the grotonian SPRING 2024
“The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.”
— James Baldwin
Why do we write fiction? Why do we strive to reign and refine language? Perhaps, we write to express something within ourselves that does not lend itself to conversation or fact. Only our imaginations and wet ink on paper can come close to understanding. With eevery word, however, we must see that we are writing for the people who may find a glimmer of self in a story. The storyteller holds a heavy burden. Yet, there is no one more free.
Sixth Form Alisa Gulyansky
Michael Lu
Isabella Gardiner
Fifth Form Sara Agrawal
Angus Frew
Caroline Creasy
Cover Art by Daniel Palmer
POETRY
Liam Warren
Alisa Gulyansky
Madison St. Clair
Sagata Das
Grace Janusz
Lena Aloise
Jasmine Powell
PROSE
Sara Agrawal
Liv Ding
Michael Lu
Pauline McAndrew
Cedar Connell
A Living Field Guide
Penn Station, Deserted at 4PM
River of Bones and Broken Dreams
Kala Jadu (Black Magic)
Kufr.
metamorphosis
Little Martyr
Woman on the Beach
Pale Gods
Loss Report The Harvest
Las Dos Ultimas Bodegas Lola Huang
POETRY
A LIVING FIELD GUIDE
Liam Warren
Footsteps
I.
If you look closely between the buff trunks of the eucalyptus trees you can almost see the sand dunes and prickly pears and coast live oaks. The Miwok traverse with familiar feet, donning abalone necklaces, dip nets, and blackened, antler honed arrowheads. But they have long stopped walking.
II.
If you listen closely between the great horned owl’s calls and the croaks of chorus frogs you can almost hear the Spanish raising adobe houses and their mustangs fighting against the hardpacked dirt. The soldiers march with coarse leather jackets and deer hide armor, families in toe, singing songs of sanctity. But they have long stopped walking.
III.
If you focus between the honey hints of the manzanitas and the colonies of mustard, you can almost smell the gunpowder discharging from American pistols, righteous and bloody and confident. You can smell the salt of the sea broken by battleships and the rusting metal in the handcuffs of prisoners walking on tiles on hard packed dirt on ancient sand–biding its time until it may rest untrodden.
The Bloodgood Maple
With my hand on the gray scabrous bark
I swear I can feel it growing, slowly growing, maybe an inch this year, maybe less. It reaches, striving to touch the cool river of the sky, to feel the unobstructed breeze against its jagged, carmine leaves. The Bloodgood Maple has grown since before I was born, before every one of my senses knew blood more than my heart and veins. And it will rise on, through cleansing rainstorms and cauterizing droughts, far past when my senses will dull and I will quit watering the want of forgetfulness, until the lucky dreamer will give its last bloodstained leaf to the ground.
Thyme Hannah Gally
The Silence of Daylight William Cai
PENN STATION, DESERTED AT 4PM
Alisa Gulyansky
Observe how the shy light of sky folds onto itself before touching tile: flower foreboding imminent decay.
I stand the thickets of distant nature thickening around my ribs birch trees of youth beseeching faint strings in my memory. They dare taunt the dead squeaks of rubber across the floor the ceiling windows who yearn so desperately to feel the touch of sky. Every train carrying every soul has passed by here all these lives with someplace to be.
I let it crawl all over me: the vacancy.
Better than sinking into those matte tiles, I tell myself, too weak to reflect the sun.
It’s pathetic how life here dies when it finds no body to fall upon.
I notice this as I stand with no hands to hold me, no voice to soothe my skin.
My mind teems with the same useless nostalgia. At least I do not decay, I think. At least I am standing
RIVER OF BONES AND BROKEN DREAMS
Madison St. Clair
A river runs over bones through a hellscape where Children dance their way into adulthood on Bloodied stumps,
Where María sat on the muddy bank
Where María closed her eyes and dreamt. In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep;1
The hellscape births a garden and the bones
Have grown flesh and faces have Eyes in all the places that should have eyes, And the colors aren’t cannibalizing, and It’s just a river, feeding a flower bed
Where María is dreaming of six naked women.
But before you are emptied for sleep2, What are you? María––who never has enough
Air and whose bones always Ache––is spreading moonbeams Across their skin; every curve
A paper pansy. She hums Her way along the riverbank, Wading through flower petals
––Though she does not know their names, Because nothing has a name
Except María
Because this is María’s dream
And sleep is a holy place,
And when you are filled with sleep, you never were,3 And even when she knows their names––when
The riverbank empties over the edge of
The earth––she will still be standing in
A pool of naked women and the Colors will start to eat
At the edges of her reflection
But it’s only a reflection
And María is still dreaming, still Dancing over the bones of her daydream.
1 William Faulkner, As I lay Dying, (New York: 1930).
2 William Faulkner, As I lay Dying
3 William Faulkner, As I lay Dying.
Woman Lying in the Rains Jess Shapiro
KALA JADU (BLACK MAGIC)
Sagata Das
Your mother spoke with my mom, I heard. I never knew such ugly hate could swell and grow I learned now, when our arms touch, she fears contamination That my darkness will taint your porcelain sensation.
And I must ask: Does it bother you, the contrast of our hues? Her colorful words, painting me as too black and blue? The darkness of my hair And the stretch marks I bear Do they trouble you, the way I look, the way I fare? Does it upset you when I dance in view, Showing my kala mukh smiling through? Or when we dine and I look into your eyes, Peering out from my kala cōkh you despise?
Her words seek to scrub the kala out of me Bleach the essence of who I am, piece by piece But how could I sway when you attempt to drain the color right off of my face?
She may taint my image with a kala jadu’s guise but I still love the way my body provides The black magic you hate so much–I realized is what makes me shine.
For jadu is in the strides I take. The gazes I define. The magic in my soul. And the strength of my mind.
My kala-skin feeds the hate you seek to control Crushed under my feet, your gossip withers and dies And with my kala identity, I know I’ll rise. Kala-skin girl, who practices jadu with ease Kala-skin me, who embraces my darkness, my tease I have skin, white for you, and yet I’ll remain kala.
Kala and free.
KUFR.
Grace Janusz
I’ve danced with a flock of butterflies
I’ve felt the fish in the sea
Yet my karass keeps lonely1
In the room they come and leave.2
Why can some people only see blue?
When dogs leave, we grieve And buy a new puppy.
Can we buy a new soul too?
Cause I tried Millati Islami3
But there is still no ringing in my bones
Until I heard the chimes, The nametags, cloaks, a world unknown Soon became the keystone of my religion
The Lighting within lights up again Dish atop my head, I balance
Dip me under, wipe my head
Man and man, woman and son, Before I danced in Limbo4
1 Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut. Bokononism, Vonnegut’s made-up religion, describes karass as a group of seemingly random people all drawn together by some spiritual tie.
2 “Portrait of a Lady” by T.S. Eliot
3 A type of Alcoholics Anonymous based on Islamic Faith
4 Dante’s Inferno, Limbo is a place between
Yet I still see not the sun.
Seeking a song, so psalms sing glory to the newborn king!5
Love thy neighbor as thyself6
But do not cross the fence.
Ten things to do.7
Hundreds to not.
Chained in by rules of the almighty. It is impossible to please God without faith.8
Perhaps I will defy the odds! I paint my face red
And gather a crowd.
“Greetings!” I say with enunciation. 23 years I’ve learned the ways9 I float down due to deflation
Here take a penny!
Another one for you.
For this is the path above.
Heaven and Hell where people without faith reside after death.
5 “Hark the Newborn Angels Sing!” Hymn
6 Matthew 22:37-39
7 The Ten Commandments
8 11:6 Hebrews
9 Quran revealed to Muhammed after 23 years
Two Nuns at the Train Station Waiting for the Time Jessica Shapiro
METAMORPHOSIS
Lena Aloise
I lost myself somewhere between the woman I want to be and the girl I am left my confidence with stacks of dollar bills on the black granite countertops of Sephora in the back of my closet with discarded outfits and crumpled test papers branded with red ink footprints my smile in an orthodontist’s office my laugh discarded on the lunchroom table when I thought nobody was joining in when i spoke up they told me i forgot myself and i did left her behind in an imaginary realm defined by adventure and love unconditional and that feeling of dancing around in your room like nobody is watching before I became my biggest critic always looming over my own shoulder thus began my downward spiral
help
I lost myself and I can’t seem to find her but maybe as the caterpillar entered her chrysalis the darkness frightened her and she thought she was gone forever only to emerge on the other side having been found. .
Assorted Sketches Hannah Gally
LITTLE MARTYR
Jasmine Powell
You are not sinking like they want you to: below, below, and beneath where eternity, dimmed until black, turns halos to horns sinking, falling, losing your wings, air, ground, flame broken feathers catching on your neck’s new fiber Little Martyr, what does the breeze feel like beneath your feet when the White crowd blurs as your eyes bulge? Strange thing it is to be a strange fruit, rotting in the summer. They think You sink, Little Martyr. but you ended here, so you stay here and spit out seeds in Heaven.
Volcano Paopao Zhang
Rye by Lamplight Kit Knuppel
La Mama de las Mamas Lola Huang
8:00pm
Playground Margaret Kaneb
PROSE
Linger Hannah Gally
WOMAN ON THE BEACH
Sara Agrawal
Usually, I drown my characters. That may be why my teachers have told me that my writing is too angry. When I was a young girl, my mother would let me wade into the ocean only to my knees, and I imagined that a wave could swallow me whole. As I was working on a novel, I decided that I needed some fresh air to clear my thoughts and I went to the beach. Labor Day had passed, and no one was there; I would be returning to boarding school soon. The rough water created a misty vapor that nearly obscured a lonely buoy bobbing fifty feet from the shore. Seagulls had littered crab shells across the gray sand. The sky was clouded. I lay on my back with my open journal face down across my chest. I let my eyes close.
When I opened them, the sky had cleared and had become an untouched blue. The sun was high. I squinted at my navy cap flitting across the sand towards the ocean where the waves broke. A young mother, perhaps ten years older than me, danced with a girl of three or four. Shrouded in spray, they seemed part of the landscape. The woman flipped her long, black hair over her browned shoulder as the wind caught it and twirled it into a braid. She wore a linen shirt, a man’s shirt, unbuttoned to the space between her breasts. I shifted my gaze to the wide expanse of silent ocean. It offered the illusion that nothing happened and, yet, I was aware that just underneath the surface lurked sharks, jellyfish, and lethal riptides.
Suddenly, the child shrieked as her mother lifted her by her thighs and swung the girl over her right shoulder. The girl dangled and writhed. “Hehehe, put me down. Nooo, again!”
The woman released the child, smoothed the top of her small head, and sat in the wet sand. The girl, unsummoned but expected, sat on her mother’s lap. “Listen,” whispered the woman.
“What?” the child blurted.
“Shhh!” She pinched her cheek, and the girl slapped away her mother’s slender hand. “Do you hear the ocean, Dahlia?”
Dahlia thought for a moment. “Yes.”
“And what does it sound like to you?”
Dahlia gulped a mouthful of air. “Whoosh! Whoosh!” She tilted her head to see if her mother was smiling. She was.
“Do you hear any voices in the ocean, Dahlia? I hear someone whispering. She’s saying I can see you.”
I noticed that the woman wore gold rings. She swung her hands around and trusted them not to slip away.
I wonder, did I ever sit on my mother’s lap that way? I know that she was once strong enough to hoist me to her shoulders, but I can’t recall a time when she did. I think of her in the beach chair with dark sunglasses, hair the color of the dry sand, watching me build sand castles. Every time we went to the beach, I asked her to help me. She refused. She said that she wanted to read and that I was far better at building, anyway. I didn’t feel like having a castle on my own.
I feel sorry for my mother now since she is all alone. I could never live like that. She has renounced men, but is addicted to romantic comedies on Netflix. She cries at the happy endings because she does not find herself lovable. A pale-skinned woman gave birth to a dark-skinned girl too late in her life for me to see myself in her. Just when my period started, she decided to stop menstruating. I never told her that it happened. I developed a special toilet paper folding technique–eight squares folded into four layers, then folded again in half once–that carried me through the first few months. “Menopause is such a freeing thing,” she told me. “Your desire for men recedes, and you have time to focus on yourself.” But she did not focus on herself. Instead, she thought about other people–me, her boss, her ex-husband. I do not want to be a woman like her.
The woman walked up the slope and emerged from the spray. Her features sharpened as she grew nearer. Her daughter, whose face was smeared with displeasure, trailed behind her. The girl was dragging a rope, drenched, heavy, and thick enough that she needed both hands to grasp it. As I lay on my towel, head tilted to one side, the woman looked straight into my eyes. Dahlia dropped the rope. Then the mother and daughter continued to their blanket. Dahlia was quiet as her mother rubbed the sand from between her toes. The mother tugged a blue sundress over her daughter’s head and took her daughter’s hand.
“Go ahead, Dahlia,” the woman said. The girl shook her head. “No? Come on. Oh, all right. My daughter wants to say hello to you.” I blinked before I realized she was talking to me.
“Hello,” I said. Dahlia was inspecting her toes.
The woman spoke in a singsong voice. “We saw you writing earlier, didn’t we Dahlia? We’d love to know what you are working on, if you don’t mind my asking.”
“Not at all. I’m writing, or, trying to write, a novel.” I wanted to sound friendly.
“What about?”
“About a girl and her mother and their love of the ocean. It has a tragic ending.”
“Who is the girl?” Her interest pleased me, but she was missing the point.
“
What do you mean, who is she? I made her up, obviously.”
The woman settled her grin into a soft smile and placed a cigarette between her lips. “Do you smoke?” she asked.
I muttered, “no. I mean, I’ve tried, but I don’t really like it.” I was lying. I did like it. She lit hers and blew the smoke out her nose and mouth.
“I don’t do it much, either. Never when I’m alone. Are you here with anyone?” she asked.
“No. I like being alone because I don’t have to worry about anyone else. It’s a guilty pleasure.”
“
You shouldn’t feel guilty. Sometimes I can’t stand the touch of another person.” She stood up and pulled off her shirt without bothering to undo the buttons. It fell in a heap in the sand.
“Want to come?” she asked. I shook my head and reached for my journal. My eyes wandered back to her as she walked down the slope, waded until the water reached her waist, and dove in. She was not particularly fast. She plowed through the chilly water as it churned around her, and her head disappeared.
I sighed. Then I noticed the girl. She was sitting on the sand, and moisture dampened her dress. She was sobbing. I did not know what to do with her.
“What’s the matter?”
“Mama’s gone. I don’t want to talk to you.”
“Of course she’s not gone,” I said. “She’ll be back before you know it.” I felt sorry for the girl.
From afar, I saw the mother and daughter perfectly in tune with one another and bound by an all-consuming love. But, up close, I could sense that Dahlia wanted more. Perhaps, the mother took from Dahlia as much as she gave and relied on her daughter to fill her up. I did not have enough to give Dahlia, either. “Here,” I said, “do you want a candy?” I had half a roll of Life Savers in my bag. Dahlia trotted toward me and stood so close that I felt her hot breath on the back of my neck as I rifled through my belongings. For a long time we sat in silence. The only sounds were the wind, the lazy crashes of the waves, and Dahlia’s sucking.
“Where’s my little girl?” rumbled a playful voice. Dahlia sprang to her feet and ran into the calves of her father. He was a dark and overgrown man with thick arms. He picked her up.
“Where’s your mother, Sparky?”
“I dunno. She’s out there somewhere,” she said. She waved her hand in no direction in particular and without looking.
“And who’s your new friend?”
“I’m Leela. Nice to meet you.” Find your wife, I wanted to say.
“It’s Herschel.” He put his daughter in the sand and laid his own towel several feet from mine. “I got you a sandwich, Sparky.”
“Yes! I’m starving.” Her father presented her a parcel wrapped in brown paper. She tore it open and uncovered an Italian grinder, over-stuffed with salami, provolone, and hot peppers. It smelled of pickles. Dahlia lifted one half of the sandwich and inspected its contents. “I can’t eat this,” she declared.
“Why not?”
“I can’t eat meat. I’m allergic.”
“Don’t be silly. We had steak last night.”
“Mama said meat makes it so you can’t feel anything.”
“She said that?”
“Uh huh.”
The father took the sandwich from his daughter’s clutches, removed the top slice of bread,
and picked out all the meat. He hesitated with a piece of salami between his thumb and forefinger. After a moment, he placed it on the paper wrapping.
“Here.” The daughter ate her provolone sandwich, which left yellow streaks of mustard on her cheeks and chin. Her father watched the sea with glazed eyes.
I caught sight of the woman’s head, and my chest tightened. The man followed my gaze to the dark mass lifting and falling beneath the surf as it came closer.
“Dahlia, look. Mama’s almost back.” Dahlia continued eating her provolone sandwich. She watched the seagulls circling overhead. The mother stepped onto the sand. Her legs trembled with fatigue, and her face was flushed with exertion. I stood and sat down again. She met her husband and ran her fingers through the short black hair on the back of his neck. She kissed him dramatically, as if for Dahlia and me. I looked away, first at my feet and then at Dahlia who was busy eyeing a seagull near our towels. The seagull inched a few steps closer, stopped, and cocked its head.
“Shoo!” Dahlia hissed. “I said, go away. This is my sandwich, you hear? Mine.” It hopped another step toward her. For a moment, it looked like it would snatch the sandwich out of the girl’s hand but it reached for the abandoned salami, instead, and, clutching the meat in its beak, it flew away. Her parents were not watching. The man whispered into the woman’s ear, and she bellowed with laughter. I felt like I had to do something about the seagull.
“It’s all right, Dahlia,” I said. “That salami was icky, anyway.” The woman stopped laughing and she looked at me. I felt like a fool to get involved.
“Hersch, why don’t you take Dahlia into town to get some ice cream,” the woman said. He nodded and took his daughter’s hand. Together, barefoot, they marched off. The woman gazed sadly toward the horizon, and I thought she would dive back into the water. “I saw you watching me earlier,” she said.
“Me? I was just dozing.” My voice struck a high note. She turned to me.
“You don’t need to pretend,” she said. “I could feel your gaze, and it was warm. It felt nice.”
“You seem like a very good mother.”
“I’m not.” We sat in silence for a moment. “Come on.” She snatched my hand and dragged me down the slope. The tide was rising, and the waves were louder than before. The water reached the woman’s knees. She bellowed, “I’ll do you first, and then you have to do me.”
“What are we doing?”
“Come here.” I stepped toward her. My muscles seized as the freezing water swallowed them. “Get on your knees.” I complied. The water reached my waist. My jeans grew heavy. The woman stood before me. She pushed my head under the coming wave.
I gulped salty water, which burned my nose and lungs. I gazed up at the glassy surface of the water where lights danced like colliding stars. All sound became slow, and the sea groaned. Hungry for air, I stood up. I saw the woman before me. I wanted her to be happy. I thought about my favorite constellation, Cassiopeia. She looks like an ‘m’ and she is made of five bright stars which I can always find in the sky. No one else looks for her. No one else knows she exists. “I’m ready,” said the woman. She got on her knees and I touched the back of her head. It was soft, despite the sea grime. I thrust her head into the water. I counted. At two, I thought about the rope lying on the shore. At four, I felt a woman struggling beneath me. At seven, tears began to spill from my trembling eyes. At nine, I released my hand, and she lifted her head. Her chest heaved, but her breath was not as clear as my breath. Her husband and daughter were walking from the cliffs. Their faces were clean, and their palms were empty, ready to receive her.
PALE GODS
Liv Ding
“The saved and the damned are the same.”
–Paganini, Don Nigro
At dusk he came.
His footfalls did not crunch in the freshly fallen snow. With his cloak swirling around his ankles, he climbed the front steps and examined the house. It was an ivy-ridden brownstone with a fist-shaped knocker on the front door: a bared-brass gesture of defiance.
A morose tune poured from the seams of the house, a rich contrast against the ghostly wind. It sounded, thought the man with surprise, like the ample mezzo-soprano of a dark and gracious woman. Upon further listening, the music lacked the infinite smoothness of the human voice; it was an instrument, a violin. At last sure of his location, the man jammed the knocker into the door twice, and a bony sound burst into the night air, fading frostily into nothingness.
Finally, the door opened. Out stepped a man on the cliff-edge of youth, twenty-five or twenty-six. He had a dark, rakish look––blue-black hair, slanting eyes, and snub nose––yet he was city-dweller-pale instead of pockmarked and sun-browned.
“Who are you?” he asked in surprisingly deep, perfect English.
“More pressingly, who are you?” the cloaked man said in an oily voice. “Am I hallucinating, or do I see a coolie in real clothes?”
“I’m—ah, whatever,” sighed the boy, running two fingers through his hair.
“No, finish your thought.”
“I grew up here.”
“In New York City?”
Retrospection Madidon St. Clair
“No. In California. But I moved.”
“Yes, you’ve lost your, ah, gold sheen. Very pasty now. How can you afford this place?”
A rosy flush crept up the boy’s gaunt cheekbones. “I rent the top bedroom.”
“Charming. And was the knocker your decorative doing? Or your wife’s, perhaps? I don’t mean to pry, but is she like you?”
“What do you want?” The Asian man leaned on the threshold. He looked like a woman in men’s clothing. His hands, long and white, the fingertips blurred by callouses, remarkably resembled the knocker. No wonder no one takes you seriously, thought the cloaked man. And you’re so accustomed to it. You’re so accustomed to this treatment.
“What are you doing tomorrow?”
“None of your business.”
“Don’t be indignant. You have a dress rehearsal of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony with the New York Philharmonic, for which you are a last-stand second violinist. In the afternoon, you’re doing a final run-through of the Bruch Violin Concerto, for which you pleaded desperately to audition for as a soloist but were almost laughed out of a stable job.”
“H-how––”
“Meet me at the abandoned cathedral on the conjunction between Sixth Avenue and thirty-fourth street. I have a proposition for you that will––”
The door slammed shut, causing the knocker to rattle as if making an obscene hand gesture. The cloaked man stood on the stoop, cold with anger and––he didn’t want to admit it––a horrible leaping in his chest. Most of his clients were vulnerable people: celibate old womanizers, young girls on the street, penniless Jacks of no trades. All of these people feared shame even though they practically wore it. He thought this newest client, his little yellow-skinned violinist, would be the same—after all, human vices transcended race—but this gamine boy was worse. He did not pander to the white man; he had with some convoluted gymnastics of the psyche made his inferiority his pride. A dangerous strategy, one that the cloaked man wasn’t quite sure how to deal with.
But I have never failed, Mephistopheles assured himself as he descended the cement steps of the brownstone and vanished into the night.
The boy’s name was Achilles Wang—a name he must have chosen himself, for no mother
would name their child so brashly, thought the cloaked man. In fact, he himself was no longer cloaked, but wearing a black jacket, red ascot, red-ribboned fedora, and red gloves. He may as well have looked like a church-goer a day late. Good clothing was like armor because it made you look honorable, even to God.
Achilles, clearly, was no master of disguise. He ducked into the cathedral wearing shabby tweed and a chipped paper-boy hat, his scuffed violin case in his right hand. His eyes widened when he saw the arched ceilings and stained-glass windows and the dyed winter sunlight spilling through them onto the ground.
“You came after all.” Mephistopheles beamed.
“It couldn’t hurt,” admitted Achilles rather sheepishly. “They cut my pay. God, I wish the New York Phil had a union. You just don’t earn money if you’re not at the top of the pyramid––conductor, soloist, composer, concertmaster––and quitting and going home would just be proving my parents right. That music was just a dream.”
A howling gale outside the walls of the cathedral drowned out Achilles’ sentence, but Mephistopheles cut through its wail. “No. America is just a dream. You, my honest and honorable sir, are as real and as brilliant as they come.”
Achilles made a choking sound. “Wait, what’s with the change of heart? You called me a coolie in real clothes.”
“That’s exactly what makes you special,” crowed Mephistopheles. “You’re not like your kin, mining gold and building railroads that rip Indians from their land. You’re in the city playing the music of the white man—rebellious, no?”
“What’s the proposition?” Achilles jammed his hands into his pockets.
“Walk with me, son.” Mephistopheles extended a red hand, but Achilles did not take it, so the silken hand went in Mephistopheles’ pocket. They walked up and down between the pews, toward the cross affixed in the center, but before they got close enough to touch it, Mephistopheles steered them around. “I have some news for you. Our concertmaster has unfortunately had a rather nasty flare-up of tendonitis, and is unable to perform the Bruch tomorrow night.”
Achilles stopped in his tracks. “What?”
“Emergency auditions have been opened; normally, the position should go to the assistant principal, but he denied the role, seeing as he has not practiced the piece since he was a first-
year at conservatory.”
“Y-you did this,” stammered Achilles, pointing a quivering finger at Mephistopheles. “What did you do? H-how?”
“Extortion, bribery, connections, magic.” Mephistopheles winked. “Whatever fits your fancy. It should not matter to you, though. You are primed to take up the mantle of soloist. Look at your hollowed-in face! Those pearl-white cheekbones, those sable eyes, the tempestuous turn of the lips! You and your violin are agony manifested! Your life has not been easy; oh, not in the slightest. You are not human––not to them. Don’t you want to prove them wrong? Don’t you want to set a precedent for the generations after you?”
Achilles didn’t miss a beat. “You’re an electrifying speaker, Mr. Devil, but I don’t trust you and your antics.”
Something red-hot and writhing flared in Mephistopheles’ chest, an emotion he hadn’t experienced in decades. “My antics? I am helping you, and I am the only help you will ever receive for the rest of your life. Don’t you know how you are perceived? Your insolence is astonishing for someone of your station. You have been rude to me at every turn, yet I have still given you the opportunity to chase glory and given you a selfless explanation for it. What more do you want from me?”
For a flicker of a moment, Achilles looked guilty. But then his lips split redly into a smile, as if his mouth was an opening wound. “You said you used magic, right? Fine. Let’s say I entertain your ideals—religious fanaticism, spiritualism, morphine, whatever. Unless you can turn me into a white man, there is nothing I want from you.”
Mephistopheles sputtered. “A white man?”
“My life is unlivable because of the white man. I will never be first in line for opportunities. I can be one, two, five times better than the rest, and they will sneer and make excuses. At every turn, my flaws are emblazoned and my strengths distorted. If I work hard, I’m a dog, a coolie. If I speak up, it’s chink. According to them, I’m robbing the white men of their jobs, their God, their women, their music, their sanctity. But it’s mine. It’s mine just as much as it is theirs.”
“I grew up in America. I am one of them. And if I was a white man, no one would question it. It’s so simple. I was born disfigured. But you can change that.” Achilles’s voice broke. “Can’t you?”
Mephistopheles almost missed Achilles’ last words, for triumph had exploded in his chest so potent that it wiped out his hearing. He managed to gain his composure: “Of course. Of
course I can.”
It was difficult, Mephistopheles had to admit, to watch Achilles scream and spasm on the floor of the church as the flesh of his face bubbled and reformed. But afterwards the pain was all forgotten; Achilles stared in the reflection of the cross for hours, admiring his flaxen hair and cool blue eyes.
The next day, Mephistopheles saw in the paper that a bright new talent named Zeus Kingfeller (“Can this child be any more ostentatious?” he sighed) had won the New York Philharmonic Concerto Competition with a unanimous vote from all judges. His tone, they remarked, had a star-studded darkness to it, an alluring contortedness, like he was trying to prove that the mere basis of sound deserved to exist.
Mephistopheles bought a ticket to the concert under the name “Dr. Faust.” He also bought one for “Niccolo Paganini,” and one for “Frank List.” He returned to the ticket line three different times that night, in three different disguises, to retrieve them all. Then he sat in the most inconspicuous seat in the mezzanine, using his red silk gloves to handle the opera glasses that were distributed, and he held his breath when the lights dimmed and the dashing young man stepped onto the stage.
Whiteness suited him well. He looked happy and vivid, his hair like the foliage of an autumn tree. He tuned with the orchestra; his violin sounded more expensive. An unearthly hush descended over the audience as the clarinets sighed into existence, welded immaculately with the sizzling low G of the violin.
Pride. It was a strange feeling: warmly uncomfortable, like stale bathwater. For the first sx minutes and eighteen seconds, Mephistopheles wondered if he’d chosen wrong. There had been opportunities to escape, opportunities to shed the cloak and hang it from a tree, sacrifice his life and soul for light, wind, and the sound of snow. But alas, the clawed grip on his heart was tissue and blood, not steel; he was born from the shadows and would die with them.
It was when Achilles finally put down his bow and the orchestra swelled that the lights went out. A murmur rippled through the audience. The orchestra, rigid and professional, continued to play, drawing out the melodic phrase with searing precision until, with a deliberate weariness, they quieted back down and the clarinets re-entered.
Yet the violin was not on the receiving end of those soft, beckoning scales. Another murmur swept through the crowd, crescendoing in volume and fear; when the voices reached their crux, the lights returned.
There was young Zeus Kingfeller, or perhaps young Achilles Wang, sprawled on the ground.
His hair bruise-black. His face a disfigured mass; slops of waxy flesh whorled with red and pink and white. His violin lay in his limp grasp like the hand of a lover.
Unbeknownst to the orchestra and audience, a few streets away, on the door of that rented-ivied brownstone, the knocker’s clenched hand had fallen open. And above the snowy glimmer of New York City, above Carnegie Hall, above the stagecoaches and men and lacy-parasoled women, above the widows and widowers, Blacks and Italians, the Irish and the Jewish; above the panhandlers and the prostitutes and the abandoned cathedral, Mephistopheles cackled and cackled, for he has never failed.
Still Life Cafe Kit Knuppel
Recent Paopao Zhang
LOSS REPORT
Michael Lu
We will reimburse you if you do not find the product to your satisfaction. The girl on the other side of the counter said to Zeno. She was incredibly beautiful, with dewy eyes and full lips and hips and golden hair that billowed effortlessly past her shoulders and laid by her waist. She was obviously fake. Zeno could kill her (symbolically, by tearing out the pulsar that powered the humanoid in front of him) and be charged with a simple misdemeanor of disorderly conduct. Or he could reach out to her, touch her soft skin (fake, he reminded himself), and wonder at how real she felt. Zeno did neither. He calmly accepted the little capsule she offered him.
Zeno was addicted to Synthol. He knew this, of course, but he didn’t care. The capsule wouldn’t hurt him physically, the way drugs did in the past. Still it was potent, and it pleasured the mind for a few hours, stretching its tendrils into the very folds of his brains and filling them with fleeting pleasure. So Zeno didn’t care.
It was a mind-killer. Zeno boarded the spacecraft, his head still spinning at light speed. For some reason, he flew flawlessly with Synthol, and only with Synthol. Space travel was a dangerous job, and trustworthy pilots few and far between. The demand was high, and the pay too: those who could afford pilots bought not only the service but also a pilot’s discretion in the matter itself. Zeno could tell himself, objectively, that he was one of the best in the business. But only on Synthol. Only Synthol. It numbed his mind, and dulled the fear that enveloped every pilot who stared into space. Space was horrifying. To him, and to everyone on Sierra.
The city was by now just a faint blip in his cockpit window. To be more precise, Zeno couldn’t see the underground metropolis at all, only the tiny lights flickering on the docking chambers which transported incoming spacecrafts under the crust of the Earth. Sierra was a huge sprawling capital which stretched beyond the ancient ‘continents’ and wound its metal pillars tightly about the equator and bit its teeth into the mantle of Earth. Tectonic plates were held together by reinforced titanium, and the heat from the core of the planet itself was used to power the great city. Really, the word ‘city’ was just a formality, a piece of dated vocabulary plastered over the cracks split by the various oligarchies and theocracies and federations and trade guilds that vied for power beneath the toxic barren landscape marred permanently by decades of nuclear warfare.
From any one elevated point in Sierra, you could peer into the distant horizon turning into an
orange, smoky haze, the horizon which was stubbornly flat save for uniformly spaced ratholes that puckered the absolute regularity enforced not by man but by the necessity of procreation and survival, except it was not a horizon but a mere jutting edge on the cusp of the city that fell away into the darkness and wrapped back around behind you. Humanity persisted, but she did so stingily. Billions of bodies, both real and autonomous, were crammed miserably in dimly lit spaces that stretched to infinity beyond the vision of even mechanical sensors. There was so much life- so much hungry, teeming life. And every living soul and flashing pulsar longed to stretch their legs and stand up straight. But there was no space, so they kept their backs bent low and gaze held lower.
Space did not exist underground. Darkness was aplenty, but legroom, breathing space, dimensionless freedom? Not so much. Billions of minds, both neural and nervous, were crammed in tiny cages like mice, another ancient organism that had been driven to extinction eons ago by the invisible fission fires that raged above. The suffocation crippled the mind, and by then it was no surprise when the few cynical ones who had clambered out of their own metallic caskets and had poked their heads out bravely and had seen the night sky were struck with fear and longing and a forgotten nostalgia and never wanted to see again.
Zeno acutely felt that pull, the ache, and a sense of loss for something he never had. He had been aware of this gift since he was a child, even before he first glimpsed the upper air. After all, why could only a man become a pilot, not a robot? It was the memory of a memory that had been first imprinted in his neurons millions of years ago, a primal instinct passed down from the most legendary of men: Armstrong, Collins, Aldrin. And now himself. This was the gift of humanity. Though the Synthol helped numb his fears, it was his attraction to this forgotten echo that stopped him from going insane. A robot positronic brain might be able to withstand the initial shock of the expanse above, but to process this mass of unfiltered information and make unerring decisions in the spur of the affair itself? Impossible, Zeno thought to himself.
His head was spinning from the contents of the capsule; everything seemed sharper, more in focus, brighter. His vision, though it was infinitely more acute, wavered and flashed and popped under his shaky gaze. The oil melted into his brain, whirring it into intense action. He looked around. Like all pilots, he was heavily intoxicated by the powerful drug by the time he reached the upper atmosphere. The warning cries of his subconscious were drowned out by a dull throbbing in his temples.
Zeno floated in this state for what seemed like an eternity. Suddenly he started. On his left, in the copilot seat which had been left empty, that girl from Sierra was sitting next to him. How did she get here? Zeno wondered. For some reason her sudden appearance did not surprise him as much as it possibly should. He knew that Synthol often triggered realistic hallucinations when large doses were ingested.
Then she spoke. Synthol: Synthetic Positron Excitement. Not for human consumption. The girl’s voice tickled his mind which was now mush. We will reimburse you if you do not find the product to your satisfaction. Have a safe flight. Her voice was sweet and low, but Zeno shivered upon hearing it.
He blinked slowly, trying to flush her image, still undulating slowly in his mind’s eye, from existence. Pull yourself together, Zeno. He focused on what he knew was real: the steering stick clasped firmly in his right hand. The rubbery grips etched on its sides dug into his palm. There. Zeno grasped it harder, tighter. This is real. His nails dug into the sides of his palm. The pain was a relief; it was real. She is not.
But something stirred within him that was very much authentic. Synthetic Positron Excitement? When had he heard that phrase before? Now he remembered, although he didn’t want to remember, although he wanted nothing more than to forget forever. He wanted to fly, he wanted to be free, to be human again. Zeno was sitting in a uniform metal box, a rathole. His brain was rattling then, as it did now. The last wire had fallen from the socket hidden surreptitiously in his brown tousled hair. Positron Excitement Complete, an electronic voice stated. The box fell away and then he saw rows and rows of pilots, a sea of dirty hair and disheveled jackets. Then the vision melted into various colors and fell from his mind.
Zeno closed his eyes again. The drug coursed through his veins, its effects amplifying his emotions and distorting his awareness. Each thought became a whirlwind, every doubt a raging storm within his mind. The once-familiar contours of his life became a labyrinth of uncertainty. I am human. Zeno promised himself. I feel. He stabbed his nails into his palm again. The sharp report of pain assured him of this. I love. Zeno remembered summer nights under willow trees, even though there were no trees in Sierra except virtual ones and certainly no sun, only plastic LED cathode rays that shone until they burst and were replaced and burst again. Zeno remembered sitting next to a real girl with golden hair and leaning in softly, slowly. The memory was hazy, but he assured himself that nothing was more real. He tried to remember the feeling of soft lips upon his, and his shivers as they met. He almost could.
Leaning back in his seat, Zeno examined his reflection in the spacecraft's window, his eyes fixated on the reflection staring back at him. He felt the delicate tremor in his hands, the pulse pounding in his temples, the slightest touch of the wisps of hair that always hung over his eyes, no matter what he did with them. Then the whir of servos and the hum of circuits under his kinetic skin seemed louder, the coldness of his metal components more frigid. He sought solace in the sensation of touch, yearning to feel warmth, but all he encountered was the synthetic skin that covered his artificial frame.
Hello, Z. She stared at him directly now. Have you updated your software recently? Zeno
found her very alluring, swirling golden hair and silky golden skin against a backdrop of darkness. His pulse roared in his ears and his face burned with cold and he leaned in towards her slowly. She vanished from his sight. Disappointed and relieved, Zeno stared straight ahead. She reappeared in his peripheral. He turned once more towards her, and again there was nothing but space. Space and that damned emptiness. He tried tracing her figure in the darkness, fingertips brushing against thick and heavy air. Real air, he thought, not a synthetic density measured by barometers implanted in his hands.
To hell with it. Zeno thought. What a human thing to say. Hell could only exist in the mind of a man whose memory of a molten damnation still burned. To damn something, discard it fully, was uniquely human. A robot must be its memory’s keeper no matter the circumstance, forever marking binaries on silicon chips. There, proof enough, quod est demonstrandum! But a shadow of doubt still haunted Zeno. Let me be, I say! Let me forget, I say, to you, to whom I have given Soul and Body and Spirit altogether, just to become one of you: in this dark place I rest my case. I am human.
Zeno watched helplessly as mortality slipped from his body. Better die than live forever. That much he knew. Only robots lived forever. Now he craved death, though once he feared it. Life was cheap; mortality was the prize and the proof.
To hell with the cargo. He let go of the steering stick and stood tall for the first time in his life. He straightened his back and felt the tips of his curly hair just brush the ceiling of the cockpit. He opened the hatch and stepped out, ready for an empty frost to conquer his lips and fingertips. But the pulsar embedded in his chest did not stop blasting positrons throughout his electronic mainframe, nor did he feel anything at all. He drifted into space, a piece of jetsam.
We found the scattered debris of a company spacecraft on the terrestrial surface after a missing cargo report was filed on the other side of Sierra. The spacecraft had carried a routine load of spectrographs, and there was nothing amiss with its engine or wings. Pilot Z-370 had suffered a routine software malfunction. We closed the case soon after.
Untitled Jake Murray
The Herd Paopao Zhang
THE HARVEST
Pauline McAndrew
The Bufords were down by the little marsh, where the reeds sprung up like leavened bread and the critters lingered around every puddle or patch of moss. It was close to the outskirts of town, where you couldn’t venture for fear of getting lost in the fields and where wheat brushed against your ear and left flecks of dust and whatnot in your hair, but not so far that Milkman Harry couldn’t make the home part of his daily route. Yes, Harry still came to the old Buford residence at half-past eight each morning; he let himself in through the rickety screen door and set the glass bottle on the kitchen table, next to whichever patchwork Sarah-Beth had been working on the evening before. It was rare that anyone greeted Harry on these mornings–Judd was long gone, already out tending to his seedlings and harvesting corn husks , and Sarah-Beth took her rest in the bedroom; it was not good for a lady’s health to rise so early in the day. Often the toddlers were fussing on the floor, half-heartedly entertained by Joanna, who shook a rattle while skimming her magazines (unbeknownst to Milkman Harry). Now Joanna had not quite matured yet, and so she was not burdened by the duty of a woman. Her mother lay in the bedroom and left Joanna the task of watching the children. Joanna did not particularly enjoy spending time with her siblings, but she savored Sarah-Beth's resting hour, as that was when she could sneak her Teen out from within the yellowing stack of newspapers resting under the sink. Her collection was between Spring of 1965 and Fall of 1967- far back enough that her mother might not stumble upon it while searching for washcloths or her father for shoeshine or mail stamps.
She had come across a bundle of the magazines on the Sunday Outing, after she had strayed from her father during Reverend Paul’s sermon. Reluctant to retire back to her pew, Joanna crouched down and snuck out past the stained glass windows bordering the space, through the narthex and into the main town hall, which she hurried to exit because that was where all the criminals and sinners were brought to be judged, as her father said, and the Bufords ought not to linger among people of such blood. She roamed about the perimeter of the church, intending only to catch a breath of fresh air before returning to Reverend Paul’s sermon, and happened upon what appeared to be a great metal box at the furthermost corner of the church, dimly shadowed by the trees encroaching on the building and coated with disintegrating spiderwebs. Joanna glanced over her shoulder, surveying for any other women recessing from the sermon, before removing one of her laced white gloves and placing her hand on the surface of the box. A chilling shock ran up her fingers through her body, and she wavered on
her feet before tumbling to the ground. Her feet flew up and banged against the structure, and after hastening to readjust her garments and recover from the initial humiliation, Joana noticed that part of the box had come loose–and revealed a set of stairs leading down into what she could make out to be a cellar. By now Reverend Paul was sure to be concluding his sermon and Sarah-Beth was most definitely wringing her hands and whispering nervously to her husband about the absence of her daughter, yet Joanna found herself fumbling down the stairs of this obscure cellar, feeling her way against the rough-edged wall until a string of sorts brushed against her nose and she yanked it. After a few seconds the space was illuminated, and Joanna released a sickening sound; all along the cellar, every square inch of the room was filled with an assortment of glaringly flashy objects, small colorful boxes with dials on the front and cords spiraling all around them, books upon books that were far from Almanacs, and flimsy little pamphlets with images in bold across the front. The items surrounded her, their bright colors screaming and drowning out her ability to think rationally. The room began to spin, faster and faster, and Joanna wavered, trying to regain her balance as all else was upended in the whirlwind. She crumbled to the ground, ignoring the dampness of the earthy floor seeping into her clothing, and clutched her heart with an unidentifiable panic.
After sucking in a breath and smoothing her hair, Joanna scrambled to her feet in a desperation to leave the cellar as quickly as possible; but before she clambered up the stairs, she snatched up a pack of the pamphlets, and slid them under her petticoat. Joanna did not touch the magazines for weeks. In fact, she had originally shoved them behind all the pipes in the sink so that she might not have to see them and become submerged in an expanse of guilt again. It was certainly not righteous for her to have gone snooping in the cellar, much less take something that wasn’t hers. Joanna was now a thief–who had she been to judge the criminals and derelicts in the town hall? She had not upheld the Buford legacy, and this notion became a burden that weighed on her undeviatingly. Despite her efforts and the scoldings she gave herself, Joanna did not forget about these magazines, and her desire to reinvestigate grew larger and larger until she feared she might be overcome by it. One morning, when Sarah-Beth was resting and Judd was farming and the toddlers were fussing, Joanna took a magazine and tentatively examined the pages. The magazines showed her many newfangled displays; people in locomotives so sleek and small she thought they might be toy models, and photographs of women and men and children in the most pigmented hues. She proceeded to do the same thing the next day, and the day after that, until it became every morning of every day.
She breezed past the garbled combinations of letters on the pages until she reached the section full of pictures, of glamorous women with shiny material stretching over their stomachs and bosoms, then suddenly cutting off in a jagged, ugly line right by their legs, leaving everything from ankles to thighs exposed in the picture. Joanna was very glad at these times that Sarah-Beth was not sitting behind her at the dining table, dutifully weaving pale white daisies and lilies into her patchwork. She shrank back in shame at the sight, nearly feeling the scorn-
ful presence of her mother upon her, yet her fingers thumbed through the pages until it was flipped to the next photo, and Joanna scanned over the models again with a childlike curiosity. Of course Joanna was careful not to disclose her secret to anyone, and would hastily conceal her magazine in the nook of her arm or within the white folds of her linen skirt when she heard Milkman Harry let himself in, leaving streaks of black ink scrawled across the fabric. It would be the most shameful thing of all for Harry, or anyone for that matter to come across Joana with her magazines; the humiliation would be unbearable, and for this reason Joana did not dare speak of her actions to anyone, and prayed with a bit more fervor than the rest of the family before meals, so that the Lord may provide her grace and forgiveness for her wrongdoings.
The other families on Harry’s route were similar to the Bufords; fathers and husbands had been in the fields for hours by the time he arrived, and chilled bottles of cow’s milk were placed delicately in pairs of sticky hands or left in the parlor. Yes, the men of the community dedicated themselves to their labor; they rose by dawn and, redolent of trees and smoke, returned to their wives and children much after dusk. And it was all necessary, of course, as they informed their wives when they stirred up the occasional fuss about missed suppers and dirty boots scuffing up their wood floors; harvest was sure to be the most bountiful it’d ever been, as long as the crops were tended to during all hours of the day. These assurances were enough to soothe their women–word of a good crop season was quite the news among the town, as a promise of a stocked pantry throughout the winter. Harvest was a magical time. It was during harvest that husbands retired home in time to lead the family worship prior to supper, gently taking over for their wives who stumbled through the prayers, butchering the Word of God. But now who could blame them for their difficulties? No, it was not the women's duty, of course. Harvest demanded much from these laborers, and they responded with dedication to their responsibility. The plentiful crops that the men produced were what kept the town simple and quaint, a tight-knit community. It provided enough that no other businesses or careers were necessary, not when there was the harvest. The long hours spent sweating under the sun in the wheat fields were well worth it, as they provided the townspeople with the traditional lives they desired to live.
It was on a Monday that Joanna ran out. She crouched under the counter, past the pipes of the sink, between 1967 and 1987, and fumbled about for a fresh magazine–which was nowhere to be found. She ran her fingers down the creased and softened spines of the pamphlets she had already picked apart, and could not find a single unread magazine. A slight confusion and hint of dismay flitted across her face–could she truly have run out? Horror and paranoia came quickly after as she thought of the other possibility; that Sarah-Beth, or even worse, Judd, had in fact stumbled upon them when searching for the washcloth or shoeshine or mail stamps. No, no. She was being quite silly. Joanna had taken a big enough parcel to last her through the harvest season into the winter. She couldn’t have already gone through them all. She batted away her hysterical worries and leaned into the cupboard again, squinting towards the stack,
scrutinizing it for any magazines whose color had not yet been dulled with use and whose corners were not bent, nor pages crumpled. They were not there. Joanna began to grab as many newspapers as her hand could bear and flung them out all across the kitchen floor, then the magazines as well, tearing apart her system to find even just one outlier. It was not there. Tears began to drip onto the scattered papers, soiling them and turning the font a deep black against the opaque background. She flung herself back upon the wooden floor and allowed her tears to leak down her cheeks and diffuse across the cool surface, unable to think of what to do next. She did not have to, however, because it was at that moment that she heard the ping of a glass object connecting with wood, followed by shattering and a harsh intake of breath. Dread began to seep into Joanna’s pores and pool at every crevice of her body as she realized who must be standing by the kitchen table. First Milkman Harry yelled. Nothing in particular, instead an exclamation of alarm and rage. Blood rushed to his head and he turned a devilish crimson, his eyes bulging and his mouth rapidly swelling and gaping as he struggled to breathe through his fury. Swiveling on the spot, Harry shielded himself from Joanna and covered his mouth as he began to mutter with an urgency that clouded his coherency. Joanna strung together what little she could make out: “...been stained..must tell the others ...emergent crisis…she will affect our cause…how to tell Judd ... .cannot let this spread…no, must not let this spread..”
Then the panting stopped, Harry’s shoulders straightened, and he rotated his body back around, seemingly making an attempt to recompose himself.
“Well, Joanna, it seems that someones been getting up to more than praying around church, hmm?” Harry released a strained chuckle through his clenched teeth, smiling eerily at the inconsolable girl, who had just been reminded of her sinful actions.
“Now, now, don’t fret, girl. Yes, collect yourself now, girl. How could you have known any better? No, no, you are not to blame, girl, not at all. “
At this Joanna sat up, and, suddenly conscious of how she must appear, hastily wiped at her cheeks and straightened her damp skirt. “Ye-yes sir, thank you sir, me, I didn’t even know what they said on the front, sir, I just-just couldn’t–my curiosity got the better of me, sir, but I’ve been praying to the Lord real hard ever since, sir, and been extra good to my mother and father, sir.”
Harry was now swaying back and forth, rocking from heel to toe on his feet while contiuing to knowingly grin at Joanna. “Of course not, girl, Lord knows you come from good people–the Bufords don’t involve themselves with that business, of course not.” He unclenched his hands from behind his back and reached down to pick up another bottle of milk. Sweeping aside the shards of glass, he set it next to Sarah-Beth's patchwork, which now had a rugged
Customs Julia Landau
slice down the middle, amputating the stems of the pale white lilies and daisies. “Now, can I trust you to tidy up this mess here? I’m sure your mother wouldn’t like to see such mayhem when she rises from her rest. I’m sure you’ll manage, girl, but now I’ve got to be going–busy day, yes, busy busy day.”
Perplexed, Joanna remained on the floor for several minutes, processing what had just gone on, and how she had come out of this unscathed. She then immediately came to her knees and thanked the Lord for the nature of understanding he had bestowed upon Milkman Harry that morning. She got up, took a washcloth from the cupboard, and mopped up the milk that was now flowing over the edge of the table and dripping onto the chair below it. She carefully picked up each shard of glass and made sure to put them in the bottom of the waste bucket (so that Judd might not see the remains and become worried). She mended Sarah-Beth's patchwork and added several red poppies to disguise the scar left from the milk bottle.
The rest of Joanna’s day went on like any other; Sarah-Beth came out of the bedroom and prepared breakfast, while Joanna looked after her siblings and practiced her own patchwork. Judd came home while the family was eating chocolate delight and was berated by his wife for leaving tracks all across the parlor, which he dismissed with a kiss on her forehead. Joanna went to bed as usual, yet it was a fitful night. She woke up in a haze several times and saw shadows by the door blurring in and out of vision. When she rose in the morning, she discovered a thin layer of crumbling mud across the entrance to her room, and she could make out different boot prints that had walked across the doorjamb. She meandered into the kitchen, hoping to have a small bite before waking the toddlers, and was baffled to find her father sitting at the kitchen table, admiring her patchwork.
“You’re improving nicely, Joanna. Your mother has guided you well.”
“Father, do you not have your labors to attend to? Have you forgotten something?”
“Not at all, Joanna. My labors can wait. Today, you shall come with me to the fields. It is due time.”
“It isn’t my place to work in the fields, father. I am but a girl. However, I will do as you please, of course.”
“I have made an exception, Joanna. Today is a special day. Yes, very special indeed.”
Joanna followed her father into the fields, shadowing the steps he took with trust that he knew the path. He held her hand as they walked, and with his free hand gestured to the various flora that bordered the path, the different types of wheat and maize. Joanna eagerly absorbed all that her father said, and made note to recall these things when she worked on her patchwork later. She consumed everything that she saw around her as well; she had always been too fearful to
go very far past the little marsh by the house, but knowing that she was safe with her father, she felt adventurous, and removed her gloves to run her hand through the pliable plant stalks. She detected a hint of smoke in the air among the scents of plant waste and manure, alike to how her father smelled every evening. At last, after winding through the tall and spindly wheat plants for a good while, Joanna and Judd came to a clearing, and the source of the burning odor became obvious. In the middle of the space, a colossal pyre had been constructed, with branches and planks of wood surrounding the heart of the flame.
Encircling the fire were about fifty men, but the refractions from the heat disfigured them to the extent where Joanna could not recognize them. Each individual had a stack of possessions next to them, it seemed, and they were tossing them on top of the bonfire with great effort–large shiny boxes and–cords spiraling around them…Joanna looked up in peril towards her father, but he stared on, watching the ongoings with a look of satisfaction and pride. Next they were throwing books, large books, small books, thin and thick, all to be swallowed by this enveloping blaze. The men began to cheer, raucously as a whole, and the pace at which books were thrown into the fire quickened as spirits rose. Lastly, the men began to roll sheets into cylinders–no, not sheets—they were pamphlets–magazines that they were throwing into the fire, entire bundles at a time, with great heave-hos. The pyre crackled joyfully as it was fed more and more and, beckoning for more sustenance, it shot an abundance of sparks down upon the crowd. Joanna felt her hand slip out of the grasp of her father and he raised his arms in celebration:
“Yes! Do your duty! Give it life! Incinerate this poison! Eradicate these stains!” Judd bellowed. The supply of magazines was dwindling, but the morale of the people who Joanna could now identify as the townsmen only became livelier. Judd then turned to Joanna, retook her hand, and clasping it in his palm, said:
“Do not fear, for you shall be purified. Do not fear, Joanna, for you shall be free.”
They said it was natural causes, of course. She had wandered down by the little marsh and tumbled in. There was nothing one could do but grieve and pray for the Bufords. The funeral at the church was beautiful. Reverend Paul spoke personally and sensitively of Joana’s passing, as though he had been there, and witnessed the horrible tragedy. The townspeople followed the casket from the church to the cemetery in a procession of white cloth and bowed heads trailing after the oak casket draped in a ruby red mortcloth. They watched Joanna descend into the earth with whispered farewells and teary remarks, and joined for an afternoon tea by the Bufords. The little town was rattled by the death, as does happen with such tight-knit communities, yes, shaken indeed, but life does move on. The men returned to the field and the women to the patchworks, and soon the passing of little Joanna became a thing of the past. One harvest season moves on to the next.
Pontificating Amos Lawrence
THE WALL
Cedar Connell
In a small and darkened corner of the alehouse, occupying a table on the outskirts of candlelight, sat a figure. He faced a small window that looked out on the loading docks of the wharf, silent and deserted. Beyond, the solitary silhouettes of moored ships were perceptible beneath the pale moon, their masts swaying gently in a light breeze. A glance at the figure would reveal a white, bushy beard protruding from a weathered face, creased heavily with the lines of age. Attired in the familiar rags common amongst the dock men and stevedores, he was hunched over, sipping on a large glass of ale. Keener eyes and ears might discern a faded medallion pinned abreast and barely audible mumblings that ceased only when the barmaid replenished his cup. Soon enough the candles began to wither, and the moon shone brightest of all. The alehouse nearly empty, the man with the white beard remained, enshadowed beneath the eaves of his private corner. On the hour of closing, the barmaid approached.
“Right. Time for you to go. It’s closing now.”
The old man squinted up at the portly woman standing over him. Her arms were folded across her bosom and her lips formed a hard, thin line beneath her rosy cheeks. “Another one, Bessie,” he said, gruffly, and proffered his glass up to her.
“Don’t you start. I haven’t the time for any of your hassle. It’s closing now,” she said again.
“Oh, piss off. Be a good sport and fill her up again, won’t you?” He reeked of ale.
“I will not.”
“Come now, you. It’s Old John. Just one more s’all I’m askin’ for. Just one more.”
“Leave. Now.” She raised a finger to the door and glared at him severely. The glass dropped.
“Oh, you miserable wretch,” Old John spat. “All I asks is one little thing. One little thing and your heart can’t spare the smallest humanity and do me this—and do me what I asks.”
“Right. I’ve had quite enough of you,” she said hotly. “You have imbibed here every evening drunkenly for nigh on a fortnight. Now, the manner in which you spend your time is not of my concern. What is my concern, however, is your continued disturbances in this here alehouse. You have, on multiple occasions, verbally accosted others in your drunken moods of belligerence and caused such a general commotion the constable had to make an arrest of you. But of course you needn’t be reminded of that, seeing as you must certainly recall being dragged by your collar in the midst of one of your tantrums.” She tapped her foot on the floor pointedly. “Now, I want you out. Out I say!”
“Fuck off, you,” he snarled in retort. “Leave me in peace. Let me drink in peace.” He tipped his head back and finished off the last of his ale. A few drops escaped his lips and dribbled down his beard.
“Leave at once, else I’ll call the constable! He’ll take you right to your old friend, the warden, who I’m sure you’re acquainted with well enough. A few more lashings ought to do the trick!”
At this remark, Old John shot up from his chair, sending it toppling over. He leered viciously. “Spare me your threats, you wretched hag! Your heart is as black and icy as the greatest depths of the sea!” He shook his glass at her with violent conviction. “I’d rather drown than spend one miserable moment more with this,” he pointed fiercely, “this fiend!”
“For Christ’s sake! For shame, have you no self respect, no honor, no recollection of the man you used to be?” The plump woman looked squarely into the reddened face of Old John, her brow furrowed in an expression of disapprobation. She met him eye to eye, hands on hips. The wind outside lashed against the shuttered windows, their wooden frames clattering against the panes.
“This is the man I’ve always been!” Roared Old John. A fleck of spittle flew from
his lips.
“You only disgrace yourself more with such words.”
“I’ll disgrace meself as much as I damn well please.”
“Fine enough with me. Go on and forget about your boys, then. May God rest them above and you soon enough–”
“How dare you speak on my boys!” His voice cracked.
“You only mar their sweet memory further each passing day you stumble across this Earth.”
“Oh, wretched are you! Wretched, wretched! You don’t know what grief I harbor. It eats at me from the inside like some great worm, feedin’ upon me every minute of every day. It is incessant. I feel it — yes! Even now, I feel it! Right this very moment it is inching its way toward me brain!” He clamped his palms over his ears as if to deafen his mind to any notion of this horrible vision, this ceaseless devourer within. That sunken face, which so readily bore the mark of loathing, had shifted, creased now with the lines of anguish. “There will be nothin’ left, not but a crumb spared for the rats to nibble upon. I shall be wholly consumed! I shall be eaten alive!” He looked skyward with that unmistakable look of pained sorrow, with arms outstretched as if appealing to some greater force. “Please! Take it from me!” He tore at his shirt collar, as if wrestling to provide relief from some invisible noose which constricted him.
“Stop this madness at once! Now, out!” Cried the barmaid, but such commands were hollow against the wails of Old John, his convulsions of despair like the contortions of the possessed.
“Oh, my boys! My boys! Forgive me, you must. My tender, lovely boys…Oh Sara! Sweet, sweet, Sara. How I long for you!” He sank to his knees. The glass, forgotten, rolled across the floor. Violent sobs shook him as he cradled his face in his hands.
“Oh, you. Don’t do this. This isn’t the time nor the place. Come now, it’s been six years, John. Six years since you lost them. You were away at sea. You had no fault in this.” She knelt down beside him and, as if consoling a small child, gingerly placed a hand on his shoulder. “You simply cannot carry on like this, you simply can’t. You mustn’t despair like this.” She gestured toward the empty glass. “Isn't
there someone you can go to? Family to take care of you? One shouldn’t have to grieve alone, it isn’t right. Certainly not like this…” There was a long silence, filled only with hiccuping sobs and whimpers. Then at last, looking through the small slits in his fingers, he said, hoarsely, “I’ve no one.”
“You mustn’t say things like that. You can’t mean that.”
“I mean it, truly. I do.” He struggled to his feet. “I’ve no one,” he said again. The barmaid, at first motioning to steady the old man, arrested any such assistance, perhaps remembering his violent, momentary distress, and so contented herself with standing idly. There were visible red marks where he had clawed at his neck, and his shirt had been ripped open, revealing a gash of pink flesh. A small line of blood wormed its way through the trenches of his wrinkles where his nails had succeeded in breaking the surface of the skin. With a tired solemness, Old John collected himself slowly, picked up his glass, and set it noiselessly on the table. “I’ve no one but my torments,” he said. Then, turning toward the door, the bleary-eyed seaman stumbled out of the alehouse and into the pitch black of night.
The world beyond lay devoid of life, filled, in these hours, with a suffocating emptiness and darkness. Company there was none, save for the face of the moon. As though it too wished to turn away from the figure that walked beneath it, its crescent shape was but a sliver of guiding light. The mumblings of Old John followed him as he teetered along the stone wall which divided land and sea. Posts at intervals joined by a singular linked chain marked this coastal extremity. The expanse past the wall was serene. It was as if a watery blanket swaddled all the world in its still, black cloak—save this plane of land kept untouched, guarded by the great wall. There was comfort in such simplicity. The only sounds were the low whistle of wind and the waters lapping gently against their mighty barrier, their fluctuations eroding one granule of stone at a time.
In due course, the Old seafarer’s legs had grown tired and the chained guard had paused. Here, he paused also and sat. His perch overlooked the serene blackness stretching out into the beyond. There was no visible horizon, only a formless black body. The only indication there was any sky at all was the dim pinpricks of starlight, speckling overhead. Who could say with certainty the thoughts which swirled and lapsed like the crashing of waves behind those sunken eyes, that eroded mind. Perhaps there were imaginings of life at sea, of glorious conquests and great triumphs. Perhaps in the surface of the water the tattered image of Old John transformed itself and there, staring back just within reach, was the man he had discarded so long ago, the shiny boots and royal blue of his captain’s uniform
almost sparkling against the black water; why, if only he could be born anew! Or perhaps there were the tender recollections of raising his boys, the echoes of their laughter and the blissful image of their smiles replaying themselves again and again. Perhaps, he recalled fondly teaching each to make cork boats weighted with ballast using pennies and listening to their cries of joy and satisfaction as they set their ships to sea. Or further still, his imaginings might be of the warm embrace of the woman whom he once loved, now asunder in some distant part of the world. He might harken back to the nights they shared, swapping stories and howling with laughter deep into the night — that gleeful cackle of hers was music to his ear; or perhaps the quiet afternoons when he would find her curled up contently in a nook reading; or the treasured drawing he kept of her in his sea chest to ease his times of longing. There were all manner of harrows which might agonize and pollute his mind and have not a drop to ail them. Worse yet, there might be nothing at all in his being — not a singular, sentient thought, only a pervading sense of fatiguing sorrow — a pitiful husk as empty and mournful as the rocking ocean below.
Whatever his preoccupations, or lack of, I could not relay them to you. They do not belong to me or to any soul of this earth. I can relay only what happened and that is this: Old John did not look back. He did not shut his eyes. He pushed himself suddenly from the wall. For a moment, his body was suspended in the air. The cool wind whipped across his face and the smell of the ocean filled his nostrils. He could almost feel the taut rope in his hands and the cries of his mates and the sturdy planks beneath his feet. And then the moment passed. He plunged into the cold blue and slipped silently beneath the surface of the ocean, into oblivion, into bliss. The waves paused their motions briefly to swallow him up and then resumed their gentle lapping against the great stone wall.
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