The Gallery Spring 2019

The Gallery

Spring 2019

G

the

allery

Volume 33, Issue 2 Spring 2019

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Editors Co-Editors-in-Chief Maxwell Cloe Olivia Vande Woude Copy Editors Robert Metaxatos Sophie Rizzieri Art Editors Hannah London Charlie Parsons Poetry Editor Noah Dowe Prose Editor Madeline Myers Julia Wicks Publicity Editors Emma Eubank Julia Savoca Gibson Staff Editors Rowan Azhderian Jake Beardsley Kae Eleuterio Meghan Gates Eli Gnesin

Sammy Murphy Hugh Mosher Lauren Wilson David Lefkowitz Mary Hannah Grier

Cover Art

Goose Flame II

See the complete work on page 26

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Contents

Max and I Stare at the La Grande Jatte A Good Mistake Pentecost Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas, 28 January My Brief Career as a Barber Take One daydrop after the sarabande palindromes Witch Loan What my heartline told me the unknowable Love Beyond Medium The Mechanicsville Myth lime An abattoir of associates Perfect Lovers at the time of core collapse Don’t Kiss the Alpaca Lips Part IV: Life and Death Get Back Together To Err Is, To Eros You’re a Person, Not a Can of Soup The Skyline Baby Shoes Revisiting Brideshead Gone with the Stairs Madison, WI Melancholy Valley of Shadow Untitled Untitled Earth Smells Whatever Self-Portait Rest Goose Flame II Fork in the Road Stargazing Relativity Person

Poetry 4 5 6-7 7 8 9 9 9 11 16 17 18 31 31 35 38 39 44-45 45

Prose 12-14 15 32-35 36-37 40-43 46-47

Art

10 17 19 20 21 22 23 24-25 26 27 28 29 30

Jake Beardsley Clara Finley Margaret Mitchell Margaret Mitchell Meghan Gates Jake Beardsley Maxwell Cloe Sadie Williams Madeline Salino Kathryn Willoughby Sadie Williams Lauren Wilson Farnaz Shirazi Meghan Gates Finley Roles Jake Beardsley Maxwell Cloe Ryan Onders Phryne Abby Comey Gwen Sachs Margaret Mitchell Anonymous Julia Savoca Gibson Margaret Mitchell Vivian Lu David Lefkowitz Vivian Lu Nia Kitchin Rebecca Shkeyrov Vivian Lu Rebecca Shkeyrov Hannah London Rebecca Shkeyrov David Lefkowitz Ashley Hardy David Lefkowitz Rebecca Shkeyrov

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to vacant space, like static on an old TV. Today I’ve come with Max, a b notsure about.

e might not meet again. He holds my hand to navigate the din. We settle in.

long

smoking

his

thin

brown

what

lavendergreen

(His beard, the way he bends his knee I’d like to speak to him.)

man

And

(this boy is so funny and nice)

the grass is green and blue and pink and white

to view, notice how the frame distorts, discolors.

revealed, boats pretty a whif hitherto concealed in f of smoke docks and cupboards, comes furling in

the

pipe

is

figures become distinct,

brown dog with a white lace ribbon

(The young woman with yellow the drab spots bouquet wonders if she should confess who holds to the girl a parasol even in front of her, though she’s sitting in the edge of darkness.)

casting

As you draw back, the

shadow? w

(Max smiles at this.)

a woman and a man stand side by side (I think they’re married?), she looks stalwart, he’s resilient. I wonder what these two are dreaming on and here beyond the green and :pale ochre (and, surprisingly, red)

that

a land scape of porcelain dolls.

then he kissed me

I said it’s like the flowers in the grass at Hyde Park

oy I’m not sure about. This is our third date, and I don’t think he likes me very much. Anyway, this is my last week in Chicago, and w

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All

(the trees at the top of the frame are extra blurry, as if on the edge of a photograph; green leaves meld into the distant background, reminding us that this impression is sheer color, nothing but form and light)

Wrapping around the edges of Seurat’s painting is a band of black and red and gold and blue and white. The scene muddles mottled in

Max and I Stare at the La Grande Jatte

Spring 2019 Poetry Staff Favorite

<Max and I Stare at the La Grande Jatte

—Jake Beardsley

A Good Mistake If it wasn’t a mistake, I don’t know what it was (When I said your name, that is) If it wasn’t a mistake, I don’t know what that was It wasn’t voluntary — what forced it out of me?

When I said your name, I knew I wanted more (it tasted like cinnamon and a breezy spring day) I knew then that I wanted to feel your secrets in between my lips and discover how your insecurities fit into mine like puzzle pieces I knew then that I wanted to discover the recipe for your smiles and your laughs Before I said your name, I didn’t recognize the gnawing that consumed me whenever I saw you as hunger Things were supposed to be more one-dimensional than this From where did these edges protrude?

How were whole hills created in the time it takes to blink?

What is this diverse landscape that I once thought was a plain?

I have never seen it before Suddenly, there are mountains and valleys my imagination would never have conceived before I said your name Even if you turn out to be a person, that’s okay Being a person just means that sometimes you make mistakes and people make good mistakes sometimes Once I saw a man and instantly fell in love with him (It was not his fault that his eyes always looked sad, he was born that way, with sloping bones) Is this like that?

— Clara Finley

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Pentecost Your face illuminated by the flame whispering shy obscenities at the wind,

body hungrily curved overâ&#x20AC;&#x201C; How humbly you receive the light, drawing your wayward fragments around an American-blend center of mass,

setting aflame

the taste in our mouths tomorrow morning.

I think since youth I have been damned to love everybody,

and to feel like a ghost for it.

There are halogen white streets that we do not belong in, but stomp our ashes out in them anyways,

a funeral procession

in artificial daylight.

I confess,

I am tired tonight

of upper rooms their solemn piety, pleading,

go forthâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;

away with sleep.

Away from dreams unearthed, or memories, rather:

the coming in from the snow, a child, stripped down to socks shivering on the edge of the bed with the low light of the fire on your forehead:

you are so vulnerable, like that.

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Or these: of you, small, still unknown to me, sheets pulled severely

over your tangled head for warmth.

I could curl up like that quite quietly on the bare mattress above the radiator

not even touching you

or letting you see me.

— Margaret Mitchell

Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas, 28 January Man, boy, creature, creatura, What do you reckon, to be good or to be happy?

Let’s be happy

without thinking why, and sun ourselves in the light chewing on our tender souls.

Beloved, don’t destroy your nature– we’re not just bodies, but suns.

Let’s be happy

and know why.

Let’s take pleasure in your hand resting on my head!

A higher and more excellent virtue!

Let’s be happy–

and know why the dust we turn up glimmers like heaven above our heads.

When I speak to you of stars, I have no idea what they are in their sublimity and remoteness, no idea how excellent! but for the living room light– all things of light

are bathed in you.

And so it is your nature I cannot speak– It would be to say everything.

— Margaret Mitchell

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My Brief Career as a Barber You did a damn decent job of blunt cuts and shaves at our house but said braids were beyond your expertise.

You are the original in-house barber.

And I didn’t sign up for lessons.

You said it hurt to lay certain ways and was more trouble than needed and if I could just help.

You said here’s the razor, the cream, and shave with the grain, it’s too tender the other way.

You sat on the toilet and tilted your head this way and that as I worked slowly, gently.

You reassured me I did a fine job, you were losing hair anyways, it didn’t matter if my shave was uneven.

I hadn’t expected barbershop lessons those months, but all of us were taking it day-by-day anyways.

Not grateful for the circumstances, I played mother to your daughter — illness shared.

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— Meghan Gates

Take One I said that I would call again but I feel we’ve already said goodbye.

Forgive me. I want the feeling to last, you on the swings and me on the grass us waiting out the setting sun: Nothing hangs and everything lingers.

We got it in take one.

—Jake Beardsley

daydrop after the sarabande finger trace breaking the wires dug shivering cross the bend my stomach makes in recoil of humclaws gasp gashing each note out staccato run gleefully down harpist scratch me kissly in the moondark and ill sing till my body glows —Maxwell Cloe

palindromes and time runs its circles around me and me around circles it runs around me and me around this bitter earth biting as it turns me around and around me from a crack in the ceiling i look back in time at myself and myself in time back looks at me she sees me as clear as i see her because light travels forwards and backwards and mine is coming back around and i know i wouldn’t change things so i watch her say yes and i smile and smiles she.

— Sadie Williams

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Spring 2019 Art Staff Favorite

Vivian Lu

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Melancholy

Ink on Scroll

Witch Loan We don’t know where the witches are.

Bundled in a burlap sack, turnips for the stew; bundled in a burlap sack at the ankle of God’s flagpole.

Every time we look for them, we only find our hands clutching at vacant fabric and ashes.

Swaddle us in a sambenito; decorate us with our transgressions.

We don’t have a religion but our religion is a procession of infamy to the auto-da-fé.

We wicked women die on our feet.

— Madeline Salino

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You’re a Person, Not a Can of Soup

by Abby Comey

My breakdown in the sauce aisle began with the bridge of “Come on Eileen.” Only one good song plays at Piggly Wiggly and it’s “Come on Eileen.” At quarter past ten on a sticky, melt-your-flip-flops kind of August evening, that song broke me out of a blood-rotting state of boredom. It started with a tapping of my black pediatric sneakers. Once the slowdown kicked in, I was practically on my knees between the candy display and the check-out belt. I was still in the lip syncing phase when Mark rounded the Red Bull fridge, but he didn’t seem all that grateful for my restraint.

“You’re facing every aisle in this place,” he told me with string bean arms folded over his boulderous beer belly. Honest to goodness, the man had the proportions of Mr. Krabs.

“Sorry,” I said, walking back to my station. I could’ve gotten there more efficiently and in more style by leaping over the belt, but Mark generally frowned upon “treating work equipment like playground equipment.”

“Go. Face. Now,” he said, all red-faced and caveman. If I wasn’t broke and Tara hadn’t steered her bike into an old lady’s mailbox you better believe I would’ve up and left. But, alas, my parents are high school science teachers and my girlfriend has been wedged between pedophiles and potheads on public transport for weeks.

Sauces and salad dressings are on aisle three, but I started there anyway because it’s the easiest stuff to face. For all you lucky bastards who haven’t donned the polyester supermarket collar, “facing” means pulling all the merchandise to the front of the shelves and making sure the labels face outward. Like most work done on Piggly Wiggly property, it makes your back ache and your mind turn to meat sauce. Sure, it makes the aisles look nice, but mostly it gets cashiers out of the way so the manager can play Nintendo Switch behind the register.

I had just made it to the ketchup when I caught a whiff of Arthur Bluestein’s radioactive body spray in the next aisle over.

“Ma, I got the lasagna noodles … Yeah, yeah it’s the right kind, I checked … Well, let Aunt Ellie have a vicious gastrointestinal reaction. That’s her problem … Sorry, sorry, but who am I supposed to ask? It’s eleven at night, this place is a desert … Alright, okay. I got it, Ma.”

Like the Mother Mary, I clutched a value size bottle of ketchup to my breast and sent up a prayer to the Piggly Wiggly gods, willing them to send Arthur to the left and not the right.

“Excuse me?” he said. I made my way toward the opposite end of the aisle as fast as my orthopedics could carry me. Arthur broke into a run. “Sorry, excuse me! Are these noodles gluten free?” He had already wedged the box into my line of vision before he noticed.

“Meg,” he said. “Hey.” “Hey.”

“I didn’t know you worked here.” “Yeah.”

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“That’s a lot of ketchup.”

“Thanks.”

In light of this eloquent interaction, I should mention that Arthur and I are two pretty charismatic kids. In fact, it was our witty banter that brought us together in the first place. It was by no means a Shakespearean love affair. We made out in his basement a couple times between rounds of Super Smash Bros. After we stopped, the banter died. I told him it was nothing personal. I was just tired of stale pizza rolls and two-player Smash. Things weren’t the same, though.

“I heard you are Tara are …” His voice trailed off and he drummed the box of lasagna for good measure. It was too painful for him to say aloud. He wasn’t alone.

People freaked out when I started dating Tara. You’re dating a girl, they said. What does this mean, they asked. How I see it, though, Tara isn’t a girl. She’s some sort of interdimensional mermaid. Beneath her purple overalls, sure, she’s got girl parts, but that’s not what I see when I look at her. She is long limbs and mint chocolate chip irises. That’s not what I feel when I’m near her. She radiates a kind of warm energy that magnetizes my capillaries or some shit. Even still, the questions came, as everyone in my life stood over me, each breathing heavily, each wielding a different label in their fists, each poised to stamp my freckled forehead.

“Dating,” I said. “We’re dating.” Arthur stared down at his Yeezys.

“

I felt like labels I didn’t want were being tightened around my neck.

”

“So are you …?”

“Am I what?” I said, taking a step toward him.

“Come on, Meg. You know,” he gestured toward nothing. “Lesbian?”

There it was. Those three syllables the world could wrap me in like leftover fruitcake in saran wrap. I had broken with the status quo and people needed a name for it. If they could name it, they could control it. It was different to choose your own label. Tara wore the word “queer” draped around her collarbones like a silk shawl. I felt like labels I didn’t want were being tightened around my neck.

I hadn’t spoken for a while now. Arthur squirmed in the makeout-free silence.

“Are you bi, then?” he asked. He hardly got the words out before I ripped the package from his hands, put my thumb over the label, and thrust it in his face.

“What’s in this box?” I said.

“Lasagna?”

“How on earth did you know?”

“Because I’ve, um, seen lasagna before,” said Arthur. I threw the box at his chest and he held it up like a shield.

“Guess you didn’t need to read the label then, huh? I guess lasagna is just lasagna.

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“Insane!” I reached for a bottle of mustard and tore off the label. “What’s this, Arthur? “Mustard.”

“DING DING DING!” I was on the move now, tearing off every label in sight and throwing them down until the white linoleum floor turned to funfetti cake batter. Arthur dropped the lasagna and made a beeline for the produce section. I picked up the box and threw it, catching him on the heel of his left Yeezy.

“And there is gluten in here,” I shouted. “It’s Piggly Wiggly! There’s gluten in the fucking milk!”

I stood there among the debris, my chest rising and falling to the quiet rhythm of “SexyBack” overhead. I couldn’t bring myself to look up when I heard Mark waddling toward me.

“I hope you know this isn’t when we mean when we say ‘bring the labels forward,’” he said, pointing to the sticker on the floor. “This is too far forward, Marge.”

“Did you just call me Marge?” He nodded.

“It’s Meg. I’ve worked here for two years,” I said. “Also, I’m wearing a nametag.” He shrugged.

“I don’t do labels,” he said. “You’re a person, not a can of soup.”

I wanted to hug Mark, but employee touching is against Piggly Wiggly policy, and he smelled like boiled hot dogs.

Instead I said, “That doesn’t make any sense, but thank you.”

As Mark made his way back to his Switch, he passed a pair of purple overalls and I broke into a run to reach her.

“Hey, Marge,” said Tara. “What are you doing here?”

“Thought I’d pay you a visit,” she said. Her cheeks were rosy from walking in the heat and I couldn’t help but kiss the spot where I knew a dimple would appear. Tara visited me almost every shift because she knew I was saving up to buy her a new bike.

“Do you think I need a label?” I asked.

“Of course,” Tara said and plucked a sticker from the floor. “How else will concerned soccer moms know you’re made with real tomatoes?” She stuck the label on the center of my forehead. “Perfect,” she said.

“Perfect,” I echoed and lost myself in the swirling seafoam of human eyes. G

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The Skyline

by Gwen Sachs

One time when we were both high, he told me that my eyes looked like Saturn. I asked what he meant, and he pointed at the sky, tinted purple from pollution.

“I don’t know. Just the rings.”

He moved his fingers in circles so quickly that it made me dizzy. Then he laughed and laughed, the sound looping around itself until it turned into a gentle lull.

We lay on the grass with our shoulders barely touching, but I swore I could feel his heart beat. It pulsed through the craters of the Earth.

We were at my 4th grade teacher’s house, even though she wasn’t home. Her daughter had invited us. An hour or so before, she’d led us through the foyer, past the kitchen and into the backyard. I’d been to the house a few times before, but each time I was still surprised that it looked different than the elementary school classroom from years ago, with paper doll chains draped over the chalkboard. My teacher could have knelt on this very floor to draw the dolls’ smiling faces. The image left my head as quickly as it came. That was my problem; I couldn’t see people once the places changed.

He didn’t reach for my hand as we walked through the house because we were always concerned with what other people guessed about us. But later, when my vision blurred and his muscles slowed, he held my head to his chest, kissing the line where my forehead met my hair.

The music and the chatter in the backyard were loud yet gentle enough that familiarity wrapped me in its arms. I almost forgot that we were just a group of people with little in common that had somehow found ourselves in the same place at the same time. Because we were all on the edge of something, we steadied ourselves with one another. He and I watched the world around us, but as its outline faded, we turned to the stars instead.

I don’t notice the sky much anymore, but when I do I search for Saturn. I still wonder what he saw when he looked at me. G

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What my heartline told me Tonight Megan sat on my bed and let me read her palm from a tutorial so ridiculous we questioned if it were satire.

“So I’m going to be a serial cheater who attends office parties?”

I nodded solemnly. “That’s what it says.”

“Also,” I intoned, winding my fingers through the soft air like casting a spell, “your kidney health is at risk. Seek a doctor immediately.”

Megan and I laughed so hard that my heart exhaled for the first time since you left.

I wonder how any butterfly can emerge from its cocoon without the velvet grip support of her friends.

It is these little moments of delicate you-lessness that bring me back to earth.

We were just being silly but it reminded me: I am silly without you; I can be silly and never see you again.

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— Kathryn Willoughby

the unknowable i go to sleep with dirty hands and greasy face, it will all be resolved come morning my life slipping past me like soap bubbles what else is there to wash away? nothing, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s so spotless i see you reflected in the corner of the glass from behind, your eye greets me in sharp relief or is that just me? my grimy thumbprints edge-gracing this surface i tip and tilt just so i see what i want to see? as i slip back into the realm of the waking, before i can to look in the face of it, the question never passes my lips, passing instead into the realm of the almost, laid to rest among all other things whose answers i will never know â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Sadie Williams

David Lefkowitz

Valley of Shadow

Photograph

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Love Beyond Medium In the quiet dawn you said I looked like a renaissance painting, with shimmer-tinted eyes, acrylic paint lips, and a soul perpetually on display.

But the world doesn’t matter if the world isn’t you.

I see traces of Rome in your cheekbones and Alexandria in your hands: you were made to bring onlookers to their knees.

There is glory and ruin in your marbled body that I’d wear my paint thin trying to understand.

Set me in a gold frame and hang me where you like, but only if you’ll stand beside me.

—Lauren Wilson

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Vivian Lu

Untitled

Lead Pencil on Paper

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Nia Kitchin

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Untitled

Oil on Canvas

Rebecca Shkeyrov

Earth Smells

Oil on Canvas

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Vivian Lu

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Whatever

Crayon and Gold Leaves on Canvas

Rebecca Shkeyrov

Self-Portrait

Oil on Canvas

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Hannah London

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Rest

Graphite and Digital Collage

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Rebecca Shkreyov

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Goose Flame II

Woodblock Print

David Lefkowitz

Fork in the Road

Photography

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Ashley Hardy

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Stargazing

Digital

David Lefkowitz

Relativity

Photography

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Rebecca Shkeyrov

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Person

Woodcut Print

the mechanicsville myth apple of my eye borne of the seeds of the sun which kissed the soil that you reached out from creatures in our fingernails they’ve been here before the birth of the first star and will continue to be long after they’re all gone they cause meteor showers in raindrops and explain why the earth grows teeth miles beneath the mantle it’s because she’s poised to bite the hands that feed her eye of worm, ear of newt, and the heartbeats of leaves a being of scripture and sand you’ve got god in your blood prayers carved into your bones and between your joints, Empyrean — Farnaz Shirazi

lime an accidentalshotofgatoradeintomywaterbottle kind of day. the thought of lime. & it lingers

— Meghan Gates

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Baby Shoes

by Margaret Mitchell

I can only imagine the sound of Meridian Street through the window’s inch-and-a-half thick glass – a muted crashing of waves that is never ebb, only flow.

The city is empty this time of year, but echoes of white noise float over the stillness like a poltergeist, incessant and irritating.

There’s a homeless woman on the street corner below. She presses her thumb hard into the button at the crossing light while the red numbers flash in descending order over Georgia Street. As the digits morph and blend into one another, she stares up. Her face is obscured by my drowsy eyesight but I can still feel the unspeakable intimacy of her eyes upon mine. My parents used to warn me not to draw the attention of homeless people, but I allow myself this moment of rebellion. Cautionary tales of the deranged always left me curious, wondering if those around me had it in them, that little thread of latent madness, and when it would begin to unravel. The fraying could begin at any second, in any person, and we’d all be utterly helpless. I wonder if God has pity on that woman. He made her that way, after all. He cuts the thread.

I pull my eyes away from her and look dully into the glass. If I let my eyes wander out of focus just enough, they can find the faint reflection of my pallid face. Indiana has drawn me thin. My hair fell out in soggy, gangling chunks in the hotel shower earlier in the evening. I turned up the heat, thinking it best to just sear everything off so Beth wouldn’t notice the thinning.

I drag my fingers along the windowsill. It is only as I fail to find an opening that I realize how starved I am of fresh air. I thump the fat of one fist against the pane in frustration and let my forehead drop into my reflection. How common were suicides, I wonder, before they sealed up these hotel windows so as to show you the world but separate you from its energy? The confinement seems counterintuitive to me. It is maddening and makes the white walls seem as if they are caving inwards.

I look upwards and over upon rooftops and terraces concealed from my sight. There’s a lamppost on one, a solitary beacon. That round orb, that distant watchtower, that hidden rendezvous, as I imagine it – full of a history I cannot tell and a warmth I cannot feel. I smudge the little grease spot left by my forehead, and as if this motion had a tinge of magic or conjuration in it, something restless moves inside of me. Maybe it’s the bellboy who checked me into my room. I let him flirt with me because he wanted to and I didn’t care. There was a lonesomeness heating up from his cheeks that the vacant rooftop reminds me of, withdrawn from this sickly city yet an inseparable part of the landscape. He pitied me, I think, and for that I find myself beginning to love him more than I have loved anyone, anyone ever. I like the sound of that and tuck the idea away for later. The thought could be a good distraction, if I don’t exhaust it.

Across the alley and just a floor below my room, a warm amber ambiance sweats out of a mediocre steakhouse. It’s alluring in a guilty-pleasure sort of way,

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like cheap Victoria’s Secret underwear or a McMansion or perfume in a plastic bottle. The light makes me sick of cities and suburbs and society and sick of America, all the while filling me with hunger for something good, cheap, filling, and pleasurable. I’m hungry. I’m depleted. I’m used to being in the city with both of my parents and looking forward to a Yelp-recommended meal paid for by someone other than myself. I’m never hungry for those dinners but I like the dressing up, the coming in from the cold and wind and noise into that warm artificial light, the faces, the familiar human faces.

Now there is nothing, just silence. It whispers, pregnant with possibility and anticipation, but I know better, now that there is nothing.

I haven’t had much that wasn’t liquid today, other than a bag of jellybeans I bought at the candy store in the airport terminal. Freedom, when you are an adult and all alone, is the liberty to act like a child. I was killing time while Beth waited on her flight to leave Chicago. I had scarfed down the jellybeans in the room while I looked for a coffee shop to spend the evening in reading a book. Instead, I just stayed in, my eyes glazed over, mindlessly skimming over serif-font words and alternating every few minutes to my phone to check for messages from Beth and then get distracted on Instagram. More than the mindless scrolling, I think reading is bad for me. Everything tonight seems analyzed and scientific and fluorescent now that my mind is in this pattern of tracing the pages of my own thoughts, grasping for little bits of meaning or connection or foreshadowing hidden in the margins. Pitiful attempts like this for some understanding of the incomprehensible world reduce me to shreds, a damp heap slouched upon the white hotel bedsheets.

“

”

When I close my eyes, I feel like I’m floating through streets trying to look like I belong here.

When I close my eyes, I feel like I’m floating through streets trying to look like I belong here, but then I get the sense that I’ve been caught in the dead stream of figures and corpses, and that’s when I get antsy. That’s when I draw inwards behind my eyeballs and imagine myself as a child, the comfort and innocence. Still, I can’t keep up that thought for long before I begin to feel as though once again I’m lost in the grocery store aisles calling out for someone, but I can’t say the name because it doesn’t exist anymore. The hushed, nervous throb of the city pulls out the most sobering thoughts when I close my eyes and succumb to it. But from my room, looking out the window, I am above it all, hovering, sedated.

My phone buzzes and lights up blue-white. A message from Beth reads, “flight is delayed again,” and another, seconds after, “won’t be in til the morning :( love you.” Some weight in me drops heavily upon my heart and I feel that stinging behind my eyes.

“Why?” I whisper to myself, lips barely parted. The sound that comes from my throat is more like a moan than a word. The muscles in my face begin to strain and stretch and wrinkle my paper thin skin. I sob silently and let my chest heave two, maybe three times, then lie sideways on the bed and let the muscles in my cheek fall

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limp. I think of every curse word I know but don’t say any of them, just let a stream of drool reach the corner of my mouth before closing my lips. I still had my shoes on, white sneakers I got for Christmas last week. My parents still gave me Christmas presents when I came to visit but this was the last of that, I think.

They were just like the pair that I owned before, which had torn but still held their sentimental value. just like the pair that I owned before, which had torn but still held their sentimental value. I left them at home but felt a strange guilt over that, like I owed it to them to commemorate their good service and companionship.

Three days ago my mother texted me to tell me that she had put the old pair in the basement with the Goodwill donation pile. Two days ago I called to see if she could ship them to my apartment. She went to bring them up from the basement and instead found my father. I was on the phone with her then.

They hung off of the end of the bed, small and stiff like those bronzes of baby shoes. That memory of the world beyond – of baby pictures and of and children crying over candy stores in airport terminals and of families in overly expensive steakhouses and of the parking lot after church and of the face of my father – makes me groan in longing and mourning. I mourn the loss of it all and I mourn because of it all.

I am glad Beth isn’t here because then I could not be sad. There is a secret, unspoken part of our sisterhood in which we do not allow the other to see too deeply into the agonizing depths of our hearts in these darkest moments. After all, they are but fleeting. We agreed long ago that there is something disgusting about seeing a person cry for the first time, something that evokes a fight or flight response. It was upon seeing our father at the dining room table when we came home from school, maybe seven years ago. I did not understand what I saw then and perhaps still do not. The mortal consequences of what I saw as his weakness are all I know of that kind of pain, consequences which now provoke a confrontation with an enemy I have long ignored: the stark realization that there is actually something painfully, undeniably worth crying over in this life.

It is an enemy that has not fully materialized until I look into the mirror and see myself projected as a familiar but separate being. I appear whole, yet half of me is gone. Will they recognize me tomorrow, clad in black and bearing half a face? Yes, I think so, and the privacy of my deformity makes it even more unbearable.

I pull myself away from the glass and put on my mother’s old fur coat.

I take the elevator down three floors to the lobby. The bellboy welcomes me by name. In any movie I’ve seen, the obvious subsequent action would be to ask him when his shift ended. I walk right past and do not acknowledge his gaze. I simply feel his eyes on me, and when I am out of his sight there is an even wider emptiness than before. It is as though by leaving him, I have lost someone dear and have been wholly hollowed out.

The automatic doors slide open when I approach. Cold night air drains into my lungs and into my bloodstream. The homeless woman has left the street corner and the lamppost on the roof of the building in the distance has been

34 The Gallery

turned off. My heart drops again in disappointment and I forget why I left the room, why I left the window, why I stopped keeping watch over the city, why I did not meet the eyes of the bellboy, why I didn’t respond to Beth’s text, why I didn’t call my parents more often. I should not have abandoned my post and let the light drain out. Oh, there are so many things I should not have done. It has all been distractions up until now, pitiful petty comforts that are nothing but anxiety of anxieties. All is anxiety, I exclaim in my mind. The words must be a prayer, something I saw my father nod his head to in the pews before our family’s faith dried up.

There’s a part of me that wants to thrust myself upon the abyss before me and painfully drag myself bloodied along the pavement and prove that I am unafraid. I feel that discomfort is the only way to comfort, to peace of mind, to complacency. It’s like the frogs in the boiling water, who do not recognize their peril until it is too late. Except I don’t want the gradual desensitization. I want the full heat, the shrieking hissing open mouthed terror up to my neck.

I place one white shoe upon the white concrete under the white light and bask in terrible power of the hush of Meridian Street. G

An abattoir of associates And you must think it just your luck That they hung me instead of you Still sitting pretty in the muck And swearing that you’d save me too And there you watch behind the glass You’re grinning through your strap-on frown While casting shadows on the past And waiting for the fears to drown And there’s a pile of fat to trim While onions ripe set out to graze Upon the hay the sun grows dim And muddy figures fill the maze And you must think it oh so sweet That I was first instead of you But even dogs are made of meat And there’s a hook made just for you —Finley Roles

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Spring 2019 Prose Staff Favorite

Revisiting Brideshead

by Anonymous

The spring that I was thirteen, the spring of wide unknowns narrowing, Lena lived for the bottle green couch and its magnetic pull. Lena lived for the bottle green couch and the rest of us lived around it. The first floor of our house was wide open, few walls and fewer doors separating room from room, and everything was audible everywhere. Returning from school or descending from my room, I checked the couch before anything to see if she slept. I would entreat my brothers to lower their voices and I would tug my dog away from her unconscious form.

The spring that I was thirteen Lena was often asleep but not always, and I vividly remember stepping into the kitchen after school in May, white tile and skylight and high ceiling, and hearing an arcadian voice from the room to my right. Not walls so much as a change in flooring separated the two and I kicked my shoes off and greeted my sister. “What are you watching?” I loved her, stood in awe of her, and all of her tastes were either to be emulated now or aspired to later.

“Brideshead Revisited,” she told me, not leaving the couch but craning her neck and smiling. “Do you recognize that voice? It’s Jeremy Irons. Scar, from The Lion King. He’s Charles.” I stopped and listened to a man describe the virtues of ground-floor rooms and grinned, recognizing the impossibly proper accent.

I knew nothing about Brideshead Revisited except that it was very British and that my sister spent a week that spring watching the mini-series. I added it to a list that included The Royal Tenenbaums, the White Stripes, Virginia Woolfe, and Frasier. Things that were correct, things I would have to enjoy someday.

Lena had returned from college that spring and would not go back for several years.

Lying on the couch all day, painting in the kitchen all night, and leaving tripwires you didn’t see until she was already sobbing. Her moods seeped from the living room to the rest of the house, palpable things you could run into face first if you weren’t careful. But I remember something idyllic about her viewing of Brideshead Revisited, presumably due to some combination of the soothing accents, the mid-May weather, my own approaching eighth-grade graduation. I didn’t watch any of it with her, but I would do homework or read in the kitchen and hear Charles emotionlessly tell my sister about his life with Sebastian and Julia.

Sun pouring through skylight, gracing white tile, is my permanent association with that voice. Lena got worse. I found the novel on one of the many bookshelves scattered in our house and, remembering that week of next-room British serenity, decided to read. Beyond the first few chapters, the promise of serenity I had invented was not delivered upon. I enjoyed and puzzled over the novel, unable to interpret or understand it as I hadn’t yet learned how to really read. It left me feeling unutterably sad.

Lena traded the couch for Taipei, then Paris, then the Arizona desert, where she finally recovered. It was over a year after she watched Brideshead that my mother and father collected their four other children to tell us about her diagnosis. I don’t remember what was said, but I recall perfectly the stage directions. Nicholas literally running away into the night, Therese crossing her arms and not hiding her hurt, Rob’s head falling heavy on my shoulder as he cried.

I stared past Therese where there was no wall separating us from the kitchen, and felt nothing.

When Lena’s tears became a constant but unpredictable piece of my life, it became easiest to numb myself to them. She left, but the anesthetic still coursed through me. That night in June, I shrugged off the vague, nagging notion that I ought to be upset to learn how sick she was. I felt it like it was no news at all. Are they shocked? I thought, Didn’t we already know?

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A diagnosis meant nothing to me. My mom bought books and books on Bipolar and told us all we were free to borrow them. I didn’t see a point.

I searched for Lena’s version of Brideshead Revisited, imagining somehow that Jeremy Irons might have something to tell me. I did not really want to find it, and I didn’t. Instead, I reread only the first few chapters of the novel, Charles and Sebastian’s champagne-soaked Oxford adventures, and ignored the hints of what I knew would come after.

I never reread it after learning to read critically, literarily, but somehow I considered it one of the most important books I owned. I took it to college, knowing I wouldn’t read it there, and it sat on my desk untouched for all of freshman year. I took it back home that spring and it has lived on the bookshelf next to my bed since.

Lena is healthy. She’s engaged, she sold her first short story and finished her second novel, and is receiving commissions for her art. I visited the apartment she shares with her fiancée over the summer, and it was a dream. The screen door let a cool Pennsylvania breeze counteract the heat coming from the stovetop as she cooked madras lentils for me. I spent the weekend with them, and she showed me the woods she had wandered as a student and all the places she loved to write. When I drove off before the sun on Monday morning, I felt an inexplicable ache in my chest.

A few nights ago, trapped under a weight I can’t name and surrounded by impassive cinderblocks, I sat on my narrow bed and stared at my laptop, willing it to give me answers. It didn’t, but it did give me Brideshead Revisited. Years after I stopped seeking the miniseries, it appeared in the middle of dozens of other suggestions. To me, undone as I was in that moment, it felt providential.

“

”

Her moods seeped from the living room to the rest of the house, palpable things you could run into face first if you weren’t careful.

The moment Charles spoke, I was back there, thirteen again. White tile and spring sunshine. Homework at the kitchen table. Lena on the couch, on the couch, always on the couch. The string tasked with keeping my heart in place couldn’t stop unraveling as I kept watching, as Sebastian’s drinking went from bad to worse, as he grew paranoid and accusatory, as he shrunk from his family and eventually his only friend.

At every moment I wanted to ask Lena something. Did you learn everything from him?

How to hide your worst habits, how to fear conspiracy, how to fear your family? How to make the world temporarily, unquestionably beautiful for the moths circling your flame? How to burn into nothing? A chasm opened in me that wasn’t sorrow but something sweeter and lonelier and worse. Novocain.

In August, I spent a week unable to eat and I lived for the bottle green couch. I sickened at the thought that I too could be drawn into it. I’ve fought to keep myself from becoming Lena, from becoming Sebastian, and I’ve won that fight. If it weren’t true I would call it trite, but I am the exact age Lena was when she first watched Brideshead Revisited. As I watched it, I understood things I could not at thirteen. Charles’s unfeeling impassivity as a drunken Sebastian huddled on the stairs, sobbing, was for me a vicarious moment of clarity, as perhaps it was for my sister at my age. I won the fight I thought I needed to, but I was never going to be Sebastian. “I’m the loneliest man in Oxford,” Charles sighed later, absent all feeling, and I saw myself, as much his twin as Lena was Sebastian’s. G

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Perfect Lovers Synchrony the alabaster beat whirring out in decimals and feet and on repeat they wander where the borders never meet, dribble in and out of line, doing fine, I worry you get lost sometimes, perfect lovers keeping time ticking turns in time, to wind the hour hands in kind, the minutes, too, they falter feebled at an awkward hew and skip, tock, tick, we’re more aligned where we differ (my spirit-lifter), more allied in our oddities, anomalies; in radio silence, all you can hear is your own heart breathing, black wings beating, dire ghouls retreating, evils done, and you’ve lost track of someone.

As fiends and phantoms twist and sway, you wonder what he’d say: Radio, embryo, decimals, feet, I can’t remember the beat.

Perfect Lovers Synchrony the alabaster beat purring out in decimals and feet and on repeat they wander where the barriers don’t meet, drizzle in and out of line, doing fine—no worries, we get lost sometimes, perfect lovers keeping time taking turns in time, rewind.

The hour hands are kind, the minutes, cruel.

They falter from a certain point of view, and skip, tock, tick, we’re more aligned where we differ, more alive (dream-giver) in our idiosyncracies, my embryo heart, in radio

Based on Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ conceptual sculpture, “Untitled (Perfect Lovers).” The sculpture is composed of two identical clocks, which tick in unison, but periodically fall out of sync. Gonzalez-Torres created it as a tribute to his partner, Ross Laycock, who died at the height of the AIDS crisis. The two columns of this poem are to be read at once.

Perfect Lovers

—Jake Beardsley

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at the time of core collapse stellarly tossturn my astral sheets stained starrier by the desperate snowflakes clung hopeless to the circles of your hair your stirrings quake the planets or at least the tin moon hanged over my bedhead where you used to die each evening and awake in agony bringing with you the freshly cleaned sins of mankind or at least the holy gasps across my back breaking the skin into strips shatterly constellating and reconstellating in time to the ticks of the approaching alarm spectral lover heavenly frozen and meltly fasting [let the record say fastly melting] curl back around me and the sheets balled up in your lightyears of ringlets before the ringringringringringringringring alarm sounds and ringringringringringringringring the sun explodes hot again ringringringringringringringring stripping you down to steam and whispers â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Maxwell Cloe

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Gone with the Stairs

by Julia Savoca Gibson

I didn’t know the dumbass who designed the civil war museum’s stairwells to require a key to exit them, but I knew they were nearly as dumb as I was. The first day my mentor Tally (yes, Tally, “like a tally mark” she always said to any visitor who asked) had jokingly told me and the other college intern Danny that if, for some reason, you end up in one of the stairways without a key or your phone on you, just scream until someone hears.

I had laughed until she shook her head. She assured me that it happens to everyone at some point and that usually it’s only twenty minutes or so before someone finds you. Danny and I both were scared enough to be careful for the first few weeks of the summer. But I guess I grew complacent.

I didn’t have a watch, but I had to guess we were coming up on one hour stuck in this stairwell. I didn’t have my phone or keys, either, funnily enough. Because I’m an idiot. I had planned to go down to the copy room to see if I could scan in an activity sheet I needed a class set of for field trip groups coming next week. Grabbing the sheet without a second thought, I just left my keys and phone on my desk as I headed for the stairs. The young, unfairly handsome graduate fellow Aaron was leaving the stairs as I approached so I was 1) distracted by his charming smile and 2) not required to unlock the door with my keys like I usually do. He made a quip about me making copies and I laughed awkwardly as I walked past. I was about a flight and half down the stairwell when I froze and realized that I didn’t have the familiar weight of my key ring in my left hand, nor the feel of my phone in my jacket pocket. Only a piece of paper with “Women in the Civil War!” written in comic sans at the top in my right hand and a deep self-hatred forming in my mind.

“Shit.” I’m a fucking idiot. I’m incredibly stupid.

It about ten minutes before I started screaming. I checked every door up and down the stairwell to see if any were open. Each one, I shook the handle and shouted for help for a minute or two before moving on. My panic and self-loathing only grew as I continued. It was like taking the wrong exit on the highway but realizing it was going to take you a half hour to get back on—except it was steep stairs instead of a road and it was eminently less likely I would be able to get out on my own after a frustrating amount of U-turns.

I knew I was fucked for a few reasons after the last door proved to be locked. First, I left to make the copy while everyone in the educa-

40 The Gallery

tion department was at lunch. So no one in our office knew I had left, and no one could postulate I had gotten stuck. In fact, after they return from lunch, they’d probably assume I had gone off to grab food somewhere and wouldn’t think twice about me for an hour, maybe even longer.

Second, this stairwell was not used very much. It provided the quickest access to the copy room because it let out directly onto the hallway where it was on the second lower level. But the copy room happened to be the only room convenient to that stairway. Tally had joked that the north stairwell was most likely haunted by a civil war ghost, and the other education specialist Kelly added it probably was a Confederate secretary who resented the modern power of Xeroxing. Danny, the other intern, claimed to have spotted him once, but his story was pretty flimsy. I almost wished the ghost was real and would appear so I could have someone to talk to.

“

I almost wished the ghost was real and would appear so I could have someone to talk to.

”

Third, and most importantly, if hot graduate student Aaron was leaving the stairwell when I was entering, that meant he had finished working down in the vault for the day. He rotated with the other fellows cataloguing and selecting artifacts for new exhibitions in the mornings before working upstairs in the archives for the afternoon. I knew this because I had been down to the vault a few times to fetch objects for education programs, usually volunteering in hopes of catching a glimpse of Aaron (or the other cute graduate students, but Aaron was my favorite). Vault tours were scheduled in advance, there definitely weren’t any on the schedule, and I knew no one else working today had a reason to be there. This stairwell was pretty near one of the exits of the vault, which was maybe the only other reason someone would come this way. It also meant that it was unlikely hot Aaron would come to my rescue. Unfortunate.

I had been screaming on and off for the past hour, mostly near the door I came in from (45 minutes? Hour and a half ? Time was different here.), but no one seemed to hear. I marched up and down, stopping to scream at each door until my chest burned once or twice, but it didn’t seem effective either. There was literally nothing interesting to latch onto to power through shouting until my throat was sore. The staircase was just depressing.

The doors were the blankest, greyest, boringest metal doors to ever exist.

The walls were cinder block in a slightly lighter shade of grey (exciting!), and there were black railings.

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I sat on one stair near the first lower level door, closest to the education department, screaming, take a brief break to breathe, and screaming again as my butt got cold. (If I made it out of here before I permanently lost some of my emotional stability, I might store my phone in my bra to avoid a situation like this. I could feel my grip on the ever-heightening panic and frustration starting to slip, so maybe I’m already past that point).

When I must have been hitting the two hour point, at least, I was screaming less. Did it matter? If no one had walked by in the past two hours to hear me, would another two hours of screaming do any good? Was there a point? To screaming? To living? No? Fine. I was starting to accept that. I was an unpaid intern at a civil war museum mostly visited by disinterested classes on field trips and old white people. Was my day-to-day much better than sitting in this stairwell? Well, yes, if only because my butt was warm at my desk.

I did a pretty good scream as I stretched my arms back, wondering if I should consider sleeping in front of the door if this went on into the evening. Surely someone would notice I’m gone before then, before we closed.

Surely. Probably. Maybe?

The creak of a door opening about two floors above me nearly caused to jump out of my skin.

“Did someone scream?” a familiar voice asked, a few hesitant steps onto the floor landing echoing. It wasn’t a civil war ghost, thank god.

“DANNY!” I screamed, sprinting up the stairs. Danny, my hero, my angel, my dearest and only fellow intern, come to save me. Danny was walking down to meet me and I flung myself into his arms, giving him the most grateful hug I’ve ever given. I let go pretty quickly but couldn’t stop grinning.

“Um. Hi, Beth. Did you scream a second ago?”

Yes. Also all the screams from the past few hours—those were me too.

“That was me. I got stuck in here. I’m so glad you’re not the ghost.

What time is it?”

“A quarter after four—wait, you were stuck? What about the ghost?”

I had gone to copy things around 12:30. Over three hours in this grey prison. Holy shit.

“Let’s get out of here, first, then I’ll tell you all about how boring it was.”

Danny nodded and turned to head back up the stairs when he turned back to me, face blanched.

“I’m—my keys aren’t—I was at the water fountain and I just opened when I heard you scream, I don’t—my phone isn’t—”

42 The Gallery

“You don’t have your keys. Or your phone.”

“I don’t have my keys. Or my phone.”

“Danny, you’re the worst.”

“I know.”

I slammed my head against the wall and Danny yelped. It hurt but it made me something, better than the nothingness threatening to consume my entire being. Danny gently guided me back to sit next to the door near the education department again. We both plopped down and leaned back against the wall. I closed my eyes and sighed. I could feel Danny squirm a bit next to me. I couldn’t decide who was the bigger dumbass: me for getting stuck in here, or Danny for getting stuck while trying to help me.

“You know that hot graduate student, Aaron?”

I raised an eyebrow as I nodded. Well, I did. I probably knew him, particularly his stunning blue eyes, better than I should. Danny and I hadn’t talked much, just the two of us. We often exchanged a lot of “god help us” looks when Tally assigned us to weird tasks, and we gave each other respectful nods in passing. I had no idea he also had the same taste in civil war graduate students.

“Maybe he’ll come save us. He’d probably look good doing it, too.”

“I’m glad I’m not the only one who thinks Aaron is unfairly attractive, in that it’s-never-going-to-happen kind of way.”

Danny smiled, and I couldn’t help but smile back. Our faces were pretty close, and I noticed that his eyes were hazel. They weren’t as pretty as Aaron’s, but they were still nice. I closed my eyes, still smiling. We were both tragically moronic. We probably we going to be here a while longer. That wasn’t so bad. G

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Don’t Kiss the Alpaca Lips Part IV: Life and Death Get Back Together

after Lawrence Ferlinghetti + Howard Finster’s “American Devils are Friendly”

you can have a hell of a time here

in your hell if you don’t mind a little

smoke and fire

all the time yes, the world is a beautiful place

to be born into if you don’t mind happiness

being hard to find and not so very much fun but a hell of a time can be had here

in your hell if you don’t mind a little

grime and wide-eyed weariness most the time for the world is a beautiful place

to be born into with no dead minds

just a few that

replaced rhyme with so-called “reason” it’ll be one hell of a time here trying

to transform hell to a re-formed Eden

re-arranging relation

re-shifting restricted spaces

and all the Time making the world a beautiful place to be born into (Life and Death now speaking together:

“with no collectors or money,

you can cry with or without tears”

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Life and Death back together with the guidance of Love, in this way they relate: “each leaf falling to the earth from above; we make it all up” — Ryan Onders

To Err is, to Eros you called yourself my “lover” once and still it haunts me. you said that Hermes was your comic relief, Hera was your romantic lead,

and I, your sidekick. you said you knew I was yours the moment we met, and I feel my swollen

soul ache and try not to think. but sometimes, sometimes, we stay up until 4 am, 6 am, 9 am, lying and talk-

ing (and lying) on the long purple couch of your apartment, and the silver disc inside our twin minds spins so fast that it becomes a

single oscilating line, a quivering lute string that yields the most clement sound. and sometimes, sometimes, we lie on the white tiles of your bathroom floor with our heads pressed together on the big blue rug, and we melt crumbled powder from ancient Hershey bars on our tongues, and we laugh at the smoke from burnt blunts, the gray cloud stuck frozen

above our heads like the dead of Pompeii. when you called me the sidekick, I thought to myself that we are closer than lovers. because truthfully, I’m not the sidekick.

I’m the disciple.

— Phryne

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Madison, WI

by Margaret Mitchell

The sound of the Sunday morning news crept through the crack beneath Madison’s door. Still half in the languor of sleep, she felt her way downstairs. In the living room, Mr. and Mrs. Mancheski’s silhouettes leaned toward the television screen intently.

Their daughter paused in the doorway, but they did not notice her. She walked past, feeling very much like a ghost, eavesdropping on the newscaster. There was urgency woven into the trained inflections of her voice. A shooting upstate, some commune of fanatics tucked away in Eagle River. She thought she heard her father whisper under his breath, “Protestants,” then change the channel.

On November 8th, while the first snow of the season was still fresh on the pavement, a convoy of police cars swarmed the Culver’s across the street from the tackle shop.

A call had reached the Madison County police dispatcher just after 10 p.m. concerning an armed robbery. Little Arnie Mueller, the youngest of the Mueller family’s eight children, was still behind the cash register in a semi-fetal position when the police arrived. No one had been shot, but the register was cleaned out, and one of the fry cooks had been socked in the nose.

“Was two fucking kids,” he dutifully reported to the authorities, while holding a handful of snow to his bloody face. “The girl slugged me in the face, damn it, ma’am.”

“Boy, she really did, huh,” an officer remarked while the others nodded in agreement.

It was all in the papers the next morning. A young man and a young woman held up the little custard joint at gunpoint and ran away without a trace, that is, until Mrs. Mancheski phoned around five in the afternoon to report her daughter as missing. Come to think of it, the Oldsmobile was missing from the garage, too, she told the operator, as if something truly remarkable were dawning on her just in that moment. She didn’t connect the dots, though, until she saw her daughter’s name in the paper the next morning as a suspect for the break-in, alongside that of her boyfriend.

Quite a shocker, she told the other mothers from Sacred Heart. It was a terrible thing, they agreed, to pay for such an expensive Catholic education and watch that money go up in smoke with the kindling of teenage rebellion. What was the world coming to.

“What the hell is this world coming to.” Madison looked out the passenger window as they drove past strip malls and fast food restaurants and billboards for Gentlemen’s Clubs. “I mean, look at these businesses, thriving on our hunger and thirst and worldly desires. Jesus. People will do anything for money.”

“You could say the same for us, Mads. Taking on lives of crime for a couple hundred dollars from the home of the ButterBurger,” Henry said, grinning, both hands unnaturally tight around the steering wheel.

Madison shook her head, laughing at her partner’s lightheartedness while sweetly

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rebuking him. “No,” she said, “no, we aren’t. We need it, we don’t want it. Henry, our hunger is for something beyond this place.” She waved one hand, gesturing towards the woods and pastures of northern Wisconsin, but Henry understood that she meant something more. This place, the great, wide, sinful Earth.

They drove on in silence. As they crept towards Oneida County, the forest grew denser and the distances between exits or clusters of civilization grew wider and wider.

Madison stared out blankly, her lips moving almost imperceptibly. From his periphery, Henry recognized her prayer. Over the past few months he had become accustomed to this habit. Praying took over any and every moment of idleness. Whenever they kissed, he swore he could hear it running through her head. Sometimes it made their joint existence seem wholly sacred and familiar, like the smell of incense in the pews of their church at home. Other times, it felt pagan and alien. It unnerved him, terrified him.

“We should stop for gas soon,” he said, eyes anxiously on the road. She nodded, lips still moving.

Taking the exit towards Woodboro, they drove another few miles before coming across a run-down Shell hunched meekly on the side of the road. Henry pulled up to the pump and peered cautiously into the convenience store.

“We’re fine,” Madison said. “No one this far out is looking for us. We’re miles from home.”

“And halfway to heaven,” Henry mumbled. His girlfriend nodded reassuringly.

“I have to pee,” she said, and left the car.

The convenience store hadn’t been restocked in months. Most shelves were only half full. Madison laughed at the thought, knowing Henry would’ve thought half empty.

She grabbed a lukewarm water bottle from a plastic-wrapped package and took it up to the cashier.

“Excuse me, where’s the restroom?” Madison asked the girl working the register.

“’Round the back,” she answered, sliding a lanyard with a single key across the counter.

Madison walked out into the chill of early November. The clouds had the dense whiteness of an omen of snow to come. She sighed deeply, saying a wordless prayer on the exhale. Now farther north, they’d have to move fast before the roads towards Eagle River became dangerous.

Around the back, as promised, was a little outhouse sealed shut with a padlock.

The shack’s walls were wood-paneled, and a toilet seat was screwed over a deep cavity in the ground below. A poster of the Crown of Thorns was hung above the seat. It read: “…he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross. Colossians 2:15b.” Madison squatted humbly below it.

The first flurries had begun to fall. Letting the outhouse door slam behind her, Madison lifted her chin heavenward and shivered, feeling terribly small. A cloud of dust had been turned up from the dirt and gravel lot, making her cough. The Oldsmobile was gone, Madison realized, and Henry with it. For as far as she could see, the road was deserted, except for a veil of dust that fell slowly, returning itself to the earth. G

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Contributors’ Jake Beardsley - is most notable for eating three slices of pizza in front of their conventionally beautiful crush, an act for which they received the Arthur Ashe Courage Award. They are also a philosophy major in the Class of 2021.

Abby Comey - is a freshman from McLean, Virginia. She plans to major in English and Religious Studies. In addition to writing, she enjoys reading, running, singing, and stargazing.

Maxwell Cloe - writes exclusively in the crawl space on the top floor of his little brick house.

One time he got locked in there and had to climb out on the roof. He’s really thankful that y’all didn’t reject his poems.

Clara Finley - is a freshman and an English major. If you need to find her at any time, she is probably in Tucker, reading books or talking about the books she’s reading. She likes to write poems and stories that are related to the concept of love and its manifestation in relationships.

This poem is one of those pieces. She thanks you for reading her work.

Meghan E. Gates - knows more than the average 60 year old about The Monkees and will fight over this. Recent hobbies include (but aren’t limted to) thinking about cats, refraining from confronting her neighbors, and running the gardens in the buff.

Julia Savoca Gibson - likes to wander around museums, though she generally avoids getting stuck in haunted stairwells. Still, she hopes you enjoy her story.

Ashley Hardy - This piece is a part of my work-in-progress collection Head in the Clouds, where the focus is evidently on clouds and another element I may incorporate. Clouds and space are probably two of my favorite elements to incorporate in my pieces along with doing portraits. Stargazing manages to capture all of them in a way that made me want to continue creating pieces like this. Thus, Head in the Clouds began.

David Lefkowitz - is a Freshman from Richmond, VA who enjoys nature, reading, and reading about nature. When not occupied with that, he plays music and pretends to understand poetry. Frankly, he’s just happy to be here.

Hannah London - This is a digital collage I made using Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood inspired sketches of mine and layering with some of my favorite works from my time working at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles—Renoir’s Landscape at Pont-Aven and tiles from the Saadian Tombs in Marrakech.

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Notes Vivian Lu - For Melancholy, I combined the imageries I saw in literary pieces and artworks to express the beauty of nothingness. (I felt nothingness only when I created this piece of artwork). For Whatever, the object, geisha, and the colour used were inspired by Van Gogh’s masterpieces. I was impressed with Van Gogh’s creativity and idealism when I visited the exhibition of Van Gogh.

Margaret Mitchell - is a freshman studying English in the Joint Degree Programme at the College of William & Mary with the University of St Andrews. She writes for the Features Team on ROCKET Magazine, and her poetry has been published in Blacklist Journal. She is excited to be featured in The Gallery, and hopes that this is just the beginning of her journey towards her aspirations of becoming an author and poet.

Phyrne - No gods or kings, only man.

Finley Roles - is not an artist nor has he claimed to be one. Finley Roles is not a creator nor does he claim to be one. Finley Roles is not a poet nor will he claim to be one. He is merely a scribe, taking down what he sees and hears and translating it into a language that either makes complete sense or no sense at all. What he feels is besides the point. That’s your job.

Madeline Salino - I’m a junior from downstate New York. In my free time, I like to cook and search for toads. I wrote this poem because I enjoy talking about witchcraft!

Rebecca Shkeyrov - I am a junior, double majoring in Psychology and 2-D Studio Art. I primarily create paintings, prints, and drawings. Although my body of work is eclectic, it is united by an interest in people, colors, and/or the realism-abstraction spectrum. If you would like to see more of my artwork, please check out my Instagram @theboldstylo!

Farnaz Shirazi - I’m just a little goblin who writes and draws on any scrap of paper available to me! My poem is about someone I love!

Sadie Williams - is a junior from Richmond, Virginia who hopes to never be able to time travel.

Kathryn Willoughby - is an art history major and, clearly, a budding psychic. (After careful consideration, she will probably stick with art.) Her life is infinitely more magnetic with Megan Pierce in it.

The Gallery 49

Dear Reader,

Editors’ Note

Oh how excited we are to present some of the best poetry, prose, and art that the creative minds at William & Mary have to offer. This has been an eventful semester for The Gallery, to put it lightly. Between receiving almost twice as many submissions than previous years (big thanks to our wonderful publicity team), digitizing decades of past magazines to put on our Issuu page, hosting community events like mindfulness exercises and interviews with local poets, and making new friends through wine nights and date parties, we’ve still managed to put together a bang-up magazine we hope you will comb through, mark up, leave at a friend’s house, tell your mom about, take on a journey around the world, start a new religion with using it as your holy text, etc.

Of course, this magazine would be nothing but a few puffs of letters and InDesign files if it weren’t for our gobsmackingly talented staff of editors, publicity wizards, and art critics. To each and every one of you, thank you. We’re excited to see your smiling faces next semester.

We would also be remiss to exclude the dozens of contributors who decided to not only make lovely works of art but submit them to our humble magazine as well. Regardless if your piece was included this issue or not, we thank you from the deepest corners of our hearts for your consideration. We hope to continue receiving your excellence in the future.

The Fall 2019 semester marks our 40th anniversary as a magazine. Like any good birthday, we’ll be throwing in some surprises throughout the semester and in our next issue. Keep an eye out for advertisements around campus. We don’t want to reveal too much but we know you’ll love what we’ve got waiting in the wings.

In the meantime, please enjoy perusing this current issue. We’ve certainly enjoyed making it.

-Maxwell and Olivia

Colophon

The Gallery Volume 33 Issue 1 was produced by the student staff at the College of William & Mary and published by Western Newspaper Publishing Co. in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Submissions are accepted anonymously through a staff vote. The magazine was designed using Adobe Indesign CS5 and Adobe Photoshop CS5. The magazine’s 52, 6x9 pages are set in Garamond. The cover font and the titles of all the pieces are Derivia. The text on the cover is set in Bodoni. The Spring 2012 issue of The Gallery was a CSPA Gold Medalist with All-Columbian honors in content.

Check out the Gallery online 50 The Gallery

www.instagram.com/thegallerywm/ www.facebook.com/wmgallery issuu.com/gallerywm

The Gallery Spring 2019

gallery@email.wm.edu