Spring 2018 |Illumination: The Undergraduate Journal of Humanities

illumination The Undergraduate Journal of Humanities

cover art: Untitled Mei Lam So Gouache

Mission Statement The mission of Illumination is to provide a beautiful space for undergraduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to publish their creative works. Once a semester, we showcase some of the school’s best talent in an industry-quality publication, becoming an approachable portal for fiction, essays, poetry, and artworks. We also publish compelling content in our online magazine on a weekly basis, which has helped us become a valuable addition to the intellectual community of the university, and all the people it affects. Both our online and print issues have been awarded the ACP Pacemaker Award, establishing Illumination as one of the best publications in the nation.

Letter from the Editor Dear Readers,

It is an honor for me to present our Spring 2018 issue –our boldest one yet.

It is always very exciting for me to see the genuine dedication, passion and thought that goes into every one of the submissions we receive. As a writer and editor, I am always humbled by the talent that exists on Campus and I am proud to provide a space for such wonderful pieces.

This semester is especially important for me, as we received the biggest amount of works in the history of our publication and that of the entire Publications Committee. I am immensely proud of my wonderful team of editors, writers and creatives who put their heart, soul and time into ensuring that every submission is received, reviewed and portrayed with the outmost care. I am also thankful to the many people that make this publication possible –it really does take a village. Special shout out to my parents Rosa Maria and Cirenio, who are crucial to the success of this journal and celebrate it as if it was their own.

As you will see throughout this issue, our artworks and written pieces are intense and insightful.

Some might surprise you, others will leave you in awe and some might simply disturb you. Our aim is to inspire you, push your creative boundaries and celebrate the diverse skills of UW-Madison students. I encourage you to be bold and Immerse yourself in every one of these works.

They were all expertly written and curated for your enjoyment, and I can only hope you enjoy sifting through these pages as much as we liked bringing them to your desk. Thank you for making another issue of Illumination possible.

With love, Fernanda Martínez Rodríguez Editor-in-Chief

editor in chief i

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Fernanda MartĂ­nez RodrĂ­guez

print

i l l u m i n a t i o n

Anna Rodriguez

Essays Editor

Madison Knobloch

Fiction Editor

Luke Valmadrid

Poetry Editor

Kayla Wasserman

Art Editor

Jennifer Lien

Art Editor

Hibah Ansari

Art Editor

creative i l l u m i n a t i o n

Sadeq Hashemi Nejad Arina Tveleneva

Creative Director Marketing Coordinator

Aida Farrokh Ebrahimi

Photographer

Noah Laroia-Nguyen

Photographer

digital i l l u m i n a t i o n

Emma Liverseed

Digital Editor

Ryan Mulrooney

Wisconsin Idea Editor

Haley McNiff

Staff Writer

Lauren Hartman

Staff Writer

Rachel Pope

Staff Writer

Zhiyun Zhao

Staff Writer

Meg Ruocco

Staff Writer

executives wisconsin union directorate

Malik Anderson

PubCom Director

Jim Rogers

PubCom Advisor

Iffat Bhuiyan

Union President

Honey 1 Raw Honey 2 Sister 3 Heartbeats 5 Untitled - Ink 3 6 Prayers from a Laden Catholic Schoolgirl 7 Another Girl with a Pearl Earring 8 Immortal Pets 9 70 Years From Now 10 Puffy Jackets & Rural Kentucky: Judgement by our Perceptions 11 Rumex Crispus, September 24th 2017 12 Bearded Colors 14 Ticklish Bilayer 16 Untitled - Ink 1 17 Curiosity 19 The Web 20 Everything I am Afraid to Own 21

To My Father on Moving Day 62 Ambush 61 Untitled 59 Crow's Calling 58 Gemini 54 The Kiss 51 My First Boyfriend 48 Kueh Kueh 47 Human Bodies 08 43 Recollections of the Incident Concerning the Escaped Wolf 40 My Brother Kevin 37 The Salmon 36 Deep Woods 34 Summer in Paris 31 Sunset People 28 Harmony 26 Sincerely, Julia

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Honey Ann Curme

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armth. And harsh kisses and laughter like the tittering wind chimes on the back porch. Sugar-coated gums and afternoon teas before a dip in the sink, she’d take my hair and she’d weave. She’d weave

mountains and fairies—I knew because she’d tell me so. Once she’d even laced my locks into her own, the soft tugging of her paws like a song, intertwining ebony and dust colored canvases. Fingers would melt against my face and draw against my clothes a smile, over and over; Leila loved me. She’d tell me so.

If I had her eyes, I’d see the stars Mama had whispered of when we had lain out back with the dirt packed neat under my dress, the undulations of the fireflies. Leila would dance us through them all, laughing, singing. I can feel them, I swear. I feel the “lazy yellows,” the “constellation crystals” against my clothes, my boots with the spurs. But there is nothing, I know. No “candy puffed” skies, nor “cherry-smeared reds.” Leila would have been spinning across the sands. I too. “I love you, Honey,” she would have shiv-

ered out. Her moonshine hair would tinkle against my buttons, her velvety breath tucked against my folds. I can feel her, I swear. And now it’s like I’m in the sink, only one of the times she forgot me there.

The water leeches up my dress and into the cotton, the cloud-like sponginess that she’d rub together with her threaded fingers. I’d imagine each of my strands catching in those threads and how she’d maybe pull some of me out when she’d finished her search, but it was her, it was Leila, and I’d not mind.

Merciless are these pulses of wet. They snatch at my legs, my crumpled stockings with the stripes, red then yellow then red. She’d told me how they reminded her of the sunrise that her daddy had made her watch in “LA.” She’d told me that she’d color them to be red and green, like “Christmas,” because yellow plus blue makes green. “Primary colors.” One time, she’d guessed at my lacking and told me about them. I remember blue: a windy day with the flags in the drive biting at their poles, berries atop the “fourth o’ july” pie, fairy horses with their wings stretched as ovals, a lonely night astride the “ocean tides”; I forget the rest but I wish she’d tell me again. I know what I’d do if she did. I know what I’d say. If I had her lips, her tongue, her voice: “I love you Leila.”

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Raw Honey Alyssa Ackerman Embroidery

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Sister Mei Lam So Lithography

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Heartbeats Ryan Mulrooney

My brother and I loved going to what my dad referred to as “the sleigh factory,” except it was lacking two very essential things: sleighs and snow, unless you counted the puddles of the melted flakes my brother and I tracked into the store. White’s Feed Service didn’t sell sleighs; it sold bags of feed to keep America’s heartland alive. I was simply a small part of the heartbeat.

We lived a mere three minutes from my dad’s store. My brother and I would listen for my dad’s diesel truck to come rolling around the corner, rush outside to the driveway, and be carried off as the store’s unofficial interns and playmates for the half an hour before our elementary school lives started. Every weekday we would find the feed store to be in the same condition as the day before: dust-covered concrete floors where you could see the footprints of the farmers’ work boots, the sign on the fridge stating “50 cent pop,” and a small warehouse of feed bags that my brother and I would climb and jump upon, enjoying this playground much more than the one at school. Consistency is how this ventricle kept the rural heart alive, though — beating Monday through Friday starting at 7:20am, sometimes on Saturdays.

White’s Feed Service served as an informal learning space, my dad acting as the instructor. My kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Nelson, came to the store to buy bird seed from time to time. By the time I was in second grade, my dad asked me, “Do you want to ask Mrs. Nelson at school if she wants any bird seed from you?”

I stood quietly for a moment, still bundled up in my winter weather gear. “How do I do that?” I asked.

“Go to her room before school and ask her if she wants any birdseed from your dad’s store. Then you can bring it to her the next day,” my dad explained.

This seemed like a lot of pressure as a second grader. However, I agreed. As instructed, I went into Mrs. Nelson’s room that day and asked her about the birdseed. She happily agreed, wrote out a check to “Mr. Ryan Mulrooney,” and I carried my very first check home to my dad with great care. In order to complete the transaction, I lugged the birdseed into Mrs. Nelson’s classroom the next day and she thanked me with a warm hug, almost feeling each other’s heartbeats.

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My dad’s store seemed entirely different to me after my very first venture as a White’s Feed Service salesman. The dust, the pop, the fifty-pound feed bags were all still accounted for, but it was the people I noticed. The feed store was just on the edge of town, right along the highway. The farmers and other locals of America’s heartland would pull into the gravel drive in similar trucks or the occasional sedan, walk inside through the white door with the same accuracy and rhythm, and each one would interact with the four employees and the morning’s child interns in a warm, winsome attitude. White’s Feed Service’s customers didn’t have a drive-thru attitude: walking in, making or picking up an order, and on their way with a simple “thanks.” The store served as a common place for the agriculture life of central Grant County for the customers. Customers would stay awhile and talk about the farm futures Bob Middendorf would narrate on 97.7, the latest gossip and news of the local area, and the wellbeing and trials of family and friends.

Occasionally a customer would ask my brother and I if we had girlfriends, at which we would immediately feel our hearts pick up rate, blush, and say, “no!” The energy inside the store was as if the customers and employees were on a lively and enjoyable sleigh ride, without the in-house-made sleighs of course.

Untitled - Ink 3 Lee Troz Ink on Paper

White’s Feed Service isn’t a local landmark; it’s a landmark of my youth. No one famous walked through to make this place memorable, but the residents who had lived and farmed in the area for generations were the only legends I needed made this place meaningful. It had been years since Mrs. Nelson retired and we saw each other, though I received a lovely get well card from her a few years ago. White’s Feed Service, specifically my dad and the birdseed, helped form a bond between teacher and student. Those strong connections are like blood vessels, pumping blood into a heart of the community, and I’m happy to have been a part of it.

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Prayers from a Laden Catholic Schoolgirl Annalise Panthofer

Our Sister, Who art in oppression, You are not to blame.

Thy Justice come.

From a smoking gun, a storm with piercing levin. Release yourself from daily dread.

And blame not yourself for trespasses, As we rise up against those who trespass against us.

And lead us not into frustration, And deliver us from evil. A men. _______________________________________ Hail Mary, full of shit. Unattainable is she.

Blessed art thou against women, and blessed is the fruit of thy oxymoron, Jesus.

Holy Mary, Mother unflawed, pray to be thinner, now and until the hour of our death. Amen. _______________________________________ I believe in fraud, The Church Almighty, Creator of misogyny on earth; and in Jesus Christ, His only ploy, Our Lord, Who was conceived by socialists, exploited by capitalists, suffered under genocidal justification his preachings crucified, died, and buried.

They descended into Hell Where the devil spun them into abortion bans and slut shaming.

On the third day They rose again in the form of a white feminist Who ascended to the sidewalks, sitteth at the right hand of their complicit counterparts; From thence They shall come to judge the minority and the trans.

I cannot believe in the Holy Spirit, nor the Holy Catholic Church, nor the silencing of women’s voices, nor the selective forgiveness of sins, nor the genocides, nor a life everlasting. Amen.

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Another Girl with a Pearl Earring Nicole Rosenbaum Acrylic on Panel

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Immortal Pets Samantha Carter

Pointless questions will ask themselves. Don’t need your mouth-piece.

Too good for ink and paper.

Fat. Just that grey matter, few square inches in your skull s’all they need.

They know Wind will swallow your words. Time will eat your scrawl. They know this brain is your eternity Cozy little lounge rats they’ll sip English Tea wear timeless tweed. They know best the importance of looking important Without ever being taught how. So there they’ll sit laugh smile tease till you wheeze your last breath.

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70 Years From Now Megan Jain Oil on Wood

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Puffy Jackets & Rural Kentucky: Judgement by our Perceptions Adam Ramer

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ver Halloween weekend, a bunch of enthusiastic 20 something aged climbers from Hoofers Mountaineering jammed ourselves into a small fleet of cars and headed to Kentucky. Thanks to some

hunger driven detours —and accidentally driving the wrong way for an hour — we found ourselves turning a 10-hour trip into a 14-hour caffeine riddled endeavor. Eventually though, half awake, and more or less delirious and emotionally disheveled, we pulled into the campground parking lot. Parking lot is probably too sophisticated of a term; it was more of a rough gravel patch canvased in old Subarus and littered with cheap beer cans. Nonetheless, we had finally arrived at the Red River Gorge, a concentrated mecca of thousands of acres of pristine Kentucky sandstone, towering high above the convoluted mess below comprised of old mobile homes, abandoned oil extraction machinery, and some of the best climbing routes in the eastern United States. That night, as my friend and I set up my tent, nestling into our sleeping bags in the comfortable yet cool 40-degree weather, I began to think of this unique fusion of livelihoods in eastern Kentucky, and more broadly, of my surroundings altogether.

Throughout the week prior, I had been half-jokingly warned by fellow climbers of all the “meth heads,” heroin addicts, and “hillbillies” living around Miguel’s Pizza, the one-two combo of a campground and pizzeria whose only existence in this world is to serve the needs of dirt-bag climbers making their pilgrimage to The Red from all over the world. My climbing companions eagerly tried to one-up each other by sharing outlandish stories of their own close encounters with these quasi-mythical country folk. They made it seem like they saw Bigfoot, or the Chupacabra, or really just anything other than just another human doing their best to survive in this world.

I hadn’t really thought too much about these peoples and their existence until I arrived, brushing it aside as just my friends cracking jokes to the expense of others. Yet, that night, as I lay there to sounds of snores echoing throughout the campground, the thought of a dichotomous environment popped into my head, one that prevailed throughout the rest of our trip, and one I haven’t really fully come to understand today.

The next morning, as we hiked through the woods on the way to the ominous and titanic but inviting 100 foot sandstone cliffs that make up the Red River Gorge, signs with the glaring “No Drugs Are Kept Here” message plaster random shacks and buildings. Someone in the group cracked a joke about meth, people laughed — myself included — but my laughter morphed into an unsettling churning. The same feeling that I had laying in my sleeping-bag creeped back over me, my stomach tossed as I slowly realized not only the dim realities of rural Appalachia, but also as I thought of the stigma against those who call it home.

It’s a sobering feeling to be in a space that quite obviously has a harsher truth than just a fun week-end

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Rumex Crispus, September 24th 2017 Sam Molinaro Photography

climbing adventure. As the day went on, the uneasy feeling persisted as I thought about the two groups of people who operated near the cliffs: us, the climbers, and the locals. Rural eastern Kentucky is plagued by diseases such as addiction and HIV, and has been decimated by low employment and high poverty. A once vibrant labor region, Appalachia fell into the dim light we cast on it today as deforestation spread, and the mines went empty. Leaving its inhabitants with little options, and little help coming from the outside.

It became abundantly clear within my first few hours climbing that no one that lived near the Red were climbing its cliffs and partaking in this predominantly white, affluent sport. The only people we saw climbing were those who looked just like us: 20-40 year olds covered in long, mangled hair and rough beards, trying to make it look like they were poor despite the thousands of dollars-worth of shiny gear clipped to their harnesses.

A few days later, we were all driving to find a crag (climbing spot) hidden deep in the woods, only accessible through miles of poor Kentucky countryside. As we drove, we passed an endless stream of boarded up homes surrounded by overgrown lots and rusted cars. Eventually, the scenery changed from rolling hills to the woods, cutting out our cell service and rendering us to the will of our guidebook, written by other climbers filled with vague directions at best.

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“Go around sharp bend and then stay left to a gnarly hill, 4wd recommended.” Okay, we can do that, let’s stay left. To our chagrin, we steer a tad too left, descending down something that would nominally be called a road or driveway if you’re feeling generous with your descriptions. Deep two foot ruts from a large vehicle carve their way down to a small shack house, rusted metal sheets cover the surrounding yard, boards cover numerous windows, and we quickly realize that this is probably not where we intended to end up.

After a quick second of panic, we quickly turning around, speeding back up the hill. At the top, we see a truck trying to descend, backing up as we approach. We panic again, under the initial impression that the owners are coming home to see a bunch of smelly 20-something year olds struggling up their driveway.

It’s quite the opposite: it’s two guys in their mid-thirties, clad in Arc’Teryx puffy down jackets. I beckon for them to roll down their window and we quickly discover that we all are trying to get to the same wall as us. My friend laughs, saying “you always know you’re safe when you see a puffy jacket.”

That comment hit me, instantly washing over me with the flood of uneasiness from before. Okay, they’re climbers, but what if they weren’t? Are we somehow safer surrounded by random mystery men who like to climb rocks than we are by random locals? Does the fact of their affluence and recreational interests somehow miraculously absolve them from doing harm? Likewise, does simply being poor and living in rural Appalachia somehow relegate you to a life of violence and mischief? Again, the dichotomy between climbers and locals seeped into my brain; a dichotomy that boils down to the materialism of those who possess a puffy jacket, and those who do not. Everyone on the trip—me included— had our perceptions shaped by a simple material item. A jacket separated us from them, and a jacket was all it took for all of our microaggressions to flood to the surface, enchaining us to the fetters of credulous mutuality based on nothing more than puffiness.

On the drive back to campus, the uneasiness left my system, being replaced by the constant ebbs and flows that accompany school stress. I staggered into my bed around 2:30 am, thinking that sleep would quickly welcome me for a few hours before class. But as I lay there absolutely exhausted, the puffy jacket comment kept ringing over and over in my head— by the time I left for class I managed maybe 2 hours of actual sleep

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Bearded Colors Sadeq Hashemi Digital Art

There’s an inexorably narrowness of the mind and general circumscription of empathy when it comes to thinking about a place that stands in such stark contrast to what we know, to what we’re comfortable and familiar with. As the tourist, we see places in rural Kentucky and think to ourselves how awful it’d be to live there, but we don’t think too much of it once we leave.

We as a society are often quick to damn those different than us just for being different or societally backwards. We sneer and crack jokes about their day-to-day lives as if we’re somehow above them, righteous and impregnable to wrongdoing. But does being financially better off than them somehow make us better than them or does it just make us assholes?

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When I think of the puffy jacket I’m overcome by an emotion, but I don’t know what it really is. Finding words for my emotions and feelings has never been hard for me; I love trying to describe in vivid detail what I’m feeling and why. But this trip was different. I couldn’t neatly fit the uneasiness into a category — was it guilt that I was overcome with? Maybe it was just the general unfamiliarity of seeing these things first hand or maybe it was me trying to draw conclusions too quickly, who knows.

We go to this places in search of walls to climb, and adventures to have, while less than a mile away, a mother overdoses as her child watches confused as to why their mother won’t wake up. We sleep in our tents, wearing our puffy jackets, as a family in a trailer lives in abject poverty, struggling to just get by.

Ticklish Bilayer Dana Loo Digital Art

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Untitled - Ink 1 Lee Troz Ink on Paper

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Curiosity

Sadeq Hashemi Digital Art

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The Web Conrad J Wight a young poet once brilliant seen at a café: Eyes deep within the recesses of thick horn-rimmed glasses, he spills a sip of cappuccino on his sweater: flips the page of the paperback he is reading:

well-ironed and pressed but

smelling faintly of eggs

and threadbare some cobwebby yet contemporary urban murder mystery.

“You could be great,” they used to tell him “if only you wrote more” “spoke more” “choked less on the mic.”

spindle verses once so nimble could still make him: he is only twenty-nine.

Remembering now his golden hour And disgusted with his dead-end

five years forward five years back, he doesn’t see the car coming

job, he takes out pen and paper on transit home

and tries to weave word webs like he used to.

(windows blacked, driver in a cap) from the side.

At his stop, he unchains his rusty ten-speed from the rack beside tracks tangled over with spider vines, naturally

Approaching rigor mortis, his eyes go blind wondering what they could have seen who they could have been how he got caught

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Everything I am Afraid to Own Anonymous Ink

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Sincerely, Julia Lauren Hartman Dear Your Honor, Matty is guilty. You know it, I know it, he knows it. But what you don’t know—and what Matty probably doesn’t either, if we’re being honest—is that he is so much more than the crime he committed. His transgressions seem to have somehow evolved into defining both who my brother is as a person and who he will be in the future, and at this point it almost feels like Matty’s fate is up to what I write here.

Some of my earliest memories of Matty are from the year he did math league. He was in middle school at the time, and I can remember him sitting at our kitchen table at night beneath the warmth of the overhead hanging lamp, hunched over a piece of paper as he furiously scribbled numbers and equations with his favorite lime green pencil. He would break his concentration only to say goodnight to me as Mom ushered me off to bed, looking up quickly to meet my eyes anvd give me a close-lipped smile before returning to his practice problems.

Mom and I went to a few of his tournaments, her hand clasped firmly around mine as we navigated the busy streets on our way to the middle school. We sat in the bleachers, their cold seeping through my plaid skirt, and she pulled my wrinkled Sudoku book and stubby pencil with the half-eaten eraser out of her purse to keep me occupied. The tournament was boring, since the audience essentially sat and watched the participants take test after test, but Matty looked up into the audience between rounds, scanning the bleachers until his eyes landed on us. We waved at him, and he flushed happily and looked away before sneaking another peek, almost as though he was making sure we were actually there.

Later, when Matty was frowning down at yet another test, I looked up from my Sudoku just in time to see my mother blinking away tears, eyes still on my brother.

“What’s wrong?”

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Mom looked down at me then, giving a minute shake of her head as though she was being pulled out of a daze, and tugged the end of the pencil out of my mouth. The taste of eraser stayed, though, strong against my tongue as I waited for her answer. She was still pretty, then, tall and slender with long dark hair that I loved to pull into messy plaits, pretending she was a princess and I was her lady-in-waiting. In hindsight, I picture her with shadowy circles under her eyes, even then, but I don’t know if that is true or just me projecting into my memories. Maybe a bit of both.

“Your brother’s going to go to college, Julia,” she said, quiet. “He’s going to be the first person from this family to make something out of himself. And I can’t believe it.”

The lawyer said that a character reference is meant to show you why Matty doesn’t deserve to get the maximum penalty. I’m supposed to write from my heart, the lawyer said, so that you can see all of the good parts of my brother. So that you can see that he is more than just the crime he committed.

“You need to keep your eye on the ball all the way into your glove. If you don’t, it’ll hit you right in the face and you’ll have to go to school lookin’ like somebody punched you.”

Matty stood in the middle of the baseball diamond, tossing a worn baseball into his tattered glove over and over again. Pale pink streaks of sunlight sliced through the sky behind him, making his white t-shirt glow.

“I’m too tired,” I groaned. Matty had pulled me out of bed early, ignoring my protests as he tossed a sweatshirt and shorts onto the foot of my bed. We plodded through the silent streets and into Meyer Park, dew clinging to my ankles and sinking into the scuffed toes of my tennis shoes until even my socks were soaked through. The rusted playground equipment, a favorite haunt of toddlers and high school students alike, was empty. Its lone remaining swing—the others torn down by violent storms or bitter teenagers, depending on who you asked—rocked gently in the cool morning breeze.

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“C’mon, Jules, you need to learn how to throw a ball,” Matty replied, brandishing it at me like a weapon, “and this is the only time when we can do it, okay? I gotta work after school.”

Matty had never actually played baseball on a team with a real adult coach, but he had easily managed to pick it up while running around with the other kids in our neighborhood. He was in the last leg of his middle school years and had shot up in height, a change that transformed him into a driving force during their pickup games despite his somewhat lanky limbs and otherwise slouched posture. I was always impressed when I watched him pitch to the other kids as I sat in the cool shelter of the dugout, discarded sunflower shells leaving imprints in the soles of my cheap Old Navy flipflops. They were bright yellow, the only color left in my size when they finally went on clearance the previous winter. I hated yellow.

“Plus,” Matty continued, “Mindy’s moving to Texas. We need someone to play third base.”

“I’m only six!”

“Yeah, which means you’re already behind, dummy. Glove up!”

The truth is that my brother is the best person I know. Probably the smartest, too, even without the fancy private colleges that his high school friends went off to. He promised Mom and me that he would go to school once we finally had enough money for it, but I don’t know if he ever would have. Now, who knows if he’ll even get the chance.

When I got home from school, Matty was waiting for me, sitting on the front stoop of the apartment building with his elbows resting on his knees, a rolled-up piece of paper in his hands.

“What’s going on? Where’s Mom?” Matty was never home during the day, always off waiting tables at the diner or doing who knows what with the friends he refused to bring around our apartment.

He squinted against the summer sun to look up at me and patted the step beside him. “She’s not feeling so hot, so I told her to take a nap before her shift tonight. You and I can hang out for a while.”

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Harmony

Emma Leeper Charcoal, Pastel & Graphite

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“What’s that?” I asked, nodding towards the paper he kept fiddling with. I collapsed beside him with my backpack still on; he never sat in one place long enough for me to justify getting too comfortable.

Matty looked down at the paper in his hands, gnawing on his bottom lip. “It came from your school today,” he said, unrolling it so we could both look at it. The edges stayed rolled up from him messing with it. “Did you know they do some kind of father-daughter dance thing for the eighth-grade girls?”

“I guess. I figured I just wouldn’t go.”

“Would you wanna go with me?”

I paused and looked up at him. “Is that allowed?”

“They’re not gonna turn me away.”

Matty was nineteen at that time, hair too-long, curling over his ears and into his eyes. The shoulders of his ragged red t-shirt were pulled tight over his back because of the hours he had spent laying concrete over the summer, and his tan still clung to his skin, warm in contrast to the paleness of my own. He was cute, my friends said, but I wasn’t buying it. I thought he was way too serious all the time.

“Maybe I just won’t go,” I said. Sammy and Kenzie would be there, with Mr. Vail and Mr. Stevens, no doubt. They’d probably go shopping for dresses just for the occasion at that too-expensive store in the corner of the mall. I’d have to watch as they spun around, debating the merits of one fabric versus the other, while I sat with the cold dressing room mirror against my back, pretending I didn’t want one for myself. I didn’t even think I had a dress in my closet.

Matty slung his arm around my shoulders and brushed my bangs out of my eyes. I needed a haircut, too, but Mom would just get that look in her eyes and then go hide in her bedroom if I asked her to take me to one of the salons that Sammy and Kenzie always gushed about. I’d probably just trim them in the bathroom some night when no one was paying attention to me. I could pretend like I meant for them to be uneven. Sammy and Kenzie would probably believe me, too, if I made up some celebrity and claimed she was starting an uneven bang trend. It’d be fine.

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“I don’t want you to miss out,” he said, “just because of our crappy family stuff. You don’t have to go. But I will, if you want. It’ll be fun. I never went to a dance in high school. Or middle school, either, I guess.”

The heat of the sun was almost unbearable, baking us until my skin tingled. I could feel sweat pooling in the dip of my back where my backpack pressed against my skin.

“Okay,” I said. “Sure.”

Matty offered me a rare smile before getting up and dusting the dirt off of the seat of his pants. “Alright, it’s a date.”

Growing up with Matty wasn’t always easy. Our dad split when we were little, and I think my brother always felt the pressure to fill his shoes, especially because of the age gap between us. Mom was gone most of the time, off working or doing who knows what else, and even when she was around, she wasn’t always present. Matty filled a void for me, and for that I will be forever grateful.

I was working on my algebra homework at the kitchen table, all the lights off except for the one hanging directly above me, when Matty and the girl stumbled inside giggling. They stopped when they saw me, standing just barely outside the glow of the lamp, and Matty’s smile disappeared. He dropped her hand.

Sunset People Franklin Chen Photography

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“What’re you doing up?”

I looked between the two. She was new, definitely not the redhead who I’d spied sneaking out last week.

This girl was brunette, a tiny thing with big, expensive-looking silver hoops in her ears and a skirt I wouldn’t be caught dead in clinging to her hips. She didn’t look like she belonged in our neighborhood.

“Algebra. I have a test tomorrow.”

Matty shifted, putting distance between himself and the girl. She folded her arms across her chest. “It’s late.” He let out a breath and ran a hand over his face. “At this point it’s probably better to get some sleep than try to cram any more into your brain.”

As if he would know. Those days, he spent far more time slinking around with his dumbass friends, smoking cigarettes by the river and spray-painting bulging letters on the cold cement bridge straddling it, than doing schoolwork.

I turned back to my homework. “Whatever. Don’t mind me. I’ll turn on the TV or something.”

Matty pulled the girl back out the front door and I could hear them arguing, their whispers carrying. He returned a moment later without her.

“I shouldn’t’ve brought her here,” he said. He filled up a glass of water at the sink and took a gulp. I could hear him swallow in the silence of the room. “I’m sorry, Jules. I wasn’t thinking. Don’t be mad.”

Sometimes I wonder who my brother and I would be without the absent parents, the endless scramble to pay the bills, the constant divide between us and our friends. Maybe one of us would be a doctor. Or a teacher. I think Matty would be good at that; he always knew how to deal with kids. I just wish we would have at least gotten the chance to try.

Matty picked me up from the party. Mrs. Iverson pulled back their navy living room curtains to peer at his pickup truck with the long scratch in the paint on the driver’s side, her eyes squinting against the searing brightness of his headlights. He blared the horn before the tires had come to a full stop, and I jogged out before he could come storming inside. I climbed in, my weight making the cab of the truck groan, and the overhead light flickered on for only a moment, casting shadows over Matty’s jaw. I couldn’t see his eyes.

“A party, Jules?” I could feel his restraint being tested, could hear it in the careful control he wielded over his voice. “Really?”

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“Don’t act like you’ve never done it.”

“You’re fifteen.”

Matty pulled out of the Iversons’ driveway and onto the gravel road. We sat in silence, and I stared out the window at the darkness of the countryside. I could see the faint reflection of myself, illuminated by the unearthly blue glow of the dashboard.

Matty broke the quiet first, as I knew he would. He had never been one to just sit and stew in silence.

“Those kids aren’t the kind of people you want to be hanging around. Trust me. I’ve seen what people like them turn into.”

“They’re my friends, Matty. Christ. It’s not a big deal. It’s just a party. I don’t know why you’re freaking out.”

“I can smell the alcohol on you, Julia,” he snapped, his knuckles flexing around the steering wheel.

“You told me I could always call you. No matter what. The Iversons came home and busted our party, and I called you to come get me. Why are you being such a jerk about it?”

Matty didn’t respond. A vein throbbed in his throat. For the first time, I really looked at him.

“Where were you, Matty?” I asked.

His eyes darted over to me, narrowing. “What does it matter?”

“Are you drunk?”

“No!” He was. I could see it on him, in the tightness in his forearms, the stiffness in his posture, the slowness of his breath. In the way every movement was purposeful, controlled, as though he thought that if he could just focus hard enough he would be able to drive just fine.

“Pull over. I don’t want to be around you when you’re like this.” I could feel the tell-tale ache in the back of my throat, the fire that burned down my nose. My voice quavered, and I hated myself for it.

“I’m fine, Jules. I swear. It was like two drinks, honest.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? I could’ve called someone else.”

“Who?” he snapped. “Who would come pick you up at one-thirty in the morning in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, Julia? Who besides me would do this for you?”

“Well, I’m assuming I could have found someone who was sober.”

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Matty recoiled like I had punched him but eased us onto the shoulder of the road. The headlights illuminated the long grasses before us, their ghostly shadows rippling in the cool autumn breeze. Matty took his hands off of the wheel and released a shaky breath.

“I thought you were done drinking,” I said. “Done with… all of that.”

“The boys called,” he replied flatly, staring out the windshield instead of looking at me. “They offered me a good share of the profits this time. I couldn’t say no.”

“You said you were finished with them, Matty. You promised.”

Summer in Paris Megan Jain Photography

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His shoulders slumped, his head falling to rest against his knuckles at the top of the steering wheel. “We need the money. You know that.”

My tough, unyielding older brother looked exhausted, shoulders slumped and expression drawn in the faint glow from the headlights that emanated across his face. He didn’t look like himself. But, in that moment, I realized I no longer knew who he was.

Matty isn’t perfect. He hung out with some bad people and let them pressure him into slipping into their world of drugs and girls and dirty money. He’s made some poor decisions under the guise of doing what’s best for our family, and he has a temper that Mom says he gets from our father. It’s clear that she doesn’t mean it as a compliment.

There was a bloody t-shirt in the garbage can.

I was brushing my teeth when I noticed it. I was late, frantically calculating how much time it would take me to jog to the high school, and I hastily slammed open the kitchen cupboard to throw away my breakfast bar wrapper. That’s when I saw the dark crimson of the shirt’s ragged edges peeking out from beneath the browning banana peels and flimsy egg shells. I froze, all thoughts of harsh pink tardy slips forgotten.

The air suddenly felt too still. Suffocating. My stomach tightened and pressed up into my lungs. I spat my toothpaste out into the sink, the mint suddenly burning red-hot against my tongue. “Mom?” She was gone, I remembered then, already off to work the extra shift she had picked up at the Italian restaurant so Suzie could go visit her daughter in Des Moines. I walked down the dark hallway, the faded gray carpet flattened beneath my bare toes, and pushed open Matty’s bedroom door without knocking.

He sat in his bed, shirtless, head resting in his hands. The blinds were drawn, allowing only narrow slats of the winter’s feeble sunlight to sneak unwelcome into the room, but the hallway light behind me shined on him harshly.

“Matty?”

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He jumped and looked up. Blinked.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

Matty shook his head quickly and stood, eyes scanning the room. Dirty t-shirts and athletic shorts littered the floor. He picked a black one up and slipped it over his head. He wouldn’t look at me.

“You’re sweating,” I said. My voice sounded strange to my ears. Foreign. Far away. “And there’s a bloody shirt in the garbage can.”

Matty’s head snapped up. “What?”

“What’s going on? Did something happen?”

“I dunno what you’re talking about. Maybe Mom had a nosebleed this morning.”

Liar. “Tell me the truth, Matty.”

He looked at me full-on for the first time then, finally allowing the light to illuminate his face. His left eye was purpled, raw and swollen. He could barely open it.

“Oh, my God.” “You need to pretend like you don’t know, Jules, okay? You didn’t see anything.”

All I could hear were my racing pulse and shocked breathing. “What have you done?”

I know what he did. It was a drug deal gone wrong, he said, the biggest mistake he’s ever made. He sobbed as he told me this, hunched over on the kitchen floor.

He never meant for it to end up like this.

“Jake and Alex knew this deal was risky. T-They asked me if I would come, said I didn’t even need to get out of the car. Just me being there would be enough, they said. And I—I don’t know, Jules, I shouldn’t’ve gone. I should’ve known this would happen. Those assholes knew Alex and Jake would have cash on them from deals earlier in the night, and I couldn’t just sit there in the car and watch while they attacked my friends, could I?” “Oh, Matty,” I moaned. Bile twisted at the edges of my stomach. “What did you do? Did you kill someone? Is that what this is?”

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“No!” he rasps, lifting up his head and looking at me with wild eyes. “I swear I didn’t. You have to believe me, Jules.”

“Then what’s with all this blood? Jesus Christ, Matty!”

He just looked at me. Even then, with me standing over him in the kitchen with the evidence between us, Matty wouldn’t tell me everything. Even then he was trying to protect me from knowing the whole truth. From knowing who he’d become.

Deep Woods

Xueyan Wang Charcoal & Crayon

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I truly believe that my brother never meant to end up like this. He never meant to start drinking like our dad, to start doing drugs and then eventually selling them. For him it was always a matter of taking care of us, of keeping me from going down that path as well. He was always protecting me, but he just couldn’t do that for himself.

Matty doesn’t look scared as they bring him into the courtroom, his hands cuffed neatly in front of him.

His hair is actually an okay length, like maybe the public defender found some way to talk him into actually taking care of it for once, and he wears a navy button down and khakis that I know don’t belong to him. He sees me sitting with Mom in the front row, and he looks away quickly. Mom takes a shuddering breath beside me.

The courtroom isn’t like what they show in the movies. It’s small, depressing, and Mom and I are the only people here to support him. Matty was the only one to get caught, the one who took the fall for his friends—if they can even be called that—and they didn’t even bother to show up.

“Matthew Robert Marks.” The judge’s voice seems to echo in the room, cutting through the silence harshly. I can feel the blood pumping through my clenched fists.

The judge wears glasses with thin silver frames, and I wonder what he thinks when he looks at our family. Matty, trying to be strong. Mom, with empty eyes that are far too old for the fullness of her face. Me, next to her, slowly feeling my tenuous grasp of control over my emotions slipping away.

The judge’s mouth is moving, but I can’t hear a word he’s saying. It’s like we’re in a long vacuum, his words slipping out before I can grasp them. The harder I try, the faster they skirt away.

Matty bows his head, letting his hair flop onto his forehead. I can see the pull of his skin against the delicate curves of his spine at the nape of his neck, a stark contrast to the deep blue of his shirt. Mom’s breath hitches. The lawyer’s hand slips up to rest upon Matty’s shoulder.

My brother made a mistake, but I don’t want that to define who he is. I don’t want the world to focus on the assault or the drugs or the money. I want the world to remember the Matty I grew up with, the Matty who took care of me while our mom worked back-to-back shifts and who attended the middle school daddy-daughter dances with me and who chose not to go to college so he could work to help support us.

That is the Matty I know. That is the Matty I know he will be again. He just needs someone to show him the same forgiveness he has been showing the world for his entire life.

Sincerely, Julia Marks

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The Salmon Grant Yun Digital Art

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My Brother Kevin Violet Wang Comic

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Recollections of the Incident Concerning the Escaped Wolf Alex Van Buskirk It came as a tin voice in the car. cool, indifferent, paternal, a radio distance, the newsman with Bela Lugosi hair you’d seen on News at 5: he notified you about the escaped wolf; into a drainage pipeline beneath the enclosure it fell. “Out its zoo into ours”, grandma observed. Your grandma had grayish hair and only ever spoke in unambiguous prophecies: prophecies never realized, that were, in fact, often glaringly inaccurate. Four days before you were born, possessed by a force from on high, she flicked hectically throughout the pages of scattered Sears catalogues that colonized her three-room apartment until she found a picture of a brunette 20-something woman—aristocratic eyes, complicated smile—and immediately tore the page. Later that day, she showed your mom the picture and informed her it was a near-perfect approximation of what her first baby girl would look like. “I’m having a boy,” mom replied, softly, the way she did anything else. “You know this.” Grandma distrusted ultrasounds and the bleached white corridors of Death Houses, and thus she never quite trusted you. But you know she loved you nonetheless, and still think about her sometimes, and other times you think about yourself.

Hulking pines hold the sky up and surround either side of you as your mom bends to their natural influence, and all the world appears constricted into just these parameters, only you and mom exist. But her eyes are pointing elsewhere, humming along to Cyndi Lauper, softly, and you know that the white beaches still exist, though only during the weekend, when dad can drive. The beach: always at the edge of Town. Some lifetimes ago, it was clear blue, the clouds opened, and your cousins and grandparents led you through the reptile house and you swore the alligator was dead. You saw the wolf; it looked tired, indifferent, an illusion—not real.

Your mom put on sunscreen because the sun was out. But it’s raining now. A disinterested little star, unstuck in space and time: the days stall endlessly. You cannot feel fear. Wolves are unreal, just like grandma and her harbingers. Divine, but wrong. You welcome the wolf. And yet you know nothing about death or wolves, real or symbolic.

Mom’s car is made of two opposing forces: cool blue, hot red—glowing disruptions, and your dissolved former face in the rearview, burning holes in your eyes, demanding your sight. But you can’t even remember how small you actually were, how large your eyes against the glass. The plains outside are flat against heaps of decayed air and crops.

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You remember now that you were thinking about how grandparents like to just materialize in sunbaked VW Beetles and dispense gross mints. You are dumped in the familiar one-story building your days revolve around, a red roof and brick foundation, a playground and empty grass surrounded by open miles and eventual tree lines South, and a barn and sheep pasture North, and mom flies away for a while— nothing is different—you understand she’ll return at 4.

It’s morning, but dark. For the past two days it’s been like that, which translates to subjective decades spent growing taller with the usual suspects (Lauren, Demetrius, Chelsea, Ryan 1, 2, 3, 3 ½, Mica, Horton the Hypochondriac ceaselessly depreciating, Gloria [who never smiles, much to her mom’s—former beauty pageant, “Ms. Gubbio County” winter twelve years straight (it’s a small county)—chagrin. “You’d look so pretty if you just, well, smiled a bit more…”], Jake the Snake, Henry Cheese-Its, Tony the Tiger, like the cereal ad, etc…), locked in the thankless game of winning Ms. Presley’s undying love & loyalty; a disjointed era, characterized by rain, displacement, and fat tubes of paint for fingers. These fractals of routine anticipate your current, linear habit of waking up and losing sleep—suspicious about the possibility of not having It, though you performed adequately enough and earned a few stickers, a couple prizes here and there; nothing spectacular, of course, you’re no Alexander. Never conquered an entire city, and not for lack of trying… Back then, with everything so open—the sky, the vortical waves, time, career, Everything.

Everything closing soon, sleep a lil and whataya know? it’s All ready to open right back up, perpetually enterprising young creatures…

Adults discuss the wolf in low excited murmurings; your friends babble on and you listen. Feel the atmosphere: gathering storms in the dull square tiles of ceilings, the fluorescent rectangles stab with burnt oxygen at even intervals—so you look away. Electricity shoots across windows, the static view of pasture made dynamic, the last of all the pretty white sheep have been marshaled back into old Mr. Gregory’s barn, painted screaming vermillion and empty white, the only edifice in view that’d prove people existed here once, but don’t anymore. Ms. Presley’s been on the phone, sharing hushed excitement with Mr. Price, who in a few months’ time will make her Geraldine Mary-Lou Presley-Price. Naturally, she can’t hardly wait. Next to you: whimpers—a figure curled up behind the bookshelf, breathing prayers on her Rosary—Lauren loves Je-sus! Lauren loves Je-sus! the kids would sometimes chant. You would join in, remember. You were never sure why. Before the sound of thunder, vermillion paint screams, the barn struck straight down the middle by white heat.

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Fire sirens, manic baaing, more thunder from outside, and within the sound of children forgetting to use their inside-voices, screaming colors and sparks, the lights appear fuzzy as folk-hysteria takes the room.

“The Plains are on fire” goes Lauren mysteriously, as if under the belated influence of some hapless lesser god, the one charged with understanding the vast and wasted dimensions of the Midwest. Lauren does not scream—Lauren never screams, never cries, she refuses the world on principle alone. Her rosary is not a chain but a lasso; you realize you cannot move. She injects glaciers using only her eyes and before you think you run, the subject of Lauren’s spell, the voice of heat deaths over you, it sounds cool, indifferent, even paternal.

Of all possible worlds, you lived here, the rusty plains. The nostalgia of rust brings you back many-a late night, scouring hopeful gold photographs the Elders kept before they left, pictures of you with squeezed eyes, like you’ve been holding in something, possibly feelings but most likely pee, giving the straightmost Thumbs-Up, trying to seem brave.

And even now, you can sometimes still see yourself on that day, blurred but real, running wild out the door, past the vestibule entrance, through the trees South, disappearing towards that point where the sky and sand are reconciled…

Before bedtime, there was only the Boy who Cried Wolf; for you it was a fate worse than death. It was accompanied by shame and fear, by dreams of grandiosity, followed by the sentence “I’m disappointed in you”, followed by the fact you cease surprising people. When they leave and the Wolf approaches, not symbolically but with actual teeth and corpse breath. and you face death aware that it’s just you, and everything, everything, is of your own making, all your own special fault. The ever-losing empty spaces— always dwindling returns, reruns, the Serpent and Its Tail… It is, undoubtedly, not good—that feeling. The fate of the Boy who just couldn’t keep his mouth shut. Yet somehow, you asked to hear it recited every night, and mom looked at you with soft anxiety. A boy and his Wolf: buried in an unmarked grave, unmarketed potential, real shame about that boy, huh? Never a chance of Redemption—the sum of familiar beats, with an anticlimactic conclusion and void audience. You run under the cloud, human atlantes in the material world of responsible people. Given to fear and loathing, endless feedback loops, malfunctions, stuttering, leaking, decomposed, malfunctioning by design.

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Human Bodies 08

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Xiaoyue Pu Photography

As is true of good narrative… the intricate untraceable networks are boundless—wire pieces meshed by something less cosmic than carbon: science, history, metaphysics, names, corporations, representatives, false beliefs and language: EVERYTHING—and who could’ve imagined the one responsible, the person behind Its contrivances, never even bothered showing up at all, passive transcriber and scribbler… As is true of all good narrative, so it was with you and the wolf. By simple twist of cause and effect, you improvised your way down roads, past a mile or so of deficient heartland to reach what’s known as “The End of Town”. There—past alleys and businesses, exits and returns—pipe water flowed into the periphery lake by way of an unknowable system of sewer labyrinths They drew up, some years ago—certainly long before the zoo was around, delivering nature to the public for prices more-than-reasonable. They didn’t know what they were building on, but all canals lead to the End, and past the Town is nothing: gray forbidden space. They say that you got out. That the wolf did not.

On lukewarm stands the wolf at the messy divide, turned away, its figure a lurking conduit between the vapor wall and gray sweeps of water over the loose earth; he was all three, gazing at the hallucinogen lake, usually clearly spread for miles in all directions, some sunnier days. You wondered if the darkly abandoned cabin you’d seen countless times before still existed, or did the world just collapse, and the wolf and you were all it now contained? Only weeks before that grim cabin had given you nightmares: you can’t remember them now, but apparently you screamed, a lot. You stepped forward and it looked back—nearly human eyes, something familiar, something of Lauren’s spiritual severity, her crusader eyes.

Fluidly restless, you could recognize it easily, as you began to approach.

Sirens blare, sounds from another world. The wolf, previously still, begins shifting, one leg to the next, making its way back: paws get wet, fur animates, bristling silver pins, and it is ever so slightly enhanced, more mythological—hark! a fairytale parable stands before you, a wolf in symbolic fashion. His eyes—naturally human, you just couldn’t see it at first. You walk, and the space between becomes claustrophobic and the air liquid, and you put your left hand out, but you’re right handed, and this, too, feels partially symbolic, but of what you could never fully say; but if there was no pattern, no universe, no connection… well, you’d be doomed to confusion, and cosmic unknowing. An unnarrated story, characters doomed to incident. Stupid transfixed and mad: so much that you completely miss the familiar sounds of shouting adults.

The wolf recalled its life.

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It started hopefully: blur green and dusky umbrages beside an artificial cave, reminiscent of a feral history never experienced, born to a litter of six, mom and pa and man with bushy Anglo mustache and big yellow hat who delivered food—a thoroughly nuclear family. People would come and swoon at the new arrivals; sometimes a hotdog might find its way into the pen. An expansive playground of sharp gradients in elevation and a brisk central pond—the plastered cave became golden in the sunlight, a spiral pathway led up to a vantage point that contained the world: from tundra of penguins to the mysterious straight rows of vehicles, out from which the people arrived in equally ordered lines. Sunlight spent wrestling with its siblings and paddling across one side of the pond to the other, then back once more: the wolf remembered these as the happiest days of its life—all those years ago—facts compiled like death sentences…

It sees itself growing older and stale and unimpressed—the same strings of people flow in, pass him, stare a while, feet shifting under the sun, only to pass swiftly on, some unknown reality that the wolf found itself unable to shake; the enclosure grows diminutive by the hour. It grew up and was transferred—the unseen Database in the Sky deemed it an appropriate match for another wolf of another zoo, this one smaller and flat, or perhaps it just seemed that way to older eyes. It remembered feeling minimally when the trailer doors closed, and it somehow knew it would never see its family again—a faint pang of instinctual tribal fealty, perhaps, but not much else.

So, it was transferred out (a long trip of bright sporadic lights and loud metallic noises), met its perfect programmed match, performed mechanistically, made some kids and gained some weight. How many it could no longer recall. it was transferred again for strictly economical reasons. A new zoo was to open in Gubbio county; two wolves were needed. It’s memories of these years are among the faintest yet, and the wolf thought it strange how the most vividly effectual memories of its life were wholly exhausted within its earliest, least significant years, and how the days stalled in catatonic increments with each passing cycle. It remembered the same lines of children visiting, yelling, throwing food, meeting swift admonishment on the part of their parents—sun-singed veiny creatures, shaking fingers and raising voices in public exasperation. The wolf remembers certain parents dragging children on leashes, some managing three at a time! Sauntering around in Gubbio—one flat, square, yellow-grass plain of human symmetry—the wolf found itself digging near one of the corners furthest from spectatorship, where it thought it heard streaming water.

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The zoo closed at four, and it went on digging well into the night. Blood fused with dirt whipped up into a desperate mound behind it. In the cave adjacent the escaped wolf to-be’s cellmate rose its head, briefly, and observed the commotion. Unimpressed, it lowered it back—there wasn’t nowhere to go, it knew. By morning, the wolf had hit the lead enamel of pipeline; it fell through rust instantly.

It ran wildly the direction of the stream, and splashed across puddles for its own amusement. By daybreak it reached the lake and felt the rain, and became transfixed by the vapor over the lake as it amassed, drowning first the dark cabin across its shore, then the dark trees lining its yard, higher still, till an indefinite monolith supplanted everything directly around it—a wolf contained by a pillar of sand and fog.

When you stepped in, the wolf decided you weren’t real, rather a memory of some kind. But as you approached, sirens followed; it seemed as if you brought—like some unwelcome prophecy—along with you the impending forces beyond this present state of fog, and when you did, it became the voice of your father, near as ever, reverberating with a confusion of tones and sentiment, and behind him came a second voice, this one unfamiliar. And it was dueling fight or flight impulses, thus the wolf sprung into cold water, so much colder than his childhood pond, and infinitely deeper, and it felt its heart run warmer than ever against thickets of waves turned late-winter leaden. But you saw what the second voice was planning to do: with a black rifle he shot something at the wolf; you wanted to cry but dad said, “just a dart, son.” But the wolf was reaching that last gloomy curtain, dart between shoulders. It felt itself grow wary. It didn’t stop, kept paddling. Insistently. Its translucent gray merged into the antihorizon as you watched it vanish, and you can remember now the way you sobbed when your dad scooped you up, how you were reprimanded sternly the long way home.

At odd hours you like to think, even now, that the wolf truly escaped, but it’s a fact its body was found, washed upon the opposite shore, three short days later, only a few yards East from where that gray lonesome cabin still stands, though no one knows why.

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Kueh Kueh Dana Loo Digital Art

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My First Boyfriend Yuqing Wu 1.

Chan, the boy from a different class, had been “noticing” me for a year before he first talked to me. Just a week before our very first conversation was when I first realized his existence when I heard a rumor from some snickering classmates that there was a guy “interested” in me. Shortly after the rumor spread, Chan several times led his group of friends to my class to look at me from the window during the intercession between classes. To avoid embarrassment and any chance for conversation, I quickly escaped to the female bathroom upon the bell ringing every single time.

One day, after class ended in the afternoon, I was packing up my things to return to the dorm since my Chinese middle school was a boarding school.

A classmate sitting near the window suddenly announced, mischievously eyeing me, “Someone is looking for you.”

As I followed his cue, I saw a guy wearing a bright yellow t-shirt standing near the back door. It is him! My heart skipped a beat, and all the classmates who still remained in the classroom set their gaze on me. Setting my backpack on a school desk, I gravely walked toward Chan, as if fulfilling a deadly mission.

“I like you,” he directly said to me, after we walked out and settled. Staring into my eyes with great courage, he continued, “Can you be my girlfriend?”

We barely know each other! I screamed in my heart and looked at him in disbelief, and we can be kicked out of school if caught in a relationship! I thought further and settled my facial expression to calmness.

I said, finally, with a tone of annoying, patronizing authority—the kind of authority you naturally possess when the person you talk to is nervous because he has feelings for you—”It’s impossible. I need to concentrate on my schoolwork. I have to get into a really good high school.”

“Where do you want to go?” He quickly and eagerly asked. Unexpectedly, shame was not his first reaction.

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I listed several of the best high schools in the province and added, “Maybe I will go to the United States in the future,” to assure him that there was no future for us. He looked down and fell into silence. I felt sorry for him and said, “If you do well on your next mid-term, perhaps we can hang out.”

His eyes lightened up for a bit but soon faded. We walked back together to my classroom without words.

I could feel his disappointment and felt a sense of guilt. At the same time, I felt a straightforward refusal was the only correct thing to do.

2.

As the whole floor began to know about Chan’s bold display of interest in me, my life was disturbed by the hooting of my classmates every time Chan passed by the window of my classroom. Perhaps Chan’s open and persistent pursuit of love was courageous in a context full of written and social sanctions against any expression of romantic interests at a young age (before 18). We Chinese call it a “youth relationship”. From what I perceived at that age, youth relationships were stigmatized because they were automatically associated with teen pregnancy and an inability to control sexual urges. When Chan and I walked together in school uniforms in the city, we always got a lot of stares. In many cases, however, youth relationships do not always have to do with sex as those adults imagined.

In December, when my birthday was coming, Chan racked his brain and used up his social connections to find out that I was recently into Japanese anime. Then, Chan went to all the stores on the busiest commercial street in the city to search for a doll of the anime character that I really liked, yet he failed to find one. Ultimately, he bought a scarf for me.

“He put into real efforts into selecting this scarf for you.” A girl from his class later told me, “He wanted to find a scarf that just looked like you -- cute and pink.” I cringed at these words but still appreciated his gift.

After my birthday Chan began to ask me out more often. When I say ask me out, it just referred to walking several circles on the school playground. When we walked, we just talked about good and bad things that happened to us in school -– quite innocuous and innocent talking. Chan was certainly a friend to me. But was he my boyfriend? No, I did not want to think about this question.

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3.

A big event of the following semester—the first semester of the ninth grade—was the Sports Festival, for which every class elected students to compete in various sporting activities. I signed up as a competitor for the female 800 meter race. To be extra hardworking for practice, I ran circles on the track every day, even on weekends. One Saturday night, I asked Chan to train with me and asked him to wait for me by a statue in the school at 7:15 pm. I accidentally left early and arrived at 7 pm but saw Chan already there waiting for me.

“Why did you come early? I said 7:15,” I said.

“Of course. Because it’s you,” he said flatly and matter-of-factly. I blushed.

“Ok,” I said, turning my face away, «Let›s walk to the playground.»

As we were walking to the playground silently and about to turn left at a corner, he stopped.

I stopped and looked at him. He stared at me and a sense of doom rose up in my mind, as I could predict what he was going to say.

“Can you be my girlfriend?”

The second time. I repeated to myself in my mind. Why couldn’t you see that it is impossible? There’s no future for us. We are so young, and just one semester later I am going to one of the best schools, but you will not get in. What’s the point of us being together? It would just be more painful at the point of separation. I yelled these words in my mind yet kept my mouth shut, anxiously thinking of a way to refuse him again. But finally I said, “If you get into the school I am getting into, I can be your girlfriend.”

I said this as I knew that he could not get in, and if he indeed got in, we then would not have to separate from each other, and being in a relationship would make more sense.

“Really?” He asked, voice shaking in excitement. He looked at me in the eye with joy and anticipation.

“Really.”

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The Kiss

Alyssa Ackerman Embroidery

“You promise.” He reached out his right hand to me with his little finger sticking out. I reached out my hand and rounded his little finger with mine. It was the first time we had any physical contact. Our little fingers tightly locked and our thumbs clicked — the childish ritual of making a promise.

At the Sports Festival, Chan ran with me in the inner circle throughout my 800 meter race. While I was running nervously, I heard Chan saying “you are the best” again and again near my ear. His running with me made such a scene and attracted a lot of attention (including that of teachers), but he was oblivious to it at the time, and he did not even realize that I won the second place. After rushing through the finishing line, I collapsed. Chan lifted me to his chest to rest at a less populous area and then laid out the beverages he prepared.

“Are you thirsty?”

“No I’m fine. Thank you.” I weakly replied, brain still deoxygenated.

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4.

Even though for a long time I knew that Chan could not do well enough to get into the same high school I was going to, when Chan messaged me his disappointing results on a chill, summer night when I was listening to music in my room, my first reaction was still shock. For a long time, I could not type down anything to reply. The music faded out of ears and I felt my heart sink very, very deeply. At that moment I was surprised at how I felt because I thought Chan did not have the power to make me sad like this.

While slowly recollecting my memory of my past middle school life, I recalled that every time after class, I always walked to the teachers’ offices to ask questions. I particularly enjoyed the walk, with fear and excitement, because I wanted to walk in that hallway where I might glimpse into Chan’s classroom, wanting to see him sitting inside. He was always very keen to notice my presence, as if he had an internal radar. He could always find me within seconds in a crowd of students all in uniforms or even when we were far away. He would always wave at me in a very exaggerated manner that pulled his whole body. Right outside my classroom, Chan also always “happened to be” playing basketball tricks, laughing really loudly with his friends and frequently peeking into the classroom to see whether I was noticing him. Yes, I was aware of all his attention-grabbing tricks and often sniffed at them, honestly speaking. While sitting in the silent, dark corner of my room that night, I was suddenly reminded of all these moments of us trying really hard, just to take a look at each other or get ourselves noticed by each other. I suddenly realized that without Chan, all these silly, implicit, attention-grabbing routines that had unconsciously occupied much of the happiest moments of my school life would disappear forever. When I walk in that long hallway again, there would no longer be any anticipation, an anticipation that I could not quite articulate at the moment but finally understood at the point of separation. The hallway, from then on, would just be a mundane and pointless hallway, no matter how lively or loud it is.

I finally typed, faking a calm and normal tone, “I hope you have fun at your new school.” As I pressed the “send” button, streams of tears shed on the keyboard and made my hands slippery. I wiped them out as more tears ran down.

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5.

While Chan did not come from a very rich family, he persuaded his parents to bribe the school officers and got in. Chan and I were on the same floor again, but ironically, we stopped talking to each other.

It all began in the summer right before, the same summer I cried for him, when my parents also awarded me a summer camp trip to the United States and I decided, with more certainty, that I would like to attend college there. As I told Chan about this decision, he did not reply — he was pushed down a cliff and truly made aware that there was indeed no future for us. Our separation was imminent — if not high school, then certainly university. I was angry at his feeling grumpy as opposed to feeling happy for me, for my bright prospect.

Nonetheless, I became the one first talking to him several weeks into high school. When the clock struck 5:30, I saw Chan, hands in pockets, walking toward me in the long, empty hallway. When he was finally near me and stopped, I was struck by how much he had grown in the past summer and how handsome he suddenly became. Peering down at me with a flat, cold face, he silently waited for me to speak, eyes no longer with the trace of anxiety or anticipation that he usually had when talking to me.

I reminded him of my promise and implied that he could be my boyfriend. After I did so, I imagined that he would be ecstatic, eyes lighten up, hugging me or laughing out loud — but none of these happened.

He paused for several seconds and brushed it off. After he left I was truly puzzled whether he got my point.

It turned out that he indeed got my point, as he replied a week later with a stuffed panda as a gift and a card saying that he was very happy to be my boyfriend. He had that familiar timid, joyful smile on face when he handed me the present, but I was genuinely puzzled by his late reply. I thought he had wanted to be with me this whole time — ever since the eighth grade, and now it was the tenth. But I did not say anything, fearing that it might put us into an unnecessary argument. I also forced myself to not let this confusion bother me any longer. I should be more looking forward to the future of our relationship, a journey destined to be full of struggles, since I therefore officially turned myself into an outcast who was openly defiant toward the school and social norms. I was in a youth relationship, but I thought it was worth the sacrifice.

Besides dealing with teachers’ sanctions of my relationship, I faced other problems. From being a top student in middle school, I became only an average student in my prestigious high school. I grew ever more hardworking at the cost of my health, staying up late and getting up early to solve math problems and memorizing SAT vocab under a dim light. Preparing both domestic track schoolwork as well as applications for American universities, I was at the edge of over-exhausting myself at any moment. Even for an American native speaker, college applications were a painstaking process, not to mention to me, a foreign student ignorant to all the complicated procedures and a bad English speaker.

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Chan could not offer me substantial help since he was not very good at schoolwork, but he accompanied me all the time I was studying at the library and hung out with me when I was unhappy. And wherever I was, a telephone call would bring him to me.

While I was with Chan all the time and gained much emotional support from him, my parents also found out about this relationship and the many lies I weaved to disguise the meetups with Chan.

My mom started to constantly talk to me in a tone of «I can’t believe this is my daughter.” My dad called me shameless and yelled with rage, “End the relationship, NOW!” I pressed some buttons on my phone, and reported, “The relationship was ended.” But of course, that was another lie.

Gemini

Ben Orozco Neon, Argon, Glass

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7.

I took two months off from school in the second semester of the eleventh grade to concentrate on my preparation for an impending SAT exam. This departure had another meaning, which was that Chan and I were now sort of in a long-distance relationship because he was still in our enclosed boarding school, and I was outside. To be honest, I really missed him when I could not see him. We texted a lot at first, then less and less. Behind the screen, I could tell that Chan was growing colder to me, but I was not totally sure about my hunch. When I asked him why he replied to my messages so slowly, he said he was overwhelmed by his schoolwork and suggested that we chat less frequently. I complied with his request.

Until one night, a night not any different from any other night, I was again studying in my room. Suddenly on my computer screen jumped out Chan’s message, which made me almost faint at that instant. It was conveyed in a very calm tone yet made my mind explode.

It was, “We should break up.”

I could never forget about the feelings when I saw those words. It was so sudden —coming out of nowhere — and I felt my very basic trust about this world crumble. It threw me into a kind of appalling dread and I had all kinds of urges — to cry, to yell, to beat him, and to beg him at the same time.

I typed with my heart racing as if going crazy, “Why? Is it because I’m not good enough?”

“No. Don’t ask more. I don’t want to say more.” He replied coldly, with a kind of dominance that was utterly annoying, yet at that time I could not perceive it. I desperately wanted an answer, a justification.

“Because I’m going to America?”

“Not totally, partially. Please, don’t ask me anymore. Continuing this relationship would be unfair to you.”

My heart sank at this last sentence. Intuition drove me to put my hands on the keyboard and start typing with hands shaking.

“Does it have anything to do with another girl?”

After sending this sentence, I could not help but laugh at myself. No, it’s impossible, why would you ever think so? Chan would never do that.

I quickly and desperately typed down again, “As long as it is not related to another person, whatever between us could be solved by us. We have already conquered a lot—all the resistance from teachers and parents—” Before I finished my sentence, he sent, “Yes. It does have to do with another girl.”

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In my mind a lot of images appeared. I imagined him kissing that girl. I had no idea who that girl was and what she looked like. I only imagined a vague yet beautiful face, and I felt in my mind a lot of hatred for her. I imagined how hard I would slap Chan’s face the next time I met him. I would shake him, kick him, and call him ugly names. But ultimately, I would still ask him, “Can we get back together?” I hated myself, for my lack of assertiveness and lingering longing for such an asshole. But “asshole” is an oversimplified word. I thought of the Chan who secretly put bubble tea or watermelon juice on my desk on hot summer days, who quietly put food in my backpack when knowing that I skipped meals, who sent his buddies to ask me to wait for him after school, who nervously looked at me when we first met. I started crying and continued crying for the rest of the night. It was the first night I did not sleep for a single second and witnessed the sky change from black to grey to white. Then the sun rose, my tears were still running down. I did not have any anticipation for the new day. I knew things wouldn’t be any different.

I talked to Chan’s best friend, asking about the girl he broke up with me for. Then I realized that I saw that girl’s photo as one of Chan’s feature photos on his social media wall ever since the beginning of high school, but I never bothered to ask about it, to not appear as easily jealous. I realized that there were more reasons to Chan’s indifference and coldness to me at the beginning of high school — not only his perceived lack of a future for us but also his already falling in love with another person, a person with whom he shared more similarity — at least similar family background and life trajectory (e.g. going to a domestic university). When I talked to him, which was out of his expectation, he still chose me over her after a whole week’s contemplation. But after a year of a relationship with me, he still found our differences unconquerable and her unforgettable, so he chose to break up with me when knowing that he could not love me fully. Knowing this whole process of Chan’s decision-making was heartbreaking for me. But when asking myself, at which point did Chan begin to do something that is really wrong? I could not answer that. Could I say it was wrong for him to have feelings for her? Could you blame someone for an emotion he could not control?

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Years later, when I tried to describe to others my relationship with my first boyfriend, it was always hard for me to simplify this complicated story into single sentences. If the story ended before high school — if Chan did not go to the same school as I did, my impression for him would stay as the very sincere and kind boy who liked me for years. If I wipe out of the middle school part, Chan might be more like a cheater with his volatile romantic interests.

Today, I finally decided that I would not label him as anything, but rather tell this lengthy, complex story, as a documentation, also a disclosure, before I forget about the details of it as time passes. I experienced some of the happiest as well as the most painful moments in my relationship with Chan. After Chan, I never experienced any of these feelings to that intensified extent. As I’ve seen and experienced more, it was harder and harder for things to disturb my emotions. I am not likely to be particularly happy nor particularly sad. Perhaps that is what growing up means.

Two months after our breaking up was New Year. At 00:00, Chan sent me a message wishing me happy new year. I politely replied back. That was the January 1st of 2013, the last time we talked to each other.

Crow's Calling

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Lucilia Schieldt Ink & Colored Pencil

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Untitled

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Lee Troz Pen & Ink

Ambush

Grant Yun Digital Art

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To My Father on Moving Day In the back of the basement behind The garbage bags of stuffed animals, Cardboard boxes of karate belts and VHS tapes, littered with lint and rat waste, There’s the telescope you bought for us On a whim, that we only used twice.

You dreamed of nights gazing At the sky, explaining why The stars may be no more than dead light, Or the last hope of humans fleeing a hollowed home.

You would tell us about the scorpion chasing The hunter around the Earth every year.

About how little of the Universe we know.

When I look up at the stars now, I can only marvel at the unfathomable geometry Of it all and the fact that Most of what we know will be disproven, but That nevertheless, for thousands of years, People navigated land and sea, Eyes fixed firmly on a celestial map.

I know this to be true.

You showed me the North Star and Anchored me to the sky for twenty-three years, Even as the ground fell from beneath my feet.

And if Polaris turns out to be long dead, That beam that bound us Will be no less real.

There are a thousand and one things I wish I had looked at differently, But some things you see regardless the lens: Children make God in their parent’s image And children, for better or worse, grow up.

I want to look into the telescope, But I’m afraid I’ll just see a room full of salt.

I take off the lens cap and look anyway.

There’s a sky full of stories: Nicknames, nonsense words, curses, fights, apologies.

Above your easy chair in the corner there is a star.

The needle in my chest stops spinning, and Points straight ahead.

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Aaron Durlauf

Final Thoughts Illumination is made up of a huge team of wonderful individuals whom we thank for their support and collaboration. First and foremost is Jim Rogers, our very own superhero –he is never tired, never defeated and always ready to face a new challenge. Our deepest gratitude and appreciation to Sadeq Hashemi, whose immeasurable patience, skills and sense of humor got us through the stressful process of creating two marvelous print issues. Special thanks to Emma Liverseed for being a wonderful leader and Arina Tveleneva, Noah Laroia-Nguyen and Aida Ebrahimi for excelling in their positions every day. Illumination would also like to thank Jen Farley for her optimism, professionalism and grace throughout the printing process. Also, huge thanks to Kelli Hughes and Eliot Finkelstein at College Library, Julie Ganser and Karen Redfield from the Art & English Departments, Jay Ekleberry from Wheelhouse Studios, and Emmett Mottl for his continued guidance as former EIC. Final thanks to Adam Ramer and Ziyad Sultan for their assistance with Illumination programming, as well as Theda Berry and Carlo Romagnolo for their support.

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Publications Committee Mission Statement The Publications Committee celebrates and promotes Reading and writing on Campus. WUD Publications aims to offer Badgers various leadership opportunities to gain experience in publishing-related fields. We provide creative outlets for UW-Madison students through our journals, lectures with established authors, mentoring program with professionals in the journalism and publishing industries, plan an awesome literary festival and more.

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