Fall/Winter 2010, Albany Road by Deerfield Academy

Albany Road

ALBANY ROAD

2010

The thread that you weave quite skillfully is no light matter. Rather, it is the substance of your unbecoming, to me, and bears infinite gravity, and I boundless remorse. My frustration mounts always near rage, though in my way, never reaching that one, tiny, precise point of unbridled fervor. For what it is worth you always make the most beautiful things. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Drew Eident

DEERFIELD

The Literary Magazine of Deerfield Academy | 2010

Albany Road The Literary & Art Magazine of Deerfield Academy

WINTER 2010 DEERFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Hannah Flato LITERARY EDITORS

Cecelia Buerkle Drew Eident Amanda Minoff Eliot Taft ART EDITOR

Jen Mulrow LAYOUT EDITOR

Alexander Heller

FACULTY ADVISORS

Andrea & Robert Moorhead

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from the editors— THESE FIFTY-SIX PAGES TAKE A BITE OUT OF DEERFIELD. Reading it, skimming it, enjoying the pictures—you’ll absorb the hiccups of one student’s life, another student’s sense of humor, another’s love of nature, another’s concern for the legacy of the Iraq War. We are used to looking through the lens of school meeting and seeing a community composed of familiar faces, coats, ties, and cardigans. So now open Albany Road and venture into the thoughts behind those rows of faces. Play with the dynamic snapshots; discover the dynamic undercurrents of our school. We sit in class-dressed rows, absorbed in a common, shared moment, but through this issue, you can peek into where some of us are coming from, what others see in their surroundings, and where others are headed. Enjoy. Hannah Flato, Editor-in-Chief

I SCRUNCHED UP MY NOSE AS IT MET THE WINTER BREEZE, brisk and sharp whispering roars into my ear. Winter brings the precarious piles of snow, the short days and lingering darks, and a growing dread of walking outside from building to building. I continued past the dimly lit dining hall, past the modest Hitchcock House and a bustling John Williams until I finally reached my destination. Circulating a calm, constant warmth, the Memorial Building Art Studio is its own safe haven, lined with drawings, paintings, and photographs all created by the hands of our very own here at Deerfield Academy. For many including myself, the Art Studio is a place to lose all sense of time, an escape from the outside world even just for a moment. I hope as you read through this issue of Albany Road you can use it as your own escape, from the trials of school, from the stress of work, from the brisk winter breeze whispering roars into your own ears. Jen Mulrow, Art Editor

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Contents Prose Kayla Corcoran

The Lake, a Fascination

Eliot Taft

Overflow

Katie Regan

Notes towards a History of Pictures

Amanda Minoff

Reflections

Henry Michaels

Poundmelter4500 Pill

Alec Strandberg

Peter

Morgan Marks

Indecency

Amanda Minoff

Fog and Rawhide

Veronica Houk

Marriage

Drew Eident

ยง

Julian Gonzรกlez

Steeped Loose Recollections

Drew Eident

ยง

Mah Sotoudeh

Mother

Willem Molenaar

Past and Future, Day and Life

Poetry

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Visual Art Kyle Wieczorek

Knotted Drapery

cover

Hannah Dancer

Two Highways, One Way

Ariel Beauregard-Breton Self-Portrait

Ariel Beauregard-Breton Two Nudes

Estelle Kim

Deer with Antlers

Lizzy Gregory

Katrina

Sarah Oh

George Washington Bridge

Anne Mosley

Censored

Jen Mulrow

Tools

Rebecca Levy

Even Greeks Gods

Kyle Wieczorek

Girl Smoking

Cameron Overy

Head

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Hannah Dancer

Two Highways, One Way Digital Photograph, 8x11

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Amanda Minoff

Fog and Rawhide 1. Here, they air-condition cafes With the cool blue of counterculture. Here, The street walks are Pasted with mossy pavement And taste of chewed gum and tacky footprint. And here, also, there are women (deep like coffee And as strong) who Come and go Come and go. They stick burnished boots off filth-licked cement And don’t ever break for a bowing of a head Or the silly union of two palms— 2. Down the crusted, cobbled road There’s a house for the ages: Brow composed of creaking bricks, And tongue a stern, burly plank Of cracked cedar.

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Through a break in the rooftop The smoke still stacks and cataractsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; Descends Like a dust cloud puffed from the pages Of an old paperback Bible. It sweeps round the dogwoods dampened black, Cross the green-tinted storefronts boasting shoe-soles, Then meets the leather handshake Of a woman (coffee in palm and Draped in deep red). 3. She rolls the smog round once in her mouth, And, when the signal sounds, Trudges her feet out cross the ground.

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Ariel Beauregard-Breton

Self-Portrait Oil Rub-out, 10x12

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Kayla Corcoran

The Lake, a Fascination HE DOMINANT LIGHTS ARE A PULSATING BLUE, breathing on their own, whirling around in overlapping spheres. Orange streetlights move the sky above the water from deep dark to a grey purple, a shade that feels unsatisfying, empty like a yawn without purpose. This nocturne of sorts breathes aliveness: inhaling then exhaling to the loud siren screams and the bare fingers tapping on bare knees. His thumb traces patterns on my hand, on my knee, on the stone wall near the water, near the cold metal barrier which rests only to separate us from the rakish waves. We arrived here by chance, but every surface, every new texture, beckoned us to stay. We watch a crowd gather, mash together, and then recoil in heat and loss of interest.

“Can you even imagine?” I ask. His hands are sweaty in the summer night air. “How long do you think…” my voice trails into the space between the sky, that vast void between night and day. “Why would you want to? Imagine? He’s already gone, no matter how long it takes,” he says matter-of-factly, but then softly, sympathetically, asks, “why are we even here, blue eyes? It’s getting late.” I suck in a deep breath. I am feeling pensive and there is everything to think about: the lake and its poisonous seaweed; ground-up ashes in the dirt; the squeals of tires on the grey pavement that is split by a million little lines just like the palms of my hands; and the steady thrumming of fire engines, one thrum after another. In the coming days when I read the newspapers over and over, searching for information, this is the moment I will attempt to re-imagine. The moment of when the seaweed is so thick, I can see it floating on the water’s surface, quiet and gnarled. The moment of which taking a picture is impossible because it can only be seen, not felt.

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The people around us smoke in deep drags, holding their cigarettes in one hand and a beer in the other. The beer is served in plastic cups. It makes me want to vomit. “This one guy told me that he was with somebody else, or someone who knew him was at the bar and saw him fall over,” he says. I press onto my toes, searching the crowd for the distressed faces of family. He laughs because he is still taller than me. But the only faces we see staring back are ones of feigned concern: Neighbors with frizzy hair and drooping grey pants, girls in black denim and boys with earrings, drunks wearing t-shirts with the names of bands lost to the generations. The energy of indifference sucks them all into one crowd, a mass of ambivalent faces, indistinguishable from one another. “I also heard that someone at the bar saw an empty boat, so they called the police,” I tell him. In the crowd of old townies and kids who run by laughing too loudly, I like to imagine that I am the only one searching out the truth. We have been here for almost two hours, waiting, watching the police set up the road block, watching the dive teams scour the surface, watching the others gossip. In the summer heat, the elusiveness of the lake appeals to us all. We are at once rooted to the cement road that splits the lake in two, the road flanked on either side by ceaseless winks of grey-green. We are stuck in our own dreams and the inky depths of their horrors. “I bet Death isn’t as worse as the worst imagination,” I sigh. He looks at me with furrowed brows of confusion. Biting my lip, I say, “I mean, what do you suppose will happen now? If they can’t find his body?” His thumb stops moving for a moment, paused on my knee in either annoyance or nervousness. I can understand it, though. Death has a habit of making people nervous.When I think about it, it seems impossible to

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comprehend. How can one just disappear? Float away? End? By now the pinkness of the sky has been folded and tucked away for a few hours. I have seen the lake one thousand times, and I can never quite decide what to think. But tonight it is the most beautiful, perhaps because it is the most overwhelming. The lights are all I can see. All I can hear. All over, on the beige stucco walls of the bar, the black poles of the patio, the pale faces of faded early-summer tans. “I don’t know,” he finally answers, and I turn my face to his. “What if they don’t find him?” I whisper again. “What if they never find him? Will they just leave him in there?” Across the water, there are more lights: red, orange, white, extending into long columns that bend and grab like fingers. I close my eyes for a moment, imagining the drift into nothingness, his drift. Everything is screaming, but I’m not listening. For a moment, everything fades. And then I’m slipping, slipping slowly into darkness. Cesious. Blue and black and clammy green ribbons of seaweed. Knotted like the snakes of Medusa’s hair. Moonlight white hands and pearlescent white feet, tangled in the green ropes, rough on such smooth skin, wet with the water and the mud and the sweet tasting sweat of panic. The end. This is the end of rose pinks and the deep blood orange evenings. Of coralflushed peach colors and dewy yellows of morning. No more lips stained with the reds of life, only white fingernails cracked like broken shells. By now the gritty sand has erased all the lines on his palms. Wrinkles and creases will wear smooth until they’re finally gone. Eyes wide, hauntingly swollen and open, gazing into the abyss of foreverness. Emotionless as marble. “He’s already gone. It wouldn’t matter either way,” he whispers in my ear.

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I tell him that I know, that I don’t care. I want to stay until they find his body. I don’t even know him, but I feel like I do. Or, I feel like I want to know him. That I need to know him to be fully enveloped into the surrealism. Otherwise, it feels like some ridiculous absurdity, standing here, among these people—this crowd that I am a part of, this crowd from which I am apart. The lake isn’t deep, but it’s wide. By now, the red lighted trucks have assembled to cast larger, white lights onto the black darkness. The mosquitoes gather by it like the people gathered outside the bar, comparing theories and presenting their opinions for the news networks. From inside, the music is loud enough to reach the other side of the lake, I imagine. The words are too insignificant to distinguish one from the other. Only the thrumming, thrumming, thrumming of the jukebox can be felt, can be seen in the smallest vibrations of air, quivering. Or maybe I just don’t care. I only want to think about the drowning, but I am afraid to say it out loud. My thoughts are a watery mass, sloshing around in the safety of my mind. Speaking them means giving up control, leaving myself at the mercy of what they may turn into. I remember driving on this road, once. An early, misty morning that made me think of postcards and Debussy. Of traveling and of old books from the library. And of beginnings, which seem so easy to contemplate and so difficult to understand. It is much easier to imagine things as I want them to be then as they might have been. This lake, before the road was made. This man, before he drowned. There is something that wants to be said about such beginnings, even though it may not be true. “Truth is relative, anyways,” I say, thinking out loud. “Huh?” he asks. I laugh. “Sorry, I was just thinking…” I pause for a moment to imagine his

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thoughts. Surely, they are more concrete than mine. For him, it is about the adventure. It is always about the adventure. Some dreamed glory of his feted discovery of the drowned man’s body, the town clamoring for his story, the half-grin that will creep onto his face as he retells it. A grin on my own face betrays my imaginings. “How do you think this lake got here?” I flush, trying to hide my thoughts of him. “Hmm… it rained a lot?” he suggests. “No!” I laugh. “Seriously.” “Fine, you tell me.” And then he smirks because he knows I will. I take a deep breath and begin to tell the beginning for which I’ve been searching. Somewhere, along the outer edges of my thoughts, floats the dead man with his perpetual statuary gaze. “They say there’s a stone wall in the middle of it,” I begin. “Connects the far-right shore to the road. Long time ago before the lake was made, it was a field, and the wall separated one pasture from another. Whoever made the lake never bothered to remove the stones.” “Interesting,” he pretends to ponder deeply. “What’s so special about this wall? Were these stones made of gold?” he jokes. I gently smack him on the arm. “Hardly. Anyways, every morning this one man would walk across the wall, through the water and fog, to reach the road. An old teacher at the school. Name of Nutting. Kind of ironic, if you ask me. Guy had a young daughter, about ten or so, his only child, real well known in town.” “Ah, yes. His only daughter. Definitely a bright girl, freckled nose, blue eyes, just like yours,” he pinches my nose. I ignore him.

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“Early one morning—they say it was the mistiest morning you could imagine, a haze as thick as the seaweed—daughter runs off, tries to get to the other side of the lake for some reason. Disappears. Nobody can find her. The father swears he can hear her calling for him, her tiny voice through the fog. Naturally, he’s sick with worry, tries to find her, but no one can see anything. They search for weeks, but nothing. Father tries to persuade the people to keep looking for her, but eventually they had to give up. There was nothing else they could do.” I swallow hard. Was this what it would come to for the drowned man? An end empty of answers? I swallow again and force myself to keep imagining. “Anyways, the father cracks up. Keeps yelling at everyone how he hears her every morning, knows she’s out there. He stops teaching, stops going anywhere. Becomes a bit of a recluse. Just sits around, yelling bits and pieces of delusion, saying that he can hear her singing to him from across the lake every morning. For him, time stops moving by. There’s still enough of it to find her, to save her.” “What did it sound like? Her song, I mean?” he asks slowly, as if feeling each word separately on his tongue. “Like Debussy,” I say. It is the first thing that comes to my mind. “Clair de Lune.” He nods for me to continue. “And then one day, he just disappears. Walks off into the lake. They searched for the body and didn’t find anything. Nothing. Guy just disappears. Some people think he went crazy, others who knew him swear he must’ve known what he was doing. No one really ever knew, I guess. “People assumed he drowned, just like his daughter, but they never found any evidence. No body ever turned up, same as the girl’s. Ended up that they named the lake after the both of them: Nutting’s Lake.”

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We are both quiet for a moment. “So that’s it, then. The end?” he murmurs. I nod. “Or the beginning…it’s horrible, isn’t it?” I whisper. What’s horrible is that we can never really know anything. I can’t say why the little girl ran away across the lake, and it’s my own imagination. How can we know real life if we can’t even know made-up stories? How could anyone know why the young man who drowned tonight was out alone? Or whether his death was intentional? Or maybe it was an accident? Did anyone hear the water splash around his body as it broke the surface? Did he even make any noise? Can he know the pain of his white fingernails cracked like broken shells? Of his wrinkles and creases worn smooth? Of his eyes swollen open, hard, hauntingly alive? Sometime after they find the man’s body, they will learn that his name is Roman, an Armenian, roughly twenty-nine years old. The drowning is too insignificant for the major news stations. Instead there are only cycles of weather, murder, weather, murder, robbery, weather, sports. I will keep reading the newspaper, hoping to find answers to the questions that journalists never seem to ask. The ones that seem obvious are the ones most difficult to answer. The cause of death will be apparent, but no one will be able to explain exactly what happened. No one will ever know, and there will be no family to want an autopsy of the remains. Some of his friends will try to scrape together enough money to send his body back to the Ukraine. The dive team will be exhausted from their strenuous searching, all night, all day. They will be glad to be rid of the murky wetness that lingers in their hair, on their minds. The drunks and the old-faced neighbors outside the bar will talk of other things; too busy chattering to hear those faint murmurs, inklings of a soft song that can sometimes be heard across the lake on early, misty mornings if you listen hard enough.

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Ariel Beauregard-Breton

Two Nudes Ebony Pencil, 16x20

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Veronica Houk

Marriage They are building a fence in the backyard— An unfriendly steel barrier because their wives Do not get along. The men, they’re the ones Outside, sun-tanned and sweaty, working At each end of the yard, but they are only concerned With sleeping in the bedroom tonight. Pick your battles, They figure. They try To remain silent as they work, but their eyes flit To each other’s bald faces and casual observations Shoot out their lips like nails from a gun. Quality metal here, one murmurs, real sturdy. Nice polish, too, the other adds. Their wives creep behind thick crimson curtains, Patterned with heavy plants and ornate root Systems, beady eyes behind swollen lids, Sawing an invisible path from sweaty back to Sweaty back. They almost could not Distinguish which husband belonged to them If not for the obvious obsidian stakes Dividing the property lines.

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Estelle Kim

Deer with Antlers Ebony Pencil, 12x8

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Eliot Taft

Overflow SPILLED INTO THE EDDY where the current flows around it in little electric

folds and wrinkles along the river’s surface, where stillness folds back into movement. August never makes sense. On the first cold morning of the summer, sweat, glistening in the sun, rolled in a salty tandem off my legs and into the slow circling flow of the rapid’s gentle side pool. The big green kayak looked awkward. It was floating in the eddy, not against and not with the flow of the river, its back filled with the things I needed for my course up river, on that adventure I told myself to take after a slow summer of reading too many adventure books. There was a thunderstorm last night. The Deerfield River cooled to sixty nine degrees, and the rainwater flowed off the cornfields and creeks and into the river, brown and fresh like apple cider. Rolling off the hill towns and small folds of mountains replete with deciduous green Appalachia, autumn exhaled its first chilled presence, tumbling gusts and zephyrs, into the river valley. Water wasn’t the only body flowing in a natural course down and against the river bank where I stood waiting to begin. So I set out. I dug my paddle into the river surface and it broke like glass. The light gleaned against the big clear crush and up into the resplendent emerald leaves shining like morning constellations against a blue white porcelain sky, open and endless, sore after a night of thunderheads and lightning cracking the dark like a fissured egg. The hardest parts seemed to be dragging the kayak up against the pressing flow of the actual rapids. The rest was easy. Wherever the river didn’t require me to jump out of the boat and pull it upriver with a string tied to the nose of the green kayak, I could easily glide up the waterway in an almost natural pace. The river didn’t have a pace. When sometimes it flowed soft and easy, it could quickly tumble into a shallow rocky current, flowing fast like blood pounding through a vein.

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Around the first large bend in the river, a fly fisherman’s sporadic cast wove in irregular patterns against the nitric green backdrop of the Japanese knotweed on shore. He stood still, unmoving in the current as it picked up speed around his ankles and swiftly gushed past the boulder whose eddy I sat in, relaxed. The rapids strengthened and on the opposite shore I detached myself from the boat and pulled it along. The river flowed past and in between us, pulling along the stillness of our bodies etched into our respective sides. “Any bites?” “Nothing, I’m off today.” The Stillwater Bridge sat as my last reminder of familiar civilization. Under it, brown trout swam with their iron dark backs and dinosaur fins. They twisted beneath the water in edgeless curls, as phantoms before sinking into the deep brown. Beyond the bridge stood an island locally rumored to have once forged coins in the revolutionary era. The sun smoldered in a noontime haze, like a welder’s torch alit through smoke and steam. The bridge steadily disintegrated behind the leafy, gnarled wickerwork of the trees and the river ahead moved in the new wilderness untouched by too many hands. Nothing was easy. I was in the more rugged foothills of Western Massachusetts. Roads and cars didn’t run parallel to the river anymore, and fears and failure flowed through my head. I knew only the river from previous downstream trips, the surrounding woods sat in a formless, viridescent cast shrouded by the granitic boulders pocked in an ashen impasto along the bank. The day itself shaped into the shapeless stretch of minutes in hours pulled by the slow even flow of the thinning stream. The sky expired into the later afternoon and reflected on the river’s early evening surface. It pulled the sky into the water. It pulled, and then flowed. The first dangerous rapid surged under the Bardswell Ferry Bridge. Its red iron girders stood rusty and dry like scabbed blood. The bridge loomed over the skeletal ripples churning like thin stew. I had never

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explored the river beyond this point. The metallic body over my head set like a window beyond which the incunabular design of unknown territory stretched in a boundless infinity. The river flow rushed, inconsistent but fast and heavy, onward, and I maneuvered the kayak upstream along the shore side with short sprint paddles up the current and rests in the eddies. Everything was current. Current and ruin. Railroad towers and dark archways emerged among the old growth forest on both sides, and small creeks toppled into the cannibalistic flow of the Deerfield River. My thoughts consumed each other. As the sun flickered lower and lower like a candle in a burnt black foundry window, I panicked over where to sleep. Unsure, and with the oncoming dusk beginning to cerement the hillsides, I pushed around the corner and hit an impassible rapid. Class three at least. Steep boulders on either side, the river pounded along in a vitriolic flow. I sat helpless in the calm watery dais at the end of the current, roiling in its own glossy evening delirium. It was the end, the stream-like course of my summer finished with this final white-capped cataract. I camped along the current in the dark of the woods in an opening in the trees like a grotto, its shadowy mouth tongued with pebbles and its borders fell into the black. My camp fire cooked my meal, and then reduced to cinders on the sand. The trees stood old and rachitic, below the night festooned with bulbous white stars among the venom dark. As I tried to sleep, I could only hear the river. It flowed in a riotous surge in the night, along which I sweated and felt my heart beating, finally, with the momentous course of the pounding stream. In my fear of the night, I moved with the flow of the river, the overflow. Everything now was over, and among the oncoming autumn night nothing was still anymore. A train on the ridge of the far bank slid eastward, crashing through the dark with one bright white orb chewing along in the amorphous shade. Flowing with the train in the dark of the night, the ceaseless current bounced, tolling in its everness, diminished among the blood and shades of thoughts flowing in their cerebral course, heavy and never ending in my mind. My head flowed and

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overflowed in every direction and I fell asleep. The sun rose in the east and I paddled east downriver at my own stroke, at whatever pace the river took me. Moving against or with, or beside or above the Deerfield River, things flowed along the arrhythmic bounce of the currents. Pouring downstream, I passed under the Bardswell Ferry Bridge, through the long straight jumping rapids and into Stillwater again, finally back in the field towns closer to home. I flowed along slowly, in my head. Summer was burning away into an ashy fall. After the fast rapids, around the bend in the river, I saw the same fly fisherman roll casting his same cast. “Any Bites?” I said. “Nothing, I’m off today.”

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Lizzy Gregory

Katrina Pastel & Charcoal Pencil, 13x10

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Drew Eident

ยง The thread that you weave quite skillfully is no light matter. Rather, it is the substance of your unbecoming, to me, and bears infinite gravity, and I boundless remorse. My frustration mounts always near rage, though in my way, never reaching that one, tiny, precise point of unbridled fervor. For what it is worth you always make the most beautiful things.

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Sarah Oh

George Washington Bridge Wire, 35x15x10

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Katie Regan

Notes towards a History of Pictures I. When are circumstances fixed as opposed to fluid? Can a moment be frozen in time, or is that just an expression? There are moments that are worth freezing in time, but can’t be. There are moments that I wish I could just capture behind the lens of a Polaroid, shake vigorously, catch a glimpse of, and then send tumbling into the trash-can along with all the others that didn’t quite come out right. Maybe it was the lighting. Polaroid photos have the tendency of coming out all grainy and fuzzy anyway. For some reason those are the ones that last the longest. They march on monotonously toward oblivion, suffocating you, each grainy centimeter choking you and blocking your nose and throat like sand. After a while, those grains press so hard and so sharply, that you desperately want them to stop. But then the circumstance is frozen, it’s the way it is. And will be. The circumstances as they are; a state of affairs, situation.

II. How can a mental picture be a framework of understanding when the picture is something I don’t understand at all? My big toe traces invisible shapes on the sand-papery ceiling. The skin becomes warmer and warmer with abrasive friction and invisible pictures. I can’t even see what I’m tracing. I can’t really see anything except for liquid silver moonlight oozing through the constricted cracks left in the blinds. I can’t see the empty walls. Or the rug rolled up tightly in the corner. As if it’s all temporary. The gasoline makes oily rainbows in the puddle by the mailbox. That puddle always sticks around the longest after it rains. Unlike the car that left the gasoline. Pictures swirl, explode, retract in the water at a sickeningly lethargic pace. The tan and maroon Subaru Outback appears in the driveway only occasionally now, just like the ebb and flow of the pictures in the water. It is never parked in the garage anymore. Sometimes

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not even in the driveway. As if it doesn’t have a permanent place. A mental image, an impression or idea created in the mind; the sum of impressions apprehended mentally; an intellectual model or framework of understanding.

III. What about a particular moment in time gives people the urge to capture it forever and print it on a four by six rectangle of paper? What makes one split second as opposed to the next, or the next, worth holding in your hand? I flip through the family photo albums, absorbing each picture in its entirety before allowing my eyes to stray to the next. Each picture captivates me. Every single one is there for a reason, and every single one has a memory attached. Maybe it’s the way our cheeks, rosy with summer, seem glued together, and that it is the most hilarious thing that has ever happened to us. My sister has the biggest grin of the three of us, probably because her face is being squished the hardest, sandwiched between my mom and me. She is smiling with her baby teeth and looks like she could smile like that forever, in her special white dress with pale pink roses on it. Maybe it’s the way my sister and I are sitting in the green lawn chair with our knees drawn to our chests, Care Bear night gowns stretched over our knees. My sister and I are sitting so close together that you can’t tell whose arms are whose, and it doesn’t matter. Or maybe it’s the way there are only four pink candles on the “Happy Birthday Mommy” cake because my sister and I couldn’t count much higher at the time. My mom has both of us in her arms and we look like a trio from the circus in our pink, purple, and blue party hats with yellow stars on them. A painting, drawing, photograph, or other visual representation on a surface.

*Italics are quotes from the OED definition for picture

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Anne Mosley

Censored Ebony & White Pencil, 18x24

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Julian González

Steeped Loose Recollections I’m from the dust upon old bookshelves. I’m dirt underneath cracked fingernails, From scratched glasses. I’m from the screeching train wheels, Urban decadence. The pursuit of simplicity. I’m from sepia-coloured photos from yesterday, Legend in the making.

The days of ta’anit (Kippur for the bad things), brachot with kippah, tefillin & tallitot our statement of faith in Him. I’m from late-night films and comedic videos with buds. Romanticist humanism in poetry, Nature’s green mattress I’m the Go-Gurt in the freezer, A pool of blood on the stairs.

I’m from shark teeth and mosquitoes in amber, Colourful graffiti on brick-faced walls. Cat hair and lizard skins. I’m from quill and adventure-in-mystery, fantastical hats. The snicker-snack of fireworks in the summer sky. I’m from late nights, sleeplessness and lewd thoughts, Rowing on a shallow, man-made lake.

I’m valour and honour outside the armour, A composition of times long-lost (Is it nostalgia from a life long past?). I’m from fears, Death and hypodermics, Fading memories that return refreshed. I’m from Alzheimer’s memories of Spanish wars and near-death experience, Primal memories of embryonic existence outside the womb.

I’m from the mind of Leonardo and the escapades of Casanova

I’m from wishful thinking and idleness,

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Foolish undertakings And overwhelming odds. Chocolates and cheeses, Bohemian (or hippie/ Yippie?) in a brave new world. I’m from tea and eccentricities (the Wilde in me), Tree-falling, cliff-jumps and Ogling in wonder. I’m from whimsical randomness, Friendship in perpetuity. I’m from under the rock you fail to notice, the inner person that you fear to be. I’m from myself and how I want to be, mementos collected in crinkly-brown leaves and tied with twime.

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2010

Amanda Minoff

Reflections hanging off her skin—scintillating, grinning, and dancing around, they put the dim fluorescents of the kitchen to shame. The metal fragments of the chains, dangling off her wrist, seemed to shriek out against the age spots on her arm and flood the shallow contours of her skin with a luminous liquid. The chains would clank against each other, the friction amounting until— suddenly—a cacophony of lights would tear violently around the whole kitchen and leak into the living room. This metallic ballet, this orchestra of light beams—it was almost too much for five-year-old eyes to bear. But as she finished hanging the houseplants and descended from the kitchen stepstool, her scent filled my nose and the flashes dashed away from my pupils. As she came into focus, I reached out for her arm and ran my fingers over the loose, wrinkled flesh. I fiddled with the bracelets and asked her what the dashes etched into the silver bangle meant. She spoke something of years and love and anniversaries, but mostly of love because love was the most important—more important than food or money or anything hard and shiny. She pointed to the Hebrew letters scrawled into the pendant around her neck. Ani l’dodi v’dodi li. I am to my beloved as my beloved is to me. But just as she was telling me about her beloved and how she found him when she had none of this food or money or shiny things, her voice faded off as light beams from all those bracelets and necklaces swallowed her words, one by one, until finally all I could hear was the deep pulse of flashes.

ND SHE ALWAYS HAD THESE LITTLE BITS OF GOLD

Though when I was five years old her golden magen david necklaces and jewel-beset rings occupied every inch of my field of vision, by the time I was seven or eight the parameters of my eyes had expanded to encompass the brilliance of something greater. My sister and I called the

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bathroom the Black Bath because it was different—darker than all the others in the house. This was not the ordinary kind of bathroom with white tiled floors partial to grime, with frumpish towels hanging loosely over metal bars. This was her bathroom and hers alone, and so it was clean and pristine, the edges of every corner perfectly sharp. The counters were made of black granite and the walls were mirrors and there were those little, circular lights over the sink—three in a row which reminded me of a Hollywood actress’s dressing room. Sometimes the sheen of the granite and the mirrors and lights would all align to produce the most profound sort of gleam. We would sometimes wander into her bedroom and hope that the bathroom door would be cracked open a sliver so that we could see inside. I remember once, I wandered in alone and my eyes found the edge of the bathtub where three little golden Buddhas were balanced. Suddenly, I was overcome with an image. I saw a younger version of her, with thicker hair and stronger bones, floating somewhere over India and swooping down to retrieve these artifacts and bring them back to Miami, to the place she had created. It seemed only fair that they should belong here. This was the place that she had restored when there seemed to be nothing left of her. This was where she had arrived with her beloved and together they had filled the shelves with ceramic figures and laid Persian carpets across the floors and built the pool on the back terrace. And so the Buddhas seemed like a nice addition, to me anyway. And the glow that they gave off! The gold varnish mixing with the granite and the lights and the mirror…The mirror! There she was again. Reflected across the glass panes, she was older than I had been imagining. Slender legs and hips and those arms with the gold chains presented themselves before my eyes and it seemed like minutes before I found her face and saw that her lips were curved in a smile. She asked me if I liked looking at the Buddhas and went on to tell me not just about India, but about Holland and Turkey and Israel as well. I remember smiling and

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nodding and gazing purposefully into her dark, stony eyes and the gleam of gold that was reflected in them. She squinted a bit as she laughed and told me, “They’re not real gold, you know. Just shiny paint over plaster. But I like them all the same. Don’t you like them?” I turned back to the Buddhas. But why couldn’t she buy real gold now that she could afford it? I was suddenly overcome by the urge—an urge to give her something expensive. Something real that she could hang around her neck with everything else that was important. The Buddhas were bright and pretty and I liked the smiles across their faces, but it didn’t seem fair that they were just plaster. I looked closer and saw little nodules on the surface. And the closer I looked the deeper these contours became and the sheen on the outside grew dimmer. I don’t know how long I stayed there, in that moment of disappointment, but when I glanced back up to the mirror, I saw she was gone again. As she grew older over the next few years, she seemed to also be approaching something. Closer and closer she grew and I realized I could see her more clearly. I didn’t lose her so often in mirrors anymore, and when she sat on the couch watching Animal Planet, I found I could make my way under her arm without being scratched by the sharp edges of her jewelry. The overbearing dazzle of it all had subsided to a modest glimmer as age-spots stretched further across her skin and deepened in color. But as she spread that buttery knife across her breakfast cracker, the knife strokes directed towards herself, I saw that she was still brilliant— brilliant, but very much alone. To be one or the other isn’t much of a pity, but I remember thinking that the combination of the two, to be so stunning and have no one to show oneself to, was just the saddest thing of all. I bit my own cracker and the crumbs disintegrated on my tongue. She asked me if I liked the crackers and I told her they were good and asked where they were from. She clicked her nails on the metal cracker tin and pointed to the Dutch label. “My sister, your great aunt Elisabeth, sends them to me

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from Amsterdam. I’ve eaten them for breakfast since I was little. I just can’t keep down those American cereals. Too sweet! Too sweet!” She laughed and the sound was high and loud and sharp, but flowing too, like honey. Her teeth shone bright and strong in the light, and I imagined they must have been the strongest bones in her body in order to resonate against her laugh the way that they did. She told me once that they were strong because she used to chew on walls to get calcium when they had no other sources of the vitamin. This was a Holocaust story—well, at least the closest she came to telling a Holocaust story—and so she had sped through it and skipped over the details in order to get to the moral, which, in that particular case, was to get me to drink my milk. I never did overcome my aversion to milk, but every so often I see her hard little teeth gnawing on the chalky exterior of a wall, and a bitter taste forms in my mouth. She had always been fragile, but the jewels and the golden Buddhas and the cracker tin and the Persian carpets and the heavy scent of Shalimar perfume—even the sanguine ringing of her laugh had endowed her with an immeasurable weight. All that she didn’t say seemed to hang off her and surround her and envelop her brittle core. So perhaps this is why I couldn’t imagine how that plain, wooden box could hold all of her entirely. Stripped of all her things, she must be cold, I imagined. But also at peace, yes very peaceful indeed. And when they lowered her down, just at that moment, the sun shifted behind a cloud so that the smallest amount of light seeped through. A muted buzzing echoed in my ears and leaked into my head, and then I heard it. There was her voice again, resounding through the pores in the wood. It wasn’t sharp, brilliant laughter, but a quiet hum. “Yerushaliyim Shel Zahav.” I had forgotten how soft and sweet she could make the words sound all the times that she had sung it around the house. Tears pooled in my eyes, and through them the image of my Bubbie came into focus, and I noticed, for the first time, that her eyes were but a reflection of my own.

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2010

Jen Mulrow

Tools Marker Ink, 20x16

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Drew Eident

ยง There is something to be said about the way the light reflects off the table and on to the empty wall. The way untruth unfolds into something much more than just your tired throne, or the brown folds beneath my mantel. Like anything else, she cries for my solitude, and for a small bit of decency.

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2010

Rebecca Levy

Even Greek Gods Wish They Were Usain Bolt Stamp & Ink, 20x16

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Henry Michaels

Poundmelter4500 Pill Intro to Poundmelter4500. We see a man in a suit (Chuck Davis). He is a well dressed and appears in shape. He walks towards a man in a doctor’s coat with slicked back hair (Dr. Joey Bertonali), as if he got his med school degree in a back alley. They stand side by side; the man in the suit speaks. Chuck Davis Hi, for those of you sitting at home, I am television personality Chuck Davis. Dr. Joey Bertonali And don’t you dare look me in the eye. Chuck Davis Dr. Bertonali, we’re talking to the good people sitting at home. They can’t hear about the great deals we’re offering them without looking at you. Dr. Joey Bertonali Yeah?! Well it still don’t feel right to me. Anyways, what we got for ya here is some real revolutionary stuff. We’re talking about you not being such a fatty anymore. You wanna look good like Dr. Joey ove here on ya TV, you better listen up—(cut off by Chuck) Chuck Davis Ok Dr. Bertonali, I think we should explain to the good people watching at home what exactly this product is. Well first of all, it’s called the PoundMelter4500 Pill. Dr. Joey Bertonali And I know what you tubby nerds at home are thinkin. You’re thinkin, hey Dr. Joey, does this really work? Of

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course it does. You think Joey Bertonali would lie to you? You think I can be bought by 200 dollars worth of XTC? Get the hell outa here! Chuck Davis Yes, well, you see, what Joey is trying to say is that yes, the PoundMelter4500 Pill really does work. It does exactly as it says, it melts the pounds right off! Isn’t that amazing? Just a simple pill that can change your life, and put you in the best shape of your life, and just in time for beach season I might add. Just to clarify, no diet or exercise is required. Just take the PoundMelter4500 daily, and you’ll see results right away. It comes with our own patented PoundMelter4500 scale to help you measure your weight loss. Dr. Joey Bertonali Yeah, what the man in the big fancy suit said. He ain’t messin’ around. This pill really works. It’ll make your girl hot enough for her to leave you for Dr. Joey. Chuck Davis Real results, and you don’t have to wait for weeks to see them. Not even days. Hell, the results are almost immediate. Step on the scale after taking your first day’s dosage, and you’ll notice you already weigh less than you did before. Goodbye shy, awkward you, hello beachready sexy you! Don’t pay attention if you don’t see changes in the way you look and feel, because the PoundMelter4500 is simply turning all that ugly fat into toned muscle. Just pay attention to what our scale says and watch the pounds just fly off.

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Int. interview room. Chuck interviews users. Chuck Davis sits in a chair opposite a fat person. There will be multiple fat people. A two-shot can be used for this, with the occasional close up on the fat people. Chuck Davis Now Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m sitting here right now with PoundMelter4500 user Anthony Maxwell. Now Anthony, how much did you weigh before you started using PoundMelter4500? Anthony Maxwell (In thick Wisconsin accent) Well, ya see here Chuck, I weighed about 300 pounds before using the PoundMelter4500 here, and let me say it has changed my life. Shot here of Anthonyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s before and after pictures. They look exactly the same, only a different t-shirt. My wife and I have a much better sex life now, and I am just happier when I wake up and more eager to start the day. I feel like a new person. Chuck Davis And according to the PoundMelter4500 scale, how much do you weigh now? Anthony Maxwell I weigh about 180 pounds now. And I feel great. I never thought I would be able to lose 120 pounds in just a month. I was amazed at the results I was getting. Chuck now stands alone.

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Chuck Davis That is just incredible. Just to think, losing 100 pounds in a month? But, even if you don’t want to lose quite that much, but you still are interested in the PoundMelter4500, just tell our specialists how much weight you would like to lose and in what time period, and we can guarantee that you lose the weight. Call now to order your month’s subscription of PoundMelter4500, for only 4 payments of $19.99. We throw in the scale for free. People say this pill works like magic, and that’s the only explanation we have for it. I am personally baffled by the results people get from this simple pill. And as Dr. Bertonali can attest, it is very healthy. Dr. Joey Bertonali walks to where Chuck stands. Dr. Joey Bertonali This pill works, like it goes into your stomach, and gets all ya fat and makes it into guns. You got stomach guns goin on, butt cheek guns goin on, and if ya lucky enough, ya maybe even got Dr. Joey guns goin on. But probably not. Keep dreamin fatty. This pill really works. So don’t be dumb. Get PoundMelter4500 and melt that fat off. Chuck Davis There you have it! Order now and get free shipping. PoundMelter4500, it’s so good, you’ll be the talk of the town before you know it.

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Kyle Wieczorek

Girl Smoking White Charcoal, 8x14

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2010

Mah Sotoudeh

Mother From the grass on college yard sprout hairbrushed inkblots spreading dully across thin, filigreed papyrus Somewhere in a split-level in Pelham, you share a filmy room and indulge in clawing paranoia, in bedside knifepoint depositions, in four-wheeled loneliness and solitary desperation. It had to be real, because at fifty, you still have the scars to prove it. At seventeen, I confront the naked sensibilities, Strip myself to avoid the clutching truth: It will be my turn, next.

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Cameron Overy

Head Wire, 18x12 WINTER

2010

Alec Strandberg

Peter S HE LAY ON HIS BACK AND STARED UP AT THE CEILING , Peter wondered as he often did whether he ever really had come back home. He knew that an airplane had taken off, flown over an ocean for a while, and landed again. He knew that he was back in Santa Monica, that he was living in the same house heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d lived in before his tour of duty. Yet he also knew that the hand he had left back in the Desert had never let him truly leave. It was still there, clenching a fistful of red sand, and even now that he was thousands of miles away, it still would not let go. Peter knew that his life should have changed now. Ever since Kevin had told him that he was being awarded a Purple Heart and being sent home, everyone in the squadron had been telling him that he was a lucky bastard, that he was done being a soldier and could go back home for good. Now all Peter could think of was that someone must have forgotten to take his name off of the Active Duty Roster. How else could he still be a soldier, after so many months at home? How else did he still catch himself looking for I.E.Ds as he drove to work in the morning, or find himself staring up at the rooftops to make sure there were no insurgents with AK-47s waiting for his patrol to let their guard down? Peter knew that the only dangers back in Santa Monica were sunburn and the occasional mugging, and yet every day he still felt the sand in his shoes and knew that he was still in the Desert. The sun was beating down on his head and the inside of the humvee was heating up like an oven. The only way to cool down the inside was to roll the windows down, but ever since five soldiers had died when an insurgent managed to get a grenade inside one of the open windows on a patrolling humvee, no one was about to complain about keeping the windows closed. Peter scanned the road ahead for the signs he had been taught to watch for, wiping his brow to clear the sweat off. A stopped car on the side of the road made his heart beat fast, but he just put the pedal

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down harder and looked ahead. His mind went blank for a split second as he counted in his head. Three… Two… One. Nothing. He breathed a sigh of relief, relaxing his foot off the pedal and turning his gaze to the side of the road once more. A dead camel was rotting there, flies buzzing around its head like some sort of repulsive crown. His foot pressed down on the gas once more. Three… Two… Peter’s eyes snapped open a few seconds before his alarm went off. He simply lay in bed for a moment, trying to figure out if he had just woken from a dream or drifted into one. Sitting up, he glanced down at his wife. He wanted to reach down and touch her face, but reaching into other worlds was not something casually done. Instead he silenced the alarm and made his way to the bathroom. He turned on the faucet and began to rinse, his stump first, then his left hand. It took him a moment to realize that it wasn’t water coming from the sink, but a trickle of sand. Peter just shook his head and stepped back. The sand hadn’t appeared since his first week back. Why had it come back? He put his hand under the faucet and began washing again, closing his eyes and telling himself it was water. It was Kevin’s fault. The realization struck him suddenly and he withdrew his arm, leaning against the counter. Kevin was coming to see him today and he had brought the Desert back with him. Peter decided he was finished washing and turned the sink off, but the sand continued to trickle out. Instead of pressing the issue, he turned around and walked out the door. Kevin brought the car to a stop in front of Peter’s house. He stepped onto the sidewalk, adjusting his glasses a moment and pausing before he knocked on the door. He had done visits like this before, of course, but never with someone from his own squad. He had been hesitant at first, but when Helen had called him she had been frantic. He didn’t know who she was when she first talked to him, but after she explained that she was Peter’s wife and that she’d found Kevin’s number at the local VA, he agreed to come down. It wasn’t a unique problem. Plenty of veterans had trouble adjusting to civilian life. There were a lot of names for it. Post Traumatic

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2010

Stress Disorder. Gulf War Syndrome. All Kevin knew was that he had sworn to never leave a man behind, and that promise didn’t end just because the war was thousands of miles away. And yet somehow he felt nervous knocking on the door. He hadn’t spoken to Peter much at all since the night Jonathan had died and Peter had lost his hand. Part of him didn’t want to see a fellow soldier, someone whom he’d trusted his life to, struggling like this. He’d seen soldiers who’d once been trusted to fly million dollar helicopters reduced to begging for change on street corners. Yet knowing that this soldier in particular was one he himself had frequently trusted with his life, the bitter irony was harder to ignore. He glanced down at the newspaper clipping in his hand. Hellen had sent it to him. It was written by Peter and talked about the night he’d lost his hand. How he’d been hunched over next to a burning humvee, reaching inside desperately to pull Jonathan out before the tanks exploded. How he’d failed. Forcing a smile to his face, Kevin raised his hand and knocked on the door. Peter sat down in one of the living room chairs and pointedly did not look at the stream of sand that was now coming from underneath the bedroom door and flowing out from between the floorboards. It was acknowledging it that gave it the power. Part of him knew this had been inevitable. Just because he had gotten on a plane and flown over an ocean didn’t mean that he’d left the Desert behind. He might be halfway across the world, but he could still feel his right hand clutching red grains of sand, unable to let go. It wasn’t content with bringing him back to the Desert every time his eyes closed. Now it was going to bring the desert to him. Peter suddenly realized Jonathan was sitting next to him. The humvee went over a bump and shook Peter out of his thoughts. A song was playing on the radio now, and the sun was going down. Their patrol was almost over. Just ten more miles to base and Peter wouldn’t have to hold his breath and count down again for another few days. Off on the side of the road was a smoldering pile of twisted metal. It might have once been a car,

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but there was no knowing for sure now. Peter forced himself to look ahead and count down. Three… Two… One… The knocking on the door brought him back to Santa Monica. He opened the door before he even realized that he’d stood up and stood aside to let Kevin inside. Kevin stopped for a moment, staring down at the floorboards and the sand that was flowing up. The whole floor was almost covered now, and an arid wind was blowing through the room. Peter wondered where it came from and suddenly realized that one of the walls was gone, opening up to a vast, endless expanse of desert and an equally vast blue sky that was only broken up by the plumes of smoke from burning oil rigs dotting the horizon. The sun was low and getting lower as the sky turned a dull orange. Kevin let wanted to take a step back, but he forced himself to stand firm, feet planted in the sand. “Peter.” It was all he could say at first, still trying to get his bearings. It wasn’t the strangeness of the landscape that confused him, it was the familiarity. “Helen called me. She’s worried about you.” Peter nodded. He knew that she was afraid for him, but also of him. It had all crystallized two weeks ago when he had been holed up in the study and had heard her breathing on the other side of the door. He’d been writing his article, but stopped to listen to the loud and terrible sound of her standing at the doorway too afraid to even knock. For ten minutes they both remained stock still on opposite sides of the door before Peter put his head back down and began typing again. He hadn’t even heard her footsteps as she paced away. “I know you haven’t gone in to the VA since you returned, Peter. Not even for physical therapy. I know it can be hard, but you’re not the only one going through this.” Kevin continued, tucking his hands behind his back. “I still wake up from nightmares about the night Jonathan died.” The roof was gone now and the sunset had turned the sky a vivid orange hue. Only two walls were left standing. The floor wasn’t even

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visible anymore beneath the dunes. Peter turned to face the last two remaining walls, putting the desert at his back. Kevin placed a hand on his shoulder. “Peter? You’re not alone. We soldiers stick together. We went through everything together in Iraq and we’ll go through it all together here as well.” All the walls were gone now. Peter strained to hear Kevin, but the sound of the radio and the engine made it difficult to focus on the words. In front of them was a burning wreck and to their left, a humvee was driving towards them. Kevin recognized the scene even before Peter did. “What you did that night wasn’t your own fault. No one is blaming you. But you can’t let this dictate your whole life. You can’t—” As the humvee reached the burning pile, it exploded outward. The force shook the ground and sent the humvee rolling, finally settling upside down, it’s wheels spinning uselessly straight up in the air. Screams came from within and Kevin watched himself crawling out from under the wrecked vehicle, coughing up smoke and spinning wildly to see if anyone else had made it out yet. But on the other side of the car a scene was unfolding that he hadn’t seen all those nights ago. Peter was trying to crawl out, his hands gripping at the bloodsoaked sand as he strained to pull himself free. Something was holding him back, trying to keep in the car. Kevin leaned forward to see what it was only to realize in a moment of horror that it was Jonathan, clutching Peter’s leg and screaming for help. Peter kicked once, twice, three times, and finally Jonathan let go. Peter pulled himself free and turned around just as the fire reached the gasoline tanks and turned the humvee into a ball of flames. Kevin watched the whole scene unfold, taking a step back as he saw Peter fight his way free. Peter didn’t say a single word, just stared straight ahead and rubbed the stump where his hand was. Kevin couldn’t speak for a long moment, but then took Peter’s left hand and pulled him back. “We all did what we needed to do to survive. We all did things

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we’re not proud of. You have to let it go, Peter.” Peter stared straight ahead for a long moment, then turned and looked at Kevin. He had been afraid of what would happen if his friends had known the truth. What they would have said if they had figured out that instead of trying to pull his comrade out of the wreck, he had fought tooth and claw to escape and save himself. But Kevin had been there. He knew the terrible things war did. He knew what it made people do, and somehow he had lived with that fact. If Kevin could do that, Peter thought, perhaps he could to. Thousands of miles away in the Desert, his hand released it grip and let the sand flow out from between the fingers. They were sitting in Peter’s living room once again, and Kevin was sitting there next to him. Nothing had changed. His hand was still missing. He was still tired. His wife was still afraid of him. But now the sand was gone and he could focus on moving back home.

WINTER

2010

Willem Molenaar

Past and Future, Day and Life. There is a shadow in the peaceful morning. When the hot sun of the day had not yet Scorched the dew off the young and growing blades of grass, Had not yet illuminated the wearing typewriters. Loose keys, worn from frenzied tapping, maintenance forgotten. Before the world woke, In the lingering shadow of the night, In the idle time when nothing is produced but the foundation. Over the swamp and hills, the bird flits in that morning. Its movements directed here and there, not in one place for long, Becoming less deliberate with the day. He watched a bird down by the river. Like him and the bird with the dull blue slate feathers that shadow is. Like that scene in which the bird left him watching in the waning sun. Left him sitting in the snow on a frozen sandy bank, pondering, remembering. Looking over the pool that lay in the path gauged into the bank by the flooded river, enclosed with leafless brush. A cold roomy nest hidden from the road, At the end of winter, and the dusk of that day Turning into night, leading to realization, away from substitution. This quick walk pushed into a nick in the schedule. A poor substitute for that actual time (when it is a substitute and not itself) What the bird had left by the time it flew away, The lightening shadow takes with it as day breaks. You just have to look for shade left in the sun.

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Morgan Marks

Indecency of cushioned white whicker chairs while the gentlemen stood on the grass. The ladies wore white linen dresses and clutched lacy parasols. Across the lawn, a game of croquet took place, but here, conversation held the attention of the party. As a man spoke, the ladies leaned towards him, their faces properly interested. At the end of a line, bouts of chirping laughter delicately erupted from the ladies. As the conversation played on, the laughter of the party rose and faded, and smiles replaced appropriately solemn faces, which were replaced by faces of disbelief and amusement. At a crescendo, a man burst out, â&#x20AC;&#x153;That slut ran off and got herself pregnant!â&#x20AC;? As if the conductor had dropped his wand, the faces of the party drained of all expression. As soon as the pause had come, it was gone. The ladiesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; faces picked up an injured air, the gentlemen assumed a careful inexpressiveness, and tentatively the conversation continued.

HE LADIES WERE PERCHED AT THE EDGE

*** From a dark green painted park bench, a young man watched a curling balloon string slip from the hand of a fat man standing just within the park gates. The balloon, a blue a shade darker than the sky, jostled its way up from inside the overwhelming rainbow bouquet, squeaking all the way out. Untethered, it spiraled upwards, venturing slightly north in the breeze. The young observer turned to face the center of the park, his sight following the cement path that guided children and adults from the park entrance with the balloon-bearing usher through the grassy square, lined with booths and food stands, and crowded with people. A young couple walked by, sipping lemonade through straws and holding hands. The path was blocked at a point by a line of children, waiting and watching the table

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2010

where a woman bent over a seated, brown-haired, pig-tailed girl. With a paintbrush, the woman smeared colors on the girl’s cheeks, making sticky butterflies. The tent awning over the table stirred with a slight gust of wind. The observing man shivered as the breeze swept over his naked body. *** The long table, covered with an egg-shell linen table cloth, had ten places, each precisely set with egg-shell linen napkins, gold-rimmed china, crystal water goblets, and monogram-engraved silver. In the center, a bouquet of flowers, precisely arranged in a crystal vase, added color to the shiny display. Ten people sat, hands in laps, all but one watching one head of the table, an old lady wearing a frilly high-necked silk blouse, highwaisted skirts, and a cameo pendant set in gold on a fine gold chain. Holding her salad fork, her hand was poised above her plate as if to eat, but it stayed stiffly suspended as she gazed to the middle of the table at a man, wearing a blue, collared, button-down shirt and a brown blazer. Whether he wore a tie or not she did not know, for one corner of his napkin had been stuffed into his collar. He too held a fork—his dessert fork,—and he was using it to stab at the china, attempting to skewer another forkful of salad, for one was already being emulsified by his vigorous jaws. Everyone’s heads turned to face the man. Unaware, he smiled and nodded at the woman across from him. She sniffed and looked away.

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Contributors Ariel Beauregard-Breton is from Montréal, Québec. She loves to give a little dark and deep sense to all her art projects. Kayla Corcoran thought it might be fun to write her Contributor’s Note in the form of a telegram STOP. Hannah Dancer is a junior from Deerfield, Massachusetts. She has lived in Deerfield her whole life and one day hopes she can travel the world taking pictures for National Geographic Magazine. Julian González estas judo sefardi kiu aklamas el Novjork-Urbo; naskigita ˆ en Brooklyn, log deziras ke li povus logˆ en Manhattan. Li estas lingvano ˆ ˆ en Reginoj, la angla, Hispana, Franca, iuj Germana kaj Hebrea kaj Esperanto. Li estas la esperanto. Drew Eident lives in a state of dreams of becoming. Lizzy Gregory is a junior from New York City. She has often stated that she will attain her tattooing license before she gets her driver’s license. She has a cat named Mr. Wiggles, and she likes to scribble. Veronica Houk is a sophomore from a rural town in upstate New York. Her favorite time of day is in the morning before anyone is awake, and if she could live anywhere in the world it would be Raglan, New Zealand. Estelle Kim is a junior from Seoul, Korea. She enjoys drawing as something she loves doing during her spare time. Maybe this is because she had been drawing all over the walls of her house from a young age. Becky Levy is from Kingston, Jamaica. Although her accent makes it almost impossible for her to ask for 'water' at the Greer and be understood, she is still very worthy of her heritage. Morgan Marks grew up in Charleston, SC, where she went to elementary and middle school. She has attended Deerfield since ninth grade; she enjoys volleyball, snowboarding, and physics. Henry Michaels can handle the spiciness. Amanda Minoff is a senior from Northampton, MA. She often catches herself still writing “2004” as the date (why this year—she doesn’t know). It’s not so much that she’s nostalgic—she’s just a bit spacey sometimes.

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Willem Molenaar lives on a farm in Deerfield. He believes there is a way to farm sustainably and that it is simple, low input farming, for ex. mob-stock grazing (see salad bar beef, Polyface, Inc.) and organic no till (Rodale Institute). Anne Mosley doesn’t know how to describe herself in a sentence (she is from Connecticut where she can be found paint-spattered and smiling under 14 layers of clothing, plus a coat?). Jen Mulrow still chooses not to acknowledge winter’s “Dress-Down Fridays.” Sarah Oh is a senior from NJ, living in her fourteenth house. She's a beast at Wii Super Mario Bros. Brawl. Cameron Overy is a senior from Williamsburg, Virginia, and co-captain of the swim team. He hopes to pursue architecture in college. Katie Regan has a fascination with glow-sticks and loves the sound of rain. Mah Sotoudeh has never been mud-tubing before, but she plans to conquer the mountain this year. Alec Strandberg is a senior from San Francisco. He enjoys bad 80s action movies and, being from California and failing to disprove the cliche, surfing. Also, he occasionally writes things. Eliot Taft is a junior from Deerfield, Massachusetts and spends a lot of time in Vermont. He is a co-founder of ZASC, the Deerfield Academy Zombie Apocalypse Survival Club. Kyle Wieczorek is a senior looking forward to spring.

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S T A T E S T I G E R

N O R T H A M P T O N

T H E

O F

A M E R I C A

P R E S S M A S S A C H U S E T T S

F E B R U A R Y

2010