, preparing them to lift my hand and wipe away the thin layer of eye mucus that has crusted along my lower lash line. But even as I feel my muscles contract under my goosebumped skin, my arm stays motionless. My body tenses. My breath deepens. All I want to do is pull the faux fur blanket over my face and shield myself from monsters like I used to as a child. But I remain motionless. Defenseless. A corpse laid out on a steel slab with only a panicked heartbeat to remind me that I’m still alive. I can tell that my arms and legs are spread out, I can feel my fingertips against my bedsheet’s scratchy cotton, but I am unable to grasp the cheap material. Suddenly, the sounds around me come to an abrupt stop and my breath halts. My marble clock stops ticking, sirens fade into the night, even my own breath becomes silent. I close my eyes, begging for the sounds to return. The first few times this happened, I mistook the silence as peace, a still peace that would give me the freedom to fall back asleep. However, I quickly learned that horror lurks in that kind of silence. My body jolts at the sound of a wood door slamming shut, and my small slice of freedom is replaced by a shot of adrenaline. I squeeze my eyes tighter together, trying to ignore the mild pain that forms when the skin around my eyes creases. I tell myself that all of this isn’t real, and that I can wake myself up at any moment. But I don’t. I never do.

My heart slams to the back of my rib cage when the thick sugary scent of peppermint and artificial eucalyptus envelopes me. It’s the same sickly sweet scent as the peppermint gum that Adam always used to pop into his mouth before we studied for our vocab quizzes. As we laid out all of our vocab lists and scribbled on our half-assed flashcards with a red crayon, I always wondered if the peppermint tasted as dreamy as it smelled. That fantasy was crushed after Adam convinced me to go out for a drink after our midterm. I woke up confused and alone with only the faint taste of peppermint on my chapped lips and bright red bruises forming around my wrist. I now exclusively chew pink bubblegum. A gross clammy breath then bounces off my cheek. I let out a small cry, knowing that my bubblegum shield will never protect me from the chilling sting of peppermint. An invisible weight drops onto my chest, pinning me onto the springy mattress. It’s a pressure that feels as if it could snap my ribs in half like a flimsy wishbone at Thanksgiving. It is only when I stop resisting that the pressure disappears. Some nights it takes minutes, others it takes hours. Eventually, the clock starts ticking and the weight on my chest lifts, but my eyes remain open. The fear of my own subconscious makes sleep repulsive to me. I numbly lie awake as sunlight chases the darkness away and begins to stretch along my eggshell-painted walls. Through the annoying chirp of birds, the sound of my roommate’s cereal falling into a ceramic bowl, and the lingering scent of peppermint, I tell myself that nothing happened.

“Isn’t this sick?” James’ smile widens as if he has discovered the ruins of an ancient civilization. “It’s just a staircase.” And that’s exactly what it is: a wooden staircase in the middle of the forest. When James told me he had found something amazing, this wasn’t what I imagined. However, after sitting through two classes— Spanish and calculus, which are both foreign languages to me—I’d take any form of entertainment I could get. The stairs were too old to belong in a suburban home, but they were too intact to have stood alone in nature for so long without deteriorating. Plus, they didn’t connect to anything. The top was just a one-way ticket to a twisted ankle. While I wasn’t a Home Depot dad, the wood reminded me of the picnic benches where James and I used to trade rocks and snacks during recess. It was the kind of wood that scraped and pricked at my pale flesh when I still wore flowing dresses and baggy shorts.

0 “But it’s a staircase in the middle of the woods!” James’ giant frame leans over me like a parent trying and failing to communicate something important to a child. “So?” His warm brown eyes widen behind his shaggy bangs. Sometimes, I found myself looking into James’ eyes a little longer than I should. When he was a child, a small piece of metal was flung into his right eye, causing his pupil to permanently dilate. He reacted to his injury as if he was Frankenstein’s monster 2.0 and hid his eye for a whole year behind a felt eye patch that he got from a cheap pirate costume. But to me, his eyes were hypnotizing. His blown-up pupil made his right eye wide so that it looked as though it belonged to a mysterious psychic who could see into the future, while his left eye appeared brighter as the sunlight reflected the particles of gold captured in his iris. It wasn’t until I told him he looked like my secret celebrity crush, David Bowie, that he threw the eyepatch in the trash. He had always dreamt of becoming a rockstar. “So? Haven’t you seen the Reddit post about the search and rescue guy?” James says, waking me from my daydream. “No. Unlike you, I have responsibilities and can’t spend every second of the day on Reddit.” He places his hand over his chest and stumbles forward as if I have just jammed a knife into his back in order to save the Roman Republic. “So Julius, what’s the deal with the staircase?” I shuffle closer to him, convincing myself that I will catch hypothermia from the cool October wind if I’m not near him. “Well, some guy posted that he works with a search and rescue team in the national parks. Apparently, they always run across staircases like these in the woods. Weird shit is supposed to happen when you go near them.” I never believed in any of James’ conspiracy-crystalhealing-spiritual shit. However, for whatever reason, a magnet in my stomach anchored me to the ground, freezing me in my tracks. “So your first thought was to find one and drag me along?” I chuckle at him as he gapes at me. “No, it’s only if you get on the stairs and disrespect them and stuff.” Even after knowing James for most of my life, I still get surprised at some things that come out of his mouth. “And what happens if you disrespect them?” “Stories vary. Some people lose track of time, others see weird stuff, but most just get a strange feeling, like a pit in their stomach.” Maybe some of his mumbo-jumbo isn’t that crazy. “So you’re saying that the stairs are dangerous?” I crane my neck up at him. From one glance into his bright eyes, I know that all he wants to do is grab the splinter-infested rail and pull himself to the top. “Yes.” His left pupil dilates.

“Then why are you going near them?” I ask just before his thrifted leather boot pins down the brown leaves with a satisfying crunch. “You aren’t curious?” He looks back and smirks, and my weight shifts to the front of my feet as if the butterflies in my stomach are preparing to take flight. “Not really,” I lie. “Oh come on.” He tilts his greasy mop of hair toward the staircase. “No, I’ll stay here and spot you like we used to do in gym class.” “I’m not doing this alone.” He extends his lanky arm and holds out his large hand. I could take it. I want to take it. I want to interlock my numb fingers with his boney ones. I want him to rub his thumb over the part of my skin where my pointer finger and thumb meet once he realizes how cold I am. I want him to chuckle at the pink scar on the side of my pinky from a nasty paper-cut incident I had in the sixth grade. But my heels sink into the earth’s dry soil, and the pit in my stomach tells me that I can’t go with him. I convince myself that it is for the better and that my hands are too dry to hold hands this time of year. “Yes, you are. You’ll be fine without me.” I cross my arms, hiding my hands in the soft fabric of my sweatshirt. “Come on, you used to love stuff like this.” He reaches back and places his hand on my elbow. A flash of light. The scent of peppermint. A rough hand grabbing my wrist. “I said no!” Shit. That was louder than I intended. He quickly drops his hand and stuffs it in his pocket. I know from his sporadic eye movement and his furrowing eyebrows that he wants to ask me what’s wrong. But from the way he huffs and shuffles past me, I can tell he knows he won’t get a truthful answer. “Whatever, let’s just leave then,” he snaps. He doesn’t playfully brush against my shoulder when he passes the way that he normally does. My eyes follow him as he dodges branches and bushes until he reaches his beat-up tan pickup truck. As I hear the truck’s engine start and its rev fade into the smooth sound of the wind and the faint rustle of falling leaves, I realize that I am alone again, stranded in a sea of bright reds, yellows, oranges, and browns. As the weight of regret in my throat drops to the pit in my stomach, I turn to leave these damn woods. “Fuck you,” I mutter to the stairs. I don’t care if I’m disrespecting them.

I wish that I would’ve stayed with James until our conversation faded, until our awkward pauses became a blissful silence, until we could watch our breath dance across the purple sky. But my sudden outburst leaves me cranking up the heat and sad indie music in my car alone.

0 That’s how I find myself in my apartment as well. At first, choosing a roommate who was constantly out with her boyfriend felt like a smart decision. It meant that I could blast music from my guilty pleasure Spotify playlist, accidentally smudge paint on the floor and wipe it up without getting yelled at, and cook intricate dishes without being interrupted after binge-watching Bon Appetit videos. But now, being alone means that I am forced to face my peppermint-and-eucalyptus-filled nightmares. I stand in front of my dimly lit microwave, my eyes watching my leftover chicken and broccoli slowly rotate. During my temporary fascination with the mechanics of microwaves, my phone buzzes on the dirty countertop, causing me to jump. My heart swells at the thought that it was maybe James wanting to check on me. My smile fades when I see Erica’s name pop up on my screen. I quickly pick up the phone and type out my staged “sorry, not tonight, I don’t feel well” text. I don’t have to look at her text before hitting send. Erica only reaches out when she wants to go out, and I refuse to put myself in that situation again. Lately, I find myself procrastinating sleep to avoid the torment of my imagination. I have learned that this can be achieved by re-reading the dusty history books in my desk, blasting music through my broken headphones, and lying upside-down in bed, re-watching episodes of The Office. It is only when my eyelids begin to droop and my breath slows that my body gives up fighting. The strobe lights and smell of sweat wake me up tonight. I close my eyes and repeat, “It’s not real. It’s not real.” But when the silence screams in my ears, my shaking hands try and fail to grip the sheets. Somewhere past the paralyzing fear, I know that I don’t have to confront my nightmares alone. I know if I told James, he’d show up with monster-repellant juice in a plastic spray bottle and would hold my hand as we figured out an attack plan. I know his blood would boil if someone even whispered Adam’s name. I know that he would wrap his oversized coat around me to shield me from the scent of peppermint during the holidays. James would fight for me. But I can’t ask him to do that.

“I saw a ghost last night.” James huddles over his coffee, using the heat rising from the flimsy cup as an alternative to the mittens he lost a few months ago. I hum in response while I pick at the dead skin around my nails. I refuse to look into his eyes, partially because I’m still embarrassed by my outburst yesterday and partially because if he sees the gray bags under my eyes, he will know that I am not okay. “I think it was from the bad energy that I experienced yesterday,” he teases. I feel his smirk warp into a smile. He knows that my anxiety won’t let me apologize. I hate that he knows so much about me.

“Sorry about that. I don’t know what came over me.” My voice is soft as I run out of dead skin to pick at. I know I need to change the subject before he can use the detective skills he picked up from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to analyze my outburst any further. “So tell me about this ghost.” I lean my head against the window, focusing on watching strangers who walk by. The cold glass against my boiling-hot cheek reminds me how guilty I still feel. “Well, I was on my phone and lying in bed when the door kinda moved,” he explains, drumming his fingers against the smooth oak coffee table. “That’s all?” I snort, my smile perking up a little when I see a golden retriever and its owner prance past our hole-in-the-wall café. “The door moved by itself,” he whispers. He leans forward and widens his eyes, hoping to get a reaction out of me. “So your paranormal experience is just a cold draft.” I laugh and beam up at him, accidentally locking my sleepdeprived eyes with his warm caramel ones. Dammit. “You look like shit.” From the way his eyes widen and his mouth gapes, I know he instantly regrets his phrasing. But he is right. From the gray bags anchored under my eyes to the corpse-like purplish tint in my skin, I don’t look like myself. “Gee, thanks,” I reply. “You okay?” He leans toward me and pushes his coffee to the side of the table. “I’m fine. I just didn’t sleep well last night.” Well, it isn’t a lie. “No, this has been going on for a while now.” His eyes scan mine, watching to see if my reaction will confirm his theory. Luckily, my father taught me how to master a good poker face. “What? Me looking like shit?” “You know what I mean.” He presses his face into his palm, squishing his cheek. I tell myself to spit out the most convincing lie I can come up with. But James has the ability to see past all of my lies. He often jokes that his blown-up pupil gives him x-ray vision to see past my bullshit. “You know the answer to that question. Otherwise you wouldn’t have asked.” I look down. My eyes feel heavy as they begin to water. I want to wipe my tears away with the sleeve of my father’s old college sweatshirt that I pulled on when I woke up, but I don’t want James to see me this way. I look at my untouched, lukewarm coffee and stir it with my spoon. “True, but I want to hear it from you.” He pauses before adding, “You know you can tell me anything.” A small tear escapes from the corner of my right eye and crawls down my cheek. I untuck the hair behind my ear as my last defense mechanism to shield myself from him.

0 “I know that. But what if I’m not ready to tell you?” I take a sharp breath, praying the tear will somehow reabsorb into my skin before it drops onto the table. “Then I’ll wait until you’re ready.” He leans closer to me and calmly whispers, “You’re the one who got me through my eye deformity. It’s the least I can do.” He unravels the bunched-up paper napkin that he’d used for his oatmeal muffin and hands it to me. He knows I won’t use it due to my mild phobia of germs, but he’s trying to make me smile. “You don’t have an eye deformity. Plus, I don’t think your healing crystals will help me right now.” I chuckle, taking the thin napkin from him and holding it in my fist. “Well, what about some music then? We can go try to find the Led Zeppelin album you’ve been looking for.” He scoots his chair back, swiftly stands up, and reaches to grab his patched jean jacket. “Actually, I think I need some excitement to wake me up. What about we try to get stuck in a parallel universe at the top of those stairs?” I firmly place my beanie on my head like a soldier preparing for battle. “Sounds like an adventure.” He laughs and holds out his hand to my eye level. I look up at him with a confused expression. “You know I don’t have mittens, and it’s getting pretty cold outside,” he begs, further extending his hand. I hesitantly place my hand in his as he pulls me up from my chair. Once I am standing, I notice that our awkward height difference isn’t ideal for hand-holding, but James doesn’t seem to mind. He curiously raises my hand to his eye level and inspects my right pinky. “That’s a pretty gnarly scar you have there.” He seems proud of his observation. “Shut up.” I nudge his side, mad at myself for never noticing that he smells of spicy cloves and sweet orange flowers. “Ready?” His left pupil dilates. “Yes,” I say, and I mean it. One day I’ll be able to sip a Bombay Collins and smile at its puckering sweetness. I’ll be able to laugh along with Erica. I’ll be able to tell my sleep paralysis to kindly “fuck off.” I’ll be able to dance around my apartment to my longtime love, David Bowie, and fill a blank canvas up with bright swirls. I’ll be able to understand my roommate’s relationship issues while offering her a fresh batch of pumpkin cookies. One day I’ll tell James about Adam, and I’ll be prepared to fight my peppermint and eucalyptus nightmares. But right now I want to disrespect a creepy staircase with my scrawny best friend because cloves are so much warmer than peppermint.

Nightmares

Chasity Murphy | acrylic and oil on canvas

Casually Drowning Grey Weidman | photography

Silence Ends

by Virginia Ewing Hudson

know there were two times. I remember realizing this while talking with a friend in the park. The OBGYN stood too close beside the table examining my breasts, his growing erection pressed against my bare arm through his pants and white coat, its urgent, tensile texture unmistakable. I willed myself still, staring at the ceiling, pretending it away, embarrassed and furious, betrayed by the nurse who left the room. But there was another time, remembered just long enough to note its existence, a second incident dredged up from someplace deep. When I tried to speak this occurrence aloud, it vanished. I remember myself remembering, though, and wonder what else I’ve lost.

No Uterus No Opinion Bailey Birtchet | digital media

Light

by Caroline Koser

was afraid of my own thoughts for a time. Always a step-above, a stride-under, off to the side, never quite right enough. I couldn’t stand myself. But now we have to be friends, and I’m learning things about myself that I forgot existed. Things about the world that I haven’t believed since I was a child. I forgot the simple pleasures provided by the embrace of the mind, hand-in-hand with the body, to discover what the soul might find. I am afraid of many things, but we souls are learning to sand down the edges on the teeth of the world. When I ran from the world, I forgot things existed. If I try really hard, I can soften the gunshots in my head. I sweat so much from the heat of the earth that I can shake and pretend I am cold instead. I can pretend the exchanging of money between the big men is just leaves in the wind, pretend I am worth more to the people who have not much to offer in passing but a smile, a blip of color in their passing days. Lives lost are just lights dimmed, only for new ones to arise at the end. We are so quick to forget them. I’m trying to make light of a world that I don’t really want to be in but love anyways. I’m trying to make light of the woman that is always afraid and I’m trying to believe that I’ll be okay.

Circle of Life Taylor Harris | fibers

Claystation Website Redesign McKennah Drury | digital media

Garden

Ana Ramirez | photography/digital imaging

Boil Me Alive

by Lilly R. Wood

Poetry Honorable Mention

was the frog in the pot Living in my thick clay bowl Believing it to be perfect for me Unaware of you moving me to the stove Unaware of you igniting the flame The water slowly started to simmer and I... I thought it a passing disturbance.

Accidentally, you flicked the fire too high too fast And out I jumped. Then I was frozen, The absence of hot water stunned me The world was so cold and empty Why was the air so cold? Trailing hot water, I landed; breaking bones, Blood seeping from the cracks of my skin And you scoffed at the mess As though it was entirely my fault Only then, amidst the cold and the cracks And the chasms of me, I saw the truth: You would’ve boiled me alive for your own amusement. And I’d have let you.

Fire Fish

Alanah Reid | digital media

0 Blisters

by Krista Wiese 1st Place Prose

found the boots at a thrift store. It was my favorite thrift store, the one between the antique shop and bookstore where I used to spend a lot of time. It was small, dark, and smelled like lemons, but I always found the most charming items in it—my favorite purple sweater, the little bird figurine that I kept perched on my bookshelf, those bright orange earrings that looked like something out of a fantasy novel. And it was where I found the boots. It was my boyfriend, Owen, who found them, actually. We were browsing the boxes of shoes together—me carefully sifting through the box, making sure I didn’t miss a single pair, Owen just sort of throwing shoes around, trying to make it look like he wasn’t miserable. It wasn’t that Owen didn’t like shopping—he actually had a better sense of style than I did—it was that he didn’t particularly care for thrift stores. They made him feel poor, and he hated how everything felt dusty. He thought thrift stores required too much time to look through, so we didn’t go thrifting very often. On this day in particular, I had convinced Owen to step inside the store by promising we would spend only ten minutes there. I pulled out a pair of sparkly sandals from the box. Even in the dim lighting, the warm gold of the shoes shimmered brilliantly. I smiled and set them down beside the box. I could feel Owen’s eyes on me, so I glanced at him. “Are you going to get those?” he asked me, his left eyebrow raised just the slightest bit. “Yeah, I kind of like them. Do you?” I asked, already knowing how he would respond. “Not particularly,” he said with a small smirk. “Aren’t they a little much?” “I guess so,” I replied softly, returning to the box of shoes. A moment later, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Owen pull a pair of boots out of the box that he had been looking through. They were made of a reddish-black leather and had thick black soles. They were something a cool person would wear—someone who knew a lot about music, spoke in a hoarse voice, and had a tattoo of a withered rose on their ribcage. I happened to have a tattoo of a kitten on my wrist. “Check these out, Jenny,” Owen said, setting the boots down in front of me. The rubber soles clunked heavily against the dingy carpet of the thrift store. “These are pretty fucking cool.” I nodded and started to turn back to my box of shoes. “You should get them,” he said. “They’re your size.”

I looked back at him. “You think I could pull these off?” “Yeah, of course,” he replied, standing up to go. Maybe Owen was right. Maybe I could be the kind of person who wore edgy black boots like these. I brought the boots to the counter and paid for them.

It was a challenge the next day to find an outfit in my closet that would match the boots. I owned mostly pastel colors—light purples, pale yellows, soft pinks. I also owned a lot of skirts and dresses, the schoolgirl kind, usually plaid with buttons and a collar. I felt very put-together and in control of my life when I wore something with buttons and a collar. I ended up finding an old pair of grey jeans at the very bottom of my nearly empty pants drawer and a black turtleneck in my closet that I usually wore underneath dresses. I sat down on my bedroom floor and tugged the boots on. They weighed down my feet as though the soles were made of metal, and when I stood up, the thick, unworn leather dug into the backs of my ankles. In the mirror, my legs looked like twigs sprouting from the clunky boots, but somehow I looked strong, unapproachable, and cool. I wanted to smile at my reflection, but this was not an outfit for someone with a wide smile and dimples, so instead I attempted a smirk, then stepped away from the mirror.

We met Owen’s friends at a coffee shop—Peggy with the tongue piercing, Jake with the fiery red hair and temper, Willow with the purple hair and dangerously sharp jawline. I suppose they were my friends, too. We hung out together all the time, attended concerts together, explored together, took trendy friend photos on top of skyscrapers together. But I don’t think they’d be my friends if I weren’t Owen’s girlfriend. They had gone to the same school as me my whole life, but hadn’t said a word to me until last year, junior year, when Owen asked me out. Regardless of their reasons, however, they were my friends, and I did my best to like them. Owen and I stepped into the coffee shop, out of the cold, gray weather that blanketed D.C. in the wintertime. Peggy, Jake, and Willow already had a table for us, back in the darkest corner of the coffee shop. Willow had her feet up on the table. She waved when she spotted us. I took a deep breath, filling my throat with burnt coffee-flavored air.

0 “I ordered your coffee,” Willow said to Owen, gesturing with her ring-adorned fingers towards a steaming mug, full to the brim with coffee the color of damp soil. “I wasn’t sure what you wanted, so I didn’t order anything for you,” she said to me. “That’s totally fine,” I said, and then I thanked her for some reason. I went to the counter and ordered a hot chocolate. By the time I got back to the table, Owen’s friends were standing to go. “Jake heard there’s an art fair going on a few blocks away,” Owen explained. “We figured we’d check it out.” “Sounds good,” I said, forcing a smile. As we headed out of the coffee shop, I felt someone looking at me. I glanced behind me and met Willow’s piercing gaze. “You look different,” she said, scanning me with her emerald eyes. “New shoes,” I replied. She nodded slowly and gave her customary frown of approval. “They’re cool.” “Thank you,” I said and smiled awkwardly down at my feet.

The art show was more than a few blocks away. After ten minutes of walking, the cold had soaked through my sweater like ice water, and my ankles had started to sting where the stiff leather of my boots rubbed my skin. The group seemed to walk faster and faster, but maybe I was just in slow motion. I held onto Owen’s arm and his warmth. He’d always emanated a mysterious warmth. He even smelled warm— like a campfire or an old sweater. I clung to his arm and breathed in his comforting smell as we walked. He smiled down at me, and I smiled back, and for a second, I didn’t mind the cold or the long walk. Owen seemed happy, and that made me happy. But by the time we made it to the art show, I was clenching my jaw to distract myself from the pain of the blisters my boots had created. It was a hot pain, and I could feel my socks starting to cling to the backs of my ankles where I knew there would be blood. I didn’t bother complaining, as there was nothing that could be done. The art show itself was cool. Huge white tents filled with artwork lined the street. Artists sat inside on wooden stools, ready to tell us about their inspirations and their processes and their passions. There were paintings and photographs and pottery and jewelry. Color was everywhere, chasing away the gray of the afternoon. Owen and his friends and I had this in common—a love of art. We were art appreciators of different sorts, however. I could have stood and listened to the artists talking about their artwork for hours. I would have liked to pause at every

painting, to let the emotions of it rush through me, wonder about its meaning, and then move on to the next one. It was the nature paintings that brought me the most joy, the ones full of blues and greens, calm swirling waters and beautifully natural wildlife. Not Owen and his friends, though. They were always in motion, darting from one tent to the next like a flock of crows, arguing over prices with the artists, pushing their way through crowds without a second thought. They spent the most time in this one tent full of the strangest photographs. The photographer had brought various inanimate objects to life in his pictures. To me, all the objects seemed so sad. “I like this one,” Owen said, pausing in front of a photo of a pear. The pear looked almost alive, its nose pointed in the air and head cocked to the side as if searching for something. But the pear was on an empty table, nothing to be found but shadows. Willow scrunched her pointed face thoughtfully. She stepped closer to the photo and to Owen. “I like it too,” she concluded. “I don’t,” I said from behind them. They didn’t hear me.

After an hour, Peggy declared that she was bored. “Let’s go skate,” she said, and my stomach sank. The thought of following them around for another few hours, jogging to keep up in my heavy boots, blisters growing wider on my ankles, and trying and failing to balance on their skateboards over and over again made me want to sit down on the sidewalk and throw a tantrum like a toddler. I glanced at Owen with raised eyebrows, hoping he would pick up on my panic. He didn’t. “For sure,” he said. “Let’s go.” Normally I would stay quiet and let events proceed however fate saw fit, but not today, not with the nagging pain accompanying every step. “I have a lot of homework to do. Can we stop by my house first?” I asked Owen. Owen’s friends stared at him, and I detected the slightest pinch of annoyance between Owen’s eyebrows. “Can’t it wait a little longer?” he said. In my periphery, I think Jake smirked, but when I glanced towards him, his face was straight, brown eyes dead as always. A prickly emotion crawled up my throat, an unfamiliar and unwelcome one. I tried to swallow it down the way I always did, but today, it was too strong. “Actually my homework can wait,” I said. “But I can’t. You said we’d only be out for an hour. I want to go home.” My words were sharp. I wasn’t used to using words as weapons, and for a second, I felt strong. Then Owen’s face fell. “I thought you were having fun,” he said, his voice soft. The anger rushed out of me in a sliver

0 of a second. Quickly, I gathered back my enthusiasm and patience and energy like spilled beads of a necklace. “Of course I’m having fun,” I exclaimed, taking Owen’s hand. “I just meant that I’m getting pretty tired. Sorry.” Owen stared at me for a second and then agreed to walk me home. I apologized profusely the entire way back. I hated myself for being such a killjoy. I wasn’t usually like this. As a kid, my mom told me that in order to have good friends, I had to be a good friend, and that’s a lesson I’ve applied to every relationship in my life since then. It used to work for me. I had this friend my freshman year of high school who hated painting, but when she’d come over to my house and find me sitting at my kitchen table surrounded by easels, she’d join me without a complaint. Her paintings were always awful—her trees somehow looked like people, and her people always resembled trees, but she never complained. This was because every Wednesday after school, I’d come to her Chinese club meetings even though I was the only one who didn’t speak Chinese or have the slightest bit of interest in learning. I remember having lots of friendships like that in middle school and my freshman year of high school, and I think it was because I was a good friend to people. I was not the kind of person who forced others to accommodate my every whimsy, who ruined others’ fun because I wasn’t having fun. Something was wrong with me today, and I blamed the boots.

I wasn’t surprised when I got back home and took the boots off to see that the backs of my socks were stained a brownish red. I peeled the socks off, wincing when they clung to my torn skin. The blisters covered my heels entirely. The edges of the broken skin peeled upward, ragged and white. The new skin underneath shone bright pink. Exposed to the open air, my ankles throbbed. I sprayed Neosporin on the blisters, and the stinging of the alcohol brought tears to my eyes. The tears didn’t stop for another hour.

It was a week before I hung out with Owen again. For weeks he had been begging me to come with him to Kate Anthony’s New Year’s Eve party. I quite honestly forgot that I had agreed until Owen showed up on my doorstep on New Year’s Eve dressed in his nice black jeans and a burgundy suit jacket. I was wearing stained joggers and a tank top. His blue eyes filled with disappointment. “You’re not ready,” he said. “I can’t figure out what to wear,” I lied. Other boys would probably shrug and say it didn’t matter what I wore, but not Owen. He pushed his curly brown hair out of his face. “I can help.” “Sure,” I replied, leading him up the stairs to my bedroom. I didn’t bother to warn him that my mom was

asleep. She always was, ever since my dad left. And that was three years ago. She worked a short shift at a daycare every morning but crawled into bed as soon as she got home. My mom had a therapist visit the house for a few months after the divorce, and one time I overheard her explaining to the therapist her reasons for sleeping so much. “I did everything I could to convince him to stay, but he left anyway,” she had said. “I failed and now I’m too tired to try anything else, so it makes sense just to sleep.”After hearing my mom say this, I remember wanting to run downstairs and argue with her, but I didn’t know how to argue it, so instead I let her sleep. Once in my room, I opened my closet for Owen. He did a double take. “How many of these dresses do you own?” he asked, pinching the fabric of one of my brown collared dresses. “A lot.” I giggled. “Haven’t you noticed?” “I certainly have,” he replied. The sarcasm cut just a little bit, but I brushed it away like a piece of lint clinging to my sweater. “There are other dresses in there. You just have to dig around,” I said, and he did. After a second he pulled out a black dress. The top was sequined and the bottom was lace. It looked like it would be tight and short. I didn’t recognize it. “How about this one?” he asked. I frowned at it. “I don’t know if it’ll fit. I don’t remember buying that dress.” “Well, try it on,” Owen replied. I sighed. “Fine.” I took the dress from his hands and made him turn around so I could change. I slipped my sweatpants off and pulled the dress over my head. With much tugging, I finally got the scratchy fabric to slide over my stomach and hips. I stepped towards the mirror and grimaced at my reflection. Staring back at me was a rather sleazy and very uncomfortable looking version of myself. I looked like I would either sleep with everyone at the party or boil them all in a giant cauldron of green stew. I sighed and gave up trying to zip the dress. “Let me help you,” Owen said. His fingers brushed my back, giving me chills. Once the zipper was up, he leaned forward and whispered in my ear, “You look hot.” My breath caught in my throat. “Thank you,” I said softly, looking back at the mirror. My reflection looked right standing beside the tall boy with the sharp jawline and sharper gaze. The couple looked like they belonged together. I couldn’t stop my smile. “I like it,” I said. Owen pretended not to be surprised. “Good,” he replied. “It’ll be cold, though. You should wear a jacket and boots.” I rummaged around in my closet for a jacket. “Okay,” I said distractedly. “Which boots?” “I like those ones.”

0 I glanced behind me. Owen gestured at the black leather boots lying tipped over on my bedroom floor where I had pried them off a week ago. I stared at them. “Okay,” I said, ignoring the part of me that screamed no. My blisters had turned to scabs by now and my skin wouldn’t be as tender, I figured. I could just wear thick socks.

The party was uneventful at first. I followed Owen around the house, said hello to his friends. I knew their faces from my school, but nothing more than that. My friends were the type to spend New Year’s Eve watching television from their couches while drinking sparkling grape juice from wine glasses they found at the thrift store. At some point, Owen ended up with a red solo cup full of sparkling beige liquid. He didn’t offer me any, and I didn’t ask him what it was. Willow showed up eventually, followed by Peggy and then Jake. They acquired their own plastic red cups and then came and stood beside us in the corner of the living room. The room was filling up with people, the sky outside darkening to a rusty orange, and the music increasing in volume. Everywhere there were girls in short dresses, bare legs and shoulders gleaming in the dim lighting. I wondered how they weren’t all freezing. Every time the front door opened, a puff of cold air floated in, drifting to where we stood in the corner. It tickled my bare skin. I tugged my dress down. “So you found a use for the dress after all.” I turned to my left where Willow stood, leaning against the wall in a purple, shimmery dress that was stretched tight across her thin body. “What?” I asked, unsure if I had heard her correctly. “That’s the dress, right?” she said. “The one I made you get when we went shopping last year?” Then I remembered where the dress had come from and how a dress so different from my others had ended up in my closet. Owen and his friends and I had gone shopping last year after Christmas. Willow saw this dress on a mannequin and decided it would be perfect for me. When they didn’t have my size on the clothing rack, she had gone to the effort of wrestling it off the mannequin, even knocking its head off in the process. I felt too guilty to say no when she told me to buy it, so I spent the majority of my Christmas money on the dress. I don’t know how I had forgotten all of that, but now that I remembered, I felt even more uncomfortable in the dress. I was wearing a skin that wasn’t mine, and it didn’t quite fit. Suddenly, the room seemed colder. I glanced at Owen. He was talking to Jake and Willow, but I interrupted. “I’m cold,” I said. Owen seemed startled when I spoke, as if he had forgotten that I was there. “Could I borrow your jacket?” I asked.

“Of course,” he said, his deep voice nearly swallowed by the pounding of the music. He took off his jacket and helped me put it on. Then he pulled me closer to him and draped his arm across my shoulders, and for a second, I felt as though I fit. I fit in that space beneath Owen’s arm, and I fit in the room, as loud and crowded as it was. I started to relax, to remember how to breathe. I noticed for the first time the giant clock projected on the ceiling, counting down to midnight, and I thought of the kiss that would come when midnight arrived. I had always wanted a kiss at midnight to mark the new year. It would be romantic, I thought, and magical. I had a soft spot for fairytale moments. Suddenly Owen pulled away. “I’m tired of standing here. Let’s do something,” he said. “Let’s dance,” Willow declared. Our group moved away from the wall like a herd of animals. I followed. They pushed through groups of people, ignoring the icy glares, the drunk glares, the confused glares, and claimed their space at the center of the living room. They began to dance immediately, spinning, jumping, twisting around as if their bodies were possessed with a magical energy summoned by the approach of midnight on New Year’s Eve. I tried to feel the same energy, but only a shimmering tail of it seemed to reach me. I caught that tail of energy between my fingertips and held on, forcing myself to jump. My boots were heavy, and I landed with a hard thud every time. The thud was as loud as thunder to me, but no one else seemed to notice. I was breathless after a few minutes, but still I jumped and shook my shoulders and hips, mirroring the people around me. My feet began to throb and then ache, but still I jumped. With every movement, the stiff leather rubbed through my two layers of socks, and fireworks of pain exploded across the backs of my ankles. I could feel my socks becoming warm with blood again. Desperately, I tried to make eye contact with Owen, hoping he’d see the pain coloring my face red, but Owen was in that other world with everyone else where exhaustion and pain didn’t exist, and neither did I. It seemed like a fun world, and I wanted to join it badly, but at 11:50, I gave up. I danced one last song, biting my lip to keep from crying out as the leather rubbed the rawness of my skin, and then I stood still. At last, Owen noticed. He stopped dancing. “Are you okay?” he asked, his face twisted with concern, or maybe it was annoyance. I couldn’t tell anymore. “My feet hurt,” I said. “I’m going to take a break.” I turned to go. I knew he’d follow me. He had to. It was almost midnight. But then Willow’s shrill voice broke through the music. “Keep dancing—it’s almost midnight!” she yelled. She grabbed one of Owen’s hands and one of mine and started to spin us. Owen laughed. The noise echoed in my

0 head, and for a brief second, anger coursed through me. I ripped my hand away from Willow’s cold grasp. “I have to go,” I said and started to push my way towards the kitchen. “Come back soon,” Owen shouted, and my heart sank down to my feet as if it was made of the same heavy material as the soles of my boots were. His words were a little jumbled, as if he was perhaps drunk, but at that moment it didn’t matter to me whether he had an excuse or not. I turned away from the kitchen and towards the front door. I limped my way through the living room, past the band thrashing away at their instruments, past the boy sloppily kissing his girlfriend’s neck, past the group of drunk people spinning crookedly on the dance floor, and away from Owen with his glittering blue eyes and charming smile directed at his friends who would never be my friends, and away from Willow, a girl dancing with Owen like I never would. I walked past them, stepped out of the house, and didn’t look back.

It was cold outside—a numbing, gentle kind of cold. Clouds hovered in the night sky as though waiting to snow, but for now, the air was still. I sat down on the brick steps of the front porch and breathed. It had been a while. Then I leaned over and started to unlace my boots. I wished I wasn’t crying as I did so. I wished it was anger that fueled me. I wished I had ripped off the boots, oblivious to the pain, and thrown them at the door. But instead, I cried as I unlaced the boots and carefully pulled them off my feet. I set the boots on the step beside me, along with my bloodstained socks, and then I sat for a long time. Eventually, the cold began to numb my fingers and then my toes. I waited for the cold to numb the pain, but I guess there are some parts of a person that can’t be numbed. I ordered a taxi because my mother was probably asleep. It arrived at the same time that midnight did. The house filled with celebratory shouting as I walked barefoot to the taxi and stepped inside.

Nature Conservancy Website Redesign Delaney Rhodes | digital media

Untitled

Ana Ramirez | digital media Best in Show

Firework

Taylor Harris | yarn, wire, metal rod

Is It Still Freedom If I Don’t Feel Free? by Caroline Bell

t hink of birds: the spreading of their wings, their careless flight. I envy the birds. I spend my time trying not to love you, dusting off the shelves in my head where memories were placed. I whisper, “We were never going to work,” while my heart yells, “Just hold on for one more day.” I don’t have another day in me. I look at windows trying to find doors, getting lost in my own house when I try not to think of you. I envy the birds. I finally flew away from you— so why does it feel like my wings have been clipped?

Weeping Woman Chelsi Sherrell | digital media

Earth Embodied by Morgan Ellington

hen I think of you, I am reminded of the Earth. I am reminded of the trees who have seen my birth and will see my death. I am reminded of the wind that brushes my hair over my shoulder and the choir of robins singing in the world’s wake. You manifest the beauty of mortality, like a decaying corpse encouraging new growth. You are a sticky summer day where the leaves are a green you cannot paint. You are a pale winter where the forest is quiet and the life is lifeless, yet to be uncovered by a new dawn. You are autumn and spring, the seasons of healing and recovery. You are the thorns, the broken twigs, the fading leaf floating upon a still pond. You are a vase that’s cracking and chipping away, but I won’t replace you because you hold the daisies and tulips on my kitchen table perfectly fine.

Skin Mistakes

Katelynn Kilburg | clay with green patina

0 Foreign Objects by Kali Ranke

Prose Honorable Mention

t’s been three months since my mother died, and no one has touched her purse. We’ve all taken turns cleaning out her closet and going through her clothes, my sisters and I deciding what we wanted to keep. My dad would smell her clothes, telling us stories about each item she wore. The week my brother came up, he looked around, but he said he didn’t need anything. He said that it wasn’t his place to take her stuff. But no one has touched her purse. It feels like a foreign object to all of us, something that we’re forbidden to touch. The purse was hers and only hers. Even when she was here, we couldn’t go in it. It was her purse. And we haven’t talked about it either. It just sits in the living room, where my dad put it after claiming her things at the hospital. She died in a car accident—a hit and run on her way home. It had been pouring rain. The police officer said the driver had likely lost control and drifted into her lane, slamming into the side of her car, and causing her to spin out. Her car hit a tree, and the officer said she had probably died instantly. We never thought the crazy, sporadic woman that was Dorothy Jean Bishop would die in such a mundane way, especially not so soon. That’s what my mom’s sister said at the funeral. I couldn’t speak at all the first few weeks after she died, so I didn’t get to say anything, but everyone pretty much covered all the bases. “She was a beloved woman who will be missed by many in our community,” our pastor said, even though we hadn’t been to church in four years. “She was the best mom she knew how to be,” my older sister Louise said. “She loved so graciously and with everything she had,” my dad said with a smile, despite clearly fighting back tears. My other sister Nora, who is only twelve, didn’t say anything, and my brother Adam was holding Nora the whole time, so he didn’t get to say his piece either. And so the three of us sat quietly the entire time, accepting sympathy graciously. Dad and Louise were the talkers in the family, so they handled the stampede of Chatty Cathys that approached as soon as the funeral ended. But even Dad and Louise were pretty quiet that day. After the funeral, we all went home, and that’s when the quiet became unbearable. Normally, our mother would play jazz music throughout the house when she came home. The music was never blaring, just loud enough to be heard. She turned it on when we were doing homework at the kitchen table, while she and my dad cooked dinner, and even

when we were all in the living room at night watching a movie together. It was comforting white noise—a sign that our mother was home and not at work or anywhere else. But now it was quiet. Most of our family lives less than twenty minutes away, except Adam, who studies law at Florida State, but he didn’t fly back to school until the day after the funeral. So, it was just me, Nora, Louise, Dad, and Adam at the house. We ordered pizza because no one had it in them to make a meal. Then we ate in silence in the living room, right next to Mom’s purse.

For as long as I can remember, my mother carried around this huge black faux leather purse. It had silver detailing because gold was too raunchy for my mother. She carried everything in there: an extra eyebrow pencil for when she was running late to work and had to do her makeup in the car, M&M’s to snack on while waiting in the carpool line to pick up my sister from school, a massive wallet, two change purses, extra tampons and pads even though none of us use pads, a 2006 issue of Cosmo to read if she was ever waiting around somewhere, a mini lint roller, and a phone charger. Anything you could think of, she had in that purse. My mother lugged that purse around everywhere she went, and despite it being at least ten years old, it always looked brand new. She treated the purse as her most prized possession, the thing she was most proud of, despite having four real-life children. None of us could ever go into that purse though. If we ever needed money to go out with friends or medicine for a nauseating headache or for paralyzing period cramps, it was always: “Bring me my purse.” “Well, can’t I just grab it out— ” “No, just bring it to me.” With a big family, you share a lot of stuff. You share the bathroom with all three siblings at 7 a.m. when you’re all trying to get ready and the living room TV on the night that, coincidentally, all your favorite shows are on. You even “share” those leftovers from your favorite restaurant that you specifically told no one to touch. But my mother’s purse was hers. It was like the necklace Louise got for Christmas four years ago that she only takes off when she showers, or the stuffed pig Nora has had since she was two, or my journal; you just know to leave it alone. It was an unspoken

0 agreement we all had. And my mother was not sharing that purse.

It had been a little over a week since the funeral, and we were all starting to get back into the habit of things pretty quickly. No one really talked about her after the funeral, because no one knew how. It was too touchy for us because mom was always the sentimental one. She was the one who wrote all the birthday cards and called all the relatives. If any of us were ever fighting, she was the one who knew how to bring us together and resolve the conflict. For lack of better words, she was the glue that held us together. But once she was gone, we were left to pretend everything was normal. Adam flew back to Florida the day after her funeral, and I’ve talked to him twice in the past three months, which is what our normal is. Louise lives about a mile up the road, and she still calls every day and comes to have dinner every Sunday. She’s a school teacher at the elementary school the four of us had gone to, this being her second-year teaching. Nora and I had to go back to school as well, her being in the seventh grade, and me in the eleventh. It was almost December when Mom died, so we had exams coming up. Nora and I were both excused from them for obvious reasons, but Dad still wanted us to keep going to school. “Just because you miss out on these tests,” he said, “doesn’t mean you’ll get to miss out on the next ones. You need to be there and learn as much as you can. It’s important stuff, and you don’t need to sit around all day when you could be learning.” That’s what he would tell Nora and I any time we tried to object, even though he knew how pointless it was. He couldn’t tell us a single thing he learned in his high school statistics class, but our mother would have told us the same thing. He doesn’t say anything without thinking of how she would have said it.

One afternoon there was no one home, and my curiosity was getting the best of me. I walked from my room in the back of the hallway, cutting through the living room, and into the kitchen every few minutes just to get a glimpse of the purse, and each time I’d let myself linger longer and longer. It was sitting in the exact same position on the living room floor as it was three months ago: pressed against the navy sectional so no one could touch it in passing. But I was getting curious. Why couldn’t we look in it—not even my dad? Why were we so scared to deal with this? Why was touching her purse so hard? These questions swarmed in my head every time I walked past the purse. I decided to get some water and to try to stop thinking about it. But on my way to the kitchen, I hit the purse with the heel of my foot, and it fell over onto its side. I stopped

in my tracks and stared at the bag for a moment. There was my mother’s purse fallen over on the floor. The same purse she had my entire life. My dead mother’s purse. She was dead. For the first time in three months, I could say it. She’s dead. I said it out loud over and over, and then I started wailing as I clutched her cold leather purse to my chest. My mother was dead, and I finally felt every bit of it. I kept crying. I sat on the floor and cried for at least an hour until everyone got home. My dad rushed over and held me, repeatedly asking me what was wrong, but Louise already knew. She grabbed one of my hands, the purse still clutched in the other, and helped still my shaking. “It’s okay. She’s gone and that’s okay. It hurts, but we’ll be okay.” She kept saying that to me over and over. Eventually, I started saying it too, and that’s when I finally calmed down. My dad made me some tea, and we all sat in the living room quietly for a few minutes. Everyone was looking around, not knowing what to say. “Well what’s in it?” my dad said, nodding at the purse still in my hands. “I never looked inside of it,” I said quietly, barely loud enough to be heard. “Then let’s do that,” my dad replied. Our heads shot toward him, and we gawked at him, wondering if he had lost his mind. No one knew what to say to that. We all wanted to do it, but we knew we couldn’t. “What if she kept thousands of dollars in cash, and it’s just sitting in there? Or what if there’s food that’s gone bad? Or some note? Let’s look,” my dad joked, trying to lighten the mood. We still just stared at him, not saying a word. “We don’t have to if you all aren’t comfortable with it,” he said, knowing how curious we all were about the contents of the purse. “No! No! It could be important!” Nora replied, probably the most curious of us all. So, it was decided. We were finally going to look in the purse. My dead mother’s purse. “It’s okay,” Dad said to me, taking the purse from my grasp, but he meant it for everyone, and in that moment, it felt like it might be.

Jewelry Book

Sarah Joyner | mixed fiber and jewelry pieces

Schooling

Katherine Dorn | acrylic

Girl of the Glen

by Tara Rahman

lie on the lush, green grass in the meadow, stomach facing the sky on a hot summer day.

The sun beams brightly down on me, and I shield my eyes from the light with my right hand. The weather is so warm, almost muggy, with cicadas buzzing in the background. My hand gets tired from staying up, and so do I. There is nothing left to do on this hot summer day but sleep, so I close my eyes and rest. I wake suddenly, throat aching for water. I look around, and twilight has embraced the earth around me. As I rise, I hear river water ebbing and flowing in the forest north of me. Slowly, carefully, I enter the forest. There is something off-putting about the ambiance of these dark cherry woods, as if there is a greater force at play, a certain spirit waiting for me. I near the water, and hear the bubbling river behind a tuft of trees. When I push the branches out of the way, I finally reach the water. And at the riverbank is a girl with sun-kissed skin crouching near the river, cupping and drinking the water. Almost out of instinct, I back away. My feet step on the twigs and leaves on the ground and the crackling noise makes her look back at the source of the sound, back at me.

0 She gracefully turns her head, enough to see me out of the corner of her eye. Her long, dark hair spills from her shoulders, and her eyes glimmer in curiosity, her mouth slowly forming into a soft smile. She glides closer and closer to me as her dress billows in the sudden gust of wind. All I can do is stare in awe, as it seems that her halo of honey-colored hair perfectly catches the little rays of sunlight peeking through the arms of the trees. She reaches her hand out for me to grab. I do. We walk together, side by side without speaking a word, but telling each other everything. She learns my shameful secrets and I glean bits and pieces of her past. I wonder if she is a nymph, or a fae of some sort, as she has an air of otherworldliness about her, but I do not ask. When we converse, her soulful, doe-like eyes focus on me at all times. Heat prickles the skin of my neck and a burning blush creeps onto my cheeks. While it has only been a matter of hours since we met, I feel my chest tighten and breath quicken. She must feel what I am feeling in the air, because then she smiles knowingly and reaches her hand out for me to hold. I do, as gently as possible. My gaze focuses on her, on her mouth, on her eyes.

0 I can’t read her face. Is it a look of curiosity? Wonder? Hunger? I inch closer. She stands where she is. I come even closer; she still does not move. One. Two. Three. My face is barely inches from hers. Four. Five. Six. My mouth hovers over hers. Seven. Eight. Nine. I close my eyes and lean in. There is nothing in front of me anymore. I open my eyes and search frantically all around me. She’s nowhere to be found. Suddenly, I hear a rustling of trees and shrubbery behind me. I sprint in that direction, desperately trying to reach her, to get a glimpse of her. I can see her long hair flowing in the air. I run, run, run through the moss-veiled trail in an attempt to keep up with her. Wait, Wait for me. My legs grow weary from this pathetic chase, but I keep going.

0 Don’t leave. Please. While dodging trees left and right, pushing and lifting branches away from my peripheral view, I pray to the heavens that someway, somehow, she’ll stop for me, so I can let her know how I feel before she leaves me forever. And maybe, just maybe, she’ll reconsider leaving and stay for me. I finally reach her, and while she’s slipping behind the cypress branches, she gives me a sly smile. My heart soars from seeing her face, and I follow her into the backwood. As I push past a stray branch, all I can think is, Oh, mysterious, magnificent girl of the glen, I— I stir awake from my lengthy slumber in the sun-dappled meadow, mind hazy and heart broken, bedeviled as to how my emotions felt so real and raw when what happened was not.

Fairy Forest

Megan Fesperman | digital media

London

Emily Santrock | digital media

Bubble in Snow

by Claire Heins

Poetry Honorable Mention

ur hands barely touch as we walk, but I am terrified of what might happen next. The snow is incessant in its falling, and leaving could have waited for the morning, but here we are, two messy tired bodies tumbling downhill toward the car. We haven’t been alone all night; we are still not alone now. This feeling is clear, fragile, and fantastic; it’s a bubble that’s been drifting back and forth between us for weeks now, and it’s here tonight, whispering what we want and promising what will come. I am sure I have never been this nervous in my whole life, but the car is closer now, so this is probably the time to say it. I take a deep breath in, drawing courage from the midnight air and the fresh memory of the night we just had. “I really want to tell you something.” Suddenly you’re staring at me; I forget what to do. A thief in the night is headed back to the party, making off with my eloquent confession and best-laid plan. I am just beginning to panic as a smile lights up your face. I don’t have to say anything at all because you do. My face tells you what I’m hiding. I hold my breath— the bubble hangs in the balance, full and frozen like the snowflakes around us, perfectly still above both our heads. “I know. I like you, too.” Before you reach for my hands, but after we know there’s no going back, I can tell neither of us knows exactly how to do this. My eyes have just closed when you kiss me, softly at first but then strong, sure, the way I have always known you to be. You are not pulling me in, but drawing me out of myself. And everything around us is so desperately quiet, but I swear I can hear something pop.

Ghost in a Mall Parking Lot Grey Weidman | photography

Story in Six Parts (Part 1–3) Anayeli Collazo Lopez | photography

Story in Six Parts (Part 4–6) Anayeli Collazo Lopez | photography

The Dog Lover

by Megan Roberts

e found you here in seclusion, which you built like a snow fort in winter, mashing the snow into your hands like cold clay, rolling a small ball against more powder, collecting until you have bricks that turn into walls, into houses— the ball keeps rolling. You have been so cold for so long it takes the heat of his breath minutes to meet your mouth. He has dogs, and their coats rub against you, and each time you are thankful for touch. Weeks ago while getting your blood drawn, the big-haired nurse swabbed your arm with cool iodine and you thought how nice this feels, her thumbnail pressing into your arm. When she inserted the needle, it was as a gift: you remembered what you’d been missing— the shock of another in your skin. His dogs leave fur everywhere in your old house. The golden retriever leaves honey patches of hair, but you don’t sweep, the hair collecting in corners like loud whispers. He says he has turned you into a dog lover, and you don’t tell him that three years ago you owned a mutt, Watson, who ran into the road. The ice-house wasn’t even in the works. You never wanted to get married, to bear a heavy, expensive ring, one you would only lose in the ocean. You always wanted a bearded man who would fly you away to Italy or Costa Rica; you’d even take Oregon at this point. And you know this isn’t that man. This is the man who makes you spaghetti casserole and brings over his barreling dogs. This is the man who likes you to be on top. This is the man who notices flecks of snowflakes on your shoulder and gently removes the remnants. He does things: places your hair behind your ear, bends to tie your shoelace, gives you the good pillow, the last bite of steak.

0 The snow fort is still there, in the center of your yard. You haven’t let it melt or thaw or even soften. He pulled you out by the hand, but you know you are just a refugee and will be leaving soon. The cold fort travels like a yurt on your back into his house of dogs. Your body is beautiful, he says. You think this means you have very large breasts. This is what you have done all your life— make substitutions for words, until they turn into nothing. He likes to sing in the morning, and this is when it gets hard. He is a terrible singer and sounds like a mutt-mixed beagle howling. He likes the Rolling Stones, but on rainy days he will fall into old country tunes, Haggard and Hank. He calls you his little Tammy Wynette, when you are the furthest thing from little or Tammy. The snow fort starts to drip a little. Maybe an icicle falls on an oblivious sleepy dog. ~After reading “How to Talk to a Hunter” by Pam Houston

Anxiety Illustrated

Katelynn Kilburg | rebar with found metal

CottonTail Pies Identity Design McKennah Drury | digital media

What I Wanted to Tell Her by Tara Rahman 2nd Place Poetry

asked my mother— my devout Muslim, Bengali mother— what she thought of two women wedding and raising a family together as that daydream gnawed at my insides and sought my mother’s blessing. She stopped in her tracks. “Why would you ask me that?” “No reason, just curious.” She pondered for a moment then proceeded to tell me how it was immoral, how it went against God’s intentions, how it would dishonor both families, and how the children would grow up to be confused and in a poor state of mind. How other people would talk, judge, and shun. Before returning to chopping chilis, she paused again and looked me in the eye, her brows furrowed. “You know I love you, don’t you?” I looked down. “I know, Mama.”

Nightmares and Dreams Chelsi Sherrell | photography

0 Some Wake to Reveille by Krista Wiese

Prose Originality Award

hey don’t hear it. Many are asleep, a thick kind of sleep like tar that makes the head heavy and clogs the ears. They sink into their mattresses and lie still as though they are not bodies, but simply the displacement of space— footprints left in soft dirt. Their thoughts are still too, cradled by the plump arms of unconsciousness. If one were to hover in the sky and look down at all those asleep, that person would wonder: “Will they ever wake up?” Some do crawl out from under the heaviness of sleep, but they still don’t hear it. The sound of their own alarms is deafening. All over the world: ringing, clanging, buzzing, beeping, bells and marimbas, and the shrill voices of early-morning talk show hosts. The world is loud and chaotic in the morning. Everywhere people jolt awake and scramble to find silence, but again and again their alarms sound. They wake up eventually—most people do—but many live as though they are in a dream. They walk from place to place, unable to understand what everything around them means. They look at a church and see a church. They look at a school and see a school. They look at a library and see a library. They look up at the flag on their campus and think only of the weather. Sleepwalkers can only understand so much. In the dim space inside their heads, shapes are vague and deeper meaning is always just beyond reach. “There is the flag,” they think to themselves. “The wind blows from the east.” They don’t wonder what life would be like if the flag they read the wind from wasn’t red, white, and blue. Then there are those who sleep through the alarm. Those are hopeless people. How will they ever hear it if they do not wake even to the sound of their own alarms? If they can sleep through classes where knowledge is freely given, if they can sleep with piles of books waiting on their desks, if they can sleep while sermons of every religion are preached, lectures on every topic are spoken, and music of every type is played—if they can sleep knowing they live in a country where they can learn whatever they want, worship whoever they want, express themselves however they want, love whoever they want—if they can sleep through the beckoning of such beautiful freedoms, then they are hopeless. They will never hear it. But some do. Some wake to reveille. Some rise to the bugle’s declaration of dawn. They do not fall for the dark sky, which tells them to sleep or to obey the heavy creature in their minds which murmurs lullabies. They know that sleeping is not an option. When the metallic notes of the

bugle shatter the early morning stillness, they rise. Commands are shouted, uniforms donned, boots laced, hospital corners folded. Some do these things while tired or while sad or while missing the people who they love, but all of them do these things. They have to. They have chosen to. They have chosen to wake so that others can rest peacefully. The sun rises, and the notes of the bugle fade, but there is a reveille that does not fade, and some hear it. Some hear the reveille of our nation—the alarm that cannot be silenced, that never stops sounding, that commands Americans to wake up, to rise, to work, to live, to appreciate. Some wake to reveille.

College Debt Advertisements Sarah Joyner | digital media

Will Chris Harrison Find Love Again? Emily Santrock | digital media

A Letter to Myself Carol Mabiala | graphite and pen Judges Award

0 Nowhere, USA by Hannah Flood

he miles ticked by as I cruised along the interstate. It was dark and late, and the land on either side of the highway was illuminated only by the heavy moon hanging in the sky above. Its blue-white light painted my hood and dash in broad, uneven strokes through dead tree limbs. As the night crept further around me, the number of other cars on the road dwindled. Ten cars an hour rapidly became less than three. Soon, I could go for twenty miles or more without seeing a single other light, either on or off the road. But the darkness wasn’t that strange, considering I was in the Middle of Nowhere, USA. And the night’s solitude didn’t bother me as much as it might other people; I’d always preferred to make trips alone, in the dark. I didn’t like to stay in one place for too long. Constant movement kept things exciting; I never wanted my life to feel stale. As far as I was concerned, there’s just too much life to be lived, too many things that can’t be seen by standing still. What I liked to call wanderlust, I assume most people called stupidity, or at least instability, although I had never stuck around long enough to find out for sure. Luckily for me, my little brother’s college graduation just happened to coincide with my last month of rent. Florida, here I come. There wasn’t much to listen to on the radio, partially due to the late hour, and partially due to the vast nothingness of my surroundings, and my car’s broken CD player left me in the unforgiving hands of the local radio selections. I switched through stations until I found one that I liked (liked being a relative term), listened until it faded to static, and started switching again. That routine became subconscious as I neared the Texas-Louisiana border, the miles seeming to roll by a little faster beneath my tires. As the hours grew later, so did my choices for entertainment, until only one radio station wasn’t completely garbled with static. It sounded like some sort of talk show. Considering the fact that I was currently cruising through the Bible Belt, it came as no surprise that it was religious in context. I’d passed at least two tent revivals in the fields next to the highway with big crosses out front, signs welcoming any and all to join them. The talk show host, who responded to the name Pastor Joe, was carrying on about the importance of repenting your sins to save your soul as gospel music played softly in the background. I’d never been big into religion, or at least I hadn’t been for quite a while. Wearing dresses every Sunday morning as a kid had gotten old pretty quick, and as I got older, I saw

the power that organized religion had for causing just as much harm as good. But I listened to see what this guy had to say anyway. I wasn’t atheist, after all, and it was the least I could do on my solo drive at two in the morning. “Brothers and sisters in Christ, let me tell y’all something I’ve learned.” He spoke with the authority and charisma of a used-car salesman and an auctioneer all rolled into one. “Your life should not be seen as an endeavor to achieve perfection. There is only one perfect person that we recognize, and that would be our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Reaching for perfection would be wasting the gift that God gave you when he put you on this here planet Earth.” His voice crackled as it sailed across the radio waves. “Now, what you should strive to do, every day, is to live your life mindfully, acting as a true disciple of the Lord in every decision and encounter you face. Keep Him in your hearts and minds always.” Sure, Pastor Joe, I thought, if you’re into that. “Now, even as a faithful adherent to the teachings of my man JC, I’m afraid I have to tell y’all that people do make mistakes now and then. It is in these moments that the real work begins. Makin’ the mistake is the easiest part—it’s everything that follows that will be a test of your true character and faith. How are you going to rectify your mistake? Will you do what Jesus would have you do, or will you resign yourself to a life of unease, trying to forget that mistake ever happened?” As the background music intensified and the choir kicked in, I had to admit that I could see how some people might buy what Pastor Joe was selling. “I won’t lie to y’all, asking the Lord for forgiveness will be a defining moment in your life. I guarantee you that there are people out there who have resigned to live with their sins, too embarrassed to ask for forgiveness, and let me tell you something: those people are weak. But not you! Oh no. I know that what you truly seek is forgiveness and absolution of your sins, so that you may be welcomed into paradise with open arms when your time comes.” I had a feeling that intense religious propaganda was rapidly approaching and figured that was about enough for me. Sorry Pastor Joe, I gotta split. I’m not drinking any of this Kool-Aid. I switched stations and heard only static. I hit the button again, more static. Two more stations with nothing but white noise. Damn. I hit the button for the fifth time, and there was good old Pastor Joe, waiting for me on a different station this

0 time. The local ones must be sure to tune in when he began preaching, as he was now, with the choir dropping an octave behind him. “The time has come! Stand up in the face of God and ask for His forgiveness! Stand with your brothers and sisters and ask for the mercy of the Lord!” The choir was practically chanting their song now. The sound of a hundred voices converging on the verse was intense, and whether it was ethereal or haunting I couldn’t decide, but hearing it gave me chills. Oh no, definitely not. I flipped the station and sat in the relative silence of static for a few minutes, trying to rid myself of the uneasy feeling in my chest. Glancing out my window at the rolling farmland briefly distracted me from the thumping of my heart. Farmhouses sat in the vacant, dry fields, dilapidated and leaning. Grain silos stood like steel blue missiles erupting out of the flat earth. Apart from the light of the moon on the trees, there were no other lights to be seen. No houses or buildings had any lights on, not even floodlights for the yard, like a 10-mile power grid had shut off for the night. Well, that doesn’t make me feel much better. For the first time on my drive, I felt painfully alone. Where is everyone? Even out in the middle of nowhere and at this time of night, I couldn’t be the only person driving on the interstate. The road started to curve ahead of me just as a cloud passed over the moon, limiting my vision. I cursed and flicked on my pitifully dim high beams, trying to avoid an off-road detour. Even if my high beams weren’t pathetic, I thought grimly to myself, there isn’t anyone out here to blind with them anyway. My focus on the road was interrupted by a break in the radio static. I looked down to confirm that the station had not changed, but bits and pieces of sound began to cut through anyway. I frantically flipped stations to avoid it, but to no avail. Pastor Joe’s words began to shoot sporadically, though clearly, through the white noise. I smacked at the radio’s power button. At first, I thought my finger must have slipped because I had pressed so hard. I paused momentarily, trying to block out the onslaught of noise coming through, and clicked the button more deliberately. Nothing happened. I clicked again. And again. And again. I clicked the button until the sweaty, tight hand of panic crept up my neck and took hold of my throat. It squeezed so tightly that I could only manage a single terrified squeak. I probably would have thought it was a stupid sound if I hadn’t been the one it came out of. Suddenly the static fell away, letting Pastor Joe through loud and clear. The chanting choir raised goosebumps on my

entire body as Pastor Joe screamed his sermon. “The time has come!” he yelled, his voice cracking with effort.“Come to us and repent! Come back to your creator! Let us bring you to His light!” High-pitched static screeched through the speakers, but all I could hear was Pastor Joe’s voice, as if he was whispering into my ear. “I know you hear me calling.” And then he began chanting too. Hot tears slid from my eyes. The malevolent sounds blasting through my speakers sent a wave of panic down my spine, and then I saw my high beams flicker. I thought it was just my eyes playing tricks on me until my car chugged, and the lights surged again. I was going almost eighty. I let off the gas and pressed on the brakes, but the speedometer didn’t budge. Even when I stood on the brake so hard that I lifted up off my seat, nothing happened. Panic began to pound hot in my chest as the radio’s volume increased to the point that I could barely hear myself think. The chanting had almost become screaming. When my headlights cut off, I screamed. And I kept screaming when they wouldn’t flick back on, even as I turned the knob. I twisted the knob so viciously I thought it might break off, yet the darkness in front of my windshield only seemed to deepen. Desperation was rapidly taking hold. I don’t want to die like this, I thought as I sobbed. I didn’t know whether to cover my ears or keep my hands glued to the wheel. This can’t be the end for me. I don’t want to go out like this: crashed into a tree at eighty miles an hour because I wanted to drive alone in the dark. Please, oh god… Then my headlights snapped on, and suddenly the car was filled with pure white noise. I hit the brakes and watched the speedometer steadily decline until I was going forty-five. My hands were shaking as I pressed the radio’s power button, and it happily shut off. I continued driving in silence, staring through the windshield, breathing shallowly for almost two minutes before I pulled over and puked out my door. After I rinsed my mouth out with the bottle of flat, warm Fanta from my backseat, I pulled back onto the highway and drove until I saw a sign for a motel, a quartermile off exit 279. It was the first exit I had seen for almost twenty minutes. Perfect timing. When I pulled into the dusty parking lot, empty except for a raised, camo-covered Ford with truck nuts, I was pleased to see the motel was relatively cute and looked very clean. However, a big rig rest stop would’ve seemed just as appealing to me after whatever the hell that was. I had never been so happy to see so many goddamned John Deere tractors before in my life. This corner of hillbilly hell was a godsend. The front office smelled like pine needles as I walked in, the room lit by a single lamp. Upon hearing the tinkle of

0 the welcome bell on the door, a little white-haired woman tottered out from a back room. “Well hi there, sweet pea,” she said, “what can I do for you?” I paid for a room, speaking unintelligibly as I tried to calm my nerves. I thanked her as best as I could as she handed me the key. As I turned from the check-in desk, I noticed the plethora of crosses hanging on the wall behind me, all of them ornately detailed and shiny. One in particular caught my eye, and as I got closer, I saw that there were symbols etched into the wood, though none that I recognized. As I stood observing it, I began to feel the gaze of the woman on my back. I turned, a pacifying smile on my face. “I love how you’ve decorated in here.” A few moments passed before a smile cracked across her face, “Why thank you, sweet pea. We thought you would.” I tried to keep my smile from faltering and thanked her again, backing out quickly through the door. She didn’t mean you, she meant visitors in general. Calm down. I walked across the parking lot and unlocked the door to my room, not even bothering to get my bag out of my car. A bath helped ease my shock, and after I stopped shaking, the hot water actually felt kind of nice as I cried. When my eyes grew so puffy that my vision blurred, I decided enough was enough and pulled the drain plug, watching the water swirl and gurgle down. As I crawled in between the scratchy red-and-white checkerboard sheets, I said a few Our Father’s and what I could remember of Hail Mary, before thanking God or whoever was listening for not letting me turn into a bloody mess on the highway, my head on backwards as the firefighters used a can opener to get into my car. I stared out the window at the parking lot’s streetlight, watching moths fly sporadically around it until I fell asleep. The sound of birds chirping woke me, and I stood at the window, taking in the beautiful new day. The sun was shining, and the sky was such a cloudless blue it could’ve been 2D. It felt like a second chance—at what I didn’t know, but I was thankful for it anyway. I practically skipped to the diner across the street for some breakfast. Inside the restaurant a few older couples, a group of twenty-somethings, and a family with their kids were all milling about, eating away at their pancakes and eggs. The sound of pleasant conversation and the palpable energy of living, breathing people filled me with relief. I was finally in good company. Spotting me sitting at a table, a young waitress hurried over, a big smile on her face. “Hi there, sorry ‘bout that. What can I getchu this mornin’?” I smiled. “How about some pancakes and a black coffee?” “Sure thing.” She nodded, that smile still on her face. As she glanced out the window, I saw the silver cross on her necklace. It was engraved with something, though I couldn’t

quite make it out. It reminded me of the one I saw last night hanging in the— “Motel?” “Sorry, what?” “Are you stayin’ at the motel?” “Oh, yeah,” I said. “I got in pretty late last night. I needed to get off the road.” I guess it was clear to her that I wasn’t a local. “Oh, did something happen?” she asked through her still exposed teeth. “Yeah, actually...” I had no idea why I was telling her this, but the way she asked made it sound like she already knew the answer. “Something weird. I was just driving and listening to this churchy talk-show that was on the radio, some Pastor Joe guy or something.” Her big brown eyes were glued to mine as I continued. “It was fine at first, but then there was this weird chant-singing in the background...Anyway my car started acting up out of nowhere. My lights and brakes stopped working for a minute. It freaked me out. Could’ve been really bad.” A metal chair squeaked against the linoleum as someone slid back in it, and I realized that I could only hear it because all other conversation around me had stopped. Not even the kids spoke. I glanced back up at the waitress. The smile was gone from her face. My own quickly disappeared as a black mass swelled in my stomach. All eyes were on me as I sat there, stupidly. “Oh good,” the waitress said, “so you did hear us calling.”

Envy Eye

Alanah Reid | gouache

Kafka at Lunchtime by Lauren Shawcross

ltimately I wonder when these justifications will grow wings or sprout flowers or legs and scuttle away. There is only so much your words can do here. I’m sorry I can’t hear you; I’ve plucked my eardrums out. My vocal chords are rotten; now there are just beetles in my throat. I think I’m morphing, losing the language, returning to primal sounds. I don’t speak your tongue, clumsily learning like a child mumbling my first syllables.

Into the City

Corinne Zibell | photography

0 Trapped

by Karen Spangler This is a true story; some names have been changed to protect privacy.

fter the foundations on the house cracked, the spiders came in droves. At first, only a handful of brown recluses sidled out from underneath the gaps in the baseboards. Eventually, there were hundreds. I would wake each morning to the march of their eerie shadows across my bedroom wall. Not wanting to kill them, I would shuffle to the kitchen to retrieve a mason jar for collecting the ones within reach, later depositing them safely outside. Even the Texas summer heat was poor refuge from the infestation, for just as many black widows plagued the piles of firewood under the moldering hackberry trees. Once one of my sisters was bitten, my father decided to eliminate them. When he proved unsuccessful, he called an exterminator who informed us that the infestation was permanent. At this news, my parents visibly wilted; it was the latest in a series of unfortunate events ever since the purchase of that house. “If you need a real estate attorney, I know a good one,” the title company officer told my parents when they signed the papers during the purchase of the house. “He’s reputable. He’ll do the kind of job for you that you’ll need done.” For my mother, who was working through the ramifications of selling her home of twenty-five years and moving to a small town of less than three thousand citizens, this statement was far from reassuring. Perhaps, she thought, the officer was trying to find business for a friend, but why would he think that she and my father would find the services of an attorney necessary? Down the street from the title company office, an elderly shopkeeper welcomed my parents into her little antique shop. As she chatted with them about her wares, she asked where my family lived. “We’ll be living near town,” my mother said. “Do you know where the big ranch house is on the hill overlooking the farms?” The shopkeeper’s smile froze in place. “Yes, I know that house,” she answered brightly. “Do you plan to live there long?”

“Where do you live?” The local librarian asked when my parents visited the town library after lunch on Main Street. When they told her that they had bought the big house on the hill, she stared at them, suddenly cold. My parents returned home troubled, but the purchase of the house was complete, and it was just a house after all. Like many an optimistic man fallen on hard times, my father

had bet all his hopes against one chance to break free from financial troubles, and the big ranch house was large enough to contain all our dreams. Two days later, those dreams began to shatter. We were up the street from our new house having a celebratory barbeque at the Palmers’, who were good friends of ours. Carol Palmer couldn’t wait for us to get there, brimming with news that she had been holding back for weeks. “Oh, Mrs. Spangler,” she announced, “if you only knew about the awful murder that happened at that house! It was horrible! My parents said we were never to tell you.”

“Your daughter divulged that there was a murder in our new house,” my mother said to Mrs. Palmer after we sat down to eat. Mrs. Palmer went ashen gray as my mother’s announcement cut the loud ripples of conversation to the quick. Taking a deep breath to recover herself, she pasted a false smile on her face. “Oh, the original owner of the house shot the town jeweler a few years back,” she laughed. “It was scandalous in the town when it happened, but I think mostly everyone has forgotten it now.” “Some people in town remembered it,” my mother said, “and obviously you do.” “She was our neighbor!” Mrs. Palmer emphasized. “Though we didn’t know her well. Anyway, it was a long time ago, and it really doesn’t matter anymore.” As I took the first bite of my burger, I noticed Carol running out of the room. She became a recluse for the remainder of the evening. Since the more intelligent parts of my attention were claimed by her older brother, Chris, I hardly missed her, and I scarcely noticed the darkening expressions on my parents’ faces as the conversation among the adults continued throughout the meal. We moved in autumn, just as the last colorful leaves were dying on the branch. As Mr. Palmer and Chris backed the U-Haul trucks into the gravel driveway, I took a moment to survey what I hoped would be my new home for many years to come. From the bottom of the hill, the house was charming. It straddled the sloping profile of a high ridge populated with ancient hackberry trees. Inside, a series of successive owners had added to the original structure, creating a maze of misplaced doors, hallways, and closets. For the support of my future college endeavors, my parents envisioned rekindling the piano studio in the

0 second library. Behind the house, the backyard was spacious enough to include both my father’s apiary and my plans for miniature dairy goats and chickens. This was before the spiders, of course, for the cold had driven most creeping things into deep hibernation. On a clear December day, I cleaned out the old barn behind the house in preparation for spring and found the handprints of the killer’s children, complete with names, pressed into the concrete floor. The discovery chilled me. A few days later, I showed Chris Palmer the handprints when he came over to help. He said very little, but he refused to look at me while I speculated on the implications. Horrified, I realized that he had known and never said a word to me, even though we were close confidants. I relapsed into silence, unsure what to say, while the winter wind moaned under the eaves of the barn and stirred a few threads of a spider web attached to the joist above my head.

Christmas came and went before my family learned of the sordid affair predating the murder and the rumors of lights seen in the house during its previous vacancy, especially on cold, dark nights. We were left on our own to discover each ghostly trace of the murderer and her family over the winter, spring, and early summer leading up to the spider infestation. With each passing week, my family sank deeper into the depressing mystique of our new home and the growing knowledge that the Palmers’ betrayal of our friendship long predated the purchase of the house. “Are there any reasons we shouldn’t buy this house?” My mother had asked Mr. Palmer months before in golden summer. My parents were visiting the house during a showing—it was one of many houses they were to visit that day. “None that I can think of! It’s a good solid house!” Mr. Palmer exclaimed, confidently slapping his hand against the kitchen countertop. “Are there any reasons you can think of why we shouldn’t buy this house?” My mother asked his wife. “Certainly not! And you’d be living two miles away from us, so we can be over to help! Chris can come help Karen set up the barn for her goats,” Mrs. Palmer replied with a knowing smile. For my parents, who had sunk their retirement money and life savings into that house, this was a giant web to trap them. For me, it was a chance at bliss. Chris’s close proximity helped to soften the impact of the house’s mysteries and the town’s suspicion, especially in the first months. I had a screw loose for that boy. Taller than me with broad shoulders and skilled, work-worn hands, he was reasonably handsome with his tousled blond hair, vivid blue eyes, and appropriately crooked grin. He was thoughtful, well spoken, and was working on his master’s degree. I was so stupid in love that

for the past year, I had been ignoring obvious warning signs of what lay in store for me if I pursued him seriously. After we moved into the house, I discovered that I could no longer ignore them. “I would love to be a fly on the wall in their house,” my mother said to me one day while we were peeling the red paint off the kitchen cabinets in preparation for refinishing them. “Why?” “Haven’t you seen the way the younger children shy away from Mr. Palmer’s hands when he moves them? And Carol hid herself after she spilled about the murder. I don’t even want to think about how much trouble—or what kind of trouble—she was in.” I stopped peeling the paint and stared at my mother, aghast. “Do you think he beats them?” I asked. “Did he hurt Carol?” “I don’t know,” my mother replied soberly. “I don’t think we’ll ever know. But something isn’t right there. I think they’ve been hiding more than the murder.” “What for?” I wondered, but deep within my mind the suggestion came unbidden, terrifying in its implications: me. They wanted me. The Palmer parents ignored my siblings, but I was invited over all the time under the pretense of socializing with Carol but instead often left to be entertained by her brother. How many times had Mrs. Palmer pulled me into the back apartment to show me how beautifully Chris had finished out the kitchen area with tiles or the cabinetry in the single bedroom, which hid a queen bed which he had helped to build? I could barely articulate these thoughts to myself; the thought of walking away from Chris was unbearable, but so too was the other thought. I was no fly to be caught in a spider’s web. As winter progressed toward spring, I began to see what my mother had only guessed. The Palmer children did in fact shy away from their father’s hands. Untreated anorexia in one of the younger girls came to light, complete with bedsores and suicidal journaling. Even the animals on the property were not immune: a dog, suffering in the final stage of cancer, was left to drool blood and phlegm for months while the tumor swelled out of his head. My interactions with Chris began to be tinged with apprehension, even fear. How much about him did I really know? Things came to fruition the week Carol was discovered in bed with an adult man in the back apartment of the Palmer home, and her parents justified her actions vigorously despite the fact that she was only fifteen. Frustrated with the Palmers’ continued deceit and overwhelmed by the pressures and doubt they had introduced into my life, I decided that I needed to do something. I decided to walk away. Untangling myself proved difficult. Two miles up the road was two miles too close for all of us, but especially for me. Each morning, Chris’ white car would crawl down

0 the road and inch past our house, its occupant attempting to peer up at the wide windows where I would be huddled into one of the curtains, able to see but not be seen. I would wait, barely breathing, until he had passed and floored the accelerator in frustration. Then, I would collapse onto my bed, shaking. In struggling to break free from the web laid for me, I felt as though I had walked into another—the trap of my own mind as I attempted to cope with the paranoia of living in that spider-infested house. By summer’s end, my family had accepted the harsh reality that we had been trapped in a web of cruelty and deceit. I, especially, had been snared. Left alone to process my heartbreak, I alternated between insomnia, panic attacks, and nightmares. I would dream of children screaming in fear; of open, running sores breaking out all over my body; of mistreated animals; or of a strange male figure whose intent was to harm. I would wake each morning to shadows of spiders marching across my bedroom wall, shadows from which I could not escape no matter how hard I tried. As they witnessed my growing distress, my parents realized that there would be no peace for me as long as I lived in that house. We moved out of state and across the Appalachian mountains without saying goodbye to the Palmers. The day we crossed the Texas border was almost a year to the day that Carol had disclosed the murder. Seven years and twelve hundred miles are now between me and the Palmers’ lies and betrayal. Divorced entirely from my home state and the life that I loved, my world has been irrevocably altered in ways I could never have imagined. While old fears and hurts have been laid to rest, I cannot see a house spider without looking twice to see if it is a recluse. The old memories come streaming back then— old griefs, too. Inevitably, I will contemplate the direction my life has taken since I left that house of horrors on the hill and wonder, if only for a second, what things would have been like if I had stayed. It is speculation at best, but sometimes I wonder if I would have gone mad in the end. Had I married Chris as expected, I know for certain my life would have been wretched. He never finished his degree and washed out a few years after I left. I would have been doomed to live an impoverished life had I married him, stuck forever in his parents’ back apartment, never able to get away. While the Palmers’ web of lies proved to be the catalyst I needed to launch into my current life, the fact remains that they impacted me in ways which I can never alter. I escaped the spider’s web, but at great cost.

Eating Disorder

Taylor Harris | embroidery hoop, fibers, food wrappers

0 Napkins

by Whitney Pepper

don’t know why I remember going to get smoothies with my dad at the mall. It wasn’t a tradition by any means. In fact, I think my mom kind of forced us to spend time together with some not-so-subtle hints and what at the time seemed like some unwelcome advice to my dad. Considering I was about six and my dad was about forty, we did not have much in common at all except for our blood and our eyes— we’re both O negative and brown-eyed. I had my mother’s body and personality: short, round-faced, full-cheeked, loud, and outgoing. Dad was taller, slimmer, and quiet. We hardly had any issues or conflicts with each other, other than the occasional spanking I’d earn myself by running my mouth or disobeying my parents because I was too stubborn to take “because I said so” as an answer. Mostly, those spankings were administered by my dad because my mother would be so mad in the moment that she’d be half tempted to spank me into the next week, so Dad stepped in to do the job. Other than that, my father and I coexisted peacefully, but we never really bonded like my mother and I did. Naturally, that meant that my “special time” with my father would be spent getting a smoothie from our small town’s run-down mall food court. What we did before and after the mall is a blur. All I remember is hearing Wynona Judd and looking out of the passenger side window of his pickup truck. My smoothie was strawberry, and his was strawberry-banana because he was older and wiser and knew how the blend of flavors could make the smoothie sweeter. We sat down at a dirty table for a bit to slurp our smoothies. It was almost like a bad first date. We didn’t know what to talk about. “What do you think you want for Christmas?” he asked. “I want a Barbie jeep.” “You’re too old and big for a Barbie jeep. Besides, you know your mom won’t let you get one because you would sneak out and wander all over the neighborhood, and we wouldn’t know where you went.” We slurped our smoothies. “Well then maybe some Bratz dolls,” I said, looking at him out of the corner of my eye as I turned to face the broken fountain in the middle of the food court. Mom said she’d never let me get a Bratz doll. She called them hoochie mamas and bad influences because of their outfits and the brand name. I thought they had pretty hair and lips. “I’ll talk to your mom about it.” We sat and slurped our smoothies some more. Dad offered me a quick sip of his, but I refused. I didn’t quite trust bananas in my smoothie yet. Strawberry smoothies were my favorite, and I knew that they were my favorite.

I didn’t want to mess up my smoothie by fooling with new ingredients or possibly getting the taste of something disgusting stuck in my palate. So I waved my hand to say “no thank you” and accidentally spilled my red strawberry smoothie all over my shirt. “Seriously?” my dad said, shoving a bajillion napkins across the table. “Clean up your shirt. Your mother will be so mad if you get red stains on your clothes.” I quietly wiped my shirt with the napkins. Embarrassed, I didn’t look him in the eyes again. After a while of sitting and looking at our shoes, my dad sighed and made some comment under his breath about how dirty the table was; then he stood up. When we got home, he turned on a football game and sat in his recliner. I came in and sat on the couch with him in comfortable silence. At that point, Mom came in to be nosy about what we’d done and how our “bonding” went. We both said, “we got smoothies” in a monotone voice, keeping our eyes on the TV. Mom sighed long and hard, like a balloon deflating. We went on about our business and watched the rest of the ball game in silence until I got bored and decided to go play with my Barbies. I really hoped Dad would remember to convince Mom to let me get some Bratz dolls. She’d probably still say no, but it was worth a shot.

Now I’m thirteen, and not much has changed. Mom and I do most everything together. We shop, we talk about school, we watch movies together, she meets and talks to my friends, she picks me up from school. Mom’s been acting funny lately, though. She just seems sad and angry all the time. Dad tells me it’s because her parents are fighting, and she has to go out of town to help them deal with it. Why they can’t deal with it on their own, I don’t know. They’re old; they should know how to do everything. Since she left a few days ago, the house has been quiet. The only noises around here when Mom’s gone are the sounds our TVs make—referee whistles downstairs and dramatic movie and TV music upstairs. I don’t really like to watch football, and Dad hates romcoms. That’s why we have TVs in different parts of the house. Neither one of us wants to hear the other’s noisy entertainment. Today I’ve chosen He’s Just Not That Into You. It’s a classic, in my opinion. Imagine this, though. With my luck, right when Gigi and Alex meet, my stomach starts hurting. It’s so annoying. This has been happening for weeks now. When I told Mom about the pain in the car the other day, she told me they were ghost cramps and that she thinks I’m going to

0 start my period soon. I haven’t told her that I’ve never had a period, but I haven’t told her that I did. So I guess she just put two and two together. She told me to ignore them until my back started hurting too because then they were serious. My back isn’t hurting today, so I just keep watching my movie. Alex and Gigi fall in love, Anna dumps that trash guy who just wants to cheat on his wife, and Mary is Mary. You know how it goes. The movie’s hard to get through, though, because of my cramps. There are more than normal, but my back isn’t hurting. I make it through the movie, cut off the TV, and decide to just go and check really fast—just in case. Turns out, there’s a full-on crime scene in my pants. “Shoot,” I whisper. Eyes wide, I jerk some toilet paper off the roll and fold it to make a makeshift bandage of sorts, just like the lady told us to do in health class when something like this happens. I look under the bathroom sink to see if maybe my sister left some pads behind when she went to college. She didn’t. Harshly pounding my fingers on my phone’s qwerty board, I text her: “Help! Do you have any pads?!?” She doesn’t reply right away. She must not be awake yet or something. I sit on the bathroom floor waiting for her to solve my distress. I lie on the floor in a fetal position, holding my stomach and bracing myself against the knife fight going on in there. Ding. I scramble to my phone that’s inches away and read the verdict. “No, but I think I might have some tampons? Since when do you need those?” Obviously right now, doofus, I think. I look under her cabinet one time and find a tampon. Unwrapping it slowly, I see how massive the applicator is. “Oh, hell no,” I whisper. Okay, think. Where would you be if you were a pad? Would Dad know where Mom kept them? No, stupid. Why would he know that? Why would you want him to know that you want to know that? Maybe she keeps them next to her nail polish under her sink? I feel like they’re there next to her nail files. Why did she have to leave? This whole ordeal would be so much easier if she were here. She could tell me what medicine to take, get me ice cream, and sure as hell would know where to find a good pad…Chill out. Channel your inner Mom so you can find them. I barrel down the stairs. However, it seems Dad thought that I was tiptoeing. He is focused on his game and doesn’t even notice. The Tigers are down by a touchdown, so there’s no way he’s moving from that chair. I decide to pillage Mom and Dad’s bathroom like a pirate looking for gold. I look under her sink. There are the nail polish bottles lined up in a perfect pink-to-red ombre, there are the nail files, there is the pad box. Jackpot. I open the tabs that seal the box, but they show me nothing. Mom must have forgotten to throw away the empty box. She’s got to have another one around

here. Frantically, I start looking around the room: behind the trash can, next to the shampoo bottles, in the Band-Aid bucket. Why does she have extra toothpaste but not extra pads? Why wouldn’t she be prepared for a crisis like this one? “Shoot,” I yell as I, defeated by circumstance, fall to the floor. Okay, so you have to go to the store. Mom’s not going to be back until Tuesday. It’s Saturday. You have to go to the store. Pull yourself together and tell Dad you want some ice cream and need to go to the store. He doesn’t have to know your real reason for needing to go. You can just toss the pads in the bag, and he’ll never know. Calmly, I wipe my tears away and pull myself together in the mirror. He doesn’t have to know. My cheeks are red and my eyelashes are wet. I walk out into the living room. It’s the fourth down and the Tigers are in the red zone with one touchdown to go. I try to wait for a commercial break to ask him, but then a cramp from Satan himself doubles me over. My back starts hurting. It’s getting serious, and I’m panicking. “Hey Dad,” I yell like we aren’t in the same room. “Can we go to the store? I want some ice cream.” “Yeah, after this game I guess. There’s only five minutes left.” “Yeah, but those are five football minutes. You know that’s like thirty actual minutes, right? I need to go to the store now.” “You don’t need to do anything right now. This game is almost over, and they’re in the red zone. Why don’t you just wait until they score? This is an important play. You can wait ten minutes to get ice cream.” “Dad, no I can’t. I’m in the red zone.” “What?” “I’m in the red zone,” I say with a wavering voice right as someone scores a touchdown. My dad doesn’t even turn to watch the TV. He just stares at me, confused. All I can hear is the sound of spectators cheering and yelling and booing. “What do you mean?” “I started my period, Dad!” I blurt. “Oh...um...okay.” More cheering and booing. The play is under review. I can feel the tears welling in my eyes. One falls down my face as I stare at my shoes. Now he knows. “Can you please just go get me some pads from the grocery store,” I sniff, wiping the pesky tear off of my cheek. Some commercial pops up. I think it’s for Pizza Hut. Ninety-nine cent wings on Wednesdays. That’s a pretty good deal. The next thing I hear is my dad kicking the foot bar of his recliner down and the jingling of his keys. “I’ll be right back,” he says as he shuts the garage door on his way out. I just sit and watch the last five football minutes of whatever game was on TV.

0 When Dad comes back he’s intensely whispering into his phone. I can’t tell what he’s saying, but I can hear the plastic grocery bag rustling as he sits it on the kitchen counter. “I don’t know, I’ll have to call you back. Love you.” He hangs up his phone. “Hey, I have your...your stuff. It’s in here on the counter.” Not wanting to make eye contact, we both find some interesting veins in the hardwood floor as we pass each other. In the bag, there are some intimidatingly large maxi pads and super jumbo tampons. This is what I get for not going with him. I can make do with the pads until Tuesday though, I think. Then Mom can show me which ones I need. Behind the monster tampons, there’s a carton of Cherry Garcia and some Pamprin. How did he know to get that? On the carton of ice cream is a sticky note with something written in his chicken scratch: “Tried my best. Feel better.” I pass Dad on the way to my bedroom with all of my new gifts. He’s back in his recliner looking silently at the TV. “Thank you,” I whisper. “Mmhm…let me know if you need anything else,” he says, clearly not knowing what exactly to say but at the same time knowing exactly what not to say. And, in that silence, my cramps relax, and I feel more comfortable again. I look again at those maxi pads. They’re like miniature diapers, I think. How old does he think I am? Oh well, better to have too much than too little. That’s what Mom would say. I sigh and walk upstairs. Time to clean up and hope I don’t have red stains on my clothes.

Saturday Afternoon Marissa McCauley | photography

Hereditary

by Alexandra Rouch 1st Place Poetry

here’s the four of us— my aunt, mother, grandmother, me —seated at this round table amidst all these cups of coffee (all more cream than coffee, artificially sweetened) with a litter of family photos spilled across the checkered canvas tablecloth, like eggs or entrails or chromosomes. It’s not often we’re all here, but at Christmas, we can pretend that this is normal. As the others talk, I look at the photos and take stock of what there is: There’s the chin, passed from my mother to me, that juts like the end of a dagger broken off at the handle, blunt and confident despite its uselessness, paired with an underbite— the result of too many hard fast words colliding with our teeth on the way out; There are the ticks and twitches that my great-grandmother, now dead, dealt out as heirlooms: the is my card in my wallet? is the door locked? is the bed cover perfectly even? is the oven off? did I leave anything? — These have created that constant, overwhelming sense of dread which lies beneath our skin like a clan tattoo: as intricate, as meaningful. By the book, it’s a disorder, but here it’s a habit, as comfortable as the cats that follow us from room to room on their soft, silent feet. There’s not a house in our tribe without a cat. It is the one thing that can be counted on. My other aunt is in many of these photos, with her storm of frizzy hair, dyed red, that same angry mouth, but she won’t be here today— not with my side of the family around. This too is normal. Then Grandmother reminds us we’ll have to sort through her things one day. Every visit she gives each of us something new— the throw pillow I looked at for too long,

0 the mug I admired. Whatever our hearts desire, we’ll have. The women in our family have always been too generous: with time, fear, love, fury. And talent. My mother writes, has since she could speak. My aunt, the engineer, designed the roads we drove to get here. I do my own strange activities to feel useful and interesting. Grandmother’s oil paintings won prizes when she was younger, before she stopped— too busy with her many needy daughters, she says. Self-sacrifice is a hell of a craft and short fingers like ours are surprisingly deft. But there are some things even we can’t give up, try as we might. A heritage sometimes feels as much like a promise as a threat. And yet, when I look around at these women, I can’t help but love them. My grandmother makes a crude joke involving a cucumber. She grins. Her smile echoes across the table, four sharp half-moons that mirror like a ritual chant, or a pledge of allegiance.

Hotel Didot Stationery Set Bailey Birtchet | digital media

Hotel Didot Brandboard Bailey Birtchet | digital media

0 Grandfather by Paola Cira 2nd Place Prose

That it would never be mine. I would sit for hours pretending to read the Spanish text, staring at commas and periods, wondering what the words in between them meant. My grandfather, before turning back to his masterpiece, would pull out a cigar or some tequila and give me a secretive wink and a soft smile. The click click click of the typewriter would fill the nook once more, broken only by the sound of my grandfather’s quick sips and gentle puffs filling the air.

he hunched frame of my grandfather was always the first image that came to my mind whenever I thought of the nook. An extended alcove, near the end of the second floor’s eastern hallway, was the place where my grandfather’s writing came to life. The nook was always held in the suspended animation that came with infinite afternoons spent writing, reading, and pretending the world could never fall apart. Even as the clamor of the busy street below announced the comings and goings of the people outside— the fruit vendors announcing their delicious treats, the children laughing at the joy of being in the sun, and the cars meandering around the potholes—the nook was always a quiet place. Through the years, my grandfather had learned to favor acid-free, beige tone, eighty-pound letter stock for his first drafts. Being the kind of person that never threw out his drafts, he quietly hid them away after continuously gnawing at his brain for inspiration. Pulling a metallic gray typewriter from the right side of the bottom shelf, he would begin working a first draft into its final form. The click click click of the typewriter rang through the nook, past the stainless glass window, reaching out into the hallway. As a child, my tiny hands gripped the edge of the doorway to the nook, while I peered into the barred space at my grandfather rapidly typing away. My eyes, catching on the faded blue curtains, the leather sofa chair sitting in the corner, and the dusty sunlight streaming into the nook, would try to make sense of the odd room at the end of the hall. Knowing my curious intrusion would be discovered eventually, I would wait to hear the loud clanking of the typewriter come to a stop. and then a soft voice would ask me, “Qué haces aquí, mijita?” “Nada, abuelito,” I would mumble, my usual response. He would sigh gently, tell me I could sit in the armchair if I was quiet, and then hand me a copy of Don Quixote. He encouraged my curiosity and said, “There is no book so bad...that it does not have something good in it.” “Don Quixote?” “Si mija, Don Quixote.” My fingers eagerly flipped through the pages as I looked for the drawings of the old man dressed as a knight and the fat man on a donkey. The copy, old and well-worn, sat comfortably on a tall wooden bookcase for most of the day, bathing in the atmosphere of collected dust and churning thoughts. The name Noelle Othoniel Emmanuel, which was written in elegant calligraphy on the title page, reminded me that this book was not mine.

My begging made no dent in my mother’s iron will. “No.” “Por favor mami!” “No.” My stomach growled, accompanying the annoyance and hunger, which were forming a deep frown on my face. My eyes wandered over to the simmering stew in the stall next to the vendor that my mother had decided she needed to hassle for cheaper tomatoes. The aroma of the food had already enticed my grandfather to wander over and buy a bowl; a quiet smile rested on his face as he sipped spoonful after spoonful. After glancing at my mother, I slipped quietly towards the stall, tiptoeing as I snuck over to the delicious scents. Eyebrows raised and eyes big and aimed up at my grandfather, I pouted. He paused, spoon in midair, staring directly into my eyes. He handed me the bowl and cursed his soft heart, saying, “Miguel de Cervantes once wrote, ‘Hunger is the best sauce in the world.’ Tell your mother that next time she says no.” My smile was victorious. “What are you up to, troublemakers?” My mother’s voice trailed from behind the stall. My grandfather smiled and simply said, “She was hungry, and I was easily influenced.” My mother glared pointly at the bowl between us and with a skeptical eyebrow raised, she opened her mouth to begin what would surely be a verbal lesson in the dangers of indulging in the whims of the moment. The busy noise of the market was incisive and distracted her long enough for the tomato seller to call her name with a final offer. She sighed, mumbling, “I wonder if you’ll ever let me into your world,” as she walked away. My grandfather and I shared the glee of our success, folding ourselves into this moment. It was us against the world.

0 no one in our family ever went into the medical field. We never excelled in delicate use of the hands. I couldn’t see his face, but the hunch of his shoulders showed how vulnerable he was at this moment. It wasn’t just concern over the shaky hands, the amount of medication he was required to take, or the necessity of his hearing aids that filled him now. It was utter defeat. The Knight of the White Moon faced Don Quixote. He defeated Don Quixote.

As I grew older, the nook grew smaller. By the time I was sixteen, the shelves no longer loomed, the chair had aged from rich mahogany to a cardboard brown, and the curtains had been replaced with white drapes. The sounds of the typewriter no longer rang as frequently, arthritis having taken this underappreciated and simple pleasure from my grandfather. The letter stock he favored no longer existed; the business that produced it had gone bankrupt years before. His last ink pen had been broken by my cousin in his latest temper tantrum. But the muted atmosphere of the nook retained its consistent presence. The eerie quiet had never bothered me, nor my grandfather; we were both comfortable with the gentle click click click and the hum of background noise. The nook felt like a place where prayers were said, where ideas came to life. The presence of anyone else would break the calm; the silence wasn’t secret, it was sacred. One of the other things that remained the same was the worn copy of Don Quixote: The Ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha, having grown more meaningful as I began to read the annotations my grandfather had added as a young man. His time in the Spanish grammar school taught him to hate more things than his indigenous accent. He never liked the e-reader I had gotten him, nor the access to the internet that my aunt insisted that they add to their home. Grandpa didn’t trust anything that he couldn’t hold or anyone that he couldn’t look in the eyes. “Que es esto mija, no lo entiendo?” He kept hitting his hand against the side of the e-reader, his brow furrowed deeply. “Let me see it, damelo!” “Don’t give me that attitude, I’m not as adept at this new technology as your generation.” “Well maybe if you wore your hearing aids, you would have heard las pinches claras instrucciones that I gave you three times…” “Huh?” I smiled innocently. “Oh, nada abuelito.” He never touched the tablet again.

The first sign of real trouble came when my grandfather began to suggest selling his typewriter. The change had started off small in the beginning—many of my grandfather’s favorite novels went missing from the bookcase in the back of the nook. Then, soon after the typewriter began to dull in color and some of the keys began to stick, it too disappeared. “Why are you trying to get rid of all your stuff?” I asked. “Eh, just needed some change, that’s all.” “When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies?” I mumbled the words of an ageing fantasist under my breath. “Huh?” “Nothing, abuelito.” He had started to have some difficulty getting up the stairs earlier that month. When my cousin suggested helping him up, he numbly allowed it. The arthritis had spread to his knees, and the fight he would have usually put up was dulled into muted resentment at the loss of complete autonomy. He began taking his medication like clockwork, swallowing large pills to keep the pain and illness at bay. But in an effort to have some semblance of control over his aging body, he refused to use a cane and would only use the railing of the stairs when he was sure no one was looking. In the times when I would help him up to our nook, he would always remind me that in our family, the last thing to go was the mind. He would swear upon the crucifix around his neck that he would let his heart give out before he lost control over his sharp, perceptive thoughts. I would counter his claims by waving a bottle of insulin in his face or pointing out the way he would get out of breath with a simple task His mood would become serious, and, with a sullen look, the conversation would end. The truth may be stretched thin, but it never breaks, and it always surfaces above lies, as oil floats on water.

On the morning of the hottest day of July, I found my grandfather staring at his hands as he heated some pozole in the kitchen. The strings of dried corn, chilies, and garlic hanging at the entrance covered me from his peripheral vision and allowed me to intrude on this private moment. After dropping the spoon for the fifth time, my grandfather left the boiling stew to simmer. He took both of his hands and brought them close to his face. Palms down, he shook his head as he stared and glared and stared again at the slight tremor passing through them. We had always been a family full of shaky hands and carpal tunnel. That was why

The space where the typewriter once lay remained empty, while the bookcase in the nook gained some freshly-printed bestsellers from my own collection. I bought black-out curtains from Target to replace the now yellowed drapes. A new rug was even added as an

0 attempt to cover the dark stain left on the floor where my grandmother’s oldest cat, Machete, had decided to spend his final moments. Machete, having been a parting gift from my uncle when he moved to Spain, had been around since before my birth. My whole family had spent years expecting him to go after he stopped following people around with his famous attention-seeking yowls. Since my grandfather continued having difficulty getting up the stairs without assistance, the nook went from being a special spot where Grandpa and I spent time together to the only place in the house where I could garner some alone time. The new Wi-Fi connection was strangely the strongest in the nook, and I frequently spent hours writing out emails, typing away on the Internet, and supplying myself with an endless array of entertainment and information, more than any book could ever hold. One evening, I heard the dragging footsteps of someone approaching; I looked up to find my grandfather staring at my laptop from the entrance of the nook. The contiguity of his shrinking frame standing outside of the nook, coupled with his silence, prompted me to immediately ask him if anything was wrong, if he needed help going to the bathroom or taking his insulin shots. He cautiously asked to sit with me while I typed my homework. I gestured to the new Lazy Boy sitting in the corner and said, “Por supuesto abuelito, this is your place.” My grandfather’s brown eyes lingered on my gesturing hand. He slowly moved to sit in my new chair and replied, “No, ya no es mio.” Our eyes met, and a thousand words that neither of us spoke hung between us, but both of us understood. The words of Don Quixote floated to the top of my mind: “He filled his imagination with everything he had read, with enchantments, knightly encounters, battles, challenges, wounds, with tales of love and its torments, and all sorts of impossible things, and as a result had come to believe that all these fictitious happenings were true; they were more real to him than anything else in the world.” I coughed awkwardly, my shoulders set in understanding, and began typing again as my grandfather settled in for an afternoon nap.

Don’t Let Them Disappear Karen Spangler | digital media

He Who Shared the Stage by Christina Romanelli

met an angel alum in Joyner, Who said—“I studied Shakespeare here, below The likeness of the queen. The professor, Stood on the desk, red-haired, thin, and bellowed, ‘Fetch me the handkerchief!’ and then he banged The wood, and we all jumped for fright, alight With sorrow for Desdemona’s lot. Stabbed By his own sword, on another day, might He be Anthony, lying in the arms Of a half-dozen angels, heaving high The dying weight of Cleopatra’s charmed Consort. At times we laughed, at times we cried. Dr. Walton generously shared the stage And helped us learn to live through Shakespeare’s page.”

Summer Sisterhood

Corinne Zibell | photography & digital media

From

by Garry Walton

am from lightning bugs in Mason jars, from tar-ball marbles rolled from melted asphalt on pothole-patched country lanes and neighbors who told my parents I’d been playing in the road, from tobacco-stick horses ridden endlessly around dirt driveways at Grandma’s house while she sat in the corner on her overstuffed throne as her grown daughters and their families made their pilgrimage every Sunday afternoon after church, from Crisco-fried chicken and Duke’s mayonnaise in the potato salad and an inch of sugar undissolved in the bottom of the ice tea glass and dessert after every meal

I am from chiggers and skeeters and yellow jackets, from not going barefoot for fear of bee-stings, from swinging on young poplars and building forts in older oaks, from shooting BBs at glass bottles and killing a bird, once only, from elementary chemistry sets that offered a recipe for gunpowder and invited trips to the drug store to buy sulfur (easy to get) and saltpeter (not), from bouncing a rubber ball against the steps to learn how to play second base, from almost hitting a home run in my final at-bat in Dixie Youth baseball (not Little League— that was integrated)

I am from Sunday school every week, where I got 10 points for remembering to bring the Bible with my name embossed on the front in gold letters, and where I got into trouble for asking about the two different sets of Ten Commandments in Exodus and Deuteronomy

I am from writing for the local newspaper, taking flashbulb pictures at the high school football scrimmage with a gigantic press camera, from having my photos published quarter-page size with no names in the caption because I had been too busy trying to focus the shot to notice who was carrying the ball from “Wallace for president” and “colored only” and “separate but equal” and “freedom of choice” from knowing the one Catholic and one Jew and one black student in my class

I am from an empty house with a “sold” sign in the front yard and a deserted swing in the back and a new foreign name on the mailbox and a half-century of lovingly-acquired heirloom furniture carted off to the antique shop up the road near the sunny hillside with two extra cemetery plots that will never be occupied or draw me back to where I’m from

Recalling Love’s First Moment Hannah Schneider | digital media

Mountain Blooms Destiny Eudy | photography

Ghost Dogs

Hannah Schneider | photography

0 The Sea Serpent and the Storm A fable by Katherine Dorn

No matter what I do, it is still not enough to conquer that storm! No matter what I do, I’m never enough.” The leviathan saw how the sea serpent flashed its teeth in rage and how it had begun to turn that rage inward, instead of towards the goal it had wanted to achieve. With one of its massive fins, it gently batted at the serpent, turning it end over end and shocking it out of its angry tirade. “Little serpent,” it said sternly, “it is not the fault of your fins that you are powerless against the storm, nor the weakness of your conviction. You are young still and have not yet grown into yourself. This thing you desire, to set yourself against the storm and succeed, is hard. You are supposed to struggle, and you are supposed to fail, for it is the struggling and the failing that will give you the strength you need to succeed.” At this, it looked closely at the sea serpent, and as it continued to speak, there was a firm gleam of determination in its eye that the sea serpent recognized. “I was once small like you, and my fins were not the great paddles you see before you now. The only thing you still need to succeed,” said the leviathan, “is time.” After imparting its wisdom, the leviathan pointed the way back to the sea serpent’s own waters and left it floating there in shocked realization. Slowly the sea serpent shook itself together and began to make its way home. On the journey back, several more storms stirred up the waters, though none as big as the hurricane, and the sea serpent set its strength against the tide with new conviction. When the waters buffeted it about, it felt the strain in its small fins and reminded itself that this was right. Time passed, and with every new storm, the sea serpent held its own. It was tossed back many, many times, but it remembered the leviathan’s wisdom. In time, the sea serpent was able to teach itself to feel satisfaction in the struggle, and even a type of furious joy, rather than the poisonous defeat it had felt before. Slowly, so slowly that the sea serpent barely noticed, its fins began to lengthen and grow, and its sinuous body became a whipcord with new strength. When the autumn hurricanes came again, the sea serpent fought and fought and fought against the current, armed with rage and fins and teeth pointed outward as a weapon of pure determination. It fought its way to the ocean’s surface and burst through the waves into the howling winds above. Laughing now, it leapt and played in the raging storm.

nce upon a time, back when the ocean was wild and unknown and sailors had not yet reached the edges of the map, there was a sea serpent. It was not a particularly fantastic thing—it was small in the face of an ocean so vast, and it had not yet come into its own fins. It struggled against currents much stronger than it, and when the sea raged in storm, there was nothing it could do but try and survive its passing. The sea serpent grew frustrated with its situation and with its own perceived helplessness. “I know I could be something greater than this,” it said to itself. “So why is this so difficult? Why do I feel like no matter what I do, nothing changes?” Every day it would work its hardest to swim against the great currents, and yet every time a storm came, it was buffeted back, pushed down further and further into the depths of the sea. All the sea serpent wanted was to breach the storm-tossed ocean’s surface—it knew that even if it could only rise up once, it would be proof that it was stronger than the forces set against it. The turn of the seasons to autumn brought with it the greatest storms yet, and the sea serpent knew that soon the yearly hurricanes would come to its waters. It was determined that this year, it would not be overcome. It pushed and strived and beat its small fins through the water, but when the storm came, it was overwhelmed nonetheless. The sea serpent was battered about like a single drop of water in a gale, and no matter how much it shored up its might, it seemed nothing it was able to do made any difference. When the waters finally calmed, the sea serpent found that it had been blown far from its home, and in that moment the rage and despair at its failure almost overwhelmed it. The sea serpent cursed its own weakness, that its fins were so small and useless, that it hadn’t set itself against the currents hard enough, that it hadn’t been able to do better. As it drifted through unfamiliar waters, an enormous shape came looming out of the darkness. Looking up, the sea serpent found itself face to face with a great leviathan, a whale of truly incredible size with fins that passed through the deep water as if there were nothing there. “Little serpent,” it rumbled, “why do you despair? Why do you set your teeth against yourself and curse the fins which have carried you here?” “My useless fins did not carry me here!” the sea serpent bitterly replied. “They are too small and weak, and I was blown here against my choosing by the autumn hurricane.

The Sea Serpent

Katherine Dorn | steel rebar, assembled metal

Fairy Date

Chelsi Sherrell | photography

Umbrian Tea Ad Leah Jensen | digital media

0 Art Index Birtchet, Bailey

No Uterus, No Opinion Hotel Didot Stationery Set Hotel Didot Brandboard

19 78 79

Collazo Lopez, Anayeli

Story In Six Parts

50–51

Dorn, Katherine

Schooling The Sea Serpent

41 91

Drury, McKennah

Claystation Website Redesign CottonTail Pies Identity Design

22 55

Eudy, Destiny

Mountain Blooms

Fesperman, Megan

Fairy Forest

Harris, Taylor

Circle of Life Firework Eating Disorder

21 33 71

Hashmi, Huma

The Nose Knows

Jensen, Leah

Mrs. Eaves Hotel Umbrian Tea Ad

11 93

Joyner, Sarah

Jewelry Book College Debt Advertisements

40 59

Kilburg, Katelynn

Skin Mistakes Anxiety Illustrated

37 54

Mabiala, Carol

A Letter to Myself

00 94

McCauley, Marissa

Saturday Afternoon

Murphy, Chasity

Nightmares

Ramirez, Ana

What Had Bloomed In Her Head Garden Untitled

5 23 32

Reid, Alanah

Fire Fish Envy Eye

25 65

Rhodes, Delaney

Nature Conservancy Website Redesign

Santrock, Emily

London Will Chris Harrison Find Love Again?

47 60

Schneider, Hannah

Recalling Love’s First Moment Ghost Dogs

87 89

Sherrell, Chelsi

Nightmares and Dreams Fairy Date Weeping Woman

57 92 35

Spangler, Karen

Don’t Let Them Disappear

Viera, Kristen

en el vecindario los arbustos

8 8

Weidman, Grey

Casually Drowning Ghost in a Mall Parking Lot

17 49

Zibell, Corinne

Tree Hugger Into the City Summer Sisterhood

7 67 85

00 95

0 Literature Index Bell, Caroline

Is It Still Freedom If I Don’t Feel Free?

Christopher, M.

Peppermint and Cloves

Cira, Paola

Grandfather

Dorn, Katherine

The Sea Serpent and the Storm

Ellington, Morgan

Earth Embodied

Flood, Hannah

Nowhere, USA

Heins, Claire

Bubble in Snow

Hogan, Ashley

First Day

Hudson, Virginia Ewing

Silence Ends

Koser, Caroline

Light

Pepper, Whitney

Napkins

Polaski, Kate

The Women

Rahman, Tara

Girl of the Glen What I Wanted to Tell Her

42 56

Ranke, Kali

Foreign Objects

Roberts, Megan

The Dog Lover

00 96

Romanelli, Christina

He Who Shared the Stage

Rouch, Alexandra

Hereditary

Shawcross, Lauren

Kafka at Lunchtime

Slack, Olivia

Sansepolcro

Spangler, Karen

Trapped

Walton, Garry

From

Wiese, Krista

Blisters Some Wake to Reveille

26 58

Wood, Lilly R.

Boil Me Alive

00 97

0 Literary Awards Poetry Awards

Prose Awards

Juried by Bianca Diaz

Juried by Jennifer Hubbard ‘87

Winner of the Robert Wason Poetry Award and author of No One Says Kin Anymore , Diaz earned an MFA in poetry from George Mason. Now an assistant in the Meredith Admissions office, she has published widely in print and online journals.

Author of two acclaimed novels (Paper Covers Rock and And We Stay ), this alumna was on the staff of the Colton’s

1st Place

This poem’s imagery, metaphors, and compression are striking. The speaker is beautifully haunted by the lineage she describes. The author deftly celebrates the duality of gift and curse that is a heritage.

This is a story in the most classic definition of story, one that presents a conflict with a resolution. It reels us in immediately with its honest voice and specific, well-chosen detail. The arc that the protagonist undergoes is both significant and earned.

predecessor, where her poetry and prose were published for several years.

Hereditary | by Alexandra Rouch | page 76

Blisters | by Krista Wiese | page 26

2nd Place

What I Wanted to Tell Her | by Tara Rahman | page 56

Grandfather | by Paola Cira | page 80

The author invites the reader into this room, where mother and daughter share an intimate, fraught exchange. The speaker is full of hesitance and yearning. I couldn’t get this poem out of my mind for days.

This story manages to balance the timely with the universal, and its invitation to revisit Don Quixote only enhances its sophistication. The clarity of setting lends credibility to this piece, which reverberates with meaning.

Honorable Mention

Boil Me Alive | by Lilly R. Wood | page 24

Foreign Objects | by Kali Ranke | page 38

Bubble in Snow | by Claire Heins | page 48

An authentic voice, a knock-out inciting incident, and a familiar object imbued with mystery: yes, yes, and yes. There is much to mine here, including complex family relationships, for a more extended work.

Originality Award

Some Wake to Reveille | by Krista Wiese | page 58 This compelling piece means to open our eyes, and it succeeds. It offers a fresh point of view, and its economy of language is arresting and mature.

00 98

0 Art Awards A Letter From the Designers “Every artist dips their brush in their own soul, and paints their own nature into their pictures.”–Henry Ward Beecher The design staff from The Colton Review would like to extend a thanks to the artists who submitted and are featured in this year’s issue of the journal. We were impressed by the variation of mediums submitted to the journal that truly showcase the range of creativity and skills of our students. We also saw many pieces that decided to deal with heavier subjects, a theme echoed by the literature pieces published in this edition of the journal, and strengthened the relationship between one’s artistry and the expression of experiences we each face. The vibrant images included in the journal add an additional facet, both complementing the written pieces as well as telling their own stories. Photography and digital imaging were heavily featured in this edition, allowing momentary glimpses into students’ lives, relationships, and emotions they face. This edition of The Colton Review is very special to our design team, and we are thankful to everyone who contributed to seeing it come to life. To Professor Lovelace, thank you for encouraging us to be true to ourselves and our artistic vision. Sincerely, Sarah Joyner and Anayeli Collazo Lopez, Co-Art Directors Delaney Rhodes, Graphic Designer

Art Awards Juried by Marius Valdes

Marius Valdes is an Associate Professor in studio art concentrating on design and illustration at The University of South Carolina. Valdes has been recognized by design publications such as HOW, Print, Communication Arts, Creative Quarterly, STEP, and industry competitions including American Illustration, AIGA InShow, AIGA SEED Awards, and The South Carolina Advertising Federation Addy Awards. Valdes’ work has been featured in several books about contemporary graphic design and illustration, and he has participated in solo and group exhibitions internationally.

Best of Show

Judges Award

Untitled | Ana Ramirez | digital media | page 32

A Letter to Myself | Carol Mabiala | graphite and pen | page 61

I found this image to demonstrate excellence in digital art. The attention to form and composition are strong, and the artist’s use of color and attention to detail pushed this to the top of my final choices. As I looked at all of the entries, this was the image that made the most immediate impression for it’s technical skill and overall quality. This looks like the work of a professional artist/illustrator.

I was drawn to the formal qualities of the portrait, which shows a stylization of the subject that is loose and charming. The image is strengthened by the use of the hand written text to create an interesting texture that makes me want to investigate the image further and with more attention to the detail. The limited color palette defined by the artist’s tools adds a nice contrast to the shades of color in the figure. All of these decisions by the artist combine to make a piece of art that makes me want to stop and consider who this person is and what does the “letter” say about her.

0 Literary Staff

Design Staff

Co-Editors Alexandra Rouch Krista Wiese

Co-Art Directors Anayeli Collazo Lopez Sarah Joyner

Poetry Editor Olivia Slack Prose Editor Devin Totherow

Graphic Designer Delaney Rhodes

Engagement Manager Kali Ranke Social Media Manager Bridget Gable

Faculty Design Advisor Professor Dana Lovelace

Archivist Rachael Sampson Faculty Advisor Dr. Garry Walton Writer-Editors Katherine Dorn Claire Heins Lauren Luke Sarah Page Kate Polaski Tara Rahman Mia Shelton Gwyneth Thomas Aidyn Truesdale Erin Wendorf Katelyn Wiszowaty Lilly R. Wood Corinne Zibell

Production Notes Printer PrintingCenterUSA Copies 750 Type Families Bodoni MT & Odalisque NF

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The Colton Review 2020