Daedalus 2016

Daedalus

DAEDALUS

Greenwich Academy 2016

Mr. Lepore: Anna Khoury Mr. DePeter: Faye Tapsall Mr. Kress: Belen Agrest Mrs. Meyer: Olivia Koorbusch

Paper Cuts 145

Dӕdalus, the ancient Athenian, created the Minotaur's famed labyrinth and invented wings so that he and his son could escape from King Minos.

Dӕdalus reminds us that we are all creators and all inventors.

Editors-in-Chief Lucy Burnett & Ellie Garland Art Editors Paloma Corrigan & Olivia Quinton Fiction Editor Caroline Dunn

Web Editor Francesca Narea

Associate Editors Phoebe Bloom, Serena Profaci, & Gallant Zhuangli Caroline Baird Graiden Berger*** Ainsley Buck Katie Callaghan Fiona Casson Olivia Coyle Jo DeWaal** Katherine Du** Elizabeth Dunn Jordan Fischetti* Emma Gallagher Sara Ganshaw*** Amanda Gill Erinn Goldman** Marley Houston Phoebe Jacoby Mairead Kilgallon

Staff Chandler Lane Anisha Laumas Allison Lindemeyer Alina Maki Anna McCormack Katie McClymont Lulu Meissner Kate Miele Devon Mifflin*** Zoe Morris Winter Murray Christina Normile Renee Ong*** Elisha Osemobor Emma Osman Sarah Packer Priya Saha

Anna Sargeantson*** Jordan Smith* Sadie Smith Emily Thomas Lizzie Thornton Susana Vik Susanna Warne Jane Watson Rachel Windreich Elizabeth Winkler Alexis Wolfram Grace Zhao *Senior Board **Junior Editor ***Production Assistant

Five times a year, Dӕdalus sponsors a Writer-of-the-Month contest. All submissions are sent by email and read anonymously by the entire staff.

In March, editors narrow the selections and begin production, which continues through April with art, layout, and page design. Through May the editors collaborate with our printer through weekly stages until our final assembly, where we read from the issue, show slides of all art, and celebrate!

Faculty Advisor Jeffrey Schwartz

Visual Arts Advisor Sherry Tamalonis

Printer Advanced Printing Services, Inc., Bristol CT Section entitled "...but the air and the sky are free..." from Edith Hamilton's description of Icarus' escape in Mythology.

Colophon 750 copies of Dӕdalus have been printed on 80 pound Euro Gloss stock with 120 pound Euro Gloss for the cover. The text is set in Palatino, a typeface designed by Herman Zapf and originally released in 1948.

CONTENTS Front and Back Cover: Painting & Collage Devon Mifflin Inside Front Cover: Watercolor Lily Berger Section Pages: Marker & Collage Anjali van Biesen, Annabel Thrasher, Sofi Gallegos & Katherine Elmlinger

Wings Hyperkulturemia at the Louvre Photography & Digital Design The Big Screening Photography 2.13.2016 Building a Resumé Watercolor & Pen Masseusery Pen & Ink

Stopping by Store on a Sunny Morning

Photography To Be a Child Digital Design Pantoum Gymnerd Digital Design The Heaviest Blanket Photography Georgia Photography & Digital Design Sweet Lemons Pen & Ink Drawing Collage Green Menagerie Olive Green Revelation Photography

Ellie Garland Graiden Berger Lucy Burnett Lulu Berner Elizabeth Winkler Elizabeth Dunn Sara Ganshaw Jane Watson Kelsey Krantz Ellie Garland Ellie Garland Grace Zhao Phoebe Jacoby Allison Lindemeyer Amy Cass Julia Saer Jane Watson Lulu Berner Jaclyn Mulé Graiden Berger Francesca Narea Devon Mifflin Jo DeWaal Jo DeWaal Phoebe Bloom Phoebe Jacoby

7 8 9 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 21 22 22 23 24 25 26 26 27 27 28 28 30 31 32 32

Katherine Du Serena Profaci Kate Connors Anna Sargeantson

35 36 39 40

Labyrinth Joy Lin The Box Laser Cut Sculpture Photography & Digital Design

Watch The Art of Surfing Painting Collage & Digital Design The Traveler Digital Design Black Lies Dolls: A Split Narrative Digital Design Collage & Digital Design Stones of Silence Brooklyn House Just Another Day Lose It

Aayda, 12, Naudeh, Afghanistan Sonnet Without War Photography Food Poisoning Collage My Pet Fish Drawing 3-D Construction Falling Through Ice

Erinn Goldman Emily Thomas Olivia Bastianich Faye Tapsall Mairead Kilgallon Chapin Ruffa Ainsley Buck Olivia Quinton Annie Klein Belen Agrest Phoebe Bloom Olivia Quinton Thomas VanBelle & Allison Lindemeyer Lucy Burnett Kaitlyn Packer, Sara Poulard, Lizzie Thornton & Maggie Varvel Katie Callaghan Olivia Falkenrath Paige Guerriero Ellie Garland Alexis Raskin Lucy Burnett Renee Ong Alyssa Gerasimoff Jo DeWaal

41 42 43 44 45 48 49 50 51 52 54 58 58 59 59

60 61 62 63 67 68 70 74 75

Mortals and Immortals Measure of Time Ceramics A Meal of Inheritence Conversation Over Curls Pencil & Watercolor Charcoal & Pen My Everything Marker La Payasada de Las Chiquitas Cardboard, Wood & Paint Marker, Paint & Collage The Mothers Marker, Paint & Collage

Jo DeWaal Amelia Riegel Grace Zhao Lucy Burnett Renee Ong Paloma Corrigan Tiffany Rodriguez Olivia Quinton Paloma Corrigan Megan Bugniazet Renee Ong Katherine Du Renee Ong

77 78 79 80 82 85 86 86 88 89 90 91 93

Popcorn Charcoal A Change in Scenery Photography & Digital Design Photography & Marker Room in New York, 1932 yelp.com/labor-skate-shop-new-york Photography & Digital Design Photography & Digital Design Louisianna Summer, 1957 Timing Laser Cut Sculpture

Gallant Zhuangli Joey Jimenez Liz Chicas Anna Sargeantson Devon Mifflin Anna McCormack Francesca Narea Olivia Weiser Paige Guerriero Elizabeth Dunn Caroline Baird Jadesola Ariyibi

Photography & Digital Design Photography & Digital Design

Graiden Berger Gabi Guzman

The Train Station (November 20th, 1910)

Caroline Dunn

94 95 96 96 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 116 117

“...but the air and the sky are free...”

September Photography & Digital Design the summer we were free Photography & Digital Design Turks on Turkey Day Photography & Digital Design Pen & Colored Pencil 26 Angels After Sandy Hook Two Boat Rides on the Nile Photography, Painting & Collage Silent Conversation Pen & Ink Drawing Becoming Immortal Pen & Ink Drawing Le Poisson Rouge Colored Pencils, Marker & Collage Three Vignettes Dynamics of Nature Paper Cuts

Serena Profaci Annie Harris Emma Gallagher Kate DeFrino Francesca Narea Olivia Quinton Phoebe Morris Jordan Smith Maggie Basta Julia Saer Elizabeth Winkler Phoebe Morris Mairead Kilgallon Avery Barakett Ellie Garland Renee Ong Charlotte Winkler Erinn Goldman Anna Khoury, Faye Tapsall, Belen Agrest & Olivia Koorbusch

119 123 124 125 126 126 128 129 130 133 134 136 137 137 138 141 142 144 145

WINGS 6

Hyperkulturemia at the Louvre

Ellie Garland

If you want to travel from the right bank of the Seine to the right bank of Kawthar, you should leave your hotel at 9:35PM on a Wednesday because heaven closes its golden gates at 10.

You will need a Métro card and nine euros (or thirteen if you want to make a detour for a tasse du thé at Les Deux Magots).

Wear a black turtleneck and hold a cigarette between your index and middle finger to become one with the others traveling from the first arrondissement to the next world.

Get off at the Palais Royale, but leave this Métro purgatory slowly, one step at a time until you see pigeons fly through gray clouds and women whirr away on mopeds with baguettes beneath their arms.

Spend your nine crumpled euros on an all-access ticket to the Musée du Louvre.

Hold the white slip closely— this is your indulgence.

You are nearing your ascension, but you must first descend through the 666 glass panes of Mr. I.M. Pei’s pyramid.

It took Pei four years not six days to finish his godly work, but when you look up at the Parisian stars through warped glass, you will wonder how he finished so quickly.

You will collapse on the marble stairs, your pulse will slow and beads of sweat will appear on your forehead. Wipe the perspiration away like a blessing.

Look up at the world above you through the 666 panes.

You will blur and spin and grow still. A clock will strike 10, the Musée’s doors will close, and you will rise.

You will smile with the Mona Lisa and fly with the Winged Victory of Samothrace and shoot arrows with Diana of Versailles and make lace with The Lacemaker and record your adventures with the Seated Scribe and live eternally in the haven of art, the heavenly exhibition.

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Graiden Berger

8

Photography & Digital Design

The Big Screening

Lucy Burnett

I told my dad I thought we were drifting apart. We weren’t actually, but that’s just something I say when I want him to watch a movie with me. That’s the cure to our drifting apartness—movies. He laughed. He was on to me.

“Alright, but I’m choosing tonight.”

He pretends like I always choose and that when I do, I force him to watch some corny rom-com. But in reality, I prefer when he chooses. And by the way, when I do choose it’s usually a pretty sophisticated picture (okay so maybe one time I made him watch Twilight, but he sometimes makes me watch trashy sports movies—we all have our guilty pleasures).

“Bo,” he said (my dad calls me Bo Bo for short—Bo for shorter).

“I think it’s time.”

He got all serious, disturbingly serious.

“Time for what?”

“Go get your sister.”

I was beginning to get a little nervous. I felt like I was about to find out that I was actually adopted and that my whole life had been a lie. Or that Syd was adopted and my dad wanted to break the news to her while I was there for support. I went to search for Sydney, eager to find out which one of us was adopted.

She was in our room. I told her that Dad wanted to talk to us, so she followed me back to the kitchen.

“Girls,” he said. He paused—he’s the king of dramatic pauses.

My sister and I feign annoyance, but really we are grateful for the pauses, as they come in handy when we do our Dad impressions.

“Yes,” Syd said, knowing the pause wouldn’t end until one of us responded.

Just then our little brother Charlie, ten at the time, came into the kitchen.

“Buddy, could you give us a second?” my dad asked Charlie.

Charlie left, happy for an excuse to play video games.

That’s when it occurred to me. Charlie was adopted. I was only four and Sydney was only six when he was born. It’s very possible we just accepted the unexplained arrival of a baby. But 9

then again I feel like I have memories of my mom being pregnant.

Did Sydney?

“Dad! Can you just tell us?” I yelled, before my imagination spun too wildly out of control.

“Tonight’s the night.” He paused, of course. “We are going to watch One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

Syd and I rolled our eyes—classic Dad, announcing tonight’s movie in the most dramatic way possible.

“Why did Charlie have to leave the room?” I asked, laughing, but genuinely confused.

“He’s too young. He’s not ready.”

“Oh, come on,” Sydney said, “It’s just a movie.”

Things got quiet in a hurry.

“It’s off. You’re not ready either.”

“Oh my God, Dad. Shut up, we’re watching it tonight,” Syd said.

“Yea, I really want to see it now,” I added. I had never seen my dad so serious about a movie. There was a bit of a ceremony before The Godfathers and, now that I think about it, before the Rockys, too, but Charlie was never excluded from the plans. We were on a whole new movie-watching level.

“Here are the rules. One. Cell-phones are not entering the room. I’m serious. I don’t care if they’re silenced or turned off; they are not entering the room. Two. The movie will begin at exactly eight o’clock or it will not be shown tonight. Not that it’s really possible, but I don’t want to risk you two losers falling asleep. Three. The movie will not be shown without proper movie theater snacks. This means that at exactly 7:00 we are getting into the car, driving down to the Railroad Avenue Theater and buying two large buckets of popcorn and whatever other snacks we decide we need in the moment.”

Sydney and I just stared at him.

It was 7:59 and Syd, Dad, and I all sat in our designated movie-watching seats, holding, not cellphones, but way too much movie theater popcorn. Sydney bought a pack of Twizzlers, and I bought a pack Peanut M&M’s (I like to pour a few into my popcorn for a nice chocolatey surprise every couple of bites).

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After my dad perfected the “movie-theater” lighting, he looked at my sister and then at me.

“Are you two ready to become women?” That’s exactly what this was: some sort of Burnett Bat Mitzvah. To my dad, watching One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was a rite of passage.

“You better press play before it turns 8:01,” Syd said. I laughed. He pressed play.

I was immediately entranced. Jack Nicholson was like quicksand—each lick of his lips, each raise of his eyebrow, each look at Nurse Ratchet seemed to suck me deeper and deeper into the film.

Not a word was spoken during the movie, except for the quiet mutterings of my dad, as he recited his favorite lines verbatim.

The only time my eyes left the screen was when the line was said.

It’s said during the scene where McMurphy is telling the guys how he is going to go to the World Series game. He explains that he will lift up the marble hydrotherapy fountain and throw it out the window. After trying, but failing, to lift the heavy structure, McMurphy walks out of the room and says, “Well, I tried, didn’t I? Goddammit, at least I did that.”

My sister and I looked at each other and lock eyes. My dad laughed. He knew what we had discovered. For all of our lives, whenever my dad tried something and failed he would always say this line—very dramatically of course. Just last week when he tried to flip his egg without a spatula and ended up dropping it on the floor, he looked up from his yolky mess and said, “Well, I tried, didn’t I? Goddammit, at least I did that.”

I quickly realized my dad’s “cuckoo-ness” for this film is justified. I don’t know if it was when McMurphy points to the playing card and asks the doctor, "Where do you suppose she lives?" or when he riles up all the guys by narrating a fake baseball game, but I quickly fell under the One-Flew-Over-the-Cuckoo’sNest-spell, too. As I sat there watching my dad mouth the lines and conduct the score, I envisioned myself watching One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest with my fourteen-year-old child. Without cellphones. Precisely at 8:00 PM. With popcorn in hand.

11

Lulu Berner

12

Photography

2.13.2016

Elizabeth Winkler

You’ll be beside me, an arm round my waist, your body pressed against mine.

Our fingers will touch, for a moment, by chance, then you’ll lay claim to my hands, fingers sliding down mine, subliming the ice in my fingertips.

Your head on my shoulder, my cheek on your hair, I want to breathe nothing but you.

Comets will blaze flaming trails through the sky, rooftop waltzes’ silent accompaniment.

Time will politely refuse to progress, its new pendulum our intertwined hands.

Two roses will bloom in a rainstorm on the edge of our favorite path, and, seeing each other in one of the blooms, we’ll pause, pick the flowers, matching stems tucked away between ears and bedraggled, wet hair.

I dream of clichés as rain pounds on the roof and as the fire’s caress warms my skin, I close my eyes and lean into you.

13

Building a Resumé

Elizabeth Dunn

When you were three, you wanted to be an astronaut.

You knew that once you graduated from school, you’d be so smart NASA would seize you as soon as your teachers let you go, and in a few short years, most of which would be spent traveling in space, your own two feet would touch Saturn’s soil.

A time came, however, when you looked up at our Milky Way and no longer felt a magnetic pull to the stars.

Earlier that morning, you passed a Fire Station and realized how talented you’d be at driving a glossy, red truck.

Plus, you already owned a Dalmatian named Leisel.

When you blew eleven candles off your birthday cake, you discovered your love for baking.

You concocted muffins, cookies, and pastries, declaring confidently that one cup of baking soda would make your cupcakes bigger and more delicious than a mere teaspoon.

(Your siblings gagged at the salty pungency, but all you detected was a more fulfilling flavor.)

When baking grew repetitive, you saw yourself as a writer.

You sat at a picnic bench dappled with chipped, white paint beneath a willow that wept stories of lost heroes and powerful wizards named Henry and John.

But, at thirteen it became clear that the time had come to start acting like a grown-up.

Your class took a field trip to the New York Stock Exchange where you conceded that a life of educated guesses would have to do.

Surely, with time, a monochromatic desk would excite you.

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With your eyes still swollen shut from a night of little sleep, you'll pull on your striated socks and scued leather loafers.

You'll walk the three and a half blocks to the train station, and as the moon hangs tauntingly above your head you'll imagine your feet making soft imprints on Saturn's soil.

Sara Ganshaw

Watercolor & Pen

15

Masseusery

Jane Watson Hi! Nice to meet you, too.

Here we go. So ready for this. Firm grip. Makes sense.

Right here on the table? After I…okay.

Oh Lord. Why isn’t she leaving the room?Just rip it off like a Band-Aid. Whip it off. Scratch that, don’t whip it. She’ll think I'm weird. Slide the robe off…and I'm naked. In a room with a stranger. Great.

Yes, I’m ready.

Okay, now lie down on the table. She’ll put the towel over me.

Just do it! Less fish flopping. I am a fish, aren’t I? A big naked fish on a table with a towel over my butt. Cool.

Oh yes, I’m really comfortable.

Ooh this head donut is so comfy! Donuts. I’m so hungry…no stomach, don’t rumble! I hope she didn’t hear that. She definitely heard that.

Yes, the pressure’s good.

I think I’m in heaven. I must be in heaven, and she’s an angel.

Is that weird? I wish I could take her home with me and have massages whenever I want. That’s definitely weird. I hear it now. Why are my calves so tight? And my ankles too? And my feet? Oh no. Not the feet. DON’T. LAUGH. Do not freaking laugh. Bite the tongue. Bite it… I laughed. Of course I laughed. Make it sound like a cough. Now she just thinks I'm dying.

Oh no, I’m okay! Just a little hoarse.

She probably doesn’t know that colloquialism.

Not the animal…my throat…haha.

Why did I say that?

Turn over? Okay.

I can do this. Just hold the towel in place. Slipping. Not good.

Very not good. Stop flipping out! She’ll think I'm having a seizure.

Yes, I'm fine.

Just close the eyes and relax. Stomach massages? Those exist?

This is magical. Head massages might just be my favorite thing ever. I take that back. Hand massages.

16

Ahhh.

This music is so peaceful. I wonder if they sell CDs of this up front. I am totally going to meditate every day from now on.

Totally. So peaceful. So relaxed…Did I just snore? Did I fall asleep? Did she notice? That better not be drool I feel. It’s over already? Can I get back in some line and go again? Wow. I haven’t lived until today. This must be why people look so happy in those spa commercials.

Thank you so much!

For being alive. For taking up massaging. Masseusing.

Masseusery?

Kelsey Krantz

Pen & Ink

17

Stopping by Store on a Sunny Morning

Ellie Garland

Lucy wanted real coffee, strong and black— a brew whose beans tasted of dandelion fields and 5AM sunrises and the rushing Robert Frost River, not a Dunkin’ in a Styrofoam cup off I-287.

This coffee craving prompted an unexpected left turn off the winding road. We had only made it through four songs on our recently purchased a capella CD, and if you counted the drive ahead of us in a capella songs, there were over one hundred to go. Still, neither Lucy nor I questioned the necessity of this little pit stop. We saw the faded sign for the Ripton Vermont Country Store and pulled into the gravel driveway. A chicken coop was positioned on one side of our parked car, a rusted tractor on the other.

With the coop and the tractor, the red peeling paint, the sagging white porch, the cheddar cheese curds, the maple syrup, the clay mugs, the knitted socks, and the scenic postcards, it was almost too country store. But, in no way did its predictable appearance lessen our desire to enter and explore.

It felt like the perfect ending to our Vermont adventure, our three days on the Bread Loaf Campus for the New England Young Writers’ Conference. We had traced constellations with our index fingers. We had written poetry in yellow Adirondack chairs. We had gone on early morning walks, wetting canvas sneakers and socks with dew. All that was left, it seemed, was to taste some cheddar and syrup and drive the five hours back to reality.

Upon entry, bells jingled above our heads. The screen door slammed. A woman with a hairy mole above her lip and a graying ponytail warmly greeted us. A blue cotton t-shirt, stained with sweat, stretched over her wide belly.

“Welcome,” she said. “How you ladies doing today?"

Before we could respond with the usual pleasantries, she continued.

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"This is the Ripton County Store. We've been 'round for over a hundred and forty years. Can yous imagine? That’s older than Mr. Robert Frost himself! Oh and we gots some of his poetry for sale up front…”

She wandered off to retrieve copies of Birches and Stopping

by Woods on a Snowy Evening printed onto thick stationery paper. We rifled through twenty-cent post cards of pastoral landscapes. We grabbed some individually sold pieces of Bazooka Bubble Gum and gawked at the strange array of knives and matchbox cars and figurines beside the more commonplace items. There was a People magazine, eight months old, with a significantly younger Justin Bieber posed on its cover. Time moved slowly here.

The woman resurfaced and handed us the poetry, forty cents apiece. Lucy ordered her coffee. The woman nodded and disappeared again. I wondered how many customers she had per day.

Only 588 people live in Ripton, Vermont, but 588 people need somewhere to go for their milk, cheese, potatoes, tomatoes, matchbox cars, and dated celebrity gossip. Still, there were probably whole days where this woman sat behind the old cash register of an empty store. In the slow morning hours, she might pop some bubble gum into her mouth, wash it down with a can of sweetened iced tea, and re-read Robert Frost poems, thinking about the boy with the saw or apple-picking, waiting and waiting for the bell to jingle and a customer to walk in She returned with Lucy's coffee. Four pieces of gum, three post cards, two water bottles, and one cup of coffee came to a grand total of four dollars and seventy-two cents. As we handed over our bills, the bells jingled again, and a boy walked in. He looked to be approaching the age of twenty.

He smelled of pigs and manure. He had left a tractor running outside. It howled and sputtered like a wild animal.

The boy whistled through crooked teeth and approached the counter. Lucy and I shifted politely to the left, but it did little to stop his scent from infecting our nostrils.

“Oh Eli!” the woman said.

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They might have hugged if she wasn’t trapped behind a counter. The woman’s expression quickly changed as she gazed down at her son’s shoes.

“Don’t go treadin' in all this dirt. I just mopped these here floors. Did ya get the potatoes from Mr. Wilhelm? Did ya feed the chickens?

“Geez, Ma, ‘course I did.”

She tightened her ponytail.

“Alright, son, what will it be?”

His gaze shifted to the shelf behind his mother. Blue camels, green camels, purple camels, and red camels stared back at him.

“The usual, Ma,” he said. He seemed in a hurry.

He watched his mom go up on her tiptoes and grab the red pack from the highest shelf. She handed it to Eli, and he reached into his worn-out jeans and gave her a few crumpled bills in return.

He took out his lighter and extracted a cigarette from the new pack. It rested between his teeth and muffled his speech as he called, “Bye, Ma, see you for dinner.”

“No smoking in the store—” she called back feebly, but the door had already slammed. Smoke drifted in through the screen.

We muttered our thanks and walked out after Eli, the Vermont coffee sloshing over the sides of Lucy's cup. As we reversed and continued on the windy road, as the a capella voices drifted into our ears, I thought about the woman. We were racing ahead, 62 miles per hour on an open road, back to the land of cellphones and SAT prep and green juice and constant movement.

She would be alone again, eating maple candies and sipping tea until the next customer wandered in or until supper with her smoking son, whichever came first.

20

Ellie Garland

Photography

21

To Be a Child

Grace Zhao

My brother David and I stroll down the avenue at twilight.

I can run faster, he says, and challenges me to a race.

I say, No David, not now, I’m wearing flip-flops.

He persists, But you always run in them anyways, and it didn’t bother you this morning after church when we ran across the lawn.

I tell him, No, Dave, and he laughs and throws back his small cap of silky black hair, chuckling, Why?, in petulant defeat.

I hear my sister, currently at her Senior Prom, her voice in my head chiding us both, Hey, no running in the streets.

My lip twitches as I feel myself inclined to respond, He started it.

Then I hear Mama asking me how old I am, and Dad telling me and Dave to stop, You are too big now, You should know better.

Fine, let’s not run this time, Dave says though I see right through him, his smirking lips, how he means to say, Race you!

And for a split second before I give in, before I chase him like a little kid, ritually racing ahead, I think I can see Dave growing up.

I reach the car, our finish line, and exclaim, I win, as Dave whines in playful frustration.

Above our heads, a navy veil shrouds the pinkish orange sash, the splatter of my sister’s prom dress in the evening sky.

22

Phoebe Jacoby

Digital Design

Pantoum

Allison Lindemeyer

I remember The times when I could not bathe myself Tilt your head back she'd say so the soap doesn’t get into your eyes Playing with plastic waterproof toys The times when I could not bathe myself When I was small enough to fit in the middle of them while they slept Playing with plastic waterproof toys Running around half-naked When I was small enough to fit in the middle of them while they slept Being the teacher when we played school with the neighbors Running around half-naked Thinking I could be anything I wanted Being the teacher when we played school with the neighbors Getting up before eight o’clock and watching Cartoon Network Thinking I could be anything I wanted Wanting to drive and have a cell phone because then I’d be a grown-up Getting up before eight o’clock and watching Cartoon Network Not knowing anything, but thinking I knew everything Wanting to drive and have a cell phone because then I’d be a grown-up Seeing the good in everyone because I had yet to see the bad Not knowing anything, but thinking I knew everything Tilt your head back she’d say so the soap doesn’t get into your eyes Seeing the good in everyone because I had yet to see the bad I remember 23

Gymnerd

Amy Cass

In the summer of 2011, as I carelessly flipped through the TV channels, I came across a broadcast for the Women’s Gymnastics National Championships. I was mesmerized by the tiny girls executing death-defying tricks with such confidence and precision. Just one year later, I could name every girl on the junior and senior national gymnastics teams as well as her key events and most recent scores.

I had discovered the “gymternet,” an entire online community of fellow gymnastics enthusiasts, affectionately known as “gymnerds.” Before the 2012 Olympics, I became a key contributor to this online sports fandom. I listened to Gymcastic, a weekly gymnastics podcast and frequented the website Gymnastike for all the latest news. I woke up at ridiculous hours to watch Chinese nationals and European Championships, all the while connecting with other gymnerds worldwide.

I became most obsessed with the data and statistics. I read the code of points from the last few decades. I analyzed the nuances of each skill and searched for patterns in the code’s history. I watched international competitions and tried to predict each gymnast’s score on each apparatus before the judges released their results. I calculated averages and played with numbers to create different competition scenarios. I even considered learning Russian after finding a series of interviews and documentaries of which I could not understand a single word.

The summer after ninth grade, I attended the National Championship in Hartford. This was my Super Bowl. The routines I knew so well, the girls I had watched grow and come to love so much– all in person for the first time. Towering above almost all the other girls who had come to watch, I was clearly not a gymnast, but I felt completely at home in that stadium.

While it may seem strange that I love a sport I have never tried, to me, it makes perfect sense. Gymnastics combines 24

my greatest passions. As a dancer, I recognize not only the difficulty, but also the beauty of the sport, evident in its ballet foundations. I appreciate the choreographed elements of the gymnasts' routines just as much as the tumbling and frequently use them as inspiration for my own choreography. I also have a great appreciation for the precision and numerical aspects of gymnastics. I love the sport’s rich history. Gymnastics has the ability to reflect a society’s cultural values and political climate at any given time. Even in my busiest weeks I still try to spend at least an hour or so surfing the gymternet, as I have come to realize that my love for gymnastics inspires all other aspects of my academic and extracurricular life.

Just this past month, while listening to the weekly Gymcastics podcast, I was stunned to hear my own name coming through my laptop speakers. In the previous week’s podcast, they had issued a contest, asking listeners to think of gymnastics-themed cat names. They were now announcing that my entry, “Tabby Douglas” (a pun on Olympic gold medalist Gabby Douglas) had won runner-up. Although I will admit that naming a nonexistent cat seems rather trivial, this recognition felt like a monumental achievement. Listeners around the world had heard my name and recognized my contribution, however small, to the gymnastics community.

I had officially earned the title of Gymnerd!

Julia Saer

Digital Design 25

The Heaviest Blanket

Jane Watson

The heaviest blanket one shall ever find Is that made of the most delicate thread Of crystals twisted into glistening twine And woven tightly over Earth’s warm bed.

Its folds have served as armies’ parapet Yet orchestrated many men’s defeat, Its presence just as ready to upset Life’s balance as bombs bursting in the street.

Enjoyed by all and yet controlled by none, It never asks to come or knows to go.

By many, its favor cannot be won Yet can present itself with quite a show.

Until eternal summer has been found, This swallowing sea of white shall rule the ground.

26

Lulu Burner

Photography

Georgia

Jaclyn MulĂŠ

Surrounded by the summer's hard-baked heat The air simmers and bubbles like cheer wine; The patio is hot beneath my feet When I'm below the Mason-Dixon line.

We lounge in pools and on the cold bath-rims Sweet tea in hand, our fans with pages made From books, while sunscreen swims on sunburnt skin And hope our tans will take their time to fade.

Too hot to move, we peel bikini straps From sticky shoulders and resign ourselves To coming months of school and hot days trapped In textbook chapters, praying for school bells.

The cooler northern breeze trails up my spine Although I left those colder days behind.

Graiden Berger

Photography & Digital Design

27

Sweet Lemons

Francesca Narea

“I’m going down to the lake to pick lemons,” I announced.

My family spends our summers at my grandparents' ranch in California. Over the years, I watched our three lemon trees grow from small stumps to my 4-foot height.

While my parents and sister rested inside the air-conditioned house, I decided to trek to those plump Meyer lemon trees under Sonoma County’s scorching sun. I packed my Hello Kitty bacpack with a water bottle, my Game Boy loaded with Pokemon Ruby, and a harmonica. A walkie-talkie and pair of binoculars hung around my neck. I put a pink bucket hat on my head, and I was ready to begin my journey.

I stumbled along a path, overgrown with brambles and thorns that poked at my tanned legs. I reached my first destination: the lake, a full mile in circumference. Its sun-skimmed surface reflected the color of the blueberries we bought from the farmer's market.

I picked a spot under a willow, the only shade as far as I could see. I set aside my Crocs to dip my feet in the water.

The trout nibbled my toes. My grandfather once bought long fishing rods to use one day down by the lake but they sat dusted in the garage.

Instead, he spent all day typing on a fat, white Mac. The foyer hallway in the house was a long bookshelf filled with the same 20 novels, some published in peculiar languages with accents and stroked lines I didn’t understand.

I pulled my feet out of the water, slipped on my Crocs, and trudged up the cliff overlooking the lake. Loose rocks tumbled down as I climbed up. At the top, purple wildflowers grew from patches of burnt grass.

I could see the expanse of California wine country, the winding rows of grape orchards and the dusty red and yellow soil. The lake was a puddle beneath me.

I lay on my back and felt the tickle of grass on my ears.

A hawk trailed above me, passing over the sun again and again in circles.

When the sun reached the top of the sky, I continued along the overgrown path. The straw grass grew taller. I heard the occasional hissss of rattle snakes. I looked down at my feet as I walked to dodge the ant mounds.

When I glanced up, I recognized the old barn with our chickens: Dixie, Trixie, Pixie, Chuckie and Cluckie. We bought them from a small farm down the road when they were chicks the size of my pinky finger. When I heard them clucking from their hut, I knew I was not far from the lemon trees.

And there they were, blossoming yellow with olive-green leaves. They reminded me of the Florida’s Natural Orange Juice commercials, in which perfectly rounded citrus fruits hung from equally spaced trees of propotional height.

I filled my backpack with lemons to bring back to the house.

I climbed the height of the four-foot tree to grab more lemons.

If you squeeze their skin, the scent can fill an entire room, the same way I can smell my mom’s perfume from the other end of the house.

I sat at the base of the trees and attempted to play a song on the harmonica. I only ever tooted one-note tunes.

A car interupted my music and the cheerful tweeting of birds.

Mom had come to get me because I had taken so long.

“Sweetie, I’ll drive you back home,” she said.

As she drove up the hill, I looked out the window and saw the hawk, still searching for prey, high above us. I thought I could hear the hissss of the rattle snakes. We drove over the ant piles.

Back at the house, I juiced the lemons by hand and mixed in water and sugar in a large pitcher. I served my family in tall glasses with ice cubes that I pulled out of fat freezer trays.

The next day we left for the airport, and I waved goodbye to my grandparents. The pitcher of lemonade stayed behind in the fridge, kept cool from the heat.

Devon Mifflin

Pen & Ink Drawing

30

Green Menagerie

Jo DeWaal

I keep a green menagerie buried in my heart where emerald leaves brush turquoise seas and parrot fish roll honeyed eyes to feathered fins.

I sweep a traveler palm, its plaited leaves unfurled like a giant Chinese paper fan folded with fancy jade blossoms spread to catch the lifting breeze spinning circles in my hair.

And if I stop to listen I can hear the tiny buds on green branches nicking edges of the wind to remind me, will the earth turn to hold the warm of summer on my skin?

Jo DeWaal

Collage

31

Olive Green Revelation

Phoebe Bloom

My bat mitzvah was not one of the top ranking tween festivities among my classmates. My parents reminded me that it was a religious coming-of-age event that happened to allow a sparkly dress—not a glitzy affair that made a little room for a prayer or two. My diligent studies led to a performance that I declared to be flawless the moment I stepped away from the Torah. Family and friends congratulated me on my entry to Jewish adulthood.

Yet neither my self-proclaimed flawless performance nor the congratulations I received afterwards left me feeling any more adult. Truthfully, I wasn’t so concerned with my lack of monumental feeling, but as I got older, I wondered why I had been bat mitzvahed. My family is not very religious, I know no Hebrew beyond what I’ve learned in temple, and I had to overcome immense shyness to perform the ceremony. I suppose I had wanted the Jewish identity this service seemed to promise, yet my memorization of Hebrew chants, words, and pronunciations left me feeling no more Jewish than before.

Three years later, I embarked on a month-long journey to Israel with my sleep-away camp. I found myself standing in a dusty field, wearing an army uniform that would have made my sparkle-clad bat mitzvahed self shudder. My feet were sealed together, my back straight, and my arms folded behind me in perfect form to avoid the penalty of pushups.

My eyes were heavy and my skin was caked in sand. It was 8AM, and I’d been up for three hours. It was the final day of a week-long Israeli army boot camp. This day was the culmination of the week’s lessons. In a simulated mission, we would understand the need for camouflage, practice various forms of crawling and covert walking, and use the guns with which we’d been training all week.

I expertly travelled through the mission covered in mud and leaves. I successfully army-crawled through 200 yards of gravel, and I landed eight of my ten bullets on my target.

32

But I felt all these physical trials enhanced my identity as a non-athlete, rather than as a Jew. Then my unit’s commander pointed to an imaginary civilian in the distance. She asked us if we’d like to kill the civilian, who may otherwise report our presence to the enemy, or let him live, thereby assuming his innocence but risking our lives. The pride of conquering prior obstacles disappeared from our faces and we looked to one another for an answer. We came up with no satisfying solution and chose what seemed to be the moral high ground– letting the civilian live– simply to complete our mission.

Yet when we left the field, we were not satisfied with our journey. Though surviving the excruciating physical training was cause for pride, we were left unsettled by our final challenge. The loneliness we had experienced as one of a handful of Jewish kids in each of our grades at home no longer felt like a real issue when, across the ocean, Israeli Jews had to fight daily to protect their country.

This revelation of what it is to be Jewish in the world beyond my New England bubble hurled me into Jewish adulthood far faster than my ten-month bat mitzvah preparation.

Learning prayers I hardly understood and overcoming my own public speaking fear didn’t bring me nearly the maturity that I learned in military training, where I suddenly had to protect an entire nation. So it was not in a sparkly dress, but rather in a grimy, olive green uniform that I could finally congratulate myself on my newfound Jewish adulthood.

Phoebe Jacoby

Photography & Digital Design

33

LABYRINTH 34

Joy Lin

Katherine Du

I. 7.6 pounds, no calculator buttons for teeth, almond-eyed. Beautiful.

II. Laolao painted the times tables in her head.

Joy squinted and recited and recited and five years later: Genius anymore?

III. Sweat on ivory and fine-grained wood nobody will see in seven years, when she’s ended her first decade on the stage where Carnegie wept tears many more shades than yellow.

IV. Joy’s never seen a boy who looks like her in the headlines: part Lin, part insanity.

Mama said, They couldn’t chalk it up any other way.

V. Bruises sugarcoating nails steal her sleep.

She’s not supposed to talk about them because that would mean they hurt.

But fingers ache, not fly.

VI. Her teacher called her Soo Min today.

She kept her hair long after that, after Soo got sick and didn’t have any for herself.

But Joy never forgot how red it was, how it curled at the tips like fire, like a voice.

35

The Box

Serena Profaci

At the heart of the White Mountains in New Hampshire, there is a dirt lane that winds from the base to the top like how my dad peels an apple, carving around and around and then letting me eat the skinny, twisted peel.

Nestled amongst the white birches are bears, birds, and the Box. The Box is what we call our house. Imagine a giant shoebox on stilts, rising vertically into the sky. It’s made entirely out of chocolate-brown wood, speckled with windows, some small, some round, some covering entire walls. This is where I grew up.

The house was our friend. We had this toaster that only worked when it was plugged into the socket next to my grandfather’s chair. We laughed when my dad’s friends came to stay at the house because their toast was always burnt.

They swore at the “damned toaster” and we exchanged secret smiles, our eyes bright with mischievous joy.

My name is Amy, and I have two older brothers, Charlie and Randy, and two older sisters, Debbie and Steph, and sometimes they let me play with them. Our mom is the same, but we have different dads. My dad lets them live with us in the Box, but they don't always get along. I don’t really know why.

My favorite part of the Box is the top floor. I have to climb three flights of stairs, but from there, I can see all of the White Mountains. Sometimes, depending on the time of year, I can see bears and mountain lions on the edge of the property, but only when I have binoculars. Those I have to steal from Randy when he is napping or else he’ll get mad.

One summer, when I was about ten, my brother Charlie slipped on the stairs and broke his arm. We would play these long games of hide-and-go-seek, especially when Dad got home extra late. The Box was perfect for hide-and-go-seek because there were lots of tiny spaces to fit into. Charlie would count to 100 as soon as the garage door started cranking open, and all of us would go hide. Sometimes, when I 36

was younger, I would fall asleep in my hiding spot because my bedtime was earlier than the rest of my siblings’. Debbie and Steph always hid together, and depending on how late it was when we started, Randy would count with Charlie.

I’ll never forget the night that Charlie broke his arm because I wasn’t in my normal hiding spot. Since there were so many stairs, there were so many spaces under the stairs. The carpet on the ground floor smelled kind of bad and there were usually spiders because the stairs were next to the garage, so I never hid down there. My spot was under the stairs of the family room one floor up. From the slant of those steps, I could see everything, and no one could see me. I loved that.

On one side of the staircase was a window, from the ground to the roof. On the other side was the living room, with my grandfather’s chair, which was just off the kitchen.

It was mostly my mom’s chair now because my grandfather is dead and because that’s where she liked to drink wine and fall asleep.

Mom was usually asleep when Dad got home. That’s why Charlie had to stay up. Mom and Dad didn’t fight that much but that’s probably because they didn’t speak much in general. My mom told me once that a lot gets said in silence, but I didn’t really know what she meant.

Anyways, the night Charlie slipped on the steps, he and Dad were fighting. Charlie started counting as usual, but this time he told us that no one could hide alone because then it gets lonely and it’s no fun. I said that he was just saying that because he didn’t want me to win again, and he said that was true, but the rules were still different.

So, I went to hide with Debbie and Steph, and Randy stayed to count with Charlie. We climbed two more flights of stairs to the very top floor, which was my parents’ room.

Mom was asleep again, and I saw Debbie go over to her bed, put something in her pocket, and turn off the lights. It took me years to realize what that item probably was, until I started having trouble sleeping myself.

We didn’t hear it at first because nothing at that point seemed out of the ordinary. It wasn’t the first time Charlie 37

seemed out of the ordinary. It wasn’t the first time Charlie changed the rules. It also wasn’t the first time he’d “slipped.”

The rumblings of dishes in the sink, the shuffling of feet on the wood, the scraping of chairs on the floor, it was all normal. I could smell the smoke and pine and knew the fire was still going in the living room. I imagined my dad reaching for the decanter on the table next to my grandfather’s chair and clunking down on the couch as I had seen him do hundreds of times from my spot under the stairs. You could tell by looking at his feet what kind of mood he was in. Dad was either quick and nimble like a fighter or a dancer, or he was heavy. I guess that night was probably a heavy night.

Charlie didn’t greet him.

Laughter seemed to resonate around the Box in a way that anger didn’t. Anger permeated the air, seeped into the wood and stayed there for a later time. There were grunts and hushed yelling that crescendoed until the first crash was heard. Sometimes plates got broken. It happened.

I looked at Debbie and Steph, and they smiled back at me.

We didn’t really hide since we knew exactly where everyone else was and that was enough. When the thud came, I thought about how it could have been a number of things.

One time a bird flew right into the giant window of the Box while we were sitting there at the table eating cereal.

One time Randy’s friends thought it would be funny to pelt snowballs at Steph’s window as hard as they could so that maybe she’d come out and blow them a kiss or something.

This thud was different though, because it wasn’t coming from outside. It came from inside the Box, our comforting, loving Box, and that made it even worse.

We never really talked about that night again. My mom came downstairs at 11 the next morning to make us pancakes, but by that time we’d all already eaten. Charlie sat at the table in a sling. I guess Randy drove him out to the Whitefield Hospital or maybe they just found some ace bandages somewhere from when one of us hurt ourselves riding horses.

Dad was at work. Debbie, Steph and I sat making friendship bracelets out of colorful string. I made a red, white and blue 38

Chinese Staircase because it was the easiest stitch. Debbie made a more complicated arrow pattern and promised she’d teach it to me later.

That night we didn’t play hide-and-go-seek. My mom stayed up reading one of her romance novels in the chair and my dad came home with dancing feet. I climbed one flight of stairs and peeked into Charlie’s room. With no physical acknowledgment of my presence, he signaled me in a way only siblings can. I curled up at the foot of his bed like a cat with eight lives left. We didn’t say anything, but a lot gets said in silence.

Kate Connors

Laser Cut Sculpture

39

Watch

Erinn Goldman

4AM and the phone rings. I pull it to my ear and hear her voice, I don’t know where I am. I am somewhere dark sears the phone wires, I imagine, with its plaintive notes.

Grandma, you are in your own house.

Orange shapes coalescing behind my closed eyes, I wonder if that is how she feels when waking up in shrouds of dementia.

She keeps taking off her watch and her wedding rings, because what is this on me?

I imagine that she places them on her Formica kitchen table, wondering why she is wearing time. As she slips from adult abilities like checking dates on milk cartons, she grows older into a child and she doesn’t need seconds and minutes and hours, because she simply lives inside herself.

Yesterday as we sat on her deck in slanting sunlight, a yellow leaf floated from the tree above and stuck on her frail form.

She told me I feel far away. Like I am under something.

Anna Sargeantson

Photography & Digital Design

The Art of Surfing

Emily Thomas

I have only surfed once in my life. It was a much more serious sport than I had anticipated, so I, for the most part, failed. We visited Punta Mita, a small town in Mexico, the summer after my brother came out to my family. The resort where we were staying offered daily excursions and activities to the guests in the nearby parts of Mexico. One of these was the option to go surfing.

I remember sitting in the car on the way to the cove, visualizing myself on the board. I played the scene over and over in my head. I would be a cool girl, wearing Roxy clothes, playing with my perfectly curled beach-blonde hair, even though I was a brunette. I would paddle out to open water and carve through the waves.

After my mother was in remission for breast cancer my parents sent me to see a psychologist. I hated the first one.

She was stone cold and wore clothing two sizes too small.

Her waiting room was filled with generic animal-covered inspirational posters. Not an item was out of place; the blanket even seemed to be professionally sprawled onto the couch to appear gently used. Her office was stuffy and reminded me of a Limoges box, a small French hand-painted ceramic box. My mother collected Limoges boxes for as long as I could remember. She kept her porcelain collection in a locked display case. I always felt that the Limoges boxes and I were mortal enemies competing for my mother’s love.

When we finally arrived at the surfing cove, the instructor handed me a black wetsuit. They put me in a tiny boat, rusted with chipping paint. It smelled of old fish. It was crowded on the boat with all of the surfboards.

When I slid my body into the freezing water, it sent shivers like earthquakes through my bones. My mind wandered to the unknown sea-animals swimming underneath me. Immediately I felt out of place in the ocean.

I finally did find a therapist that I liked. She diagnosed 42

me with generalized anxiety and depression and gave me a prescription for Zoloft the first day I met with her. She ran late to every appointment, and the couch in her office had too many pillows for comfort. She had a drawing board with a dolphin magnet that brought me strange serenity. We spent the sessions talking about our mutual passion for 19th century American literature.

Surfing, for me, was an experience like no other. Every attempt I made to stand up on the board led to a mouthful of salt water. Red veins spiraled my eyes like spider legs.

The waves devoured me. I was attached to the surfboard by a chord around my ankle, which the waves used to hold me down under the water, sending my body and the board in opposite directions, both fighting to reach the surface first. It was impossible to respond to the waves that came crashing over me, because as each one passed, another took its place.

The Zoloft made it better. I didn’t feel bad anymore. I didn’t feel anything anymore, and I never went surfing again.

Olivia Bastianich

Painting 43

Faye Tapsall

44

Collage & Digital Design

The Traveler

Mairead Kilgallon

Once upon a time, at the beginning of the universe, ancient beings traversed the stars. Known as the Gargantia, they had immense power, each large enough to hold a galaxy in their cupped hands. They existed in the fifth dimension, where time is a physical substance that can be altered and disrupted like the ground we walk upon. They could feel the slightest ripple through the space-time dimension, see thousands of years into the future, and potentially change the course of events that would occur millions of years after their extinction.

The Gargantia were governed by laws called the Star Notes.

These were three commandments that the earliest Gargantia interpreted from the wondrous burning specks that were scattered everywhere in the space around them. These three laws were the basis of their celestial civilization for eons: 1. There was a past; yet you shall not alter your life.

2. There will be a future; yet you shall not alter the lives of your children.

3. The expansion of the universe is infinite; yet no life shall be.

The devout enforcement and belief in these commandments are what kept the Gargantia the ruling force of the universe.

They were at peace with time and the guardians of the past and future. All beings of the cosmos were content with this arrangement, at least for a time, but when the Earth was still a smoldering rock, fresh from the Big Bang, the Gargantia were on the brink of crisis.

The Star Reader, a descendant of the Gargantia who translated the Star Notes, was the leader of the great race and the primary protector of the fragile tangle of time to which these beings had access. Their line was sacred, said to have the gift of interpreting messages from the universe's outer reaches.

This particular Star Reader, a Garganti called Ronan, was of a greedy and desperate sort. He felt he needed to provide his race with a new message from the stars, but he saw nothing on 45

his daily walks. One day, his son Sirius, came bounding up to him, shouting that he had seen a word in the stars: BEWARE. Ronan felt a surge of panic. Disregarding the ominous message, he fretted about his son’s ability to star-read at the young age of 500,000, when he, a full-grown Garganti, could not make out the slightest letter. I must restore my reputation with the people, he thought to himself. Ronan began to plan.

The next day, the revered Star Reader came shouting to every crowd of Gargantia he could find that the stars had sent him a message. “It is wonderful news! Rejoice!” he sang. The people heeded his words and began to celebrate.

A great throng of Gargantia formed before Ronan, eager to hear the news from the cosmos. Ronan smiled at them, and they smiled back.

“This is a happy day for all the universe, my good people,” he boomed. “The stars have graciously revealed their will to me to humbly present to all of you. Without further ado, I shall recite the message: As Gargantia, the rulers of this universe and all the space-time continuum, we are entitled as a race to the free manipulation of time as we see fit.” Ronan beamed. Most of the crowd cheered. However, one very old Garganti, Librus, raised a gnarled hand. The other Garganti fell silent immediately.

“Exalted Star Reader, if I may,” said Librus in a stronger voice than expected. “I do not take your words as the truth.”

There was a collective gasp, but the other elders nodded sagely.

“Your words contradict the sacred Star Notes of your ancestors, the translation of which I witnessed myself. Your ‘message’ calls for the Gargantia to manipulate time to their own ends, when the ancient, eternally true Star Notes command us to not tamper with time for personal gain.”

Gargantia who had previously been cheering began to nod and mutter to one another. Librus met Ronan’s panicked gaze with cool confidence. “The stars, in their infinite knowledge and omnipresence, do not make contradictions.

Therefore, you have fabricated this message, no act for any Star Reader to perform.” An angry cry rose up from the 46

people as they turned on their increasingly uncomfortable leader.

Librus did not falter. “However, I have heard that your son, Sirius, has been seeing words in the stars. He seems like a perfect Star Reader to assume your position.”

Ronan finally snapped out of his daze. “I am the Star Reader! What I say is the truth! My son is not ready--” He attempted to continue, but was silenced by the shouts of his people, turned against him.

Eventually, he vacated his position, leaving Librus and young Sirius to take up leadership. Ronan traveled to the edge of known Gargantia territory. He paced among the stars, observing the strands of wild time that sprawled out endlessly before him.

Suddenly, a brilliant idea occurred to him. He could go back in time! If he were to change his actions that day, fabricate a different message, then he would remain in power and revered by his people.

As Ronan set about finding the strand of time he needed to manipulate, his son’s message lay forgotten at the back of his mind. What was there to beware of? He assured himself this was the only option as he gripped his Traveler, a hooked rod made of a rare substance able to touch and change the strands of time.

After hours of searching, Ronan finally found his timeline.

He extended the Traveler, ready to restore his power, but was then thrown back by a surprisingly powerful pair of small hands. He turned to see his son, Sirius, looking at him with anger and sadness in his eyes. “You were trying to go back, weren’t you, Father?” he asked softly. All Ronan could do was nod, stunned. Sirius seemed as if he was about to speak, but then just shook his head and heaved a long sigh.

Librus, who had been standing behind Sirius, bent to retrieve Ronan’s Traveler, which he had dropped when he fell. Librus gave the rod a long look, then turned his gaze to Sirius. “We must not let this happen again,” he said.

Sirius nodded. “I understand.”

And so, Ronan was put to trial and eventually exiled to 47

the outer reaches of the cosmos, able to observe time, but never again manipulate it.

As for Sirius, he became a loved and revered Star Reader.

Today, people remember him through the Dog Star, named for the most loyal of animals. Librus advised Sirius until his own death, and is recognized now as Libra, the zodiac sign for peace.

After the encounter with Ronan and his Traveler, Sirius and Librus agreed to destroy all of the instruments, so that no event so nearly catastrophic could occur again.

However, legend has it that the two Gargantia destroyed all but one of the rods. The last Traveler, to be used only if the fate of the universe depended on it, was hidden away some place in the folds of the cosmos. Many have gone searching for it, and some believe that it was even hidden here on Earth, which was but an unassuming lump of molten rock in that time. If found, the wielder of the Traveler could be the most powerful being in the universe, but also the most likely to destroy it.

So, listen closely: heed the words of the stars, no matter what they say, and know that time is never a good thing to meddle with.

Chapin Rua 48

Digital Design

Black Lies

Ainsley Buck He doesn’t know Cause she won’t tell He’s been to heaven She’s back from hell He lives blind But she can’t see He’s ostracized She’s deaf to pleas She’s in his heart He’s in her hair She doesn’t notice He’s still there He’s buying rings She’s buying booze He can’t get up Cause she hits snooze She’s in control But he’s the driver He’s the gold And she’s the miner She’s not sleeping But she’s not awake He’s hardly breathing His heart will break He doesn’t know Cause she won’t tell He’s been to heaven She’s back from hell 49

Dolls: A Split Narrative

Olivia Quinton

I beg Laura to play with me, and she finally agrees. We choose American Girl Dolls, one of the few toys my sister hasn't outgrown. With Kit under my arm, I make my way across the house to Laura’s room. The phone is ringing, but I don’t bother to get it. Mum will pick it up downstairs.

Laura’s room is my favorite place to play. The phone is still ringing. Mum has the groceries in her arms, and can’t pick it up in time. They’ll ring again if it’s important, or leave a message. The bags tumble onto the counter, and Mum begins to unpack the eggs, milk, and cheese.

Laura has the nicer American Girl Doll stuff because she’s older. She has the table and chairs, the bed, and the horse. I’m jealous, but I always feel special when she deems me responsible enough to set the table for the tea party. The phone rings again.

This time, Mum catches it on the second ring. A voice on the other line crackles. “Hello? Mandy?” Maybe we’ll play tea party today, and I can set the table. “Is everything OK?” Or maybe Felicity will go on a horseback ride through the countryside and bump into Kit who will be busy reporting about a cat stuck in a tree. Granny is on the other line. Or maybe Kit will be emerging from a soup kitchen, covering more stories about bread lines and the Great Depression.

Calling on any day but Sunday is unusual for Granny.

And Felicity will be working at her father’s store, waiting for Kit to come in for a candy bar. Mum can feel her heart beat faster as her mother’s voice falters and breaks. I can’t wait to tell Laura all my ideas.

I walk into her room, and Laurs sweeps away her math homework, clearing the floor for our afternoon of adventure.

“What’s happened?” It’s about her father. We change their outfits. Grandpa. Felicity sports her riding clothes; Kit wears a green and red dress. Dressing them up is the best part.

He had been suffering from Parkinson’s for the past ten years. Laurs pokes holes in my ideas. She always comes up 50

with better ones anyways. Mum’s voice wafts up the stairs.

I’m too absorbed with our storyline to hear what she’s saying. Silence.

Kit is interviewing Felicity about her horses. Tears slip down Mum’s cheek. It’s hard coming up with questions. Be strong. Felicity gallops across the room. She can’t be. “When should they go to tea?” I ask.

The memories inundate her mind. Laurs lets me set the table. Tennis in the summer. I lay out the silverware. Travelling to the coast. Next come the plates. Sunday roasts. Then the cups and saucers. Walking down the aisle. Laurs gets out the cakes. Holding her daughter, his first grandchild. “What about the sandwiches?” The diagnosis. The dolls are seated around the table. The hospitals. The sandwiches. The doctors.

The cakes.

“Girls?” We turn as Mum comes upstairs. Her face is pale, and the minute she steps foot inside Laura’s purple room, the atmosphere changes. Even I can understand that something is wrong. “I’m going to have to go to England.” Laura and I exchange glances. “My father just died.” Silence. She sounds emotionless. Just stating the facts. But, I know she is trying to be brave for us.

Of course I’m upset. Of course. My only memories of Grandpa are of his sickness. I never saw him in his home, sitting with Granny watching Wimbledon or a period drama.

I only knew him when he sat in his chair in the medical care center. I never really understood what was wrong. I saw him maybe once a year, at most. But, now he’s gone. Mum will never be able to hug him again. She wasn’t there to say goodbye. The dolls fall to the floor.

Annie Klein

Digital Design

51

Belen Agrest 52

Collage & Digital Design

53

Stones of Silence

Phoebe Bloom

Walking on the gravel felt disrespectful. Our shiny American-bought shoes were too garish for the history of this dirt and these rocks. Speaking, too, seemed inappropriate– our voices too quick and chipper for the European barks and deep-throated sobs that filled the air years before.

Our eyes flitted from barrack to barrack, to austere stone buildings, to chain link fences, to watch towers, and to each other. No one looked in any one direction for too long. It seemed wrong to marvel at any one thing, and too selfish to hold eye contact with one another.

Following a meal of various gray foods with gray flavors, all fifty of us congregated in a beige room with a stained carpet. Hungry, tired, and longing for an English menu, our blank faces matched our surroundings. We sat in a circle and turned to look at the group leader.

“As you know, tomorrow we will be visiting Auschwitz,” Josh began. “This isn’t an easy part of the trip.”

His eyes scanned the circle, not in a disciplinary manner, but rather in a way that reminded each of us that we were crucial to the journey. Contrary to our usual boundless energy, no one shifted positions, played with her hair, or cleared his throat.

“I want us to remember we’ve come here together, and will experience this together. Let’s remind one another of the trust we share. If you have any concerns, feelings, or thoughts you’d like to share, let’s embrace them now together.”

At this point, people did shift in their seats, and gazes darted across the room, staining the bland walls with our nerves and discomfort. The first to speak was Rebecca.

“My great-grandparents lived in Poland. Their whole family came here. Or like, to Auschwitz. Not this hotel,” she laughed nervously. “They survived. Because, you know, I’m here now and stuff. But my great-aunt—my great-grandma’s sister—she died here.”

54

Becky’s tense eyes skimmed the circle, then dropped.

Comforting squeezes on Becky’s shoulders rustled in the silence that followed.

Jesse, whose thick beard and broad build established him as the big brother of our group, went next.

“My great-grandmother lived in Germany. She was blonde.”

We chuckled softly. Jesse was known for the thick black beard and bear-like hair that first covered his body at age thirteen.

“She knew what was coming, I guess, so she went to some guy. She got new papers, a new name, new passport.

Her family didn’t look like her, so she had to leave them.

She moved away, and she got a job for a German officer. You know, if you can’t beat ‘em, be them?” A halfhearted smile.

“She was a maid. Cleaned up after SS officer parties. The officers liked her. She was pretty and smart. Sometimes she spent time with them and talked to them. Once, they cracked some joke. I don’t know what it was, but it related to Judaism, and she had some clever retort. Because, you know, she was pretty cunning. But it didn’t sit right with them that she had a smart answer about Judaism. And she knew that. So she ran away again.

“She got to America eventually. She doesn’t know what happened to her family. But her kid in America, my mom, lived abroad in Germany one summer. She rented an apartment and it happened to be in that same town where that officer lived. She told her mom about it, and turns out, her landlord was that same officer.”

His story was startling, the irony conflicting. ‘What a small world’ seemed too charming a thought. And Jesse, a big brother to fifty of us, was the provider of warm hugs and comforting smiles. He was there for us. He wasn’t meant to have a troubling story of his own.

We walked through another beige room. Only this one was made of concrete. As we proceeded past the registration room, the tattoo room, and the shower rooms, we felt like a poisonous presence. Surely not more poisonous than the 55

camp’s history, but still not able to fully respect the memory of that past poison.

Our cameras were heavy in our hands, and our voices banged against our throats. We wanted to save the images, to discuss and understand the experience. But nothing seemed appropriate. To take a picture seemed to imply too much awe. Talking seemed a violation of the soundless, yet loaded, silence.

Emerging from the concrete building, we squinted in the sudden sun. It too seemed poisonous. Stormy clouds seemed more appropriate for the past of this place. Icy rain dropped the width of the equally translucent prisoners. Thunder echoed the voices of guards and drowned out cries for help.

Across the gravel path were the barracks, equal in size to the building we just exited, but made of wooden planks whose cracks made us shiver at the thought of an Eastern European winter.

Inside, the piercing sunlight was gone. Our eyes adjusted to take in the triple-layered wooden platforms that once served as beds for four people at a time. A small plaque explained how the luckiest situations put whole families in one bed. Otherwise, the so-called beds were filled with unrelated people of all ages.

“My brother and I like to have sleepovers with each other.

Usually I sleep on his trundle while he sleeps in his bed. If our mom is in a good mood, she’ll let us stay on the couch.

Like, because we’ve been good kids and have proven some more TV won’t rot our brains,” said Ali. “So the night before this trip, we had a sleepover. A couch one. Nick was off to camp in a few days, and I was coming here. And we were talking about if we were excited, or nervous, and stuff. And then he goes, ‘Ali, I can’t wait to be grown up. Because then I won’t have to be Jewish anymore.’

“And I just kind of looked at him, curiously I guess. And then he said ‘you know, because being Jewish is scary. Like that dream I had.’

“And then he turned red, and then kind of pale. He said, 56

‘well yeah, the other night I had this dream that we were at school. And people were throwing pennies. Which isn’t a big deal, I know, I’m used to it. But then they weren’t pennies anymore, they were stones, and we weren’t actually at school. Everything was grey, and I was grabbing at the walls to escape, but the walls were sharp and would poke me, and I was hungry and tired and they were making me eat shrimp and usually I like shrimp but I don’t know, this time I didn’t want to eat it. And the pennies weren’t at my feet like usual.

You know, because they were rocks now. They hurt when they hit me.’”

We headed towards the big gate. A clean arch with smooth stones; it may have been a notable work of architecture, had it been elsewhere in Europe, serving a different purpose.

The train tracks that stretched from our spot, towards the gate, underneath, and beyond provided our trail. Some of us walked in between the tracks, some on the outside, some balanced on top. Blades of grass, strangely green for the monochromatic, manmade camp, shoved their way defiantly out from under and around the tracks.

The tracks brought us to a train car, stationed there permanently to be viewed. Some people climbed inside; most of us just looked at it. I could see people calculating the discomfort of the sixty of us, accustomed to our air conditioned tourist bus, folding into that car the way Becky’s great aunt, along with fifty-nine strangers, did.

Around the side of the car was a ladder. Each rung of the ladder was piled high with pieces of gravel. Placed there by visitors before us, each one represented the story of an Auschwitz inmate. Some stones were dark and dusty, others light and shiny.

Diminished to brittle bones and loose-fitting uniforms, the prisoners were boiled down to simple stones. It seemed both a gross understatement and a beautifully simple honor.

I picked up a stone of my own and placed it on the car. It was for Ali’s brother, and the death of his innocence, and the beginning of his fear.

57

Olivia Quinton Brooklyn

Thomas VanBelle Allison Lindemeyer House

58

Lucy Burnett Just Another Day

Kaitlyn Packer Sara Poulard Lizzie Thornton Maggie Varvel

Lose It 59

Aayda, 12, Naudeh, Afghanistan

Katie Callaghan

Born from the ravages of war in the desert village, she bore a numbness like the ringing after a blast.

Cradled by the trenches her father died in, Aayda found comfort in the outskirts of Naudeh: no one and no light.

Arid soil caked her skin, an abrasive blanket, as Aayda’s mind unraveled into dreams of piloting the airplanes that crossed her sky.

By ascending higher into the atmosphere, her prayers would easily fly to father, the messages lucid.

Walking back to her home, her velvety heart grew spines, hundreds of sti, barbed restharrow stems plunged into her chest.

Dragged only by the commitment she owed to her widowed mother, Aayda returned to the four sloping walls, veiny cracks tattooed on the mud.

Inside, her brother, Habib, sat in candlelight tinkering with scraps.

He peered at her with twinkling crescent eyes, like her father, perhaps.

60

Sonnet Without War

Olivia Falkenrath

1. The refrigerator is empty. 2. Empty of good food, I mean.

3. But if you complained to my grandmother about not having fat-free milk or ice cream, she’d say that children in Haiti don’t even have refrigerators. 4. She hasn’t told me that, I just know she would. 5. She’s traveled to Haiti maybe three or four times. 6. She doesn’t care about not having refrigerators.

7. When she feels strongly about something, she dives deep.

8. I don’t know why other women aren't more like her. 9. Are they scared or do they want to enjoy life? 10. She believes that she should try to make everyone’s life better. 11. My mother says she wasn’t always so proactive. 12. "Why do you work so hard?" I ask her. 13. “Because where someone lives shouldn’t determine their future,” she simply replies.

14. Today, on my phone, I read about the Syrian refugees and where they sleep. They sleep on the ground with no blankets or sheets. And it gets cold at night. A quarter of the refugees are uneducated children. The distance from Syria to Turkey is about the distance from where I live to Canada. Imagine leaving everything and walking there, leaving behind your things, friends, and family. after Sherman Alexie

61

Paige Guerriero

62

Photography

FOOD POISONING FADE IN

Ellie Garland

INT. CORDON BLEU COOKING SCHOOL, NYC. EARLY EVENING. TWELVE MEN AND WOMEN sit at a long wooden table. The youngest is 17. The oldest is 82.

Napkins are in laps, and one woman at the head of the table rises from her seat. With a glass of Chardonnay held up to the chandelier and a deflated chef hat perched atop her graying ponytail, she ceremoniously clears her throat. This is SYLVIE VIGNERON. SYLVIE Mes chèries, I invite you to my table for a spectacle culinaire. We have, today, ze salmon. Seven salmonz, seven vays. Ve grilled, ve seared, ve poached, ve smoked… I am happy, happy chef! And now, ve eat! Bon appetit et bon travail, mes amis!

They all clink glasses and grip their forks and knives, uncertain which of the seven salmons to try first.

MAN (whispering in WOMAN’s ear to his right) Do you even like salmon?

WOMAN No, not particularly, but this, this sure is a salmon lover’s dream. It might even convert me…

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MAN …If it doesn’t make you sick first.

I’m not much of a salmon guy either.

I just told my buddy Chris over there I’d keep him company for this class.

He told me we were making chocolate chip cookies! I shoulda known… trying to impress the fiancé.

WOMAN suppresses a laugh and prepares a bite of salmon. CHRIS can be seen inspecting the spice rubs and the lemon zest, sniffing each bite, and humming in approval. SYLVIE smiles proudly and looks down at her empty plate.

MAN (still whispering in WOMAN’s ear) She’s a skinny chef.

WOMAN Mhmm, I guess she is.

MAN Doesn’t that worry you?

WOMAN Should it?

MAN Well, I’ve heard the best chefs are always fat. If they don’t bulge out of their aprons, there must be something wrong. If the food you made were good, you would eat it, right? Look, la chef won’t even touch her salmon.

WOMAN (playfully) 64

That’s silly. Just try it. It will make you big and strong... I promise.

They do a mock-cheers with their forks, a poached pink bite on the twines. MAN makes a gagging face and gulps dramatically but never quite brings the salmon to his lips.

SYLVIE Alors, mes amis, vat do you think?

CHRIS from across the table, who has indubitably consumed the most salmon of the 12 diners, is turning bright green.

MAN Well, Madame, it’s lovely, but… hold on, Chris, are you alright?

CHRIS is sweating now, struggling for air and turning greener by the second. The 17 yearold is turning a shade similar to his. The 82 year-old, is a bright purple and falls face first onto his plate with a loud thud. A gay couple, impeccably dressed in tailored suits, chokes and coughs, trying to untie their bowties as they turn a bluish green. Two honeymooners from Morocco are red and splotchy, eyes bulging. Everyone struggles for air. MAN and WOMAN stay seated at the table in horror.

WOMAN is becoming increasingly nauseated and overheated.

SYLVIE (coolly, evenly) Mes chèries, ça va?

SYLVIE sips her Chardonnay and smiles to her65

self. She removes her chef hat, plumps it up, and returns it to her head, unflinching.

MAN (ferociously) Would someone tell me what the hell is going on?

He watches WOMAN fall backwards in her chair and tumble to the floor. She is still. Everyone but MAN and SYLVIE are unconscious, now. It is unclear whether the 11 others are alive.

SYLVIE Ah, l’homme solitaire… ze only vun left… you didn’t eat your salmon, no?

She casually removes one of her knives from her apron and polishes it with a checkered dishtowel, tauntingly. It glints in MAN’s face. MAN lunges at her. SYLVIE can’t react, falls backwards, and hits her head hard on the floor, the knife planted in her ribs.

SYLVIE (sputtering) Bad boy, bad, bad boy, who doesn’t eat his…

MAN is now alone in a room that reeks of twelve dead bodies and too much salmon.

FADE OUT

66

Alexis Raskin

Collage

67

My Pet Fish

Lucy Burnett

I never really understood the concept of owning a pet. If you really think about it, they’re nothing but a hassle—just another mouth to feed, another source of mysterious odors, another attention-craving noisemaker (all traits often found in humans, whom I try to avoid as much as possible).

I always see those YouTube videos of little kids getting a puppy for Christmas. Tears of joy stream down their faces as the admittedly cute, but annoyingly hyper fur ball dashes around the room. The camera begins to shake because the parent holding it cries too, as if their sensitive, animal-loving kids are just too much to handle. The video usually ends with some sort of, “Thanks, Mom!” or “Thanks, Dad, you’re the best!”

The whole thing is supposed to be adorable.

Well, I don’t buy it. Do you ever see a video of that same family two months later? No, of course not. And you know why? Because they’re probably sitting at the dinner table with that dog (who has far outgrown its cuteness) by their feet, staring them down as they try to eat their chicken. And with each bite they take, the dog releases a faint whimper.

The dad, who just now remembers he never even wanted a dog in the first place, looks at his wife and aggressively mutters, “This dog was never trained properly.” In response, his wife, the sole defender of the dog, emotionally cries, “He’s just hungry, how would you feel if you weren’t fed?” The dad feels bad for making his wife upset, so he asks one of the kids to feed the dog, but of course this request leads to a fight because both the kids claim they fed it last night. Finally, one kid stands up to do the chore, but not without adding, “I’ll feed it, but you let it out, after.”

What’s it all for? The cute Christmas card? A beach buddy? A friend? Well, whenever I see a Christmas card with a dog perfectly posed in front of also perfectly posed children, I can’t help but think about how much time it took to get the dog to sit still and look directly into the camera.

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And whenever I see owners on the beach chasing their dogs who are barking at other dogs who are also being chased by their owners, I want to ask those owners if they consider going to the beach to be relaxing. And as for the idea of pets being “friends,” well that just makes zero sense to me. I mean, sure, sometimes I get a little lonely, but a dog or cat isn’t going to make me feel any less lonely. In fact, I think if I called my dog or cat a friend that would just make me feel lonelier.

I tried to explain all of this to my therapist when she suggested that I get a dog. However, my five-minute rant only led to a prescription for a higher dosage of Xanax and a compromise: I had to buy a fish. Shirley (that’s my therapist) said it would be good for me to take care of something else.

She came to the conclusion that Theo, my ex-fiancé, left me for Jennifer, a baker at the Sweet Tooth Shop (which was my favorite bakery, before well, you know…) because I’m not “nurturing” enough, which is Shirley’s way of calling me selfish. I’m sure Jennifer is very nurturing.

Anyway, normally I would have just pretended I bought a fish and told Shirley she was a genius, but for some reason I decided to actually give it a try. I guess I figured that for the amount of money I pay Shirley, she better make my nurturing skills skyrocket. So I went to a random pet store, called Pets And Their Needs, which was two blocks away from my apartment. I only knew about it because it was right next to the Starbucks I go to every morning before work.

I walked in and immediately wished I hadn’t. The smell was nauseating and there was a buzz of scampering feet and clanking cages. All of a sudden I heard a voice.

“Welcome to Pets And Their Needs. How can I help you?”

The line was clearly scripted and rehearsed, but was delivered with little passion. A man—I couldn’t tell if he was an old looking twenty year-old or a young looking forty-year-old— stood up from behind the cash register. His clothes were too big; or rather his body was too small. He had a nametag on his shirt, but the ink was smeared off, so I’ll never know the name of the guy who sold me my first fish. He was high.

69

70

RenĂŠe Ong

Renee Ong

Drawing

Pencil & Watercolor Pencil 71

“A fish,” I managed to mutter. I don’t know why I was nervous—probably because I was pretty sure the whole store was a fire hazard.

“Fish food? Fish tank?” he genuinely inquired. He was too dumb and too high (confirmed by his smell) to be annoyed by my verbal incompetence.

“Yes. Everything. Including an actual fish, as well.”

He smiled.

“Alright. Welcome to the pet life, my friend.”

I couldn’t help but smile too. I felt good—like I was suddenly part of this pet-owners bond. It really made me happy.

He handed me a tank, a filter, and fish food. Then he turned to me and got all dramatic.

“Repeat after me.”

I was confused, but said, “O.K.” “I.” “I.” “Solemnly swear.”

“Solemnly swear.”

“To care for this living creature, as if it were a child I bore into this world. For the gift of life is the most powerful gift of all.”

I looked at him. I wasn’t sure if he was serious or not. He just stood there waiting, so I guess he was serious.

I repeated the line, but at a much faster tempo: “To care for this living creature, as if it were a child I bore into this world.

For the gift of life is the most powerful gift of all.” Though no one else was in the store, I was deeply embarrassed.

He turned around and grabbed a plastic bag from one of the shelves. He then lifted a lid off a cooler and scooped three cups of water into the bag. He shut the cooler and walked over to a tank of gold fish. He scooped up one of them and put it into the bag. He dramatically extended his arms and handed me the fish.

“Thanks,” I said.

There was an uncomfortable pause.

“So is it a girl or boy?” I asked.

“How the hell am I supposed to know?” he responded.

72

It seemed a little weird not knowing the gender of the living creature I was supposed to treat as if it were a child I bore into this world. I looked down at it. I decided it was a boy. He looked like a Frederick. Freddy for short. But I would mostly call him Frederick.

Anyway, the nameless Pets and Their Needs employee rang me up and I headed back to my apartment. Once inside, I decided to set Frederick on the kitchen table—that way we could eat our meals together.

I watched him for a little. It was mesmerizing—watching him swim laps. He seemed to swim with such purpose. I got a bizarre sense of pride in what a good swimmer he was. I decided I would go back to Pets and Their Needs tomorrow and buy Frederick a bigger tank. He deserved one.

I went into the kitchen to make some dinner so that Frederick and I could enjoy our first meal together. I wasn’t that hungry so I made a bowl of cereal. I placed it on the kitchen table and went to go get Frederick his food. Just as I was about to put a few flakes into the tank, you’ll never guess what I saw: poor Frederick floating on his back. I got all depressed and then weirdly angry—angry at Shirley, angry at Theo, angry at Jennifer, angry at the nameless employee at Pets and Their Needs, angry the people in the YouTube videos, angry at the people in the Christmas cards, angry at the owners on the beach, angry at Frederick.

I never really understood the concept of pets. You get all attached to them and then they die.

73

Alyssa Gerasimoff 74

3-D Construction

Falling Through Ice

Jo DeWaal

You have more time than you think, I think.

I first fell through ice as a child on the River Vecht my skate blades sawing a perfect hatch to frigid water.

My legs, sticks sinking in icy cold, could not kick yet my steely blades attached to clawing feet slashed at frigid depths.

My small arms yanked from the jagged hole, my gelid legs attached to frozen torso obediently slid.

In the commotion, one red mitten pulled o, stuck to the ice like a smoldering ember as if to sear a mark.

Years later, I plunged through the ice again in a New York lake, thousands of miles from the slow river meandering in a small country.

My head crashed below the fragile surface, and gray sky overhead disappeared.

For a moment, the crush of cold, the utter silence became beguiling.

I slumped, forgiving all that matters, and rushed to please everyone who loved me.

From my maritime stupor I was plucked.

A soggy skater destined to shake o frozen depths and wake to the answer of inexplicable warming sunrise.

75

MORTALS AND IMMORTALS

Measure of Time

Jo DeWaal

Hunched over the hearth like the curve of a willow near the cool water of the river Vecht Oma meditates on the flicker of the flame, turns a smooth wooden spoon through applesauce as thick as muddy earth.

She claims I could live to be one hundred if I ate her cooked apples every day for the morning meal— but who has time for breakfast?

Oma dips her pointer into the boiling muck and samples, a smack of her lips saying the most diďŹƒcult thing, that her hands are her hands, she cannot hold time for me.

She pinches cinnamon from a glass jar and sets it free, my spirit chases the ripe scent through warm air, nudging copper pots like kindled tambourines.

I wrap my arms around her soft waist, rest my chin on her gracile shoulder and bite down on my lip.

A yellow square of light drifts from the window to the linoleum floor, our joined shoulders rise and gently fall, cleaving with the air of uncertainty.

77

Amelia Riegel

78

Ceramics

A Meal of Inheritance

Grace Zhao

Sprightly girl ran about with dark onion-ring curls, moving in twists and turns, the way ink ignites off a bamboo brushstroke.

Her eyes, a deep vinegar brown, searched low near the grass for the most elegant rice-like blades.

Next, she sniffed out a juicy leaf, imagining Ma Ma rolling the dough, crafting each peel with arched fingers submerged in a floury sea.

She then stooped and sifted through the unpaved stone thinking of Ma Ma blobbing meat onto flat dough.

She imitated her mother's movements, swaddling the gravel in the leaf like the meat in the dough.

Chopsticks fell, plinked on the bowl.

Sprightly girl pinched the edges, creating delicate ruffles, and wove the grass tightly so her dumpling wouldn’t unravel.

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Conversation Over Curls

Lucy Burnett

Today is Sunday. While some people may be going to Church, my religious activity for the day is rolling up my Oma’s hair. She sits in front of the muted TV as I deftly wrap her thinning white mane around the ancient curlers.

My Opa took a shower and dressed himself the morning of the day he died. It took him two hours. So I guess my Oma’s weekly hair washing is a tribute to him. “No matter what, your Opa always got up and dressed himself,” she says with adorable pride. “The least I can do is wash my hair.”

Normally we spend this time discussing last night’s movie, but today is different. I have an agenda. I tell her I’ve been assigned to write a profile on someone and that I think she is the perfect person.

“Me?” she asks, as if it were the craziest idea I’d ever had. “I’m not interesting enough for that, and the only things that are remotely interesting about me are exactly the things I shouldn’t share.”

The begging begins. I tell her she only has to focus on the happy times. I tell her to talk about Opa or my mom. I tell her to retell the peanut butter sandwich story. In response, she gasps—such an embarrassing story could never leave the confines of the house.

Five minutes of silent mousse application pass.

“Where were you born again?” I say, feigning an off-therecord tone.

“A hospital,” she says. She is on to me.

“Oma, that’s not what I meant. What town in Germany?”

“Manheim.”

“And your birthday? January 17th, 192—what year?” I know the year.

“Lucy Lein I know what you’re doing.” She pauses.

Then, “Don’t say the exact day. Just say January, 1925.” She surrenders to my persistence.

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However, her reluctance continues. Trying to get her to open up is like trying to wrap her shorter hairs around a big curler: it’s hard but possible.

I begin stating facts.

“World War II started in 1939. So, you were only 14. It ended in 1945. So, you were only 20.”

“14 years old,” she says slowly, half to herself. “I remember when my friend and I first heard we were going to war.

We were so excited… My mother almost slapped me. She thought I was old enough to know what war really meant. I wasn’t. 14 years old.”

She snaps back into reality and asks, “Are you using enough mousse?”

“Yes.” I begin to feel guilty. For a brief moment the colors on the TV screen are dark enough for me to see her reflection. There is a pain in her eyes. I let a silence hover. For a moment.

Then, I clear my throat and manage to say, “And your older brother was drafted?”

“Walter. Yes, he was drafted right in the beginning.”

She begins telling me all about his life as a soldier. Sweating in Africa. Shivering in Russia. Shot in the leg. Shipped to England. It was interesting, but my curiosity was hungry for a sneak peak into the life of 14-year-old Oma. “And so you were going to school this whole time?” I ask in hopes of satiating curiosity.

“Yes, but Lucy Lein you don’t want to hear about that.”

“Oma. Yes, I do.”

“Kohl’s,” she says out of the blue. “On the television, they were showing Kohl’s.”

“Yea.” She sighs. She knows her observation is not even an appetizer for curiosity.

“Lucy. This is how it is. Many of our days were interrupted. Wee-oo. Wee-oo,” she says whirling her arms. “That was the alarm. We had to go to the bomb shelters. It happened at night too. Awful. Oh, Lucy. We don’t need to talk about this.”

81

Renee Ong

82

Pencil & Watercolor

There comes a point when someone is pushed to his or her limits. I had pushed Oma to hers.

“It’s OK. Can you just skip to when you met Opa?” She laughs. “Someone has been watching too many movies. That’s not how it happens in reality. The war doesn’t just end and the women don’t just get swept off their feet by soldiers.”

I begin to think about all the war movies we have watched together. Romance is heightened. Battle is glorified. The suffering on the home front is ignored. She says she loves them, but the inaccuracies must be hard to watch.

“Your Opa was an American. So you can imagine how my father felt about that.” It makes me happy she decided to answer without a question. I see her reflection in the TV once again. There is a soft smile at the corner of her lips.

She explains how at first she was nervous to go on dates alone with Opa so she always brought her friend Ruthie. One time Opa took her and Ruthie to a bar and asked the bartender to make a platter of peanut butter sandwiches. Here it comes.

The peanut butter sandwich story. The bartender handed them a huge platter with triangularly cut sandwiches.

“We were starving, Ruthie and I,” Oma explains. “Everyone was hungry in Germany.”

She begins to laugh—a real laugh, a bobbing body laugh.

I had to redo the curl I was working on because her head was shaking so much.

“We ate every single sandwich. Paulie, your Opa, didn’t eat a single one! He just stared, amazed at how much these two petite women could eat! I had a petite figure back then.

Oh Lucy, I can still taste the peanut butter! Oh and after the sandwiches we danced!”

I become a mirror of her smile.

“Why do you think that story is so embarrassing?” I ask.

“I was so unladylike!” she says.

But Opa didn’t think so. He wanted to meet Oma’s parents.

“My father said, ‘If an American enters my front door, I’m leaving through my back door.’ So my mother and I made a plan to not tell my father when Paul was coming. And so 83

when Paulie came, my father was forced to meet him. Eventually, they loved each other.”

I ask her where Opa proposed to her. She said she didn’t remember. I kind of liked that. In reality proposals are insignificant; it’s what comes after.

Opa was still in the military so they had to move back to America. Oma had to leave her family, her country. “I didn’t like the thought of never seeing Paul again so it was worth moving, but it was definitely hard.” Together, they took a ship to Ellis Island and from there ventured to Opa’s little farm somewhere in Connecticut.

“Thank God, your Opa was with me on the ship. There was a storm like nobody’s business.” Opa was her protector.

She spent the next couple of weeks living with Opa’s mother and seven siblings, while Opa worked. She said she never felt so uncomfortable.

“I didn’t know his family that well. I was the foreigner.

They warmed up a little bit, but soon Paul and I had to move to the south… that’s where he was stationed. And soon after that we moved back to Germany, where I had your mother, and then back to West Hartford, and you know the rest.”

I place the last curler in her perfectly moussed hair. Oma is tired. She does not want to talk anymore.

“Lucy Lein. Don’t write about me.”

“OK, Oma. I won’t.” That was the first lie I ever told her.

I place the hair net over the curlers and tell Oma she’s all set.

“Thank you so much, Lucy Lein.” She squints at the clock and gasps. “10:30! You have school tomorrow! Go Lucy Lein go! And sleep double time!”

I walk to my room, deep in thought. Oma needs to know where everyone is because for one full year she had no idea where her brother was. Oma insists I try on my school dance dresses for her even when I am busy because she spent her school days in a bomb shelter. Oma shakes her head when my family buys overpriced food because there was a time in her life when a platter of peanut butter sandwiches was a delicacy.

The Oma I know is a product of things she "shouldn't share."

84

Paloma Corrigan

Charcoal & Pen

85

My Everything

Tiffany Rodriguez

I am the result of a teenage pregnancy. Growing up, truthfully, I was ashamed. When I was little, though, having a young mom was awesome. We would always go on fun trips like to the aquarium or zoo, but then in 6th grade health class, we learned about teenage pregnancy and it all changed. When girls would talk about their moms, I’d just listen or sometimes even lie about my mom’s age. Looking back, I understand that while now I may be regretful about my behavior, I was making the “right” choice. I didn’t have the confidence to share with others that part of my story yet, but now I do.

My mom is a strong believer in things happening for a reason. She moved to the US from Peru just a few years before my birth. Despite her limited English, she was able to get a job at Lord & Taylor.

When she heard she was pregnant with me, my mom knew that she was not only caring for herself, but for two people. Now that I'm eighteen, I can’t imagine being in her situation.

I used to think about who my mom would have been if she hadn’t gotten pregnant so young. But now, I’ve embraced my mom’s belief in things happening for a reason. While I may not always have this optimistic attitude, especially on occasions when things don’t go my way, I realize that my mom is in fact, a very successful woman.

We each have our own paths that we choose to follow in life. Recently, my mom chose to follow a path that did not include my father. I remember being upset with her. I didn’t like how she was splitting up our family. The problem was I wasn’t very vocal about my thoughts and we fought about it. Once we moved to a new place to start fresh, my attitude changed, as I was constantly surrounded by my mom’s optimistic personality.

My mom has been through it all: teenage pregnancy, labor complications that left her unable to walk for a month,

discovery of uterine fibroids and then surgery for them, a cyst in her neck, divorce, and money problems, yet she always maintains a positive attitude.

That attitude of hers is something that I’m happy to say I have gained. Her positive attitude and her ability to spend time with my sister and me is what I have come to admire so much. My mom is my everything. She’s my stylist, my chauffer, my cook, my rock, my inspiration, but most importantly, my best friend. The fact that my mom is able to come home each day after a long day of work and find the energy to spend time with my sister and me is what pushes me to work hard. I truly admire her for always being there for us and choosing her own path in life. I will miss my mom so much when I go to college and not just because she is the one who stays up with me late at night for Law & Order SVU marathons.

While most teenage pregnancies don’t lead to a happy life, I am now proud to say my mom had me when she was seventeen. I love my mom and couldn’t be happier with the way my life turned out. People are free to judge me if they want, but I don’t care. I’m not my middle school self anymore.

My mom had me at 17. That’s what makes me, me.

Olivia Quinton

Marker

La Payasada de Las Chiquitas (The Little Girls’ Antics)

Paloma Corrigan

It was a fragrant Saturday morning.

While we snuck our way through Zacatecas, I remember the sound of wives beating the week’s footsteps off the entranceway rugs, cleansing them of the stagnant past – of slumped shoulders after a hard day’s work, of little Paulito’s dirt from hours of play in a world where a bill is just another word for a bird’s beak and the hardest part of the day is choosing to go to the town square or to grassy fields.

All the beating was to make room for a new week as we were just making room for trouble.

We were about 9 – still considered chiquitas – but we were rebels, always trying to act like the older kids, so my friends and I went to the river where they played.

The copper red dust swirled at our heels like cloudy wings to help us fly before anyone noticed where we were headed.

The leaves on the branches above us stippled the sky, casting shadows on our laughing faces so that the sun danced on cheekbones, eyebrows, lips.

As we sprawled on rocks near the water’s edge, the clay that lined the river wriggled between our toes, a thank you for our returning once again.

But Suzana (the daredevil of us all) wanted more; while the rest of us giggled about nothing, she inched forward, tempting the river. SPLASH! Suzana was pulled in to be swept away with the current like driftwood.

Aucilio! Aucilio! we screamed to get the older kids’ attention. SPLASH! one of the boys, already clothed, dove in and expertly grabbed Suzana, while we were all smirking not because she was saved, but because she was saved by an older boy!

88

Megan Bugniazet

Cardboard, Wood & Paint

89

Renee Ong

Marker, Paint & Collage

The Mothers

Katherine Du

My grandmother is eight years old when she sees her birthmother’s ovaries bleed into a wooden bucket. She hears moaning. Melting. Something godless as the blood pours like congealed tea from a flask.

Forty hours later, the light unfastens tenderly from her birthmother’s eyes.

Months after her birth, my grandmother is sold to a family with food and a stillborn daughter. They live on the other side of the mountains, away from Chongqing, away from the war.

They will love a ghost. Clothe her. Feed her. She will swipe scraps in the dark, find a way to send them back to her five blood siblings.

The family with food is a textile tycoon. It yawns, rich from the blood of others. Before her eyes know to lower, her voice to cool, my grandmother asks where the swollen lilies are born. Her milk mother holds her like a glass doll. Cotton is a dream, my angel. Never question the mother of dreams.

It is December 13, 1937, a day as timeworn as bloodless winter light. My grandmother is beginning to forget the shape of her birthmother’s voice when they descend: the Japanese, their gun-licked fingers, their salt-smoked lips.

Three hundred thousand Chinese will sprinkle these streets. Countless unborn children glued to the tips of bayonets. Bodies in the dust. Most are women with bellies sliced open like flayed salmon, purple-bruised legs splayed out in invitation.

My grandmother’s milk mother leaves her textile factory in Jiangsu hours before the Rape of Nanjing, only to die weeks later of the influenza. My grandmother will call it the miracle that knifed her in the heart.

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At seven years old, my grandmother leaves the empty house of textiles. With a cotton bag of prayers and morsels, she walks three hundred li through the remains of the Sichuan countryside. One hundred miles through a world of feral fear.

All around her are volcanoes of upturned dirt, frosted shells of peasants, broken faith. Sometimes she kisses her hands to the dusty fields so her tears can sting the earth.

After two suns and moons pass, a mountain ridge creeps toward her with no beginning or end. She sees a dip down the middle, a gorgeous wound. A memory surfaces: her milk mother’s warning. Bandits roam the place where the mountain sinks.

But the pangs of hunger cut her, devour her, become her. Her bamboo sandals carve rivers of blood on the soles of her feet as she runs. Ascends. Presses on. Dusk swallows the luster of the day. She persists. Sweat licks her cotton bag, the spaces where her face meets hair. Her eyes shudder, but she forces them open. Pretends they are orbs of fire. Soon the sun drips scarlet blood on the canvas of the sky.

A year after my grandmother returns to her homeland, her birthmother bleeds endlessly. My grandmother learns to pack, then unpack a box of ice around her heart. Allows an ugly hunger to become the pulse of her life.

Eventually her eldest sister embraces Chairman Mao, and the five blood siblings are fed well and taught the ways of the world. They spring fire from wet matches. Attend Chongqing University. The Japanese exchange students and professors inflame my grandmother at first, but on a fateful day of downpour, she slips in a pool of mud. A tender hand stretches before her eyes. She holds it. She will never let go of the Japanese professor who shows her that a nation does not define its people, that forgiveness is the only weapon that can end war.

92

In 1967, my grandmother flees a Chongqing ruptured by opposition factions within Chairman Mao’s paramilitary.

Eight One Five captures the northern bank of the Jialing River, while Opposition Until Death sticks guns through the southern cherry laurels of Chongqing University. My grandmother wraps her daughter in her arms. Scales the mountain behind the University. Eight One Five’s bullets sail toward their fading bodies. She is breathless. Boneless. Pockets of earth erupt inches away. In her mind, she is again on the mountain of her youth. That gorgeous wound. She is drinking the story of her blood, cresting the mountain to the place where the sun will rise.

Renee Ong

Marker, Paint & Collage 93

Popcorn

Gallant Zhuangli

“You know what I like about you?”

I ladle chicken broth into a paper bowl and hand it to him. Unenthused, he sniffs the soup before setting it back down on the table.

“You don’t fuss around. Some of the others – they drive me nuts. There’s this one girl. She force-feeds me.”

“Force-feeds me,” he repeats for emphasis. “Treats me like I’m a goddam toddler. She does the helicopter-spoon thing, and I go berserk. She makes this moronic humming noise.

And, when I open wide to request that she quit being such a bumbling idiot, she smashes food between my lips.”

Leroy looks me square in the face. His eyes, though foggy with second-stage glaucoma, grind into mine. “I’m old,” he says. “I’m not an invalid.”

I nod sympathetically. Subtly, I nudge the soup back towards him. Clearly, force-feeding is not an option.

“What are you doing here, anyway?” He asks me this at least twice a week. “Stuck inside with geezers. You’re young.

You should be out – having fun.”

I give the same answer I always give. “High school,” I say. “Internship. It’s a graduation requirement.”

Leroy snorts. “At a Senior Citizens’ Home. That’s ridiculous.”

I shrug. “What can I say? I have a thing for geezers.”

Leroy throws his head back and laughs. I love his laugh.

It’s full-body laughter - deep, rich and uproarious. For a moment, I just sit there and watch him. His chest heaves, and his shoulders shake; he’s brimming with an earthquake.

But I’m not here for banter. I’m here for details.

The soup is nearly cold now, so I revert to a new tactic.

Popcorn. It always gets him talking. Sure enough - I offer him the bag of microwaved kernels, and his eyes light up.

Leroy scoops a handful of Orville Redenbacher’s premium brand – quietly, he ponders its buttered saltiness.

“You know,” he says, suddenly. “I used to have a daughter.”

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“Really?” I inhale sharply. “What happened?”

Leroy shrugs. “I messed up.” He runs his finger along a jagged scar on his right forearm. “The Foster System took her.”

Eagerly, I urge his memory onward. “Did you ever see her again?”

Leroy averts my gaze. “She found a good family,” he says simply. “I didn’t want to intervene.”

Abruptly, he stops chewing popcorn. Clearly, we've gone too far. He looks at me again: “What are you doing here, anyway?”

Frustrated, I bite back my response. Three months of fake interning at Sunset Assisted Living. I want progress. Gently, I rest my hand on Leroy’s jagged scar. He jerks back. “What?” he demands. “Spit it out.”

The beads that encircle my wrist blend with the aged rouge of his veined skin. I refuse to let go. Startled, Leroy's eyes rise to meet mine. With a hint of recognition, he lets out a breath. I smile.

Joey Jimenez

Charcoal 95

A Change in Scenery

Liz Chicas

On a hot summer evening in Queens, under orange parking lot lighting, Grant crouched on the floor, searching for the best angle. Dancers surrounded him, smiles on their faces, trying to get in his shot.

They wore blue jeans and white polos that read "San Simon Bloque New York." The soccer players across the park stopped their game to watch how in sync they all were.

There was so much noise— the music, the soccer players yelling ¡aquí pasalo!, and the chitchat of locals who watched the parking lot become a stage, a stadium, a performance.

“The equipment is familiar. This setting isn’t. I’ve done plenty of documentaries, taken plenty of photos, but never any videos like this. This is different, for sure.”

Incessant hand movements accompanied Grant’s words.

It seemed too much for someone whose career depended on steady shots. I wondered when it started, the movements.

Anxiety? Habit? Excessive excitement?

Grant was taller than all the male dancers. He had light brown hair that always seemed to slide out of the black hat he wore. It was hard for his eyes to leave the camera’s small screen, the people moving in it, the light glaring in the corner of the shot.

“It’s an addiction. I can’t stop taking photos, or I get anxious. I always see things I want to share with others. I want to show people that there is more to photographs and more to this world than the things they see on billboards and in the subway.”

He never stopped feeding his obsession. Left hand steady, right pointer pressed down, snap. Next. There was so much to see that night in Queens. I could see myself becoming an addict.

Grant Flanagan broke his arm skateboarding when he was fifteen. “I was injured, but I wanted to stay involved, so I started taking photos and videos of my friends skating. It ended up being even more fun than doing it myself, and I 96

got a lot fewer bruises.”

Grant never took his eyes off the little screen.

“I think I got the shot,” he said as he cleaned his camera lens and placed it gently back into its pouch. He went home happy that night.

Grant and I went to a café after the shoot.

“So tell me about growing up in New York, some of your favorite childhood memories,” I said.

As he took a gulp of coffee, Grant sat in silence. We could hear the couple next to us arguing about whose parents’ house they would go to for Thanksgiving. I could feel the cool New York air hitting my skin, the awkward silence filling the space between us.

Grant called the waiter over, “Can I get another coffee please? Same thing. Black. Thank you.” He looked at me. I took my coffee the same way.

“I went to school for photography in California, and from there went on to intern for Joe Pugliese in Los Angeles and then Mark Seliger in New York. After three months with Mark, I was offered a full-time position but turned it down to be a freelance photo assistant. I was then hired as Marco Grob’s studio manager and first assistant, and that’s where I am now.”

He believed his childhood started when he went to college. I wanted to know what he thought of me— the eighteenyear-old girl across from him. What was I if not a child?

“In 2013, I was having a hard time finding inspiration to shoot. I was having problems with my girlfriend. All of the dark, brooding stuff that wasn’t in me before filled my head.

So, I just left what I was doing and blew through all my savings in Paris for three months. It was liberating. I read every day, watched old films, and came back much more focused and driven.”

Three months in Paris. Three months to clear his head and figure out what he wanted. He made it sound so simple to pick up everything and leave.

Grant never got back together with his girlfriend. Everything he said about her felt heavy. The words dragged 97

98

through the dark part of his mind. He cared.

After Paris, Grant started many new projects.

“I spent a long time in Southern California working on a project about drifters. There are so many interesting stories waiting to be told out there. I met a family of drifters with a seventeen-year-old daughter who hadn’t been enrolled in school in a decade. It gave a lot of perspective to the reasons behind my drive to work.”

Grant never seemed to stay in one place for a long period of time. Everything was always moving around, whether it was him, the people in his photos, or his hands. He paired every word with a gesture.

The hair was coming out of his hat again. I felt like taking a picture.

Our conversation was almost finished, but there was always another story to tell, a place to go, a person to meet.

It was no surprise Grant found it difficult to part ways with his projects.

“Why is it difficult to finish?”

“When I show a photo to someone, I always spot things I could have done differently. Questions pop in my head that I should have asked my subjects. Always.”

It seemed hard leading a life of unfinished business. Studio time was never enough. There were too many questions, too many incomplete conversations in his head.

Grant took one more sip of coffee and paused for a moment. He bent down and searched through his backpack. He pulled out a camera. It was pointed at me. Left hand steady, right pointer pressed down, snap. Next.

Anna Sargeantson

Photography & Digital Design 99

Devon Miin

100

Photography & Marker

Room in New York, 1932

Anna McCormack

Her hand slides mindlessly across the white keys, pushing from note to note, creating no recognizable melody, her boredom evident in the way she leans lazily against the piano, using only one finger to make discordant sounds.

The satiny red of her dress stands out beside the glossy black piano, and the yellow walls bathe her in golden light, but she is unnoticed.

While her shoulders are turned towards the piano, her knees are bent, ready to face him, should he look up.

But his shoulders are hunched, and his brow furrowed with concentration.

And he is not focused on her.

She waits, stalled by his newspaper, which must be read, because at that moment, the news is less provocative than a discordant note.

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yelp.com/labor-skate-shop-new-york

Francesca Narea

Labor Skate Shop 5/5 stars $$ 46 Canal St New York, NY 10002 b/t Ludlow St & Orchard St Lower East Side Francesca Narea says: For the real skater, Labor Skate Shop is a daily stop en route to the park, conveniently located two blocks down the street.

The inside is gray and plain, but the decks fulfill all aesthetic needs of the store. You will find all the obligatory skating paraphernalia, including Labor Skate Shop hoodies, Vans shirts, and Adidas shoes.

The outside is covered with stickers, scratched from skateboard tricks. You will most likely see a boy attempting his first kick-flip onto the curb, snap his board, and curse.

The other skaters hanging outside balance their elbows on their knees, sitting on top of the board’s sandy grip tape, probably putting holes in their jeans.

You’ll see a girl with a flannel shirt tied around her waist glide up to the side of the store and slide to a stop, saying, “Hey, can I have a some hardware?”

She’ll reach over the counter to grab a skate tool and go sit on the stoop. Her deck is worn with years of stickers on top of stickers (purchased at Labor of course—the free hardware perks are hard to pass).

Across the street, Dimes serves brunch. It is known as a model 102

hangout, and if you look closely, you can see skinny girls eating acai bowls, dressed exclusively in black.

Labor is as well-known as Dimes but by a different kind of celebrity. If you’re lucky, you will catch a glimpse of a welldressed man sticking his head into the store.

The staff will greet him with a familiar, “Anthony, how’s it going?” Anthony’s leather Oxfords versus the staff's worn canvas sneakers define the relationship between the deck artist and the skater. When you sell designs, you get money, not fame, but when you skate professionally, you get the fame, and if you're lucky, a little money.

As usual, only a few of Anthony’s deck designs are left in the shop—he’s the artist behind 5Boro boards, which I’d highly recommend if you are looking to gain some street cred.

Next time you’re in the Lower East Side, stop by Labor and maybe even try an acai bowl from Dimes.

Pro tip: The subway is at the end of Canal Street which gives you a few blocks to try out your new skateboard.

Olivia Weiser

Photography & Digital Design 103

Paige Guerriero

104

Photography & Digital Design

Louisiana Summer, 1957

Elizabeth Dunn

Growing up, Louisiana summers meant Ginny guarding the door, the buttery smell of Coppertone permeating from her flour-speckled apron as she dabbed the tips of our noses and ears with the thick, sticky whiteness.

We scampered past her protesting, “Aw come on, Ginny! Do you want us to be pale as ghosts forever?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Ginny would retort with a soft laugh.

“That’s exactly what I want.”

The day I packed our silver car to begin the long trek towards a place of higher learning, Ginny had been bustling all day in the kitchen, baking my favorites: peach crumble, two dozen pralines, and a whole caramel cake.

I wrapped my long arms around her middle, clenching my fingers tightly together at her back and burying my head into the soft folds of her apron.

She rested her chin on my hair as I listened to her breathe in and out, in and out, real slow.

“Ginny,” I whispered, pressing my check firmly against her.

“Yeah, Honey?” she cooed. I swallowed my breath, as I gazed at the front door and remembered the sun beating down on its white wood. “Ginny,” I said again, as I pictured an empty room with four white-washed walls and a springy mattress 1300 miles away.

“Ginny,” I croaked, but she hushed me with her soft voice and stroked my hair.

“Don’t worry, Honey,” she said. “I know, I already know.”

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Timing

Caroline Baird

You died in 1983, sixteen years before I was born.

We were supposed to be great friends, and they tell me God made us one brain, then split it in two, but, Grandfather, our timing did not align.

There would be a picture in an album of me on your shoulders, pointing at floats in the Memorial Day parade and a stued rabbit in my room, dirty and torn, a companion since the day of my birth.

There would be a song you would sing to me that I would hum when you weren’t around and a charcoal drawing of you on my wall that would smile at me before I closed my eyes at night.

There would be times when I'd run away from home and go live with you and times when we'd lock eyes and know just what the other was thinking, but most importantly, there would be you.

But the rhythm of your pulse came to a stop at a dinner table in 1983 because your cholesterol was too high and you smoked like a chimney.

I wish I could have these memories, instead of imagining them.

I wish I could have adored you, and I wish you could have adored me, but, Grandfather, our timing did not align.

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Jadesola Ariyibi

Laser Cut Scultpure

107

The Train Station (November 20th, 1910)

Caroline Dunn

Wash the tiles, Tanya. Scrub the train station. Hasn’t he seen the tiles of the Astapovo train station? Nikolai’s a fool, his mind numbed by his daily kiloliters of vodka. Wash the tiles? Water alone won’t clear the tiles of all their grime, let alone the years of secrets and intrigue that occurred here.

Aching, I bury my head in my hands, wincing as I bump the yellow bruise staining my cheek. Ridiculous job.

A train caws in the distance; unfurling wings of steam as it pulls from the station and speeds towards St. Petersburg away from Astapovo. Only the burnt smell of coal remains, wafting through the grimy station from the caked tracks, past the stands selling tea and vodka, and nestling in the crevices beneath the looming yellow windows. Is this what I dreamed of, as a little girl nestled beside the fire? For a moment, I sink my tired head into the warm lap of self-pity: why, why, must my life be so miserable?

“Tanya,” a deep voice bellows behind my crouched figure.

“I’d like to see you in my office.”

A pause. Only the roars of engines and the chattering of passengers can be heard.

“I’ll be there in a moment, Nikolai,” I reply, bending my head even closer to the tiles in hopes that my tawny curls will hide the bruise. Last time – but I promised myself I wouldn’t think about last time. Footsteps fade behind me, and aching between my shoulder blades lessens.

Sighing, I toss the rag back into the bucket and awkwardly shuffle back towards the utility closet, stumbling once over an uneven tile and sloshing the sooty water all over my shoes.

Fool, I chide myself.

Another train hoots, and a stream of passengers pours out of the first class compartment. A herd of well-dressed children, trailing silken ribbons and ruddy-cheeked nursemaids, marches behind an elegant woman. She glides past me, all swishing silken skirts, not even sparing me a glance.

The wizened man behind her leers at me, though, winking 108

suggestively. I frown, because it isn’t proper. Still, it’s nice to be admired.

The stationmaster’s office is tucked in a dusty corner, but at least he has an office. “Nikolai?” I knock on the door, greeted by a gust of cigar smoke as his toad-like eyes peer at me through the crack. “Come in,” he leers, puffing a tendril of smoke into my face. “Does the smoke bother you, Tanya?” he asks as I cough, but he doesn’t extinguish it.

“N-no,” I hack. “What is it?” Reflexively, I shove my curls behind my ear, revealing the bruise. Nikolai’s eyes narrow.

“Ivan hit you again, Tanya, didn’t he?”

The floor seems immensely fascinating, all of a sudden.

I watch a little spider crawl from a crack, its spindly legs quaking with effort as it climbs its mountains. Such small mountains…but such a small spider, too.

“I asked you a question, Tanya,” Nikolai growls, forcing my chin upward. His nail bites into my flesh, and I can almost feel the bruise blooming, the skin turning a sallow yellow and a deep indigo, like an indignant flower.

“Did your brother hit you, again, Tanya?” Staggering out of the dusty shadows, clutching his bottle of vodka, singing throatily.

Slamming the door, waking me from my little pallet by the fire.

“I – no, Nikolai, he didn’t!” Only kvass, for dinner? What do you do all day, woman?

“Don’t lie to me, Tanya!” Bitch. Just like her. Firelight glinting off his dark eyes, so black, so angry. Swinging massive hands at cowering targets. Outside, the neighbors chatter, children laugh. No one comes. This is Russia, after all.

“He didn’t hit me,” I repeat. “I fell.” Nikolai grabs me, shaking me harder and harder until blackness threatens to seep across my vision and my stomach spins and spins.

“TELL THE TRUTH!” “Stop it!” I gasp finally. “You’re the one hurting me now!”

Nikolai freezes, his dark eyebrows crinkling with consternation. Silence falls as inscrutable emotions flit across his face – frustration? Guilt? Rubbing my sore arms almost absentmindedly, I watch the little spider, still treading across the tiles. How easily I could smash the little creature, climbing 109

its mountains and never aware of the force about to strike.

I hate them. I really do. My brother, Nikolai, all of Russia.

“I forgot myself,” his eyes flash, as though his principles can’t abide the apology.

“It was nothing.” I feel the words slip out of my mouth, though I yearn to scream, you hypocrite!

“But,” he adds, raising one hairy finger in the air. “I can’t abide a liar. Especially if she is to be my wife.”

The small office seems to grow more claustrophobic by the minute, heated by my fear and his anger. I imagine kissing his thin lips, his scraggly beard scratching my cheek. Baking him pies for dinner, smiling as he lumbers home. No longer living with my brother…but married to a Russian misogynist.

Trading Satan for the Devil.

“Nikolai.” I try to smile, but it quavers unconvincingly.

“We’ve been over this. I’m only seventeen. And you are 42.

Maybe in a few years.…”

“Plenty of girls marry at 17. Peasants marry at 14!”

“I’m not a peasant.”

“That’s right, you’re the daughter of a whore,” Nikolai retorts sadistically, his eyes glinting as I stiffen. “Many would say that makes you a whore too, Tanya. Be happy that I am not of the same mindset, or we would be having… a different conversation.” Father’s body barely cold, already landladies banging on the door with their wizened hands outstretched… money, money, money. One day, Mother’s pallet lay empty. But the landladies stopped banging on our door, and the shopkeepers accepted our credit again…and Ivan kept beating me. So cold, alone by the fire!

“I. am. Very. Grateful,” I spit each word out through my teeth, hating my subservience, hating my cowardice. “I need to finish washing the floor,” I announce, spinning without him dismissing me. If I stand in this room any longer, I think I might die of fear.

“We’ll finish this conversation later,” Nikolai warns. “And Tanya? There’s an old man loitering in the second-class waiting room. Go kick him out. We don’t allow vagrants at the Astapovo train station.”

110

Flinging open the door before he can add any more hints about our nuptial, I hurry towards the waiting room. Berating someone for waiting in a waiting room? Obviously that makes sense. But I don’t have enough courage to ignore a direct command.

Grimy and cramped with a mix-match assortment of chairs, the waiting room is empty besides one gnarled man, staring fixedly at a point on the wall. Scratching his matted white beard, he mutters, “But that can’t be right.” Despite his fantastical appearance, his clothes are too expensive and his wrinkled skin too soft to mark a vagrant. Nikolai is a fool for calling him one. Hating myself for disturbing a gentleman’s musings, I mutter in a small voice, “Excuse me, sir?”

He doesn’t turn around, but remarks, “If you were that spider, would you want to know that you will spend your entire brief existence only spinning webs and eating flies, until squashed by some careless person?”

“P-pardon me?” I stutter, staring at the small spider adorning the wall. Is it the same spider from Nikolai’s office?

“What’s your name, mademoiselle?”

Suspicious of unusual courtesy, I only give him my first and patronymic, “Nataliya Ivanovna, sir.”

“The spider is a metaphor, Nataliya Ivanovna,” the man smiles, “for an individual. Most humans spend their entire lives working, eating, sleeping, only to die one day, forgotten.

What then, is the point of life?”

“What else is there to do?”

“Die,” smiles the man, his milky eyes almost twinkling.

“No one said you have to live.”

“God does.”

“So then you believe in God?” “I go to church.” Mother used to take us to church…before she disappeared. How Father would scowl, putting on his worn overcoat!

“But do you believe?”

“The Bible tells us that God is merciful, that He will protect me. But I don’t think God cares what happens in my life. He doesn’t stop Ivan from hitting me or Nikolai from 111

tormenting me.” Why am I telling you this? But the words just keep pouring out.

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” quotes the man, smiling at some inward joke.

“Anna Karenina,” I grimace, remembering the selfish heroine and her thoughtless destruction of her family.

“You don’t like Tolstoy?”

“No, of course I like Tolstoy. He is the greatest writer in all of Russia, in the whole world perhaps. But…he made Anna a hero, and I don’t know if I can forgive him for that.”

“And why wouldn’t she be a hero?” the man asks, his white eyebrows raising in an alarming fashion.

“Tolstoy paints her as this tragic, beautiful hero, but all she does is tear her family apart. And then she kills herself!”

“For love, and independence!”

“It’s selfish.”

“To escape a loveless marriage? To put your happiness before others? I wonder, Nataliya Ivanovna, if perhaps it is strong.”

“Then strength is something only the wealthy can afford.

I certainly could never leave my brother for my own happiness.” And my mother, I add silently, wherever she is.

“Then why do you work in a train station, Tanya?”

“To make money,” I reply, “because there is no other work.”

“There are other jobs. With better bosses, perhaps. But only at a train station can a dream become reality. Only in a train station can you leave.”

Irrational anger surges through. Who does this man think he is, to tell me how to live my life? “Anna dies at a train station. She throws herself in front of train,” I retort, “How can you tell me to be selfish and seize my freedom when it wrecks havoc upon every character in the novel?”

“Don’t be this spider, Nataliya Ivanovna. Or soon enough, you will find yourself squashed, and old and withered and bitter, and wonder why you didn’t leave when you had the chance.”

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With that, he closes his wrinkled eyes and sets his snowy head upon hands speckled with age. “Now leave me,” he mutters. “I am trying to sleep.”

My feet carry me towards the broom closet, but my thoughts continue to whirl, the rusty cogs suddenly oiled with hope and anticipation. Leave? Leave! I had no money to support myself. How could I leave my mother? If she’s still alive, Ivan’s voice whispers in my head, but I banish the sound of the Devil. Doesn’t God demand altruism? Won’t the meek be rewarded in heaven?

Ignore the crazed ravings of aged gentleman; I remind myself firmly, his mind is probably garbled from years of servants and frippery. All the same, I find myself walking reluctantly back to the waiting room. I want to ask him, was all of Anna’s unhappiness worth the love she found?

The waiting room is still empty besides the slumbering stranger. No one wants to stay in this sleeping town, let alone the decrepit station, any longer than necessary. Loath as I am to interrupt the fervid dreams of a madman, the eponymous specter of drunken tirades – and perhaps a marriage to Nikolai – overcomes any self-respect.

“Excuse me, sir?” I whisper, peering over his sleeping form. He doesn’t stir.

“Sir?” I insist again, peering at the speckled lids, the craggy features. I don’t want to tap him, not only because he’s a stranger but also because of the almost divine aura around his sagacious features. A gentleman philosopher.

What is he doing, sleeping in this tumbling station? Leave, Nataliya Ivanovna. Live your life!

But Nikolai’s furious face appears in my mind again, and so I gently tap his shoulder. No response. I shove him a little harder, and the body shakes but doesn’t wake.

I feel a prickle of unease. The flesh feels cold, lifeless.

Shaking the body even harder, I feel a small sob escape me.

The face is waxen, just like my father’s when he died. The eyes stare into the great beyond, seeing a world that I cannot fathom. Just like my father. The heady smell of incense, mother sobbing in black, strangers crowding around a wooden box, too 113

tall for my ten-year-old self to see into. Stop sleeping, Daddy!

Why isn’t he waking up, Ivan? Then, dragged outside my tawny curls, sobbing and screaming, beaten for the first time. Mother no longer laughed, Ivan no longer played, but drank and drank. And the blows just kept coming.

“Please wake up, sir, please wake up!” I shove him desperately. How can he have been alive one minute, and then dead the next? He simply closed his eyes…and now he’s gone.

Ivan, where’s Mummy? More slaps, more screams. Don’t mention her name, anymore! Whore. She is dead to me, DEAD. They’re all dead. All of them.

“Excuse me, miss, are you all right?” The soft-gloved hand of a bourgeois middle-aged woman taps my shoulder.

I raise my red-rimmed eyes to hers, concerned but distant.

It’s à la mode to give charity these days, I remind myself bitterly. Even so, another sob escapes me.

“That man,” I gesture towards the corpse, “is dead.”

Gathering up my skirts, I rush away, leaving the woman to figure out what to do. It isn’t my responsibility. It isn’t my fault that he talked to me, and died minutes after. Everyone you love leaves, Ivan caws in my ear.

Submerged in a pool of mucky water, my rags and bucket remain besides the dirty tiles. There’s a certain comfort in the monotony of cleaning tiles that will never get clean. I could scrub for eternity…and it would make no difference. Your life makes no difference. Tears bite, and I imagine their salty taste as they trickle past my tongue and disappear into the muddy floor. I won’t give into weakness. I won’t cry.

“Tanya – you’d never guess – are you still scrubbing the same tile from this morning?” To hope more from life than scrubbing tiles. Cooking dinnr for my brother, dodging the amorous attentions of my stationmaster. Dreaming, always dreaming. Take your head from the clouds, Nataliya Ivanovna, and live!

“The floor is very dirty.”

“Never mind,” Nikolai waves his hand, for once unconcerned. “That man I thought was homeless, do you know 114

what happened?”

Surprised that Nikolai cared about the death of some forsaken soul, I reply flatly, “He died.”

“Inconsequential,” Nikolai insists, ignoring my glassy eyes that betray the tears that threaten to rush again, “That man was Tolstoy – Leo Tolstoy! The greatest writer in all of Russia.”

He made Anna a hero, and I don’t know if I can forgive him for that. The greatest writer in Russian history talked to me, and I insulted him. Me. The servant waif, the subjected sister – perhaps Tolstoy appreciated the cliché of it all.

How can he talk about life achievements, when he’ll be remembered in history? Leave? Stay? What to remain for – a brother whose love has turned into violence and alcoholism?

A misogynistic suitor who protects me with punches? His life had purpose…even if he died sleeping in a train station.

But what circumstances… “….I wonder why he was waiting in the second class waiting room? He’s nobility, certainly he could afford first class…”

Has he no family? To die alone, lecturing a young girl on the importance of taking chances. But to leave, to throw myself into the great expanse of the wide world? Why work in a train station? Freedom. Leave? Stay? What regrets must he have? “…I think I might make the paper, Tanya. Imagine, me – a celebrity! It…” A train hoots in the distance as passengers spill onto it.

“Tanya?” Nikolai calls, as I spin around and begin to run towards it.

Tolstoy died. But his life wasn’t like that of the spider.

His name will be sung by the muses for all of history.

Anna dies, too. But she gained happiness – momentary happiness – and escaped her loveless life. Was that brief moment of happiness worth all the pain she caused?

What is my legacy? A drudge, hoping to earn enough to leave. In a year or two, married to Nikolai, sporting new bruises, still seeing my brother every week for dinner. Still 115

scrubbing floors, baking pies. Spinning webs, crawling mountainous tiles. Until one day squashed by a careless foot.

The train hoots again, and I peer at the open doors, beckoning, the warm, laughing air pooling out. Freedom, Freedom, Freedom, sings the conductor’s whistle.

Below, the track mocks me, prison bars. Make a choice.

Anna. Tolstoy. Tanya.

Is there any choice at all, really?

Graiden Berger

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Photography & Digital Design

Gabi Guzman

Photography & Digital Design

117

“...BUT THE AIR AND THE SKY ARE FREE...”

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September

Serena Profaci I One of the best parts of September was waking up to sunlight. Before Bryan even opened his eyelids, he could sense the warmth streaming in from behind the shades, smell the scent his wife’s shampoo left on their pillowcases, hear her warming a bottle for their son.

“Good morning, babe.” Sarah poked her head into their room and flashed one of her radiant smiles. It was funny how even after ten years of marriage it could still surprise him a little.

“You got up before me. That’s not fair. I wanted to give you a kiss.”

“You can give me a kiss now.”

“Uh-oh. What’s that look?

“Sean is going to stay home today. He has a fever.”

“Sarah, I have to go to work. I can’t miss it again.”

“Bryan, you know I miss work whenever he’s sick, but I can’t do it today. It’s show-and-tell, and I have to hamsterproof the room. The kids are so excited.”

“There are no other teachers who can cover for you?”

“Bryan, I have to. Please stay home with him? You can tell your boss there was a funeral or something.”

Bryan paused, staring at her. He knew he would relent, but the way she blushes when she gets flustered made him want to stretch out this moment for as long as he could.

She was still beautiful, something he had almost forgotten a while ago. “Fine.” At least he wouldn’t have to go all the way downtown today.

“Thank you. I love you. Have fun, you two.”

“We love you, too.” Bryan picked up Sean and sank into the couch, holding him close to his body as Sarah rushed around the house, boots clicking on the wood floors. She gave them both one last kiss and dashed out of the door. Bryan looked around, suddenly struck by the silence, the hole her missing presence left.

“What are we going to do today, buddy? Mom’s gone!”

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II As the train rattled, Bill’s knee brushed against his neighbor’s. They instinctively scooted apart as much as they could—which was not more than half an inch on the cracked leather bench. They muttered an apology, both looking down or away, and went back to their papers. It was commonly understood—that’s just what you do.

Bill stretched his leg out in the aisle and stared out the window ahead of him, trying not to make eye contact with the person in the booth facing him. It made him wonder when human contact became such a bad thing. Another commute, with men in suits packed in like sardines. Or maybe they were just sardines living another day, same suit, different tie. The thought made him smile.

On days like this, when the routine carved into his skin and back with nails like iron, he would think about how life could have been different. Bill had played hockey at Yale, even went on to make the US Olympic team in ’84. What if he’d stayed pro, instead of taking a job in finance? He could have traveled the country, maybe even the world, instead of commuting from a suburb in Connecticut to downtown Manhattan every day. He could have retired early, maybe become a sports commentator. He had the looks, the charm, definitely the knowledge and fast wit.

But he also had a family. Two daughters and a wife whom he loved very much. And they were more important than any dream he ever could have had.

III Joe twiddled a pen between his fingers, his foot tapping incessantly. Even as a kid, he’d always get anxious when it was sunny outside, and he was stuck indoors. Joe was sitting at a large round table in a room with windows overlooking Midtown. The jabbering traders, buzzing printers, and the ring ring ringing of telephones played in the background while his coworker’s presentation droned on.

Joe was the type of guy who had almost been a lot of different things and had plenty of stories to share about each.

120

Today, and for the past eleven years, he was a trader. And he was damn good at it. Some nights he took classes at NYU, but he hadn’t been back since the birth of his son.

If you ask him about it, Joe always recalls this day the same. He was sitting in this meeting, when the glass door swung open, the glare shielding the man’s shaking hand.

“A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center,” he’d said. Just like that. And no one knew what to believe. Joe instinctively texted his mother, as if only she could verify the truth. “No,” she’d said. “It was a jet.”

That’s when he started running. Running and running and wouldn’t stop running until he got to Grand Central.

And he realized, he was not alone. But he felt it. His survival instincts had kicked in. Some people were running to catch trains before they shut down, but there were still men and women pouring out from the tracks heading to their jobs.

Utter oblivion. There were yells all throughout the terminal.

Turn around. Turn around. But people didn’t know to listen.

To Joe, those other people meant nothing. They were insignificant. His one thought: his daughter.

IV Show-and-tell. That’s all that today meant to the kids, and it was Sarah’s job to keep it that way. In so little time, everything had changed. She knew that after this day nothing would be the same. But that was her burden, not the kids’.

As soon as parents heard the news, they rushed to the preschool. It was kind of beautiful, the way the parents hugged their kids so tightly and the kids delighted at the unexpected sight of Mommy or Daddy.

Soon, a dad approached her, tie loosened, eyes frantic.

His name was Joe. “Where’s Serena?” In those two words, Sarah knew what he had seen that day.

“Playing. On the rock climbing wall with Nate,” she pointed, voice as level as possible, and immediately he spotted her, thanking Sarah with his eyes.

Yet, he did not go over to her. He let her live in peace for several more sacred minutes. Together, the adults stood, 121

watching the innocence around them, trying to soak it in like flowers absorbing light.

V “Where are we going, Daddy?” Joe peered at Serena through the rearview mirror of their station wagon, as if taking his eyes off her would cause her to evaporate.

“We’re going to Boo’s, baby.” Boo was what the kids called Bill, and now everyone had taken to calling him that.

“Why are we going to Boo’s?” Joe knew Serena’s favorite word was “why,” but he wasn’t really prepared to answer this one. Because we haven’t heard from him since he left for work this morning. Because phone calls aren’t going through, and we can’t leave his family alone to just wonder where he is. Because he could be… He couldn’t let himself think of that as a possibility.

He went, with the classic, “Because,” but added, “I love you.” She seemed satisfied with this, at least for the moment.

“Knock-knock.”

“Who’s there?”

VI The last kid to leave, as usual, was a boy named Jack. Not many of the other teachers had the patience for him, but to Sarah, he was puckish and delightful, with a smile quick to cover his entire face, like a flame racing up the sides of paper.

Sarah lingered, long after the other teachers had left. As she stood in her classroom, hand on the light switch, she turned over her shoulder and looked about her. The fingerpaintings hung on the wall, messy yet made with the most care. The tiny plastic red chairs, hardly a foot off the ground.

She sat down on one of these red chairs, knees almost to her shoulders, and felt her childhood memories flooding back to her.

She rubbed the spot on her forehead where a boy named Alexander threw a block at her head, as if she could still feel the throb, the stinging tears welling up in her eyes, the blush rising to her cheeks. She heard the music playing in her ears, faintly, as if underwater, of the time when she refused to clean up and marked her defiance by dancing on the arts and crafts table.

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Absentmindedly, she began scraping glue and stickers off the table where she sat. Minutes could have passed, hours.

She sat, and scraped, and thought about how her husband should have been in that building, but wasn’t. Mostly, she thought about the baby boy, her baby boy, who had saved her husband’s life.

Annie Harris

Photography & Digital Design

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the summer we were free

Emma Gallagher

I lean out the window & it’s already dark 7 at night & black swallows me up the stars here at home are small & scarce I remember the nights when they filled the sky like the freckles on my arms & I was so dizzy I was certain I would pass out the phone connection crackles & gives out & I am left in the black alone with nothing but the grainy Polaroids & they don’t even come near the truth of dark water rushing fast underneath me drowning in sweaters & salt & laughter radio & freedom & purple sky all I know of sleepless nights & worn-out Converse of motels & hair dye & scary movies of fiery sparks & yellow lights cast upon empty streets & now my flannel still smelling like smoke reminds me of you & all of our friends & when I'm back on the phone I laugh as you tell me about your week & your hockey team & the song you found that I need to listen to & I tell you about the book I just read & what happened at the football game last weekend & we talk about who we like & moving to the city & what we want to do with our lives & it kills me every time you call that I can't capture the minutes like fleeting fireflies I breathe in the autumn air hear the crinkly laughter over the phone look up & drink in the night sky 124

Kate De Frino

Photography & Digital Design

125

Turks on Turkey Day

Francesca Narea

“Why is that Muslim buying a turkey!?”

A fat woman in a chador pointed to a man walking out of the butcher shop with a plump package—Thanksgiving turkeys.

In the heart of Queens, where Moroccans, Turks and Arabs wander the shopping streets, the fourth Thursday in November is not a national holiday.

As a butcher waited for his next customer, he watched Netflix’s latest action movie with gun scenes blasting at full volume. A woman bought her halal meat and several bags of groceries. Among the recognizable items were Turkish cotton candy, pita and farmer's cheese. The butcher emerged from his corner in the small store to carry her bags, carefully navigating without touching the woman. “Soh ree, soh ree,” the butcher apologized when he returned a few minutes later.

Even during the winter months, A Taste of Morocco, the restaurant across the street from the butcher, offers only outdoor seating, hence the ubiquitous silver kettle of hot mint tea. The aroma of lentil soup pervaded the premises as a family devoured a hearty Middle-Eastern lunch, with a side of fries. A passerby on the phone wore sunglasses and a leather jacket, dressed as though he were an Arab pop star. He spoke in harsh syllables, which caused a point of contention between the two younger sons at the table who broke from their Arabic mother tongue to debate the man’s language: “It was definitely standard Arabic.”

“If I heard two more words, I would have been able to tell you it was Eastern, for sure.”

The father retreated inside to pay. The mother spoke for the first time during the meal while fixing the scarf wrapped around her head.

The two children raced to the candy store next door, eager for Turkish delights and baklava over sour patch and skittles.

“We get to pick anything we want!”

126

Past the candy store, the street stretched on for about five blocks, sprinkled with hookah bars, supermarkets, and clothing shops selling chadors, until the corner, where a Chilean bakery faced the busier road. An older man behind the counter pulled steaming empanadas from the oven. A tanned Hispanic ordered in Spanish, while his girlfriend waited in the corner with a pale face and a multicolored flower crown wrapped around her head. The two Chileans eating their completos laughed and muttered, “Quien es esa gringa,” pointing out the girl’s stark presence. A soap opera on the television above the seating area drowned out the ambient sizzles of cooking. The shop ran out of chicken empanadas and the abundant alfajores supply was quickly diminishing—as per usual.

A block to the left, a woman clothed in a red sari with beaded gold embroidery stepped out of the temple onto the grey concrete and glanced at the clouded sky. In a moment, she was gone. Her family followed, clothed in indigo and cardamom, colors as spiced as the steam of Indonesian rijsttafel drifting from the restaurant across the street.

While one Muslim man prepared his Thanksgiving turkey, the hookah bars spewed fruity smoke, the butcher cleaned his next goat head, the soap opera’s main character passed away, and a weeklong wedding celebration began.

Olivia Quinton

Photography & Digital Design

127

Phoebe Morris

128

Pen & Colored Pencil

26 Angels after Sandy Hook

Jordan Smith

I want to write a song made up of birthdays and tragedy. But I don’t want it to be the same as the one I’ve heard for the past three years. It will start in the key of C; perfect, easy, and whole in 4/4 rhythm. Time will be my metronome. I will hear the tick tock tick tock of laughter around me. But then in the twelfth verse, it will change to the key of F, one single flat. It will sound a bit funny, like a mistake, like when the winds pick up and the sky is growing darker, but the weatherman hasn’t issued a warning and still sports his thin, plastic smile.

It’ll be just like that. Time will tock faster. The metronome will change to 2/4 time as the smiles and presents slip off the score, unable to keep their grip. I will hold out all the notes. The fourteenth verse will slow almost to a crawl, and the key is now G, no, not G... one sharp cannot poke my ribs and cut me into tiny, flying pieces like snow. You cannot fit an infinite amount of sharps in a single key. It does not exist.

By the end of my song, you will be too shocked for words and one lonely tear will forge a trail down your cheek. I will play the song every birthday for the rest of my life for the 26 angels who will never have another.

129

Two Boat Rides on the Nile

Maggie Basta

From the East Shore Other than the small wake our sailboat leaves behind, the Nile River lies utterly still. The shore to the left of us is Luxor.

Littered with Egyptian Luxury Resorts, it is the go-to tropical destination for European tourists in March. Faux authentic stone buildings sit behind decadent infinity pools, lined by cabanas. Vacationers sit poolside in loungers, tanning under the beating sun. To the right, the western shore is covered by grain farms. Water buffalos graze next to soggy rice paddies, while farmers sow the fields above them.

As the boat slowly bobs along, beads of sweat roll down my face. I graze the water with one hand and eat an apple with another, studying its smooth green skin in a futile attempt to distract myself from the stifling heat. Eventually, the two owners grow exasperated with the slow pace of our trip, and take it upon themselves to lower the sail and row manually. They are desperately eager to please my grandfather. As a surgeon, he is one of the few men of "prestige" from the area, and his approval would bring immediate success to their chartering company.

Despite their efforts, we sit for ages. The boat barely moves.

“We should have gotten the motorboat,” my grandfather grumbles.

The men try harder, but their efforts are useless. A shout comes from behind the boat.

“Marhabaan!”

Everyone turns. About fifty feet away, a young girl paddles tirelessly in a small rowboat, fighting our wake. I look at my grandfather and the boat owners. They want her to leave. My grandfather wants to show us the beauty of his country with a peaceful boat ride. The owners want to please my grandfather. The girl perseveres, slowly pulling up next to us.

“Marhabaan!” she shouts again in Arabic.

The girl is about my age, no more than eleven or twelve.

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She is wearing a long pastel pink dress, the fraying hem caked in mud. Her head is wrapped in a hijab. Underneath, a small patch of hair peaks out, plastered to her sweaty forehead. In between strokes she tries and fails to pull her hijab back over her hair.

She stops rowing for a second to hold out her hands.

“Min fadlik!” she says, begging for money.

No one replies.

As she paddles closer, her face becomes visible. Her eyes protrude from their sockets. Dark brown circles sag below them. When she opens her mouth to shout, her cheekbones jut out from her hollowed face.

“Min fadlik! Min fadlik!” she continues.

“Nabil, what is she saying?” My mother asks my grandfather.

“Please.”

My mom holds her hand over her mouth.

“For God's sake Nabil, just give her some money.”

He turns around.

“That is not what we do here,” he replies through gritted teeth.

The boat owners can sense my grandfather’s displeasure.

They exchange glances.

“Aibtaead!” they yell at her, shooing her away.

She doesn’t listen.

“Aibtaead!” they yell again. This time they take a paddle and splash her.

She stays.

“Aibtaead! Aibtaead!”

They splash her again. Twice this time, harder.

Water sprays all over her face. She wipes it away between strokes and continues to paddle.

Eventually, everyone gives up. The two owners stop yelling and splashing at her. She stops begging.

From our boat we can here her wheezing for air. She rows beside us for a few more minutes. As we sit in silence, we hear the paddles slapping the water and her heaving breaths.

No one speaks.

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She finds it in her to beg one more time.

“Min fadlik!” she yells.

As she says it, she stands up in the boat, dropping the paddles at her feet. She looks at us with her hands cupped.

Still, no one moves, and she slowly drifts off into the distance.

“I’m a coward. Good lord, I’m a coward,” my mom whispers next to me. She shakes her head.

From the West Shore The murky river water laps over my feet as I stand at the base of our farm. I let the mud between the reeds seep through my toes. It dirties the bottom of my pink dress.

On the opposite shore, resorts run for miles. I can see tourists milling around by the pools, vague specs in the distance.

My father shouts from up the hill, pointing down stream. I look. A tourist boat is letting down its sail and taking up the paddles. It’s time.

I grab my rowboat, jamming the edge of the bow right under my chest to bolster it as I push. When it’s deep enough, I hop in and start to row. I’m going to get money today. I need to get money today.

I manage to get out to the boat before it gets too far ahead.

I have about fifty yards to make up against the current before I am close enough for them to notice me. Normally, this is the hard part. I hope this time will be quick.

“Hello!” I shout, to get their attention.

Everyone on the boat turns. No one responds.

“Hello!” I shout again. Still, no one replies. I know this is not a good sign.

I hold out my hands to beg.

“Please!” I shout. No response.

I pick up the paddles and get closer, now able to make out the faces of the people on the boat. Two men are rowing, the boat owners. The rest are presumably all part of a family.

The daughter, sitting on the side of the boat, stares back at me. She is about my age, tanned and skinny like me, but in a different way. My skin is dark from laboring in the sun. Hers is dark from lounging by the pool. I am skinny because I have 132

no food, but she is not starved. She eats an apple mindlessly.

I shout again.

“Please! Please!”

This time, people on the boat stir in growing discomfort.

A couple of them mutter things to each other in English.

“Get away!” the two owners yell.

No. I can’t leave. I fought the current. I need this one.

“Get away!”

They splash me with their paddles.

“Get away! Get away!”

They splash again. The water sprays into my face, up my nose and into my mouth. I wipe it away. I will keep going.

Eventually someone will give me something, even if it’s just to get rid of me. I try to shout again but no sound comes out.

My throat is parched. My muscles tire.

Keep going, I think. Keep going. I stay with the boat, but eventually my thick calluses crack and my palms start to bleed. I stand up, one last time, dropping my paddles. I know no one will reply. I let the current take me. I watch the other boat fade away. Tomorrow, I think. Tomorrow I will get money.

Julia Saer

Photography, Painting & Collage 133

Silent Conversation

Elizabeth Winkler

I can’t do small talk. No, seriously. Put me in a room with my best friend and I won’t know what to say until an event occurs that we can talk about. If you don’t believe me, take a look at where I am right now. In a room. Isolated with my best friend of 16 years. She’s also my sister, in case you want to know.

That trademark antiseptic scent – the one that means you’re in a hospital, the one that allows you to tell with your eyes closed when you’ve entered the building – needles its way up my nostrils and I try to suppress a gag. How can she stand being here? I suppose it might be something you get used to after awhile, the same way I’ve gotten used to being at home without her.

I don’t have to be good at small talk here, I suppose, because there’s so much of it going on already. We are alone in the room, but she is surrounded. A tube from her chest to a bag filled with chemicals. A slow, constant whirring beep, not as harsh as a heart rate monitor, but just as undeniably present. They converse, the tube and the whirring, making conversation to fill our silence.

Blue eyes meet hazel, we smile. Or at least she does. The mask covering the lower half of my face steals mine from her. Can she still tell? That I’m smiling underneath it? Do my eyes shine brightly enough for her to notice? I should ask her – What would she do if I did? Would she roll her eyes and laugh? I should still ask her, if only to fill the silence between us. If only to block out the conversation between the drip and the whir of the bag and the machine. It must be awful to have to hear that all day, all night. I should ask how she is – really. Not the stalwart face she shows everyone; I should ask how she actually is. Shouldn’t I? But is that the way our relationship is? I should say something – I should ask her if she knows I smiled. That’s a safe place to start, isn’t it?

How long have we been sitting here? A balloon of silence 134

has filled the space between us. Is it comfortable? For her I mean? It is for me. Would I be breaking something if I popped the balloon with speech?

Why am I not bursting to tell her about everything that’s happened while she’s been gone? She’s been stuck in the hospital with only our mother for company for over a month – it’s not like she’s going to judge the quality of my conversation.

The balloon’s expansion is pressing against me now, pushing me against the wall, my spine digging into the bland eggshell-white surface.

I want to snarl at the silence, face it down, tell it I know my sister well enough to be able to talk to her about anything and make it interesting. Were this a novel, my character would take the leap and start a conversation, and even though I have nothing to say it would be engrossing and vivid and you would never want to stop reading and she would remember how much she likes being around me. But such eloquence is unlikely.

So I focus on everything except her, not wanting to stare without speaking, not wanting to speak without anything to say. I turn my head so my cheek is against the rubbery surface of the expanding silence and the side of my face is all she can see.

She’s in the children’s portion of the hospital, so they gave her cheerful stickers for her door and the single window: a smiling sun, a frog, a couple tufts of gelatinous grass, some snowflakes – they’re identical to one another, all seven of them. That must really bother her, the scientist.

The stethoscope and that device that measures blood pressure – what’s it called? Ugh, I can’t think – sit on a wire shelf in the portion of the room dedicated to medicine. A sterilization sink, some cupboards above and below it in the trademark dark purple-tinted wood that all medical buildings seem to favor, a bathroom that looks like it’s been transplanted from an airplane, two twin beds, the stack of books beside hers almost identical to the one next to my bed at home, two chairs: one with a blanket on it, the second, the one she’s sitting in – 135

I can’t do it. Can’t avoid the eyes that I know are fixed on my cheek. The roots of my eyes begin to ache from looking at everything but her; I surrender and turn them in her direction, mostly because she must think that I’m avoiding doing exactly that and how must that make her feel?

Now I have to come up with something to say. Really. I have to talk. Now. But she makes the decision for me, popping the balloon with words perfectly calculated to make it easy for me to drown out the whirring and the dripping and the stethoscope: “What books have you been reading?”

And just like that a flood of words comes rushing out of me; and this time, I know she can tell I’m smiling.

Phoebe Morris 136

Pen & Ink Drawing

Becoming Immortal

Mairead Kilgallon

If I shook out the beach like a carpet, what might I find in its folds?

Perhaps I will build a palace of seashells stacked on each other, standing until exploring children take them home.

Avery Barakett

Pen & Ink Drawing 137

Le Poisson Rouge

Ellie Garland

When Madame Martin entered the cramped fourth story classroom, I was staring at a miniature fan. I watched its three blades move in slow, monotonous circles through the heavy June air. The twenty-seven other students in Monsieur LeMasson’s fifth grade classroom leapt from their chairs to greet the visitor. In two straight lines, with shoulders back and hands clasped, my classmates cooed in unison: “Bonjour, Madame Martin.”

I was sixteen years old but entirely incapable of addressing this guest with the speed and grace expected of the ten-year-olds. I was glued to my seat, my knees pressed uncomfortably into the gum-studded underbelly of my desk. I felt very much like the class goldfish. He tried to hide behind the synthetic seaweed, but the students still peered at him through the glass. They laughed and tapped and left fingerprints all over his tank.

“Bonjour classe, veuillez vous asseoir,” announced the woman, smoothing a wrinkle on her blazer.

They promptly returned to their seats.

I knew better than to ask Pierre who this woman was.

If I so much as glanced at my desk mate, he buried his nose into his notebook and started violently scribbling. I hardly ever saw his face, just the spiky blond hair on the top of his head. One time, I asked if I could borrow a pencil, and he shoved his stash into the depths of his desk drawer. When he did speak to me (because Monsieur LeMasson had asked him to), he mumbled and slurred his words. Pierre didn’t want me to understand him.

Madame Martin and Monsieur LeMasson had a brief conversation in front of the class. I tuned out their words and watched the second hand on the clock. It moved like the blades of the fan—in a circle but not quickly enough. It was three-thirty in the afternoon.

138

The day Madame Martin visited the class marked the end of third week of school in Franqueville Saint Pierre, a small Parisian suburb. I had spent my first ten days with a sophomore class, following around Marie, my host sister, like a puppy. Her school year had since ended, and she was interning with a physical therapist in town. She said he had terrible breath and often made racist jokes about his patients.

I was not invited (nor particularly interested) in joining her, so I started going to school with Jean, Marie’s younger brother.

I enjoyed Jean’s class much more than Marie’s. Monsieur LeMasson spoke slowly. I understood most of his lectures— about commas, tectonic plates, unit conversions, and the Battle of the Marne. I tried to stay focused, but I often found my eyes wandering to the fan, the clock, the goldfish, and the wall art. One wall was adorned with a collection of twenty-seven apples drawn in graphite. Most were flat and comprised of shaky lines, but a few were three-dimensional and magnificently shaded. I wondered which ones belonged to Jean and Pierre.

Monsieur LeMasson cleared his throat. He wanted the class’s undivided attention, “Et maintenant, Madame Martin va partager les évaluations de chaque élève dans cette classe.”

The class released a collective grown, one I knew too well from my own schooling experience. They were about to receive their grades, and in France, it was a public affair.

One by one in alphabetical order, Madame Martin called the students to the front of the room. She relayed their semester performances in exact detail, announcing some test scores with a nod of approval and others with raised eyebrows and frowns. She scolded. She warned. She threatened. She asked them questions like “Qu’est-ce qui s’est passé? What went wrong?” She compared students to one another like the apple drawings hung side by side on the wall, some remarkable some pathetic, but this time their work wasn’t anonymous.

The last girl Madame Martin called up was a lanky brunette named Mathilde. She announced that it had been a “semestre catostrophique” for the young girl. She rattled off a long list of failed tests and late assignments. She mentioned 139

her poor work ethic and her general carelessness. Mathilde started to cry. Her face grew red and hot as the boys smirked and the girls exchanged glances. I wanted to go up there—to hug her and wipe away the tears that dribbled down her cheeks. I wanted to tell her to move to America where report cards are personal and confidential. But, I stayed glued to my seat as I had before.

Madame Martin ignored the sobs and continued to humiliate her. And then, she said something I will never forget: “On ne peut pas oublier la polémique dans la maison avec tes parents et leur divorce… Ça peut être la cause de tes problèmes académiques. We can’t ignore the problems you’ve been having at home with your parents’ divorce. That might be contributing to your academic struggles.”

It was cruel. A girl’s problems at home should not be broadcasted to her classmates. I looked at Monsieur LeMasson, hoping he would interject and allow Mathilde to return to her desk in the back corner, but his expression was cold and dispassionate.

At last, Madame Martin finished her harangue. Mathilde ran back to her seat and sunk low in her chair, hiding behind a stack of books. Monsieur LeMasson thanked Madame for coming. She click-clacked out of the room in her high-heels, and I could see the children’s muscles relaxing.

Monsieur dismissed the class for a brief recess period.

Normally I stayed in the classroom when they went outside.

I would flip through the Marie-Antoinette biography written for young French readers that my host family bought for me, so I wasn’t dragged into a game of cache-cache-attrape, French hide-and-go-seek. But on that day, I decided to follow the children down the four flights of stairs to the schoolyard. I didn’t know what I would say, but I wanted to talk to Mathilde.

I walked across the beaten grass, searching for a tall brunette sulking in the corner. But instead, I found her running around with her friends. The tears had dried, the red had faded from her face, and she was smiling. I realized then that I must have looked much sadder than Mathilde did.

Madame Martin hadn’t critiqued my academic performance 140

or exposed my personal problems, but I was still the quiet, lonely foreigner in a sea of laughing children. I walked along the yard’s perimeter in a slow, aimless circle like the blades of the fan, the hands of the clock, and the swimming goldfish.

Renee Ong

Colored Pencils, Marker & Collage

141

Three Vignettes

Charlotte Winkler

Eden My cousins live in a town called Eden. I always laughed and thought it was like naming your child Angel- the expectations are too high. But whenever I go there, I can see why the town is called Eden. There is not really a town– it is mostly farmland and wooded fields. Just like the Garden of Eden, the fruits and vegetables produced there are fresh and gorgeous.

The best time to be in Eden is the summer. The cornfields are always “knee high by the fourth of July,” as the farmsaying goes. The wheat is green and creates an endless rolling path through the woods and other vegetation. Peppers are heavy on their delicate dark green plants. The lettuces splay against the rich fertile soil, plastered there with the heavy rain that pours from the saturated sky most nights.

But, there is also Eden in the fall. Apples and pears ripen in the orchard, early red and gold globular ornaments on strangely shaped Christmas trees. The wheat turns yellow, drying in the sun and is rolled into huge sculptural spirals.

Pumpkins and squash prepare for Thanksgiving, ripening on the creviced dark chocolate earth crusted with sea salt frost.

But winter is magical. The blankets of snow that pile up put modern life to sleep. Everyone turns to old traditions and instinctual pleasures. Sleds, skis, and snowshoes are the preferred method of transportation. The lines between land plots blur as everyone trespasses heading for their favorite hill or trail. The best time is when the snow falls. Lying on the ground, face towards the grey sky, each snowflake can be seen. Large clumps of flakes break off of the conglomeration of flakes, the cloud, and then fall gently to earth. They seem to pause, high above, as though meeting resistance. But eventually, they break through the invisible barrier and fall faster and straighter towards the earth, towards your eyes. Then you are blinking, your eyes watering from the impact of what had appeared to be a delicate puff but turns out to be a tiny piercing arrow.

142

Returning Home A game I never understood predicted your life: house, children, marriage, car. When you think about the future as a child, it doesn’t seem real. We expect to be living in the same stucco house with trumpet vines and ivy, making potions across the street near the chickens, climbing from the tree house to the old lady’s roof and watching her unpack groceries, being panthers in Indian Rock Park, a continuation of life at that moment. My friends and I expected an ordinary life. We had no way of knowing or predicting how we all would change. Our lives could have run parallel, railroad tracks without switches. Somehow, between then and later, something changes. We lose each other and move on, stuck on tracks radiating in all directions. Divorce for many, drugs for two, depression, anxiety, and cancer. I wonder if I asked a stranger, whether they would say all society must have such problems, or if my kindergarten friends and I are carried in a pocket of bad luck, the only holes too small for all but the charmed to squeeze through.

A Walk I become my dog. Other dog walkers may think me rude, cars may think me a nuisance, people may look at me strangely but I do not notice. I do not make eye contact, avoid people by cutting into the road, walking on others’ yards. Every small movement catches my eye– will it make her forget I exist? My ears strain for any car creeping around a corner, the tingle of a dog’s collar, the pound of a runner’s feet– I must notice before she does. I watch her language, the bulging lip, the twitch of the ears, the slower crouched walk.

She escapes. Each second seems to contain more time for her to react. I act without thinking, grab the closest object that resembles a toy, shout to her and run away. If I could think, every part of my brain would be hoping and wishing her to follow me. There is not room even for the fear of what will happen if she does not follow.

Instinct, in the end, drives both of us. Instinct to keep the dog next to me calm, present, and quiet. Instinct to retrieve her. Her instinct to attack and chase movement.

143

Dynamics of Nature

Erinn Goldman

Nowadays we can’t tell airplanes from stars when we look out the window.

Yesterday a cicada climbed out of itself and left its empty husk outside the shell of the garage outside the car because it was going somewhere just like we all are, leaving fragments behind like scars or blessings. I can't tell.

I can tell motion from motion like the motion of the cicada crawling onwards from the garage and the motion of my neighbor’s hand riding the wave of his drunk breath with a slap and the motion of the car wheels rolling again.

And then there are the heaving breaths of my grandmother without her oxygen tank.

There are lightbulbs and suns and neither one seems bright enough to light up these orbiting entities and both seem dull enough next to the meadow across from my garage because its wavering plants are simple and rooted.

Nowadays we can’t tell grass from turf under our walking feet, but who really can tell anymore?

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Mr. Lepore: Anna Khoury Mr. DePeter: Faye Tapsall Mr. Kress: Belen Agrest Mrs. Meyer: Olivia Koorbusch

Paper Cuts 145

Daedalus

DAEDALUS

Greenwich Academ 2016