the torch
W
e have found meaning in the man-made things that define our environment – the ice that floats in our filtered water, the machines that signify our daily lives, the remnants of an industrial revolution in the background. Late at night we sharpen photos, blurring the lines between genres. Behind the verb tense changes and comma placements, hidden in the dirt we play in, we see a message hidden, ready to be exposed.
Laura Jackson, 2015
CoNTEN s ART 6 9
Thomas Griffith
Hannah Russell Royalty
Katie Williams
Non-fiction 7
Beggars
Andrew Gray
poetry 5
Crisis
Stephanie Traylor
Fiction 3
Root Beer
Renee Roberson
3
Renee Roberson
Root Beer
“D
on’t you want some breakfast?” Momma called out at me from the kitchen,“it’s a long drive into town.” “Nah, I’m not hungry,” I said. I was combing my hair and pulling on my boots at the same time so I could be faster. Daddy and me were going to town today to pick up Momma’s new oven from Howard’s Hardware.“Where’s Daddy?” “He’s in the living room,” Momma said, turning back to washing dirty dishes. She had gospel music playing like she always does, and she sang along about precious salvation and God loving the wretches. “I’m ready,” I hollered, breathless and running into the living room. Daddy was sitting in the easy chair, reading the paper. “Whatcha reading?” I asked, craning over his shoulder. “Wars, murders, Bush. Nothing you need to worry about,” Daddy said as he folded up the paper.“You ready?” “Yes, Sir,” I said and ran out to our old rust-red pickup truck. I was seat-belted before Daddy even left the porch. He got in the car and made his usual adjustments: the mirrors, the air conditioning, the seat. The truck stuttered to life, and we set out down the dirt road towards town. I waved goodbye to my older brothers that were already out working with the horses. Daddy put in a tape of a preacher man shouting about hell-fire and revival. Turning to Daddy, I ventured:“Revival feels like jumping in the pond when the water’s extra cold and the sun’s really hot, right?”
“No, Son,” he said, turning down the preacher man, “revival isn’t a feeling. You’ve got revival when you mind me and your Momma, and, most of all, the Lord Jesus.” But he just said that because last Sunday my church clothes were itching me, and the preacher man just kept talking; so, I got up to “go to the bathroom” and played outside ’til the service ended. Momma and Daddy came out with that great rush of people in their fine Sunday clothes, and they found me chasing lizards in the shady side of the church. They pulled down my pants and whupped me right then and there. I told them I left because I was uncomfortable. Momma said,“Eli, you need to pray to sweet baby Jesus and ask forgiveness for being so wicked and listening to the devil.” I bowed my head down and folded up my hands, but I didn’t pray, I thought about those lizards I was chasing. Remembering Sunday, I looked off out the truck window and smiled. I watched the bramble bushes and gumball trees blur by the truck. Soon enough, candy wrappers and soda cans replaced the loose cotton plant leftovers strung along the roadside grass. That’s when we came to our town, Wimberly. I gawked at all those city-folk in Wimberly, and they gawked back or paid me no mind at all. At the hardware store, Mr. Howard already had an oven-sized box waiting for us on the front porch.“You just stay in the truck, this will take a minute,” Daddy ordered. He got out of the truck to talk to Mr. Howard and his men.
After arrangings and rearrangings, two strong men and Daddy picked up the oven and pushed it onto the truck bed. The sweat on their muscles reminded me of the sweat on the horses at the track. I only went to the track one time when Uncle Joey took us kids because he was watching us for the weekend. When Momma and Daddy found out he took us to a den of vipers, they sat us all down at the kitchen table with the family Bible and read us verse after verse about casting lots, redemption, and that wily Satan. After they had the oven all strapped down, Daddy climbed back into the truck, all hot and sweating.“Hungry?” Daddy asked. “Yes, Sir,” I nodded gravely. “You like Mexican food? How about El Nepal?” Daddy smiled at me and started the truck. We drove a minute to a pink adobe building with a red tile roof at the edge of town. Inside Mexican music played, and it was sweltering hot. A lot of white folk were there sitting at the bar smoking. The only Mexicans in the restaurant were running around with baskets of chips and bowls of salsa. We were seated in a corner booth, and a Mexican waiter asked about our drinks. I asked for root beer, because he had root beer-colored skin. “I would like,” Daddy said drawing out his syllables, “a number 5”— he held out five fingers with one hand and pointed to the menu with the other—“and a number 3.” He held out three fingers. The Mexican nodded, scribbled on his notepad, said “Sí, Sí,” and left.
While we waited, I told Daddy all about the baseball team this year, about riding my horse around our land, and about Billy and Jonah’s fight yesterday. When our waiter came back, he had four quesadillas and two burritos balanced along his sarsaparillacolored arm, like feathers on a wing. He placed two plates in front of us and hurried away to other tables. “I’ll say the blessing,” I offered, and Daddy smiled at me. We bowed our heads and rested our folded hands on the orange plastic tabletop. “Lord Jesus, thank you. Amen,” I prayed. We sat silent for a minute; then Daddy added his own “amen” to my prayer. We ate our beans, rice, and tacos then got up to leave. Daddy rifled through his wallet, past fives, tens, and twenties, to one of those tracts they gave out at church last Sunday. We’re supposed to leave them at gas stations, public restrooms, and restaurants so we can spread salvation wherever we go. Daddy tipped with a gospel tract that was shaped and colored like a twenty-dollar bill. He said while we walked to the truck, “We should’ve left him one in es-pan-yoll.” I didn’t take any of those tracts with me when I left church last Sunday, and I didn’t laugh with my Daddy. I just wished that we hadn’t left that man a fake twenty-dollar bill for salvation.
4
5
Stephanie Traylor
crisis
A
t the edge of a New Mexico town (two thousand people, one stoplight) where civilization fades into desert, a clapboard cabin stands. A young man paces the yard, bundled against the bite of October. He looks up at darkness and breathes a puff of white vapor, eyes attempting to break the barrier between earth and thoughtless sky, but no. The emptiness echoes with coyotes’ mournful moans, with the beating of his heart.
6
Hannah Russell, 2015
Thomas Griffith
W
7
Andrew Gray
Beggars
e have traded the stars, in Birmingham, for white fluorescent tubing and the smolder of streetlamps. We have encased them in iron and steel. Sometimes in the thick heat of the summers, Mary and I stand on a vine-eaten brick wall etched against the eastern bank of Red Mountain. From the heights, the city lies like a black tarp, wet and flecked with light, and the metallic sounds of industry echo upward through the fog. “If you squint at them, they flicker,” Mary says. “I know,” I tell her. To the south, the smokestacks are firing, gray spires writhing toward the low-hanging stratus clouds. It is late, and another shift will come soon to restoke the flames, replenish the raw material. Sometimes I try to see them—the dirt-crusted boots of the factory workers, the businessmen in skyrises of glass, the women who sleep under newspaper along the railroaded veins of the city. I wonder if they have ever seen their city as I see it, swallowed it whole and tasted their part. I want to tell them something. Last summer, we walked along the steel spines of railroad track, balancing above the white-pitched stones. The railroad is Birmingham’s river, and we raised our arms against the humid gusts. I watched the glass-walled skyscrapers glint above the squat earthen-colored rooftops, the redbrick frames long coated with dirt and soot. “Listen,” Mary said.
And I listened. The electric buzz of power lines, the low moan of freight trains and the grating hiss of their departure, a trill of birds, a distant siren—I had missed them before. The sounds were not singular, not isolated; they were the sounds of the city, my city. A man in a paint-tattered navy smock stepped out from under an overpass and said, “In the good and precious name of Jesus, if I can just get me enough for a sandwich.” His fingers looked like burnt sticks. “This is all I have,” I said, and I emptied the change from my pockets. “Bless you, son. Bless you,” he said. He smiled with a single tooth and hurried from beneath the overpass, his dark hands wreathing his eyes from the sun. “He’s going to buy booze with it,” Mary said. “Probably,” I said.“Still a beggar though.” We walked until dusk within the rails, pacing our steps to the knotted wooden planks, the whipped air growing cool at our backs. In the western outskirts of the city, we might have been alone. Houses rose in cinders, stabbing blackly towards the skyline. Speargrass clotted in the cracks of sidewalk plots and trembled in the churning winds, the backlit building-tops orange and idling in sunset. We left the tracks. On Elder Street, a house had collapsed within itself. Its roofing sat upon the woodpaneled porch, the brickwork flaring out like the petals of a crushed iris.
“It’s kind of pretty,” I said, and my hands shuddered. I lowered my voice. “But not for them.” In the last pale traces of day, Mary shattered a window with a rock. The shards echoed like chimes inside the hollow body of the airplane hangar. We crawled inside, falling with our backs to the chilled cement. We stood brushing dust from our legs and staring. The ceiling and upper walls were greentinted plateglass, the metal ribs arching like a zeppelin toward the darkening sky. Every pane was chipped or splintered, and the yellow half-light poured through in tangled shoots. We screamed HELLO, our ricocheted voices inside wholly abandoned space, resounding against the metal framework and returning to us larger, stretched. “I can’t believe they would just leave it,” Mary said. As the sky spilled slowly black, we laid on the cool floor gazing upward at the lights of lifting planes, flaring away from Birmingham. We had walked across our steel city and found a place within it. The lower walls, swallowed with ivy, wafted in warm and curling drafts. We whispered. “Think if this place were new,” I said. “It wouldn’t be ours if it were new.” “No,” I paused.“It wouldn’t be ours.”
slow-sloping ridges of the mountain are coated in oaks, and the lights of the city flash erratically between their dark pursed branches. A quiet descent into the valley—I think of them again. I think of the day we walked for miles to lie in a place that no one else wanted, balancing the rails between beauty and abandonment. We found something that day, but I have no words for it. Something that could only be whispered in ivy, something that cannot be kept. I want to tell them something. I want to tell them: We are all beggars. Mary eases the clutch,and the soft fastening of second gear hums like the city itself. We are back in the valley, the fogsiphoned lights pouring through windows.
Staring out over the city, Mary squints her eyes again. “At night it’s all just flashes,” she says. “You can’t tell what’s underneath.” She flicks the browned end of a cigarette, sending a hazy arch into the underlying foliage. The
8
9 Katie Williams, 2014
Royalty
BOs I Junior Laura Jackson really did grow up speaking Spanglish. Renee Roberson loves slight sunburns and crossword puzzles. Senior English major Stephanie Traylor has an imaginary pet dragon named Muffin. Senior Art Major Hannah Russell struggles with things like bios because art. Andrew Gray wishes poetry was more like chocolate chip pancakes.
Union University