Fall 2011 | Illumination: the Undergraduate Journal of Humanities

art

essays

literature

illumination The Undergraduate Journal of Humanities

fall 2011

staff

Cover Art:

Stephen Conrad Untitled Oil on canvas

administrative committee Editor-in-Chief: Brittany Estrada Assistant Editor-in-Chief: Kiran Gosal Events and Involvement Coordinator: Elyse Kowalczuk Release Coordinator: Katherine Busalacchi Marketing Director: Rachel Seurer Financial Advisor: Justin Walker WUD Publications Commitee director: Gayle Cottrill WUD Publications Committee advisor: Jim Rogers

art Art Editor: Molly Rentscher Art Reviewers: Alexandra Machover, Shuming Zhang, Grace Edge Jolicoeur

copy Head Copy Editor: Jenna Severson Copy Editors: Amie Kjellstrom, Casey Nordman, Shaun Miller, Heather Sieve, Sam Snyder

essay Essay Editor: Alex Dunn Essay Reviewers: Taylor Brown, Brianna Karis, Emily Rossmeissl, Kelsey Sorenson

layout Layout Editor: Kelsey Eaton

poetry Poetry Editor: Ryan Lehrman Poetry Reviewers: Kao Yong Thao, Roxanne Gentry

prose Prose Editor: Chelsea Bliefernicht Prose Reviewers: Allie Koelbl, Jordin Barber, Sarah Vroman

special thanks

Illumination would like to extend a special thank you to John D. Wiley and the Friends of the Library Association.

Illumination would also like to thank the following people: Jenny Klaila, Vicki Tobias, Andrew Gough, Eliot Finkelstein, Kelli Keclik, Adam Blackbourn, Gary Sandefur, The Font Bureau, Inc., Pamela O’Donnell, Tom Garver, Elisabeth Owens, Mary Rouse, Jim Jacobson, Ken Frazier, Carrie Kruse, Ron Wallace, Gayle Cottrill, Jim Rogers, and the Boulware Fund.

prose: 4-20

4-5 6-10 11-14 15-16 17-20

The American Dream Oasis: Connor Wild Simon, in the Dark: Cameron Graff An Inconvinient Thing: Gayle Walsworth After Charlotte?: Brontë Mansfield Effigy-Chandelier- A Short Story:

Thomas Howland

poetry: 22-31 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30-31

illumination: table of contents

table of contents To Whomever it May Concern: Julia Matthews The Essentials: Heather Sheets Ginger Ale: Eric Lynne The Drugs Don’t Work: Sam Eichner In Defense of Latitude: Sarah Mathews Shawn: Michael Ashley Second Year in Boston: Trina Van Mell Impromptu in Friday Minor: Chris Apfelbach Of Mice, Of Poe: Eric Lynne

essays: 32-33 32 Why I Deserve to be Here: Kabnpauj Xiong 33 Memory Project

art Cover 3 3 5 and 10 8 12 14 16 21 and 27 21 24 and 28 31 33

Stephen Conrad Cate Virnich Mandi Hutson Jennika Bastian Caitlin Furlong Kathryn Weenig Alicia Gonzales Sally Kronsnoble Olivia Baldwin Allison Cunniff Emily Owen Alex Vogel Esta Pratt-Kielley

mission

The mission of Illumination is to provide the undergraduate student body of the University of Wisconsin-Madison a chance to publish work in the fields of the humanities and to display some of the school’s best talent. As an approachable portal for writing, art, and scholarly essays, the diverse content in the journal is focused on being a valuable edition to the intellectual community of the University and all the people it affects.

letter from the editor Dear Readers,

Welcome to the Fall 2011 issue of Illumination: the Undergraduate Journal of Humanities. I am delighted to see yet another beautiful issue printed. We have published an incredible collection of poetry, art, and essays that truly embodies the talent of the undergraduates at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

I first approached Illumination with some lofty goals to ensure success and development with the journal and as with every head of staff Illumination has had, I came into the position with considerable ambitions. When you have such talented undergraduates submitting to the journal, it is easy to showcase some of the school’s best work in the humanities. We have continued to maintain a venue for diverse creations to be published, and furthermore have created an incredible issue.

I want to take the time to recognize all the members of Illumination, especially those staffers who have really committed extra time and effort throughout this process: thank you for all your dedication. Without those who support the journal and its endeavors, Illumination would not be possible.

I also want to thank Gayle Cottrill, Director of the Publications Committee, and Jim Rogers, the Publications Committee advisor, who have helped me through all the unexpected twist and turns of the learning process. I appreciate all of the valuable advice and (patient) guidance that you have given me and the journal throughout the semester. Thank you!

And finally, to all the readers: Thank you for your support, new-found or ongoing. This journal was created to support and showcase all of the talent that can be found on UW-Madison’s campus. We are so grateful for all the incredible submissions we have received this year and appreciate your trust in our ability to present your work in our issue. Stay in touch by visiting illuminationjournal.com or e-mailing illumination@library.wisc.edu.

All the best,

Brittany Estrada

Cate Virnich Taller Half Acrylic on canvas

Mandi Hutson Self Portrait Oil pastel on paper

3

the american dream oasis Connor Wild

The road stretched before him endlessly. Like an asphalt tongue unfurling from the horizon’s esophagus, it swallowed him for eternity.

He was driving in the middle of nowhere, but, at the same time, it was everywhere. He couldn’t remember how long he’d been driving for. Days? Months? Years? Whatever, it’s all the same. Time just keeps on flipping by, one picture frame after the next, even if no one’s watching. Splice yourself in if you want. Shakespeare was right about one thing, at least. We’re all just actors in the human drama, even if it’s become stale and ratings have stagnated.

On this road, you really start to comprehend the infinity of it all. There’s no present, just what’s before you and what you’ve left behind. No present, just the future and the past. No presents, just futures and pasts and a whole slew of dichotomies to get lost in. Enjoy.

A glint in the distance snags his eye. A gaudy sign grows as one picture frame replaces the next. On the top is a desert isle with a lone palm tree ripe with coconuts, the icon of paradise. Juxtaposed to the palm is an American flag in mid-wave. Below, a white, plastic rectangle imprisoned a name. In alternating red and blue standard caps was “THE AMERICAN DREAM” followed by “Oasis” in a black, sultry cursive. Below that in a text box stood a message: C ME IN N FIND Y UR AMER CAN DREAM! The whole sign bled an aura of neglect and abuse. The plastic was brittle and cracked; colors faded by the sun, the white blasted a dirty brown. It was a gas station and convenience store. Its chipping brick walls boasting: ‘Open 24-Hours,’ ‘Daily Deals and Steals,’ ‘Best Prices Around.’

Fuck, he thought, they’re the only prices around.

The gauge had been on E for miles, days, months, years, so he pulled in to refuel. The brumb-brumb-brumbling of the engine cut off as soon as he flipped the key in the ignition, only too glad to rest. Stepping out of the car, he took another gander at the store.

Jaded, bubbled into his mind. Sycophantic. Desperate.

He grabbed the gas pump, stuck it in the car, and pulled the trigger. With his vacant hand, he massaged his eyes. He was tired. Very tired. He hadn’t slept in days, months, years. The pump was ancient, outmoded. Not automatic or electronic. The numbers were just like wheels in a slot machine spinning upward into eternity, and, like a slot machine, no matter the amount you put in, you always somehow lose, and while you stand defeated, the bastard next to you hits jackpot.

He felt he was being watched and then saw the silhouette of a sitting man through the opaque, storefront windows.

Were those binoculars in his hands?

A choked, gurgling sound splashed around in his ears as he felt gasoline slop on his shoes. Without much alarm or care, he released the trigger and pulled the nozzle from the car. No worries. No such thing as waste here.

He ambled over to the door and hesitated for a moment to open it, fearing such an action might just topple the whole, dilapidated structure. The door opened with the horrible screech of rusty metal grinding together. Ahhh...music to the ears. As soon as the door slammed shut, a thick blanket of stifling, musty air enveloped him. Noxious. He was surprised how empty the store was.

An elderly man in jean overalls and a plaid shirt sat behind the counter. Thin cirrus clouds clung to his head.

“Got anything good in here?” he asked the elderly man.

The elderly man pondered sincerely for a while, candidly answering, “Nawww...Not really. Some chips and snacks.

Some candy. Drinks. A few toiletries. The usual.”

“No greener pastures?”

“That some new product? Nah, we ain’t got that.”

“Yup.” He walked to the door, arms full, but then turned around.

“You got a shotgun underneath that counter?”

“Sure do.”

“Yeah, wouldn’t want anyone to rob this place.”

“Sure wouldn’t.” He walked out.

He set the bag in the front seat, got in on the other side, and turned on the car. Gotta go, gotta go, gotta get up and go, ya know. Chin’ up, kid. There’s a pot-a gold at the end of the rainbow. Work hard and dream big. All there is to it. Real simple.

Yeah, real simple.

He pulled out and back onto the road. Fumbling to get a cigarette, he stole a glance in the rearview mirror.

The American Dream Oasis was gone. Hollow emptiness. Had it been a mirage? Had he imagined the whole thing? Was he insane to have ever believed it was there?

The cigarettes and the coffee and the booze and the gas were real enough. Whatever. Back on the road now. Just a frame slipping behind him now. Gotta keep the eyes on the road now, on what’s in front of him now, on what lies ahead now. Sense in the senseless, that’s what he grasps.

Now where did the elderly man say the next town was?

Jennika Bastian Four Vessels Welded metal and plaster

illumination: prose

“No hopes or dreams?”

“Aisle 7. Deal right now. A dime a dozen.”

“Any happiness?”

“Only the liquid kind.” A toothless grin wrinkled his face.

“I thought that was courage?”

“It’s both. It’s liquid many things.”

“No real stuff, though.”

“Nah...ain’t carried any for years. No one bought it. Just sat on the shelves and rotted.”

“Um.....Ok, gimme a 24-pack-a Miller, a bottle-a Jack’s, pack of Blacks, and...a coffee.” “$66.27” “What a steal.”

“Yeah, all about cheap these days.”

“Cheap lives. Cheap dreams. Cheap happiness.”

The frames rolled on by as the elderly man counted the change.

“Where’s the next town?” he asked.

“Not sure. Just drive. If ya go long enough, yer bound ta hit somethin’.”

The elderly man handed him the money.

“Thanks.”

“Yer welcome. And thank you.”

5

simon, in the dark Cameron Graff

It was mid-March, and it was suddenly very cold everywhere.

All day long the morning frost lingered and hugged the grass, smothering it with love. Simon could sympathize, sitting up in his bed, staring out the window. He watched the silver steel of the city, silver poles and silver train tracks snaking through the infinite horizon. They left long shadows, like his breath left long murky stains on the glass. He wiped away at them with his sleeve and chewed on his lip. It was the inverse of the Indian summer, when even the sun seemed to sap the warmth from the air.

Simon got dressed. He pulled on his pants and his shirt and ran his hair under the sink water and pulled his eyelids down in front of the mirror to search for encroaching illnesses. Bags hung under his eyes, deep as trenches, and they refused to leave no matter how much Simon slept.

He splashed water on his face and looked into the mirror again. He looked even worse now. There was nothing to be done about it, though. That’s just the way things were.

The clock in his bedroom read 6:30; the train would be on its way inside of the hour. Simon stared at himself and felt at his thin cheeks.

He had to get on the train today, just like he had to get on every other day.

Today was no different.

He took one more look at himself in the mirror and felt his lips. Then he talked to himself, just to make sure that he still could. The words slid out of his throat like fish, flailing against a current, but they came nonetheless. With an empty sense of satisfaction lurching in his stomach, Simon put on a jacket and left for the train station.

The wheels of the train clicked endlessly, forever away. Simon could hear them, could almost feel the flash of steel cutting the wind, but the train was nowhere to be seen.

Simon rapped his feet against the pavement idly and watched his frozen breath waft from his half-open mouth. He balled his fingers into fists in his pockets, rubbing them together for warmth. He rubbed his tongue against his teeth, and he thought and he thought and he thought.

The train came every day, at 7 p.m. on the dot. It slid into the station, opened its doors and sat there, empty and patient, waiting for Simon to walk in. When he didn’t, it closed its doors with a touch of apprehension and slinked away down the tracks and into the inky black.

Every day.

For a lifetime.

Maybe even longer.

Simon thought about a lot of things while he waited for the train. He thought about the weather and about his family, about the inevitable heat-death of the universe and about the soles of his shoes, about the starry sky and about what he would do when he got on the train. He didn’t like mulling on those things though, they felt like old scars on his brain that burned when caressed, phantom limbs that ached where warmth used to be. Sometimes he thought about what he would do when he didn’t get on the train instead. Those were more comfortable thoughts; they felt like old friends, fitting gloves, and other tired metaphors.

He would have preferred to think about nothing at all, but even in the loudest of moments, as the train roared past and everything became a silver explosion of light and sound, Simon’s brain ticked away, whispering the most horrible thoughts.

Simon’s world was never quiet, no matter how much he wished it would be.

Sometimes he did wish it would be louder, though.

Simon sighed, and with his sigh came the wind, and it cut deep into his bones. He hugged himself, his arms weak and fleshy. They felt like a doll’s arms. Still, they were better than nothing.

And that’s what there was: nothing, as far as the eye could see.

But then, suddenly, there was something. Simon caught him out of the corner of his eye and held his breath, not daring to exhale.

He’d blow away like paper if Simon breathed— of this he was certain.

He was a person. A person in a downy gray sweatshirt, slouching slightly and with a slight upward curve to his lips. He wore a cap that was pulled tight down over his face. The fluorescent lights of the station cast shadows over his face. A world unexplored.

Simon watched him for a while, his mouth slack, and then he looked back down at the tracks, then back up at him. The man was still there.

For a moment, Simon though about turning and walking away. Maybe running away, if necessary. Running from this impossible man.

But before he could make up his mind: “Excuse me! Do you know when the train is supposed to come?”

Words like silk. Like falling rain. Like snow on a burning building.

walked to the fencing at the edge of the cliff and leaned out into the abyss. The wind pulled his hat from his head and cast it into the black, but he didn’t seem to notice.

His hair whipped back and forth in the breeze, unchained.

Simon’s hair clung to his forehead, and he meekly walked up to Sam’s side and stared out into the absence, trying to see what Sam saw.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Sam asked.

“I— I guess so. It’s so big though, it’s almost frightening.”

“What is? The city? Or everything around it?”

Simon realized he hadn’t even tried to discriminate between the two. Embarrassed, he asked, “Which were you talking about?”

Sam only smiled in reply.

The grin suddenly made Simon’s temples tighten in anger, and with irritation in his voice he asked, “What are you doing here? You shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t be here at all.”

“No, I most certainly should be here,” Sam snapped back. “I’m just as entitled to be here as you, I think. Even more so, maybe. A better question is why you think I shouldn’t be here.”

Simon thought for a while, but his head was hazy. He remembered that Sam was impossible, that he was more likely to be a cancerous lump on Simon’s brain than an actual living, breathing individual. Why was that, though?

Simon couldn’t remember. Something happened, a long time ago. Or maybe it was only a few days ago?

His head began to throb, and he gasped. Sam looked at him and smirked, then turned back to the black. Why was he so happy? Was it confidence? No, it wasn’t just confidence, it was an absolute certainty. There was the arrogance of someone who knew things others didn’t in that shark-smile of his. But what was it?

“You mind if I smoke?” Sam asked. Simon, starry eyed, didn’t hear him, so Sam pulled out a cigarette and lit it silently. The orange flicker of the lighter exploded in the night sky for a golden second, and then suddenly everything was black again.

“You know what your problem is, Simon?” Sam said between smoky puffs. “Your problem is that you think too much.”

Simon looked up at him, and then looked away.

“Like that’s a bad thing,” he said quietly.

“But it is. Life is meant to be experienced, not hypothesized. You don’t read about things, you go out and do them. You don’t imagine what it’s like to be rich and famous, you make a name for yourself and then you buy sports cars and date supermodels. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

A carpet of smoke sprayed from Sam’s slack mouth.

“If you spend your life in your head you’ll never be able to do the most amazing things. People! For god’s sake, you’ll never experience people! And love! And pain— you’ll never feel that horrible, life-affirming pain.”

Simon watched the cigarette roll lazily across Sam’s mouth. He didn’t agree, personally. Life alone was better than life with others; people were terrible, they were clumsy and angry and in their blindness they were quick to destroy.

Suddenly uncomfortable, Simon asked. “So, Sam, um, what happened to your, you know, your eyes? If you don’t mind, I mean—” Sam turned to him, aghast, “You mean you don’t know?”

Simon shook his head.

“Look in a mirror, Simon. You have holes for eyes too.”

Simon felt at his eyes. The squish of his eyeballs surprised him, though he didn’t know why. Sam’s smile glowed through the night, cutting apart the darkness like

illumination: prose

Simon blinked. The man was staring straight at him.

“I—I’m sorry?” Simon asked the man. Simon had heard him, but he didn’t know the proper words to reply.

The man smiled a shark-smile, all teeth and fangs. “I asked you when the train’s gonna get here. Not that I really care, of course. It’s not a train for me. But it is a train for you, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, I guess it is.” Simon said quietly. He couldn’t take his eyes off the man.

“But it’s not one you’re ever going to get onto, is it?”

Silence. Then the man continued.

“I thought as much. But that’s all right, you’re afraid. I understand. It’s perfectly natural for a man in your position to be scared. Change, after all, is something inherently disturbing. Why should we ever disrupt the comfort of consistency?

It’s silly, isn’t it?” He rubbed at his chin, thoughtfully. “People do all kinds of things that are contrary to their nature, don’t they? I wonder why that is.”

“I don’t know,” Simon replied meekly.

“You don’t know? You can do better than that.” Simon blinked and the man was suddenly looming over him, taller than he should have been. “You’re so indecisive sometimes, you know that? It’s one of your less endearing traits. But to generalize is to murder the complexity of the human animal.

So tell me, Simon, what kind of person are you?”

Simon had no answer. He had no idea how this man knew his name, but hearing it said out loud sent a shiver up his rigid spine. Again, flustered, all he could think of saying was “I don’t know.”

The man smiled and with a finger nudged his hat and the shadows up. Where his eyes should have been there were two great gaping holes that spilled out blackness and sucked in all the light around his face. Simon didn’t say anything, just watched the holes as they spun like midnight pinwheels. They were hypnotic.

“It’s not so bad to be honest with yourself every once in a while, you know,” the man was saying.

Somehow he seemed gentler now. Less human, but that was hardly a bad thing.

“Take me, for instance. It took a long time for me to figure out what I am, and to come to terms with that. But I’m happy now. I’m content. I’m better than I ever was before.”

“And what are you exactly?” Simon asked.

The man smiled a knowing smile and looked Simon straight in the eyes. Far off in those holes, cosmic dust began to stir and galaxies began to gather. Suddenly the air was hazy red, and in the back of Simon’s skull he could smell the genesis of life. It smelled like roses.

“My name’s Sam. Sam Shell. It’s not a particularly clever name, but it suits me well. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Simon,” the man said.

Sam stretched out a single phosphorescent hand that pulsed with the heartbeat of the stars. Simon took it uncertainly and shook it slowly. It was warm, like a hand should be.

He smiled at Simon again, his lips curling up the sides of his face. “Well, now that we’re formally acquainted, I think there are a few things we should talk about.”

“Like what?” Simon asked.

“Just, you know, things. The kind of things that people talk about, that they explore.”

Sam turned and started to walk away from the tracks.

Simon followed after him, his heart thudding. Sam continued without looking back, “Repressed feelings, unrequited loves, things better left unsaid. The quiet things, the little things, the things that kill.”

As they walked the landscape slowly shifted from urban sprawl to sprawling woodland, and before Simon knew it they were up on the ledge of a great cliff, the city yawning beneath, miles away. It looked like a neon lit anthill, the pulsing lights of flickering traffic signs the only hint it was still alive. Everything around it was black though. It was as if it were the only real thing left in the wake of some unspeakable disaster. Sam

7

a steak knife through twine. There it was again, that horrible arrogance, worse than any words.

“Okay, so I don’t have eyes either. What does that mean? What does that make us?”

“People, Simon, it makes us people.” He took a long drag of his cigarette, and then repeated quietly, “Just people. Just glorious, beautiful human beings, doing our absolute best.”

“Oh. I see.” Simon thought for a minute, then asked, “But, why the eyes? What happened to your—I mean, what happened to our eyes?”

Sam shook his head and laughed a little. He rubbed at Simon’s straw hair and replied, “That’s what I mean. You think too much.

You think way, way too much. Nothing happened to my eyes. It’s just, one day they were gone when I woke up. Or, at least, I think they were. Something was missing, something important. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was, so I decided it might as well be my eyes, and so it was.”

Simon thought about a life without eyes. He thought about the blackness, about the uncertainty. And he felt a shiver run up his spine. “But why not something else? Anything else? There are a million other things you could’ve lost, why did it have to be your eyes?”

“Because I wanted it to be my eyes,” Sam said, slowly sliding his fingers into his empty eye sockets. Blackness spilled out where they went. “There was something gone, I knew that much, and there was nothing I could do about that.” He pulled his fingers out and stared at them, his smile sinking slightly. “I lost my eyes because you see with your eyes; you see the ugly truth of things. Every other part of your body is used to feel the other truths of the worlds, the less ugly ones. And there was nothing I wanted to keep more than feeling. So let me ask you, Simon, if you didn’t lose your eyes, what did you lose? What hurt you the most?”

Simon didn’t answer. He couldn’t think of what he possibly could’ve lost. The wind whipped across his face and he felt its sting; the night sky was blindingly dark and he saw its infinite expanse; the city was silent and still and he heard the blinking of traffic lights and

the squall of absence. Placing a hand on his chest he felt the steady thud of his heart. ‘All in working order,’ he mumbled.

“Try not to sound so excited,” Sam replied absently, sucking on his cigarette.

“It’s not like I’m not happy, but, it’s just. Just…” He tried to continue, but the words weren’t there. His tongue was steely and still and like dirty ice against his teeth.

“But you’re not happy, are you? And how could you be?

Living out here, in emotional squalor.” In the depths of Sam’s sockets, the cosmic dust began to spiral again. “No one should have to endure what you have to endure, Simon. You’re putting yourself through hell and you know it. Now you just need to know that you know it, and deal with it. This isn’t healthy.”

The smell of roses burned Simon’s eyes, and all he could think of was the prick of thorns. “But I am happy like this. Happier than I was before.” He meant it, too. Or he thought he did. Sometimes it was so hard to tell.

“Happy in a vacuum,” Sam mouthed the words again, silently, testing them out. Then he shook his head dismissively. “It even sounds fake. How can you live like that? Somewhere like this, where nothing ever changes. You’ve childproofed the world. No, worse than that, you’ve quarantined yourself. Like you’re diseased.”

“Maybe I am, though. What if I am? What if I’m something abnormal, something horrible? Something people shouldn’t see?

I’m doing them a favor then.”

“But that’s not the truth and you know it.”

Of course it was a lie. But Simon was scared, a creeping fear that wound up his legs and into his spine and through his body.

And in the face of that horrible certainty, all he could do was lie.

Simon knew he was someone, that he wasn’t worthless at all. But sometimes, he did have doubts. And really, what did it matter what he thought anyways? He could know with that horrible confidence of Sam’s that he was a real, valuable person; it wouldn’t actually make him one.

Sam watched him quietly, his cigarette slowly crumbling be-

Caitlin Furlong A Light Photograph

could see. Emptiness for forever. It was nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

He sat up, slowly, perched on absence. Slowly he drew his knees to his chest and hugged them tight. It was colder here than it had been in the city.

And then…

“Yes, Sam?” His voice bounced off the nothingness, shaking everything.

Simon’s voice bounced back, “Why are you so afraid? No lies this time, just between you and me.”

That night-splitting grin was nowhere to be seen, and Sam’s voice was quiet. Like snow on a burning building. Simon hugged himself tight. His arms were skinny, and weak. A doll, one that hadn’t been played with for years and years.

“It’s because people are frightening, Sam. They scare me, and they should scare you too. And… Sam? Are you scared of anything?”

There was silence.

“Just—just between you and me,” Simon insisted, slowly.

Then, Sam’s voice replied, quiet and displaced, “I’m scared of being alone, Simon. It scares me more than anything else, the thought of nothingness.”

“And— Are you scared right now?”

“Yes Sam, very much so.”

“Oh.” Simon thought for a moment. And then, “Sam, what’s it like? On the train? And past it?”

“I don’t know. I think it’s beautiful, and I think it’s the most perfect place in the world. But I only say that because it isn’t here, and here is—.”

Simon bit at his lip. But that’s just what you think, isn’t it, he said to himself. The words rebouned off the walls of his little private prison.

“Simon? This is it. This is really his is your last chance. I’m going to go now; what you do is up to you. I’m sorry I did what I did, it wasn’t my place. This is your world, and this is you. Everything here is you.

What happens next is nothing to anyone but you, but— please, Simon, do the right thing.”

Then the air began to pop and fizzle, and in the middle of the vacuum existence began to take shape.

Then a bubble burst, and everything was a waterfall of colors and feelings and smells and pains and loves and lives and trees and cars and stars and dreams and horrible, horrible sounds.

“Sam? Sam!” Simon screamed over the cacophony, over and over again, even after the world had fallen back into place, and Simon was lying on the hill all by his lonesome. “Sam?” But Sam was gone. His words lingered, angel feathers in Simon’s brain, but anything real of him had vanished. It was just Simon and the darkness now.

Slowly, he got to his feet and wrapped his arms around himself, shivering. It was colder now, and his arms could only do so much.

Simon headed back towards the glow of the train station lights. It was almost midnight now, but he could still hear the train clunking along off in the distance. He could see it now, though, whistling through the night miles and miles away. It made his stomach sink.

Around him the city hummed quietly and then began to shut down. The streetlights faded into black, the silent buzz of the traffic lights fizzled away into nothingness. Everything was still, and everything was silent.

It was tremendous, the emptiness. Big and steely and unfeeling and unthinking.

The train skidded to a halt in front of Simon. It hissed and puffed and stuttered, then it was lifeless, and the doors slid open soundlessly to Simon’s left. Light spilled out from the inside, curling, twisting, octopus

illumination: prose

tween his lips till there was nothing but ash dribbling from his mouth. He spat into the cliff below, and as he looked back up at Simon trails of blackness followed his face. His eyes were spinning faster than before.

“Okay, here’s what needs to happen, Simon. We need to go back down to the city, and we need to get on that train. Oh, don’t worry; it won’t come till you’re there. You need to leave this place. It’s killing you, bit by bit, little by little. Even if you can’t see it, you have to know it is.”

The howling wind, the silence of the city, the roar in Simon’s head. “Sam, I don’t think I— what I mean is—’ “Look, I’m losing patience, Simon. What I’m doing here is something amazing. I’m giving you another chance. This isn’t something that happens every day, and you don’t seem to appreciate what I’m doing for you.” The smile cutting through the night. Like shark’s teeth. Like knives. Like a halo.

In Sam’s eyes the cosmos began to shudder. Then they began to smolder, and suddenly all of creation was exploding out from his sockets. “Come on, Simon. It’s just a step.

Just a train-ride, and then you’ll be back where you belong.”

He stretched out his hand again, but this time the starlight burst through his veins and split the sky. “I’ll take you there.

You’ll be safe with me.” Light screamed and hissed and erupted from his pores. His eyes began to spin faster and faster and the wind began to howl as it was sucked into his face. It was the end of time. The roses were gone now; everything smelled like death.

“But, but what if I don’t want to!” Simon shouted over the squall as he slowly inched away from Sam. “What if I want to stay here!”

“Do you really want to stay? Or are you just scared of leaving?” Sam’s voice was quiet but it boomed over the wind.

“Are you just scared of living?”

“No! I’m not! I— I’m not scared of anything!” Simon’s hair whipped in the wind and his clothes tugged against his skin. He could feel the air being pulled from his lungs. “I just— I just don’t want to get hurt. Is that so bad? Is that so unreasonable?” He stumbled as he was backing away and collapsed in a heap. Now Sam was over him, a million feet tall, the apex of destruction, the birth of everything. His smile was gone now, and his mouth, apathetic, was like a grimace carved into stone.

“This is your last chance, Simon. The last one you will ever get. I’m here—we’re here to save you. All we want is for you to be happy. And this? You’ll never be happy like this.

This is fake. You’re fake, Simon, and no one should have to live like that, lying to themselves, hiding from the world just behind the curtains.”

That horrible face, that mockery of humanity, that gargoyle scowl, it crept closer and closer to Simon’s face. Sam’s mouth kept moving, the words kept spilling out, but they all blended together, like white noise in the back of Simon’s head. The ground underneath Simon began to corrode as everything unhinged and fell into Sam’s eyes. He clawed at the ground, grabbing onto whatever he could to keep from being sucked in. Sam’s face was right in front of his now, and he could see deep into his eyes, deep into those tremendous holes. There was nothing there but coldness and order. The heat-death of the universe, billions of years too soon. Simon shut his eyes and screamed, he screamed and screamed and screamed over the howling cosmic winds.

He could feel Sam’s face next to his, his solar-wind breath burning Simon’s flesh and ripping him apart. In a whisper, louder than the universe exploding around them, Sam said to him, “Well, Simon, what will it be? Last chance.”

Everything was searing pain, and for a moment, Simon felt his atoms being torn apart.

And then, emptiness, nothingness.

He was floating in space.

“Simon?”

Simon realized he had shut his eyes tight, and now he opened them. Eternity loomed before him, white as far as he

9

tendrils of gold. It looked warm inside. He could see himself in the chrome of the plating. He looked tired, and he looked pathetic, and he looked like he had been alone for a very long time.

“It’s okay to move on,” He heard Sam whispering in his ear. But he wasn’t there. Simon knew he wasn’t. “It’s okay to let go. Please, Simon?”

But he couldn’t. He just couldn’t. Not yet. Not ever.

But— The train looked so warm.

And— It was so cold out here.

But— When the train pulled away a minute later, Simon watched it slide off into the night. He stayed at the station even after it was long out of sight, watching the place where he thought it might be.

Then Simon turned and walked slowly back to his empty house, in the middle of his empty city, tucked away in his own little empty corner of an empty world.

There was always tomorrow, he thought to himself. And then he crawled into bed, and he slept.

Jennika Bastian Breath Oil on canvas

illumination: prose

an inconvenient thing Gayle Walsworth

Jan said I looked doomed. She said it the first time we spoke, her eyes wide behind huge glasses, like clock faces, blinking quick between stares. She had spotted me at my door, fumbling away with my keys, trying to just get in before conversation could begin, but she insisted that I come in and try her cornbread. At the time she was just the woman in the apartment next door, the librarian. And I was the creepy teenage boy with no idea about anything.

Facing me on her velvet couch she asked what had brought me to where I was, what I was doing living on my own— the kinds of questions that ultimately lead to the discovery of personal flaws.

“It’s your mouth. It hangs, like you’re doomed.”

She had searched my face with an excited urgency. I covered my mouth like I had an itch under my nose. To me, Jan seemed wise. Her hair was frazzled and she was wearing a frumpy dress, but no matter how hard she tried to look the part of the homely librarian, she couldn’t hide her extraordinary beauty.

Jan was thirty-two and restless when we lived together in that mansion on the west side of Chicago. I was eighteen, living on my own for the first time. My dad had died under the weight of approximately twenty elephants they told me, as if somehow that extraneous detail would take the edge off the image of his body folded in half under a pile of scaffolding.

He was a worker. His hands were always rough and calloused; he’d rub them hard on my cheek saying, “These are the hands of a man.” He’d call me a dreamy fuck. I didn’t cry for him when he died.

My mom said I was a sick kind of person, that I couldn’t care less about our family. She was right. I felt free, but that doesn’t mean my heart didn’t marinate in a kind of sadness when I admitted it. The sad feeling dripped down the walls of my insides.

My mom picked out the place, a renovated apartment building on the other side of the city.

“How could this have happened?” she spoke into her shoulder as I shyly waved goodbye on the sidewalk, realizing I was the ‘this’ she was referring to.

I got a cat, a sweet girl named Duchess, from Animal Rescue. I got a job sweeping hair at a barber shop in the city, just me and an old barber. He hardly spoke. Some days all I heard was the snip of his scissors and the blues music he liked—the kind that sounds like cries.

Some days I didn’t talk to anyone but Jan the librarian. She wanted me over all the time. It seemed like there were so many words she hadn’t spoken in a while and needed the ear of someone with too much time.

Things became usual with us, Jan and I, like getting drunk on Sunday mornings. She made Bloody Marys in tall glasses.

I would suck the spices and vodka from the pickles and burp and Jan would laugh. We’d lie on the floor and stare up at the mirror on her ceiling. It had lasted along with the house, almost a century, with an elegant frame around it. Sometimes her hair fell over my face when we lay down and I wouldn’t say anything. It smelled like detergent and spread like ferns around her head.

Drunk, we’d walk the streets of the city and watch the shadows grow long, the street splitting into a sunny side and a dark side. We’d walk through skinny alleys while Jan talked about lines of books that meant the most to her.

“A shadow (black enough) becomes a glorious color, not a glorious color, but the heart of a glorious color, like the innermost heart of the intense anemone, or like the fervor of dark eyes.”

Her voice would get more and more excited when she spoke, and then would die on the final word, a singing drone.

11

“How about that one?” she’d ask.

I thought my darkness wasn’t the kind she wanted.

And my eyes looked pink and yellow in the reflections of puddles.

“I liked it, I like that one.”

I’d put my arm around her waist with drunken confidence as we walked down alleys.

“Do something with that nervous heart,” she would always say.

She’d laugh toward the trees and I’d feel like a floating thing, an ice cube in her drink.

When I was eight my librarian told me that I was missing the part of the brain that tells your mouth to close when someone else is talking because I kept interrupting her rendition of “Are You My Mother?”

When I told Jan this, she laughed with her gut and punched me in the shoulder.

“Well, this librarian says you’re gonna talk and like it.”

She didn’t realize that I actually believed it until high school when I raised my hand and asked my psychology teacher where that part of the brain is located and he said it didn’t exist. I had already formed into a meticulously quiet guy and a loyal listener by that time. Still, Jan and I stayed up plenty of nights talking. She told me about past adventures and the people she’d loved the most. She liked to talk about when she was my age.

I had lived in the mansion for about a year when I found Duchess lying dead in the front yard. I buried the cat next to the tulips in the garden, startled by the fullness in my throat, my lips and cheeks quivering the way water does before it boils.

Halfway up the stairs I couldn’t fight the conviction to knock on Jan’s door and kiss her. I could smell the venison stew from the hallway. It made sense, it was a Tuesday and on Tuesdays Jan made dinner for the housemates to share.

Her apartment was that tender spot, a baked potato warming itself from the inside.

My knocks were shy, but Jan answered immediately.

“Hey doll,” she said.

She held my face to her chest and I let myself pretend she was my mother for a moment. She backed into the kitchen, her long skirt trailing, lifting, and revealing her ankles.

“You gotta try his stew. It’s Sam’s kill.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Sam, you know, the one who lives upstairs.”

Jan always felt the need to remind me of the location of the neighbors. She didn’t realize that I knew who everyone was and where they lived, they just didn’t know me. I often saw Sam smoking cigarettes through my bedroom window, his face pink and squinty like a pig’s butt.

“No stew for me.”

I sat by the window and rested my arm on the back of the couch.

“Duchess died.”

Jan turned and walked toward me slowly, locking eyes with me, her eyebrows bending toward each other. She knelt down by my knee, took my slack hand and kissed it.

“I’m sorry doll.”

“It’s okay. I mean, it was just a cat.”

I said it but I wanted her to keep touching my hand, to come closer. I reached toward her and I put my hand on her shoulder.

“You loved that cat. This is a truly sad experience, and truly sad experiences must be felt. It’s where all the best art

comes from.”

She was looking up at me, her words curled out of her mouth. I put my hand on her neck, hesitating. She relaxed her head and rested her cheek on my hand. We sat like that for minutes. Her cheek was warm like bread.

She turned around, sat on the floor and leaned her back on the couch. There were books scattered around her, ripped open and cut up like she had been making collages. She collected these kinds of things: old books, toys, crayons. She began ripping pages out of an old children’s book titled “I Love You Because You Are My Friend.” The illustrations were simple and colorful. She handed me one of the book’s pages without looking up.

There was a bright yellow sun and a boy running through a flowery field. The text read: “I love you because you say ‘Hello’ to me in the morning.” I tried not to smile. I rolled my eyes and looked out the window.

I thought about Jan reading stories about trips to the zoo and mouse ballerinas to kindergartners. I thought about their faces cushioned in baby fat, fascinated by the way she could hold the book wide open with one hand and read with enthusiasm and do all the accents all at the same time, her pinky sitting dainty on the page. I realized I was staring and smiling at the drawing of the running boy and felt embarrassed and wanted to leave.

“Are you regretting things today?”

Jan wanted me to talk about my dead father, but today was not the day. I didn’t want a n y more talking.

“Yes, I’m regretting not having any of that stew.”

“Well, that’s more like it.”

She waded into the kitchen, stuck her nose into the pot, and began cutting a huge block of cheese.

Jan gave me books to read and every morning I would read most of one and then try to live out the story as much as possible throughout the day. The morning of Duchess’s death I had read “On the Road” by Jack Kerouac. I was looking out the window, down at the cars passing on the road below with deep concern for the passing hours and lack of adventure when Jan nudged me with a steaming bowl of stew.

Jan began to tell me about the time she hitchhiked out of Canada to San Francisco. She was lying flat on the floor, her hair bunching under her like a pillow. She said she thought she was in love with a guy there but it was naive because she never saw him after that summer.

“Why haven’t you gotten married? So many men were in love with you.”

“Oh, you know perfectly well why. Men, they don’t know how to loosen their grip. I hate feeling like a substitute mother. You know, all they want is someone to breast- feed them and hold them when they cry. Nope, not me.”

“Gross, I’m eating.”

“Sorry. Really, I’d just rather be alone.”

I watched Jan smiling at the ceiling, probably thinking about the trivialities of life and she looked older. I wondered what she thought of me, if I was like other men, if she even thought of me as a man. I didn’t want to care, so I got up to leave and leaned down to rub her head a little like I was cool, like I was just leaving for a bit and don’t worry I won’t leave you like those other men, those assholes.

I went back to my place and tried to wipe the dumb off my face with some water. I lay down in bed. The sounds of Sam visiting Jan seeped through the vent. Her voice had a lazy roll; it wafted into my bedroom as more of a scent than a sound. Sam’s rounded vowels were

illumination: prose

Kathryn Weenig Earwax Mixed media

13

droopy, like an overripe fruit hanging over the forest floor.

I thought about Sam and his deer. Did he think about how the deer’s eyes changed, before it died and then after, its blood spotting the snow? I turned over and put my face in the pillow.

I could hear birds outside my window. Even in the middle of winter, these fat, fluffy birds crowded into the leafless bushes that lined the side of the apartment building. I thought maybe the sound of their own voices kept them warm. I thought maybe I’d take one, pluck it from the tree and carry it inside, warm in my hands. Then I’d give it to Jan. She would have someone to say hello to in the mornings. Winter was a dirty blister of a season without those birds. I suspected that maybe only I could hear them—that they were a figment of my imagination, and they were telling me that one does not need to migrate to feel alive.

I slipped into a dream about a baby deer licking blood off the snow. I pet the deer with caution and with enough gentle coercion I was able to hold him around his chest, rubbing my cheek against his warm ear.

I drew thirty portraits of Duchess, one every day after she died. I spent my hair-sweeping hours planning the composition, thinking about colors. And then I’d deliver them to Jan and she’d hang them on the wall above her mantle. I never liked them, I thought I couldn’t get the eyes right.

Once her wall was full, I stopped hearing from Jan. There were hardly any inviting smells coming from her place. I waited for her to knock every Sunday morning but she would not. Sometimes I would climb onto my kitchen counter and lean into the vent, listening for her sweet mumbles, my feet curled over the sink, but there was a quiet emptiness that seemed to grow behind that wall.

She came into the barbershop once. She was with our neighbor Sam, accompanying him for a haircut. While he was loud and friendly, Jan seemed much more timid than usual. Sam got a buzz while Jan and I chatted over old eighties haircut catalogs.

“How about that one?”

“I have a cowlick, I couldn’t do it.”

Jan giggled into her chest. “Cowlick?”

She looked up at my hair and I tried to catch her eye so maybe she would say something like she missed me or was happy to see me, it’d been awhile or something to that effect. But Sam was done with his cut and looming over us with a grin.

Jan said “Well,” and stood up and the two disappeared with the ring of the bell above the door.

Jan moved out soon after that day. I saw her for the last time the day the snow from the blizzard melted into puddles on the street. I was sitting on the porch, listening to the wind bang the door open and shut at the cafe across the street. She came out quickly from the front door.

“You waiting for someone?”

I wanted to say yes but I really wasn’t.

She asked for a ride. She needed some stuff from the hardware store.

In the car, her cheek was creamy in the afternoon light. She was looking out the window, turned from me. I looked toward her at a red light and saw her reflection in the window of the bank outside, her face blurry and far, like she was there and not here. I felt desperate to touch her.

The sky flattened over our heads when we walked up the hill of the street toward the store.

We were mostly quiet.

“The heart is an inconvenient thing,” she said.

I was quiet. I didn’t say anything and we kept walking up the hill, necks straining, wet breath showing themselves in the air in front of us.

“And sometimes you can love someone and have no idea how,” she sighed into her chest.

I thought maybe Jan was the only person to ever know what I was thinking without me having to say it out loud.

I don’t know how long she was sleeping with Sam, or if that was just a rumor in the house, but something made her leave. It was sudden and strange. When it happened I thought I heard her crying. I pressed my ear against the vent like I had done so many times before. I held my breath; I collected the shrapnel and her soft

cries. Dust rushed through the vent when her door slammed shut.

I coughed and then Jan was gone.

I peeked my head into the hallway. I could see Sam inside Jan’s apartment, grabbing his forehead, pacing like an impatient horse.

My portraits were stacked along the mantle, the walls bare. Sam saw me and dropped his hands to his side.

“She’s gone man,” he tried to say but was silenced as I walked into the apartment and grabbed the stack of portraits and returned to my place.

I lay in my bed with the portraits under my arm. I could feel my stomach sinking with the weight of gravity and the sauce around my heart warming and thickening. It was becoming a familiar feeling, this heaviness. I thought about Jan leaving, a suitcase dragging behind her. Maybe she was picturing her life. Maybe she was smiling. Maybe she was feeling freer than ever before. Somehow it didn’t matter much to me what she was doing, but that’s the only way I wanted to picture her.

The next morning I buried the portraits next to Duchess’s grave. The birds in the heavily branched bushes were leaving their winter nests and shooting across the backyard, playing, stretching their restless bodies in search of taller trees for their spring homes.

I watched those birds for a long time, trying to find a pattern, watching one for a while, and then losing track with the chaos of their busy flights.

Alicia Gonzales Mimesis Photograph

illumination: prose

after charlotte?

Brontë Mansfield

I was a Vermeer trapped behind black rimmed glasses. Beneath the two thick panes of corrective glass, with all their implied intelligence, were my eyes. Beside my eyes were the matching indents in my nose where the burden of sight had rested since I was five. I was hidden and unspoiled; my skin was a canvas.

Tucked in a corner of the Shakespeare and Company on 37 Rue Bûcherie, I could have been framed and tacked on the wall, and hardly a single passing soul would have seen any oddity. There is a strange, far-off world to which readers transcend when they enter a bookstore: where noses are consumed by the old smell of weathered volumes, where ears are consoled by the flip of flittering pages, where eyes blur with tantalizing, unread words…

I wandered between the chaotic shelves and up the narrow, winding stairs. Every crevice, covered with books; every spare surface, pasted with some quote, some fragment of some story of someone’s wanderings.

We had wandered through the streets of Vienna on our last day.

“Have you read A Room with a View?”

“Who is it by?”

“E.M. Forster, I believe.”

“No, I haven’t. Why?” “It reminds me of us.”

Lucy and George had wandered through Florence. What was the quote? “Not all who wander are lost.” Who is that quote by? Not all who are quoted are remembered.

Late spring sunshine warmed the room, catching the heavy bits of dust drifting in the air–dust disturbed from its resting place on the spines of forgotten books, dust made from the flaking remnants of past readers’ dead skin cells on long-closed pages.

The floaters in my eyes joined the dancing dust. Opaque grey dots and faint squiggles swarmed across my sight, drifting with my gaze, breaking up the vast blue of any cloudless sky, falling on pages of classic books, flecking the brush strokes of famous paintings. No one could see the same way I did, with tiny needle pricks—no bigger than distant stars in the dark—in each glance; or when I slipped my glasses off, with indistinguishable blobs for people and places, only colors were vivid, details lost, like an entire world of Impressionism. Maybe I saw things the way Monet or Van Gogh saw things. I reached into my bag, my fingers greeted by the worn edges of an envelope.

Dear Brontë, I know it is not a letter, but I thought you would appreciate the art of the one and only VVG! What a nutter he was, eh?!

I got this at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, an amazing place with about three million exhibits! I wanted to send you a postcard of Monet’s ‘Lady in a Flower Garden’, but they had run out. Sigh, the hardships of life.

I am enjoying my time ‘on the train,’ a beautifully spiritual period of nothingness —inside and outside the train. Trees, snow, and books. Hours seem to slip away into the white plains and lose themselves in the secretive woods. It feels like anything could be happening out there, and the occasional small collection of bright wooden houses is almost enough to shock me!

Anyhow, enough of my ramblings! The famous list! Have you been to Borough Market?! If not, then it’s a must!

Gastronomical heaven! A trip to Soho on a Friday night is also a brilliant experience. A morning stroll around Hyde Park, a summer’s evening on the South Bank, mixing with the cool on Brick Lane. As a fan of records, you should definitely try and go to Rough Trade just off Portobello Road in Notting Hill—really great collection there. E Pellicci café up near Bethnal Green is a fantastic ‘greasy spoon’ example.

Why the hell did I leave that place?

I hope you are ok, and I miss you.

Love ---- xxxx

15

I circled back to the stairs, my eyes not finding the title I was searching for. I walked past a nook with a typewriter, filled with readers’ odes to the bookstore, the story of their journey to Paris, and their hopes and their favorite books. I walked past a piano and a piano player, filling the shop with notes. I composed in my mind, not music, but words.

“Forgive me, are you from America or Canada?”

“America. Northern America.”

“I never can tell.”

“And you?”

“London.”

“I am living in London! I arrived in February.” It was March.

I had escaped on a whim the drizzling cold of England for a rainy trip to Vienna.

“Ah! A newcomer.”

“Very new. I’m still terrified of the Tube. How long are you in Vienna for?”

“Just two nights, then to Budapest.”

“I’ve never been to Budapest.”

“Neither have I! I’m on a gap year. I’m going from London to Tokyo with nothing but trains and a boat ride.”

“How long will that take you?”

“I will be back in London in August.”

“August. Long trip.”

“When are you going back to America?”

“June.”

“Ah.” “You should make me a list. A list of things for me to do in London.”

“I will. What’s your name?”

“Brontë.”

“After Charlotte?”

I smiled. “Yes.” I slipped by readers pressed against bookshelves, perched on scattered, ancient chairs. Close to the storefront, the sounds of the bustling Paris rue filtered in the open door. Rue sounded much different than Strasse, which sounded much different than “street.”

I paused by two sections labeled “Lost” and “Beat.” Different generations, different names, same wandering. He was Jack Kerouac-ing across Russia. Was I a Ginsberg or a Hemingway?

A woman bustled past, big swishing skirt, arms full of books.

I slipped behind, following her berth as she cut a path through the crowded store. “British Fiction,” a big label declared of an expansive wall of books. My floaters found letters of names of authors, searching for order. I lost myself looking at books.

The rain dribbled against the window of the quiet Viennese hostel, tucked away from the busy Mariahilferstrasse. My fingers smudged with charcoal. Black on pale. Floaters swept across a sheet of sketching paper, tracing the figure I had drawn: a girl, glasses hiding her eyes, and the words “idiot repellent” at the bottom edge of the page. The corner of my eye felt the passing of a figure through the common room; my face and glasses and floaters lifted in time to glimpse a young man walking through the door to the upstairs bedrooms, but my ears never registered the sound of his feet on the stairs. He reappeared, silently sitting across from me and pulling out a book. Floaters fell across the title of the book, tracing the letters: Walden by Henry David Thoreau.

I spoke the first words. “What are you reading?”

My eyes found the name, my hand found the ladder, and my feet found the steps. Reaching up, I pulled the last paperback copy of A Room with a View from the shelf and into my hands- letting the pages fall open to the twelfth chapter.

The passage was blocked by a wardrobe, which the removal men had failed to carry up the stairs. Mr. Beebe edged round it with difficulty. The sitting-room itself was blocked with books.

“Are these people great readers?” Freddy whispered. “Are they that sort?”

“I fancy they know how to read—a rare accomplishment.

What have they got? Byron. Exactly. ‘A Shropshire Lad.’ Never heard of it. ‘The Way of All Flesh.’ Never heard of it. Gibbon.

Hullo! Dear George reads German. Um—um—Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and so we go on. Well, I suppose your generation knows its own business, Honeychurch.”

“Mr. Beebe, look at that,” said Freddy in awestruck tones.

On the cornice of the wardrobe, the hand of an amateur had painted this inscription:“Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.”

I took a pen to the page, dragging its tip under the seven words of the quote.

Someday, he would wander through the pages and find me.

Sally Kronsnoble Untitled Oil on reclaimed wood

– a short story

illumination: prose

effigy- chandelier Thomas Howland That was the last summer I ever thought I could stay afloat while getting wet. The water in the Des Moines River appeared a different shade of blue. The lines of current stretching along its banks were like welcoming arms to me as I stared down at them one late May afternoon from the Oneota mounds on the city’s Eastside. It would become the summer I spent many afternoons snorting drugs in my family’s doublewide while my crippled older sister could only look on.

I was seventeen, a bit of an early-starter in the game of hedonistic shits-and-giggles that now seems like a whole different life altogether. My older sister was my only responsibility. There weren’t any jobs or strings to pull, and she had to have someone to take care of her after the accident that previous winter. For months she sat next to me in her bed-chair in that old trailer with the wallpaper crumbling while I watched TV shows like The Price is Right and peeled stickers off McDonald’s French fry containers and occasionally learned I was just lucky enough to win a free one.

One Monday in early June my father came home around three in the afternoon. This was a rare event in the summer because he worked as an installer for Jackson Industries – a stage-curtain manufacturing company out of Altoona, Iowa that did most of its work between May and September when all the high schools with the grants to fund it were getting their stages redecorated. “Goddamn company laid me off again!” he shouted as he entered our doublewide, lighting a cigarette as he turned the corner for the kitchen. He had this weird pace to his walk – moving his short arms off-rhythm with his long steps. When I was younger it had always reminded me of a dwarfed T-Rex, fleeing.

When he returned to the room holding a can of beer he sat down on his La-Z-Boy, pulled it all the way back, and took a swig from the can. A beam of light glinted off his bald spot.

“What’s your mom up to, Gregory?” he asked, turning to face me.w “She went out to get Sidney more IV treatment from the hospital,” I told him, lying because I knew the little secret she had with the carpenter on the Westside. I’d seen him pick her up an hour earlier.

“That’s odd,” my father said, looking over at Sidney, seated back in her bed-chair like the superfluous queen of some constitutional monarchy. “It looks like she’s got quite a few left to me.”

I looked over at them. The bags of clear liquid were leaned against each other like loyal little soldiers on a shelf above the bed-chair. “Yeah, weird,” I said. “Maybe that batch expired.”

After my father learned where my mom had been that day he accused me of conspiracy. “That little candy-ass is in on it too!” he shouted as he kicked me and my mother out of the doublewide and threw our clothes on our small lawn with the dog shit the neighbors never picked up.

“Get in the car,” my mother said, trying to light a cigarette. A surprisingly cool breeze swept through and blew all our clothes around, forcing me to run down my favorite jeans and grab them before they danced their way into the road.

My mother didn’t try to grab her things. She just stood there on the porch, smoking and staring at the door for what felt like eternity.

“We’re going to your aunt Helen’s house,” my mother said as she opened the rusty driver’s side door of her old Corolla and climbed in next to me.

“What about Sidney?” I asked, as she jerked the stick shift into gear.

“I don’t think your aunt’s house has room for her. At least you won’t be able to whine about having to care of her for a while,” she said, skidding the tires as she pulled out of the driveway. She had already lit another cigarette by the time we were on the road.

Life at my aunt’s house was an instant improvement. I had my own room, as much of Helen’s and my mom’s leftover booze as I wanted, and an actual house to live in; although, there was still the inconvenience of having a mentally and physi-

17

cally handicapped sibling living – after my father got re-employed

by Jackson Industries – alone during the weekdays. At first my mother and I took turns going over there. However, after Aunt Helen threatened to kick my mother out if she didn’t start doing chores when she was home from the McDonald’s she managed part-time, the responsibility fell almost entirely on my shoulders. I lamented the fact that my aunt had hardly done anything but drink since the First Presbyterian Church had laid her off for extended truancy back in March, but my mother insisted on placating her older sister. She was able to get a pair of keys copied from the spare set at the mobile-home office. I started spending my weeknights in the doublewide taking care of Sidney, while on the weekends my father supposedly watched over her. He never inquired about her condition when he arrived home every Friday afternoon.

On Monday mornings I’d trudge two miles along the state highway to the doublewide and spend a few hours cleaning Sidney (which my father never did) and administering her IVs. She gradually improved. By the second week of July she was able to swallow soft foods. Later that month the doctors took her off most of the IV treatments and prescribed her Vicodin for the headaches she suffered as side effect of multiple hairline skull-fractures.

Around this time I started spending my weekends with Allen Gately and Jesse Riser. They were both a year older than me. Jesse thought she was all hot shit for getting into Grinnell College with a good scholarship. Allen had just graduated from Hoover High School and was headed to the east coast for art school in the fall.

They both lived in kind of up-scale houses on the periphery of Aunt Helen’s neighborhood. On the weekends we ran around with some kids who lived in the apartments near Drake University Campus. When nothing was going on in that neighborhood we got baked all day with whatever money Jesse and Allen could squeeze out of their parents. The morning after the first time we kicked it I woke up behind the two of them in the backseat of a van I didn’t remember getting into. They were both asleep. We were parked by the Des Moines River and I was so hangover I wanted to dive right into it and bury my head in the muddy bottom.

One Monday evening I was sitting at Aunt Helen’s old dinner table scrapped with dusty modern-day theology magazines, listening to her read a sermon she’d given years ago at the First Presbyterian Church. Aunt Helen hated her former clergymen; she feared they’d blackballed her from ministering “word” and “sacrament” in every Presbyterian Church in the Midwest.

“They wouldn’t even give me a good reference,” she said, interrupting her own sermon, as she sipped the glass of sour mash she’d originally poured for me. Above us, in the center of the ceiling, hung an effigy-chandelier of Jesus Christ nailed to a cross.

His chest glowed translucently. Little clear light bulbs sparkled in his crown of thorns.

I’d told my aunt I wasn’t in the mood to drink but she’d still poured the glass and plopped in the ice cubes, which had now melted into the pallid light-brown liquid that she always squinted into for a few seconds before sipping down. “You could always just not put it on your resume,” I told her, as she sipped on the dregs of my glass.

Her eyes widened. In the thick lenses of her glasses I could see myself looking back at me confused as ever. “And deny the last five years of my life?” she said. “Deny the funerals, the baptisms, the fucking prayers I’ve heard? The fucking lives I’ve saved! You expect me to lie about that!” She slammed the empty glass against the table so hard I could have sworn I saw the effigy-chandelier shake.

“I think I’m gonna check on Sidney again,” I said.

As I was walking over to the trailer I was startled by the honk of a large green van passing on my left. I’d been walking on the wrong side of the road because the shoulder was wider and a large portion of the trip was on the bridge over the Raccoon River – a tributary of the Des Moines River that cuts west across town and into the cornfields of greater Iowa. The van suddenly pulled into the shoulder ahead of me and I saw a tall figure, which I immediately recognized as Allen Gately, emerge from the driver’s side door.

“What’s up Greg?” he shouted over the rush of oncoming traffic. He kept pulling his hands to his eyes to block the long black

hair that blew back in his face.

“Not bad,” I said. “Just heading back to my old place to give Sid her medication… How’ve you been?”

“Good, man… Real good,” he said. As I got closer to him and recognized the van as the one I’d woken up in that morning by the river I noticed that Allen smelled like marijuana. Allen let out a big yawn and scratched at his stomach which poked out an inch or so below a red tie-dye shirt. “You want a ride?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said.

When I got in the van I found that Jesse was sitting crosslegged in the front passenger’s seat, running a hand through her dirty-blonde hair. In her other hand she held a joint. She passed it back to me as I fastened my seat belt in the back seat behind Allen.

He put the car into drive and it smoothly lurched forward.

When we got to my old doublewide I thanked Allen for the ride and began to pull the van’s big sliding door shut. “Would it be cool if we came in and checked out your place?” asked Allen.

I froze. They hadn’t actually seen my sister yet. I’d only told them about her accident. More importantly, I hadn’t been over there since that morning with my mother before her shift. I didn’t know what kind of shape Sydney was going to be in.

“Well, I…” “I mean… we did drive you, man.” Allen’s pipey voice increased in pitch as he trudged over his sentence.

Jesse’s hazel eyes met up with mine as she leaned her head over the dashboard. A waft of smoke poured out from her nostrils and rose to cloud her face like a dull silver veil. I felt pinned, stoned, and assuaged from the common sense of familial interiority that most people might experience at the prospect of letting two people they barely know into a doublewide to see a sister whose face had been all but peeled off like a cupcake wrapper.

And then there were the diapers she wore: the diapers that usually needed changing around this time of day.

“Well, uhhh…”

“We just want to see it,” said Allen. “I don’t think I’ve ever even been inside a place like this before.” As he said ‘place like this,’ I felt a defensive jolt and for a second wanted to shove him against the hood of the van and beat his face into it.

And then the feeling quickly subsided and I felt horrible for ever having it. I said, “Yeah, I guess you guys can have a look inside,” immediately wanting to bite off my tongue.

They climbed up the steps and I opened the door and watched in horror as they stepped inside. I felt like the ringleader of my own satanic little circus.

Luckily Sidney was asleep. I’d half expected to hear a sickeningly muffled kind of scream, the kind of scream that usually doesn’t garner a response but just makes people tremble in that way that indicates an absolution of complicity; the shudder of ghosts and psychoanalysts.

“Well, this is it,” I said.

Jesse looked a bit perturbed. There were still beer cans my father had left lying around from the past weekend. Allen appeared more intrigued than off-put. He kept tilting his head around like one of those tall, incredulous cranes I’d see once in a while in little runoff streams by the river – looking at the world from a new angle every instant.

“So, uhh What exactly happened to her?” he said.

“Car accident. Thrown through the windshield. Swiped her face against a tree Car had been going about fifty,” I said.

“Hmm I see,” he said.

“We should go,” said Jesse, as her eyes darted around the room.

“What’s the rush?” said Allen, opening his arms in a confused gesture. “We just got here Greg, how long do you think it’ll take for you to do what you came here to do?”

“Not long,” I said.

While I washed a few dishes and threw out the beer cans my father had left behind, Allen and Jesse sat on the couch next to Sidney’s bed-chair. For a second I thought I heard them whispering. After I was done in the kitchen area I walked back into the living room and found Allen standing up and Jesse still sitting on the couch with her arms crossed in front of her with a

One time she was drinking a beer and watching us “Vic out!” as Allen once put it, and she started listing off a few of her favorite authors – Kerouac, Bukowski, Hemingway – and talking about how they all fucking pickled their livers in alcohol. ‘Fucking Pickled!’ she said again, tipping back her head and taking another swig.

Sometimes I felt a little bit guilty. I was, after all, abusing prescription medications while the person they were meant for was sitting right next to me, incapacitated, sometimes turning to see what was going on but never stating any objections. I soon started to think of my sister as not exactly human but more of a human invention. She was a deity I had to honor with great devotion – which, in turn, rewarded me with feelings of euphoric wellbeing.

On another evening I was sitting at my aunt’s dining room table feeling tired from the latest week of sleeping two hours a night and eating nothing but the Jolly Ranchers I’d started buying by the bagful and the overexposed McNuggets my mother occasionally brought home from work.

This evening, fortunately, was one of the rare occasions when my aunt Helen prepared dinner for just the two of us. She’d called me on the cell phone my mother and I shared, and I’d walk back across the bridge after doing the final line of another crushed up Vicodin pill. It was a pork butt roast basted in French onion soup, and at the time it seemed like the most delicious thing I’d ever eaten.

My aunt sat at the table across from me, drinking pale chardonnay and shoving large slices of exceptionally well-prepared pig-ass into her mouth. “Gregory, did I ever tell you your mother was a great actress?” she asked.

“No, I don’t think so,” I said.

“Well, she was,” said my aunt, forking another piece of butt roast between her teeth. “She actually had a scout from Julliard School come here to talk to her,” she said, taking another bite. “She was your age, seventeen... That is how old you are, right?”

“Right,” I said, looking into those old bifocals again and seeing my face all sunken in their reflection.

It started raining and I was suddenly overcome with an odd feeling of guilt for not being over at the doublewide. The rain reminded me of when my sister and I were younger and I used to climb into bed with her during thunderstorms.

“Why don’t you do anything like that Gregory?

You don’t even play basketball anymore, do you?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “I quit last year when Sidney had her accident.”

She blinked at me and there was a flicker in the effigy-chandelier above us and all the lights went out.

I kept eating my portion of the roast while I heard my aunt stand up and say, “By the queer will of the lord!”

Through the window I saw a bolt of lightning strike somewhere off in the direction of the doublewide. It was close enough to give me a glimpse of my aunt clawing through the drawers of a cabinet in the corner of the dining room. After I heard her slam two of the drawers shut, a bright light burst through the room and I saw the milk-bottle shape of my aunt’s body silhouetted next to the cabinet, pointing a large flashlight directly at me.

She led me downstairs to the moldy basement with its cement floors that, even in early August, felt cold through the soles of my shoes. After resetting all the switches in the circuit breaker, we went back upstairs to find every light but the effigy-chandelier illuminated.

Again, my Aunt said, “By the queer will of the lord!”

I returned to my seat in the dining room, which was now dimly lit from the lights of the other rooms, and began eating the butt roast again.

“What are you doing?” said my aunt.

illumination: prose

sulking expression.

“So, Greg, I see your sister happens to have a Vicodin prescription here,” he said, lifting her prescription bottle up from the coffee table in a way that almost looked like he was proposing a toast.I nodded and looked up at his emaciated yet somehow pudgy face with those little beady blue eyes tucked up in it.

“Does the prospect interest you of, well, uhmm… prescribing ourselves a little hydrocodone this evening?” he said with a wink.

“I somehow failed to see the question coming. “Well, uhmm… Allen, I really wish I…” “You ever done it, man?”

“Well no, but I really don’t think we should use…”

“Doesn’t look like she needs it now,” said Allen, motioning to my sleeping sister as if cueing applause. “It’s awesome! You feel so relaxed, yet you just can’t fall asleep on this shit!”

I glanced over at Jesse sitting on the couch. Her eyes looked like china plates meant to sit safely forever on white kitchen mantles; they gave no indication. “Uhmm… alright,” I said, as I looked back up at Allen.

“Cool! Now do you happen to have any juice or citruscandy or something? This shit’s pretty bitter when you insufflate it!”

After that night it sort of became my crutch. I’d originally agreed to snort only half a pill of crushed up Vicodin, but after an hour of sitting on my father’s La-Z-Boy and smoking the cigarettes Allen bummed me I wanted more. He wasn’t lying when he said the pills were bitter when you crushed them up and insufflated them. At first we passed around a carton of Florida Orange Juice to fight the taste; after that ran out I got up and stumbled into the kitchen and started looking for anything sweet. In the freezer I found some old popsicles so freezer-burnt I had to smack them against a counter, cracking them into little pieces so I could see what flavor they were. I carried the pieces out to Allen in the den, holding them against my stomach like little treasures.

Jesse just sat there the whole time, occasionally stealing a cigarette from Allen’s pack. Once in a while I thought I saw her looking at me, but I couldn’t quite tell with all the smoke.

But, as I said, it just kind of became my crutch after that…

I was still a good brother. I just felt like other painkillers would work for her. I’d give her three 200-milligram Ibuprofen tablets in lieu of one 500-milligram pill of Vicodin. She was getting the better half of the deal. I changed her diapers, gave her sponge baths, even spoon-fed her disgusting pre-blended assortments of meats and vegetables my mom picked up from Aldi. It was our own unspoken little compromise.

Sometimes Allen came over alone but usually Jesse was with him. Although she would never “rail” Vicodin with us, she stopped being so judgmental about it when she realized I was doing it when they weren’t around. She’d even make fun of the two of us and we’d all crack up even though she wasn’t as clever as she thought she was. It didn’t matter. After a couple white lines and a blue Jolly Rancher at the back of my tongue I felt like the weight of the world was hovering a millimeter above every inch of me. All I could do was laugh at its inability to fall.

At some point I misplaced my copy of keys my mother made for me. I thought I’d left them in the pair of jeans I chased down that day my father kicked my mother and me out of the trailer, but when I looked in the front right pocket I only found a pair of semi-melted Jolly Ranchers. I started leaving a window unlocked and pushing it up from the outside and climbing in. Jesse teased me mercilessly for this. She said I looked like a burglar with low standards every time I squeezed my torso through the window to let her in. ‘A burglar with low standards,’ she would say again, after I got inside.

She had a way of repeating everything as if it was so profound we all needed just another moment to mull it over.

19

“You can’t eat in here!”

“Why?” I asked.

“There isn’t proper lighting,” she said, shaking her head as she trudged back over to the cabinet and rummaged around in another drawer. After a few seconds her arm emerged with a small object I could barely distinguish in the dimness. “We’ll have to give him a new bulb!” she said with a giggle. “This will come in handy.”

She walked around the table, extending the hand that held the object. When she was close enough I saw that it was an Allen wrench. She quickly snatched my plate and slammed the wrench down, and said, “Thou shalt not eat the body of Christ until thou hath proved him thy worth!” She then proceeded to tell me how to use the wrench to open up Jesus’s heart so the forty-watt bulb that wasn’t making him light up our dining room could be replaced.

After helping me move the table and setting up one of the chairs for me to stand on she left to look for light bulbs. I climbed onto the chair, placed the end of the shorter leg of the little L-shaped wrench into the hexagonal socket at the effigy-chandelier’s naval and twisted open the heart of Jesus Christ.

My aunt reemerged from a hallway with a packet of forty-watt light bulbs, pulled one out, and handed it to me. I removed the old bulb, screwed in the new one and Jesus’s heart, again, emanated light throughout our dining room.

“I should go check on Sidney,” I said.

As I climbed through the window and the rain tickled my neck, I heard that muffled scream I dreaded hearing the first time I brought Jesse and Allen into the trailer; although, now it was my sister screaming. She screamed at the sight of me. I shuddered.

Allen was sitting on the couch beside her. His mouth formed into a big smile. “How you doing, man?” he said.

I didn’t say anything.

Jesse sat in the corner holding a bottle of gin in one hand and a joint in the other. Her eyes lit up when she saw me. “Greg! You’re just the person we were talking about a second ago!”

“What were you saying about me?” I asked as she hugged me and I felt her warm chest push against me.

“Oh, just that you’re a great guy and… we really appreciate you letting us hang out here!” said Allen, reaching toward Jesse for the joint.

I couldn’t believe it; the image of my favorite pair of jeans with the melted Jolly Ranchers in their pocket hit me like a punch to the sternum. I noticed the key my mom had given me lying on the coffee table.

“I think Greg needs a drink,” said Jesse.

“I think Greg needs a drink.” She placed her hand on my shoulder dug her fingers in a bit and smiled in a crooked way.

“Yeah, I think Greg needs a drink real bad!” said Allen, laughing.

“I don’t want one,” I said. “I want the two of you out of here, now!” I glared at Allen. He didn’t even move from his reclined position.

Suddenly I started to get that feeling I’d been getting lately before railing a line of Vicodin. My hands tingled and my mouth suddenly tasted dry.

“What’s wrong, Greg? You look strung out,” said Allen.

I looked down at him again, and then up at my sister – whose face, despite being half-covered in white bandaging, seemed horrified at the sight of me. For a few seconds I just stared at her.

It was like I hadn’t seen her since the accident.

And then I started to shiver and my thoughts came back to Vicodin. I looked down at the coffee table where I usually kept her prescription bottle next to the bag of Jolly Ranchers and saw that it wasn’t there.

“Where is it?” I asked Allen.

“What?” he asked.

“Shot time!” Jesse chimed in, carying in a shot glass full of gin from the kitchen and extending it towards me.

“I don’t want a shot. I want those pills! Where are they?” I shouted.

Allen shook his head. “They’re gone man. Sorry. We decided you were getting too into that stuff, so I did the rest of them.”

He reached under the couch and pulled out a red plastic plate.

I could see a faint white layer; the dregs of crushed Vicodin pills.

The next few seconds will always be clouded in my memory. I know I threw the first punch, and then the next thing I knew Allen was on top of me and hitting me in the face with little punches that felt more like he was falling on me with his fist. It took me a few seconds to get over the shock of what was going on, and when I did I just laid there, taking his weak little jabs until I felt something poking me in the hip.

I managed to wriggle a hand into my jeans’ right front pocket and felt the Allen wrench my aunt had given me. I gripped my hand around the length of it, holding it tight while Allen continued to punch me. He seemed to be getting a little more used to the idea of hitting me. His blows gained force. One of his punches struck me in the lip causing a little burst of blood.

The shot glass Jesse had tried to give me hit floor with a clink, and that seemed to be my cue. I ripped my fist out of my pocket, swung it across my body, and slammed the end of the wrench into Allen’s temple.

I heard a crunch. Then Jesse or my sister screamed. For a few seconds I laid there supine on the trailer floor, catching my breath while I heard someone, presumably Jesse, sobbing quietly in the background. It sounded soothing. When I pushed myself up and looked to the left Allen was thrashing around and holding his head.

Blood dripped through the cracks between his fingers.

Jesse was kneeling next to him. “What did you do?” she asked, once.

I couldn’t answer her. My head felt like a malfunctioning component of a machine that should never have been invented.

I felt the Allen wrench in my hand and opened my palm to look at it again. It looked like a talisman. When I stood up Jesse was hunched over Allen. He was breathing in short rapid breaths and crying out in pain. My sister had somehow fallen asleep in the ruckus. I walked up to her and placed my palm on the side of her bandaged face. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Please forgive me.”

And then I tucked the Allen wrench back into my pocket and ran out the door.

I didn’t know where I was going. It had stopped raining and fireflies were blinking on and off all around me. It didn’t occur to me to get back in my aunt’s old Chevelle. I ran toward the Raccoon River and came to an area where the lights from the fireflies intensified. It was a small pond, surrounded by short pine trees, near the entrance ramp to the bridge that led out of Des Moines.

A picnic-table sized wooden dock protruded into the pond from the weeds along the shoreline. I stumbled onto it and looked up to the night sky with all the stars and the fireflies blinking. They blinked so ferociously, but as I let myself fall backwards they all seemed to freeze in place.

As I lay there, suspended in that forever-period before buoyancy kicks in, I caught sight of the moon. Through all the waves and ripples above me it looked more like a hexagon than a circle, like a socket. I wanted to reach up and place the end of the Allen wrench in it, unscrew – pull it all out like a loose bolt… I wanted to gaze into the great concavity of everything impossible.

I wanted to see if there is anything worth seeing.

illumination: prose

Olivia Baldwin Untitled Photography

Allison Cunniff Untitled Copper, nickel-silver, glass enamel, pearls

21

to whomever it may concern Julia Matthews

I found you to be charming once In our quaint little town You took my hand under the moonlight And friction kept our bodies warm Atop the blankets of grass Until the valley of my heart opened To the sunlight of yours We walked hand in hand as the Days became more sweltering, more dangerous Floating with smiles on our faces As the winds turned dark and the Days turned orange And it all became too apparent.

Because we were ruined from the night you took my hand Each day since, just one more day For what we had to stale Serenity gave way to fear Because now I had to face the consequences For your salacious looks I had to wake up every morning and Know that just outside my bedroom door Was reproach Coming ever closer with each passing day As the sky turned darker And the turmoil thickened And I could see you seething in the distance Surrounded by every face I’ve ever seen in my nightmares So I left To ponder alone my mistakes To escape the shame of having every Face see my failure

Grow as the trees turn And my naivety was hoping that You’d reach out your tender arms And wipe the disgrace from my eyes.

That you’d convert me to honesty, My naivety was assuming you’d Never want to.

To whomever it may concern, I’m sorry I never trusted you That I left you Never telling you the gift I had to give, And though it took too many years Too many, And you may not even remember me, I’ll leave the invitation open Because your son would like to meet you

illumination: poetry

the essentials Heather Sheets

He stood quite still at his tin pretzel stand but on occasion raised his hands to move his stocking cap, and hug his body close.

The wind was cold like it should snow but no snow fell in Chicago. Yesterday he told me “10,” I gave it back. Yesterday his wife withdrew every dollar and left.

And his breath rises, sad steam, slow steam, the very palest steam. I think of white birds in the fields waiting after the combine, like God is a scavenger, huge, pale flocks gathering around the unusable portions. But when they lift off the chaff, I really do feel like I’m saved. Maybe it’s the morning, or the smell, maybe if I was blind I wouldn’t understand. But he’s still standing there with his cart. This whole scene should be in black and white. An angel should appear. The sun should come out. He has lost it all! But he hasn’t lost it all. More cold is coming and the emptiness that I feel now is nothing like the hunger I had felt before the pretzel stand where his breath comes out in pale, bird prayers to God.

23

ginger ale Eric Lynne

I’m trying to work out more.

I’m trying on new sweaters, new jackets.

I’ve got a new beard and a cool new habit of taking deeper breaths.

I’m trying to read shorter books that have longer titles, by people who are French or African—or have abstract last names at least.

I’m trying to listen to songs that try new sounds that accompany their unheard words about southern drinks and east coast affairs and not about girls, or futures, or love.

Skinny ties are in so I’m trying those too.

I’m trying to watch new foreign films twice removing the subtitles the second time around.

I’m trying to eat better since the market reopened.

I’m toasting my fresh bread darker than before and toasting new friends with a little more liquor.

I bought new sheet music for the piano.

The sad one from the last animated movie with the old guy and the dogs who hate squirrels, where the wife dies, leaving him old and alone.

I’m clunking out the melody—trying to learn— to forget the ones I wrote and played for her.

I’m growing out my hair with new shampoo so I can try a different hairstyle soon.

I’m trying to come up with new reasons to wear my glasses outside of class and create new excuses for why my phone dies less often.

I’m trying to make more flashcards and outlines, so I can try to take up more time studying and less time watching the meaningless TV shows and stop following that series she and I laughed at late Thursday nights then quoted on Friday mornings.

I’m trying to get a job on the graveyard shift.

I’m going to start drawing out my designs with the new colored pencils I bought today.

I got a new notepad, too, where I’ll try writing down my thoughts on why Mendota’s snowdrifts are bitter mirages posing as September’s white-tipped ocean waves and why the bridge hasn’t been reopened yet.

The one past her house, strewn with the orange warning signs we sidestepped and the caution tape we cut through so we could lie down, the tarp-like blanket perfect for the uneven road.

We ate the leftover key lime pie and then kissed, tongues fizzling with the taste of cold ginger ale— I’m trying to find a way away from that bridge.

Emily Owen Luchador Oil and Serigraphy

illumination: poetry

the drugs don’t work Sam Eichner To unknow: to feel the tingling trepidation of anticipation, first in your spine but then in the pit of your stomach to the lump in your throat that rises like a balloon and flattens and expulses all of its air in cool streams that push against your forehead and force your skin to tighten its grasp on your body, to steal that first kiss back, so that it’s always wetter than you expect, and slimier than they make it look in the movies, to hear Dylan with fresh ears, so that his gasping rasps and swooning croons always sound like a poetic instigation of raggedy revolutionaries, to see a Pollock with virgin eyes, so that his visualized whims and impasto reveries forever entrance you with impossible beauty; and to play in the leaves for the first time again, so that when you rake a pile together and jump in, it will be with the genuine expectation of getting lost inside.

But I know too much already:

I remember; and my memories narcotize my experiences, and blow sensation to oblivion.

They are my drugs, and I, their faithful junkie. I try to resist them, but they’ve corrupted Sleep, stained sweet dreams.

They lurk one step behind me with my shadow, and I can’t help but indulge…

Once in a while.

I breathe in and off I go. One day I’m a child, playing football with my brother in the backyard.

Another, I’m seventeen and I see her for the first time again.

I exhale and I cough, hard. It always burns more on the way out than on the way in.

(There’re times I want to forget but I don’t remember how.) Some things we never get back.

25

in defense of latitude Sarah Mathews

there’s dirt older than any exile. yes, beyond your country roads. the answer, as always, lies in history and you dislike that, the lack of control in matters of the temporal. but since you asked: my forefathers were tradesmen, that is what my mama told me. faces brown and seaweathered as boat hulls, they too left land behind them, for rubber. for pepper, cloves, cardamom. to dry-weave palm leaves into baskets of intoxication. the scent makes blood run quicker, lulls eyelids closed. and for chillies— darkly red and fragrant, saturated with dull fire pungent as lust. bought in crateloads by white men who could not stomach them, who wanted mashed potato women i picture you, dearest. rooted in shallow prairie country. dreaming porch wood beneath your feet to be a woman’s face. beige dust cloyed with summer damp, pores split with foreign heat and i am never sure what i desire. anchors, or the dark glitter of an expanse of water, a boundary blurred by fear and expectation. but i want you to know, i apologize for singeing your mouth with kisses. you have not yet learned to deal in heat or blood, the turn of milky sap to stubborn rubber my ancestors were sailors, mama told me, bodies brown and seaweathered as boat hulls. faces taut as their women weptfor their return eyes and jaws adamantine, upbraided by the fleshy priests Mother Ocean is the abode of gods not intended for men to cross this means losing caste and life. and these men set forth still so i am taking up oars, against other counsel. i have dealt before in partings, in tautening hearts, but still am truly sorry for choices i could not choose between. for the pulls of horizon and history, the elliptical nature of love and its capsaicin burning, that no waters can allay.

Michael Ashley

In the endless of replica of houses there’s a plan that just didn’t go right for a man with a job that he hated, so he lives in the TV each night.

illumination: poetry

shawn He grew up a dyslexic Catholic in Saint Al’s, where sisters taught through switch flicks and told his parents that he was retarded.

It replays when brotha’s at work say he’s quick.

His friends all OD’d or went brain-dead from heroine, cocaine, and weed.

He lectures his son: do like he dida six pack a night is all he needs.

Junior calls him with first name defiance, and skates ‘til his grades are destroyed.

Shawn beats him with backhanded manners ‘til there’s less of himself in that boy.

His menopause wife lies with lupus, ignoring nightly his sexual prods.

He gives Maria, in Waste, Disney movies, so her three-year-old keeps thinking he’s God.

Olivia Baldwin Untitled Photograph

27

second year in boston Trina Van Mell

You and I, we cracked oysters Outside by the band.

You told me a joke and I showed you my scar.

We ate them in buckets On Saturday night, Laughing with cops And filling our cups.

Thinking back to last summer, Just “Strawberry Fields.”

There was sunshine and kisses--but nothing was real.

This city it turned upside down in one year.

And I know this because When we heard that sad song on Saturday night, I found It don’t put me on edge anymore.

So I’ll pray really hard, probably barter with god-Because now I have something to lose.

Emily Owen Venus with the Blue Hair Oil and Serigraphy

illumination: poetry

impromptu in friday minor Chris Apfelbach

If it’s a haunted house, it’s a funny one.

It fills up with ghosts at noontide, and evicts each one by midnight.

Blue, blue, the spaces between adore the stuff.

The door frame glows aquamarine; the windowsill, a wan turquoise.

The ghosts get drunk off thé à la mer.

I throw them out by 8:00. Still early.

The desk could use some flowers.

Bluebells, maybe, or violets.

Silence rings the buzzer again, and though the intercom stays quiet, I know she’s asking me to take her back.

I begin to wish the ghosts would visit.

That’s the problem with them: No sense of punctuality or time.

They haunt at the oddest moments.

If I’m an island of no one’s devising, then this room is my bride of quietness.

Everything important is already said.

By 10:00, I’m tuned to the key of blue, and the ghosts keep pouring me teal shots.

Maybe they’ve always played to my tune.

The night continues, and nothing is changed.

That’s the trouble with ghosts: you can exorcise them, but they’ll come back through the walls, like sex sounds do.

I’ll put on some Miles Davis: his best friend was a Harmon mute, too.

Or maybe it was heroin. Bit different.

Still, that’s something in common.

The ghosts start smoking in the bathroom.

I run a shower to mask the pooling vapors, cut the lights to pretend the butts are stars.

9:00, and they’re out the door again.

In the armchair, my mind gets recursive, running circles in four or five dimensions.

I got another first name from the gym worker.

That was 7:00. A good hour, if short.

The weights feels light in my hands.

29

of mice, of poe Eric Lynne

Part I Dad said there was a mouse problem. Asked me if I could please check the basement before I left in the mornings.

He had put poison in the corners mixed with lunchmeat, and told me to put out more if need be. The box was in the shop and extra salami was in the cooler. The movers had found droppings on the orange velvet couch and joked they were the size of chocolate covered almonds. I decided to buy Tupperware for my cereal and slept upstairs on the blowup. Crunching on an off-brand Raisin Bran I had barely heard the tick. I followed the sound and found her sitting on the corner of the worker’s bench. Tick. She did not move. Her tail lay limp as a rainy-day worm, but her black pearl eyes stood frozen and open—there was no blinking. Just ticking. Tick. I stepped closer. Tick. I stomped my foot. Tick. Her legs were quivering. Tick. I soon got close enough to touch her, so I traded my bowl of cereal for workman’s gloves. She was small. She was so small. I wanted to touch her. More than words, I wanted to touch her, so I reached for her whiskers. And then I saw. I saw that she wasn’t ticking. She was gagging. Tick. Tick. It was as if the poison had sucked the batteries of this toy dry, so the squeaks had faded into these ticks. Her fur at this standstill behaved more like plastic and her whiskers like taught fishing wire. I had to use a hammer. I tried not to look, but missed, so I had to watch the thump of the hammer and listen as the juices trickled from her mouth like runny ketchup. Watching wasn’t hard though. The feeling was hard. Through the handle I felt the fur, then the skull, then the squish.

Part II The next day I had to be out by eight. I was deflating my bed when Dad called to remind me to clean the basement.

Before I left, it was my responsibility to make sure the house was ready for the showing. As I hit the bottom stair, he hit my sightline, standing alone on an empty shelf. He was slightly bigger than she and was broken in the same way—shaky-legged and gagging. Ticking. His fur was checkered with patches of course black-brown hair and his tail hung from the shelf ’s edge, praying to fall off. I couldn’t see his eyes, and I meant to keep it that way. When I turned to retrieve the hammer from the shop, I nearly stepped on another one. This little girl was lying on her side with her small ear to the floor, listening for death. Her panting made for higher and more frequent ticks. A stain at the mouth suggested she had been successful at discharging some of the tricky filth. I walked through the skeleton of my barren basement and found one after the other. Most were twitching and ticking. Some were tranquil and silent. Three shook together around a pile of toxic salami, as if huddled around a fire. I found an empty shoebox and, like dandelions, plucked the mice up one by one at the tail. I found a dozen or so on the first go around—I did not bother to separate the dead from the living. After I felt I was done, I closed the shoebox. Their ticking became muted and hollow. I placed the shoebox in the driveway and ran over it with my car. The radio failed to distract me from the bump. The sticky blood dripping from the shoebox reminded me of cranberry chutney.

Alex Vogel Lord Kanti Intaglio Print

illumination: poetry

Part III I washed the driveway off with a hose and watched the red blood fade and spread into a light pink. I went into the basement to look around one last time. I found that I had forgotten to clean up the paper towel from the day before. I had used it to soak up the first mouse’s blood.

It was still lying there like a dollar-store funeral shawl. I used a paint scraper to clean it up because the blood had fused the paper towel to the wood. Under the towel, a stain remained, but it was small. So small. I was scratching off the blot when I heard it. Under the hum of the house it hit quickly, clearly. Tick. I had missed one. I looked around the shop. Through the dusty air I could not see any mice. The shelves were empty and the leftover woodpile proved clean. Tick. I swept through the basement. The vacant rooms held no secrets. Closets that boyhood action figures use to occupy were only filled with echoes. Tick. I tracked my old hideand-go-seek spots and only discovered unpacked scented candles. Tick. I moved upstairs into the kitchen. I ripped open cabinet doors and was met with thin layers of dust where Mom’s unused Puerto Rican china used to sit next to my sippy cups. I used a flashlight to check behind the stove. Tick. I let my eyes travel along where the floor met the molding. I went through each room, on hands and knees, inspecting any forgotten inlet. I poked the crease with my fingers.

Tick. I double-checked the poison stations. I threw them away. Tick. I began knocking on the walls. Tick. I knew this house. Tick. I tore up the carpet. Tick. I was born in this house!

Tick. I took my hammer to the walls. Tick. Tick. Tick. Time was up. The realtor would be there soon. I grabbed my stuff and left a note to the realtor about the holes in the walls and to buy mousetraps, not poison. I locked the door behind me. Tick.

31

why i deserve to be here: Kabnpauj Xiong

Throughout my life, I have struggled with belonging because of my Hmong American identity. I was caught between the tension of two completely different cultures and communities. I sought to establish my own individuality and to express it as a unique Hmong American. From these experiences and challenges, I’ve wondered how complete strangers could understand me if my own family couldn’t. Through the friendships I have made, however, I’ve learned to accept that everyone won’t always understand me or see the world as I do. Understanding wasn’t realistic because what makes the world whole are everyone’s contrasting viewpoints.

Applying this thought to a campus community, we coexist and together overcome the challenges of diversity through acceptance.

Naturally, diversity generates different experiences because each person is unique. Sometimes this causes division, lack of acceptance, and alienation; situations that I’ve encountered early. Even since kindergarten, my name has been a barrier between whom I am and who I could’ve been. I’ve become accustomed to teachers raising their eyebrows at the end of the attendance list, struggling to identify my name. I accepted that it was my responsibility to speak up and excuse them from this undertaking, a yearly tradition I now fondly remember. My name is Kabnpauj Xiong. Although it reflects a big part of my Hmong identity of which I don’t deny, I will not allow it to label, define, or limit me in any way.

Outside my cultural background, my Hmong side was marginalized, whereas within my family, my American identity was. My parents, immigrants who lack the most basic knowledge of native-born Americans, posed many difficulties between us through their traditional expectations. While my parents invested in my brothers, my sisters and I were expected to become submissive housewives. However, I grew up in a place where men and women were equal. The morals and beliefs that I had were modern and more American, yet I lived under the rule of my parents. I grew up as a black sheep because I couldn’t abandon my Hmong identity, yet I wouldn’t compromise my views, which had been highly influenced by American culture.

I continued to be in and out of Hmong and American culture. Since nowhere accepted both, I always felt incomplete. They were only two aspects of my identity. There was still my personality and my uniqueness as an individual. One day, as I looked around my school I noticed the student body was extremely diverse, with minorities being the majority. Amidst this mosaic, I found unity.

Students came together to learn regardless of their differences. My peers knew me not by my race, but through my actions and words. Previously, I thought that diversity was a cause for isolation. I now see that through it we’re unified. Although we lack the ability to understand each other, we understand diversity and through that arrive at acceptance. The barrier that diversity originally paraded as became a bridge.

Although there will always be tension and a struggle to belong, to feel complete and unique in a diverse world, I feel that I have gained some perspective on how to overcome the challenges of diversity through personal acceptance. Although I would like to speak of the ways that I can personally create an accepting campus community, I cannot. Acceptance is something that cannot be forced or enforced; it is a choice, the willingness and readiness of each individual. However, we can and will conquer these challenges of diversity because we cannot allow it to conquer us, a conclusion that will serve to unite. My contribution to UW-Madison’s campus community will be my acceptance of others.

The Memory Project brings the Wisconsin Idea to life The Wisconsin Idea is the principle that the university should improve people’s lives beyond the classroom and the Memory Project could not embrace this vision more. In 2003, while volunteering in Guatemala, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Ben Schumaker, encountered a man who had grown up in an orphanage. This man explained that he did not have any personal belongings from his youth. He suggested that Schumaker help the kids collect special items that would contribute to their sense of identity and selfworth. In response, Schumaker initiated the Memory Project which has been successfully implemented in schools around the nation for nearly a decade.

The Memory Project is a unique initiative in which art students create portraits (drawings, paintings, digital art, etc) for children and teens around the world who have been orphaned, neglected, or disadvantaged, and students are given the opportunity to open their hearts to youth who have endured many hardships, and to promote the value of sharing kindness with others.

To do this, the artists receive photos of kids waiting for portraits and then work from those photos to create the portraits. Next, Schumaker and the Memory Project team deliver the portraits to the kids as gifts. They also take photos of the kids receiving the portraits so the artists can see those special moments.

Given that kids who have been orphaned or neglected usually have few personal keepsakes, the purpose of the portraits then, is to provide them with a special memory of their youth, to honor their heritage and identity, and to help them build a positive self-image. Schumaker explains that that they also want to help the kids see themselves as works of art. The Memory Project not only connects American youth with kids from other countries in a meaningful exchange of caring but inspires global friendship, and a positive sense of self.

Esta Pratt-Kielley Ramish Prisma Color pencils

illumination: essays

memory project

33

illumination The compositional objective of this issue was to make a highly professional magazine incorporating various art, essays, and literature. The titles, headers, page numbers and page graphics are Helvetica Neue, while the content is Garamond. The color scheme is directly derived from the cover of this magazine, artwork by Stephen Conrad.

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