Fools Vol. 11 by Fools Magazine

vol. 11 december 2021

Dear Reader, I’ve made a lot of wishes in my life, but none as great as this.I was eighteen when I attended my first Fools meeting. It was the first semester of my freshman year, and I had just experienced what I thought (at the time) was the worst heartbreak of my entire existence. After day four of laying miserably in my bed, neglecting to respond to any of my family members as I shoved down the storm of emotions catapulting around inside me, one of my friends decided she’d had enough. “That’s it,” she texted me, as I sat wallowing in the darkness of my dorm bedroom, “Get up. We’re going.” I didn’t ask where—which was how I ended up sitting in the back row of an IMU theatre wearing an oversized pair of Iowa sweatpants and an old One Direction sweatshirt that hadn’t seen the light of day in six years. We sat in the back for two reasons: one, because dragging me out of bed had made us outrageously late; and two, nobody else in the crowded room seemed to have gotten the “freshly broken up with and clearly not doing okay” outfit memo. So that’s how I began my relationship with Fools. Confused, aching, and a little bit lonely. Volume 11 feels like a wish made on thousands of fallen eyelashes and drifting dandelions and shooting stars. During that first meeting I looked around the room filled with so many passionate, talented people and wished quietly to myself that I could be a part of the community that made Fools so special. Now, four years later, I’ve been granted that wish again and again. Every day I find myself in awe of the team of people who make Fools possible and who pour countless hours of dedication and enthusiasm and love into everything we produce. To everyone on the Fools team—thank you. This volume feels honest, revealing, authentic, and powerfully real. Each of our contributors shared intimate parts of their lives that could only be expressed through their words, art, and photography. To all of you, I also say thank you—your pieces helped us discover hidden parts of ourselves that we couldn’t have found without your truth and vulnerability. I needed to read and see your work when I was heartbroken and wandering all those years ago, and I still need them now. Please keep creating; the world needs your beauty. As the clock strikes 11:11, I wish that you, reader, find something in these pages that speaks to you the way it spoke to us. When you’re finished, we’ll still be here. Again and again.

Always yours,

Madeleine & the Fools Team

a thank you to our sponsors

Fools Magazine is generously funded by the Magid Center for Undergraduate Writing, The School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and Undergraduate Student Government.

editors Madeleine Ackerburg Editor-in-Chief

Molly Erickson Design Editor

Gretchen Lenth Web Editor

Cailin Hall Creative Director

Chloe Tharp Design Assistant

Grace Champagne Web Assistant

Marriah Talbott-Malone Writing Editor Ebbie Benson Writing Editor Aspen Taylor Writing Editor

M Clark Managing Editor

Kate Doolittle Design Assistant

Bobi Knox Photo Editor

John McAtee Treasurer

Anna McDonald Design Assistant

Anfornee Nichols Photo Assistant

Sophia Considine Writing Assistant Parker Jones Writing Assistant

contributors Cheyenne Mann

9, 12, 44

Ting Gao

Ebbie Benson

Ellie Chouinard

Grace Champagne

Lauren Sanyal

Cheyenne McGuire

Ella Kate Doolittle

Jacob Lietz

Sydney Gabrielle Mayes 20

La Della Gallagher

Chloe Tharp

Caitlin Bissen

Allison Izui

Joyce Kennedy

Erin McCain

Amanda Pendley

Erin Challenor

Samm Yu

Bobi Knox

Aspen Taylor

41, 42, 43

Oli Brunning

21, 51

Dissociation

Rest Stop, Late Autumn, Love Me

Six Years Old at the Movie Theater

ClownTown

civic body

Modeled After ‘In Memory of George Dyer’ by Francis Bacon

How well do you know the clitoris?

Decay

The Manner of Fatness

a little light reading

carsick covershoot

Car Talk

lovesick

Stretched Out

the siblings as psychics

the forest follows me

quick September journal entry

tracks

An Obsession Over Ends

The Diore Effect

Luna

Care For Me

Compound Fracture

things i’ve earned, 2021

State of Mind

table of contents

the ideas and opinions expressed in this magazine are not representative of the University of Iowa

Ex Astris

Allison Izui

Ex Astris

When our shift ends, Diana grabs our paychecks and asks if I’ve ever been high before. I haven’t, which only serves to encourage her more. She smiles wide and talks too loudly, asking if I brought my car to work and if my parents would care if I came home smelling like skunk. “Nah,” I shrug, “They don’t give a shit.” “That’s what I like about you, Olive.” “That my parents don’t care about me?” I ask, barely even pausing to unlock the car as she skips by me, “Or that I give you free rides?” She manages to smile wider, wrestling her mane of loose, dark curls into a ponytail before hopping into the passenger’s side. Even though we do this every week, and her pot has yet to affect me, this routine remains the same. She gives directions like she’s trying to get us lost, giggling through tales of arson and heartbreak between lefts and rights. I indulge her. I always do. You see, where I am limited by death and fear and silly things like that, Diana has mastered the art of youth. She says that Diana is the name of the Roman goddess of the hunt, the moon, and wilderness. Sometimes, when the traffic is ugly enough, I can see all the ways that Diana and her godly namesake are similar. Most days, Diana is little more than a girl I met in seventh grade who spends her days drunk, high, or both. She works the same shift as I do, at least on Saturdays. The rest of the week we spend on other sides of our Olympus. Her, with her pack

of proud huntresses and smoke-filled woods, and me, lazily spinning a broken pen around my fingers to watch it splatter ink across my physics homework. Those are the days that she is unrecognizable. She chokes out monsters with her bare hands, staining her favorite crop top with hydra guts and transphobe blood. All throughout our school there are stories about her and her huntresses, razing the concrete in search of our local chimeras and pedophiles. But neither Diana, nor her huntresses are immortal. Not forever, at least. Two of them have been sent to rehab, five have mandatory school counselor meetings, and one is living in Diana’s basement. The rest juul in the back of their classes, waiting to kill more monsters. After work though, Diana is not a monster killer, goddess, or immortal. She’s the girl I met back in seventh grade who didn’t know who else to turn to. She tells me secrets in between smoke and stories, and I listen. I always listen. I know we’re lost once she directs me past Wrigley Field a third time, insisting that she recognized Niobe’s tear-stained stone. She calls it a landmark, glancing towards me with an obsidian glint in her eyes. Despite what people say about me, I can read between the lines. She doesn’t do it often, but I know a threat when I see one. I can leave whenever I want. You remain for the extent of your entertainment value. This isn’t love. I do not love. She doesn’t say it aloud, nor would I ever ask her to. Instead, I nod, unbothered, and answer just the way she likes, “Remind me of the story of Niobe. I always confuse her and Actaeon.” The darkness stays, but the violence leaves her stare as she regales me with tales of her bloodshed. With her focus turned towards her own wrath, I have time to find our bridge. This is an area of her woods that I find to be a sort of common ground between us, where we sit together peacefully without the discomfort of our unnatural coexistence.

She splays out on the dirt, propping her head up on my lap with a half-grin. We share her blunt beneath the bridge, noisy with the highway overhead, and she tries to teach me how to smoke right. (Breathe in, hold it. Kinda force it down your throat and—no, not yet. Don’t let it go yet. Hold it until you can’t.) It doesn’t work, it never does, but I indulge her once more. Every Sunday, I listen to the highway and keep my mind busy with questions of how we keep ending up here. Me, coughing out curses, and her, tracing my palm and trying to teach me how the Romans loved her namesake. “Olly, do you believe in past lives?” She’s high. That’s what I always have to remind myself before I answer. “Sure. Maybe.” Diana arches up just enough to expose the scab that stretches from the center of her choker to the left sleeve of her white work tee. The rumors going around say that it’s from a knife fight, but last time I asked, she told me it was the byproduct of a nervous tic she couldn’t seem to shake. I’m not sure which answer is the more honest of the two. “If you were a boy, I think I might’ve fallen for you,” she tells me, deep in thought. I raise my eyebrows in amusement, waiting for her to elaborate. She turns and props herself up onto her knees so she can cradle my face

between ash-soaked hands. Back pushed against the wall of a column, I let her. Just like I know that she could leave, she knows that I let her stay. That might be why she’s so insistent in reminding me. She traces my features with her stare, humming prayers that no god will ever hear. “You could be Orion and I’d be Diana,” she says, releasing my face and holding the blunt for me to breathe in again. I try, but just like last week, I end up hacking too hard for any of it to mean much of anything. “Orion, like the belt?” “The constellation,” she corrects with a frown, shifting to sit cross-legged in front of me. “There’s a whole myth about him. How Diana never loved anyone except the hunter who could keep up with her and still… respect her and shit.” “And that’s… me?” I asked dryly. There’s a tense pause before her gaze flickers from the blunt back to me. I open my mouth to soften my tone, but she beats me to it with a sharp grin and a barked out laugh. “You put up with all of my shit.” “I’m well aware, Di.” “Yeah,” she laughs, her hand lifting to fidget nervously with her ponytail, “But you also see me while you’re doing it.” “Oh, I can see you? What a ferocious hunter that makes me,” I drawl out, mostly just to hear her laugh again—and really, who wouldn’t? She’s the face that poets dream of and I’m mortal. It’s the fate of all mortals to love what they cannot have. It’s a realization that I’ve grown to accept. The fact that I don’t fit in with her sexual orientation is just icing on the cake, honestly. It’s all I can do to nod along, placating her frenzied mind despite the painful reality of our situation. “Do you like me?” she asks, in between giggles. “Sometimes,” I answer, “When you’re not making fun of me for coughing.”

She throws her head back in a thunderous laugh that would make her father proud. Leaning back, she takes a moment to calm down before she answers quietly, in a muted shade of awe. “I’ve never met someone like you before.” I don’t know what to say to that, so I don’t say anything at all. I wonder if all crushes hurt this badly or if this isn’t a crush. Noticing my struggle, she amends her statement playfully, “Someone so bad at smoking.” The highway above us roars, drowning out any answers I could’ve come up with. All we can do is stare at one another, waiting for something to happen. Not that either of us know what we’re waiting for. But this is how it always goes. We stand around, chasing a high that I’ll never grasp, and she tells me about love and mythology. “I’ll drive you home,” I offer. “The high might still kick in,” she counters. I’m not sure if I’m disappointed or endeared by her. “I don’t think it will.” The cars wail, mourning the goddess turned girl and her unpaid vices. They sing their dirges, watching the two of us attempt to keep up what little words are left. Before I can insist on driving her home, she makes her move. She turns her head to the side dejectedly, letting the residual smoke foam across her jawline as she asks, “Next week?” A beat of hesitation rings across the bridge as I do the math in my head, calculating how long I can keep this up before I’m little more than a ghost. “How does Orion die?” I ask, before I’m done solving for the last variable. Diana’s attention snaps back towards me. It’s awful and refreshing all at once, to have someone want to see me. “Depends on the storyteller,” she admits, “Some people think that Apollo, Diana’s brother, got too jealous of Diana giving Orion all her

“I’ve never met someone like you before.”

attention. Then, he tricked her into accidentally killing him.” “Sounds like an asshole,” I joke weakly. She cracks a half-smile, but somehow the mood remains tense. “Other people say that Gaea, the earth goddess, heard Orion boasting about how he could kill any living being because he was such a good hunter. So, to protect her children, or some bullshit like that, she sent a scorpion to poison him.” “What do you believe?” I ask, uncomfortably aware of the distance between us. For the first time since I met Diana, sitting outside our school without a ride home and sobbing because if her parents find out they’re gonna kick her out and oh, fuck, what is she gonna do, she doesn’t have all the answers. She was lost and vulnerable and I was too young to know what to do about her tears, but I could listen.

“I don’t know,” she whispers and for a brief, awful second, I know what she means when she talks about past lives. She looks at me like she knows me and is powerless to fight that. “All I know is that, in every myth, Diana loses him. She makes him into a constellation to visit every night, but she still loses him.” There’s nearly an entire minute of silence before I can answer back shakily, but sure of myself. “Well, thank God I’m not Orion.” It takes two steps, one to muster up what little courage I have and another to pull her towards me. As far as first kisses go, it could’ve gone better. She jerks away on instinct, but quickly pushes forward to meet me. I go in too strong and end up bumping our foreheads together in a way that I know she’ll complain about later. Somehow, through all the frenzied movement, she kisses me back, one hand gripping the back of my shirt and the other buried in my hair like she’s afraid I’m going to leave. But I’m not Orion and she’s not a Roman goddess. We’re just two girls, one who needs to be heard and another who’s willing to listen. I laugh against her lips and even though she still looks a bit concerned, she laughs with me. I’m not leaving. I try to tell her without saying it aloud. You have me for as long as you want me.

Erin McCain

Six Years Old at The Movie Theater 8

I feel at once like I know and have forgotten Everything I have ever learned by walking down the street— Staring at everyone who passes me. When I am handed a coffee cup with my name misspelled on the side I wonder— is it too much to ask to be heard? Or maybe it is too much to ask them to listen. When words get caught in my throat, Or when I stay silent out of fear of what I will say. Contradiction follows me. Like the memory of that crush I had in first grade, When my mom took us to see Indiana Jones And we shared a box of candy. The type of candy forgotten— The story still told to this day to anyone who will listen, The last intimate moment I had with someone who knew my truest self. Like maybe telling this story makes me desirable, Because once a boy touched my hand in the dark with no expectation, Our innocence as palpable as the disappointment to follow. I chase the feeling of unbridled fondness— Talk too much, too loudly, with too many opinions about things that do not matter. Fighting the urge to seem small and palatable, As though my constriction could make someone else feel good Even for a minute. All at once I want to be known, But can’t find the right words when I am close to being pried open. I can tell you my favorite book— Though I haven’t even finished The Catcher in The Rye— Will you like me more if you think I have? I can’t tell you why I never cry Unless I am watching a movie and the main character dies Or if I sit and watch two people exchange vows Even though marriage is a pipe dream. Because doesn’t everyone know what the statistics say? Or maybe I just can’t imagine what it’s like to be close enough To someone who wants to share their ugliness with you. I expect others to understand what I mean When I can’t even comprehend my own thoughts Without feeling like I’m losing every sense of my sane self. That dream I have where someone is chasing me As I run up an endless spiral staircase I wonder if they will ever catch me— Ebbie Benson I wonder if I will ever let them.

Cheyenne Mann

Civic Body Ting Gao

If I could remember to remember to be half-interesting, set out the right assortment of facts about myself at parties, I might tell people that I grew up within fifty miles of a nuclear power plant, or that I have suffered at least one major pneumothorax. My home: A bit of corn caught in the teeth of the world, just big enough for a line of poetry, a scrap of prose, the cutting of an olive ribbon where once every ten years, the blebs of the wetlands pop and fill the cavity of land, where the flood-bringers are half-forgotten, and even the names of those old, white men supposed to have brought this place to its bringing are faded to concrete gray, gasoline spilling, pooling on a garage floor and the city rewrites itself in bronze, heavy books opened to just the right page, every word trodden a plea for recognition, for admiration,

and the Mormons who never crossed the creek gather underneath the cut of white steeple against blue, heaven scarring heaven where crowds of congregants clump together to half-heartedly hum that no one loves God here anymore, and crowds thrum in brick arteries standing underneath a stained-glass skywalk to pray— Our Mother, who art in nature hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done among man as it is in heaven— and the crippled cilia of the trees writhe across the landscape where the scalpel of the house harvest has shorn them jagged, and the ghost of a child shadow-walks between them, all spine and ribs no water, no fat, no land; and beneath it all, under the prairie sod, a knife in a boy’s heart, sleeping.

Modeled After ‘In Memory of George Dyer’ By Francis Bacon Cheyenne Mann

I. soaked in street water//bubblegum puddle//i hop rain gutters like connecting flights//mitochondrial//as in to fold in on oneself//as in you are made from red licorice veins//and teeth that jut from powderpuff pink gums//there’s a pigeon underneath a statue of the lord somewhere in southern barcelona with a broken wing//he fights his hollow bones in the way you fight spectral flesh//as in i melt into the remnants of you//as in the sting of you is gone. II. geometric lungs swell//i’ve been told//just like origami//a butcher wraps cattle organs in newspaper//firm and sweet//pink viscera palimpsestic over obituaries//a cannibal in germany read star trek as he waited for his dinner to melt into bathtub soup//he knows what a body tastes like//roasted in white wine and the sour tang of garlic//he doesn’t know what your body tastes like// as in carnage//as in cane sugar dissolving//in stripes licked across the forearm and neck and wing. III. cellular division leads to regulated cell death//a hazard-light-stopbutton for the smallest increments of a person//my mother makes cans of raspberry jam every summer//vacuum sealed//a gelatinous glob of maroon and pulp and fruit innards behind cylindrical glass//we eat syrup so sweet it rots holes in the mouth// the birds that live in the trees behind my childhood home//robins and bluejays and the like//only eat from the cherry tree//i’d spread you on toast//there’s something to be said about consummation//as in to consume is to do away with completely.

cut me! Ella Kate Doolittle

HOW WELL DO YOU KNOW THE CLITORIS?

cut me! how to fold a zine

decay La Della Gallagher

My body makes a mockery of traditional femininity with shoulders like propellers and thighs like stabilizers; my body is a footnote, a shotgun, a carnivore. Mauled by the products of my own fantasies, carvings and stains and unwanted firefights like warpaint on my skin: my body is a kamikaze bomber plane. But girls’ bodies aren’t supposed to be powerful—we are vessels for other life, not our own. They’re supposed to be dainty and innocent and weightless; yearning. Hourglass figures, collarbone divots like marble bathtubs, dolphin skin, girls’ bodies are supposed to be breakable. I can bodysurf the Pacific Ocean in 50 degree weather, I get burned at work so often that I don’t feel it anymore, I know how to starve, and I don’t get cold easily; please, break me. The shoulders like propellers and thighs like stabilizers come in handy in exactly one environment—water. I’ve always liked the water. My sister likes it too—we are the first to dive under the waves when we go to the beach. I like to think it’s because our grandpa was a sailor in the merchant navy. We’re going to get matching mermaid tattoos when she comes and visits me sometime. I revel in laughing at my skinny friends who screech that it’s too cold when the icy ocean licks at their toes, thirsty for easy flesh, or the wind whips the sand into their eyelashes. Oregon beaches are not for everyone, and when they say it’s too cold there and that we should go to the Sandy River or something instead, it makes me feel special, wanted, preferred over someone else. I want a drowning skinny girl to ask for my help, choking on water as her voice croaks and her legs die out because she was an idiot and thrashed all her carrot-given energy away. I would wait a deadly second before helping her, just so she knows what it feels like to be painfully contained in your own form. I play water polo now, where drowning people is part of the sport. The girls are like me, I accidentally jostle one of them too hard in a scrimmage and they drag me down so I pull their cap off, but then we get out of the pool and the adrenaline is forgotten. We all just need an outlet for the world telling us that our bodies are a contradiction.

The Manner of Fatness Erin Challenor

Being this size soiled the youthful innocence of my girlhood, cracking me into something bitter and spiteful and poisonous, like black licorice or a school shooter. The blissful ignorance of not yet knowing how the world sees you is the bedrock of childhood, but I learned how to hide from myself early. I was too big to be a “little girl” but my hair was too long to be a boy. I wanted to be a boy though, boys are strong and expected to become something, so I stopped wearing pink because pink was girly and girly means weak and I wanted to be tough, so I played tag at recess and wore dirty trainers and didn’t wipe the dirt off my knees and shunned One Direction because whatever girls like is a balefire of fragility. Girls who like pink get their hearts broken, and I wanted to be the heartbreaker because boys too should know what inferiority tastes like. I was stumbling within what I eventually learned to call “patriarchy”, and how it convulses talons in every aspect of girls’ lives: self expression, masturbation, jobs, marriage, and most apparently, sex. When we learned about sex in school, they didn’t teach us about how it can be violent, how it can even hurt people who haven’t had it before. If fifth grade was a production, sex ed pulled beauty standards center stage. All people could talk about was who was cute and who wasn’t; what was cute and what wasn’t. When we went to Ally Jackson’s house after soccer games, she showed us this book she found in her mom’s room that called sex “fucking”, that we all giggled at and then each secretly read. At Lola Martin’s birthday party that year, she showed us the picture of Max Lewis that she kept by her bed, because “god gave me fingers for a reason.” We didn’t know then that female masturbation is frowned upon, that our fertility is put before our pleasure. Later we would say fuck that and give each other vibrators as birthday presents. When we learned about rape, I was relieved. They told us stories about drunk girls in skimpy clothing getting raped, but I don’t wear those kinds of clothes, I don’t go

out, I don’t look like them, and no one finds me pretty, so I should be good. I don’t look nearly tasty enough to tempt someone out of morality, and I liked that. It was the first time I felt safe in my body, protected, grateful, loved by what held me. Later I learned that fat girls get raped too, because it’s easier for us to mistake fetishization for love. I got called a feminist before I knew what it meant, by a boy who didn’t know what it meant either. It was in seventh grade, and he said that women exaggerate how badly their periods hurt, and when I interjected he spat out the word coated in as much venom as his 12 year old body could make. The spittle that accompanied it out his mouth looked like cum, unsolicited and unwanted, like his mouth was a rapist and the sound barrier between us was my vagina, raw and unconsenting and forever mauled by his verbal deposit. Two years later I would discover slam poetry, which was too juicy of an opportunity for boys like him to pass up totally ripping on. Instagram meme accounts post clips of the LA Brave New Voices team’s “Rape Joke” poem all the time, captioned with laughing emojis or assorted variations of “look at this shit y’all lmaooo.” My senior year I praticed spreading my arms out like an eagle when I would give my final feminist slam poem to the audience, bat wings and wolf tattoo unapologetic. Covid got in the way of that, but one day I will stand on a stage somewhere and fulfill it. Another fat girl being bitter, but this time I don’t care about any of it. Today, I have a plethora of feminist t-shirts. My favorite one says “feminist killjoy”, because once on the train on the way to school, a man yelled at me what he thought my bra size was, so I flipped him off; he rushed me so I kicked him. From the ground he looked up at me and said, “you’re a killjoy alright.” I liked the annoyance in his eyes. It made me feel powerful. It’s just that at times it’s hard to forget all that’s been said to me about the way I look. I believe other women—I think we’re all beautiful and badass and can do anything we set our minds to. Other times they cut in front of me to talk

to a cute guy: or tell me about how exhausting it is to be flirted with all the time and that they wish they were more like me, never seeming to care about being single; or a guy at work accidentally drops an entire pan of garlic bread fresh out the 600 degree oven because he sees a pretty girl half my size walk in wearing a skirt that probably wouldn’t fit around my thigh. It’s in those moments that a dark part of me takes over, a carnivorous vendetta stitched of envy and panting. It makes me say that they like it when they tease men with their low necklines, so they shouldn’t be mad when they get catcalled, and then I feel bad and I hide away in my room and eat Cinnamon Crunch and watch the same YouTube videos over and over again and play solitaire and name my plants. A serial killer on Criminal Minds ate Cinnamon Crunch when he was sad too. The downtown Target must sell out of bralettes in the days leading up to home football games. Every Saturday I’m reminded of the one Mean Girls quote about Halloween being an excuse for girls to dress slutty without anyone pointing it out. I feel like every Saturday is Halloween now, but not with cool costumes, just the same variation of short, ripped jean shorts and crop tops. I like to watch everyone walk to the game from my 10th floor window like a suburban mom stalking her neighbors. Some of the girls wear tiny shirts that expose their backs; you can see the etchings of their spines dent their thin skin, like their skeletons want to come out and play too. I find myself staring at them, my head cocked slightly to the left like Hannibal stalking his prey. I imagine making a mini model of Stonehenge with their vertebrae, or sharpening their bones into butter knives, or hanging their teeth off my backpack so they make little clinking noises when they bump into the zippers. I want to unzip them to show them how badly a body can hurt. It isn’t enough for me to imagine if I looked like them. I want them to look like me too, so we both get a turn to feel unworthy. I’d like to go to a game sometime, but I’m worried that it will bring back all the feelings I’ve tried so hard to let go of and I’ll go home with a manifesto.

I want to be desired, for some boy to think that I’m not too much, for him to kiss my scars better and not feel like I’m betraying all my feminist t-shirts. For people to stop calling stretch marks tiger stripes or lightning bolts or whatever metaphor other than what they are because they’re ugly, and we have to compare ugly things to pretty things for people to accept them. It’s complicated being a girl this size, who plows through water like a battleship but globs her way through dry land, who is just trying to get through college without harm. I don’t want to be another fat girl cold case.

Caitlin Bissen

The only time my mom stops being a mystery is in the car. We pass trees on the highway that have succumbed to the frostbit air, crystals suspended from limbs like felted stars and moons above a crib. I assume my mom had once bought a similar contraption to soothe my infant curiosities, but I don’t remember. My mom doesn’t remember either. Or, if she does, she’s hesitant to talk about it. A baby toy is not just a baby toy. It’s a notch in the key to Pandora’s box. A snake that attacks if not contained. A relic from another life. I glance at my mother. Crisp January sunlight illuminates her face, highlighting the natural rosiness of her cheeks (she is self conscious about this, especially after a glass of wine). Freckles dot the bridge of her nose, the oldest fading into her skin while the fresher ones peek through. High school health class tells me these are early signs of skin cancer. Epidermal damage. Irreversible. A bunch of bullshit, obviously. A kiss is a kiss, no matter how long it burns. I glance down at the clock and see we’ve been driving for only a couple minutes. I

take a breath and familiarize myself with the itinerary of these car rides. 5-10 minutes talk about pointless things: grades, the weather, a customer who may or may not have been undressing you with his eyes, the gas station on 72nd closing, the news, feelings, a bruise on your arm that you lie about, appointments to schedule— “are you sure I’m not adopted?” *nervous laughter* the weather again *silence* 10 minutes glance out the window and note how dead everything is but avoid the irony or theatricality of it 5 minutes attempt a conversation about men but realize this is a sacred space

20 minutes Find the nearest McDonald’s and proceed to dip French fries into your Oreo McFlurry.Remember how He calls this an ‘abomination.’ Be a spiteful bitch and commit the sin anyway. Have mom recount her first job at McDonald’s. Don’t tell her you’ve heard the story before. Remind yourself that the woman beside you and the picture hidden under your pillow of a teenage girl jumping on a waterbed with black curls in her face are the same person. Struggle to believe it. Laugh when she makes a joke about dragging herself into bed and still smelling grease in her pores. Shut up when she glosses over the day she met Him. Forget that she had a baby at twenty while you still can’t make a doctor’s appointment without having a panic attack. Dissociate. Wonder how many lives the stranger beside you has lived. Wonder when yours will begin. Don’t say any of this out loud— it will scare the child.

Remainder of Trip (TBD) Proceed with caution. Days like these are few and far between. We stop at a Casey’s to dispose of our feast. The sun has made a full appearance and breathes warmth on the frigid air that creeps down our coat collars. My mom, who usually keeps her curls in a tight updo, has let them cascade down her shoulders. A breeze moves them slightly as she pushes McDonalds bags into the overfilled trash can. We lean against the Honda Civic and take in wafts of gasoline and cigarette smoke. She recalls her time in the army and tells me about a drill sergeant who always called her ‘princess’ during daily roll calls. A dig like that, she says, renews your sense of purpose. To run faster, to train harder, to prove every male in your life wrong. To travel to San Antonio, Albuquerque, Munich, Paris, Tokyo. Leave rural wastelands and their lifeless trees behind.

But then you get pregnant during a visit back home. You panic and agree to marriage. You cosplay as Goldilocks while they shove the Bible down your throat like hot porridge. The mysteries of the rosary are sprinkled in for spice: Joyful, Sorrowful, Luminous, Glorious. Mystery? You think. What is Jesus so insecure about that he needs to hide? You hide the baby bump on your wedding day from your in-laws and God himself. God laughs at you. You spend the next five years of your life trying to be the perfect housewife. You fail. You believe this because He tells you this, and imprints the truth into your sun-kissed skin. You wear long sleeves at work so people don’t see the blue and purple splotches on your arms. The sun is setting and you can feel it. The month before you leave, Wednesday study group does a series on the Glorious Mysteries. *** Spoiler: They kill off the main character. He rises only to succumb to the frostbit air of human neglect. Orbs of crystal dangling from dead limbs.*** You pack you and your children’s things while He’s at the bars. Sneak out while He’s at work to a rundown apartment complex on the other side of town. You file for divorce. Change your number. Get excommunicated. Kiss your boss in the smoking lounge at work. Ignore the snide comments of your coworkers when he gives you a promotion. Get married again. Ignore your new husband’s comments on your weight. Your taste in music. Your friends. That red lipstick that makes you look like a whore. Your daughters, who will grow up to be whores just like you. Beautiful whores. Intelligent whores. Whores with sun-kissed skin. Whores who will screw up their lives in new, beautiful ways. Whores who will fill the cavity in your heart on days like today. Glorious (adj.): a. possessing or deserving*glory // b. marked by great beauty or splendor** *man has yet to adequately evolve so that the difference between these two words is clear **a kiss may burn slowly, quietly. The ‘splendor’ lies within the heat, not the scar

80’s music trickles out of the stereo, Stevie Nicks’ vocal fry surrendering to the crackle every thirty seconds or so. My feet are propped on the dash but she doesn’t scold me like she usually does. She taps her fingers on the steering wheel to the beat of “Leather and Lace.” I close my eyes even though I’m not tired. Laying back, I slow my breathing so she’ll forget I’m there. I listen as the tapping morphs into a hum, then into a low, raspy croon. It sounds spiritual, a hymn of a church we have yet to build. I need you to love me I need you today; Give to me your leather Take from me my lace Her soul is resurrected in this moment and I smile at its brightness. The stone has been rolled away from the tomb. What was once crucified has now risen. My mother, her own Glorious Mystery.

Lovesick Jacob Lietz

If I vomit and kill the bird in babyblue or fit my head comfortably beside a stud, could I learn which metaphysical theory I need to offend for this to cleanse its hands of me?

I haven’t known a thought since she last said my name. They’re all busy bouncing around consonants of hazel blue and grey to be of any use to me. Fire is far hotter when it’s been simmering in mental turmoils and romantic delusion whose solutions are hidden in the walls. I’ll scoop out my eyes and lose my hair to become a reflection of something to take cover from. I’ve heard a hollow husk of man and bone can blend in quite well among crowds. How am I to think when I have nothing to give? Books, dull nails, a sloppy letter, a broken pen under a box of used tissues and hot sauce. Find it in the drawer. Send it back to the boy who’s scooping his eyes out and losing hair. Add a stamp or two. Cellophane tape and scissors to cope.

S tt rr e tt cc h e d S e h e d S t r e t c h e Stretched d

O u tt O u O Ou u tt

Ellie Chouinard

Amanda Pendley

// the day my brother was born I caught the sun staring at me/ that all-seeing eye./ let me meet its gaze for two whole seconds/ before burning/ a consolation prize/ an entrancement./ some gripping of the shoulders/ back before I was taught to tuck my ribs in/ tilt chin up./ this was the beginning of the knowing without knowing/ there was a lightness given to my veins, some ability to absorb that jumpstarted my magnetism to nurture. I sucked all of it to me/ those who loved so hard it hurt/ grief personified in the human face/ the world was screaming violet/ a burnt plum of warning/ I held that pain hostage/ I never learned to let go. // I did not meet my brother on his birthday/ my mother barely met my brother on his birthday/ there were balloons disguised as blood pumps, that wide open candle blow/ that screaming for dear life/ that gift of life/ I never knew that gifts could have expiration dates/ I have spent the last twenty-one years hoping that his would not be tomorrow.

separate things/ but now not so much./ my silence took up more space than I did/ it was the doorframe and I the figure/ I never knew how I could outgrow who I created myself to be/ when I could not even reach the edges/ I learned to arch my feet/ the meaning of the word elongate./ I was a girl trying to put sheets on a queen bed/ who ended up furled at its middle. // my own birth was less traumatic/ the twentysixth of May/ emergency surgery/ a quarter sized hole in the roof of my mouth/ hospital room hotels/ ears ringing./ I was taken to the speech pathologist/ my mother spoke to the doctor with the worried tone of a woman whose only wish was to hear her daughter call her mother./ I held the world captive on the tip of my tongue, refusing to let go/ the girl with a void for a voice. //

my brother and I were raised on my mother’s Diet Coke addiction and leftover Mentos on the kitchen counter/ he himself was a human // explosive/ both of love and of rage./ when he gets too upset his memory is wiped clean/ I learned how to dance by the tiptoe tradition he throws chairs and pushes tables and rips of sneaking past/ my parents fallen asleep apart everything he can get his hands on/ in the armchair/ with my brother at their and then he will run out of energy, sit back, chests/ I was not quiet out of fear/ I was rub his eyes, and open them to confusion/ quiet for the sake of others/ which were then who possibly could have done this?/ he does

not remember/ I stand in the corner with my head covered./ my mouth tastes of mint and stinging carbonation/ it was only a matter of time before I would unravel too/ my brother has anger/ I have the art of a sob/ whittled into a cry so faint, you can barely hear it slip out. // our childhood was blood/ water/ skin/ ripped open and open again/ my mother and I once came home to my brother sitting in front of the tv with a fistful of teeth/ cascading blood/ wrenched out youth/ open-armed gauze/ cradling/ swaddling./ we lived within a home that he destroyed and I mended/ a home of covered ears and eerie quiet/ bruised knees and a fear of violence/ I would give anything to read the invisible ink on those walls/ to recount the birth of my own clairsentience/ gripped in an out of body pain/ collapsed on the shower floor/ the two of us, a ripped envelope/ the shrieking peel of a wax strip/ making our own entry wounds/ exit wounds/ so that we can leave when we choose/ except we can’t.

// I walked into the world like I expected attack/ my brother simply turned himself off and back on again/ invented his hum/ loud and persistent/ it carried him through on a wave/ my mother and I agreed on a theory on its origin/ that when he was a baby the ringing in his ears was so prominent that he began to mimic it/ replicating that bumbling rhythm, that boisterous noise aloud/ tapped into some unknown somewhere./ some cosmic radio/ that lets him see beyond. // and we are both rewriting and rewriting ourselves until we get the cadence right, until we cut through to the pulse of it all/ when I look at my brother/ I see a beating heart/ when he looks at me he sees veins coursing with metallic gold/ pumping/ and flowing/ juxtaposition of future death/ whenever he draws something for me it is one color taking up the whole page/ with a tiny bit of red at the middle/ a stringy and lopsided mass./ I think my skin is seethrough/ bursting/ flooding out of my arms beyond my wingspan/ I have trouble staying in my body/ I miss too deep/ I become a vacuum sucking everything in sight into my arms to replace his weight.

// I often relapse/ come home stumbling into the arms of anyone who is willing to get crushed/ by a loneliness/ in its girl body/ everyone tells me your brother is not going to die yet/ but he’s not going to get to live either/ after high school he will spend the rest of his life folding towels or bagging groceries/ because it’s all he can do/ waiting for me to come home to him/ while I am out not drowning/ driving cars/ but not off bridges/ kissing my friends on their cheeks/ saying people’s names whom I love again and again into the wind. // I hope he catches it in the air/ tunes in to that radio station every night./ when he was a little boy he would go limp when he didn’t get his way/ I would have to hoist him up by his middle/ and he would shoot his arms up and try to slither down out of my grasp/ I know he doesn’t mean it/ but I feel that ache now/ of sand slipping through my fingers/ time running thin./ I think of us as children/ running barefoot on the hot road/ under a blazing sun/ I would hang Ry upside down and he would scream and giggle until he caught his breath/ I want to breathe that back in/ hold it for ransom/ I would make the most sinister of deals with my non-god/ not to let it go.

quick September journal entry I can’t be strong all the time. Bracing myself for the tough times to come. I know they will come. I know it, because things are too easy right now. Calm before the storm, but that’s cliché. If I’m a cliché, then I will be nothing at all. Nothing original. I feel my thoughts getting looser, like screws holding a too heavy mirror on oldening, weakening walls. I can’t be happy for them, with weakening walls. Floodgates opening, flooding the peace, the trust I built as a child torn down by everyone I’ve ever met. And I hate that I feel like this, like my naivety is running out. I realized this all on a walk the other day. It’s weird to see your friends get up and go. Leaving you, to pursue themselves. I used to keep a page of notes of all the funny things my friend would say, and the time and date when she said them. I never did anything with them. Rarely look back at them. They make me smile a bit, but I don’t really feel happy looking at them. Like nostalgia for a celebrity who died before you were even born, except they are alive and right there in front of you and so far away. Am I jealous, or do I just want to be included? Why does it hurt so much when they do things without me, without meaning to? I should be happy for them, but I’m not. I’m so, so jealous. They get to go out and do things without fear, without running out of time. It’s childish, but it’s mature to realize it’s childish. It probably comes off like I’m trying too hard, that I’m striving for things to find wrong with myself, to compare to others, to talk about something other than the god-awful movies we’ve watched for the tenth time. I’m really, really not—it comes so naturally. And somehow I still am, naive, childish, taking everything too seriously, but just the wrong things. How many words do I write to be myself? How many do I write to be something for someone else? Should I even bother anymore, with the details of summers wasted in lonely western Iowa, of friends and half-lovers lost, regained, lost again inevitably. I hate inevitability, and I’m scared, frozen in place without it, something to hold on to in the future. My friends have a future. I should be happy for them. They are going places, even if it's without me. That’s good right? Or is it too cliché? My therapist said I should start ending these journal entries with a positive note, so I guess I’ll talk about the walk I took the other day. It was sad and lonely, but it was real. I saw a hawk killing something in someone’s backyard, stomping around like it was mad at the thing, and I stared for a bit too long. I just thought it was cool. It flew away shortly after.

an obsession over ends. Cheyenne McGuire

My body belongs to me like the earth Belongs to the miners. I must taste of iron— Love is more than dissolution. In Wisconsin We watched leaves rotting off the trees and Wrapped driftwood roots around our wrists To bind us together when nothing else would Hold water in the lake. All my pieces are breaking Into you: ore to tongue, ground by teeth, Still no breakdown. If I am to dissolve Away from your mouth, I want to drift into wind In red September. This forest twists Around itself, exposed to the both of us— Leaves releasing themselves from branches Tangling naked to pickaxes and hammers. I know what happens in winter: We go to ground To rot. Maybe we are taken up in roots, Held in each other’s casing. Maybe we drift Through the soil, press into peat.

Samm Yu

The Diore Effect

Luna Samm Yu

Care For Me Samm Yu

Cheyenne Mann

I. The day her girlfriend’s arm was ripped off, Virgil hand delivered a 14 pound 7 oz seashellpink baby, whose parents swiftly named him Hank. Hank’s father, a portly man with a beard like burnt sawdust, suggested the name, and his mother, bathing in the exhaustion of her own ejected mortality, agreed. It was a stupid name, thought Virgil as she handed the little, wriggling thing to his mother. A stupid name for a baby who should’ve died. After her first few years as an obstetrician, Virgil pieced together that there was a curve for babies during childbirth. The ones who were too heavy fared as well as the ones who were too light. Only the ones in the middle really grew into anything consequential without constant hand-holding from the best OB/GYNs that money could buy. The rest turned to biowaste. Hank had his umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. Only once. But even so, untangling the puzzle of human anatomy between a mother and her strangled son was quite the ordeal. But, with sweat like flower petals dripping down her face and sterile cobalt hospital gloves stained with the bleeding red of amniotic juice, Virgil had done it. He was quite the cuddly infant. Ravenously reaching for his mother, his skin still littered with flushed fluids like spilled table salt. Not the kind you throw over your left shoulder to scare away the devil. The kind used in baking cakes. He breathed deep. Relishing in the inflation of his lungs. Virgil smiled and tried not to think of him as bones.

II. That damn Tabby cat had broken into their garage and made a home out of the garden tomato boxes her mother saved for the farmer’s markets in the summers. Its opal grey fur lay flat and sticky, in the ethereal way that forest animals bear the markings of their past. At seven years old, all tufts of blonde pigtails and watery brown eyes, Virgil begged her parents to let her keep the muddy animal. ‘Bubbles,’ she had already named it, because that’s what he was. Spherical and iridescent and light as all air could be. Even after her parents had said yes, Virgil kept the small creature clutched in her arms whenever she could. Gentle, but firm. As if some unseen rapture would take him, purring, straight away from her. Bubbles took middle class life in stride. He grew taller and wider with each can of wet salmon tidbits. Menace, though he was— fighting mice and her father’s socks— he snuggled into Virgil’s side to sleep every night. Trying to catch the last bits of sunset in his yellow irises, he closed his eyes to sleep as slow as he could. Virgil held all her molecules still when he did that. She held the very world still so the lovely little cat could dream of, perhaps fish bones, in an undisturbed hush. When morning blushed, she woke him, petting behind his raspberry ears in the way he made it clear he liked. In the 17 years she had him, Bubbles never spoke once. He purred, a deep lucid sound naturally pulled from the hollow of his chest. But he never meowed. He never chirped. As if his voice was a gift reserved only for the grass and the trees and the stars.

II. Bubbles only ate salmon-flavoured wet food. He didn’t have a preference for what brand, but any time Virgil tried to feed him gravy or shrimp or beef, he’d let the gelatinous splatter of food rot away. She never minded III. getting him the specific flavour. It made Tibby Twayne was wearing an esophagusshopping easier, and the red tinged glob of red corduroy skirt with matching lipstick brain matter salmon was the least she could do the first time Virgil ever kissed her. This was to keep him happy. cemented into her memory because Tibby was Newly seventeen and quiet as ever, wearing black lipstick the second time. Both Bubbles stopped sinking his fangs into the instances left temporary coloured inflections pile in his porcelain food dish. He no longer on the edges of Virgil’s mouth, deep as bruise, licked his maw clean, in the predatory way, and like she was marked down to the tendon. They swaggered over to her for praise. Instead he washed away easily with berry-blast body wash lulled his head at her when she walked by with and scrubbing, but Virgil swore they stayed a can. He slept. He didn’t drink water. there forever. Red and Black and Red and Black On her second visit in a week, the vet said in a pattern over her skin. Smouldering over his insides were bone dry. She said the stress and over again burning from hydrogen fusion caused fractures in his left leg. She said the into carbon dioxide and sticky saliva. radius was scraping raw against his muscles. On the skyfall of the fourth kiss, Virgil told She said the only way to make him salmonher this. She wanted the bold-faced, heavy wet-food-happy again was a syringe filled to jawed, five-foot-seven luminary laying over top the brim with pentobarbital. of her to know exactly the bone-deep lasting And Virgil lived to make Bubbles happy. impression she left. She smiled so wide that the bones of her mouth practically distended III. from their sockets. She told Tibby, when she asked, that she Salmon cotton sheets from Wal-Mart set loved her. the lining of their 312th kiss. They were cherry She told Tibby, when she asked, that stems tied together. Grapes baked down into Tibby was short for Tabby in the way a beach raisins. They were mitochondrial, spread over is short for the ocean, and that Tabby was a mattress set on beige carpet. She drowned short for Tabitha in the way Freon was short herself in Tibby. In the girl who told her she liked for apocalypse. (What she didn’t tell her, was the powder puff pink pigment of her gums. that Tibby was short for Tibia in the way that A pineapple candle was lit on the wooden Virgil’s eyes were short for x-rays. What she desk beside them and Virgil thought faintly didn’t tell her was that Virgil took in the world that they were going to catch on fire and one bone at a time and the tibia was her burn. Into cherry stem, grape-raisin skeletons. second favourite, behind the femur and before Cake-box-baked into the rubble of their first the ulna. What she didn’t tell her was that in apartment together. residency, when she delivered babies, they They’d been together a while. Last October didn’t have patellas. Only slabs of cartilage marked seven years since a fumbling exchange where the bone should be). of phone numbers at the vet had turned into She told Tibby, when she asked, that shopping for engagement rings. Being with the cat skeleton in their living room was the her was like heartburn, but larger. Like her antithesis of taxidermy. Bone art. Cats have 24 thermoregulation had shut off. more bones than humans, and one extra rib. And if the Bible states that Eve was made

from the rib of Adam, and that’s why she has one more than him, then cat was formed from the rib of Eve. Tibby kissed her after that. A strand of brown hair stuck to her ligament pink lipstick. Her cheeks were flushed with acrylic paint and her eyes were cat fur grey. She told Tibby, when she asked, that she planned on collecting more. I. Virgil hadn’t gotten the chance to check who her next patient was, when a young twentysomething boy with dark curls in his hair and panic in his eyes threw open the door, waking up both the sleeping mother and the baby. Hank screamed. He was deafening. He was fire crackling. He shot his sound waves into the atmosphere, as if his only instinct was to let the world know he was there. The man’s voice was pale when he spoke. The words were heavy with rotting peaches. He told her, in a voice the color of tapeworm, that Tabitha Twayne, riding her bike home from work just one foot too close to a city bus, was in the trauma section, getting the life stuffed back into her, and the sinuous thread still holding her left arm on, cut off. II. A vet will let you keep the body of your pet, if you ask nicely. Body, Virgil thought, not corpse. Corpse was far too much of a dissociative word to describe the bundle of living, breathing cells that Bubbles had been. Corpse was not flesh and blood and bone and heart. Corpse was not skeletal, smooth, and cardiac muscles. Corpse was not organ systems and organelles and nervous systems and spines and brains and eyes and ears. And ears. And ears. And ears. Corpse was not raspberry ears.

I. IV fluid dripped into the remaining arm of her girlfriend. Slowly. Steadily. The heart rate monitor pulsed in the unyielding stubbornness Virgil was used to hearing around the hospital. She wasn’t used to ones hooked up onto adults though. She wasn’t used to the full size. The full gravity of it. Tibby was reborn in bandages, face smeared with sunburn road rash and even redder lipstick. II. The best way to remove the animal from the bone is to skin it from ankle to scalp, remove the viscera inside, and bury it in a hole in direct sunlight for several months. Preferably near an anthill. When the bones are ripe, perhaps one summer morning when you go out to pick tomatoes from the garden, unbury them. Set them in hot, stagnant water and wait. Every two days change the water to remove the floating chunks. When they’re clean, pat them dry with your best, fluffiest towel. Gentle, but firm. I. Changing the bandages of a wound was an intimate thing. Virgil, on the rare occasions she had to, did it with fingers grazing ruptured flesh so softly they could be mistaken for pale, white ghosts. Now she was going to have to get familiar with it again, return to shaking the hands of plaster and white cotton. The doctors had told Tibby how lucky she was that her girlfriend was a doctor. How lucky she was to have someone qualified to help her recover. Virgil felt like argon when he said that. Like xenon. Like radon. Like any periodic chemical, except the ones that glow. Tibby asked the doctor, in that lilting song voice of hers, if she thought it would be heretical to wear her wedding ring on her right hand. The grin she sprouted when he said yes was helium. The sky was cloudy that day. The pink kind.

I. When she was in medical school, Virgil learned it takes eight weeks for an amputated limb to heal. II. Her favorite skeleton in the living room doesn’t meow. He doesn’t chirp or squeak or hiss or purr. He lulls his head and does not eat the can of salmon tidbits Virgil hides in the back of the supply cupboard. He sits in silence. In bone white. In spherical, and iridescent, and light as all air could be. It’s nearly enough to convince Virgil he’s still alive. II. When she was 24, Virgil learned it takes eight months for a tabby cat’s body to decompose entirely. III. She told Tibby, when she asked, driving down the interstate from the hospital to their house, that she loved her. That their love was a one-armed thing. No salt in the sea, no milk gone bad in the fridge, no songbirds flying off, no bone rot, no city bus could shake away the Red and Black.

I. (What she didn’t tell her was, lying in a scarlet pool of biowaste soup in the back compartment of their blood-cell-white Prius, sat the remnants of a left arm, severed at the shoulder and broken in eight places, perfectly ready to be stripped down to nothing but bone).

things i’ve earned, 2021 Grace Champagne

the orange cat and i have a love-hate relationship i have never been good at leaving scabs the thin red lines that dot my hands my feet begin to glow white against the August tan we go to Oklahoma in the summer leftover on my skin. even though we know from the start scars it will end with the two of us (fighting) we last three days before we’re arguing in the middle of a shabby chinese restaurant i hit the table so hard that my eggdrop soup spatters across the placemats i scream in the bathroom until my throat burns (it never goes away) fortune cookie

we walk by their house a few nights after the protests boys like that never lose anything they feed off of our anger and unsuspecting bodies mace

preacher man on campus points to me and calls me a whore. i take the book from his hands and trace my lips up the spine bible my breasts did not grow, as i had hoped, but it made me feel like i was doing the right thing. vaccine we lie flat on our backs in her bedroom the sheets smell like cinnamon there is no small talk just laughter and steady breath companion hold my hand, paper lover. i will squeeze tight as you scrape the rot from my insides; replace it with numbness and warmth from your body. intimacy

Oli Brunning

@FoolsMag

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