Hawaiʻi Review Student of the Month, February 2016

FEBRUARY 2016

STUDENT OF THE MONTH

Perry Buto

Copyright © 2016 by the Board of Publications University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

HAWAI'I REVIEW

Student of the Month

Perry Buto

Perry Buto is a writer and avid knitter from Honolulu, Hawai'i. She graduated from the University of Puget Sound with a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing in December 2014, and is currently home pursuing a Graduate degree at the University of Hawai'i.

Perry has previously been published in the University of Puget Sound’s literary & arts magazine, Crosscurrents, and in the inaugural print issue of the Tacoma literary magazine, Creative Colloquy.

In her writing, Perry explores the human psyche, how we develop our sense of self, and the effects that even the smallest events can have on a person.

Her literary heroes are Sherwood Anderson, Oliver Sacks, and William Carlos Williams. Outside of writing, Perry loves to knit, listen to podcasts and audiobooks, and play video games.

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FEBRUARY 2016

Copyright © 2016 by the Board of Publications University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

A Note From the Editor

Perry’s work is charming and haunting.

Her writing breathes with creation and destruction — kindling emotions in one paragraph and extinguishing them in the next, building intimate characters and crushing them under the weight of the plot — inhale, exhale.

This effect, paired with Perry’s focus on the ordinary, is a lively and harrowing look into the tragedy of the everyman.

-C.S. Yannell

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by

Perry Buto

“Mr. Walker, you’ve got a really beautiful car.” John’s smile was tentative, but genuine.

“Thank you, John. It really is my pride and joy.”

“I can only imagine, Sir. It’s a Porsche, right?” There was a flutter of awe that flashed across John’s face.

“A 1977 911 Targa in Desert Beige,” he said with a smile. “Though, it was used,” he muttered begrudgingly under his breath. “A budding car enthusiast, John?”

“Yes, Sir. I’d love to work as a designer one day.” John’s thin cheeks turned pink at his teacher’s surprised laugh.

“A car designer? Knowing Richard, I’d imagine he can’t be too happy about that.”

“No, sir. My dad said that cars can’t get me anywhere, but I’d like to think that they could.” John’s pale blue eyes glanced up expectantly.

“Well, that explains the model cars, I suppose. Sure. I bet cars’ll take you somewhere exciting.”

The grin that broke across John’s face was much less reserved than his first. His eyes were so bright they sparked, caught fire, and began to dribble down the sallow concaves of his cheeks in wide, angry chevrons. The boy blinked dumbly and began to tilt his head up toward the ceiling, the

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wooden back of the chair creaking and arching until it splintered into pieces of the atmosphere. The floor became black and sticky tarmac saturated by fluids—human and mechanical—and Mr. Walker watched as the young boy’s body wriggled and writhed like a dying cockroach, John’s bones crunching and crackling as it accounted for the weight of a spectral 1977 Porsche 911 Targa in Desert Beige.

John’s head turned to face his teacher, and there was a serene smile on the boy’s lips amidst the bubbling flesh. His face was blackened by char; his left eye swollen shut; his right peeping out from beneath a half-shut eyelid—baby blue, and still in awe of the man in front of him—his tall, thin nose made blunt by the cruel kiss of a heavy tire; but his thin, chapped lips were still perfectly fine and smiling up at the sky. They twitched, and, though no breath passed John’s lips, his teacher could still hear the words the boy spoke with no problem at all.

“Mr. Walker, you’ve got a really beautiful car.”

Hiram Walker woke up pallid and clammy with his hand automatically slapped across his mouth to muffle his screams. How many nights in a row had he woken up to the John’s face echoing across the border between his conscious and unconscious mind? After a moment, he managed to slow his breathing, though not the erratic, adrenaline-soaked beating of his heart.

“Tea,” he murmured aloud, swinging his legs from underneath his blanket over the edge of his bed. “Maybe that’ll calm me down.” Groaning, he pushed himself up, feeling like there was an elephant resting its legs on his hunched shoulders. He sucked in a breath, forced his back straight, and glanced at the mirror propped up against the side of his dresser, patting absently the slight concave shape of his stomach. I guess I should eat more, he thought, though, at the notion of food, Hiram thought of the ham sandwich John used to bring for lunch every day and felt quite queasy.

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Dragging himself to the kitchen, he shuffled around pulling pre-measured Motherwart tea bags from one cupboard, cheap china from another, and honey from the pantry. As he filled his cup with tap water and stuck it in the microwave, Hiram dreamt about John’s first day in class.

Hiram had brought the same bitter tea to class with him that day in an attempt to soothe his fluttering nerves at the prospect of another semester of unenthusiastic children taking his class to fulfill an art elective credit without having to do too much work. Hiram knew that he had the reputation of an easy grader, but he had decided early on in his career to be fairly lenient, because he always wanted his classes to be full of young talent.

He knew that shop class wasn’t an exciting prospect for most of the children. Many of them had grown up helping their parents repair equipment and buildings in their small, Oklahoma farming town, and as the towns around them rapidly modernized, Hiram watched the starry-eyed youths begin to reach for a future far away from the familiar. Hiram had still managed to convince himself that he could change the grading system in a few years since DIY projects were coming back into vogue, but that had been over a decade ago, and Hiram had finally settled on having a mediocre class of mediocre students to complement his mediocre home life.

John had been the first student to file into the class that day; he had been bright-eyed, though Hiram recognized and sympathized with the cautious timidity hidden beneath the excitement. John sat at the workstation desk right at the front of the woodshop, and Hiram had ignored the bitter Motherwart—which he really didn’t care for, but drank to regulate his fluctuating anxiety—his confidence restored by the genuine excitement of the student. He had been, of course, entirely disheartened by the fact that his son had also chosen to take the class in spite of the fact that the pair had agreed not to interact during school hours if possible. Hiram had

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wondered with both annoyance and trepidation what his son, Atticus, was doing breaking their pact.

Somehow, though, John’s quiet enthusiasm pulled Hiram’s nerves through to the end of class without the Motherwart, and, after class, Hiram couldn’t help but smile when John approached his desk.

“Mr. Walker, Sir,” John had said meekly. Hiram blushed, never having been called “sir” before. “My name is John Dougherty, and I’m really excited about class this year. I have a project in mind for the final already, Sir. Can I run it by you?”

“Of course, John!” Hiram leaned back in his chair, never having felt so proud of being a high school teacher as he did in that moment. There was a spreading warmth in his gut and a giddy sort of tingle erupting from the back of his neck. He finally had a chance to influence and inspire, and the endless opportunities of educating an eager mind blossomed in his heart for the first time in his life. Never before had he known a sense of excitement to share knowledge; only the dull disappointment of spitting words into students’ faces and watching it drip down onto their desks. “Do you usually have activities after school?”

“No, Sir. I usually go home straight after school ends.” Hiram leaned back in his chair, remembering that this boy’s mother was the town scandal machine, and that his father was a well-known workaholic.

“Would you have time to come talk to me after school?” Hiram asked.

John’s fervent nod made Hiram smile and wonder if he had ever been quite as passionate about anything in his youth. No, he thought. Aside from getting out of this town, I suppose. Though I can’t have been that set on it, since I’m still here.

Hiram hardly heard the beeping of the microwave as it finished heating up his drink, though he was startled out of his thoughts by the loud creak of Atticus’s heavy footsteps on the stairs and his squeaky snicker.

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Hiram flushed and moved to take his dish out of the microwave, wincing at the cool temperature. How long have I been standing here?

“Shouldn’t you be asleep, Atticus?” Hiram whispered, though he didn’t know why, since he and his son were the only ones in the house.

“I was,” Atticus bit back. “The microwave kept beeping, and it woke me up.”

“Oh, sorry,” Hiram said. He turned his head to stare blankly at the door leading from the kitchen to the garage. “I was just… going to take a look at the Porsche.”

“Whatever, old man. Just keep it down. I don’t understand why you love that damn car enough to work on it at three in the morning, but some people are trying to sleep,” Atticus grumbled, before he turned around and stomped back up the stairs to his bedroom.

Hiram didn’t acknowledge Atticus’s departure, instead putting his cup of lukewarm tea back into the microwave without closing the door, and going into the garage. With trembling fingertips, Hiram stepped forward and reached out to grab the off-white car cover, colored by dust and age.

He took a deep breath before jumping backwards and yanking the cover off of the car, letting go as soon as his arm made it above his head.

Another wave of nausea wrenched its way through Hiram’s body, and horror squeezed into his veins like an IV drip with each dull thud of his heartbeat. From his spot by the door, Hiram stood frozen and mesmerized by the overwhelmingly vivid images playing before his eyes.

He saw John coming into his office for the first time during lunch, asking if he could eat in the woodshop with Hiram instead of with the other teens because he preferred the smell of the wood shavings to being laughed at by his peers. He saw the first model car John sculpted, a near-perfect replica of the shape of Hiram’s Porsche without the details of head or tail lamps, a trunk, or a hood. Hiram saw the careful precision and skill John

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had used while carving the details into each of the cars he had shaped from wood, using a V-tool to elucidate the details which the boy clearly needed no illustration to see in his mind’s eye. Hiram had never seen such natural talent; it was only John’s fifth week handling the tools, and his first time carving, but the intentionality of each smooth slice would have been enough to prove the boy’s prowess to any observer.

Hiram alarmed himself out of his reverie as his foot took an automatic step forward. Continuing more boldly, Hiram approached the car he had avoided for the last week—opting to walk to work and the market—and tentatively reached a hand out to ghost his fingers across the well-polished hood of the Porsche. He sighed, his fingertips tingling at the familiar shine of his car, comforted by the cold metal he had abstained from for so long.

At first, Hiram had been slightly jealous of John’s talent, but, after the first month of classes, Hiram came to decide that he had also had aptitude at some point in his life, and that John’s had just arrived sooner and more strongly than Hiram’s had. Both pity, at the thought that John might lose his genius to age, and curiosity, to see how far John’s talent could take him, drove Hiram to make sure that John had any and all materials that he needed and wanted.

Hiram walked around his car, from the front left corner along the side, tracing the roof with reverent gentility, danced his fingertips across the downhill slope of the trunk, leaning over to tickle the bumper, before walking his hands back up the tall uphill on the right side of the car, only to freeze at the sight of the center of the hood. Immediately, Hiram jumped back again, a surprised yelp gusting past his thin lips. There was a rust spot that he hadn’t seen before. Every neuron fired in an attempt to discover the cause of the offending brown bloom. The entirety of his neural network

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returned with the same screaming response, and it took every ounce of self-control he had not to shriek along with it: John Dougherty.

Hiram stifled a sob with a tight fist to his lips, his fingertips curled violently into his flannel pajamas. With feverish determination, he searched for a rag and a can of polish, dumping a healthy amount of the liquid onto the rust.

“It’s okay, Hiram,” he muttered to himself over and over as he scrubbed at the hood of his car. “It’s okay. It’s just a spot of rust; it’ll come off, and it’ll all be over.” Hiram scrubbed and scrubbed, tears falling from his cheeks and mixing into the polish.

Hiram sees himself driving along the long, empty highway, taking his hands off of the steering wheel for the shortest of seconds to yawn and stretch, and Hiram screams with all of his might to warn himself of the boy crossing at a crosswalk, but no sound comes from his throat, no air passes through his lungs.

In an instant, the shattering of a body echoes through the still autumn air—a grotesque tire shriek and the snapping and crunching of a body yielding to the sharp penetration of a speeding Porsche and its careless driver. Hiram watches as the boy is swallowed by the low and hungry hood of his car and—after a heartbreaking pause—is expelled out the back, landing several feet away, and observes himself sitting in his car, stunned for a moment by the bruising push of his airbags against his chest before the panic sets in. He watches himself scream and grab at his hair, heaving heavy sobs, mouthing apologies over and over and over, turning to look at the broken body, freezing again as the face of the boy imprints itself onto his retinas: flattened nose, broken-glass cheekbones, eyes swollen shut, upturned lips, Jack-O-Lantern teeth. The moment of horror passes, though the tears will never end, and he plops back into his seat and slams his foot

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back on the gas pedal, veering wildly from the road into the grass pasture next to the highway and back again in his eager escape.

Hiram sees himself drive until his cries subside into numbness, blotchy spots of rust blooming down his cheeks where his wayward tears have fallen, taking over his entire body. He watches the rust reaching out from his tip of his shoe where it connects to the gas pedal, swallowing the interior and exterior like lichen on a sleeping rock. Hiram hears vaguely the muffled voice of an emergency operator coming from a highway callbox asking him about his emergency, and the overwhelming creaking of his tarnished jaw ringing like tinnitus until the burn of rubbing his hand against bare metal wakes Hiram from his fever dream.

He picked up the rag he had dropped and looked at the hood of his car; Hiram couldn’t remember what he had been doing, his eyes flickering around the pristine bonnet. He blinked a few times before the fuzzy brown spot faded back into a hazy existence in front of his squinting eyes, and the terror and the need to scour returned to his chest and gut.

Hiram rubbed at the spot on his car that would forever haunt and never disappear as the sun rose four hours later. He was still scrubbing at the shiny hood as the school day began, ignorant of his son leaving the house without him or the persistent calls from the principal’s office asking where he was. Hiram’s fingers bled and ached with the acidic sting of chemical burns, but he promised himself—though he wasn’t sure it was possible—that he wouldn’t stop until every last trace of John was gone.

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Copyright © 2016 by the Board of Publications University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

PERRY BUTO

An Interview with the Author

I've noticed you focus on a subject matter that many authors prefer to sidestep.

What is it about tragedy that attracts you as a writer?

In both writing and in life, a tragic situation brings out qualities that we may have never known about ourselves, and, as a result, we are able to learn and grow (or stagnate). I tend to write about tragedies because it allows the reader to see a character at their core, and to watch the character discover who they are, or who they can be.

Tragedy also provides a great opportunity to endear the reader to a character or characters--whether they feel strongly against what this character stands for, or sympathetic toward the character’s plight--by providing many moments where the character or characters may be making polarizing and life-changing decisions.

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PERRY BUTO

Do you encounter any issues when you zoom so closely to investigate internal sorrow?

I always worry about whether or not what the character is doing seems too dramatic. Sorrow and tragedy are always going to be dramatic topics, but I don’t want the characters in these situations to become caricatures of the emotions they’re feeling.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, I also worry that I will not be able to properly capture a character’s personality and convey the proper reaction and motivation. There is definitely a sweet spot, and I can only hope that, with each revision of a piece, I get closer to it.

How does this piece compare with your other work?

I always try to have fun and change things up with my writing. I do, however, tend to write in first person, so I had to be a bit careful with the perspective. With Side Effects piece in particular, I tried to be as neutral in the narration as I could, just because I didn’t want my opinions on the situation to stain how the reader interprets Hiram’s situation.

In comparison to the piece I had been working on right before Side Effects, which had been written in first-person, I felt very far away from the text, but I was satisfied because that was the effect I was trying to achieve.

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PERRY BUTO

How much research does a project like SEoD entail? Do you generally do a lot of research for your stories?

I always try to do quite a bit of research. For this piece, for example, although the larger setting of the piece is only briefly mentioned, I chose Oklahoma due to many different factors--down to the laws that determine how long a sheriff can stay in office.

Even though these factors don’t necessarily affect this piece directly, they do influence the larger community, and other pieces I would write about this incident (as this piece is ultimately part of a larger story cycle).

What's the easiest part about the writing process for you?

I don’t know if there’s any easy part about writing for me. Part of what attracts me to writing is that I always struggle--in every part of the process--so, when a piece I write is well-received it’s extra rewarding.

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PERRY BUTO

Is there anything you're working on in the moment? Can you share some details about the piece?

There are a couple of projects I’ve been switching between. The first is related to Side Effects; as I had always planned for this story to be part of a story cycle, I’ve been working on the accompanying pieces.

Basically the idea is that each chapter in the cycle is about a different member of the community and how John’s death has changed their life in some way--both good and bad. I have rough drafts for each chapter, so now I’ve got to buckle down and get to work!

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FEBRUARY 2016

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Abbey Seth Mayer

MANAGING EDITOR Chase Wiggins

DESIGN EDITOR Avree Ito-Fujita

POETRY EDITOR Julia Wieting

FICTION EDITOR Kapena Landgraf

CREATIVE NONFICTION EDITOR Rain Wright

GRAPHIC NOVEL EDITOR Scott Ka​ ʻalele GRAPHIC NOVEL DESIGN EDITOR Crystel Sundberg-Yannell

Contact us at: managing@hawaiireview.org

A NOTE ON THE SERIES

Our Student of the Month series features on our website stellar student writing and visual art from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mā noa, the institution where our roots dig deep. In print for more than 40 years, our journal has been an established voice in the Pacific and beyond for decades, featuring work from emerging writers alongside literary heavy-weights. The Student of the Month is our latest effort to expand Hawaiʻi Review’s reach by fostering the creative efforts of UH students.

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