Spring 2014 | Illumination: The Undergraduate Journal of Humanities

Spring 2014

illumination art

literature

essays

The Undergraduate Journal of Humanities

Staff Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Blackman Assistant Editor-in-Chief Alice Walker-Lampani Art Editor Megan Tuohy Essays Editor Ma Joaquin Poetry Editor Majah Carberry Prose Editor Craze McAdam Layout Editor Alice Walker-Lampani Head Copy Editor Mandy Ezell Events & Involvement Coordinator Elise Otten Art Reviewer Emily Wessing Essays Reviewers Kenneth Anderson, Rebecca Kyser, Sam Pauley Poetry Reviewers Tamara Rosin, Cody Kour Prose Reviewers Morgan Haefner, James Runde Copyeditor Sara Lawton Marketing Assistant Maryna Zhdanok

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 jounral is focused on being a valuable addition to the intellectual community of the University and all the people it affects.

Special Thanks Illumination would like to extend a special thank you to former Chancellor John D. Wiley and to the Lemuel R. and Norma B. Boulware estate for setting up the Boulware fund, which funds Illumination each semester.

uwilluminationjournal.com

Cover Min Zhang Fruits and Flowers Watercolor Back cover Stephanie Skykes Untitled Acrylic on

letter from the editor For the Spring 2014 issue of Illumination: The Undergraduate Journal of Humanities, we wanted to get back to basics. This involved answering the question: how can we most clearly and elegantly present some of the best undergraduate writing and artwork on campus? Much too often, working with advanced published software on a strict timeline can result in a product that is overly complicated, graphically cluttered, and textually convoluted. Certainly, the vast array of tools and applications offered by modern desktop publishing has provided everyday people with the ability to create beautiful and intelligent publications. But at the same time, it seems that having access to near-infinite ways of doing things can distract us from the publication’s primary function as a medium for creative content. This is not to say that attention to the journal’s look and design has been sidelined – in fact, quite the contrary. This issue of Illumination was designed to work in tangent with the content to provide a clean and sophisticated platform on which readers can engage with extraordinary writing and artwork. As such, we hope that the journal’s design complements and indeed enlarges the prose, poetry, essays, and artwork that it hosts.

You might also notice that this issue is larger than the last. Submissions this semester were strong in quantity and quality. Rather than make unwarranted cuts, we have expanded. As a result, the staff worked hard to organize, read, review, and select the pieces you see here. Thank you to the staff for once again doing the not-so-glamorous labor that makes this journal possible. Thanks to Jenny Klaila at UW Marketing for her unwavering reliability and continued help to ensure Illumination makes it into paper form. Ally Jagodzinski has been a stellar director over the last year, going above and beyond to inform, assist, and strengthen each publication, and in the process making PubCom a powerful literary force on campus. This issue is indebted to her relentless dedication. Jim Rogers has been an indispensable source of knowledge and support over the past year. Helping all of us to get exactly what we need to do our jobs, as well as providing general life lessons that far exceed the publishing world, his advising underlies much of what PubCom does, and how we as editors conduct our publications and ourselves. Putting together the final product is no doubt a long, tedious, and sometimes infuriating process, but it is also the most crucial. Alice Walker-Lampani has done a brilliant job designing and building this journal. Her creativity, focus, authenticity, and talent can be found in the core of what constitutes Illumination, and her companionship made the production process more enjoyable than it ever could have been.

I have been incredibly lucky to have been involved with one of the most relevant and exciting venues for undergraduate work in the humanities, and cannot wait to see how Illumination will continue to grow in the years to come. I hope you enjoy the Spring 2014 issue!

Benjamin Blackman

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CONTENTS PROSE

4

6/41

Afterthoughts

6

My Brothers and I

10

New Orleans, ‘92

14

No Clowning Around

21

Wrecked, Solitary, Here

27

A Fourteen-Foot Gator Named Holy Spirit

31

Battle Born

34

Love Hate Lines

38

Staring Down the Loaded Barrel

39

ESSAY

44/61

Rags to Riches: The Impact of Ragtime on Respect for African-Americans in the Early 20th Century

44

Dark Was the Night

49

Bus to the School of Hard Knocks

55

People Who Climb Mountains

60

POETRY

ARTISTS 64/72

The Fall, circa Nov. Last

Generation Y: Ode to Unaffection

64

Uninhabited Homes

66

65

Your Fours Look like Nines 66 Parallell

67

Obituary

67

Asthma Attack

68

How to Lose Your History for a Second Time

69

Here, together and Here

70

Running to or from, Home

71

The Journey of the Color Orange

72

Yolanda Arellano Amy Bohnenkamp Jiayu Chen Gillian Drier Mary Kate Duffy Alexandra Dworak Lucia Hodkiewicz Holly Hovanec Paige Ida Courtney Kessler Grace Meurer Allie Mueller Cassia Naughton Suzy Peterson Jenny Quilty Vedika Sawant Annie Shao Ben Skiba Stephanie Skykes Chao Sun Ella Williquette Min Zhang

5

Cassia Naughton Little Buddahs Photography

PROSE

6

PROSE

7

Afterthoughts Rachel Murnane

8

Alone on the table in the room I no longer enter is an Underwood. The antique typewriter is laden with dust by now, but I cannot say this for sure because I haven’t laid my eyes on it in a decade. I just assume. It was a thoughtful gift from an affectionate man, but I loved it more than anything I ever felt for him. Once, writing consumed my life. I was talented and proud and ambitious, but none of that matters now.

Once. That is what we call the time before, all spans of it blurred together. Once was a time of undefined boundaries and inspiration. Now is a time of vacancy.

Take this for example. I, a writer, think constantly, but my thoughts are of no worth. They are unoriginal; they are universal. Although they form in my mind, I cannot claim them as my own. When I think a thought, someone else has thought it before, just as I have inhaled the exhalations of ghosts. This is not unnerving. It is what it is.

Certainly, those who lived once are to blame for the way of the world today. They over-thought and created too much and experienced at an extreme level until all concepts were consumed, as in a wildfire. We are the ashes remaining in the absence of thought.

If they could, prior generations may have dreaded this future, perceiving our world as dim or bleak.

Hopeless, even. This is not so. In all aspects, now is the same world as theirs – all cyberspace, urbanization, robotic. The only difference is that everything now is less.

There is color, but it’s shallower. There are thoughts; they are all secondhand. Life repeats, over and over.

I repeat, we are not mindless. The fact that I can explain the situation is evidence enough. We remember.

I can tell you how it happened. How the last original thought came to be – how the world changed. The extinction of thoughts was not a single event, but a string of unseen occurrences. The happenings were not obvious, nor were they invisible: people were too busy trying to grasp the mirage to look around and see. Unlike the rest, I saw.

From the thirty-ninth floor, the sprawling city seems distant. But, of course, it’s real and inescapable.

The scratched-metallic skyscrapers are obscured by gray smog, but I can envision the asphalt below, and the ordered chaos and the crime. Metropolis isn’t home, but I’ve found some level of comfort here — as much as an organic being can in a world without wilderness.

Many things that existed before are gone now, like trees, and stars. Technically they are still out there; but the trees are far away, and the stars aren’t bright enough to pierce through the constant haze. Thousands of years ago this city was a prairie, pristine and uninhabited. Thirty-some odd years ago, I lived a few hours north where the trees grew steadily along the shoreline of a lake, which evaporated like a springtime puddle by the time I was nine. But, as far as I can remember, the trees were always sparse, everywhere.

For a moment, I catch my profile in the windowpane. My eyes, dark as ever and fringed by thick lashes, are like sleepy doe-eyes, and my skin is milky pale; my long brown hair makes it appear almost translucent.

I am ordinary, average, and therefore approachable, but for a writer to succeed in this world, she must stand out.

That’s why I moved here, to the city, but I just blend in. I had been warned, though.

Before I left, my mother told me writing was impractical and unrealistic. “Writers are several pathetic impossibilities at once,” she listed, “caffeine-addicted, slightly insomniatic, persistent-to-the-point-of-madness dreamers who try to capture life in reality, like wind in a net.” I mulled this over, and upon finding no fault in her observations, simply agreed. She shook her head slowly.

“Someday, you’ll realize that you were wrong,” she said, not savagely, but with a sigh. “What’s the point?” she continued, elbows deep in soapy dishwater. “What’s the point of telling stories, anyway?”

In hindsight, maybe she was right. Ten years ago, so many stories had accumulated that a sort of literary inflation occurred, resulting in the expansion of what constituted as plagiarism. Publishers hired Censors, investigative attorneys who tracked writers to expose plagiarism. Successful infringement suits against other publishing companies earned enormous sums, so every company employed at least one Censor. It wasn’t about ethics. It was all about money, and winning a lawsuit against a plagiarist, while often corrupt, was easy.

Writers, of course, were well aware of this.

Initially, I had been extremely careful, but after awhile it hardly crossed my mind. My internship at Watson Publishing was nearing its end. In a few days, I would be able to breathe again. The incident the week before was weighing on my mind. With seven days left, I received my final professional writing assignment.

“Ms. Forrester,” the Editor peered over her black frames and said to me, “I have an assignment for you.”

This was it. I, educated, talented, and ambitious, was determined to finally prove myself through this project. I told myself I would stop seeing Grant. I remembered how, several months ago on my twenty-third birthday, he’d tied a silky ribbon around the Underwood; the ribbon matched my scarlet dress. He had neatly typed, “Someday you’re going to write something incredible,” on the paper in the typewriter. For a second I was lost in that hopeful moment, thinking about the textured paper – so rare and expensive. The typewriter was antiquated, purely sentimental. Likewise, my two-year relationship with Grant had stalled, and a break was the only way I could devote more time to writing, and avoid telling him what had happened the week before, which was haunting my conscience.

I was unable to write that week. It wasn’t writer’s block – no, it was an obsession to create something unique. Every word I wrote seemed imperfect somehow, but Grant’s message, pinned to the corkboard above my table, motivated me to move past that.

I wrote a story about a story. In it, the main character discovers she’s just a character. She tries to escape from her world into the real world and succeeds, but the real world is so drastically different that she longs to return to her fictional world. She can’t, though, because she’s rewritten the story. She winds up trapped between two dimensions.

After dinner on the evening before it was due, I begged Grant to read the draft. We sipped merlot side-by-side as he looked it over. A brilliant flashing sage, combined with gold flecks and amber stripes, his eyes were like those of a tiger, and just as compelling. He was a handful of years my senior, but already his hair was silvering, and he wore glasses because his eyes grew tired after a long day at work. He had a part-time job in library research, pouring over old texts and flicking through digital documents, organizing and uploading them to various preservation databases. It was tedious, exhausting labor, and because of it he never read outside of work. I watched as he scanned the pages, fully aware that he didn’t savor words as I did. Grant read them quickly and formulaically without seeing them.

“It’s incredible,” he murmured when he was finished, “just like I told you it would be.” I wasn’t convinced, yet I blushed, and the wine turned inside me.

“I’m not sure about the ending,” I confided. “I might change it.”

“No, don’t.” Grant looked alarmed, and I peered at him quizzically.

He smiled, and replied, “It’s just, the ending is my favorite part.”

His feedback reassured me, and I turned in the unaltered draft the next morning. Afterwards, as I stood in line at the café across the street from the press, a strange anxiety surfaced, a backwards feeling that something was wrong with my story. I assumed it was the unsatisfactory ending, but then it dawned on me: the final line. I’d written “All the world’s a stage, all the people merely roles.” Or was it, “The world is but a stage, and all the people players?” I tried to remember, but I’d scratched it down on a whim. The fact that it rang a bell was not a good sign. I rushed back to my office, heart fumbling.

Distracted, I entered the small yellow room without noticing anything, or anyone. Thoughts swirled in my mind; I concluded that I would have to leave Grant. If my instinct was right, and I’d made a mistake… If anyone ever found out…

But as I planned the break-up in my mind, the intense, sharp sound of my name –“Violet!” – and the Editor’s swift motion, caught me off guard.

I hadn’t noticed her leaning against my desk.

Gently, she laid two papers on the table, side by side. One was an excerpt from a Shakespeare drama, a play from the Age of Exploration that people used to enjoy. The other paper was mine. Each had a single, identical sentence underlined, in bold cardinal red. My heart thundered in my chest.

“But how?” I whispered. Surely Mrs. Watson hadn’t read the play before; those once-revered works had been neglected for centuries. I squinted at the papers before me, and realization hit me like a train. There, on the corner, a purple wine stain.

Heat choked my throat and my body shook with rage. He trapped me, I wanted to say. How could he?

“You have put my business in a precarious position,” the Editor crossed her arms.

“Mrs. Watson, I can explain — ”

“Foolish, blind girl. Plagiarizing right under the nose of a Censor,” she spat, incredulous.

“But I didn’t know,” I stuttered frantically. “I was framed.”

“I will not hear it.” The firm hiss of her tone startled me. She regained her composure, and added, “I have a proposition.” I braced myself for the worst.

“Your contract will expire,” she said sternly, and relief swept over me. Would she spare me? Would she let me go?

“When,” she continued sharply, “You produce a breakthrough. Something thought-provoking, unheard of, original. Something that will change the world.”

I watched a strand of hair fall across her face in slow motion. That’s when I realized how desperate she was. Her blouse was ruffled and her pink lipstick smudged. She, a woman who was always pulled together, was clearly falling apart.

In words I half heard, she told me that I had to break the mold. I would write the plot that had never been imagined. This is how I would redeem myself. Pure originality was the only way to out-earn the Censors, she said, because it was valued above all else. If I failed, not only would the business go under — I would never be allowed to publish my own work again. And if I didn’t comply, I would surely be sued. And if I couldn’t come up with the money…

9

Min Zhang My Hometown (1) Black pen

The story I had to write could not be about a journey, defeating a villain, or an awakening. It could not be a history, mystery, or romance. It couldn’t be a rise to power, or comedy or tragedy. All these were patterns from which all stories ever told had come.

For a long while, I sat in front of the Underwood in utter despair, distracted by the pressure of the looming deadline and the motives of Grant’s betrayal. The only explanation I could come up with was that he and the Editor had conspired to use me as a pawn in the Censors’ blackmail scheme. I stared out the window, captivated by the falling snow that obscured the horizon. Every snowflake is different from the last, they say. Eventually, exhausted, I fell asleep atop my work.

I dreamt I was a winter tree with branches thin as a skeleton and dark as charcoal. The air was frigid and I was lost in the blindingly white wasteland, flawless and intimidating as a fresh sheet of paper. Snow began to fall and cling to me, gently at first. Then the accumulation grew heavy; the weight was too much to bear. About to shake it from my limbs, I was startled to find it wasn’t snow at all, but tiny white letters. Upon closer inspection I saw that they were words, millions of them. They were piling on my shoulders, hastening down my throat, drowning me. I tore my roots up from the earth and tried to wade through the white words, but they suffocated me.

The words that I needed were everywhere, past, present, and future, and I was desperate for them.

10

I awoke, and in a productive madness, I stained paper after white paper with black ink. My story predicted a futuristic world filled with false hope: that something existed that had not been said or heard, written or read, seen or felt. This world, obsessed with originality and paranoid about plagiarism, was determined to discover this last innovation. Anyone who published work similar to another was put to shame. A new thought was considered “intellectual property”; it was of immense value and tangible enough to be owned. But the faster originality was pursued, the more elusive it grew. This was my world, in writing.

When I returned with my assignment in hand, the Editor was out. I left it on her desk.

Everything fell apart even though my observations had been correct. A breakthrough, thought-provoking, unheard of: my writing turned out to be none of the above. With my mind I had built a world. I believed it was a fortress; it was, in fact, a sand castle. My masterpiece was nothing more than an imitation, a mirrored reflection of the real world.

In my own defense, originality was impossible.

The Editor wanted me to invent a new genre and had faith that I could follow through. Readers like you thirsted for this. According to Mrs. Watson, it wasn’t enough. My story, it seemed, had been told before. I was fired, and I carried that label — Thief — with me like a tattoo.

After I hid the manuscript, life began to change.

The happenings were not reported in the news initially.

Small changes occurred first, almost before anyone could comprehend them. Then the transformation became more prominent, coinciding with other catastrophes like global warming, infectious disease, and random acts of violence.

Theaters played fewer movies; the economy was blamed.

Bookshelves across the globe took on a peculiar permanence. Researchers gave up on searching for answers.

The disappearance of thought extended to everything everywhere.

Looking back, I see the poetry in the paradox of my story becoming reality. Many people agree that life now is fine. As for me? I have only a fraction of the ambition I once had: now I just am. Living without creativity and a sense of purpose as I do is a sacrifice only for those like me who expressed freely once upon a time.

The road to the world today is inevitably one-way, stemming from the extinction of thought. In storytelling, I am not warning. Nothing can be done; deliverance is impossible. It may be a cliché, but now’s time has come. It is what it is.

I am not the first to think these thoughts. I will not be the last.

****

The Aspiring Writer stands and stretches. She contemplates the impossibility of her given assignment: ten pages, no prompt, and no restrictions. At first the freedom had been encouraging, and inspiration was plentiful.

Stacks of classics clutter her desk, and beyond the window snow blankets the city, white like her canvas, a fresh sheet of paper. But as minutes blur into hours, the task begins to seem hopeless. Crippled by indecision, she finds herself longing for a sense of direction.

She lights a candle. Plays soft music. Washes the dishes. Paces. She reads a little. Twirls a pen in her fingers.

Brews coffee. She thinks, to no avail.

The daunting, empty page waits for her to make her move. But she knows that when she does, she will only mar its pristine nature. There is nothing she can share with the world that will get its attention. Nothing she can say can make a difference. She hears temptation calling; she feels like giving up. Hasn’t every story already been told?

Then, she asks herself, “What if?”

What if every story has already been told? The Aspiring Writer explores this thought. In a race between these surfacing ideas and her clumsy fingers, she jots down phrases: exhalations of ghosts, consumed as in a wildfire, grasp the mirage. She erases words, rewrites some, rearranges them. Paragraphs take shape, then pages.

But when she rereads the first draft, she becomes discouraged by the concept. Like a puzzle with a few missing pieces, the idea has loopholes; it doesn’t quite make sense. She runs out of time.

So for now, it is what it is.

Before she prints, she slaps a title on the piece, almost as an afterthought.

Min Zhang My Hometown (2) Black pen

11

My Brothers and I Colin Brochtrup

12

Hey, Dad. You told me to try talking to you like this, so I guess I will. We’re in Immaculate Heart of Mary Church, but it has changed since I’m not in your lap and neither is Drew. Look, there’s the St. Michael statue with a body that looks like sand with a million bits of a broken, red Hot Wheels in it. He stands above a demon, or something, threatening him with his spear. You always told me St. Michael would protect me, but why wasn’t he protecting you from your heart? He could have killed the monsters, making your heart break. Drew looks kinda like a statue too. He looks like his head is a Lego man head with a straight line mouth. I’ve been looking out for Drew and David just like you said. Even though I’m the youngest, you said we still need to take care of each other, because that’s what brothers do. I’m glad David has an AP test he needs to study for today, because that means Mom won’t have time to talk after church.

I know you told me that this would happen, but I don’t think I’m ready. Somewhere inside it feels like when we get back from your funeral you’ll be waiting for us with a fresh batch of your hot chocolate ready, to read to Drew and I – I mean “me” – the next chapter of Narnia. I know you don’t like when I make grammatical errors when I speak, Dad. It’s hard for me to think about grammar and everything else that’s going on.

They told us during second recess. Mrs. S took Drew and I – me – away from our fourth-grade-versusfifth-grade soccer game, and she told us. She told us you had died. Told us your heart had stopped working. Last year you told us that you had a condition. That this would probably happen. We beat the fifth graders for the first time that day. I kicked the winning goal, but only because Drew had stopped playing. If you were watching, you would have yelled, “That was sweet, Jacob!” Maybe you were watching, but I didn’t hear you.

What else do you want to know? Mom, David, Drew, Grandma, and I are in the same pew in front, on

the left side. We’re all in our church clothes. Drew, David and me – I’ll get it right – have our polos on. The ones we got when we had our boys’ shopping day. They’re all the same blueberry color, like our eyes, with short sleeves, because Drew will never wear long sleeves. We didn’t have any more boys’ shopping days after that. Mom had us wear these for you even though she thinks they look silly.

I don’t like how far up we’re sitting in the faded – ow – splintering, fake, wood pews. Too many people will see me if I get up and go to the bathroom or need to wipe my nose. We’re always in the right half of the pews next to the blue stained glass picture of Jesus leaving for heaven. Some people I don’t know took our spot. There are a lot of people I don’t know here. I see some of my cousins and some friends from school, but I don’t know most of the faces I see. The quiet buzz that happens before anything starts is here. It’s just like the mosquitoes that sneak into our tent and keep me up when we go camping.

Okay, Dad ... so now people are talking and laughing about the silly things you do – did. Drew is clinging to Mom like the burrs that stick to my snow pants after we sled, and David steers us around the trees.

Please come out of the casket, Dad.

David grabs me, plops me in his lap, and kisses me on the forehead, like how he ended our bedtime snuggles before I got too old for snuggles. David starts bending his fingers back one by one like he did that time we were sitting beside you in the hospital. He touches the top of my ear with the tip of his nose and whispers, “You know it’s OK to cry, Jakes?”

I nod, even though I don’t feel that way. Maybe you can’t really die until I cry, so if I’m strong enough, you can come back out of the casket. I grab David’s fingers and try bending them all different directions. I know you would tell me to stop. They bend so far it looks like they might break. I look up at all the faces around us and a lot of them are crying. Mom and Grandma are crying.

Grandma has a tissue in her hand and keeps sniffling and Mom looks like she would be screaming if she wasn’t around people.

Even people I don’t know are crying.

David squeezes real tight like when he makes a burrito out of me with the big blue blanket. He tells me he’s going to make Drew and me hot chocolate when we get home, and then we can play him in soccer. Drew and I still play soccer when we get home from school. David has always said that Drew should win because he’s bigger and stronger. Now I’m winning because Drew isn’t really trying. Isn’t that weird, Dad?

Why did God make your heart broken, and how can this lady talking at the podium say God has a plan for everything? Look at her smile; it’s like she doesn’t know you’re gone. Why was part of his plan to give you a broken heart? I’m still playing with David’s fingers, seeing what letters I can make by bending his fingers the opposite way they’re supposed to.

What else is there to talk about? David has been helping me with my grammar like you did, and I got a 95% on my last quiz. The only question I got wrong was about using “I” or “me.” Drew hasn’t gone to school at all this week. Everyone tells me I didn’t have to go to school either but I don’t know what else to do, so I went anyway.

Mom still gave Drew and me our piano lessons this week.

She hasn’t been cooking like she usually does because we’ve gotten so much free food. None of it is as good as Mom’s. Except for the lasagna Grandma brought us.

I’m gonna miss you, Dad. David is rubbing a tear off my cheek with his thumb. We’re all gonna miss you, Dad.

I’m back in the stupid church. The one I’m in every Sunday. This stupid church with this same stupid St. Michael statue. I want to knock his stupid face off for never doing anything. You always told me he would watch over me, but I didn’t think literally all he would do was watch, it’s as if my life is some kind of circus act.

He never actually does anything, and his stone is covered with flecks of blood from people he has ignored. This is shit. Sorry, Mom, I know you hate foul language, but you’re not here now, so who gives a fuck anyway? I’m not even through middle school and I’ve lost both my parents.

Anyone who thinks God has a “grand plan” for the world can suck it. What stupid god would plan this? Drew and me aren’t even teenagers.

Why couldn’t that drunk driver have hit a different mom? I didn’t get to say goodbye. I still need you. Who’s going to make your chicken noodle soup now?

Who’s going to play my duet with me at the piano recital next week? David says I don’t have to perform if I don’t want to. I told him I still want to, so he has helped me practice. I forgot you gave him lessons just like us. Drew has stopped playing piano, and I can’t blame him. I mean every time I play, it just reminds me of you and how you left us too.

I’m sure you could guess that Drew and I are talking to Dr. Bruce again. Remember how Drew had so much trouble talking with him about Dad? It’s even worse now, and I’m really worried about him. He’ll switch from being a robot to flooding his pillow with tears. Drew doesn’t want to sign up for high school algebra in eighth grade like you think – thought – he should, so Drew got into an argument with David, ending in Drew huffing and puffing his

way outside. He came back a few hours later and weakly apologized. He’s been a real pain lately. Like earlier today, he refused to wear dress clothes and wore jeans and his stupid long sleeve shirts instead. When you were around he would never wear them but now he wears dark colored long sleeve shirts all the time; I must say they match his mood because he seems hopeless.

Look Mom, at either side of the altar there are tiny white candles like the ones we saw in Bed, Bath & Beyond earlier this year. I remember how we got stuck inside because there was a funnel cloud nearby, and we got to eat at the food court while watching the clouds tumble around the sky. You taught me how to draw clouds with perspective that day. I wish you were here to teach me how to deal with all this just like you teach kids how to play piano or make art. There is David’s customary lone tear. It makes sense that it’s coming during “You Raise Me Up.” It is – was – your favorite song. Isn’t it funny that I’ve only seen David cry one tear at a time?

It’s time for the eulogies. Some crazy person is having David give a eulogy along with Grandma and one of your friends we went to visit last year on our way to a camp site. If any of them try to make me laugh, I’m going to throw up — not that that there is anything left inside me to throw up. Oh God that sounded just like Drew.

Remember how I said Drew has been a brat lately? Well, guess what he is doing now? He’s texting someone at your funeral. I mean, come on, he could at least show you an ounce of respect. You’re probably thinking it’s the times Drew would lock himself in the bathroom and yell that Dad would have to get him out, but he’s gotten way worse since you left us. It’s really hard to talk or do anything with him. You have to be extra careful not to set him off.

Some days he will be his usual self, but on his bad days I’m afraid to be in the house. He’s always yelling at, threatening, or punching something — he hasn’t hit people, yet.

He sulks quietly around the house most of the time. How are David and me supposed to deal with him? “Hey Jacob, are you hearing this lady?” Drew is talking to me and not yelling at me; that’s great.

“No… honestly I haven’t really been listening.”

“Well it’s about to get good. Listen.”

Oh shit. This lady is giving us the ol’, “God has a plan for everything.” “Everything will turn out alright.”

And, “She’s in a better place.” Drew and I have realized that certain kinds of person say this stuff. They are usually really fat women with no husband who wear gaudy, usually pearl, necklaces. This is gonna set Drew off, Mom. Look at her stupid smirk. No one should be smirking at a time like this. Does she know this is a funeral for a family who has now had both of their parents taken from them? You are not in a better place, because you’re not here. I can see Drew’s knuckles whiten and practically hear his teeth grinding. Oh, those are my teeth. I’ve gotta calm him down before he does something stupid. What do I do?

What did you always do … I don’t think a hug from me will help Drew. I lean over and do the spy whisper – you know where you keep you face parallel with theirs – so Drew’s head blocks Grandma’s view of me.

“Don’t worry about what this retard says, Drew.

She has no idea what it’s like for us. Don’t listen to her.”

Grandma just shushed us, but Drew has already opened his fists. He leans over and puts his hand on my knee and then squeezes the sides of my knee just like when our wrestling matches would turn into tickle fights.

Mom, look, do you see this? I’m tickling Drew’s neck – his weak spot – and a smile cracks through his

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Grace Meurer Untitled Digital Media (Photoshop)

scowl, and I can see him holding back laughter. The person behind us gives Drew and me a grunt of disapproval and Drew’s scowl is back. I almost saw a smile, Mom, so maybe there is some hope.

Hey, Mom, Dad, I know I haven’t talked as much as you would have liked in the last few years, but you’ll be happy to know that Drew, David, and I are doing well. I’m going to take my driver’s test in a few weeks. I’m proficient enough at piano that the neighbors pay me to teach their son piano after hearing me play, “You Raise Me Up” so much. I’ve only gotten one B in high school, and it was a little ridiculous. I got a B in ceramics class because my art wasn’t good enough. I didn’t even think it was that bad! Mr. Mohr said my “quality” grade was too low. In my painting I had some really cool purple and red storm clouds but I guess the St. Michael in the foreground looked like a swamp monster. You’re probably wondering whose funeral this is, huh? Well, it’s Grandma’s; she died from some pulmonary … I’ve been told basically old age.

She was ready to go, and we were mostly ready for her to go. She was an angel for our family after you died, Mom. Grandma did a tremendous job filling your shoes.

I bet you could never guess that David, Drew, and me – I – are all giving eulogies. I’m a little nervous and I have no idea if Drew can do this, because I’ve seen some of the old emotions from before coming back. He’s not taking them out on other people, but I think I see them lurking. He’s been in his room a lot more and he won’t finish his meals. Something tells me the demons are trying to take hold of him again. He was close to Grandma, so it’s understandable for him to be upset. I just hope he doesn’t give up on school like he did soccer

14

and piano. He’s had a rough time these past few years, but Grandma and David really helped. They got him to go to therapy for his cutting and depression. I guess I helped a little by playing FIFA with him or watching movies sometimes when he was sad, but David and Grandma took the brunt of his negative emotions. Drew is even wearing a teal button-down shirt with a sleek black tie and one of David’s old suit coats. He looks pretty good, or sharp, as you would say, Dad.

Right now we’re in the chairs next to the podium waiting for our turns to speak. One of Grandma’s larger friends, who is wearing a stunning pearl necklace, is going to speak first and then Drew. Look at David; you can see his gray hair coming in pretty strong at twenty five. I think he’s twenty five. He has more gray hair than you did, Dad. There is his traditional funeral tear. He’s only ever needed one tear per funeral.

I’m not gonna lie, having no parents sucks.

There is just no escaping the constant reminders that you guys died, and it’s so hard to deal with. Every time I go to someone’s house to hang out with them, I see their interaction with their parents and I envy them. For so long I have wanted to live a normal life with parents and normal problems, like trying to ask a girl to homecoming or trying to wear clothes your parents don’t approve of.

It’s just that on bad days it can feel like everyone I’ve every loved will leave me. But don’t worry, there aren’t nearly as many bad days as there used to be.

Grandma’s friend has finished waddling to the podium like old shrinking ladies do, and has started reading off her note card. She just said it. Mom, Dad. Drew and I have talked about people like her. Drew would say something like: “That sniveling, useless bag of genitals just tried to justify my parents’ deaths by saying I turned out fine anyway. That “c” word thinks we’re fine? I’m not fine. Does she have any idea how much I’ve been through and how much I’m still going through. I mean, how much alcohol did her mother drink while she was in the womb for her to be this heartless?”

I’m not bothered much by this type of person anymore. I know they have good intentions and I understand the appeal of believing everything will turn out right. A half smile grows on her face. Sometimes you just have to smile even though there is nothing to smile about.

Drew probably wants to punch her though. He’s a little less understanding. He won’t do anything stupid, right guys?

Drew has walked up and begun his eulogy with a clenched fist. Don’t do anything stupid, Drew. I wish the St. Michael statue could send the spear through the demon’s head and maybe it would save Drew from his demons. Maybe you have been with us all along somehow.

Maybe you are in heaven keeping us safe. Everything would be much easier if we could hear you.

Drew’s voice is trembling and I can see his hands shaking on the podium. He’s building up to something as he thanks all the people like Grandma who have helped us through these hard times.

“… all you retards who think that God has some “grand plan” or that my parents and grandmother are in a better place or that I’m fine, I have news for you. I’m not fucking fine.”

I don’t know what to do. David doesn’t even know how to react. His face looks like he is a main character dying in a movie. Drew is nearly yelling now. Drew, please stop.

Suzy Peterson Bliss Photograph

“I miss my Mom, Dad, and Grandma! I’ll never see them again. They will never be able to tell me they’re proud of me, never cheer me on at a sport, never console me after a bad break up, never explain the birds and bees, and never love me again because people that are dead can’t love you. You, you people try to justify my situation to make your stupid asses feel better should see something …”

David pulls Drew away from the mike before he can continue. As Drew is being dragged outside he yells at the people in the front pews and showing them the scars he has from cutting. The tan lightning bolts that cover his wrists have been bleeding recently.

“Do I look fine to you?! Tell me everything is going to be fine!!! Everything is going to be A-FUCKING-OK, RIGHT?”

Drew begins to laugh a laugh that sounds more like a hysterical cry. I look away as a nervous hum drowns out my brothers arguing outside.

The service continues a couple minutes later with David speaking. I don’t think Drew is gonna be all right; he didn’t come back inside. I swear David’s gray hairs just doubled. He is bending his fingers the wrong way on the podium as he reads from his notecard. He just touched his pinky to the back of his hand. It did not break. David and I lock eyes as he finishes up his eulogy and through my blurry vision I see David’s lone tear.

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New Orleans,‘92 Brontë Mansfield

The legends, the comforts of my childhood were the stories of my mother’s years before me. I grew up on the diluted anecdotes of her early twenties—watered down from the concentrate of the entire truth.

The stories were repetitively told to me, until they glowed with the telling, not the plot or the characters or the moral. I would ask her to tell me about the five years she spent in Minneapolis, studying English and slowly writing a novel, and she would answer with a story about walking two miles in her moon-boots through bitter Minnesotan snow to her early morning Latin class to find the doors to the building locked, and the university closed from snow for the first time; a story about the coop, where she was well-liked for abundant stress-cooking, and where one day they found her roommate hanging in the laundry room; a story about her ever-spartan apartments with the typewriter on the box on the floor, with black and white postcards of her favorite authors taped to the wall for inspiration—I have those now, above my own desk, where I’ve put Jack Kerouac saying “Fuck structure and grab your characters by the time-balls” next to Edith Wharton, holding two little lapdogs in her garden—and how she liked that she could fit everything she owned into a few boxes; a story about a photographer delighting in how she didn’t need any make-up before the woman snapped the only professional picture I think Mom ever let anyone take of her dangerously pretty face; or about going to Mississippi with red hair—or a red car, I can’t recall, either was likely as the other—to piss off Southern belles and weed Faulkner’s grave.

She would also tell me the story of her creative writing class, and how she met my father. She started writing about the “beautiful” man across the room wearing the beret, and she would later learn he was writing about the girl across the room with the long, blonde hair that she liked to hide behind. She would write brilliant short stories with more dialogue than description, and he would write poems. Good poems for my mom, about my mom, and sometimes, about seagulls. My parents were in college during the Cold War, and my mom had built up her mind like a bomb shelter. I think my father spent all

16

of his words trying to get in.

Then the stories would be about how I was born with just a bit of orange hair on my head, “like the fuzz of a peach” and how happy my mom was to have a little red-headed baby like she always wanted; but soon, that peach-fuzz would grow into white-blonde, a good color for tucking under berets or hiding behind in writing classes. There were stories about my mom’s beloved pre-baby dog, Gussie, and how she bit my finger and drew blood and mom nearly killed that dog and buried it in the backyard without a second thought, and stories about how she fell in the waist-deep currents of the river in Rockford with me at her mother’s house and held me up out of the water yelling “Take the baby! Take the baby!” and I slept through the whole incident.

Although I had seen him before, my mom first told me about my biological father when I was five, the summer before kindergarten. I have no memory of her telling me; his existence would come as naturally and inconsequentially as breathing, something that never required active learning or continuous thought, that only flickered into my consciousness on occasion, like accidentally thinking about the act of breathing, putting the movement of your lungs under scrutiny until forgetting about breathing once again.

The only other story I had heard involving my biological father was the trip to New Orleans, a couple of years after college, and even then, he was a supporting character, there in name and description, but lacking any kind of depth. She was not with my father yet. That trip my mother was dating a man named Brian, who I knew nothing about; he was a supporting character, too.

The story I was told of that time in Louisiana was not about the reason for the trip (my mom quickly prefaced the story with the explanation that she and a group of friends had rented a house in New Orleans, I believe in the French Quarter, to spend two weeks or so writing, and they called it the W&WWC, the “Wild & Wacky Writers Convention”), about my biological father, or Brian, the man my mom was dating, but about her awkward and surprise brush with proposed lesbianism.

My mom was sharing a bed with one of her close girl friends (who apparently was going through her experimental phase), and as my mom was settling in for what she assumed was a night of platonic sleeping, her friend looked up and said, “So you brushed your teeth, right?”

My mom always paused for a moment when telling her response—“Let me just go do that,” she said, leaving the bed and hurrying out of the room. She slept on the couch. I always like to suppose that after being propositioned, my mom found my father writing downstairs, and they sat on the couch together and laughed about it. I think that woman’s name was Michelle. She’s a doctor now; I’ve met her husband and her kids.

Those were the bedtime stories of my youth. I was content with my creation myth.

Sometime in early April, 2011, he shook the foundations of my being. I had finished high school early and was living alone in England, my eighteenth birthday a couple of months away. I was back from Vienna, seeing the world like a baby must, in a colorful blur, and all at once. I liked that I was completely alone, so if I wanted to cry over my bowl of devon custard suddenly, there was no one there to hide it from.

The only time I left the flat at first was to trod down the two flights of carpeted stairs to the mailboxes.

I checked every day, expecting something with a stamp from Budapest or Moscow, but on that day in early April, I got a parcel from America.

It was a weathered edition of A Confederacy of Dunces and a note from my biological father saying he knew this was on my reading list, and thought I might like to have the copy my mother had given him. It was written on a card with a Sir Arthur Conan Doyle quotation on the front—Life is infinitely stranger than anything the mind could invent—and that was all he said. Nearly eighteen years of usually forgetting to send a birthday card, and then he mailed me an atom bomb.

A folded piece of paper fell out of the book when I opened it. It was written on a typewriter, with my mom’s name signed in green pen at the bottom—a signature looser and less blue than I was used to seeing it, but hers, and a single spelling error which would not happen now.

April 29, 1992 Dear Michael,

Just including a little note in here to remind you to read this book like I said. Take your time and trust me.

It really is a good book. And like I said on the phone an hour ago, now that you’ve been to New Orleans, you’ll have a really good vision of the setting.

Anyway, I talked to you an hour ago and there’s nothing new since then except that I briefly spoke to Brian and it was somewhat weird and that makes me a little... I don’t know, something. Whatever.

Must get up early and go into the office tomorrow. As you know, I can’t wait and like a good girl I gladly now prepare to prance off to bed so that I may be bright and chipper for the day’s work.

I’ll be talking to you soon.

Don’t forget to read the inscription in the book.

Your friendly female femme fatale and lusty liason adventures advisor, Chantelle

The letter was like breathing. I had heard the New Orleans story before. I knew about Brian, and that my mom had been my biological father’s friend and guide through his many turbulent relationships—turbulent, my mother would say, because they were many, and they were sometimes at once.

The inscription was in green pen also, lime green, which was shocking itself. The Chantelle I knew only wrote in blue pen, and not just any blue pen, but a specific kind of pen that she bought in bulk, which covered tables in our house and swarmed in purses, which made a certain comforting click when she put the black cap in the right side of her mouth between her teeth and pulled the pen from the cap in a quick flick.

4/29/92

To Michael,

Without whose presence the troop leader would have ax-murdered all but one other member of the troop.

Your attendance at all future W&WCs is therefore compulsory. You are my good friend.

I love you.

St. Chantelle

P.S. Treat this book like life: go along with patience and wait for the epiphany.

I had never heard my parents say they loved each other. I never had any tangible evidence beyond my own body that they had ever been more than friends. If it had just been told to me, continuing in the oral tradition of my mother, maybe it would not have knocked the wind out of me. After I had become very intimate with the bathroom floor, I had a cup of tea, and wrote him a letter.

That letter, like my mother’s stories I grew up on, was watered down from the concentration of the entire truth—of the sudden awareness of the years of not processing, not being angry, not being hurt, not feeling abandoned, not feeling pretty, not asking questions—into a sweet and edible juice, a dutifully daughterly letter. What resulted was a inconsistent correspondence, and some long talks during short visits to Minneapolis once I started college. The letters he sent were filled with quotations from other people, and written on a computer. I hated them.

Years of not knowing him, and then he hid behind other people’s words and a computer screen. I wanted to see if I could find myself in his handwriting. Then I wanted to send him a card with a Sir Arthur Conan Doyle quote that only read “You had eighteen years.”

He asked me once if I had read A Confederacy of Dunces yet. I had read part of it. I had stalled on the 130th page, a third of the book rapidly read, when I got a letter from him saying he never had the epiphany at the end of the book that my mother had told him about.

I stalled. Still, I haven’t finished that novel. I’m scared to see whether I have the epiphany or not.

April became May, and I went to Edinburgh and Paris, to take my mind from Vienna and to see the world bright and magnified and raw. I felt the importance of my eighteenth birthday at a London cafe with some friends.

The plane ride from Heathrow to O’Hare was cauterizing, and when I got back to America, the world was dim and muted again, but more comfort than before.

I told my mother the story of the parcel. She stopped telling me the same stories then, stopped sharing with me my creation myth, and before I left to go to college in Madison, she took me down to the basement of my childhood home, and gave me a dusty cardboard shoe

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box, originally containing woman’s size 7 pair of Ked’s, hiding five years of letters from my biological father.

All that palpably exists of the relationship between Chantelle and Michael is a beat-up copy of A Confederacy of Dunces, a box of letters, and me.

I only read one folded piece of paper from the top of the shoebox last year before putting it away, but opened it last night, and looked at each letter and scrap of paper. My mother’s correspondence is neatly composed on a typewriter, dated, carefully folded. My father’s is a mess of handwritten musings and poems, typewritten rambles, that are occasionally dated, and later, letters written on a green-screened Mackintosh. The letters at the top talked about Brian, New Orleans, some girl named Colleen, and the events of 1992. They moved back through time, to mentions of applying for graduate school, to discussing different jobs and girlfriends, to letters sent “par avion” through the Royal Mail, while my father was visiting England, to envelopes covered with the doodles of a much more optimistic hand, all the way back to the two pieces of lined notebook paper where they began and I began, in that creative writing class, on November 11, 1986. But for now, I want to know about Louisiana, because it all seems to come back to New Orleans, 1992.

Chantelle!

Are we really going to N.O.? Wow! Can you send me or call me with exact dates—I need to book a bus ticket...

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Could I maybe meet Brian in Madison and drive down with him to Rockford? I need to book 21 days in advance to get the discount fare—so let me know as soon as you can.

Thanks!

My father didn’t sign that postcard, but I’m sure Mom knew who it was. I’ve seen other letters where he put the “!” with cartoonish enthusiasm after her first name. This is the first mention of the trip I found. They probably talked about it on the phone—my mother loves the phone. I found an envelope with just my father’s name on the front in my mother’s blue-pen handwriting, with pictures of the W&WC troop. There is one of my mother on the couch, with Michael laying on the floor, looking up at her. He is lanky, like an adolescent cat in the middle bit between being a kitten and being a real cat.

He sprawls. He’s still a bit like that, but more stiff in his movements. There are a few pictures in the streets, and two in a cemetery. Leave it to a group of writers to seek out the morbid on a sunny Louisiana day. Chantelle looks beautiful. I can see her about to be my mom. She has cut her long blonde hair to a bob. I would say she was her own Delilah, but I think it liberated her.

She wears a familiar black hat with a red rose atop her head; familiar, because I used to put it on my own head, and there’s a picture of me with her, wearing that hat, in the only professional portrait she had of us taken, that I can remember.

There is a large piece of folded and stapled paper with my mother’s first name on it, and on the back,

Ben Skiba If You Can’t Laugh Ceramic

it says “Ha! Home-made envelope—best kind!” in what I think is my father’s handwriting. He must have given it to her in person. There is a folded note, and a greeting card.

March 21, 1992 Cafe Du Monde (eating beignets and drinking coffee) New Orleans My Dear Friend Chantelle,

With my belly full of fine food and flavors, the sights and sounds of the street before me, I must take this opportunity to express my gratitude; I thank you much for convincing me that I needed to come on this journey—I most certainly did!

The detour is over—I’m back on the main road.

And this trip just reconnected me to it again. That’s what all these omens are for me: the Universe telling me Yep, Michael, you’re back on the path again—time to fly!

So, thanks again troop leader!

Three cheers to Destiny!

Love,

Michael Jon, assistant troop leader.

at Yourself...

His letter was scrawled in messy blue pen over some pencil notes of addresses in New Orleans, and peoples’ names and phone numbers. I wonder, after all these years and a hurricane, how much of that is left. Also in the envelope is a greeting card, which apparently had some money in it.

March 24, 1992

Chantelle—

HAHA! Gotcha! I knew you wouldn’t have taken more money without a struggle, but I do so loathe fighting with my friends. Like you, I’m “sneaky.”

Love,

Michael Jon

On March 27, 1992, Michael sent my mom a letter about Brian, and the same day, Brian sent Michael a letter about my mom.

Dear Michael,

For reasons I can not explain, I feel compelled to write to you.

To begin, I want you to know that you were a great asset on the N.O. Trip. Besides Chantelle, you were the one person to whom I could relate. And—needless to say—I wasn’t always on the same wavelength with her.

You provided a great deal of fascinating insight and ideas to our group. Because I value different experiences and viewpoints, your input became worthy to me.

Most interesting of all, it seems as though you became a sounding board about the tensions that Chantelle and I were facing. Perhaps this has become a natural role for you. Regardless, I think both of us trust you.

For the record, Chantelle and I have regained our dynamics. Without question, the multitude of pressures put a strain on our still-infant love. But I think, now, that our relationship is going to become stronger—since we’ve worked this mild setback out. She has a lot of wonderful

19

qualities at this point, I again feel that we are a truly compatible couple.

Relationships are a strange and wonderful force amongst we humans, aren’t they?

But enough of this silly rhetoric.

Thanks again for the hospitality and conversation.

Sincerely, Brian

In a thick rust-colored envelope was Michael’s letter to my mom, about Brian, and a poem, which I think told me as much as I could hope to know about New Orleans in ‘92.

Dear Chantelle,

On the phone you asked the inevitable and problematic question: What do I think about Brian? Did I dodge it well enough? I hope so. I don’t want to be in the business anymore of critiquing your boyfriends. I don’t want to repeat that shit.

I really do like Brian, a lot. So no need to worry!

I am just hesitant to say any more. I even had a difficult time putting what I did in the poem. I have been accused of being paternalistic and too harsh a critic. I am trying to get away from my nature, a bit. That is to say, I am trying to live and let live, and keep my goddamn mouth shut.

Difficult, difficult.

Unfortunately, I must request that you not show the poem to Brian. I don’t think you would, or would even want to, but just in care. I don’t know him well enough yet.

And I don’t want to disturb our young friendship.

Call when you get a chance. I won’t ask for a letter; I know you’re way too busy.

Love,

Michael Jon

St. Chantelle I. This is a photo-album of a friendship, pictures taken on the road to New Orleans and back: At the Rum Bogie Club, on Beale street, avenue of rhythm and blues, Memphis, Tennessee.

In her red Beretta, a car named “Scarlet.”

In the Missouri home of a wise and gracious grey-bearded man

she calls “Dad.” On the streets of that Louisiana city where the Mississippi waters born in my home state, Minnesota— fans out

and washes into the Gulf of Mexico, forever.

Forever. How carelessly we use that word, but here it falls, apropos.

I page through ancient spiral notebooks and I find the day:

November 11, 1986.

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We met forever ago.

II. In Madison, I am introduced to her baseball-capped boyfriend, Brian.

I am expecting a blend of maturity and youth, as she has described him, but I am surprised: he is more of both.

Later, driving, he asks if I have ever gone to a move alone.

Often, with joy. He, never.

Nearing 22, he is intelligent, more intelligent than me at that age.

But at 21 and younger, I understood absolute solitude, soledad, and the college of force. I understood my solitude as fortress: defence, protection, prison, and as the source of my evetnual strength, now utilized to build structures of community, webs of connection.

In the words of a guiding poem, Adrienne Rich asks: what man in this culture is lucky enough to escape the cycle of building those walls, then destroying them, so that he might create?

Maybe he is. Maybe he is so blessed. I pray it is so. For him, for her.

I would not wish those walls on any one, though they seem to be the fate of all men, here in America.

III. In New Orleans, the house is silent, dark. The writers, works read and listened to have all gone off to bed, and I am beginning to fade.

It has been a long day of felling destiny again: this city, this journey, these peopl, Chantelle. And her voice cuts into my dream, a worried whisper: “Is Brian back yet?”

“No.” No he is out in the city still. He left alone hours ago, and I know what he is doing: finding some part of himself, in solitude, soledad, in the college of force he is working through the emotions of any young man in love, where no one knows where he is This is a young man’s pride and comfort.

Men are trained to hide in themselves, to find themselves in hiding, to go into the world, alone, take something from it, and make their mark. He needs to do this tonight, alone, and he is.

And he is asking himself the questions: Who am I, in this love?

What does this love make me?

Where will it take me?

And because he is young, he will forget to ask about her.

She can’t sleep. I hold her hand, briefly.

In this: motherly concern, fatherly concern, five years of friendship.

We, she and I, have cycled through most of it: intrigue and infatuation; some lust, lost; anger, bitterness, forgiveness; respect and love; and the force of fate

pulling us, always, back

to our inevitable friendship.

Why aren’t we two a couple? I ask myself, then. He will ask her later.

She will ask it too, to herself, but never tell.

But that is not the question now, for she and I, there are others:

How do we teach?

What do we speak, when?

How do we protect the children and let them learn?

These are the questions that parents and angels ask.

She and I, both in training for the Cosmic Civil Service, in the same class.

IV. On our last night in the City of the Saints we are each in our own world, Chantelle and I high on R&B and Tex-Mex music, alcohol, and thoughts of freedom.

For a time we are untouchable, closed to our compatriots, tasting temporary solitude, and: She creates a womb an inner world of focus all her own with her hair falling down sheltering what she creates on the paper a cocoon and when that world is disturbed she starts retreats recovers re-enters she emerges happy? she smiles, but i wonder.

I remember.

Then, watching Brian dance graciously, with grace with Susan, I tell Chantelle: He is a gift.

The gods are saying ‘lighten up.’

And it is not wise to refuse the gifts of the gods.

V. In the back seat, heading home from Rockford to Minnesota, on the last leg of our American voyage, stuffed with her grandma’s southern cooking: home-made french fries,

deep-fried hush puppies, batter-friend catfish, each weary from our leadership, we speak in lowering tones, our words cloaked by the front-seat conversation, where Brian tells Kelly how he met Chantelle.

Five years and months and days; strain and storm and struggle, have brought us to this communion, sharing what we know: blood and fire, burns and cuts, and scars. that pride goeth before a fall; we were proud, we are proud, and we have fallen before.

Yet, we know our insight: we are right, most of the time and we wonder where our blind spots are now:

What am I missing? What have I forgotten?

What do I overlook? What might knock me down?

Worldly, cautious diplomats in the world, we note the omens, read the words, watch the world, and watch each other.

We teach with caution, lead when we need to, act when it is time, and wait for our time.

Our time to write, our time to speak in the world, to spark the flame of the collective imagination; our time to make the worm of our home, our love, our words, and build the fire of birth.

(April, 1992)

In the poem, he mentions November 11, 1986.

I found them, the poems they wrote about each other, at the bottom of the box. My mom had made a note of the class and the person who gave the poem to her at the top of the old, blue lined paper. I have read it before; he had pulled it into “St. Chantelle,” the bit about creating a womb with her hair. My mom’s had been kept much

21

more hidden from my knowledge.

I reached out and touched his hair Which fell in soft, quiet curls.

With my fingers I startled him And he looked at me His mouth open, about to say Something But he stopped, Closed his lips, Even though I had violated The distance between strangers.

He sat looking at me His hands on the desk His legs stretched out Crossed at the ankles And before I succumbed To the desire I felt To touch his face And kiss his lips I got up from my desk And walked from the room.

Something happened after New Orleans, and by the close of the summer, Michael and my mom were together. The piece of paper that was at the top of the box was a contract for a year-long relationship between them.

It had been creased into eight equal rectangles, maybe folded recently, or maybe when it was written twenty years ago. This was the first thing I read, and it made me shrink from the box. Calculated, numbered clauses to quantify the feelings of the people that would make me. I think my mom shrank from it too, twenty years ago.

Contract of Partnership I. Foundation for “The Leap of Faith.”

The function of this document is to serve as the basis of an oral agreement (cemented by a handshake and a kiss) to a one-year, renewable partnership between Chantelle and Michael Jon that will go into effect on some fine day in September, 1992, with a toast at the Grand Canyon (an apt metaphorical site for such a dangerous venture).

II. Central Conditions of Partnership.

Within this negotiated partnership: 1. We are each allowed to independently choose why, how, where, and with whom we live our lives.

2. We are each the primary (though not necessarily exclusive) sexual, emotional, and intellectual partner in each other’s life; we are available to each other for companionship, support, and/or a good lay when needed.

3. Where and when conflicts exist between the first and second primary conditions of this contract, negotiation is the first route to resolution. Where and when negotiation fails, the first condition takes precedence over the second.

III. Suicide Clause

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We each pledge to refrain from committing suicide without the expressed permission and/or parallel suicide action of the other (and no strange accidental deaths allowed).

IV. Safe Sex Clause We each pledge to practice safe sex with each other and all other sexual partners.

The last clause was of little consequence. I was born two days late, on June 1, 1993.

I looked at everything in the box. I watched my mother’s address change from various places in Minneapolis to Rockford and the more familiar address of the house on Harlem Boulevard—where my mom was ripping out carpet nine-months big with me, a spherical Amazon nesting until going into labor with me the next day—where I would spend my first three years as a little human being. Throughout, there were letters with mentions of me, shuffled in out of chronologically ordered, making me wonder if Mom frequently went through this box. Seeing my name written in Michael’s handwriting was strange. Apart from the occasional annual card if he remembered to send it, I never saw my name in his hand, so I never thought the name crossed his mind much. Now, I suppose I was in his mind a lot, just rarely in his presence. In a letter from October 26, 1993, when I five months old, he wrote about his mother visiting, my Grandma Carol: “In any case, I’m glad to hear (from Mom) that Brontë is doing well. Mom writes ‘She can be so serious and thoughtful and then smiling and laughing.’” I smiled at that, but he continued, “Great, I think, a manic-depressive like her mother.”

There is a book in the box as well. It is a paperback of the Communist Manifesto, and inside my mother had written that Michael gave it to me for Christmas.

There are big pen and pencil swirls on the pages, an especially elaborate one on the section titled “Bourgeois and Proletarians” which I must have taken some issue with.

That book is the only trace I have of my father from 1995.

My Christmas gift. The Communist Manifesto. I was two.

February 14, 2013 Michael,

Consider this the continuation of our correspondence. I think you will appreciate that I wrote it for a Thursday night creative writing class. Twenty-and-something years after you met Mom, and twenty-and-something years after you wrote that postcard about New Orleans to the day, you have a daughter in college, and are being schooled by Cosmic Irony.

I think you were a great poet, and that I stopped that. I think Mom would be Mark Twain if it weren’t for me. Actually, I think there’s a good chance you would both be dead. You would have killed each other. Grandma Carol told me this past winter, when I was at the flat in London again, that you had planned all along to become a part of my life when I was eighteen. You act like Mom is a warm sweater I’ve had on for the last nineteen years because I have nothing else to wear, and you can pull one of the loose threads on the sleeve. You’d like to see me come undone. I’d like for you to be more than a shoebox of old papers and a tall tale.

Sincerely,

your daughter

No Clowning Around

Cody Ostenson

The waves rolled in, curling their way up and around the piles of the pier. Each retreating wave left a slick, black sheen from the ocean’s caress. Where it had missed, the piles were splayed and cracking. Bits of dried salt clung inside the cracks, left behind from mist baked in the sun.

They stood, stretching half a mile from the tip of the pier back to the shoreline, holding up the weight of hundreds of men, women, and children weaving through the spinning iron and flashing lights of a seaside carnival.

Snaking above the crowd, a rickety wooden roller coaster chugged along its tracks, the rattle of steel covering the screams of its riders. The oom-pa-pa of the Merry-GoRound pumped across the park, drawing people over to watch the bobbing of the gold and teal adorned horses.

If observed closely, after the music wound down and the people climbed off the horses, one could still see the horses sway in time with the swaying of the pier before ramping back up again for the next crop of riders.

A tall, steel mushroom spun at the end of the pier. Swings blossomed from long chains underneath the umbrella, spinning its riders out over the ocean waves.

Lori’s ponytail whipped out from behind her as her hands clung to the chains for dear life. She tried to keep her eyes forward, watching the chubby boy and his swing be taken by the wind, but she couldn’t stop watching her feet dangle above the ocean water, then the pier, back over the ocean, and back to the pier again. She wondered what would happen if one of her boots slipped off and went careening into the crowd below, or even worse, into the ocean and lost forever. She wanted to reach up and secure her ponytail into the collar of her jacket, but she was too afraid the swing would let go of her if she let go of it.

The stalk of the mushroom approached as the

ride lackadaisically slowed and brought her closer to the ground. The fat boy in front of her swung about as she came to rest above the ride’s platform. She looked around until she spotted her older brother standing impatiently outside the chain fence surrounding the ride. He leaned against a stanchion with one arm, careful not to put his weight on the flimsy pole, trying to look like he was too cool to be waiting around for his little sister. His best friend Marco stood a few feet away from the entrance to the ride talking to a few of the girls they went to high school with who were in bikinis. Lori assumed they had just come from tanning on the beach. They could not stop giggling, and one of the girls rested her hand on Marco’s elbow before quickly pulling it back to the crook of her neck.

Her brother yelled at her from across the platform. “C’mon Lori, keep it moving.” She could not tell where he was looking through the dark lenses of his knock off Ray-Bans.

“Coming.” She let out a heavy sigh and wound her way through the chains to follow him back into the throng of people milling about the pier. It was not her fault that their parents forced him to drive her to the pier, and she definitely had not asked Marco to join. Ever since her brother got his license a few months ago, their parents insisted that he drive her wherever she needed to go. She had planned to test out the new bus pass her parents had bought her as a way to practice getting across town before the first day at the high school she was open enrolling to on the other side of the city. Summer was fading, and she just wanted to go spend one last day at the pier before it was no longer “cool” to be there.

Lori was determined not to miss her life at

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Jefferson, or to miss middle school at all. It was more the teachers she was going to miss, like her eighth grade English teacher, Miss Zelhka. Miss Z. was so full of energy from the bounce in her step to the tips of her curly, brown hair. Sometimes, when she stood at the front of the room talking about what the class was reading, Lori thought she saw sparks fire from curl to curl.

There was also the library, where she would retreat to during lunch after quickly eating her bag lunch in the bathroom. She sat paging through magazines or pulling books off the shelf and skimmed them until she found one that she liked. Lori could not read a book straight through. She had a habit of reading the first chapter or so and then skipping to the end to decide if she liked the ending or not. If it was not satisfactory, she put the book back on the shelf and tried a new one.

The library had a strict no-talking policy that made the place more attractive than going out to the courtyard to play foursquare with the other kids. In the library she did not hear the laughter of Saskia and the other girls from their recess picnic table next to the foursquare court, watching the boys play. The taunts normally had something to do with the attention some boy tried to give her or the clothes that Lori wore. She had finally matured to the point where her dresses and shirts were uncomfortably tight around the chest.

“Oh look, it’s Whore-y Lori,” Saskia would say purposefully loud enough for Lori to overhear.

She had grown tired of the way her face reddened, her body under speculation by those around her. She knew that asking her parents for all new clothes would be out of their budget. Whether she got new clothes or not, whether she actually was a whore or not, did not matter. Saskia told everyone that she was, and once Saskia started talking it spread around the school like a disease. If anything, it was the words that got around faster than any girl could.

Lori wove through the crowd on the pier as fast as she could, annoyed with the number of brushes of arms across her body that slowed her path down. She tried to keep her body concaved, her shoulders slumping away from the faceless men and women who wove among each other oblivious to the bumping of shoulders to chests, hands to thighs, to other places. She was surprised that her brother and Marco were able to keep up with her considering how crowded the pier was.

“Hey, Marco. What did Becca have to say over there?” her brother asked.

“You know, the usual. She totally wants me, man.” Marco chuckled and tried to slap her brother on the back. When he ducked out of the way, Marco ran his bronzed hand through his wavy Italian locks.

“Dude, can you not? My sister can hear you.”

“Relax man, it’s not a big deal. It’s not like Lori doesn’t know what I’m talking about.” Marco’s eyes walked up and down her body before landing on Lori’s ass.

Lori felt her face go red, just like it used to when she would ride the bus home with her brother and his friends back to their neighborhood. This was before she decided to skip the bus and walk to the public library where she made her mom pick her up a few hours after school. Her and Saskia would get on the bus together, when they were still best friends, and sit with the rest of their classmates in the middle of the bus. None of them were quite cool enough to join the high school kids that took over the back of the bus, trading quarters for cigarettes stolen from their moms’ purses or the occasional

game of truth or dare.

It was Marco who first leaned over the back of her and Saskia’s seat and started twirling Lori’s ponytail around his finger. He asked them how their days went, cracked jokes about how the girls in their grade were not as pretty as them, and then returned to sit with her brother and his buddies. Over Saskia’s incessant giggling about how the Marco Ferera thought they were the prettiest girls in their grade, Lori heard her brother’s protests.

“When did your little sister get so hot?” A cacophony drowned out Saskia.

“Knock it off guys.” Her brother’s mumbles were hard to hear over the razzing.

“That rack though…” Marco laughed and highfived the kid in the seat next to him.

On a different afternoon, when Saskia and Lori were getting on the bus, Marco popped up from one of the seats and yelled for Lori. “Hey girl, I have a seat saved for you back here.”

They started to the back of the bus together, but one of the boys yelled up at Saskia. “Not you, Cardboard.

Just Lori.”

Lori could feel Saskia’s eyes bore into the back of her head as she tentatively continued to walk to the back of the bus and took her saved seat next to Marco. As she turned, she saw Saskia slump into one of the middle school seats, peak her head over her shoulder, and violently snap her head forward again.

“Where’s your brother?” Marco started twirling her ponytail again.

She drew her backpack on her lap closer to her chest. “I don’t know. Did he not get on the bus with you guys?”

“No, he must have stayed after school for help or something.” He flashed the famous Marco smile and asked, “Does he not let you ride the bus alone?”

“I don’t need my brother to babysit me, asshole,” Lori chirped back.

“Oh that’s a mouth on you, huh?” Marco and his buddies circled in closer. “You want to play truth or dare?”

Lori felt their eyes watching her lips, expectantly. She would let Saskia down if she did not play, right?

“Truth,” she mumbled.

One of the boys blurted out, “What’s the most you’ve done with a guy?”

Her face started to burn. “Done? What?”

“Like, have you kissed a boy before?”

“No.” She replied.

It was Marco’s turn. “Dare.” He released Lori’s ponytail long enough to flex his biceps.

The same boy as before smirked and said, “I dare you to be Lori’s first kiss.”

Marco stopped showing off and looked Lori in the eyes and then up and down her body. Before he could make a move, she threw her arms through the straps of her backpack and pushed her way back up to her seat next to Saskia, but Saskia’s backpack was in the way. Lori slumped into the seat across the aisle, and the rest of the ride was spent in silence.

The next day, Saskia’s backpack was taking up the seat again and her headphones were locked into her ears. This continued, and a few days later the chair that Lori usually sat in at her and Saskia’s lunch table had been moved across the lunchroom to the table with the wrestler boys. When she took her lunch silently to the bathroom, Lori found her name scrawled in a stall next to a few

misshapen hearts and a crudely drawn penis.

During silent reading time in Mrs. Z’s class, a boy she had spoken less than ten words to all year asked her if she wanted to share a reading beanbag with him and gave her arm a tug with his sweaty palms. When she refused, he sneered and asked if she thought she was too good for middle school boys and if she only was into older, high school boys. She asked to be excused to the library for silent reading time from that point on. There were no rumors allowed in the library, and no penis drawings either.

Lori shot a quick glare over her shoulder and hoped she had lost her brother and Marco in the crowd as she approached her favorite cotton candy stand. The fluorescent puffs of blue, pink, and green hung in glossy bags from a small shack nestled between the merry-go-round and the entrance to the bouncy castle. She cared for neither of those attractions, but loved the way that the tufts of sugary goodness melted in her mouth as she watched kids fall all over themselves inside the inflated mass of towers. Lori gave the vendor a few dollars, snatched up a green bag, and started to enjoy her treat.

Cassia Naughton Little Cacti Photography

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Her brother broke through the crowd and did not hesitate to reach his hand into the bag and tear a wad of cotton candy out. She swatted at his hand. “Hey, asshole, don’t.”

“Watch your mouth,” he said, popping the wad in his mouth.

Marco, right behind him, reached his hand over to try and snag some of her cotton candy, but Lori pulled the bag away and tucked it beneath her shoulder. “Watch your hand.” She turned and walked toward the house of mirrors.

The two-story house jutted out of the crowd, a sickly lime green that had looked much bigger when she first began coming to the pier. She remembered when the front door had been just her size. She had wandered through the maze of mirrors, disoriented by the many copies of herself moving in unpredictable directions. If she took a step to the left, her copies moved in all different directions. At first it was nauseating, but she learned the pattern of the floor. She knew which reflections to pay attention to and which not to let distract her on her way towards the end.

One of the rooms was full of mirrors that distorted the shape of her body. When she was little, she spent a lot of time in this room seeing all the ways she could warp her body. There were mirrors that turned her feet into skis or that ballooned her head to be the size of the moon. Some of the mirrors twisted her body into rotini pasta or squeezed it into the shape of an hourglass.

Lori stood in this room now in front of the hourglass mirror wondering to herself if this is what her classmates saw when they looked at her, an exaggerated torso like her old Barbies. Saskia, as a joke, taped a naked Barbie to Lori’s gym locker, and all the girls had stood waiting to see what would happen. Lori knew that something was up when halfway through the 65-minute period she saw Saskia leave the gym, abandoning her racquet saying she had to go to the bathroom. It would not have been out of the ordinary, but her more loyal followers left the gym at her heels and did not return for another ten minutes. When Coach Berg blew her whistle to end class, Lori stayed back to help put all the racquets and birdies into the storage room, prolonging entering the locker room.

The shushing and whispers fell silent when she finally drew open the locker room door. Girls were silently milling about their business, some focused on undressing and dressing while avoiding eye contact. Saskia and a few of her friends stood in a circle pretending to browse through an old Cosmo. There it was, the brown haired, naked Barbie taped to her locker. Lori kept walking forward, pretending like there was nothing wrong, just like Saskia and her friends pretending to be giggling over a juicy article instead of Lori’s reddening face. She took off her gym t-shirt with her back to Saskia and put on her dress as quickly as she could manage. After slipping off her gym shoes and gym shorts, she closed her locker, grabbed her backpack, and made for the door before the tears could start running.

She never said a word to Coach Berg but instead went to talk to Mrs. Canastra, the school guidance counselor.

“Do you know why they might have stopped talking to you?” Her smile was stretched far across her face that her upper lip lost its curves and fell into a flat horizon across her face. The tips of her lips nearly touched the Bob haircut framing her taught cheeks.

Lori shuffled her feet along the carpet at the

edge of the old couch and did not want to say. She didn’t want Mrs. Canastra thinking things about her that were not true. Even worse, she did not want Ms. Canastra calling her parents and getting them involved.

“No,” Lori lied. “I just came to lunch one day and I saw that my chair wasn’t at the table anymore.”

“Well it’s possible that the custodial staff just moved the chairs when they were cleaning, Lori dear. I wouldn’t get too worked up about it.”

“But that hasn’t been the case before,” she halfheartedly protested.

“Why didn’t you just pull the chair back over to the table?”

Lori thought back to the cold shoulders, the chairs placed awkwardly yet purposefully around the table so it would have been difficult to slide in another chair, the lull in the conversation when she walked past, the laughter when she was just out of earshot of their whispers. “There wasn’t any room.”

“Now Lori, there’s no use in isolating yourself from the other girls. To make friends you have to be a friend.” Mrs. Canastra turned around in her swivel chair and faced her shelf of self-help books and icebreaker manuals. She pulled a pamphlet from the brochure rack resting on top of the shelf and handed it to Lori.

Lori gave it a brief glance before shoving it into the depths of her backpack: The Art of Making and Keeping Friendships. “Thanks, Mrs. Canastra.” She sighed and started to stand.

“I’m glad I could help. You let me know how it goes, you hear?”

Lori threw the brochure away in in the dumpster behind the public library, and instead went home and told her parents that she wanted to open enroll to a different city high school than the one in her neighborhood where most Jefferson kids ended up. She never really told her parents the truth about why she wanted to transfer. It was too embarrassing, and she didn’t want them to think she had done anything to warrant the unwanted attention.

They agreed, reluctantly, but her father had grown up in the city and she was smart enough to choose his alma mater as her choice. Not that there was anything special about it, just that it was not where Saskia would be, and that was good enough reason for Lori.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Marco duck under the doorframe. She watched him step in front of the mirror that turned heads into planets and saw him fix the flow of his hair with great attention. She laughed under her breath, and he stopped fussing with his hair.

“Don’t worry, Becca’s not here to see,” she prodded, further.

“Oh shut it, you don’t even know,” Marco shouted back. He came up behind her and starting trac ing her curves in the air until he realized that a few small kids had wandered into the hallway behind him and Lori’s brother had entered the room.

Her brother, crouching, made his way through the entryway to the hourglass mirror room. He took advantage of the tall ceiling space with a big stretch. The mirror that made people taller and skinnier nearly erased his already beanpole reflection. He stood, checking out his reflection in the different mirrors before turning his attention to Lori and Marco.

“Would you two quit, there are kids in here.”

Her brother had a look of disgust on his face.

“Quit? Nothing was happening…” Lori started to mumble.

But Marco’s voice clipped over the top of her own. “Sorry man, you know how it is with the ladies.” He flicked her brother’s sunglasses off his face and slid them onto the bridge of his nose. After a double take in the mirror, Marco walked out of the room and out into the afternoon sun.

“Would you try to not do that in front of my friends?” Lori’s brother’s voice hissed, trying to contain his anger in front of the little kids pressing their faces against the warped mirrors.

Lori stood there, face burning, and stared her brother down. “I’m not doing anything…”

“I just don’t understand why you can’t be less of a whore around my friends…”

Before he could take it back, Lori spun around and stormed out of the maze, her blood boiling so hot that the mirrors might have steamed and fogged as she blew past. She could hear her brother fumbling his way through the false passageways to try and catch up with her multi-faceted, retreating image.

She slid past the last mirror, out into the sunlight, and ran into a man in a clown suit, dropping her cotton candy bag on the ground. His red nose was fastened between two jolly, round cheeks. The edges of his already beaming smile extended up, outlined in red and white paint. He tipped the brim of his bowler hat, covering tufts of a purple wig, and let out a chuckle.

“In a hurry, little Miss?” He rested his whitegloved hands around yellow suspenders that held up a belt weighed with deflated balloons and an air pump. “I was just about to make this young man here aballoon animal, but you can be next up.”

“No.” She tried to ignore Marco standing, clearly enjoying the awkwardness, and saw her bag of cotton candy on the ground just beyond the clown’s red, white and blue striped slacks.

“C’mon Lori, you can even go before me.” The smirk on Marco’s face grew wider.

“What a gentleman! You can’t turn down that chivalry nowadays.” The clown’s smile was not phased and even seemed to extend further up his cheeks in the face of her clearly demonstrated impatience with being treated like a child. He grabbed a pink balloon from his belt and attached it the hand pump at this side. “Pink for the beautiful young lady,” he said. It was all too cartoonish, and reminded her of Wile E. Coyote grinning over the handle of the dynamite strips he had laid in anticipation of the Road Runner. Like the Road Runner, she could not get away fast enough.

Just then her brother came barreling out into the open, gasping for breath. He took stock of the situation, and a fake smile spread quickly across his face.

It was more like the smile she expected to see painted on the clown’s face. “Oh there you are Sis, I was worried you didn’t make it out of the maze and I’d have to go back in and find you.”

“Naw man, she’s safe with me. We’re just about to get some balloon animals from this clown.” For Marco, the situation just kept getting better and better.

Lori choked down the urge to call him out and focused her attention back on the clown. “No thank you, sir. You don’t need to waste your time.”

“Waste my time?” She was amazed at his persistence. “This is what I love to do, and I’ve already started. So what will it be? A squirrel, horse, or elephant, perhaps?”

“Actually, how about you make me a snake?”

She shot a glare over at Marco, but the clown was oblivious.

His hands flew to work, bending and manipulating the growing pink tube into the shape of a small snake, coiled and ready to strike. The hiss of the rubber against rubber was barely audible over the hum of the crowd. He reached up towards the snout and made one final twist at the tip to pronounce the noise. With a contented smile, he handed the art down to her.

In one deft motion, she took the balloon animal, threw it on the ground, and drove her boot heel down into the balloon snake’s skull. There was a deafening pop, and the clown looked at her in disbelief.

She ignored making eye contact with the clown, and instead turned and glared at Marco and then her brother.

When she felt herself needing to blink, she snatched her bag of cotton candy from behind the clown and stomped down the pier towards the bus stop.

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Min Zhang Grandma Charcoal

28

Wrecked, Solitary, Here Kaitlin Miller

Delilah Tull was black fabric and bleached blonde hair, all carefully applied and worn with meticulous consciousness. She was perfectly put together, aside from her teeth, which deviated from the rehearsed theme by being somewhat crooked. They overlapped and bent forward ever-so-slightly, as though they were in a race to escape her mouth along with her next words. Those teeth were one of the first things I really noticed about her. She stood by her evening-lit pool, while music played and toodrunk guests danced around her. Her eyes were closed and her mouth parted slack, singing along with a sort of subconscious cool, as if she didn’t care that others were watching. How does one achieve that level of social apathy so deliberately?

In the bathroom, or one of the bathrooms — this house was huge — I dug in my purse for a match, and smudged the burnt charcoal around my brown eyes to make them stand out. Far from creating allure, I looked like a clownish prostitute. A fumbling knock at the door signaled the arrival of another inebriated partygoer, and I shouted out the predictable “Someone’s in here!”

Navy-polished fingers ignored my warning and curled their way around the wooden frame. Two raccoon-like eyes peered at me. “Who the fuck are you?” These were the first words she ever spoke to me.

I was surprised to learn that Delilah worked at a gas station, counting out dirty twenties in her hands and wearing a nametag. Not the place one would expect to find someone who lived in a house that could be considered palatial.

“I like it here,” she chirped when I questioned her about it while she rang up my pack of Trident. In that mini-mart that always reeked of stale bakery. It was the type of place where junior high students met to exchange cheap pot for cash. I had no reason to know this other than the fact that she was oddly proud of it. She’d grin with her sort-of-crooked teeth when she spoke of it, as if her willingness to work in such a place made her more interesting. Delilah Tull was unusually proud of being interesting.

The city we lived in had a boardwalk. Well, sort of. It was an urban spot that had been worn down and revitalized more times than we citizens could keep track of — where everyone was convinced that they were vagrants

when, really, they had nine-to-five jobs, or eight-to-four jobs, or a way to pay their mortgage at least. It smelled of dead fish and pricey hair conditioner. Delilah always had a wad of cash with her, and even though my pockets were empty, she’d drag me along with some persuasive text message and a hand on my elbow as we perused the crowded wooden platforms of shops whose rent was quadruple what my parents paid for our apartment. I learned to love the feeling of hemp on my wrist and the knowledge that hand-scrawled numbers on tags were of no concern.

In a high-end boutique disguised as a thrift store, she once held out a moth-eaten scarf to me that looked as if it would not survive a trip through a washing machine. “Do you think somebody gets paid to come up with this?” I didn’t get a chance to comment before she went on. “I love it.” Delilah paid for it with a credit card.

On weeknights when I had class in the morning, we would occasionally venture out to the train trestles — a half-rotten stretch of abandoned track that towered above the filthy city river. One evening, when the sun was just low enough to keep lookout, Delilah led the way up a steep, wooded hill and onto the trestle, kicking her feet at nothing, like a child at sand on a beach. She started the slow trek across. Loose nails dug into the bottoms of my sandals as I held out my arms for unnecessary balance; the width of the locomotive bridge was more than double my height.

“My grandmother used to tell me stories about a girl who fell from this bridge,” I blurted out. “It was the middle of winter, so the river was frozen over. She sang at her funeral.” I almost tripped over a crack in the wood.

“That’s fucked up,” Delilah responded, ashing her lit cigarette over the edge. “Do you know what the girl’s name was?”

“No.” I blinked away the morbidity of the question.

“Why would she tell you that?” She was walking ahead, facing away from me. I couldn’t see her expression, only a cloud of smoke that lingered behind her.

“I think she wanted to scare me into never playing up here.”

“Well,” Delilah flicked the rest of the cigarette away. Its small ember went out before it made it into

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the river. She turned just enough that I could glimpse the straight line of her nose. “That plan sure worked out great.” We made it all the way to the other side that night, humming “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

We cuddled in her oversized bed as I read to her “Tintern Abbey,” taking copious notes on my own interpretation of the poem. Delilah was not impressed. “It’s the same metaphor, over and over again,” she groaned, as if she’d heard it before. I knew for a fact that she hadn’t. “We get it. Nature is your sanctuary, Wordsworth. You think you have this grasp on humanity that no one else can comprehend, but you’re ordinary.” She pronounced that word with such disdain that I paused before rebutting.

“I think my professor would choke you out if she heard that.” I gazed at her pale face with amused indignation.

Delilah submerged herself into the pillow beneath my armpit, and her words came out muffled.

“Scholars are so impressed by conviction that they’ll label anything a masterpiece if you say it hard enough.” She got up and moved to her knees to take another pull from a bottle of Jack that sat uncapped on the floor. I took a small sip when she passed it to me, her eyes following my motions with a hazy sort of earnestness. “Just don’t let them make you think that you’re stupider than him. Wordsworth.” Her s’s and th’s slid together. “You’re not. They’re never going to get out of this place, so they’ll just keep studying this same poem over and over. You’re special.” It was probably just the whiskey talking.

There were several beats of silence as I read on, to myself this time, wading through the ebb and flow of my own comprehension.

If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief, Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts Of tender joy wilt thou remember me…

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The scrawl of my pen perforated the sound of Delilah’s slowing breath as she began to drift to sleep near the crook of my elbow. In a break between lines, my mind drifted back to her earlier comment. “Is that what you’re afraid of?” My own words surprised me, as if I had not expected them to make noise.

Her face wrinkled with displeasure. “What do you mean?” She pouted, and there was an edge of annoyance in her tone that I chose to ignore.

“Being ordinary. Are you afraid of that?”

Delilah’s eyelids fluttered open to study me, intoxication causing a lag in her movements. Light from my bedside lamp transformed her irises into the color of fake gold.

She never answered my question before closing her eyes once more for sleep. I took that as a yes.

On an overgrown hill in late autumn, I asked Delilah Tull about her life. “Where did you go for your seventh birthday?” I glanced at her, and the orange setting sun made her gleam. “I went to Chuck-E-Cheese,” I added, since it was only fair that I answer my own query.

She regarded my answer with a judgmental stare that was all-too-common between us. Often, I thought, the girl forgot about the class gap that lay barren in the terrain of our friendship. She’d occasionally make condescending remarks, astonished that I’d never been to Paris. “Why the seventh?”

“Seven is my lucky number.” It was true. She scoffed, and I felt predictable again.

“Isn’t it everybody’s?” Delilah took a long drag from a menthol Pall Mall.

“Just answer the damn question.” I stole the cigarette from her fingers and cradled it between mine comfortably. I didn’t even smoke.

“My mom and dad took me to Toys-R-Us.” Delilah lay down on the grass and picked at it with her hands, digging into dirt like memories.

“Wow. And I thought I was foreseeable.” I joined her in the tinted activity of uprooting the abandoned field. “I bet they bought you everything you wanted.”

“It was enough.” Her arm overlapped mine, and I could feel goose bumps forming on her white skin. “Do I have to ask a question now?”

“No. It’s fine.” My mind whirred, but it didn’t take long to churn out another. “If you could have named the first man something other than Adam, what would you pick?”

“The first man’s name wasn’t Adam. He probably didn’t have a name. He probably wasn’t a ‘he’.”

“Jesus. Just give me an answer.”

“Engelbert Humperdinck.” She rolled her head towards me, her mouth hanging open. “Cause that would be hilarious.”

I concealed my laughter with a knuckle between my teeth. “Genesis would be a much more interesting read.”

My eyes squinted as the dying sun seeped into the part of my hair. “What do you think is the most beautiful word?”

It was Delilah’s turn to laugh. “I haven’t found it yet. You’re the English major. What do you think?”

“Sonder.”

“Is that even English?”

“I think so...” I honestly couldn’t recall. “It’s the sudden awareness that every other person around you is experiencing the same complex life and consciousness that you are.”

Her mouth formed a shape somewhere between an “oh” and a smile as she sucked air across her slightly-crooked front teeth. I expected approval. I expected amazement. “I think we should go to my house and pack a bowl,” is what I received.

To be honest, I reveled in the fact that Delilah Tull seemed to need me. I never had to reach out to her — she did all of the work herself, calling me up to tell me about interactions with customers that made her lose faith in humanity, or every time her mother took too much Xanax and forgot the dog’s name. Most of the time, I was content to be her audience. Talking to Delilah was like listening to the eulogy of an impressive stranger. She was somebody I never could be — somebody I wasn’t even sure I wanted to be — but every anecdote made me wish I could know her a little bit more.

“Do unto others,” she said, as she slid a custom-crafted lock pick into the front door of a liquor shop.

The place was too cheap to bother with security cameras.

Something clicked, between us and in the air between us, and I stood with a flashlight focused on her hands.

“Have you found God or something?” I replied with a skeptically raised eyebrow and a grip shaking in nervousness.

“Just an inane platitude to make me feel better about myself.” The metallic glass-sheathed door swung open with a push of fingertips. Blue light reflected off of the plastic aisles.

“Wouldn’t your parents just buy this for you if you asked?” I was honestly curious as to why Delilah had awoken me with rapping at my bedroom window. Behind curtained barriers, I could always hear her pleas for attention.

“They prefer to pretend.” She swung the flap of her empty messenger bag open and began reading labels.

On Christmas Eve, we elected to go to the mid-

night Catholic mass. It was an appeal that I made to which Delilah agreed. It was hard to explain, the desire that I had to see Poinsettias perched in front of a pulpit— the allure of a well-crafted Nativity scene. Something about it all screamed innocence. That nostalgic awareness that so many people around the world were singing carols of good tidings. It brought me back to the excitement of poorly-wrapped gifts awaiting me underneath an artificial tree. Delilah, in the meantime, pretended that she agreed because she would get a free sip of wine. I think it was due to the fact that she had nowhere else better to be. The pews stank of polished cedar and incense.

There was something soothing about the glow of candles, and the fact that my best friend had every robotic response on the tip of her tongue, faster than my brain could recall. During a break in the Offertory, I whispered in her ear. “Go tell it on the mountain.”

“Over the hills and everywhere.”

“Go tell it on the mountain.”

“That Jesus Christ didn’t give a shit if people were gay?” Our devious laughter drew glares in our direction, but I didn’t actually care. When we opened the hymnals to discover that the closing song was that very same Christmas tune, our singing voices cracked with more giggling. Nobody noticed over the resounding chorus.

In the parking lot of the church, I gave Delilah her Christmas gift, fully decked in glossy illustrations of holly and ivy. “Emily Dickinson?” Her disbelief bounced off of the passenger-side door of my Dodge Stratus — I was always the one who drove.

“She never really left home, but she wrote these poems that are just... unbelievable.” A defensive spark ran through me. I leaned in, my jacket making contact with the vehicle, and I felt the frost through the wool.

“That’s depressing.”

“No it’s not.” I wrenched open the door to my car, and it creaked in the frozen air. Flakes of snow that had gathered on its surface sprinkled to the ground. “You should really read it.” I climbed inside of the warm sanctuary of my car.

“I will.” Delilah joined me underneath the automatic yellow light. Bing Crosby crooned at us until I pulled into the circular driveway of her house. She got out, clutching the book to her like an infant. The heels of her boot made a crunching sound as she found her balance in the light, powdery layer on the ground. Delilah leaned in the doorway, peering with a soft smile. “Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas.” She never said thank you for the gift, but then again, I didn’t expect her to. Two weeks later, I received a text with nothing but a quote: And I, and Silence, some strange Race. Wrecked, solitary, here.

An envelope in my mailbox in the still slush-laden month of March inspired an impromptu dinner invitation. In the passenger seat, Delilah’s eyes raked over a trice-folded sheet of paper. Her delight was genuine — it was a nice break from the apathy I often detected when we were face-to-face. “Damn! They’re practically paying your tuition!” I was slightly surprised that she could even comprehend how exciting this was for a person without butt-loads of money.

Northwestern University had offered me a scholar’s grant. A very generous scholar’s grant, at that.

My transfer application had been accepted months ago, but so had my application the year before, as well as my general admissions application. The truth was, attending

Gillian Drier Not So Little Anymore Colored Pencil that school had simply never been feasible. My mother had crouched on the living room floor over our family’s tax forms, but no matter how many times she’d attempted the addition, two and two did not make twenty thousand.

This, however. This would allow me to attend my dream school. This would allow all of those ‘what college do you plan to attend’ surveys I’d filled out in high school to come to fruition.

“It’s crazy,” I agreed wholeheartedly. A smile spread across both of our faces, and I noticed myself in the rearview mirror looking sincerely happy.

We went to a restaurant where a good friend of Delilah’s was our waiter. He kept exchanging loaded glances with her, peeking out beneath the wisps of dark hair across his forehead while he scribbled our orders.

I had the feeling that this choice of seating was intentional, as a bottle of sparkling wine was procured — as if from the ether — without any I.D. checking. Around us, families with vaguely-limited budgets and wealthy kids on awkward first dates chattered about who-knows-what.

“I raise a toast to my best friend, the successful, aspiring… what is it you want to do with your life?”

Delilah’s blonde hair splayed out over her shoulders as she unabashedly held a flute of Prosecco above her head.

“I don’t even know.” I shrugged, and joined her in raising my own drink. A young kid with a finger up his nose from the table beside us eyed me curiously. “I just know that I want to write.”

“The successful, aspiring what-the-fuck-ever,” she amended with her imperfect white grin. “Just promise me a dedication when you’re out there in the big world.”

31

32

“Oh, I will,” I assured her. “My first novel will be called Delilah Tull: My Criminal Best Friend.” She laughed at the joke, but something dulled behind her eyes and her lips pursed tightly around the rim of her glass.

We finished the whole bottle before I drove us home an hour and a half later at well under the speed limit. Delilah gripped one of my hands over the center console in the car while she stared ahead through the windshield, and I had to work harder to be an inconspicuously tipsy driver.

Spring passed in a blur of occasional intoxication and literary analysis. I’d made the decision in November to challenge myself by enrolling in more difficult classes. Delilah had made the decision to challenge me by purchasing a fake I.D. and making personal connections with drug dealers. It was a win-win. Or a lose-lose, depending on what my mood was that day. Either way, I passed my classes.

In June, we attended a state fair a few miles inland from the city. I dragged Delilah onto nausea-inspiring carnival rides, and she practically force-fed me a funnel cake. For that afternoon, we were the height of ‘Mid-Western.’ Against my advice, Delilah spent three-hundred dollars on a prize-winning piglet named Izzy. We transported him back to her house in the towel-covered backseat of my car. She spent the entire ride cooing at him while he snuffled aimlessly at the edges of the fabric beneath him. It was clear that Delilah instantly fell in love with him. The poor thing lasted a week living in her bedroom off of sugar-free breakfast cereal before her parents found a farmer to buy it off of them for a decent price.

That day, she appeared at my front door, tears running black mascara lines down her cheeks. “They didn’t even fucking tell me they were selling him.” Delilah heaped herself onto the couch in my living room, not bothering to remove her leather boots.

An “I told you so” rested on the tip of my tongue, but I didn’t have the heart to release it. “He wasn’t going to last in your room forever.”

“They could have at least told me,” she ranted.

“We could have set up a place for him in the yard. God knows there’s enough room. My mom was probably just afraid that having him in living there would look tacky.

Yuppie assholes.” The heel of her hand swiped a childish streak across her eyes, leaving her make-up even more mussed.

“Why do you care so much?” My question was insensitive, but I was truly baffled by her emotional reaction. Delilah rarely allowed sentiment to outmuscle her snarky demeanor.

The look she gave me was red-rimmed and betrayed, and her clipped response had splinters in it. “I’ll need something to care about.”

It wasn’t until late July that we visited the train trestles once again.

After midnight, the hills that led down to the river always took cover in shadows. Only the reflection of the moon provided any indication that there was, indeed, water — yards and yards below. I let my legs dangle off the edge of the train trestle, and Delilah mimicked me.

Something poked at me through the fabric of my jeans, and I had to keep shifting myself.

“You could just choose not to go next year, you know. A community college degree really isn’t so bad.”

Delilah sat a few feet away, and her bare arms stood out like silver.

“I love it here and all, but I’ve wanted to go to

Northwestern since high school. If I’d had enough money, I would have right away.”

It didn’t seem that my words were any surprise to Delilah. She leaned forward enough to let her blonde hair hang in the air between her knees. Long pale fingers clenched at the track beneath her. I briefly worried that she would lose her balance.

“You could come too, you know. You have the money. You could leave.” I wasn’t positive what I was grasping at, but I wanted to make her sit up straight again.

“And do what,” she called out in muffled words.

“Find another gas station to work in? Maybe one where they sell four different kinds of slushies instead of two? I don’t care about where I live.”

“But then why not come along?”

“Because it won’t make a difference.” I could hear her gritted teeth, but I didn’t know what difference needed to be made. I had not been aware there was a problem. Her knuckles clenched, and her body folded slightly further. My fingers twitched, wanting to reach out and grasp at her shirt, to pull her backwards to safety. She spoke again, quieter. “Would you sing for me?”

“Sing what for you?”

“Would you sing for me at my funeral?” She turned her head enough to reveal wide eyes, and a wide innocent face. Everything about her was wide at that moment.

I clenched my jaw as we regarded one another, barely visible in the darkness. My mind sputtered through images of every time my phone had read ‘Incoming Call’ with Delilah’s name beneath it. Panic accompanied each mental picture. “You’re not going to… jump or something, are you?” Shaky. I sounded shaky, and I didn’t know if I was referring to now or some moment in the future, when I wouldn’t be there to yank her back.

The mirror-like eyes flickered in and out as Delilah did nothing but blink for infinite seconds. Then, a harsh cackle interrupted the tense silence, and reverberated back to us from below, dampened by the distance and the water. It went on for an awkwardly long time, and I felt stupid because I didn’t quite get the joke.

Delilah could sense my unease, but her response to my question didn’t clarify anything for me. “It’s just so funny, you know? You, with your waxed poetic words and your analogies for every possible feeling that someone could be experiencing. And you don’t even know...”

“What?” It was my turn to sound annoyed.

“That you’re such an idiot, Addie.”

A Fourteen-Foot Gator Named Holy Spirit Florence Swallowbard Kids would always tell me how lucky I was to have December 25th as my birthday.

They thought I got double the presents and the cookies and the cake; but for me, the only difference between my birthday and everybody else’s was I had to go to church.

The year I turned thirteen, we got up early Christmas morning, the same as every other year. Dad moaned and pressed snooze but eventually I tugged at his legs hard enough and pulled him from his bed. We opened presents next to our Charlie Brown tree, as Dad called it. Charlie was a fake, though at least he wasn’t white, and besides, he had sentimental value. Mom and Dad had bought Charlie for their first apartment back before they moved to Florida.

When I had finished with my packages, and was surrounded by a flurry of paper and tape, Dad would look at me for a long time. “So, you like them?” He’d say, and take a quick sip of his coffee. I’d crawl over and hug him, and he’d squeeze me until I’d say something along the lines of, “Most of them.”

Before we’d go, Dad would dab his pits with cologne and squeeze into his wedding suit, and I’d don whatever bright colored polo Grandma had sent me that year, and we’d stand in front of the bathroom mirror and look ourselves over. Except for his bald head and my huge birthday grin, the shared genes were obvious: short, plump, handsome. We’d get in the car and drive to the Waffle House for our pre-service brunch. From our house we followed Doctor’s Pass, a river that ambled in from the gulf, and flowed all the way to church. The Waffle House was just off Immokalee road, a gravel parking lot and towering palm shielding it from curious eyes. It was an oasis for drunks and dealers at night, but during the day you mostly found church folk.

And sure enough, as soon as I stepped out of our truck onto the lot, Mrs. Ames was on me like Jesus on the cross. She hugged me tight — “Squeezed the sin out,” as she claimed. Trapping me between her watermelons-for-breasts, she aimed her purple lips somewhere in the cheek region and saturated my face. Dad extended his suit coat as a towel but I shrugged and used my sleeve.

Mrs. Ames always seemed to be offering us some kind of useless female commodity, like Jell-O dessert or affection.

She backed off and brought both hands to her dripping

lips to announce the obvious.

“My, my, John, your little Jordan sure is growing up!”

The restaurant was a periwinkle mobile home.

The roof was chipped and the siding had been torn apart by a series of female hurricanes that the owner, Tony, spoke of like ex-lovers. We entered the front screen door and hopped up on stools. There were no booths or tables in the Waffle House, just counter seating. Everyone sat shoulder to shoulder, and you would have been able to see everyone else inside, if it hadn’t have been for the thick clouds of cigarette smoke.

A couple clouds parted and Dad caught a glimpse of Pastor Brent getting up to leave. The pastor was tall with a blond ponytail that fell halfway down his back.

With a grown out beard he really looked like Jesus, or at least Jesus whose hair had been bleached by the Florida sun. His right arm clung to his special Bible. It had a thick leather cover and had been given to him by the pope or God or somebody like that. Lana Jackdaw, his acolyte turned fiancée, held his left arm and tugged him through the door. Dad watched them drive off.

Wendy, a middle aged waitress approached us with a guise of seriousness. She and Dad had been friends since high school, back when Dad’s belly wasn’t as round and he could fit into a swim team Speedo — a fact of which Wendy often reminded him.

“The usual, boys?”

“Wendy, Wendy,” Dad said. “How can you just assume what we want? You take us for creatures of habit?”

Wendy pressed her lips together to keep from smiling. “Two grilled gouda sandwiches. Two Pepsis. Two Butterfingers. Two milks. Napkins,” she said.

“Now Wendy, I was under the assumption that the Waffle House only serves waffles.”

“You would be incorrect in that assumption.”

“So my next question is,” Dad said, “if you can remember all that, how come you keep forgetting to look older like the rest of us?”

“I remember what I want to remember,” she said, raising her eyebrows. Her face finally gave in to smiling. She had wonderful teeth — big and bright, and Dad always knew how to get her to show them. My mom passed away before I got to know her, but I’m sure when

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34

she was with Dad, she was smiling the whole time.

Christmas Eve, they didn’t sit in the air-conditioned sanctuary. The congregation had the pleasure of experiencing the Naples humidity as God intended: cruel and itchy. They held the services out back on a small stretch of over fertilized grass next to Doctor’s Pass.

Dad told me my friends and I weren’t allowed to swim back there because of a fourteen-foot gator named “Holy Spirit,” but he was always pulling things over on me, so I didn’t know if it was true.

They’d lined up heavy wooden pews facing towards the water, like one of those weddings for weirdos who think cake and tuxedos are overdone. Pastor Brent stood shaking hands, welcoming people to the service.

“Johnny and Jordan. So nice of you to join us.

And a suit, John!” Pastor Brent looked directly at my potbelly. “You look just like your old man.” He leaned in over my Dad and whispered something. I think he said, “Couldn’t even manage a shave, Johnny?”

Dad stepped past him and sat on a pew. “Too busy praying, pastor.”

At the water’s edge, multicolored lights slithered up the trunks of palm trees, framing a nativity scene. Kids itched themselves in angel and wise men outfits. Baby Jesus was wailing. Miss Jackdaw sat behind the children, shushing them because she was about to sing. Her angel costume was cut so short you could see her pink thong underpants.

Behind us, Mrs. Ames was bragging about how it was her grandbaby in the manger.

The child lay in an old rotted out pulpit, which was upturned and perched on a few bales of hay. This particular configuration seemed awfully dangerous to me, as a stern gust of wind could topple that manger, and right behind it the water dropped off deep. I turned to ask Dad but he was pondering something else.

“You see those underpants?” he said with a smile. I nudged him. We stuck together in the heat.

Miss Jackdaw stood up and belted “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” starting off the show.

A tiny Joseph led a led a tinier Mary down the aisle, till they got to the end and didn’t know what to do. The choir ladies cooed and the rest of us shuffled in our seats, praying to God that he might be so gracious as to send us some cloud cover.

Pastor Brent got up from his pew and winked at the crowd. My dad coughed.

“Today we celebrate the birth of our lord, Jesus Christ.” He nodded towards Miss Jackdaw, who hopped down and recited her verse from memory.

“Luke one, verse thirty five: And the angel,” she pointed to herself, “answered her, the Holy Spirit will come upon you. And the power of the most high will overshadow you.

Therefore the child to be born will be called holy — the

son of God.” She curtsied then sat back down. Pastor Brent smiled one of those cheeky smiles like he’d just peed after holding it for ages. This meant it was time for his sermon.

Dad had a routine for the service, too. As soon as the sermon started his mouth would shut up, but his eyes would keep talking. He’d stare up towards the nativity scene, but past it, and at the water behind. He’d watch the pelicans bob on buoys, as if waiting for some monstrous fish, or perhaps Holy Spirit, to come take the bait. Communion would arrive, and he’d stand up, drink his wine and insult his bread. He’d leave before the service ended instead of returning to his seat. When we’d finished the last verse of “Silent Night” I’d head up to the parking lot and he’d be waiting with the engine running.

I would never listen to the sermons either. I’d try listening, and then Pastor Brent would say some big word like “justice” or “compassion” and my brain would go off on a tangent. It wasn’t that I wasn’t thinking, I just had more important concerns than the Ten Commandments. Dad said Pastor Brent was a liar, anyways. As I understood it they’d been good friends when they were younger, but something must have happened, because Dad didn’t even let Pastor Brent do Mom’s funeral. Instead, Dad had requested the services of assistant pastor Jenkins, a young man just out of seminary who mumbled and sang off-key.

The only time my thoughts got biblical was when Pastor Brent mentioned John the Baptist. I always felt bad for John; he must have hated Christmas. He grew up at the same time as Jesus, so pretty much any achievement of his would have been a disappointment in comparison. The pressure to succeed must have gotten to him; the guy ate bugs for Christ’s sake.

As they set up for communion, Dad folded his bulletin and stuck it in his pocket. We lined up in the aisle. When we reached the front of the line, he took a great gulp from the clay cup, and pinched off a small morsel of rye. He nodded to me and marched down the aisle, away from the service.

“Johnny!” Pastor Brent called, “where you headed?”

This was unprecedented. No one had ever meddled with Dad’s Christmas routine.

“Just to the bathroom, Brent,” he called back.

“Hold it. I want you to do me a favor.”

Dad stood rooted to one spot.

“Come on up here, Johnny!”

As he walked up the aisle, Dad looked like that little Joseph — confused and terrified — and he didn’t even have a little Mary at his side to keep him company.

“Johnny, come on now. Do me a favor. Read this last passage for us.” Brent held up his magnificent leather Bible, opened halfway; Dad took it. It looked heavy in his hands.

Dad turned towards the crowd, and licked his lips. When he spoke in public, Dad would get a tap going in his left leg. Just then it had spread throughout his body, and was especially apparent in his hands, which shook mightily under the weight of the book.

“Brent. This is in Latin.”

“Yes it is.” Pastor Brent’s bleached hair was blinding in the sun.

“I can’t read this.” My dad moved towards Brent, trying to return the Bible.

“You can’t read a little Latin, Johnny? You were in my Latin class back in high school.”

“Yeah, well I don’t remember it,” Dad said, fighting agitation.

“Oh. It’s no problem. I’ll just translate it for you, and you repeat after me.” Pastor Brent eased up behind Dad’s shoulder; his shadow covered Dad’s face and eliminated his reading light; even I could feel Brent’s breath on my neck.

“You ready?” Brent peered down at the text.

Dad backed away, turned and faced Brent.

“No. I’m not doing this.”

The wind whirled — a glass of cool water on such a hot day.

“Ha! That’s what’s great about you, Johnny; you were blessed with a deadpan delivery.

A born comedian.” Pastor Brent’s bony hands slumped to his hips and his smile faded. Dad slammed the Bible shut.

“What’s the point of this, Brent?”

“I wanted to involve you in our services, Johnny. When you do attend, you seem — distracted — disconnected. Sometimes I wonder why you attend at all?

You don’t like me. You don’t seem to like reading from the Bible. Why do you come each Christmas?”

There was a pause when the airplanes overhead seemed to press some mute button, and the traffic noise died, and the gulls shut up, and the only two sounds were Dad’s shot put grunt and the heavenly splash of Pastor Brent’s Bible hitting the river. Then sound returned.

The pelicans flew from their roosts. The water seemed agitated.

Pastor Brent stumbled to the bank and leapt in after the Bible.

Everyone panicked. The river didn’t have a current or anything, but it was well known Pastor Brent couldn’t walk on water, so much as swim in it. He struggled towards the ripples where the Bible had sunk, but made no progress, and began to sink himself.

Dad ran to the riverbank. “Brent. You ok? Brent.” Dad undid his belt, stripped down to his boxers and jumped in after him.

The whole congregation, including me, had gotten out of our seats and rushed towards the water.

The choir ladies were jostling for viewing position but I pushed my way to the front. “Dad! Watch out for the gator! Dad, remember, Holy Spirit!”

The water that had earlier dripped like molasses was now ablaze with action. Torrents erupted like the fountains of some celestial font. The congregation took collective breaths, hung on every splash and every scream.

For what seemed like a minute we lost sight of them in the sawgrass, but then they emerged, Dad wrestling Brent out by the underarms and slinging him onto the bank. Dad pulled himself out next and wiped the weeds from his eyes. Pastor Brent’s ponytail was tangled around his head like an umbilical cord. The Bible was nowhere to be seen.

Brent stood up and dwarfed my half-naked father. “What in the hell was that, John?”

Dad didn’t even return a glance. He dove back into the river.

“John, where are you going?”

He wasn’t going to stick around for “Silent Night,” that was certain. I looked past Brent’s sopping figure, his hair matted and ugly, and picked out Dad’s bright pink head that gleamed in the sun a couple pool lengths downriver. He was racing forward in the water with pace and vigor. It was him and the gator; it was him and Holy Spirit.

35

Battle Born Lindsay Nigh

36

“You’re bleeding.”

“That I am.”

“Mikaela — ”

“Cassidy,” Mikaela mimicked, leaning back against the counter and taking a swig from her beer.

Cassidy scowled, closing the patio door against the oppressive August heat as she stepped into the kitchen. “And you’re drinking.”

“Yes, I am. Well done, Cass. You’re two for two.”

“Don’t give me your cocky bullshit,” Cassidy bit out, already reaching for a towel and wetting it. “Just tell me what happened.”

Mikaela shifted, pushing herself up to perch on the counter’s edge and swinging her feet, bare heels tapping slowly against the cabinet doors. “Nothing.”

“Nothing, my ass. What did he do?”

“Nothing.” Mikaela shrugged, eyes downcast.

“Just some more of the usual, y’know? Nothing I can’t handle.”

“You shouldn’t have to handle it at all, Kay.” Cassidy stepped between Mikaela’s swinging feet, bringing the towel up to dab at the cut on her cheek. “Your Dad shouldn’t — ”

“Father,” Mikaela said. “Not dad. Father.”

“Right. Sorry.” Cassidy wiped away the last of the blood and set the towel aside. “Your father shouldn’t have a fucking ‘usual.’ He should be laying off the booze and keeping his hands to his goddamn self.”

Mikaela snorted. “Yeah, okay. Like that’s gonna happen. You want to be the one to tell him that? ‘Hey Mr. Remington! I know you’ve been BFFs with Jim, Jack, and Jose for about ten years now but can you take a night off?’” Mikaela chuckled, mouth turning up into a smirk as she hooked her ankles around Cassidy’s waist, pulling her in and knocking their foreheads together. “C’mon, Cass.

You know that’ll never fly. Besides, it’s not so bad. As long as he doesn’t touch Lucas, I don’t care what he does to me.”

That’d always been the case. Ever since they’d first discovered John was a mean drunk, Mikaela had stepped between her father and her brother. Mikaela was bigger, older. She could take it. Sometimes, John was drunk enough that all she had to do was duck and weave a few times. Those were the good nights.

Cassidy’s expression darkened and she pulled away. “I care, you idiot. And so does Lucas. He just doesn’t know half of what goes on because you always get me over here to clean up the evidence first.”

“Whatever,” Mikaela grumbled, sliding off the counter.

“No, don’t ‘whatever’ me, you asshole. Do something about it.”

“And what, exactly, am I supposed to do, Cass?”

“You already know.”

“No.”

“Kay — ”

“I said no.”

Cassidy heaved out a sigh, pinching the bridge of her nose in frustration. “I don’t get why you’re so damn set against this. It’s a perfect option.”

“How the hell is skipping town with you and leaving Lucas with John a ‘perfect option’?” Mikaela demanded, expression cold.

“So bring him with! We can get a three-bedroom apartment just as easily as a two-bedroom. Or — hell — we don’t even need three bedrooms, I can just share with you.”

Mikaela’s expression hardened. “No. Absolutely not. I am not a fucking charity case, Cass.”

“You know I didn’t mean it like that — ”

“Forget it.”

“Kay — ”

“Just stop talking.”

Cassidy’s mouth snapped shut. She glared at Mikaela for a moment before giving up, arms falling to her sides and shoulders slumping. “I’m sorry, Kay. You know I didn’t mean it like that. I just — I just hate this.”

“I know you do,” Mikaela murmured, turning back to the counter and reaching for the chipped “World’s Best Dad” mug that sat there holding their bandage supply. She fished out a Band-Aid and unwrapped it, smoothing it carefully over the cut on her cheek. “I do too.”

Cassidy watched her, hands curling into fists when she caught sight of the nearly empty mug. Mikaela resisted the urge to sigh. The mug was from ages ago — back when Father’s Day was a holiday Mikaela didn’t scoff at and Mary was still helping Mikaela buy presents.

Cassidy cleared her throat awkwardly. “Listen, I gotta get

home and finish packing, or my mom is going to throw a fit. Two days before we leave and all.”

“Yeah.” Mikaela glanced back at her, smile wavering on her lips. “You should go. Can’t show up to college unprepared, after all.”

“I — ” Cassidy paused, looking down at her hands. “I know you don’t want to hear this, but I don’t want to leave without you. You and Lucas both. I’m fucking terrified, to be honest. Of what’ll happen to you. Of what I’ll do. Of everything. I get that this doesn’t change anything, but I just want you to know — ” Cassidy’s eyes darted up, focusing on Mikaela. “If you change your mind, I’m leaving at nine in the morning on Saturday.

There’ll be a spot for you and Lucas in the car, whether you’re there or not.”

“Thanks, Cass.” Mikaela’s smile softened into something less fleeting, more genuine. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

about to leave Lucas. No thirteen-year-old kid should have to deal with John on his own. At least she’d had Lucas and his dumb smiling face once John decided that the best way to counsel grief was with hard liquor. If she left, John would lose his punching bag and Lucas would be the most convenient replacement. That wasn’t gonna happen so long as Mikaela was alive. She’d stay until there was enough cash to get her and Lucas out together.

Mikaela let out a frustrated sigh before glancing up at the clock — 9:46p.m. She frowned, pushing off the counter and walking over to her bag to pull out her phone. Her frown deepened when she realized there were no new texts or calls from Lucas. Where the fuck was he?

She dialed his number, bringing the phone up to her ear and waiting for her brother to pick up.

“Hey, sis! What’s up?”

“What’s up? Why isn’t your ass here at ten o’clock at night is what’s up.”

Stephanie Skykes Untitled Acyrlic on canvas

“Please do.” Cassidy bent down to grab her bag, giving Mikaela a weak smile before slipping out through the patio door.

The second Cassidy was gone, Mikaela slumped against the counter. She hated this — fighting with Cass every time John drank. It drained her when there was nothing left to drain. At least Lucas knew when to leave well enough alone. But Cass was just so damn stubborn, so insistent that Mikaela deserved to get the hell out of this town and come with her to Texas State. Cass was always the big dreamer between the two of them. She was the one who would talk at length about the “future” and a “career” and her “hopes and dreams.” Mikaela didn’t have that luxury. She didn’t have the kind of money Cass did — going to college was just not in the cards for her, even with scholarships. And even if, by some miracle, she’d gotten a full ride, it still would’ve been impossible. She wasn’t

“Chill. I’m just over at Amy’s.”

“Doing what?”

“Playing Mario Kart.”

Mikaela rolled her eyes, making her way toward her bedroom as she spoke. “Mario Kart. Great. Did you have dinner there? I only got home from work about an hour ago.”

“Yeah, Amy’s mom made spaghetti.”

“Well that’s good because there’s no food in the house. Again.”

“I thought Dad just went grocery shopping.”

“Yeah, for beer.” And whiskey. Which is exactly why Mikaela was usually the one who bought food.

“Oh.”

Mikaela sighed, opening the door to her room and going straight for the bed. “It’s okay, bro. I’ll get some food tomorrow morning before I go to work so you don’t

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waste away to nothing.”

“Hey! Are you calling me fat?”

“No.” Mikaela chuckled, sitting down on the edge of her bed. “But if I were, I’d be telling you it’s time to get your fat ass home.”

“Aw, do I have to?”

“Yes. Tomorrow’s Friday. It’s a school night.”

“School doesn’t start for another week.”

Mikaela paused. Oh right. August. “Whatever.

My point still stands.”

“Ugh, fine. Is Dad home right now?”

“No,” Mikaela said, grimacing, “he’s at the bar.”

“Oh.” Lucas’ voice was small. “Do you know when he’s coming home?”

John hadn’t exactly been open with that information when Mikaela had gotten home from work. He’d greeted her with a rant on how many dishes had piled up in the sink and a backhand when she’d remarked that most of the glasses were his.

“No,” Mikaela said instead.

“I hate it when he comes home drunk, Kay. He’s so loud.”

“I know, Lucas. I hate it, too.” Mikaela rubbed at her cheek.

“I wish we could just leave.”

Mikaela swallowed hard. “So do I, bro. But you know we couldn’t afford it.”

“We could stay with Cass.”

“Lucas ... ” Mikaela closed her eyes. “We can’t just live off of Cass. That’s not fair to any of us.”

“She wouldn’t mind. Besides, once you found a job on campus, we wouldn’t have to worry about that, right?”

“And what about school, huh?” Mikaela challenged. “You can’t drop out of school at 13.”

“I could just go to school there. There’s a high school close by.”

That pulled Mikaela up short. “Have you actually looked that up?”

Lucas paused. “Yeah. Maybe.”

“You’re really serious about this?”

“Yeah.”

Mikaela bit her bottom lip, chewing on it thoughtfully. “Okay. Let’s talk about this when you get home. Do you need me to come pick you up?”

“No, Amy’s mom said she’d drive me.”

“All right. Good. I’ll see you soon, bro.”

“Later, sis,” Lucas said before hanging up.

Mikaela fell back onto her bed with a groan, tossing her phone towards her pillow. Of course Cass had talked to Lucas about this already. She should’ve known.

The fastest way to get Mikaela to agree to something was to make it something that Lucas wanted. And now he wanted to live with Cass. Of course, Lucas was still painfully naïve to the difficulties that entailed. The fact that Mikaela only had $215 stashed away and no job lined up at Texas State was not a concern to him. Nor was the fact that she would have to prove that their living situation with Cass was stable before filing for emergency guardianship. Mikaela hadn’t wanted to get his — or Cass’ — hopes up, but she’d been looking into their options. She’d been doing research when she had time to go to the library, and she knew that a steady income and a secure residence were a necessity if she was going to try and take custody of her brother. Still.

Mikaela pushed herself up onto her elbows and took a cursory look around her room. Besides the clothes

in her dresser, the only things she cared about were the pictures of her mom and a few choice belongings. Mikaela levered herself off the bed, padding over to pick up the photo album on her dresser. She opened it reverently, flipping to the back as the worn binding cracked softly.

Her mother’s smiling face beamed up at her and Mikaela swallowed thickly. She remembered when this photo was taken — Lucas was still a toddler, amusing himself in the sandbox as John took a picture of Mary holding her. They were happy. Mom was alive and John wasn’t drinking and they were happy. If Mom could see them now — Mikaela’s gut soured. If Mom could see them now she would be horrified. She would be ashamed. Mikaela traced the edges of the picture. Would she be ashamed of me? For not leaving? Yeah, she hadn’t worked everything out yet, and yeah, it would be a legal nightmare, but leaving with Cass was probably the best chance she and Lucas had of getting out. Mikaela glanced at the picture of her 6-year-old self, wrapped in Mary’s arms and clutching a then-new, stuffed toy tiger — Survivor, named after the band responsible for the song that had inspired Mary to buy the toy in the first place.

Mom would want her to leave. * * *

Ten minutes later, all of Mikaela’s clothes had been joined by her photo album, a threadbare stuffed tiger, and Mary’s battered copy of Crime And Punishment in her duffel. As she zipped up the duffel, the sound of the patio door sliding open and closed echoed through the house, followed shortly by a shout of “Kay?”

“I’m in my room, Lucas!” Mikaela called back.

Moments later, her baby brother was walking into her room, brow furrowing at the sight of the packed duffel on her bed.

“Are you going somewhere?” Lucas asked.

“We might be,” Mikaela answered, patting the bed next to her.

Lucas crawled onto the bed, glancing at Mikaela expectantly. “What do you mean, ‘we might be’?”

“How serious were you when you said you wanted to live with Cass?”

Lucas’ expression brightened. “Very serious.”

“Yeah?” Mikaela smiled softly at him, ruffling his shaggy brown hair. “You got any bright ideas on how we would pay for the rent?”

Lucas wrinkled his nose. “Well ... would we have to? You and Cass could share her room and I could sleep on the couch. She said her apartment would have a futon.”

“You’re not gonna live on a couch, Lucas,” Mikaela protested.

“It’d be better than living here.”

Mikaela’s heart clenched. “I’m sorry. I know it sucks.”

“I know you know,” Lucas muttered, glancing at the Band-Aid on Mikaela’s cheek.

Mikaela sighed. “I wish you didn’t.”

Lucas was silent for a moment. Then he leaned over, wrapping his arms around Mikaela’s shoulders and hugging her tightly. “Promise me we’ll leave with Cass.”

Mikaela rested her chin on the top of his head.

“Okay.”

“Really?” Lucas pulled back, face hopeful.

“Really.”

“Oh my God.” Lucas breathed, smile breaking across his face. “You’re serious.”

“Yeah, yeah. You can sing my praises in the

morning.” Mikaela teased. “Now get your ass to bed.”

“You’re the best, Kay!” Lucas said, before bounding out of her room.

“Of course I am,” Mikaela muttered to herself, tossing her duffle to the floor and stripping off her jeans.

She could hear Lucas rummaging through his closet on the other side of the wall as she turned off the light and crawled into bed. She’d figure this out tomorrow. For tonight, all she wanted was a good night’s sleep. ***

An almighty crash startled Mikaela awake not three hours later. She slipped out of bed, pulling on her jeans and going to investigate. The scene waiting for her was nothing new.

Her father was staring at the broken shards of the plates that had been in the drying rack by the sink but were now strewn across the floor. He was leaning heavily against the counter, eyeing the broken plates with a look of bemused interest. At the sound of Mikaela’s approach, he glanced up.

“Mary!” John slurred, pointing at the mess on the floor. “Did you do this?”

“No,” Mikaela snapped from the doorway. “You did. And I’m not Mom.”

“No,” John insisted, voice already dipping into something dark and dangerous. “Y’gotta be her. Blonder th’n shit and those stupid green eyes. Gotta be.”

“Well I’m not,” Mikaela hissed, “Mom is dead.

She has been for ten years now.”

“You’re wrong.” John lurched forward, boots crunching over the broken plates.

“You’re drunk,” Mikaela bit back. “And you’re wrong. Mom died in a car accident. You should know. You were driving.”

“Shut up!” John yelled, staggering toward her.

“Should show your Dad some fucking respect!”

“You’re not my Dad.” Mikaela took a step back as John crowded her against the doorframe. “You stopped being my Dad the second you started drinking.”

John’s knuckles striking across her cheek was no surprise, but the strength in his grip as he seized her arm and threw her into the kitchen was. Mikaela stumbled across the room, losing her balance and falling forward, hands skidding across broken glass. The shards bit into her palms and she swore, pulling her hands in and cradling them against her chest.

“Get up!” John shouted, “Disrespect me in my house, you’ll fuckin’ learn.”

Mikaela scrabbled backwards, hissing as more of the glass poked at her legs. “You’re a piece of shit, you know that?” Mikaela spat out. “No matter what you do to me, you will never have my respect.” John stumbled after her, expression wrathful.

“Dad, stop it!”

Mikaela’s head whipped toward the doorway where Lucas stood, baseball bat clutched resolutely in his hands. No, no, no. He’s going to get hurt.

John turned to look as well. “Go back to bed.

Now.”

“No,” Lucas said, hoisting the bat over his shoulder, knuckles white. “Not until you leave Kay alone.”

John stared at him for a moment before lurching towards his son. Lucas sidestepped him and John stumbled. He looked ill. Mikaela cocked a brow in surprise. Apparently his tolerance wasn’t absolute yet. Who knew.

“Fine.” John grunted. “Fuckin’ kids. Have it your

way.” John ambled off to the bathroom, grumbling under his breath.

Lucas rushed over to Mikaela, minding the broken glass. “Are you okay?”

Mikaela nodded, brushing off his concern as she stood and picked the glass shards off her hands. “I’m fine. Thanks.”

“You’re bleeding, though! Does it hurt?” Lucas took her hands in his own, checking them for any pieces of glass Mikaela might’ve missed.

“Only a bit,” Mikaela assured him, wiping her hands on the front of her shirt, streaking it with crimson.

She offered Lucas a small smile, flicking his cheek affectionately. “Why don’t you go grab our bags and meet me outside? I think it’s time we hit the road.”

“Yeah, okay.” Lucas nodded, already moving to fetch the bags.

Mikaela walked over to the sink, stepping around the broken glass and grabbing a towel to wipe down the back of her jeans so that no errant pieces of glass were left clinging to them. She headed to the back door and pulled on her boots, tossing the towel over her shoulder and accidentally knocking the “World’s Best Dad” mug off the counter. As she walked out into the night, the sound of porcelain shattering echoed through the house.

39

Love Hate Lines Cody Meyer

She slipped a note in his back pocket between English and Math and quickly walked away. He pulled it out and read in the sloppy sixth grade handwriting, “I love you.” His pulse quickened so rapidly he thought blood would begin pouring out his ears. His head turned in her direction, but all he could see was the back of her head, her jet black ponytail beating against her back like an extension of her heart. A grin split his face in half. The next day, he held her hand.

On the last day of seventh grade, he walked her home. He leaned in to kiss her strawberry chapstick lips, and she turned away. She said her parents were watching, and he knew that wasn’t true, but he didn’t argue. He shrugged, and nodded, and bit the inside of his cheek to hold back the tears welling just behind his eyes. When the door to her house closed, and she left his life, he let the rivers break the levies. That summer, he stayed indoors.

On the eighty-third day of eighth grade, he put a note in her locker and quickly walked away. He went into the bathroom and stared at his paling skin, the love and hate lines on his wrists, and the ones he knew were there but couldn’t see. His parents told him she was just a girl, but they didn’t understand. When she read the note, she sighed and crumpled it into her pocket and walked home alone. “Why won’t you talk to me anymore?” That night, he cried himself to sleep.

On the seventh day of ninth grade, she grabbed him when no one was around and kissed his patient lips.

On the first day of tenth grade, she called him a freak.

On the one hundred-fortieth day of eleventh grade, she held her boyfriend’s hand in the hallway. He caught her eye and smiled. Her lips made an attempt at an up-turn, and then dropped back down, much like his heart. She turned the corner, and he gave up. He wrote himself a note: “She was never meant for you.” That moment, he opened his eyes.

She skipped school the last day of twelfth grade.

Her boyfriend drove them out towards the lake. She turned her head towards his the moment the pickup truck turned the corner, crushing the car, their bodies, their dreams. He found out over the loud speaker. He excused himself from class. In the bathroom, he looked at the pale

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lines along his arms. That night, he didn’t sleep.

When they lowered her casket into the ground, the crowd cried in collective frustration. Such youth, and potential, and happiness. Such a loving spirit. The last person at her graveside was a young man. He knelt beside the headstone, heart pounding like when he was eleven years old. He pulled a note from his back pocket, worn with years. He kissed the ground she was buried beneath, placed the note down and read it aloud to himself: “I love you.”

Staring Down the Loaded Barrel Theresa Cooley “Sir, it’s time to leave.”

Hitch sat on the edge of his porch, a polishing rag in one hand, rifle in the other. Dusk was falling and he hadn’t eaten much today, yet he felt neither exhaustion nor hunger. Hitch glared down the double barrels as if at a pair of eyes. “No.” “Sir—”

“Not yet.”

Hitch fiddled with the rifle’s trigger guard.

The sheriff shuffled his feet and twitched the sides of his mouth, scrutinizing Hitch from across the yard. The suit next to him, in his most affected and disclosing courtroom voice, put a foot onto Hitch’s brittle lawn. He trembled visibly when he saw Hitch counting each blade of crunched grass.

“Mr. Simon, please, there’s no need for a power show,” he announced. “We’re all gentlemen. If you’d take your gun and put it—”

“It’s not a gun.” His voice blended into the crunching of the dried-out dirt, but the two outsiders heard him perfectly.

Divots appeared in the suit’s cheeks, his bottom lip dangling freely.

“Of course it’s a gun,” he said.

Hitch dropped the stock of the rifle against the step. At the crack, the sheriff twisted for the holster at his hip. But he didn’t draw. Instead, he waved for the suit to shut his trap.

Hitch didn’t chuckle, but his eyes briefly flickered in their direction.

“This,” Hitch explained, “is a rifle. I wouldn’t expect you to know the difference.”

The suit ignored this. “The redemption period for the property has expired.”

Hitch noticed a spot on the barrel. Engrossed, he circled the rag over a few more times.

“You know we could take that gun, too, Mr. Simon? Along with the house?” The suit sucked in a breath that puffed his chest out, but to Hitch he still resembled a deflated tire. With mingled notes of victory and fear, the suit announced:

“I bought the property myself.”

At last, Hitch met and held the suit’s gaze. Across the front yard, in this clearing within the pines, the three men were utterly isolated from the rest of society. The flapchinned man teetered back slightly, but the sheriff merely remained as he was, squinting.

From inside the suit’s jacket a mobile rang. The shrill notes pierced the air surrounding the cabin like a descending flock of crows. The suit scrambled pitifully.

“Honey, I’m at work,” he said into the phone.

Hitch snarled instinctively. The sentences coming from the lawyer disgusted him. “Family,” he called. “It’s a funny thing.”

When the suit’s cheeks puckered and reddened, Hitch felt a hollow, morose satisfaction. The suit tucked into his layers and rotated away. “Sure. No, nothing—” The sheriff approached. “Mr. Simon, you’ve gotta come with us. Right now. There’s nothing you can do.”

Hitch dropped the stock against the stair again, not startling the sheriff but effectively cutting him off. As Hitch laid the rifle across his lap, he clenched it firmly in his red-specked palms until his knuckles glowed white.

“My sister and her kid are coming to live with me,” he said.

“The law’s not on your side. You can’t make that decision now.”

“That’s ‘cause the law’s always on yours. Even when you shoot a man. Isn’t it right, sheriff?” He wiped his nose on the plaid of his bicep. “Jones. That’s your name? You know the Paulssons, don’t you? Only three sheriff families at the station.”

The sheriff grimaced and looked like he wouldn’t answer.

But he played along.

“Yeah. I know Jeremy. He’s a good man,” he added.

“He shot my uncle.”

The metal was moist under Hitch’s hands. The sheriff observed the tension in the rugged man’s muscles, but there didn’t seem any real threat of response in them.

“You’re related to Gary Simon?” the sheriff asked.

“Give the man a medal.”

“Paulsson did what was necessary. He defended

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himself. He told me so himself.”

Hitch leaned forward. “A rifle pointed to the sky, and he says he defended himself? The bastard shot him.”

“Your uncle was convicted of firing at Paulsson.

Witnesses swore to it.”

Hitch laughed out loud, throwing his head back as withered memories flit through his mind. The smile that possessed him seemed to be channeling straight from the haunting image of Gary’s weathered grin and frigid scowl.

He fell back into silence almost immediately, and it made him smile even more ruthlessly when the suit’s back stiffened through his jacket.

“A couple of rednecks with a grudge against the Simons,” Hitch muttered. “Quite a pack of witnesses when you got a dead cop.”

At last, the suit blanched, and his phone was put back into his pocket. “The evidence was damning.”

“You’re a shit-ass lawyer. Even for a court-appointment.”

“Enough. Jones, please, do your job,” the suit complained.

The sheriff kept his distance. He was waiting for Hitch to make another move.

Hitch obliged.

“I never heard from Gary after the hearing, you know.” A moment of silence. “You going home to a family tonight?”

The suit’s baggy flesh pinched in annoyance.

“I am.”

“They have food on the table where you go?”

“That’s not relev—” “And plenty of room?”

“Yes—” “Then you don’t need mine.”

The sheriff was grabbing something from his back pocket—handcuffs. Hitch massaged the rifle in his grip.

“It’s time for you to leave this property,” the sheriff said.

“You can come willingly, or I’ll have to arrest you for trespassing.”

“This house is mine. My property’s in this house.”

“It’s not yours anymore,” the sheriff said.

“So this sorry asshole bought my dead mother’s albums?

‘Cause those are in the attic.”

“Personal items will be sorted out. For now, this land is being seized.”

Hitch chewed on his irritation. At last, he heaved himself up.

“Mr. Simon, leave the gun.”

“Absolutely fucking-hell no.” Hitch tromped down the porch stairs.

“You can’t—” “I won’t,” he corrected.

“Don’t make this complicated.”

The holster at the sheriff ’s hip was obscured by a hairy hand, and the steely, unyielding creases cut in around his eyes.

“Was that bastard who made this complicated,” Hitch shot at the suit. “You’re not necessary in this, suit.

Just here to gloat, aren’t you? Son of a bitch.”

“The case is closed.” At last the sheriff would wait no longer. He moved resolutely at Hitch. He flashed the handcuffs, signaling that this exchange was officially over.

Hitch’s options were thinning quick.

“All right. Want me to leave? I’m going. But I’m going this way.”

His height did its job as he tromped along the front of the house. The sheriff mirrored Hitch’s movements. Hitch

passed purposefully between them and the house as he strode toward the edge of the pines, but the sheriff insisted on following.

“Simon!” The sheriff ’s footsteps closed in, but Hitch continued until he the barrel of a pistol pushed into the small of his back. “Stop.”

Hitch glared at the pines. Beneath them, dead pine needles were strewn across the earth like a frayed, endless, gray-brown afghan.

“Drop the gun.”

“It’s a rifle.”

A sharp jab.

“Last chance, Simon. This is it. Drop the gun.”

“Promise to give me a room in the cell block?”

Hitch didn’t comprehend if he meant it as a threat or not. He could feel the tension crackling on the moaning breeze, the electricity conducted through him from the twitching metal body at his back. The charge glued him to the ground.

Hitch had never wandered farther than fifteen miles from this very spot. Was he going to die for it now? The house had always been as dead to him as the plot it was on. If anything, keeping this place was a matter of pride. Pride was one of the few things he’d be willing to die for. Was this place worth it? His pride—not his death. Even though at this point, they were practically indistinguishable.

He wouldn’t drop the rifle. It had become a fixed part of him. He considered a number of caustic comments alluding to Gary, but when he opened his mouth, something else entirely slunk out:

“I’ve never fired a rifle in my life,” he mumbled.

As if automatically, Hitch faced the sheriff. A glint in those steely eyes sparked when, for a moment, Hitch’s locked onto them, consumed with the same regard he’d paid the double barrel of his rifle. The pistol between them seemed to expand in that heady instant, or the world narrowed around it, dissolving into fragments, leaving only the smell of flesh and sweat and the taste of clenched teeth. Somewhere in the background was the vaguest, whining voice, pulsing with unintelligible sounds. At Hitch’s thigh the rifle pressed like an extension of his taut arm, but instead of feeling it, Hitch only felt the resistance of the pistol trigger against the sheriff ’s forefinger, and the somewhat weightless sensation in his own rifle arm—or, perhaps, it was the other way around, Hitch’s flesh bent around a trigger, and the wide-eyed sheriff— The answer got lost in a grunt and a bang.

I’ve never fired a rifle in my life.

Annie Shao By the Sea Watercolor

Annie Shao By the Lake Watercolor

Annie Shao In my Mind Watercolor

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Cassia Naughton Green Refelctions Photography

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ESSAYS

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Rags to Riches: The Impact of Ragtime on Respect for African-Americans in the Early 20th Century Michelle Tong

Music is the universal language of mankind. Its melodies never judge by wealth, discriminate by gender, or victimize by race, but instead create an anthem under which human beings progress and prevail. As seen in African-American culture, music brought over by slaves in the 1500s subsisted through plantation life, allowing the people to use dance and song to bury their oppression and distress. This traditional African music eventually morphed into the “black sounds” of ragtime, a genre that soon won over the hearts and ears of the American people. By triggering American nationalism and creating the modern music industry at the turn of the twentieth century, ragtime was a driving force for recognition and respect for African-Americans in the United States.

At the beginning of Reconstruction, race relations were at a point of crisis; the Union reconciled with the South by forfeiting black rights, making the black population a “martyr” in the movement toward pacifying and incorporating the conquered South back into the nation.

Hasty attempts to rebuild the South economically and politically left little enforcement of laws that hoped to

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successfully introduce former slaves into free American society, inevitably perpetuating the unfavorable stereotype of African-Americans as lazy, promiscuous, and unlawful.

Once coon songs were popularized in the early 1880s, the degrading black stereotypes were reinforced as a socially accepted definition of all African-American character. As black artists started to perform coon songs solely for the economic benefits, as seen in Ernest Hogan’s hit “All Coons Look Alike to Me,” both races saw black mockery as the new social standard (Schafer and Riedel 1973, 25).

The black community at first tolerated the ridicule, but they later turned against the style, particularly the songs with offensive lyrics, and instead welcomed the advent of ragtime in the 1890s as it lessened the status of coon songs and diverged from the musical norm (Berlin 2007, 33).

Though ragtime can often be confused with the earlier coon songs, ragtime was often more instrumental than lyrical, making it easier to deviate from stereotypes of the preceding era. In addition, ragtime was easily distinguished by a syncopated tune accompanied by a steady, duple beat that derived from traditional

plantation songs and dances. Formerly called “breakdown” by African-American artists, ragtime “broke down” the rhythm by “ragging” it on the piano, or in other words, simply anticipating the melody of the right hand with the beat of the left hand. Such a distinctive sound promoted ragtime as a definite genre by the end of the 1890s and eventually made the music tremendously in vogue by the 1910s (Haney 1976, 52).

One of the main reasons for ragtime’s prevalence was its direct contradiction to the previous style.

European influences dominated American culture before ragtime came about, with music that was typically popular among middle to upper class citizens. Borrowing from Beethoven to Mozart to Bach, American musicians repeatedly performed generic pieces that sounded like pure imitations of their European counterparts.

Fortunately, ragtime provided America with its first true cultural identity, serving as the very basis for an American school of composition and even as influence for newer European artists. Renowned European composers that picked up on ragtime styles included Czech Antonín Dvořák who harnessed ragtime sounds in his

symphony “From the New World” and his piece “Ragtime Quartet,” French Claude Debussy who used loose syncopation in “Golliwog’s Cakewalk” and “Minstrels,” and Russian Igor Stravinsky who arranged “Ragtime For 11 Instruments” (Schafer and Riedel 1973, 43). Upon attending a masked ball with music provided by two black musicians, German artist Dr. Gustav Kühl described ragtime to “captivate his senses,” praising the music as “irresistible and fascinating” (qtd. in Hasse 1985, 17). Ragtime’s rising status in Europe even boosted American morale, making Americans proud to have a nation independent from constant European authority (Tichenor and Jasen 1978, 12).

With such acceptance from European countries, it’s to no surprise that Americans were also consumed by the fervor of ragtime. Hiram K. Moderwell, major American music critic for the Liberator, stated that ragtime “expresses the dynamic American personality ... something that no European music can or possibly could do,” affirming ragtime’s power to unify the nation culturally (qtd. in Gammond 1975, 114). Once Scott Joplin’s million-selling hit “Maple Leaf Rag” established ragtime’s official prominence in 1899, Americans, regardless of their backgrounds, took ragtime into their homes. Although some said that ragtime was only popular among the lower-class youth as a way to “rebel” against their parents, its music was actually most celebrated by middle-class white women aged twenty to forty who learned piano as part of their “cultural upbringing” (Hasse 1985, 20). These amateur musicians often bought sheet music at dime stores and later willingly introduced ragtime to their children after the National Conference of Music Supervisors said that ragtime “encouraged individual music ability” (qtd. in Argyle 2009, 37). Shedding the stereotype of being “immoral black” music, ragtime was not only the first American genre of music, but also the first American music to have members representative of different races and social standings. Because of its unifying feature, Professor Harold Bloom attributes ragtime to increasing American nationalism, giving the nation the satisfaction of “overthrowing the past aristocratically-dictated European style” (Bloom 2002, 125).

Ragtime was the first form of music that the American people could boast about; no other country could match the distinctively playful yet equally

sophisticated qualities of its melodies.

It was the beginning of this nationalism that popularized ragtime into a mass culture that catalyzed the modern American music industry.

The active amateur music movement resulted in the wide sale of sheet music and parlor pianos, the latter being a symbol of the arrival of a new middle class (Haney 1976, 43). Data from the National Bureau of Economic Research showed that piano production and the number of published rags both reached a sales peak in 1909, affirming the interdependence of the two — it’s only logical that a piano was purchased for sheet music or that sheet music was purchased for a piano (Hasse 1985, 15). Increased involvement by the middle class was one of the most important causes for ragtime’s acceptance into white society; without their endorsement to the rest of the American public, ragtime would have still been considered the “savage” and “bestial” music of African-Americans (qtd. in Jasen and Jones 2002, 58).

Aside from ragtime’s impact on the personal lives of Americans, it also changed the music industry itself, revolutionizing the business. The pre1890s music industry had no firmly established occupations of composers, lyricists, or publishers, a fault that prolonged the process of publicizing songs on demand; the very few firms that existed were just small companies that rented most of their equipment and that hired salesmen only temporarily to get specific commissions (Jasen 1988, 152). In the 1890s, however, the introduction of ragtime popularized songs with the new ability to make single pieces nationwide hits.

Americans in Wisconsin soon could enjoy the same songs as Americans in New York (Blesh 1971, 42). Located in Manhattan, Tin Pan Alley was the first of these modern “salesman-composer-publisher” firms that promoted ragtime in order to acquire enough potential sheet music customers. The Alley had no discretion about where or how it advertised, seeking endorsement from brothels to orchestral theaters by hiring “pluggers” to perform in these various venues. Though some claim the Alley obliterated much of ragtime’s performance intricacy with these questionable promotion methods, it almost single-handedly fostered some of the largest publishing houses of the time and most importantly made ragtime a “social norm” in American households (Evans 1976, 83). Publication finally brought

ragtime, and in turn the black race, much needed respect: without advertising, ragtime would have remained unnoticed, unable to attract white consumers that would verify ragtime as a socially acceptable form of music (Tichenor and Jasen 1978, 179).

Seeing an appeal for ragtime across country, many white publishing firms in the Alley wanted to expand their already accomplished businesses by sponsoring black composers.

Chief firms such as Joseph W. Stem & Company and M. Witmark & Sons published talented black artists from Gussie Davis to James Vaughn; in addition, pioneer publisher John Stark worked with black pianist Scott Joplin for ten consecutive years. This economic exploitation of African- American artists, though seemingly debasing towards black musicians, actually helped the black public image: no matter how much Stark manipulated Joplin’s payment agreements behind the curtain, the public only saw it as the first positive form of white and black business cooperation, establishing a optimistic precedent for future partnerships (Preston 1988, 87).

As initial white and black business cooperation began, more African-Americans opened their own publishing firms as well, with some of their firms even surpassing the sales of prominent white industries. Black Swan Records, originating from the African-American Pace & Handy Company of 1914, was the most lucrative and esteemed of the new black firms; consumers, white and black, said that the company presented “the best music” of the time period (qtd. in Baumann et al. 2011, 44). The company advertised in a monthly trade press distributed to white audiences and in 1917, Handy was invited to New York to perform for Columbia Records, which at the time was a predominately white studio. The presence of these black firms sparked a beneficial rivalry between white and black businesses.

David Suisman, a leading authority on popular music in America, believes that rivalry between white and black publishing firms was simply rooted in economic, and not just racial, conflict; he argues that recognition of AfricanAmericans as aggressive business competitors effectively extended respect for the black race, fulfilling Pace’s goal of “challenging white public opinion about the Negro’s qualities and capabilities” (1297).

The economic exploitation of African-Americans also carried out the ideals of Booker T. Washington

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Amy Bohnenkamp Model: Abby Ernst Photographer: Heidi Bohnenkamp

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and W.E.B. Du Bois, both reformers during the twentieth century with seemingly contrasting, but fundamentally similar platforms. The introduction of blacks to the “higher-end” of the American economy encouraged respect for African-Americans in two ways: economically, it allowed blacks to play a vital role in the music industry, both as artists and as firm managers, which complied with Washington’s need for economic before social stability; culturally, it strengthened the black role in American music, asserting African-Americans as “co-workers [with whites] in the kingdom of culture,” which met Du Bois’ standards of complete social recognition (qtd. in Jasen and Jones 2002, 23).

Taking it even further, ragtime was also considered a way for cosmopolitan black musicians to “challenge the racial status quo,” and thus, for the first time in American history, allowed blacks to “participate in the creation of modern discourse” (qtd. in Schroeder 2010, 139). To whichever extent is irrelevant, but under the new music industry, ragtime definitely provided a popularized medium that endorsed the public image of talented and capable African-Americans.

The combination of increased nationalism and the evolution of the music industry ultimately culminated in a preliminary respect for African-Americans in the United States. Though to no means a complete admission of blacks into white society, black ragtime musicians that began to perform at white events exemplified the white race’s greater appreciation for African-American artists. The most momentous of these

instances was seen in Chicago’s 1893 Columbian World Exposition where more than 20 million attendees experienced the sounds of Scott Joplin, Ben Harney, Jesse Pickett, and Johnny Seymour. Although minimal press coverage made it unknown whether these black musicians performed within fairgrounds or just within surrounding areas, visitors were, in either way, thrilled by the “jubilant sounds of this new music” (qtd. in Berlin 2012).

Furthermore, black artists Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake launched ragtime careers extremely in demand by private parties in New York’s wealthiest homes, and mulatto performer Louis Chauvin won a ragtime “cutting contest” at the Saint Louis World’s Fair, a strictly white event (Hasse 1985, 21).

Besides appearances in white occasions, black musicians, in particular Scott Joplin, received raving reviews from white critics. After

Joplin performed in The Creole Show near the Columbian World Exposition, Iowan newspaper the Evening Gazette commended Joplin’s performance as “excellent and invigorating” (qtd. in Argyle 2009, 11). Later on, W.H. Carter and M.H. Rosenfeld of the Sedalia Times and the St. Louis Globe-Democrat respectively, recognized Joplin’s important role in ragtime; Rosenfeld attributed Joplin to having “more instrumental success than any other composer” and Carter labeled Joplin as “the great king of ‘Rag Time’” (qtd. in Blesh and Janis 1971, 67). In another case, aspiring white composer Joseph Lamb went specifically to Joplin for ragtime advice, illustrating how the transformation in race relations between whites and blacks began in the ragtime music industry (Evans 1976, 91).

Acceptance of black ragtime artists by white critics soon trickled down to the average white society.

In comparison to a pre-1880s “coon song” America, ragtime music was a breakthrough in providing common ground between white and black communities. For instance, a 1900 New York Times article advertised a “colored carnival” next to a white cakewalk at Grand Central Palace, demonstrating the literal and figurative proximity of developing white and black culture (“Cakewalk” 1900, 1). By the mid-1920s, white publishers and recording companies began publicly dismissing the racist lyrics of coon songs still in circulation. White music critic Sylvester Russell wrote that musicians should not compose songs “that are a direct insult or direct insinuation to the colored race” (qtd. in Schroeder 2010, 141), and white composer Fred Fischer changed the title of his song “If the Man in the Moon Were a Coon” to “If the Man in the Moon Were a Loon” in 1923 because by then, the term “coon” was no longer acceptable. The case of Fred Fischer was most applicable to the music of the time as there was often a general progression of song titles from disparaging to neutral connotations; for example, the derogatory 1896 song “My Coal Black Lady” compared to the unbiased 1902 piece “The Entertainer” demonstrated the changing prejudices towards blacks and proved the importance of the music industry in lessening negative black stereotypes (Charters 1965, 8).

Nonetheless, some argue that ragtime had little impact on effectively gaining respect for blacks.

Oftentimes, they assert that nothing

until the African-American Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s actually granted or enforced laws protecting black rights (Baumann et al. 2011, 58).

On the other hand, critics often forget to recognize that for the time period from the Reconstruction era to the arrival of ragtime, the initial development of race relations was extremely significant. Moving from running a slave society to attempting to assimilate African-Americans into white culture required the unprecedented efforts of debasing the nearly 300 years of labeling blacks as inferior “property” (Gammond 1975, 97). With that into consideration, ragtime was the first popular culture movement of the United States that dampened anti-black sentiments, specifically in the form of racist stereotypes through coon songs. Though there were still famous minstrel performances in play, ragtime offered an alternate and more positive image of African-Americans (Goldberg 1930, 36). Ultimately, its music provided a stepping stone to illustrate the ability of blacks to become just as successful, influential, and powerful as the whites of the time.

Through triggering American nationalism and creating the modern music industry, ragtime spread recognition and respect for African-Americans with its methods of mass culture. The beat of ragtime mesmerized even the “whitest” of the public, providing the United States with its first nationally recognized

genre and its first internationally prized music businesses. Although ragtime didn’t entail an absolute assimilation of blacks into white society, the top black composers improved the public image of all African-Americans, serving as the first step in the acceptance of the black race. Could a ragtime revival in a twenty-first century America also ignite a much needed national unification movement? It’s possible. After all, it’s the song of ragtime that is the true universal language of mankind.

Above Yolanda Arellano Woosuk with Leopard Masks Ballpoint pen

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Works Cited Argyle, Ray. Scott Joplin and the Age of Ragtime, (London: McFarland & Company, 2009).

Baumann, Timothy, Andrew Hurley, et al. “Interpreting Uncomfortable History at the Scott Joplin House State Historic Site in St. Louis, Missouri.”

Public Historian. 33.2 (2011): 37-66.

Berlin, Edward. Ragtime: A Musical and Cultural History, (Berkeley: U of California Press, 1980).

Berlin, Edward. “Ragtime.” Oxford Music Online. Oxford UP, 2007, accessed February 3, 2012.

Blesh, Rudi, and Harriet Janis. They All Played Ragtime, (New York: Oak Publications, 1971).

Bloom, Harold. E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, (Chelsea House Publishers: Philadelphia, 2002).

“Cakewalk and Colored Carnival,” New York Times (1857-1922) 9 Jan. 1900: 7, accessed 9 February 9 2012.

Charters, Ann. The Ragtime Songbook, (New York: Oak Publications, 1965).

Evans, Mark. Scott Joplin and the Ragtime Years, (New York: Mead & Company, 1976).

Gammond, Peter. Scott Joplin and the Ragtime Era, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975).

Goldberg, Isaac. Tin Pan Alley: A Chronicle of the American Popular Music Racket, (New York: John Day Company, 1930).

Haney, Clement. The Ragtime Era, (New York: Belmont Tower Books, 1976).

Hasse, John Edward. Ragtime: Its History, Composers, and Music, (New York: Schirmer Books, 1985).

Jasen, David, and Gene Jones. Black Bottom Stomp: Eight Masters of Ragtime and Early Jazz, (London: Routledge, 2002).

Jasen, David. Tin Pan Alley: The Composers, the Songs, the Performers, and Their Times, (New York: Donald I. Fine, 1988).

Preston, Katherine. Scott Joplin, (Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 1988).

Schafer, William, and Johannes Riedel. The Art of Ragtime: Form and Meaning of an Original Black American Art, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1973).

Schroeder, Patricia, “Passing for Black: Coon Songs and the Performance of Race,” Journal of American Culture. 33.2 (2010): 139-154, accessed February 9, 2012.

Suisman, David, “Co-Workers in the Kingdom of Culture: Black Swan Records and the Political Economy of African-American Music,” Journal of American History. 90.4 (2004): 1295- 1324.

Tichenor, Trebor Jay, and David Jasen. Rags and Ragtime: A Musical History, (New York: Sebury Press, 1978).

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Dark was the Night Alex Beck

“I … never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face,”1 so infamously declared prominent art critic John Ruskin after viewing James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (see Figure 1), an oilon-wood painting first exhibited in 1877. Whistler’s abstract work depicts a nighttime rocket display at a river’s edge, vaguely illuminating a building’s outline. Though it no longer carries the same shock value for art viewers today, his anti-academic work nevertheless fundamentally challenged what constitutes “art.” Critics have routinely regarded Nocturne in Black and Gold as devoid of meaning, focusing more in their analyses on the question of art’s nature. A New York Sun writer, for example, submitted that the work represents “the abstract appeal of painting, divorced as far as possible from any idea conveyable in words.”2 I will argue, instead, that through Whistler’s use of color, light, viewpoint, and style, The Falling Rocket expresses the artist’s ambivalence toward modernity’s technological evolution.

Whistler’s use of color and light in Nocturne in Black and Gold suggests the artist’s anticipation of the future. The foreground of the painting shows the pallid, tan bank of a river, partially illuminated by a source above the river’s far side. Two dark smudges suggest the outlines of human figures, looking across the river. Together, this use of clear color and relatively bright light imparts a sense of clarity and normality to this side of the river. Whistler’s conscious placement of the viewer, moreover, encourages an investiga-

Figure 1. James Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (1875).

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curtain of night and smoke enshrouding the Cremorne Gardens and Battersea Bridge. Whistler’s juxtaposition of knowable near riverbank with enigmatic far bank advances this theme, while referencing another of his works, Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Old Battersea Bridge (see Figure 3). Indeed, Whistler’s emphasis in both Nocturne paintings on the proximate, knowable, and technologically less impressive near objects over the exciting yet somewhat threatening far-off images ultimately suggests that The Falling Rocket reveals the author’s anticipation and anxiety about the future of modernity, rather than merely his interrogation of art’s conventions.

Figure 2. Image depicting the spired entrance to the Cremorne Gardens.

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tion of the nearly visible scene on the river’s opposite bank. In contrast to the comparative light of the viewer’s riverbank, the far bank is dark and obscured by dark blue and black, with flecks of red, orange, and gold both raining from the sky and emanating from a shape resembling the outline of a stage. This section of the painting containing the stage, which dominates over three-fourths of the entire work, is veiled by smoke and difficult to penetrate. The artist prompts viewers to stare into this pall and to attempt to discern the shapes on the river’s far side.

Many art critics have interpreted the obscure, abstract presentation of Nocturne in Black and Gold as Whistler’s attempt to evoke an emotional response from viewers rather than to demonstrate some larger point. A historical reading of the scene, however, suggests that the work has a decidedly technological, forward-looking perspective.

According to Whistler himself, the scene shows a definite location and “represents the fireworks at Cremorne Gardens,” a pleasure garden alongside the River Thames in London that thrived in the mid- to late-nineteenth century.3 Upon further inspection of the painting, the immaterial shapes on the opposite banks of the Thames begin to take form. In the middle of Whistler’s work to the left of the central line of rocket sparks and above the plume of smoke above the water, two spires are visible. When referenced with Figure 2, which depicts the spires at the entrance of the gardens in the nineteenth century, it becomes apparent that these specific lights are not sparks from the rocket. Rather, they are gas lamps, a 20th century technological innovation, adorning the Cremorne Gardens’ entrance. Ad-

ditionally, though greatly obscured by the smoke and darkness of the night, Whistler hints at the presence of a contemporary installation, the Old Battersea Bridge, on the right side of the painting. This bridge, a flimsy timber installation completed in the early 1770s, had a shoddy safety record and had been renovated a number of times throughout its existence. Significantly, in 1873, two years before Whistler’s completion of Nocturne in Black and Gold, the bridge underwent massive renovation that removed two supports from its base to make it more navigable and bolstered the structure with iron girders, a hallmark of industrialization4. Whistler would have been keenly aware of these undertakings since he lived very close to the pleasure garden.

Taken together, these visual cues and historical facts suggest that Nocturne in Black and Gold may hold deeper significance beyond a mere questioning of art’s nature. On the one hand, the rear riverbank is recognizable: other apparently human figures sit with the viewer, peering across the murky waters at a public space that exists solely to delight patrons. The Cremorne Gardens are illuminated both by the fleeting light of rockets and the manmade light of gas lamps, and the newly-renovated bridge sits just beyond the sight of observers of the painting. This “not-yet-attainable” area of enjoyment and wonder reflects the spirit of the 1870s, when technological innovation and change were rapidly occurring. This period of novelty and hasty transformation was both exciting and whimsical, as suggested by the shower of golden fireworks; it was also unpredictable and potentially disconcerting, however, a mood Whistler captures through his use of color and light in the black

Figure 3. James Whistler’s Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Old Battersea Bridge (1872-5).

Paige Ida Flight of Fury Painting Works Cited Davenport, Neil. Thames Bridges: From Dartford to the Source. Kettering: Silver Link, 2006. Print.

Merrill, Linda. A Pot of Paint: Aesthetics on Trial in Whistler v Ruskin. Washington: Smithsonian Institution in Collaboration with the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1992. Print.

Nead, Lynda. Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-century London. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000. Print.

Sharpe, William. New York Nocturne: The City after Dark in Literature, Painting, and Photography, 1850-1950. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2008. Print.

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Ella Williquette

Fear of Man Oil on canvas

Min Zhang A Math Girl

Pencil drawing 54

Holly Hovanec There Was Once Clarity Photograph

Alexandra Dworak Untitled

Graphite pencil on drawing paper

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Jenny Quilty Out Come The Knives, Part I Mixed media on canvas

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Bus to the School of Hard Knocks Sam French

I’ll always remember my first time.

It was gentler than I expected. It wasn’t like anything I’d ever imagined, but, to be honest, I had never really thought much about it. I had expected something more from it. Maybe something a little more personal, interesting, or more like you see in the movies. In reality, it’s dirtier and more awkward. It was weird having it happen out in the open, with so many people I knew around me. Later I would feel ashamed, but then I was just too hammered to appreciate what was happening. At this point I should mention that, no, I am not about to describe my first magical foray into the misadventures of sex, but the story of my first time being arrested. So I guess I could still say I was fucked, you know, just not in the usual preferable meaning of the word.

I guess I can’t even say I was arrested, since it was only a misdemeanor and a citation. I’ll tell you now that it was for public intoxication, underage drinking, and obstruction. At the start of the day I never would have guessed that what was supposed to be one of the best days of my summer would turn into one of the worst moments of my life. It was a typical Wisconsin June day, and the sun was baking anything that was brave enough to face it for more than a few moments. It was almost enough to make you wish for winter again (not really). My friends and I had all bought tickets to go to a Zac Brown Band concert a couple of hours away. It was typical summer listening. Music about fried chicken, sandy asses, and booze. And since the sun was practically screaming at

us to have a drink, we were going to damn well listen to it. We thought of ourselves as a group of responsible youths so we chartered a bus so there would be no chance of any drunk driving. However, since we were more youth than responsible, we packed the bus full of liquor. The bus could only be described as if The Magic School Bus had been about kids with severe drinking problems and Mrs. Frizzle was entirely the hallucinatory result of severe inebriation. Backpacks, which had previously been filled with textbooks and notebooks, were now filled to the brim with booze to ensure even the most minute traces of school were obliterated from our memory. I had brought a whole case of beer and a handle of vodka. I wasn’t sure I was intending to share. The plan was for us to be driven there and back to the concert in the comfort of our very own booze bus. Not everything went according to the plan.

Before I go any further I need to make a few excuses for myself.

This story took place in a sort of sensitive, transitional time for me, and I was angry, bitter, and disenchanted for reasons I’ll go into later. That being said, I really messed up. This story is not so much about the colossal mess I got myself into, or about the dark trials of my life. I’m hoping to get at something more than that. This is the story about what happens after I get arrested; this is a story of reconstruction. Sometimes you can’t find the lessons in the mistakes you’ve made, or find reasons for the trials you’ve faced. That’s why I’m writing this.

Hopefully by writing this story I can

find something good in the darkness of my past.

The bus was a dream come true for any underage college kid.

There was enough alcohol in it to render the 25 of us stupidly blackout drunk. It was fate that I should get blackout, or at least that’s what I thought it was. I certainly wasn’t going to be fighting my destiny, and I had accepted that destiny was telling me to slam back beer after beer. It was a twohour drive, and we drank continuously throughout it as if the very liquor we were consuming was the fuel powering the bus. I can really only speak for myself, but it’s safe to say that almost all of us were obliterated by the time we arrived at the concert.

In fact, I was so hammered that I’m unable to tell the definitive, whole story, but I’ll give you the highlights (conveniently the parts I remember).

We got off the bus and continued to drink while waiting for the concert to start. At this point, the only thing keeping me standing must have been some deep hatred for myself. I was a disaster waiting to happen. I was numb to the world, but that had been what I wanted. Thinking about it now, I realize that I had wanted disaster. I wanted a disaster of my own making; some dark misfortune that I controlled (I had also just wanted to get really, really drunk). I know I played some beer pong, and it’s entirely possible I didn’t make a single shot.

Beer pong was extremely rigorous and exhausting for somebody as wasted as me, so of course I had to refuel. I returned to my backpack, and whipped out my trusted handle of vodka. I

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Lucia Hodkiewz Leaf Gradient

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must have thought that the amount of pure vodka I consumed in a pull was proportional to the amount of fun I would have because I drank from that bottle like I was about to undergo Civil War surgery (the amount suggested maybe an amputation, possibly even a double amputation). Blitzed, blackedout, hammered, bombed, juiced, sauced, shit faced. There’s a lot of fun words for being extremely drunk and we were trying to be the manifestation of all of them (like an adult version of Snow White’s seven dwarfs where all of us either chose between being Dopey or Happy). After a couple of hours of enjoying the triumph of the booze bus, things took a turn for the worse.

Suddenly, the police approached, and one of my friends and I were the only ones dumb and slow enough to stick around. We were both immediately breathalyzed. My friend blew a .14, and I blew a .27. They asked for my identification. I gave them a fake. They then asked for the real one. I gave them a second fake identical to the first (if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again). They weren’t entertained.

My blood alcohol content was too high for me to be allowed to remain in public, and the police were worried I was going to need to go to detox.

Both of these reasons were more than enough to warrant my detention, but I wasn’t having any of it. I was too drunk and too angry to make the smart choice. I became aggressive and started resisting. They wanted some

cooperation out of me and I wasn’t giving it to them. At that moment, I was super human (and just really, really drunk). I wasn’t about to let these lowly police officers rain on my parade. That’s when they whipped out the kryptonite to all those who have tread on the wrong side of the law. I watched as the officer, seemingly in slow motion, reached for his handcuffs.

As you can see, this story isn’t going to end well. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not a bad guy. This was actually my first time being on the wrong side of the law, but like I said I wasn’t really the happiest man in the world. I was consumed by murky questions with answers I wasn’t really sure I wanted to know. I guess you could say I had finally grown up. I had realized that life was never getting any easier, and that you don’t always get what you want. In fact, you rarely get what you want. I didn’t want a perfect life, but I was willing to settle for normal. I wanted there to be reasons for the bad things in my life. I wanted fate to explain itself. I wanted the lessons that I had been taught as a child to be true. I hadn’t expected life to be a perfect fantasy, but I had expected it to not be an unyielding nightmare. Everything (let’s not be dramatic, this could probably be said as most things) I’ve ever truly wanted in life has been taken from me. I’ve failed at everything (screw it, bring on the drama) that I’ve given my all.

Time and time again, I’ve watched my dreams, once effervescent and brilliant, turn to ash just beyond the reach of my outstretched hands (drama take the wheel). I’ve always fallen just a bit short of the goals and destinations I’ve dreamed of. I’m not trying to tell you a sob story; my life has been no more difficult than the average person’s.

In fact, it’s probably been easier than most (white American male checking in). Everybody, at one point or another, has not gotten what they wanted. As they say, “life’s a bitch and then you die.” It wasn’t this realization that burnt me up so much, but more the garbage that I had been force-fed with a shovel my whole life regarding following your dreams. You’ve all heard the proverbs and sayings. “Pain is weakness leaving the body.” “Hard work never killed anybody.” “Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.” “Shoot for the moon, even if you miss you’ll land among the stars.” And my personal favorite, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” These phrases are a dime a dozen and they’re all bullshit. I’d been shooting for the moon, and I’d be happy at this point if I landed anywhere besides where I started. What doesn’t kill you will only make you wish it had. But I digress. To understand why I was so messed up when I was arrested, you need to know about the failures of my past.

Like all people, my life has had its fair share of troubles. I watched

my life split in two before I was even in third grade. I don’t remember much before my parents’ divorce, but I remember enough to be able to say that everything after was completely different. The divorce was messier than most. Suddenly, it was like everything had been broken into two different pieces. Two jagged, fragmented pieces that hated each other. My parents sold our old house and bought two different ones. My things, my family, and my life were divided between those two houses. Monday and Wednesday was life with Mom, and Tuesday and Thursday was life with Dad. Weekends and holidays switched off (I had two Christmases so I guess these things cancel, right?) The usual divorce antics ensued. I listened as my parents talked shit about each other while they argued who would pay for what. My mom (bless her heart) came out as a lesbian, and my dad lost his job at an engineering firm all before I was out of middle school. My mom got as closed to married as legally possible to the woman who has been her life partner ever since soon after.

(CAUTION: extremely corrosive sarcasm ahead). Since adolescents have always been known for their extreme kindness, my peers immediately accepted me for my new and unusual family background. They had all kinds of things to say about my mother’s new sexual orientation, and it wasn’t helping that I wasn’t able to afford the classic middle school Abercrombie

look. My fellow classmates were also kind enough to inform me that I was also overweight. Thus, entering high school, it was fate that I would obsessively fall in love with running as only a slightly emotionally unstable, fat, and pubescent teenager could.

I lived and breathed running. I was part of the long distance track and cross-country team. The more I ran, the more weight I lost and the better I felt about myself. Eventually, just running wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to be the best at running, or at least I wanted to be one of the best. My goal was to make it to the state track meet.

I trained and then trained some more.

As a high school student, going to state was my biggest goal. But life had different plans. I made it to state, but I wasn’t running. My hard work hadn’t been enough. I was defeated by those life had seen fit to gift with natural talent. Prodigies who were all younger than me, 20-50 pounds lighter than me, and who all considered running nothing more than something they were good at. I ended up an alternate on the 4 by 800 meter relay. They took second place, and I even received a medal. The slowest runner on the relay ran a time that I had run faster than in the past. I hate that damn medal, but for some reason I’ve kept it. I even brought it to college with me.

I wish I could tell you why; I guess it’s a reminder of something. It’s funny how life works. I hadn’t achieved my goal, but life was going to make sure I

knew what I was missing out on.

The shame of failing to realize my running dreams led me to join the crew team when I entered college.

Once again, circumstances led me to become fixated with this new sport.

College is already a trying time for everyone. I had already been struggling to make new friends and adapt to life on my own. It was just so new and different than anything I had previously experienced. However, life must have felt that adapting to college alone wasn’t enough. One of my grandmother’s biggest wishes was to see my siblings and me go through college. I remember many conversations with her in high school over the phone where I rolled my eyes as I assured her I was working hard in my studies.

I was always in a rush to hand off the phone to one of my siblings. She always loved hearing about what we were learning, and was always telling me how smart I was (that’s grandmothers for you; she also insisted I was the handsomest boy). I wish I had spent more time talking to her about school. She wanted us to go to college so much that she and my grandfather were going to pay for it. She died a few weeks before the semester started. I never had a chance to say thank you.

I told myself that I would work even harder in school in her memory. Her death pushed me through the semester, and if she had been able to ask me if I was working hard in my studies I would have responded with a definite

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yes. Then, midway through the semester I learned my father’s house was being foreclosed. I had thought I had understood my father’s financial troubles, but I never expected this. I called all my siblings and we couldn’t understand it. We hadn’t ever thought he would lose the very home that we grew up in. It was like the floor dropped out from underneath us. My first home was taken when my parents were divorced, and I wasn’t ready to lose my second home. Over winter break, I spent my free time throwing my childhood into black garbage bags, and watched the pain of a grown man having to choose which parts of his life were worth keeping and which were destined for a landfill. I centered myself with rowing. I faced these trials by dedicating myself wholly to training. I was working hard to help escape the darkness that had recently seeped into my life. I kept myself busy with constantly striving to become better in my newfound sport. But once again, life laughed at my plans.

This time, life didn’t even give me a chance to fail at following my dreams.

Before the school year was even over, I herniated a disc in my spine and was told I would likely never row again, and if I was able to row I’d only hurt my back further. I had built up this image of myself as a student athlete, and had been wearing it like armor the whole school year. I was part of a team and a family. I had enjoyed the sense of belonging it gave me. We all enjoyed the special privileges of being athletes, and enjoyed the free athletic apparel even more. In that short trip to the doctor’s I was stripped of it all.

I had been given a Wisconsin Rowing crew neck when I was officially made part of the team. I think I must have worn it at least once a week that year.

This year it has lain untouched at the bottom of my drawer gathering dust, just like my dreams of being a collegiate rower.

Entering that summer, I was quickly realizing life wasn’t really stacking up to what I expected of it. I became angry and depressed. I started to rebel a little. I had had it with life. I was going to show life that I wasn’t afraid of losing it. I took a few steps towards the edge. I shaved my head, and bought a motorcycle (I was clearly not being very creative in my half-hearted attempts at self-destruction). I started drinking a lot more.

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If life didn’t want me to achieve my goals, then I was just going to beat it by not having any. Previously, I had been driven and motivated, but now I was listless and unfocused. I didn’t think about moving forward at all. All I cared about was having a good time.

I was angry and sorry for myself all the time. I spent a lot of time alone in my room, and I’m sure my parents didn’t see me as great company. My back kept me in near constant pain, and I was most comfortable lying down. I would lay in my room just wishing I was numb. This was the behavior that brings us back to the original story.

I was too drunk to remember a lot of the details that occurred that day (keep in mind this story all occurred before 3 in the afternoon), but I remember those handcuffs.

They weren’t as shiny as I expected.

They were dull, dark, and gunmetal colored. There was nothing bright about them. Even after they brought them out I continued to resist. They forced me to the ground, and slapped them around my wrists. They were cool to the touch. Smooth, secure steel encircled my wrists, and I wrenched my hands against them. I didn’t like the handcuffs. The bite as they bit into my wrists wasn’t cold. The next morning I would wake up with bruises and welts around my wrists like a shameful tattoo. After they had me under control they started walking me to the police pavilion. I remember seeing my friends look away as I walked past them. At the pavilion, the police decided to give me a break and not send me to detox. Then, I almost wish they had.

Instead of calling detox, they called my father to pick me up.

What I haven’t mentioned yet is that the day I was arrested was also the date of my younger sister’s high school graduation. On top of that, my father had learned that his brother had died just that morning. I was clearly not winning any son of the year awards anytime soon. He wasn’t happy, but he seemed to understand. He remained calm; there was no yelling. The disappointment, however, was palpable.

I could feel it in the air and see it in his eyes. He knew that I was in a bad place, but he was disappointed that this was how I was going to deal with it. As he drove me home from my run in with the police, I sat in

the front seat crying like only a blackout drunk, quasi-man teen grappling with crushing shame, inexplicable fear, and seeping uncertainty could cry. Between sobs I asked him, “What’s the point?” I was furious. Anger and unfocused hate coursed through me and singed me to the very fiber of my being. I didn’t and couldn’t understand it all. Life looked with contempt on my goals, and my lack of them. I had never really thought about fate, but I began to curse it.

Everything I had been taught as a child seemed to make it worse. All those proverbs about pain and hard work hadn’t gotten me anywhere. My father worked hard and had his house taken from him.

He had loved with all his heart and his girlfriend of eight years, who was like a mother to me, left him. After she left was the first and last time my siblings and I had ever seen him cry. My mom used to come home from work and lecture me that hard work is the key to life, and that I need to be prepared to work if I want to be successful. She’d follow this sermon with a bottle of wine and then pass out on the couch after begging me to tell her if I really loved her. She quit drinking my senior year of high school. She quit her job the summer between my freshman and sophomore year of college, and is now the happiest I’ve ever seen her. She laughs more, and seems to be almost serene. I’ve watched her just sit outside on the porch in the sunlight for hours in the summer.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen her do that before. She got married in New York over Thanksgiving break. So why do we drive ourselves into the ground, and bleed and cry for things we may never reach? Why do we continue to rise, only to be pushed down again? I wish I had answers, but, like I said earlier, life rarely grants our wishes. I’m still trying to find meaning in my failures, but it helps that I’m starting to look at them in new ways. Ernest Hemingway once said, “The world breaks everyone, and where they were once broken they find they are now strong.” I went to Argentina once, and broke my finger while I was there. I dislocated it and shattered the joint. I spent a summer with three pins in that broken finger. The doctor told me that the previously broken joint was now thicker and stronger than before. He also told me that I’d have very little ability to move the finger and I’d also likely experience arthritis like symptoms in my hand. So I guess Hemingway was at least half right. The world had broken me, and I was stronger for being broken.

But now, like my broken ring finger, I was crippled, pained, and just not the same.

Suzy Peterson Untitled Photography

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People Who Climb Mountains Monica Nigon After reading the book Into Thin Air, a tale describing the death of eight climbers and the trauma of the survivors on Mount Everest, I somehow decided that climbing a mountain sounded like a hell-of-a good time.

This rather concerning obsession with risk and death peaked when I was 14, and following the completion of particularly unsettling story about a crew of young climbers stranded in Nepal, I posed a question to my mother: “Hey Mom, will you climb a mountain with me someday?”

It is a testament to her unique motherly characteristics, or perhaps her own thrill-seeking tendencies, that she responded with a prompt, “Of course!”

Eight years later, it was this exchange that brought me to the 24th floor of a towering building in Rochester, Minnesota, watching the backs of my mother’s calves ascend over 100 flights of stairs. We were training to climb Longs Peak, the tallest mountain in Rocky Mountain National Park.

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As I’ve grown older, I’ve reflected upon these intriguing attributes of my mother and myself and concluded that we who choose to climb mountains are an interesting bunch. In addition to the self-inflicted physical pain and the irrational need to feel exposed and out of touch with the world, there is a perception that these are people who have something to prove. To whom?

Perhaps it is to ourselves, to nurture our ego, or enhance our sense of inde-

Jenny Quilty Pillowpede Ink pendence. Or maybe it has something to do with a mission, a need to dig below silence, to see the raw, to look below the flesh, tendons and veins of our physical bodies, rip out what’s inside it and lay it out on the rocky ground to examine, wipe clean, and place carefully above our hearts again.

Or maybe it is for no reason at all.

Maybe people who climb mountains are just curious individuals who like to explore geological structures via our own bleeding and blistered feet.

Whatever our reasons are, they were irrelevant to the silent granite face that looked sternly upon us as we hiked out of our rustic pine-wood cabin at 2am, August 9, 2006.

We strapped on our headlamps, navigating the craggy path with an anxious balance of avoiding tripping and appreciating the beauty of our surroundings. We heard nothing but the sounds of our own boots and the throbbing of the blood in our ears against the silence. Our nerves were soothed by the stars and moon that defeated the darkness when we stopped intermittently for Gatorade and protein bars. The path was lit by the twinkling headlamps of fellow pilgrims, the line of sparkling beams zig-zagging its way up the mountain as if they were small Christmas lights poked through black paper to create a map of our journey ahead.

Our eyes focused sharply on our feet to avoid a fall, we did not notice the sun rising until it blasted across the east face of the mountain in a splendor of orange and rose and gray.

The route gained elevation slowly, and finally we stood in a boulder field near the base of the luminous majesty of rock as our digital watches blinked to 6:00. We walked with reverence, and even though we passed fellow hikers with nothing more than a wide-eyed nod, we felt completely alone. Any sound seemed deafening and rude, like laughter at a burial.

We traversed the back-side of the face, clinging to pink granite and loose stones, warily eyeing the glacial lake below that lay dormant and silent in the shadow of the mountain, the surface glass-smooth and lead-colored.

We clambered around glossy boulders in the Trough, where we gasped suddenly when rocks came tumbling from above due to the clumsiness of

fellow hikers. We got on our hands and knees to conquer the Slide, where descenders sat on their rear sides giggling rather maniacally, knowing a fall would mean bouncing down a boulder minefield and into a hypothermic lake.

My mind free from thoughts and my body high on endorphins, we reached the broad, boulder-strewn summit.

There were no celebratory high hives or loud voices, as if we would upset the mountain. My mother and I found a flat rock upon which to sit, looking around us with disbelieving gapemouthed smiles at the surrounding snowy peaks and jagged foothills. The sun was not at its zenith, so the hills were still shimmering in gold, the flatlands beyond a clue to the warmth ahead.

As we sat meditatively, I felt my insides plucked out from under my skin and sucked out from my bone marrow, pulled into the cold and solid embrace of the mountain, leaving me

free and light yet exposed and vulnerable. Maybe we who climb mountains are just a weird population, full of vigor and recklessness, maybe people just obsessed with ourselves and geology. But as my mother’s blue eyes met mine and we let out a sigh and a laugh, I felt my insides return beneath my skin, washed clean and new by the mountain.

Lucia Hodkiewz Northern Lights Digital Painting

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Vedika Sawant Untitled Acrylics

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POETRY 65

The Fall, circa Nov. Last Emily Hegland I. I taste November in my lungs like menthol. no matter — i’ve already forgotten how to feel warm. there’s a door in the ground, warped and weathered that moans when I open it the cellar is dank and lit by a naked bulb. behind jars of crimson beets and floating pickled hearts, forgotten, cocooned in earth and dust I find it and thank god.

II. Eden is a 24-hour diner with coffee black as Guinness, stale apple pie and hell is my hangover. skin draped like fine leather around hollow eye sockets, cufflinks the devil sits across from me think Kevin Spacey with a forked tongue –

“mercy” he slurs “aren’t you a sight for sore eyes’ all silver and southern charm

he wants to know if i’ve missed him. i am the rib with a beating heart on the eve of a six months chip

“cheer up” he says “i brought champagne.”

III. steadycam – i hear myself say. turn on my steady cam which makes sense to me but my escort just laughs that cold gilded laugh and steers me to my car and tells me let’s just get you home safe and sound, sweetheart.

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IV. I thought I went to bed alone but I woke up to the devil making bacon and eggs and bloody maries.

‘Morning, sleepyhead,’ with a hiss

from the burner.

‘Any good dreams?’

I tell him to leave but he bargains for at least one bite and it’s too good to stop.

V. He’s always watching me now. I see him in the pockets of my eyes and look just a second too late. I hear that trenchant measured rhetoric and the reverb of his murmur, rumbling and low like faraway thunder or lost radio voices. He follows me, acerbic chuckle echoing through galleries between my ears. I look a second too long and get lost, pupils black as june bugs shrinking and growing, head pounding like the metered soliloquys he whispers to me, like ‘drink this, it is my blood shed for you’; highway lamps and headlights blur and horns sing and women scream and all i see is kevin spacey kevin spacey in the sky with diamonds.

What a wonderful world, where passing the bong suffices hello and a hug.

Flesh contact, we cringe Skin on skin, our own personal sin — commandments against caring.

What a wonderful world, where a high five is sufficient After climax Let us slip on our panties.

Do not walk us home, kiss us goodbye or call us beautiful.

What a wonderful world, where emotion equates instability.

We, generation Y, a psychiatrist’s wet dream.

But when they offer their handshake, our fingers will remain occupied refilling our Xanax prescription on our Walgreens app.

Chao Sun Test Subject 9 Photograph

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Uninhabited Homes

Esteban Poole-Fuller Optimism becomes a luxury and joy a disloyalty in the waiting rooms where drop by drop is distilled the drunkeness of grief.

Desolation invades the plain of daily evolution forcing us to grow whipped by uprooting.

The end is here, inviting us to its dance where umbilical cords will be cut, expelling us to lonely agonies.

Allie Mueller Untitled Black pen

Under the twilight mournful melodies resonate across an enclosed path of images and sensations that remind the far gone afternoons of uninhabited homes

Your Fours Look like Nines I have my father’s handwriting, Thin scratches, neat rows of crooked fence posts.

But only now, in houses Of golden red and flattened rooftops Do I see the similarities.

Graphite frustrations echo And tessellate in memory, Muted angst over my penmanship.

It was time’s endeavor, Entropy’s inevitable uniformity, That my scrawl match his.

His hair, black as ink, blooms Into a crown of silver.

Jewelers weigh its grams in years And ask when I am available for a fitting.

I have written “four” instead of “four,” A mistake noticeable to him But lost on the commoners.

For he is the king, Wearing his thinning coronet.

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Sam Bennett

Below Courtney Kessler Untitled Photographer

Parallel

Tongyu Wu

I thought it was a pale blue sky stretching behind those delicate tree branches that met, diverged, and weaved. I thought I was a human.

The crisscross blanked over me, and I realized perhaps it was not a pale blue sky. It was some vast ocean on the other side of a net. In this way, I was perhaps not a human.

I should be a fish.

No, no. Probably the blue was still the sky, yet I saw it through a waving sea surface.

I heard some misty singings — or bubbling — from the vast blue.

Some shadows, lighter or darker, I couldn’t see clearly. What are they?

Birds? Or fish?

Gradually, I became incapable of motions of thoughts. I disintegrated and dissolved.

I gave myself to the blue.

Obituary

Emily Hegland i drove to see stone wings tear your skin away like tissue paper. the flesh i wear, wilted lily white, is made of dead cells. hangs like thrift shop silk upon my bones. the you and me of touch and sex is dead and flaking, but still it tastes like salt and wine when your sagging epidermis burnishes mine. in the leather of a stranger tanned in summer sun i found a foreigner beneath dusty bed skirts bedroom eyes deep-set in his skull, skeleton dressed in ivory grave-clothes graze goose bumps, gag.

Mary Kate Duffy Red Fox Acrylics

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Asthma Attack Sabrina Ross

a child’s tricycle in suburban Memphis. worn shoes under a sagging bed. jet fringes.

Chantilly lace thong. autoerotic asphyxiation-there are mothballs in this broken home. there is a gangrene stain on the hardwood, there is the sound of retching down this hallway, and these tricycle wheels are spinning, creaking cracking, like the corrugated roof that we used to throw rocks and half-eaten peaches off of. where is daddy? why was no one watching us? the ant-hills and sand-pits can do nothing but shine on us now. the arms of stranger’s are just as comforting as a mother’s embrace. the arms of lovers, they can hold you back like an asteroid belt fixed too tight round your waist. feel the loose sigh of flesh as you unbuckle. we squeeze not what we wish to suffocate but what we wish to keep.

Ella Williquette Fear of Truth 36x40 Oil on canvas

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How to Lose Your History for a Second Time Andre Tan

am mah, that sunday before you passed away you were making kuih lapis to make money for our household i told you i was playing congkak with ah beng so he would impart onto me afterwards the dynastic chinese calligraphy he had mastered at the age of seven; somehow papa and i had managed to hide the fact that i can’t read chinese and i had gotten away with fucking my eyes and ears with hollywood superstition and majestic wuxia phantasies

dear reader, some of us don’t have mothers some of us don’t have one mother tongue some of our tongues are forked - two, three, four, trans i tak sempurna (not perfect), but i cinta jugak (love too) dear self, it smells like iris, pandan, and jasmine the orgy is just coming alive to lose your history for a third time is to stop breathing

i can’t hold a calligraphy brush (no character) i don’t play congkak (closed off) ang gong, while you’re away in the last of the rubber plantations i have stuck my eyes onto the window of “modernity” that now the corner of my eyes are the frame of the rusty shrine of this “modernity” they speak of (in english); i miss the uncodeable eloquence you speak in hokkien; i have eaten and vomit and eaten and vomit through my ears and penis hbo, star movie, axn, fox abs, scruff, tall, dark, handsome, charming, sex; but i have also compared myself to the chrysalis of an abject insect watching chinese men with chiseled jawlines falling in and out of love with smart and daring ladies from hong kong in perfect chinese dynastic clothes because this new shrine no longer remembers passion of the cut sleeve i can’t marry (no one is swimming in my decolonial love water) i can’t play nuclear family (drowning husband and child)

Jenny Quilty Out Come The Knives, Part II Mixed media on canvas

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Here, Together and Here Cody Dunn

Sometimes, I write love poems about phantom women so when I talk about heartbreak the men in the room can sigh thoughtfully into their lapels.

These poems, they’re like country music, or the patient sigh after a long pull of dark liquor.

I spin some shit about catching wafts of her cooking in the morning and lament the graceful spread of her breasts as she pulls her hair back.

And as I mention how she filled out that dress— you know the one— the way beautiful names complete a holy text, I can almost see them, each and every her, floating in their countless ethers, their burlesque shoulders and senseless, recursive drift above the heads of the men who consumed themselves in turn.

Then the poem empties like a glass defined by its hollow.

Now, stop reading and sigh.

We are all threadbare, asking: With what faith do we still believe?

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Running to or from, Home Maja Ivanovic Neon lights crawl, flicker, fall, as dusk whisks past brick, concrete, flesh; it’s brisk cold hand a familiar friend.

Warm one, two, soons leads to masses and faces frozen in lust, dusty speakers tuned in to trust.

Barren seats bare frozen cheeks, desperate eyes, and chattered teeth, one by one, street by street, a moment caught from fleet to fleet.

And as dawn sets on vacancy, illuminates hollow complacency, bodies stick, minds roam, running to or from, home.

Courtney Kessler Untitled Photography

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The Journey of the Color Orange

Anna Zabiega

Tangerines and peaches Jammed into a cardboard tube Next to black powder and stars, sleeping Until caressed by a stick with a crimson end.

The petite barrel jumps towards the sky, Whizzing past rooftops, several dozen feet.

It collides with twilight, BOOM, and shatters Into a parade of bright sparks.

They disperse upon the black wallpaper, A neon sign confessing “open� in a dark shop window, And drunkenly tumble to the ground.

The grass, parched and dull yellow After a dry season, desperate For any sustenance, embraced the embers.

Boosh, a blaze blossoms And soon, like marmalade on wheat bread, Spreads over the prairie.

It spits and crackles, Swelling up and tumbling down, A newborn colt attempting to stand.

The fire illuminates the night, A passage of suppression, yet sublime beauty Like a hissing sun And its hues of red and yellow, draining Back into the horizon, Leaving the scene as nothing but charcoal.

Yolanda Arellano CL with Lion Mask Ballpoint pen

Opposite Page Stephanie Skykes Untitled Acrylic on art board

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