Literary Issue 2022 by The Tattler

THE IHS TATTLER

Literary Issue JANUARY 2022 1

Table of Contents

Poetry 1

“Gray Area” by Anonymous p. 31

“One by One” by Aria Petrella p. 31

“How to Steam Asparagus in the Microwave” by Sam Sachs p. 20

“To You Who Deserves the Moon but Would Never Ask For It” by Matilda Schrader ........................................................ 5 “Rispetto for the Man at the Library Desk” by Raia Gutman .............................................................................................. 11 “anniversary” by Clara Weber .............................................................................................................................................. 20 “Everything is Backwards” by Matilda Schrader ................................................................................................................. 26 “Exhaustion” by Joyce Spears ............................................................................................................................................. 26 Untitled by Anonymous ........................................................................................................................................................ 34 “Colors” by Cecilia Grace-Martin ........................................................................................................................................ 35 “Parco dei Mostri” by Louisa Miller-Out .............................................................................................................................. 41 “Etheree for the Falls and the Creek” by Raia Gutman ...................................................................................................... 41 “Winter” by Brenna Lucio-Belbase ...................................................................................................................................... 43 “Men, they always disappoint us” by Hannah Shvets ........................................................................................................ 43 “The Fountain of Youth” by Anonymous ............................................................................................................................. 44 Untitled by Lucy Woll ........................................................................................................................................................... 44 “Dear Death” by Anna Bjerken ............................................................................................................................................ 45 “alone” by Alice Burke ......................................................................................................................................................... 47

Shorts 1

Untitled by Nomi Falk p. 4

“The Unwelcome Guest” by Anonymous p. 45

“Contemplation” by Nathan Smith p. 31

“An Ant-astrophe” by Sammy Deol ....................................................................................................................................... “Spicy Mac and Cheese” by Dexter Joffrey .......................................................................................................................... “revolution” by Louisa Miller-Out ........................................................................................................................................... “556 days and to infinity” by Hannah Shvets ........................................................................................................................ “Seasonal Confusion” by Aria Petrella ..................................................................................................................................

Prose 1

“The Garden” by Valentina Lebret p. 10

“Zephyrus” by Vicky Lu p. 29

14 27 32 32 37

“The Clock Turner” by Ella Maines p. 22

“Icarus’s Wings” by Natalie Patrone ...................................................................................................................................... 7 “The Slow Descent” by Cecilia Grace-Martin ...................................................................................................................... 14 “From ‘As Autumn Dies’” by Adowyn Ernste ........................................................................................................................ 17 “My Sand Sun” by Aria Petrella ............................................................................................................................................. 34 “Desire, Pronounced the Scottish Way” by Raia Gutman .................................................................................................... 36 “The Fissure” by Louisa Miller-Out ........................................................................................................................................ 39 “11.9.2021” by Anonymous ................................................................................................................................................... 46

Beginnings & Endings 1

“The Houses on Rosebud Street” by Sophia Elliott p. 48

“When The Stone Falls Still” by Simon Cohen p. 49

“Perfect Year” by Lorelli Cervantes p. 48

“Sunset” by Joyce Spears ................................................................................................................................................... 47 “She Burns So Brightly” by Caroline Sine ........................................................................................................................... 50 “the calm after the storm” by Lilli Rotondi .......................................................................................................................... 51

Photography Untitled by Xinjia Zeng ......................................................... “Bloom” by Ruby Zawel ....................................................... Untitled by Emma Duell ........................................................ “Candids of people I love by Hannah Shvets ...................... Untitled by Anneke Ryan ...................................................... “Apple Fest” by Laura Mead “Curvature” by Loke Zhang-Fiskesjö ................................. p. 12 Untitled by Anna Bjerken ...................................................... Untitled by Echo Doggett .................................................... Untitled “Football Game” (1 and 2) by Laura Mead .......................... by Xinjia Zeng Untitled by Echo Doggett .................................................... p. 16 Untitled by Emma Duell ....................................................... “A Skyful of Oil” by Ruby Zawel ............................................................................................ “Vámonos” by Loke Zhang-Fiskesjö .................................................................................... “Night on Fire” by Ruby Zawel .............................................................................................. Untitled by Anneke Ryan ....................................................................................................... “N. Tioga Street” by Sam Sachs ........................................................................................... “Dino” by Raia Gutman .......................................................................................................... “Skating in Central Park” by Loke Zhang-Fiskesjö ............................................................. Untitled by Sammy Deol ........................................................................................................ “Closing the Door” by Raia Gutman ...................................................................................... Untitled (1 and 2) by Sammy Deol .........................................................................................

Untitled by Anneke Ryan p. 19

Visual Art 1

“The Fall” by Clara Weber p. 6

“The Capybara’s Lake” by Rowan Catterall p. 15

4 10 10 13 17 18 21 21 27 32 33 38 40 40 42 44 44 47 50 50 51

“Theodora’s Double Life” by Ella Maines p. 25

“SILENT DISCO” by Luna King-O’Brien ................................................................................ Untitled by Clara Weber ........................................................................................................ “-bully-” by Yoonsuh Chris-Kim ............................................................................................ “figures (pen & ink)” by Ruby LaRocca ................................................................................. “Handwoven Shawl” by Alex Jordan .................................................................................... “Self-portrait” by Ruby LaRocca ........................................................................................... “Torso” by Ruby LaRocca .................................................................................................... “Midnight Balloon” by Chester Stone ...................................................................................

Music Composition

11 28 30 30 35 37 37 41

“Who’s got time to “Bumper2Bumper P2” “Natural” name their pieces by John Clarke Jr. by Taein Eom smh” p. 51 p. 21 by Elliot Salpekar p. 18 “op1 no1 i think” by Elliot Salpekar ...................................................................................... 5

“Remember the 16th” by Vicky Lu ....................................................................................... “Stranger’s Lullaby” by Adowyn Ernste ............................................................................. “Babel” by Sam Sachs ......................................................................................................... “Together” by Theo Tuori ..................................................................................................... “Shop Jingle” by Jessica Freeland ...................................................................................... “Parallelogram” by Ronan Caci-Kukelka ............................................................................. “Down” by Kii Kinsella (SAINT KID) .....................................................................................

Music Performance

26 29 32 39 40 40 41

“Haydn Cello Concerto in C Major” by Tony Mao ............................................................ 11 “Walton’s Viola Concerto, Movement 1” by Zoe Galgoczy ............................................. 13 “Welcome to New Orleans (Valentin Hude)” by Xuyan Dong, Noa Yamaguchi, Zoe James, Taein Eom .. 14 “Rachmaninoff Prelude in C# Minor Op. 2 No. 3” by Richard Lin ................................... 21 “Beethoven Quartet Op. 95 No. 11” by Anna Cummings, Alice Burke, Zoe Galgoczy, Claire Russell ...... 46

Editor-in-Chief

Jinho Park ’22

editor@ihstattler.com News Editor Mukund Gaur ’24 news@ihstattler.com Opinion Editor Louisa Miller-Out ’22 opinion@ihstattler.com Features Editor Ruby LaRocca ’24 features@ihstattler.com Arts Editor Katie Lin ’22 arts@ihstattler.com Sports Editor Aitan Avgar ’22 sports@ihstattler.com Literary Editor Raia Gutman ’22 literary@ihstattler.com Back Page Editor Adowyn Ernste ’22 backpage@ihstattler.com Center Spread Editor Frances Klemm ’23 centerspread@ihstattler.com Copy Editor Adam Saar ’22 copy@ihstattler.com Photography Editor Hannah Shvets ’23 photo@ihstattler.com Graphics Editor Yasmeen Alass ’24 graphics@ihstattler.com Layout Editor Ella Keen Allee ’22 layout@ihstattler.com Business and Advertising Sammy Deol ’22 business@ihstattler.com Webmaster Tania Hao ’24 web@ihstattler.com Distribution Managers Evie Doyle and Addie HouleHitz ’23 distribution@ihstattler.com Archivist Alice Burke ’23 archive@ihstattler.com Social Media Kadek Nawiana ’22 sm@ihstattler.com Faculty Advisor Deborah Lynn advisor@ihstattler.com

Shorts

Untitled

By Nomi Falk

My dark roots have started to grow out from under my poorly home-bleached hair, and they absorb the unnaturally warm October sun in a way that makes my scalp crawl a little. My knee aches just slightly from being laid out on the uneven ground. My thumb scrolls mindlessly through an article about the benefits and drawbacks of shopping secondhand for shoes, or maybe it’s about the best kind of kitchenware, or perhaps about how best to secure paid internships. I shoot a glance down the road to see if my ride is yet in sight but see only a stream of the Mercedes, Range Rovers, and Jaguars that belong to the private college students who show up each autumn. The air smells like exhaust and the fishy creek that creeps over rocks across the street. I squint to see what people wear as they enter the laundromat next door. Laundry day outfits. As the stream of all too expensive cars crash past me, air pounds upon my ear in a steady beat. The parade ends, and

I turn my head again to look for my ride. Still nothing. I lower my head back down to whatever I was reading before. Maybe a list of the best bang for your buck on winter coats? Before my eyes can focus back onto the words, my ears are blasted by a honk, ripping my head back up, and a man with thin, floaty hair lowers his window, meets my eyes, and shouts something including the word “baby,” or maybe “pretty,” or perhaps “fuck.” He momentarily takes his hands off of the grubby steering wheel, makes a tight circle with one hand, and shoves his opposite index finger into it before speeding off. A thick, metallic taste crawls onto the back of my tongue, and my eardrums plunge underwater, all other sounds muted. My hearing comes back to life as the bass of a Latin beat zooms past me and I gasp for air. I couldn’t have shouted back my reproach even if he hadn’t driven off so quickly. I don’t want to become a statistic of one more girl killed for rejecting a man.

By Xinjia Zeng

Poetry

To You Who Deserves the Moon but Would Never Ask For It By Matilda Schrader

O how I would give you my lungs if you needed to catch a breath And O how I would lend you my fingertips if yours got even a little dirty If your nose ran, or your eyes bled in desolation I’d give you my breath and my limbs so you can live a life without despair Your skin is like a music note A G that is sung with perfect flow Silky like a tooth hanging from a child’s mouth I would open my ribs and hand that river of blood to you if you pricked your finger even oh so slightly I would gladly give you my eyes so you could see the world from a different view And your heart so delicate as it be Even the smallest touch would bruise it Please don’t let anyone bruise your heart; as it may be seen as an object, it is as shiny as a ruby Watching your lips dry out as you talk; It makes me wonder if you would take mine as a gift I would hopelessly skin my lustful lips off and hand them to you wrapped in a pretty silk bow My soul is yours for the taking when you can’t support that bruised heart you keep hidden in your chest Accept my gifts as I accept your life every day Hold my hand just to feel that warmth one last time And when I fall to my knees, pick me up and lay what’s left of my flaccid body under a willow tree; For I have given all that I can give My life and my spirit, you have it all I regret nothing

Music Composition

op 1 no 1 i think By Elliot Salpekar

The Fall By Clara Weber

Prose

Icarus’s Wings By Natalie Patrone

Whatever the tales and the bedtime stories might say, joy was not foreign to The Girl before the story began. She would dance barefoot in the starlight for hours, becoming dizzy and exhausted. Life was full of mirth and laughter and the warm dark of summer nights. With her mirth, The Girl would bring the music to the dimly lit valleys. She would smile and her eyes would glow with the intensity of the fireflies that danced around her gleefully. But then the dawn would break, and the laughter and music would stop. The girl would silently slip away, retreating to the darkness she called her home. The sun would rise, but The Girl didn’t know it. The day would beat down on the land in waves of heat and light, but The Girl didn’t know it. The moonlit pastures would turn golden and amber in the rays of sunlight, and still, The Girl slept unaware of the transformation of her universe. Then, darkness would fall and the chorus of crickets would wake The Girl from her slumber. She would tie her hair up and leap out of her hiding place once more, joining the delicate ballet of the night. All would have been well if life would have continued this way. The Girl would continue her dance and she would stay blissfully unaware of the light that she missed. Darkness would have stayed the safe and comfortable home of The Girl. The music would play for an eternity to come. But if that happened, what would this story be? Happy endings are often boring. The Girl frolicked and twirled among the fields of flowers. She reached her hands up towards the stars, hoping that the tips of her fingers would brush the distant sparkles above her head. Of course, she couldn’t reach them. The girl continued to spin with glee and joviality, forgetting herself in the process. She danced and moved with the warm breeze far from her home, into a field that she hadn’t ever ventured into. Her distance from her home was no matter to her at this point, for her head was occupied with other things, like fairies and starlight. The Girl almost didn’t notice the sun reaching out above the horizon, painting the sky with colors that The Girl had never imagined before. When The Girl saw the tip of this strange glowing orb of light creep over the horizon, a type of animalistic fear of the unknown washed over her. This foreign source of brilliant light crawling over the skyline seemed like an awful predator, coiling to pounce. The Girl ran with urgency and energy. She didn’t know which direction was home, so she just ran in the opposite direction of this strange mass of light and color. No matter how far she ran, though, the sun wouldn’t shrink in the distance. The girl looked around, trying to find a landmark that she could recognize, but everything seemed so different now. The world was saturated with color and life. The beauty of this whole new world was lost on the frightened girl. The Girl’s lungs were having trouble keeping up with her feet, but her sheer will kept her going until she found a recognizable tree. It looked very little like the large oak she had known. The

leaves shone bright with a beautiful and pure emerald when they were silver and fragile in the moonlight. Everything seemed so confident and sure of itself while it was colorful. The Girl might have not recognized the tall tree if it weren’t for her initials carved into the trunk. She knew her way from here. Soon, The Girl had found her way home. Her lungs filled and collapsed at piston speeds. Her head spun, and she became dizzy with the sudden lack of motion. But she was safe again. That’s what mattered. The strange glowing orb in the sky had not caught her. The girl continued panting as she sat on the floor of her home. She had reached a whole level of exhaustion that she had never experienced before. She laid her head on the cold and unforgiving ground, too tired to wish for the soft comfort of her bed of flowers. The Girl slept a dreamless sleep through the rest of the day. Her exhaustion pulled her further down into unconsciousness so that the chorus of crickets was not able to rouse her from her slumber. For the first time, the world went by without the nightly music of The Girl’s dance. A still and anticipating silence fell over the lonely valley, but The Girl was unperturbed. She slept on until the night was almost over. Nothing specific woke The Girl, and she drifted uneasily into consciousness. Instead of tying up her hair and hurrying outside with glee, The Girl slowly rose and shuffled outside with great heaviness. Her dances and movements were melancholic and reserved, compared to other nights. The Girl didn’t feel a speck of joy tonight, and she would rather be home in her bed than dancing the night away, but she felt it was her duty to keep the music going. Her legs barely moved off of the ground as she swayed without any energy. Soon, she lost herself in her own head. The thought of the brilliant sun infected The Girl. The parasitic feeling of fear and awe consumed The Girl completely. The more The Girl analyzed the experience, the less fear she felt. The sun had been, in truth, quite beautiful. The constant chase between them had been invigorating, and The Girl hadn’t felt that strongly in… well, forever. The world had been so different and alive while the sun shone over the fields and forests. There was a level of strength and constitution to the saturated world that the delicate and innocent night never achieved. Soon, the night creatures crawled to their dens and the sky turned a dark shade of pink. The Girl noticed and made her way back to her home. It wasn’t a silent scurry or a furious flee, but more of a confident sway. You could even go so far as to describe it as a saunter. The Girl was no longer afraid of the change into the day. The Girl started off the day like any other. She drifted onto her bed and fell into a soft and deep sleep, a smile lingering on her face. At noon, though, The Girl’s eyes slowly drifted open. Continued on page 8

Icarus’s Wings Continued from page 7 She rose out of her bed and tiptoed outside as if she was trying not to wake someone, even though there was no one whom she would have woken in her life. When The Girl first stepped outside, her lungs sucked in a breath of air, as if she had just resurfaced from under the dark waves. The leaves shone emerald green and the air was filled with pollen. Bird sounds that The Girl had never heard before echoed throughout the valley. The most brilliant and different thing about this alternate universe was the beautiful and triumphant sun that sat high in the sky. The Girl gawked at the glory of the heavenly body that hung above her head. The Girl tried to look directly at the sun that towered over her, but she couldn’t. It was too bright for her. The Girl settled for closing her eyes and letting the bright warmth pour over her face. A slight smile unconsciously rose on The Girl’s face. The Girl sat there in an indescribable state of bliss for quite some time. It was simultaneously too long and too short. After she felt the sun lowering, The Girl’s eyes fluttered open, and she hurried back inside to steal a few more hours of sleep. This cycle continued for a while. The Girl would rise from her bed and bask in the sun for as long as she could until the sun was almost under the horizon. Then she would try and sleep for as long as possible before she woke up and danced under the stars. She would spin and leap through the unlit fields, thinking about her sun. With these stolen moments of ecstasy, The Girl’s need for her amber sun was satiated. She cultivated her self-control every evening when she stood from her seat and slipped back into bed. This schedule was enough for The Girl for quite some time. Her need and her love for light grew every day and soon couldn’t be contained with a few brief hours of exposure. She yearned for more. With a defiant and strong constitution, the girl packed up her few belongings and walked out of her home one day, not planning on ever returning. She didn’t look back on the life she left behind, and she walked for ages. With each step The Girl took, she was that much closer to the sun. Days passed of ceaseless walking, and The Girl found herself at the foot of a rocky mountain. The sun beat down on her back cruelly so her skin was burnt and her forehead covered in sweat, but she held her head high. The Girl loved the sun too much for something as little as the discomfort of reddened flesh. The Girl inhaled and started to climb the mountain. Every step was a painful burden, but she continued on. Every once in a while, The Girl would look up into the sky and see her celestial orb gleaming above her head, and she would regain her constitution. The one thing that kept her going was the thought that she would finally be closer to her sun after this long journey’s end. She continued climbing the steep and rough edges of the mountain, the skin on her hands and feet

starting to rub away. The world became relative around The Girl. Time had become a pliable thing as The Girl climbed the mountainside. It could’ve been years or minutes that The Girl spent pulling herself towards the sun, but her unwavering want and devotion to that distant star made the journey seem like it lasted mere seconds. Her pain in her joints and muscles stopped burning as she slowly gave herself away to her singular lifeline. The Girl barely noticed her surroundings, due to her newfound tunnel vision. With the outer world melting around her, The Girl barely noticed when she had finally made it to the summit of the mountain. It was truly glorious. The sun shone so brightly and confidently. It filled The Girl with a warm ache in her chest that she knew to be love. The sun’s comforting rays dove down to Earth and reached The Girl with a loving touch of warmth. No matter what direction you looked, the sun and its splendor would fill your senses completely. The world was all light and warmth and heavenly joy. While The Girl felt a profound sense of accomplishment at this point of time, her closeness to the sun she loved so much only made her hunger grow for it exponentially. She wanted not only to feel the outstretched embrace of the sun’s rays. She wanted to be enveloped in its burning wholeness. The Girl reached her hands into the sky, and was heartbroken that she wasn’t able to grasp the sun from the mountaintop. Well, at least I can still stare and dream, The Girl thought. As children, we’re all taught that looking directly into the sun is bad. The Girl had neither sun nor educator in her life to tell her that looking at the thing she loved most would be her downfall. The Girl watched the sun unblinkingly, even after her tearless eyes started to cloud. The Girl could feel the wax holding her makeshift wings together finally melt at last, but she didn’t care. The sun would take care of her. The sun would never hurt her. The Girl held this hope as her retinas were destroyed and darkness was the only thing visible anymore. Her precious sun was the last thing she would ever see… …Up on a mountaintop, legend says that you might find a girl curled up in a ball, her eyes as pale and milky as the moon. She lays on the mountain peak day and night, unaware of the passage of time, tears cascading off her cheeks. If you ask her why she cries, She’ll tell you that she lives in a world of darkness. A world devoid of light. A world devoid of what she loves. But she still carries on, and she imagines the sun again. She tries to picture the brilliant hue of it shining in her everlasting dark world. She tries to remember what her beloved sun looked like, but she can never get it quite right.

Prose

The Garden

By Valentina Lebret

A young girl dreams. She wanders through fog, and its cold fingers reach out to brush the back of her arms and neck. She shivers and continues walking, her feet landing noiselessly on the nothing she walks on. Eventually, the fog clears, and she reaches a garden. Its land seems to stretch on forever, and its greenery seems faded in the light of a gibbous moon. Trees ripe with fruit whisper the secrets of midnight, and flowers bloom in their shadows. The scent of roses and honeysuckle color the air. A woman stands opposite the girl. Dark hair falls in curls down her back, and, as she tilts her head, her eyes seem to glow, catlike. She beckons with her hand, calling the girl closer. The moonlight glints off her fingernails. The girl approaches, and the woman smiles. “Hello,” she says. “I am the Lady of the Flowers.” The girl smiles politely back. “This is my garden,” the woman continues. “Would you like to explore it with me?” Together, they walk in silence among rows of hyacinths, daffodils, and forget-me-nots, and the girl’s eyes widen. Beauty must be love, she thinks as she looks at the garden. Finally, the Lady of the Flowers turns to the girl. “You have something I need. You see, I’m a collector of sorts.” She smiles. “I collect childhoods. I collect curiosity and wonder and imagination. I would like your childhood. You would like to be a grownup, wouldn’t you?”

The girl looks at her, and her eyes seem to trap the light of the stars. “Aren’t you tired of it?” the Lady of the Flowers asks. “Aren’t you tired of being ignored?” She starts weaving her way once more through the flower beds, and the girl hurries after her. As their shadows move over a nearby thorn bush, they become distorted and inhuman. “I can make them see you,” says the Lady of the Flowers looking down at the girl. “You just have to give me your childhood. You just have to give me the flower in your hand.” The girl looks down at a white lily pressed loosely against her palm. “I didn’t even realize it was there,” she whispered. “People rarely do,” the Lady of the Flowers responds. “Until it’s gone.” They stand together, in silence, for a moment longer, both of them looking at the white lily. Finally, the girl looks up. “If I give you this flower, people will respect me?” Her lip quivers. “Yes,” the Lady of the Flowers replies. “Your childhood will be over. Your life can begin.” She smiles kindly down at the girl and holds out her hand. Slowly, the girl places the lily into the woman’s outstretched fingers. (“Funny,” she thinks, “that a childhood could weigh so little.”) The woman’s fingers curl over the flower’s petals, and she smiles once more. The girl stands, motionless, and watches the Lady of the Flowers walk away. A young woman wakes up.

Bloom

By Emma Duell

By Ruby Zawel

Music Performance

Haydn Cello Concerto in C Major By Tony Mao

Poetry

Rispetto for the Man at the Library Desk By Raia Gutman

for Mr. Lira Standing in the four-thirty afterschool light, Watching over his domain of stacks and desks, A man, a voice, a smile, a good and welcome sight. I follow his gaze to find the picturesque. The view out the windows, its fall, its winter Whose December winds it might crack and splinter. I rise from my desk, search for my friend, To wish him, with promise, a happy weekend.

Visual Art

SILENT DISCO By Luna King-O’Brien

Apple Fest By Laura Mead

Music Performance

Walton’s Viola Concerto, Movement 1 By Zoe Galgoczy

Candids of people I love By Hannah Shvets

Shorts

An Ant-astrophe By Sammy Deol The early morning sunshine beamed through the tall grass blades surrounding my colony, creating beautiful shadows below. Everything was peaceful until the violent trembling started. I knew instantly: a human was on the loose, running through our lawn. In shock, I tried using my six legs to crawl away, but within seconds, the human caught up. Piercing screams rained down around me as the human began stomping on my friends and family. I witnessed their mangled, crushed corpses limply flying through the air between each step. But suddenly, everything went dark. Looking up, I saw its massive foot above me.

Prose

The Slow Descent By Cecilia Grace-Martin The air smelled of stale rain and sickly sweet flowers. It was the smell that came after a torrential storm when the air was wet but no longer fresh, the stirred up dirt leading to the prevalent scent that brings to mind an untended basement. The rain had torn the flower petals from the newly blossoming trees and battered them relentlessly, spreading a smell that was almost pleasant but left a bad taste in your mouth, like that of fruit on the cusp of rotting. The damp air clung to her skin, pressing in on her and making her feel like the air was hugging her just a little too tightly. The air seemed too thick to flow in and out of her lungs, and she felt like she was slowly suffocating. Her bare toes curled into the wet earth beneath her feet, trying to ground herself, but she barely felt the cool mud as it squelched between her toes. All she could focus on was the stickiness of her hands and the slight tickling feeling as thick liquid dripped down to her fingertips and then fell to the saturated ground. She might have been imagining it, but she could see a deep red stain slowly spreading out from her and the form lying at her feet. As she watched, it spread out over the hills and up into the gray sky, consuming the entire world. Dazed, she looked back down at the ground, at the body lying there. All she could see was too pale, clammy, sickly skin and lifeless, soulless eyes staring up at her, locking her in place, immobilizing her. There was a metallic taste on her tongue mixing with the acrid sweetness of the flowers. As she stood there, frozen, a strong wash of salt overtook her taste buds, nearly overpowering the tang of blood. She brought her hand up to her face, inadvertently smearing her cheek red, and realized she was crying. She was finally able to tear her eyes away from the sight on the ground, and she stared with unfocused eyes as her tears drew tracks through the deep red liquid on her fingertips. She tried futilely to come back to herself, but she just floated further away, all of her other senses fading as the sounds of screams filled her ears and her mind, calling, begging for her to stop, for her to put the knife down. She smelled the fear in the air, thick and choking. She felt the flesh resisting, for just a moment, before her hands plunged the knife in, over and over and over and over and over. She tasted blood as it flew up into the air. She saw the life drain from once vibrant eyes. And she smiled.

Music Performance

“Welcome to New Orleans” (Valentin Hude) By Xuyan Dong, Noa Yamaguchi, Zoe James, Taein Eom

The Capybara’s Lake

By Rowan Catterall

By Xinjia Zeng

Prose

From “As Autumn Dies” By Adowyn Ernste

The first snowflakes fall like daisy petals caught in a breeze. From the first accidental flakes, the world becomes gradually illuminated in a silver haze. The garden, ratty leaves dried brown and brittle from the cold, seems to wither slowly within the breath of winter. I watch as autumn dies, staring out at the desolate world through the haze of my breath. Dry air catches in my throat, and I hold the instinctual cough deep within my chest until it dies away. I would hate to be the one to disturb the stillness that seems to freeze the world into itself. In the silent wood, all the little creatures are huddled away in their dens. There is not a single wind to disturb the silence. Not a single birdcall to filter through the trees. All that is left is this barren landscape of the trees and the sky and the snow. As the flakes descend slowly all around me, kept aloft by their thin, crystalline frames, time slows to a standstill. And maybe I too will stand here for eons, moss growing along the skin of my arms and legs. Maybe this body I wear will turn to stone and I will become a statue for the birds and squirrels to rest upon. Maybe small, red berries will sprout alongside the feet that will be obscured by snow. Maybe snow and ice will bury me beneath the naked limbs of this lonely forest and I will be forgotten. The world is painted the muggy brown of late autumn, all the color and life leached from its veins by the changing of the seasons. Only the faint glitter of frost on leaf tips hints that winter has come. Like the softest whisper, its first, gentle flakes fall upon the world. Who could imagine, gazing out upon the new, silver sheen of a dying world, that winter brings with it a new form of despair? Burying old sorrows and regrets within its pristine facade, it becomes a constant discomfort that gnaws away at the insides. Until you forget that you ever knew the meaning of joy or warmth. A kind voice draws me from my thoughts. I turn my head and see the woman approaching me. The sound of her bare feet crunches against leaves and twigs as she draws near. With a woven shawl slung around her bony frame, she hunches inward, away from the cold. She offers me a warm smile, but says nothing else besides the initial greeting. She simply stands beside me in silence, staring out at the wood with the air of someone regaining contact with a long-lost friend. Close up, I notice the stark creases beneath her quiet eyes as she smiles, and I wonder if she has grown old here in this little patch of forest. I wonder how many years she has lived alone with the man called Smith and the many cork-topped bottles of vines and powders. Now she is an old woman, and yet not even she is old enough to remember a time before the War. Those memories have been buried away beneath the snow, lost. We stand there together, this strange, forest woman and I, as the snow falls endlessly from a rolling, grey sky. We watch as the golden browns and auburns are glazed with a silver dust as subtle as dew. A quiet wind sweeps through the treetops and sends the last of the leaves into a downward spiral towards the forest floor: autumn’s last, resigned sigh.

By Anneke Ryan

Music Composition

Who’s got time to name their pieces smh By Elliot Salpekar

Curvature

By Loke Zhang-Fiskesjö

By Anneke Ryan

Poetry

anniversary By Clara Weber

it’s been ten years ten years since reality shattered ten years of puzzle pieces that fit, but show a different, clashing picture

after ten years ten years of give and take ten years of this or that where do i, the broken piece, fit back in?

it’s been ten years ten years of new contexts ten years of new people that i have no choice but to tolerate if not like

after ten years ten years of “you choose” ten years of “it’s up to you” how much choice do i really even have?

it’s been ten years ten years since the world split in half ten years of tug of war neither side willing to admit they’re pulling aiming to win

after ten years ten years of here and there ten years of now and then when was i, with two lives, supposed to live?

it’s been ten years ten years of “the new normal” ten years of “for nows” that last years or forevers that last only months

after ten years ten years of surviving ten years of learning and relearning will i ever learn how to be one again?

Poetry

How to Steam Asparagus in the Microwave By Sam Sachs

Again will spring come tree Drawn and quartered Cut and bartered Rationed, wasted, quickly slain

Arise, sing! Unclothed for all And taken in like strangers from a storm Repeated sickly Repeated loudly Repeated, repeated

Only touch to cleanse Only touch to undress

And winter, finally gone to bed

Upon long-hardened floorboard Green, wet, fresh

Rerouted dish Rerooted wistful

Clothed pieces, wrapped like snake’s warm scaled embrace Oil, power, sense of dangerous newfound place

Tree come spring will again

By Anna Bjerken

Music Performance

Rachmaninoff Prelude in C# Minor Op. 2 No. 3 By Richard Lin

Music Composition

Natural By Taein Eom

By Echo Doggett

Prose

The Clock Turner

By Ella Maines

June 8th, 1968. Most Dallas residents were using this fine Saturday morning to recharge and sleep in. Theodora Twist was not one of those residents. Theodora, or as her friends called her, Thee, was an almost-thirty-year-old physicist, chemist, engineer, and local basement dweller of Jackson Street. She was raised on test tube kits and homemade rocket launchers and passed her more recent, less amateur knowledge on to the students of Lilith Senior High before turning entirely to personal work in 1964. Thee survived with weeknight shifts at the nearby diner, but she lived with weekends. For the past four years, Theodora had toiled away at a massive project. It’s a breakthrough, she thought, a miracle. The things she had seen as a result of her work, she still struggled to process. But she was sure of one thing: people needed to see this. Those years had finally paid off, and now was the time for Thee to run a long errand that would change everything. When her old, yellow tin alarm screeched for her to wake up at five-thirty that morning, Thee reacted not with the usual dismay but with alertness, lurching out of bed, already dressed in formal wear, her hair ironed into a bob. She brushed her teeth while packing her bags and spat by the time she was in her driveway. Across the street, Thee’s neighbor Joan waved before entering her trusty pickup truck and parking it outside of Thee’s house. The short woman smiled and held out a golden-brown hand for her neighbor’s darker pinkish-brown hand to shake. “Thanks for lending me your truck, Joan,” said Thee, wiping away toothpaste with her other hand. “I owe you one.” “You owe me twenty for having me get up this early,” said Joan, grinning. They both laughed and headed to Thee’s shed, where they retrieved and hoisted the blanketed invention into the back of the truck and tied it to the vehicle with rope. “How’s my hair look?” asked Thee, brushing sweat off her forehead. “Not too muddled?” “It’s perfect,” replied Joan, tossing Thee the keys. “You’ll do great. You know, I was beginning to worry you were becoming a hermit, staying inside for three weeks straight like that. But it seems to have been worth it.” Her smile faded, giving way to a frozen look of pure horror. Thee was preoccupied peeking under the cloth at her invention, not noticing. “Thee, I’m so sorry I forgot, I have to tell you—” “Christ! It’s a quarter to six! I gotta get a move on if I don’t wanna be late!” “It’s serious—” “I’m sorry, Joan, I must go! But we can talk when I get back, I promise! Goodbye!” Theodora hopped into the driver’s seat and adjusted her mirrors. Joan ran over to the window. “Listen, please, there’s going to be—” The engine of the truck drowned out Joan’s words, and

Thee was off, leaving a thick trail of dust behind her. Clovis, New Mexico was Theodora’s destination. Over there was the official building for Daifus Enterprises, a tech company that was on the search for new ideas from young technicians across the nation. Thee was able to land a meeting, though with how outlandish her invention seemed, she didn’t know how she managed it. The meeting would take place at two PM that day, the hour that the world as Thee knew it was never going to be the same. She just hoped it would be for the better. The Texas sun grew warmer as the day progressed, beating down on Thee and prompting beads of sweat to trickle down her face. She had to use a lot of fuel just to reach the speed limit, with the machine in the back. It was grueling, no doubt. But she wasn’t about to let this opportunity fly by. She couldn’t allow it to, when there were so little for her. New Mexico’s options may have been few, but Texas? It was near impossible. So Theodora kept driving. After numerous gas stops so quick that Thee would often drop the gas pump, and a lunch break so rushed that Thee wolfed down her food in under a minute, she reached Daifus Enterprises at 1:20 PM. Theodora was able to kill 10 minutes just trying to safely take the machine out and wheel it into the building. She was blasted with cool air from the AC upon entering, and heads turned to look. Thee’s dark skin looked almost metallic with sweat, and she was rolling around an ominous blanketed object that was bigger than her. These gawking people included an older housewife with a device that looked like an egg beater taped to a shoe, a baby-faced man with a locked, chained safe, and a wiry figure in a trenchcoat and shades that was holding a dripping paper bag. Theodora wanted to laugh. She was the one who shocked people? Thee skimmed through pamphlets and listened to the radio music for half an hour before her name was called. She wiped her face with a handkerchief and fluffed her hair one last time as the receptionist gave her directions to the conference room. Down that hallway Theodora went, the bossa nova in the waiting room behind her growing fainter with each step. Sickly green-white walls hugged her from all sides, the fluorescent light humming a tune of uncertainty. The door at the end muffled the sounds of men talking, laughing, throwing around banter. Thee took a long inhale. Showtime. Her exhale lined up with the creaking of the door as she opened it. Seven men sat at a rectangular table, in a wide variety of ages, from 40 to… 60? Maybe? The one exception was the man in the back, at the head of the table. He looked around Thee’s age, maybe younger. He had gelled strawberry blonde hair and incredibly pale skin, like bone. Horn-rimmed glasses sat over tired but alert green eyes, coated in dark circles. The man stood upright, quietly, passively, watching like an owl.

Sure, he looked professional, but something about him didn’t look… right. Not “didn’t look right” to insinuate that he was a slob, or a slacker, just… out of it. Looking at the man gave Thee the same feeling as looking at an antique doll or a taxidermied animal. He was completely unnatural. The jabbering died down, replaced by faint whispers and stares at both Theodora and the object behind her. Thee cleared her throat. “Good afternoon,” she muttered. “Are you Theodora Twist?” asked the man at the back, with a soft but prominent voice that pierced through the whispers. Thee nodded. “Well,” said a pink-faced man with a cigar perched in his teeth, “Wow us.” Thee cleared her throat again, feeling like, if she didn’t, her heart would beat out of her mouth like an alien. “I’m sure you gentlemen received the phone call I sent when scheduling. So some of you, I am sure, have a faint idea of my creation.” Many of the men nodded, their faces wrinkled with skepticism. “Truly, the ridiculousness of the concept sounds like something out of pure fiction. I would blame no man for raising an eyebrow. But the endeavors I’ve taken have answered the question that we have grappled with for eons: ‘can mankind traverse through the barriers of time and space?’” Thee pulled the blanket away to reveal a yellow clock, much like her alarm, but supersized to a device larger than even Thee’s 5’11” stature. Wheels for portability were placed on the clock’s legs, and the functioning clock arms ticked consistently. “I present to you,” announced Thee, “the Clock Turner.” Snickers, eye-rolls, sighs and grunts came from the table like escaping air from a soda pop. The odd young man remained observant and stoic. “Uh… allow me your ears as I run by the basics,” Theodora croaked. She rolled the Clock Turner to its backside, where there was a circle hatch with a little window. Theodora pulled on the handle to reveal a train-like seating area: four seats, across from each other, a platform of buttons and levers positioned in front of one seat. “The Clock Turner seats four people. The operator’s seat is equipped with a control panel.” Thee lifted up one of the seat cushions to reveal a compartment. “Each seat has a space underneath to place any tools that are necessary for travel, like clothing to blend in, or food.” She closed the cushion. “Where are the seatbelts?” asked a man with a long face. “Hm?” “The seatbelts.” “Roger, we’ve been over this,” said an old, balding man. “Seatbelts are an Orwellian breach of this fine country’s values of freedom, equality, and respect. Say, doll, how does this thingamajig even work?” Thee held her breath and blinked slowly for a moment. C’mon, Thee, she thought, just a few more minutes of this. She moved the Clock Turner back around to its front and

opened the clock part of it like a door. Even when opened, the ticking of the clock persisted. On the inside of the Clock Turner were a myriad of cogs and gears; Thee lost count after 209. In front of it all was a long metal tube that stretched horizontally along the diameter of the machine. A small clock was ingrained in either side of the tube. “This pipe,” said Thee, “is a dilator.” “A what now?” asked the man with the cigar. Thee took a large, binded stack of paper from one of the compartments and placed it on the table. “This is the long explanation,” said Thee. “Just so I can keep this short.” The older men all tried to grab at it, but the strange man at the back held his hand out and motioned for the others to pay attention and let Thee continue. Theodora could see the man silently leaf through the documents as the others were focused on her again. “And what’s that doohickey right there?” asked the balding man. “The red gadget, at the top?” Thee knew what he was talking about. At the ceiling of the area containing the inner workings of the Clock Turner was a closed-off, glowing red button. A lock was embedded in the glass barrier to prevent it from being opened. “That? That’s the safety button. Right now it’s on.” “What’s that do, if I may ask?” wondered the odd young man. “It prevents any effects of time travel from being enacted.” “But what good would that bring?” “Time is a dangerous tool,” replied Theodora. “It can be observed, watched, sure, but the slightest change in a blade of grass could change… everything.” The man squinted at Thee with his owlish green eyes, looking slightly disappointed. “Mhm,” said a petite man with a big forehead. “How are you going to demonstrate time travel to us?” “I’m going to travel to the future, to this same location,” said Thee. “Let’s say… 30 years. 1998. And I’ll bring back a photograph for proof.” Thee took a camera from the compartment. The mens’ faces wrinkled again. “If the machine starts whirring and levitating, that’s how you’ll know it’s working.” “Good luck,” muttered the young man. Thee nodded in response and entered the hatch, shutting it behind her. This had to work. She knew it did, since she had travelled once before. Thee had seen it all, yet nobody would believe her. Just they wait, she thought as she set the time to JUNE 8TH, 1998, 2:05 PM. LOCATION - SAME. Theodora took a deep breath and hit the latch to set it all off. The cogs grew louder first. That was good. Then the ticking of the clock stopped. Also good. That meant it was processing. A loud whirring began, just as Thee had promised. Any second now the Clock Turner would start to levitate, and then it would zap away, across time and space, on its way to the great unknown. Instead, the Clock Turner began to shake. Huh. That wasn’t normal. Continued on page 24

The Clock Turner Continued from page 23 With each second the machine shook more and more violently until it let out a threatening hissssss. Something in the air made Thee start coughing and her eyes water. She stepped out of the Clock Turner, putting her handkerchief up to her nose. To her horror, the room was filled with smoke. The table of men were coughing just as hard as she was. Some were putting their shirts up to their faces for protection. Others were taking cover under the table. “Oh, God,” wheezed the man with the cigar. “This is like smoking but without the nicotine. So I can’t even have a good time.” “LOU, YOU BUMPKIN, NONE OF US HAVE A GOOD TIME WHEN YOU SMOKE, IT’S NOT THAT DIFFERENT FOR US,” hacked the long-faced man. “I knew she was a dud, Stanson!” yelled the balding man, pointing at the strange young man. “Why’d you let her come here?! She’s a loony, kid, we all knew it! Another hack from those run-down Texas ‘houses!’ You wanna get anywhere, you don’t trust them!” “Sir, I know this looks bad—” started the young man through coughs. “Bad?! This is horrendous!” screamed the balding man. He turned to Theodora. “WE’VE HAD ALL SORTS OF SCREWLOOSE TWITS COME IN. BUT TIME TRAVEL? ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND?” The young man, now no longer the focus of the rage, stood upright again, regaining his stoicness. The balding man’s face turned the entire color of the rainbow with fury as he yelled in Thee’s face. “TAKE YOUR DAMN METAL JUNK BACK TO YOUR WASTELAND. TEST IT ON THE ROACHES FOR ALL WE CARE, JUST… GET OUT!” The strange man pulled the balding man away from Thee. “I think it’s best if you leave,” he said. “Please,” begged Theodora, sifting through the documentation of her work. “I can try it again, I don’t know what went wrong, I—” “Just go,” said the young man softly. “Sorry.” Thee sighed and silently exited the room. Even after she closed the door, she could still hear the young man being yelled at. The aching in Thee’s throat lasted from when she left that building all the way to when she returned home at 10 that night. Too tired to even return Joan’s truck, Thee mindlessly dragged the Clock Turner back down to the basement to work on it again the next day. She didn’t know whether she hated those men or herself. She didn’t even have the energy that night to sort through it. Thee plopped straight into her bed and fell asleep almost immediately. At around one in the morning, a horrible orchestra of rumbling and beeping noises awoke Theodora from her sleep. Frantic knocking came from her door, along with faint yelling. Thee rushed across her house and opened the door to reveal a distressed, out-of-breath Joan. “Thee!” Joan yelled, grabbing Thee by the shoulders. “You have to get out of here! Right now!” Joan dragged Thee out of her house.

“What’s going on, Joan? What are those noises?” Joan pointed to a large crane that towered over Joan’s house, a large ball attached to it, ready to crush it at any moment. “I tried to tell you, Thee, they’re demolishing a whole area of houses on your side of the street to make room for a new building! I couldn’t get to you, on the phone, in your house, nowhere! Didn’t you read the notice? What happened?” “Joan,” replied Thee, “I didn’t get a notice. I didn’t get anything.” Joan’s eyes widened, darting around, trying to process what she had just been told. “Thee,” said Joan, “I don’t know how this happened. Stay at my house for now. I’ll help you get situated, we can—” “My inventions are in there,” blurted out Thee. “I’m not leaving them, alright?” “What?” “Joan, I’m going back in.” Joan blocked the doorway. “You’ll get killed! Don’t do this, Thee!” she yelled. Thee shoved Joan aside, as much as it pained her to do so. “I won’t. I know I won’t.” Thee darted down the stairs to her basement, in a race against time. A loud crash came from upstairs. Specks of rubble showered down. Smoke crept down the basement stairs. Jumping over toolboxes and a typewriter, scrap metal and blueprints, Thee reached the Clock Turner, and, taking out a key that was worn around her neck, turned off the safety button. She then opened the hatch. Please, please work, she thought. Each crash grew louder, making Thee shudder. She had trapped some smoke in the seating area of the machine, which made her vision blurry and her head light. Thee began to see double. A month in the past. May 8th, 1968. That should do it. The sound of crackling wood filled the basement. Thee closed her eyes, hit the latch, and held her breath. Cogs grew louder. The ticking stopped. The whirring began. A click, click came from the control panel. That was odd, but Thee didn’t see anything wrong. Finally, the otherworldly, rising sensation began. Bright light shot out of the machine. She had made it. Once the Clock Turner had stopped moving, Thee opened the hatch, hoping to be met with a basement that was not yet destroyed. She set her foot down on what she hoped would be cold, smooth, concrete, only to be met with rubble, old wall pieces, and soot. Rotting wooden planks littered the floor, and a plaster ceiling above her obstructed any light. The basement stairs were chipped and caked in dust. And any tools and inventions, any traces of Theodora Twist that had occupied the dimly-lit basement that she was used to, had been removed. Thee took an ax from a compartment and made her way up the stairs to an entryway that no longer existed. She swung her ax back and chopped, through the drywall and the fiberglass and the cork that stood in her way. Climbing up the new entryway she had created, Thee walked around what once

was her house, now a desolate shed-like building. Racks of tacky costumes, blank bulletin boards and metal cabinets with yellowing labels populated the place. A brown double door’s windows illuminated rectangles of sunlight on the dirty floor. Thee squinted out the windows at the building that loomed over her house-turned-storage area. Thompson Junior High School. Something was very, very wrong. Thee returned down the stairs, then took a flashlight out of the compartment and inspected the control panel. The smoke had clouded her vision; the destination was set to JUNE 8TH, 1998. Thee attempted to adjust it. Click, click, click. The settings flipped back to JUNE 8TH, 1998. Somehow the wiring had messed up. And she had little to nothing to fix it. Thee sank to her knees in

defeat. “No. No, no no! This can’t be real! What on Earth, I—why can’t I just go home?!” Thee cried, burying her head in her hands. After a few moments, she looked up at the Clock Turner again, gently placing her hand on its yellow exterior. This couldn’t have all been a coincidence. Her machine failed to start at the conference. She got no notice of the demolition. Her wiring messed up and trapped her 30 years in the future, far gone from the ugly, beautiful, twisted world she knew. No matter what anyone told her, Thee would conclude, going forward, that what happened on June 8th, 1968 was a sabotage. Things weren’t over.

By Ella Maines

Theodora’s Double Life

Poetry

Everything is Backwards

Exhaustion

By Matilda Schrader

By Joyce Spears

Where do I feel the most beautiful?

Slowly but surely He takes hold He grips vastly tight And doesn’t let go He strangles my mind He grapples my soul His twisted face Becoming all that I know My vision is blurry My words begin slurring My last words, last thought They swirl into nothing I attempt another whisper I struggle to stay awake I see nothing but black, And at last I am asleep

Hands down when I’m writing My mind just goes blank All I can think about are my words Words, they are all that I have left I am so in touch with words They are how I express myself Poetry, stanzas, lines; they are the belle of my mind In the fullness of time my words will end up meaning nothing The things that I admire the most will bitterly withdraw from my head Then and only then will my soul be truly vacuous To someone these verses we call writing are deadpan To that someone, what I speak and what I do is meaningless My beauty is conveyed through my prose All the beauty I have is written in lines formatted to please the human eye This ballad is perfect {to me}, maybe only {me}? Every emotion I portray in my materiality, I smash into the keys of my long in the tooth computer And every feeling that I have ever felt is marinated into these online pages But oh that feeling of putting every bit of ardor into this little size nine font, is worth the rosy sting of reading my own words back to myself Do others envy their own “feelings” as much as I do? Does a lonely someone wish to feel every tingling feeling that they can think of? Or does this lonely someone execrate everything to do with these poems? To any abandoned soul that hates the writing inside them, or me, or anyone, I wish you well I wish to you the feeling this poetry brings to me I wish to you the love that I write about The love that I ponder my sleepless nights about And I wish to you that once your mind softens, you will find the hush that you deserve; because even if my balladry upsets you, I still wish you well Maybe to you it’s nothing, but to me I need this I need this to keep my mind floating above the clouds Owing to the fact that without the typing of my keys my sorrowful life is; backwards

Music Composition

Remember the 16th By Vicky Lu

Shorts

Spicy Mac and Cheese By Dexter Joffrey After you’ve spent five hours throwing, mixing, scooping that cheesy mess, you finally get to add it to the pasta, sit down and eat. First you take that big serving spoon and scoop. As you scoop you hear the squish of the cheese yelling as the spoon moves in, and you can hear the cheese losing contact with the other cheese, sounding like a mushy slurp, fearful that they will never see their friends and family again. For a first-timer, it sounds like your hands are covered with sticky syrup being torn apart. For a veteran, it sounds like the next 20 minutes of your life are going to be remembered and dreamt of for the next 50 years. When you finally plop the cheesy mess of pasta onto your plate you see the cheese spreading out, running, onto the rest of your plate because it is scared of how it is going to be stuffed into your mouth, suffocating and grabbing on for dear life. But it doesn’t matter to you because all you see is cheese. Now you finally get to poke stakes into the heart of the pasta and cheese, picking it up with all your might and throwing the mess onto your tongue. Your taste buds may be fearful at first, but oh my will they be dancing like the monsters in the “Thriller” music video. The spice, the heat, the texture, the flavor of all the cheese—mmmmmm, so good. Your taste buds have never experienced anything so amazing, so savory. Not even seeing your first child for the first time is as great as this experience. Then you chew. The cheese and pasta swooshes around in your mouth as the saliva rises throughout. The cheese and pasta are swimming and looking for their way out. The cheese uses the last of its might to scream, everyone around you hearing the squishing of the cheese disintegrating in your teeth. The screaming continues as the cheese and pasta falls through the gullet and you are so happy for the experience. The squish you hear from the cheese is the last sound the cheese will ever make. The cheese is now in your stomach, engulfed in acid, losing its life slowly, like a snail running from a predator. But it has already given up; there is no way out. Now you get to experience the same thing again, because you will never feel like you’ve had enough of this brilliant spicy mac and cheese.

Football Game By Laura Mead

By Clara Weber

Prose

Zephyrus

By Vicky Lu

The Greeks had three winds for three seasons. Zephyrus is the West Wind, of spring and mild weather, of gentle hands and giving. An old man who has seen too much and done too much and is mostly content to let the wind blow where it will, so long as no harm befalls his favoured. I test the name on my tongue, and decide that I like the spark that starts the breath and the way nothing really obstructs it, even at the end. Zephyrus has eyes that are blue like the well-loved blanket on the couch that I throw around him when he stays up too late designing grandiose structures in the candlelight, or writing letters to his beloved. It suits a husband, a father, a friend. Notus is the South Wind, of summer and storms, catching those around him a flurry of feathers and leaving splendour in his cackling wake. A mess, some might call it, unordered, unnatural. I have never seen anything but passion and beauty in the things that he builds, nor the lightning that he calls to smite our enemies in guarding my back on the field. His eyes are blue, not like the sky but like a tsunami on a deceptively sunny day. I exhale the consonants and vowels in a rolling wave followed by an arrow at short range. When he holds this name, I know he would follow me to the ends of the earth, through fire and flames to the gates of hell. Boreas is the North Wind, of winter and all-encompassing cold, who tempers his violence under a stony facade and hides his strength under a billowing cloak until the time is right. Boreas is barked laughs tinged with bitterness and desperation, quick and clean and deadly, leaving no time for even the thought of mercy. I stand side by side with him, not because he is not trusted but because I could never keep pace otherwise. Boreas has brittle eyes that match the deepest-reaching ice, and I would bloody my lips on hidden edges if I said his name. Apropos, for an avenger. I hold three breaths for three winds. I see Boreas from his cool efficiency, sneering as he sets the encampment alight. I hear Notus when he spreads his wings and laughs, raining arrows from the skies. I know Zephyrus in the feeling of hands carding through my hair, sharing body heat on cold nights. And I wonder if living in the tundra might have brought Boreas out more often, or if being grounded hasn’t dulled Notus’ fire. I wonder if there will be anything left of Zephyrus for me to unearth for his beloved at the end of this ageless war. And the Anemoi whispered to let them go.

Music Composition

If you think your premiums are low... it’s probably

Stranger’s Lullaby By Adowyn Ernste

INSURANCE

Specializing in Auto & Home Insurance 29

-bullyBy Yoonsuh Chris Kim

Shorts

Seasonal Confusion By Aria Petrella

I miss the snow. Right now, it feels like late February or March, when we prepare the buckets to gather sap from the trees and get ready with lively music and heavy foods for the leprechaun and St. Patrick. But it’s not. That time is far away, away in the future, a time when I’ll know my college decisions and my friends will have turned eighteen. Now, it’s supposed to be snowing. It’s supposed to be December. Cold, thick winds coated in an icy flurry should be dusting and gusting across the fields. Instead, it’s raining, and my nose picks up scents of the months yet to come.

Poetry

Gray Area

By Anonymous

You are me. We are the same. Our neurons fire identically The poison ivy is itchy on both of our ankles And the narcissism that flashes through your eyes when you gaze into a mirror parallels mine

Poetry

One by One

You are my uneaten sublime A kaleidoscope that will never quite make a stained glass window You tied knots in my veins and jump roped up my vertebrae

By Aria Petrella In April, May, or June, when the bugs just first start returning to the world, and the ground is covered in a thick mud-paste, I watch the ants. I see them gather and carry something one hundred times their weight. I avoid them in the cracks on the pavement. And I miss who I was when I first met them. When I tripped over my sandals while singing “the ants go marching.”

I locked the keys inside I can see them on the counter making cookies and listening to Souls of Mischief But the best we can do is press our noses up against the glass until it fogs The cookies are burnt You must have sprinkled something in my drink because this game is fanatic I want to leave the door open Instead the mail piles up outside The phone’s been extinct for months, but my brain’s acoustics must be top notch, because the dial’s still echoing I foresaw your importance In preparation I braided my eyelashes together Now I can no longer see the shadows of light that pool off of the stained glass window You are not me. We are not the same.

Shorts

Contemplation

By Nathan Smith

It’s Thursday evening and I am sitting on the porch with a new book about group theory on one leg and a battered notebook on the other. A slight breeze threatens to disturb my setup, but I am still. The sunlight falls onto the pages, causing them to shine faintly and feel warm to the touch as if they had just come out of the printer. Occasionally I jot down a line of symbols or a useful diagram with a chewed BiC pen, the taste of plastic lingering in my mouth. This afternoon my mind is on the idea of a coset, a unique concept at the heart of abstract algebra. I might stay here for an hour, contemplating, shifting and glancing up at the maples, then looking back at my notebook. My mind is on the book, watching as the clean ink marks lift off the page to form ideas and images. “Why must all cosets have the same size?” I wonder. I meander in and out of both worlds, the reality around me and the reality that sits perched on my left leg. I barely notice as the sun inches across the sky and the shadows pivot around their casters. Eventually, the neighborhood is engulfed in shade as a cloud slides in front of the sun, the sudden chill bringing me back to Earth. I take one last breath of fresh air and head inside, ending my mathematical reverie weary but inspired.

Shorts

revolution By Louisa Miller-Out

Noun 1. 2. 3.

There’s sedition in your eyes and a fire roaring at the back of your throat; you choke it back but you want to spit in the faces of the marching steel-toed boots that crush everything in their path. You want it with every fiber of your being. I can hear the crescendo of your heart, so strong the air vibrates with heat even though the snowflakes are falling onto your eyelashes and the wind is picking up and the crowds are getting thin. We bite the insides of our cheeks and the blood flows red, red like young hearts and defiance, red like the soul of a people in chains. The words ring across our brains, lyrics to battle songs composed for eardrums and limbic systems. Your eyes widen, just for a moment, inflamed. Righteousness boils through your veins like ichor and you’ve never ever felt this way before but you don’t ever want it to end.

Shorts

556 days and to infinity By Hannah Shvets

A worksheet in French. A chapter in U.S. history. A problem set in Chemistry. It’s 10:27, and I know sleep is nowhere near. The Winter Solstice is quickly approaching so the sun hides behind the horizon right as I get home and my brain says, “It’s time to sleep! The day is over,” but the end is really far from sight. The house is quiet and for a bit it feels like all of Ithaca is asleep. But I’m awake, sketching parametrics as if I’ll ever use these skills again. Every morning, every extra minute in my bed feels like heaven. How many times can I hit the snooze before I miss the bus? It becomes like a game, a challenge for myself. You can drink all the caffeine you want and take the Vitamin D capsules your parents give you, but by 5th period you’ll be asleep regardless. 556 days left, and then I’m free. Oh wait, not really. This is capitalism; we’re never really free.

By Echo Doggett

Music Composition

Babel

By Sam Sachs

By Emma Duell

Prose

My Sand Sun By Aria Petrella

I live on a sun made of sand. I spend my days sliding down the dunes. I spend my nights sleeping below the crests of their sharply cut slopes. I ride the dragons as they slither through the sand or skate across the sky into the atmosphere. I cherish the warmth that the sand provides me. I write stories, countless stories, about my dragons, my sand, my sun. In the summer, when their hemisphere tilts towards my distant sun, the people on Earth are greeted by its warmth; the sand sticks to them. It floats in the air and twists with the billowing winds. The sand of my beautiful sun drifts to them, millions of miles from its home. I hope that my sand will travel even further, to worlds beyond my understanding. At the center of the sun, the sand expands with heat. But the constraints of earthly physics do not apply. The heat creates movement; the sand spreads apart and fights itself, swirling in fractal motions. The smallest eddies can create dust storms thousands of miles wide. My sun is hundreds of thousands of miles deep, so, eventually, the sand once again calms and compacts into smooth and welcoming dunes. My sun is as bright as any gaseous plasma ball in classic astrophysics. Each grain of sand radiates a thousand lumens of effulgence. Sometimes, when I glide with the dragons, I need to cover my eyes to protect myself from the brilliance of the sand-filled skies. And when I sleep, I need to find the largest dunes, the ones that bend over like waves and cast mile-long shadows across the sandscape. On Earth, when the sand sticks to lazing people, it burns them. Its brightness is too much for them to handle.

My sun is never boring. It’s thrilling to know more about something than anyone else ever could. So I have to maintain my knowledge. I tirelessly study my special world to learn its intricacies. There are many. Gravity works differently here: despite the size of my sun, the sand is light, so sometimes I can bound across the sky with the dragons (I say “sometimes” because, at certain times, more or less sand migrates to neighboring planets, and my ability to bound changes accordingly). The creatures on my sun are called “fantastical” on Earth, invisible or unrecognizable to the human eye. The epistemologies of certain other worlds allow them to see my sun, so I get many visitors. Sometimes even children visit. I once had a peculiar run-in with a small boy who was in search of something. I told the boy that he could stay, that my sun is welcoming, and the sand would accept him, but he declined. He only wanted the comfort of his lost friend, a rose, I think. But I’ve made many other special friends. One time a beautiful serpent visited me. It was unlike any creature I had ever had the pleasure of beholding. It was so long I never saw its entire length at once. Its vibrant iridescence spent a while on my sun. At least I think it did; time moves differently here. The life of time on my sun might be the thing I love most about it. I have always resented the sin of time, so how could I not resent worlds like Earth and its moon that can only move according to its dictates? Well, plainly stated, I do. My sun doesn’t allow for time or the worries it brings. Its constant irregularities comfort me. As long as I wake up and go to sleep, I know that I am, and so is my sun.

Poetry

Untitled By Anonymous Dear Body,

Dear Mind,

I am sorry. I used you up And then wondered Why you weren’t more

I forgive you. For the lies you told me I know you were hurting too I promise we’ll do better

Thank you. For tearing yourself apart So I could stay

—A bad friend, getting better

Poetry

Colors

By Cecilia Grace-Martin Her joy streaked across the sunset sky in vibrant yellows, the hazy pink of her contentment casting a soft glow over the trees and hills. Puffy clouds drifted lazily as her thoughts across the bright sky, the birds flying by overhead bursts of amusement in an otherwise serene state of mind. A glowing ember of love, the sun sunk down below the horizon. Long shadows of doubt crept along the landscape, the encroaching deep blue desolation rapidly consuming the light-heartedness in the sky. The chill of deep, reverberating heartache set in, sinking into her skin and leaving her chilled to the core. A dry apathetic wind blew in, any trace of happiness dissipating in the gusts. After many hours sunk deep down in a dark pit of despair, the sun rose again, casting its healing light on the world, warming her skin with the promise of a new day. But at her center, the iciness remained, never to be thawed.

Handwoven Shawl By Alex Jordan

Prose

Desire, Pronounced the Scottish Way By Raia Gutman

What was it about her that told her, this is one to keep an eye on? Maybe it was the marked swagger in the way she walked, the irreconcilable confidence that suggested she grew up with older brothers or at least taught boys long enough to emerge like that. She searched for the devious, arrogant recklessness she despised in cops, which often accompanied the swagger, and found none. Maybe it was the soft Scottish voice that broke through, dripping below her chin like spilled water, drawing the open, curious faces and outstretched hands of those around her. She was sure the artful stretching of her t-shirts over her breasts played a role as well, but she couldn’t be sure quite where. She waited. Pondered. Drank cold coffee in her classroom. Wondered when the crackle of a walkie-talkie on the curve of a hip would signal her proximity. Resisted the urge to rise when it did, pretend to look for a book on the shelf. Resisted the urge to choose one she suspected her to have read and watch the Scottish eyes drift over the spine and look back up at her with a recognition she hadn’t earned before. She told herself their dance around each other, classroom to hallway, was fun. Was something she didn’t pursue but let happen, observed, on the side. Told herself teaching took up any of the time she might’ve spent pursuing something. Lied. Lied. Lied. Then came the meeting in the room with glass walls, the notebook she took out only to draw letters in the margin of the next blank page. She lifted her head periodically to look at her mouth, to reassure herself she hadn’t forgotten the sound of her voice and that she truly wasn’t speaking. She waited to hear the pure, dribbling r’s that crept out of the corners of her mouth. The r’s she had googled just to be able to do them justice and refer to them with linguistic correctness in her mind. The convergence of the alveolar tap and trilled ‘r’ and the retroflex approximant found in American dialects, which she read came together in the Middle Ages to produce the pronunciation that was now dying out. Her retroflex approximant, however fragmented, was always the best in the room. She strained to hear it in the glass meeting room and had trouble remembering its sound, realizing she hadn’t spoken once in the meeting. She lifted her head to look at her and pulled back, feeling her gaze was accusatory. She was picturing right-side-up and upside down r’s in her mind as she carried her notebook out of the glass room, and she didn’t realize she was right beside her, walking ahead with hands dangling at her sides, far too available and far too close, making her fingers twitch like a mating instinct she was helpless to subdue. She wanted to turn her head and ask her to say the word murder, the word surrender. After. War. Cigar. Tender. When she came to lover, her breath hitched, and she turned, and she told her she didn’t say anything in the

meeting—something she didn’t want to do, but her brain saw two options and did her a favor in choosing the better one. She met her eyes slowly, as if expecting the question, smiled only faintly, and said, “Coffee?” She agreed. She repeated those words at night, murder surrender after war cigar tender lover, imagining her accent, sometimes making herself laugh, sometimes cry—but always desire. The desire sat uncomfortably like hunger, boring into her in a constant ache. Even in class, she would hear one of the words and burn, her mind going blank and her thighs pressing together if only to mask the displeasure in the awareness that her hand was not there. It began to feel that she was not pursuing but backing away, and she hated it. She wanted new words and new ways to pronounce them. She attempted to sleep with a neighbor, joined them at her headboard, their eyebrows, noses, and chins parallel, but couldn’t get beyond touching their cheek. She praised herself, afterward, for the decision that leaving it at that and meaning it was preferable to following through without conviction. She had done so so many times before that she didn’t have to conjure the image of her head on a white pillow, her hair splayed and quivering slightly with the impact of the body above her, her eyes staring, lifeless, desireless, into the ceiling; she found it there waiting for her. The teachers striked. She joined a colleague in the Language department on the sidewalk in front of the school, making prints in the snow with their boots and signs. Watched each car as it passed, the blue Hondas and silver Fords, some honking, eliciting cheers from the teachers around her. Of course, she kept the silhouette of her car in her mind as she stared down the road. Of course, she wondered if she would pull into the parking lot to attend the administration strategy meetings that preceded the negotiating table. On Friday she saw her on foot, trekking up the hill in red and white snow boots and a large, unzipped coat. She didn’t catch her eye until she stopped, holding the cup of coffee in her hand at arm’s length in her direction. She took it, and she looked her in the eye. She said: “It’s almost cold enough to murder out here.” She said: “You’d think they’d surrender already.” She said: “At least after this week.” She said: “The war rages on.” She said: “They’re in there smoking their cigars.” She slid her sleeves up to her wrists and took her hands and said, “They’re dry. So red and tender.” She didn’t wait for her to say lover. She clutched the edges of her big, ridiculous coat and fit her head on her shoulder and turned her head with the flat of her palm and kissed her as the snow fell and her wages rose.

Self-portrait

Torso

By Ruby LaRocca

figures (pen & ink) By Ruby LaRocca

A Skyful of Oil By Ruby Zawel

Prose

The Fissure By Louisa Miller-Out

“Good night, honey.” Those three magic words signified that it was time for Lydia to pull the covers over her head and click on her flashlight. She let out a sigh of relief; her glowing personal tent provided a refuge where she could read deep into the night until her eyelids turned to lead. Tonight’s selection was an ancient copy of Alice in Wonderland, its fragile spine bound in green velvet. She’d found it in the library, which was undoubtedly her favorite part of the old summer house. But its creaking floors and drafty windows left much to be desired. Tonight, however, Lydia was warm and cozy in her makeshift blanket fort, and it was time to settle in and go to sleep.

were just trees again and not witches’ fingers. After a few minutes of tossing and turning, she managed to drift into unconsciousness again. When Lydia woke up, her bleary eyes instinctively swept the room. They landed on a long crack in the sheetrock of the wall next to her bed, like an open wound. How had she not noticed that before? That must have been where the heat was seeping in; maybe it led to the boiler room or something. Her room was in the basement; it made perfect sense. That night, she slept like a rock. Crrrack.

Tap. Lydia hated how the skeletal trees outside her window would flail their branches against the windows with the slightest breeze, how they cast long spidery shadows in the moonlight that danced around the room like witches around a cauldron. But she tried to concentrate on her book, and managed to transport herself back to the world of Alice and sentient playing cards and hookah-smoking caterpillars. Tap. This time, it sounded hollow, like knuckles rapping on a rotten pumpkin. Lydia couldn’t concentrate on Alice and her adventures anymore. She’d always been able to easily separate her rich imagination from reality, but something was distinctly unsettling about this unfamiliar house and the eldritch shadows flying around her room and now this incessant, bony tapping. She took a deep breath and poked her head out from under the blanket, half expecting to see some horrifying creature at the foot of her bed or lurking in the floor-to-ceiling window. But there was nothing, nothing but the wind and the trees and a breath of cold air on the back of her neck.

She went down to breakfast the next morning covered in dust, with cobwebs in her hair. “What happened to you?” asked her dad. “I had to crawl under my bed last night to kill a spider and was too tired to shower,” she explained. “Well then, please clean yourself up before we drive back home. Don’t want to have to vacuum the car.” She was more than happy to oblige. As the car pulled out of the driveway, she peered into her bedroom window one last time. Peered straight into the terrified eyes of a girl who looked just like her, a girl with duct tape over her mouth. Her face was the only visible part of her, poking out of a jagged, gaping hole in the wall. “Goodbye, Lydia, I’ll enjoy your life,” whispered the changeling under its breath.

Music Composition

Together

Tap. It seemed to be coming from the wall on the right side of Lydia’s bed. Spindles of icy fear in her mind wrapped around her insatiable curiosity, attempting to restrain it and keep her safe under her blankets till the morning. But Lydia couldn’t resist, and she sat up and pulled on her slippers. She padded over to the wall, but stopped dead in her tracks when she heard it again, a couple inches from her face.

By Theo Tuori

Tap. Lydia pressed her ear to the chipping paint. The wall was warm, like the palm of a hand. She recoiled, stumbling back and collapsing on her bed. Lydia resolved to just try to sleep away the fear. Everything would feel better in the morning, when there weren’t any shadows on her walls and the trees

Music Composition

Shop Jingle

Vámonos

By Jessica Freeland

By Loke Zhang-Fiskesjö

Night on Fire By Ruby Zawel

Music Composition

Parallelogram By Ronan Caci-Kukelka

Poetry

Parco dei Mostri

Etheree for the Falls and the Creek

By Louisa Miller-Out Just a stone’s throw away from the bustling city And down a dusty forest road Dappled with leopard spots of light I know a place where monsters dwell and sirens sing Lingering in marble daydreams Like moss on your cerebral cortex

By Raia Gutman

Bridge, Ten steps. Graffiti Across the pavement. I stop to witness the motion of the icy blue winter water. Two blocks across it spills down smooth rocks, permeates the silence around it, cooled to slowness by my cloudy breath.

A haughty prince bored by wealth Indulged his wildest whims He found sculptors as mad as him To build a garden that had never been They created life with hammer and chisel Beasts of land and sea, women with snakes for legs Giants tearing each other apart And houses that seem to defy all reason Ogni pensiero vola And Orcus swallows you down to hell

Music Composition

As your feet traverse the sacred wood Your eyes have a mind of their own They flit from dragon to nymph From elephant to colossal turtle From goddess to gaping demon mouth Carved into the hillside They’ll be in this valley for eons Long after everyone you’ve ever known is gone And the moss grows into every crack in those cold stone faces But sometimes When the sun shines just right And sometimes Maybe it’s a trick of the light Or maybe the rustle of the leaves You’d swear the statues were breathing And Venus reaches out to stroke your sun-kissed cheek

Midnight Balloon By Chester Stone

Down

By Kii Kinsella (SAINT KID)

By Anneke Ryan

Poetry

Winter By Brenna Lucio-Belbase The world glimmers, covered in white, All around you is twinkling light, Snow lies in heaps on the ground, Each unique snowflake meanders down without a sound, Viciously whirling with the temper of a hurricane, All is white beyond the window pane, Then a silence, the howl now in your head, You creep outside, shovel snow heavy as lead A slithering wraith threatens to consume you, Putting on more layers is all you can do, You grit your teeth, suffering and trying to bear, But the cold is vicious and has no care And then you hear a shout of laughter and turn to see, Rosy-cheeked children, diving through snow, full of felicity, Throwing white powder, skating on ice, Building forts and with feelings so nice You feel envious, longing to play, “Hey friend! Come on, it’s a Snow Day!” You finish the driveway, turning to friends and beam, Winter can turn out better than it may seem. Though you may feel childish, you are aware, It is nice to have no serious care, No matter what age, you’re never too old, To enjoy the pleasures of youth, despite what you’re told.

Poetry

Men, they always disappoint us By Hannah Shvets When we’re 13 we hear the way boys speak of us, Boys who we grew up with, played with, trusted, We hear them whisper in Geometry, About some girl they f*cked last night. We see our friends transform themselves, From little boys to violent men, They start to think because you loved them, Your body starts to owe them something. Our older brothers say, “Just locker room talk,” don’t worry, But still I feel the bile rising up, When I see the boys I always trusted, Showing pictures on their phones to friends, Photos only meant for them.

Poetry

Untitled

N. Tioga Street

By Lucy Woll

By Sam Sachs

A lily bathed in sunlight smiles to the tips of its petals, down into the delightful reasons why that composes its doings. Happiness – a drop of navy dye suspended in your drink, Is worshipped like the sun, stolen like a jewel, tended like a garden – requiring constant devotion or coming without any effort at all. It is born, too, small and unprepared, finding control of its lanky limbs like an infant learning just to be. It slinks its way into our eyes and ears into our breath (into our brains) into the space we have only come close to calling ‘soul.’ It turns twice, and settles down. It stays a while, long past its due, until its sleep has grown tired of being abided. Afterwards: the soft spot where the animal has lain – it may only have been a deer. Our bodies close around the cavity, feeling small remorses for though uninvited, the body of that joy was warm. A wandering doe comes across a flower: It had never seen a lily before. Joy has many a home.

Poetry

The Fountain of Youth

Dino

Surely you remember? When you stabbed in the back, From behind you attacked.

By Raia Gutman

I wasn’t expecting, I fell, Falling I cried. I sought the eternal springs, But they were stolen. The fountain of youth — dried. You took them from me, You stole yesterday’s years. Gone. Now you don’t even recognize me. You stole my youth, And you don’t even remember.

Poetry

Dear Death By Anna Bjerken Dear Death.

our Ravenous Hair, and Sensuality taunting the Sinners below.

My Abuela’s soul departed today. What happens to Women after they die?

If our Blood Births the Fires of Conviction, Like a crimson letter To the Devil.

I wonder when Women die perhaps we become the Heavens memorializing and basking in the Life we gave those years ago.

When women die, who will remember us? Our Skin, our Tears, our Ravenous Hair, our Blood? Will we be remembered for what others made of us, or what we created in our own right?

If our Skin paints the Skies as our Tears fall from above, giving Life to the World we can no longer Birth.

Dear Death.

Or maybe when Women die we become the fiery Hell

My Abuela’s Soul departed today. Will you watch over her?

Shorts

The Unwelcome Guest

By Anonymous

The four o’clock hour flew away and with it her sanity. A naive hope had characterized the two years leading up to this moment, a hope for the monster that always overstayed its welcome to finally say goodbye and leave her and her family alone. The first time, she was too young to understand why Mom could no longer give her milk and why Dad had hidden his all too familiar smile and put such a hardened, anxious expression in its place. The second time, she understood it, possibly too well. She understood that her responsibility was to remain emotionless, to allow nobody to see the deterioration of her mother in her youthful, vibrant smile. She understood that once it was over, she was to never dream of it happening again. But it did. The cold, unrelenting beast returned, more vengeful and destructive than before. At five o’clock on a piercing Thursday evening, the old friend knocked on her door, announcing its plans to join the family for eternity. And so she worked. She boarded herself up and began to write, hands moving faster than her dog on the day he left the family, asking nothing of the page except to distract her. If she could only keep writing, maybe her mind would empty itself. Maybe she could will the creature out of existence.

Prose

11.9.2021 By Anonymous

The bell sounds in the middle of the period. I hear the principal stutter over the loudspeaker that students must move into classrooms and lock the doors immediately. Panic sets in because I’m in the bathroom and what happens if I can’t get back to my class before it’s too late? My rubber soles squeak on linoleum as I run down the hallway and around the corner. There are windows everywhere. Should I crouch? I make it back to my English class and frantically rap on the door, hoping school protocols allow my teacher to let me in (school protocols can be quirky). Today, logic prevails at IHS, at least on this front. The handle clicks and I scramble inside. My teacher is shepherding everyone into the corner around and behind her desk, out of view of the narrow glass window in the door. But we’re right in front of a bay of much larger windows, which seems to kind of defeat the purpose. At least we’re not visible from the hallway, but what good is that going to do if the shooter’s a student and knows the geography of the school? I push the thought aside for now and crawl under an adjacent table, settling next to a friend with our backs to the wall. “I wish I was shorter,” he groans as his head scrapes the bottom of the table. Light teasing about my height (or lack thereof) is a daily occurrence in my life, so I make some kind of dumb joke about it. But once my nervous giggles subside, anxious thoughts swarm inside my head. Are these my last moments on Earth? Will I die in this room, in these clothes, with these people beside me? I try to drink in every detail—the slight itch of the alpaca wool sweater that my great-grandpa brought back from Peru before he died, the normal force of the cold, hard floor against my lower spine (I just had Physics). But something inside me refuses to fully focus, to accept my mortality here and now. Worrying about myself becomes unbearable for a moment, so my racing mind turns to other people. My little sister goes

here too; oh god I hope she’s safe. My friend’s texting someone—his parents? Girlfriend? I wonder if he’s as worried as I am. Oh god, what about my parents? I reach for my phone to tell them where I am and that I’m safe, but my teacher’s already telling my friend to put his away. Am I going to die without saying goodbye to my parents? My sister? Was every interaction with everyone outside this room my last? Does that even matter if my life’s going to end anyway? I don’t want to spend what could be my last moments of consciousness tortured by anxiety, but I can’t dispel the profoundly uncomfortable thoughts crowding my brain. A light touch on my arm brings me back to reality. “Are you okay?” It’s my friend, who feels others’ emotions as his own, who’s always cared about me even when I didn’t care about myself. As I vaguely nod in response to his query, I feel a twinge of guilt for being so locked in my own mind that I’ve barely stopped to consider how the people around me must feel. My friend has a little brother who goes here too. We all have friends and girlfriends and boyfriends in this building, and families outside it who we might never get to say goodbye to. I wonder what people around me are thinking, if they’re praying. And I find myself wishing for a moment that I was religious, because I have no one to pray to and nothing to comfort me but the cold, prickly, inexorable fact that once you die, that’s it. My thoughts drift back to my parents. I barely saw my mom this morning; we were both in a rush, ships in the night. My dad was already at the office. Was that it? Hot tears start to crowd my eyes, and my breathing gets shallower and faster. But then I feel a touch on my arm again, this time a bit more insistent, laden with a bit more concern. I’m clearly not okay. I clearly lied the first time. I usually lie the first time. I don’t need to explain all that out loud, because my friend already knows. His hand slips into mine and our fingers interlace. It’s going to be okay, he tells me without saying a word. And it is.

Music Performance

Beethoven Quartet Op. 95 No. 11 By Anna Cummings, Alice Burke, Zoe Galgoczy, Claire Russell

Poetry

alone

Skating in Central Park

By Alice Burke

By Loke Zhang-Fiskesjö

there used to be stars in the sky countless jewels suspended in a dark pool of nothing loving me unconditionally forever unchanging but me— i was always going to change maybe maybe i changed too fast for the stars so they let me go and now i look up where i once saw constellations i see only black expanse pale beacons fading away losing to the growing darkness of the night or maybe the stars are winning because i know they never fought for me not really they were glad to see me go soon there will be no stars in the sky gaping holes in place of light is all i will know nothing left for me during the darkest nights the moments when all seems lost because now it will be and i will be completely utterly wholly forever alone.

Sunset

By Joyce Spears The sun is falling down The sky is blazing pink The trees are shifting in the breeze And the birds are screaming Despite all of this chaos There is still serenity Because the sun will fly back up The sky will turn back blue The trees will shift back in the breeze

And the birds will sing anew After nightfall comes The sun will see it’s day And the moon will patiently wait So through the night it can light our way But for now I watch the sun descend Into the night it goes And I lay here in the grass Waiting for the moon to show

The Houses on Rosebud Street

By Sophia Elliott

There was a house on Rosebud Street that we passed on the bus to and from school each day. The paint was a faded memory of blue, and it had started to peel off in places. The windows all looked cloudy and warped, and the curtains were always shut. The grass in the front yard was always overgrown with weeds, and there was a single dead-looking shrub at the corner. One day in January, as we passed the house, there was an ambulance in the driveway. The next week, we saw a moving truck. The house was completely empty for a bit, and then in February there was another moving truck. With it came a family with two little kids and a fluffy dog. In early March, the windows were all replaced and we could see a “Happy Birthday!” banner hanging inside. Four birdhouses, held together with hot glue and luck and painted in rainbow stripes, were tied to the shrub’s branches with yarn. In late April, the snow melted, and one of the parents cut the grass. Dandelions took the place of the tall thistles that had been there before. In May, as it was getting warmer outside, a swingset went up. The whole family always left for a walk with the dog as we passed, always laughing about some unknown joke. In June, there were people outside on ladders, scraping off the greyish paint and replacing it with a bright red. There was a baby pool by the swingset and there were flowers by the front door. The little family in the house seemed happy. The house itself seemed happy.

Perfect Year

School ended for the summer. In September, as the bus passed by, we saw that all that was left of the house was its charred foundations and overgrown grass. The birdhouses, as broken as the house itself, were scattered in pieces around the shrub. We heard that there’d been a fire in the middle of the night in August; that none of the little family had survived. Everything about the plot of land where the house had been looked sad and dead all through the winter. In the spring, the remnants of the house were gone. The hole in the ground where the basement had been was covered up. Our bus route changed. We never drove down Rosebud street again. It’s been almost five years, and a few weeks ago on the way to a dentist appointment, we drove through that neighborhood. There’s a new house that’s taken the place of the one that burnt down. It’s painted green, and the dead shrub in the yard is gone, replaced by little bushes along the edge of the road. They’ve planted some saplings. There are flowers by the front door, and a swingset in the yard, and at least three kids with an almost-unreasonable number of cats. They hung seven colorful birdhouses on wooden posts.

By Lorelli Cervantes

She stands there, unbeknownst of what’s to come to her that year She stands against a tree holding up nine of her fingers Her first day of high school You can see the excitement in her eyes The sun highlights her hair and projects her shadow onto the tree behind her She wears the perfect white dress Perfect white jewelry and sandals to match Perfect smile She has a perfect year waiting for her A perfect year she tries to have The perfect smile fades away

She cared less and less about her jewelry and her shoes to match The sun quickly disappeared behind the clouds like a bird when something gets too close. The excitement in her eyes dimmed as she got further into the “perfect” school year Her first year of high school was not like the movies She didn’t get a perfect boyfriend and make friends with everyone She did get a girlfriend who made her smile But that smile only lasted for a week She didn’t ace all of her classes like the years before She was failing more than half of them Halfway through the year school shut down

And she could no longer see her friends She had to teach the subjects she already didn’t understand To herself She had to teach herself because her mother worked And nobody else could help her She could have asked but her anxiety held her back Just ask for help, her mother told her If she doesn’t then she’ll never get her perfect first year Oh how I wish you could have had the perfect year I wish you could have not lost so much of yourself I wish your confidence was increased with your girlfriend I wish it wasn’t the opposite

I wish she didn’t drag you down Tear you apart I wish you could have had the perfect smile lasting you till the end I wish you could have enjoyed every minute of it I wish you could have just reached out to someone Instead of isolating yourself If you had just told someone how you were, maybe you wouldn’t struggle so much later on If you had just reached out and said help Things could have been different They wouldn’t be perfect but maybe it’d be a little easier

When The Stone Falls Still

By Simon Cohen

For so long I’ve believed we are only a set of beginnings and endings, endlessly crashing and rising in search of something, a Sisyphean task I was given by a three pronged fury. But what of the falling, the space between the rising and crashing? Why only birth and death and not life, why only how things begin and conclude when life is what happens in between? I wonder what Sisyphus felt not when he began pushing his great stone, nor what he felt as the stone rolled back down. I think about the moment between the two, the moment the stone fell still and the man who nearly cheated Hades wondered if he’d ever see life again. Who heralds those who fall? Who protects those souls from the winds that raze their backs as the earth closes its gates? Who clipped their wings in a fit of rage, happier seeing them fall then fly? Why did Lucifer fall so much further than the Earth? I stand among barren fields of earth and stone and I feel no field around me. There are no luscious crops, nor blazing heat turning them black. I feel the field’s absence. Everywhere I go, I am absence. If life is our descent from heaven, then is the clipping of our wings not a beginning but an end? A death written in the stones that cradle us as we begin again? The fall isn’t where you land. It’s the wind in your hair. Everywhere I go I am falling. An end is not relief, a beginning is not opportunity. Life is not important because your bones form then one day begin to decay. Life is precious because while we float downwards, we are beautiful. We are ourselves. Life is what propels the bones forward without direction. Life is the moment when the stone falls still.

She Burns So Brightly

By Sammy Deol

By Caroline Sine “We’ll be adventurers,” She says. “Sailing uncharted seas Together,” She says. “Explore the colors Of the sunset.” And while she dares the Orange from the sun Or strikes the vivid blue From the sky, I Compromise with The green between. Then the sun sets Along the caverns Of her mind, yet I Am barely allowed The light to touch The moss in mine. So she stretches Her hands over All she can see, Ignoring the Flickering me Who may just want to sit, see The daring orange Attack The vivid blue And appreciate The green Controlling The between.

Closing the Door By Raia Gutman

the calm after the storm By Lilli Rotondi

Muninn floats along the earth grazing up against trees and brushing against the ocean, touching the tips of mountains and caressing the low hanging valleys and ravines. The whole world is at the wind’s fingertips and yet it wants nothing to do with it. The wind yearns for another time. One could say it has all. It is an uncaged bird, a falcon soaring high above with not a care in the world. It is after all the wind, unbound from earthly desires as they say. Free to whisk around the world. But what would Muninn say to these assumptions? Sure, they may be the wind, but they are confined, not by any physical limitations but the pain of remembrance. The wind remembers all. Muninn has been around since the beginning and unfortunately has continued to be here after the end, for the wind is constant, ever moving, ever the same. By now you may have guessed that Muninn is the wind and the wind is Muninn. But there is another side of the story, another half. Muninn isn’t alone in the world. The other is the rain, or Huginn. However Huginn does not share these same feelings that Muninn has. Each day Huginn falls from the heavens to the ever awaiting earth. The ground soaks up the water, giving it life again. Every day Huginn rises back up towards Muninn with its own new life. The rain is refreshed as the world blossoms into new seasons. The rain beholds anew the world each and every day. Every small detail, every crevice and wrinkle in the ground. Each vein on a leaf and every gurgle of the rivers. All of these are perceived for the first time by Huginn, and as they marvel about the beauty of the world Muninn wistfully glides on by. Muninn has been around since the beginning and fortunately will continue to be here for their own beginning, for the wind is constant, ever moving, ever changing.

Music Composition

Bumper2Bumper P2 By John Clarke Jr. By Sammy Deol

By Sammy Deol

By Ella Keen Allee

Literary Issue 2022

Articles inside

“Beethoven Quartet Op. 95 No. 11” by Anna Cummings, Alice Burke, Zoe Galgoczy, Claire Russell

“Welcome to New Orleans (Valentin Hude)” by Xuyan Dong, Noa Yamaguchi, Zoe James, Taein Eom

“Haydn Cello Concerto in C Major” by Tony Mao