INKBLOT VOLUME 18

L I T E R A RY M AG A Z I N E

INKBLOT LITERARY ARTS MAGAZINE ON SUBMITTING WORK TO INKBLOT: Inkblot Literary Arts Magazine is published by the Orange County School of the Arts (OCSA) at 1010 North Main Street, Santa Ana, California 92701. Inkblot welcomes submissions from all OCSA students. Submissions can be sent by email to inkblot@ocsarts.net. If a digital photograph or scan of artwork cannot be emailed, the artist should send an email to the Inkblot editors to arrange a time when the editors can view the artwork. All electronic submissions are guaranteed blind, and editors will review and either accept or reject such submissions without knowledge of authorship.

COVER DESIGN AND ART BY: Rachael Kim

PRINTED BY: The Printery Irvine, California www.theprintery.com

Inkblot Literary Arts Magazine, Volume #18 Issue 1 Š October 2020 All Rights Reserved.

This magazine includes literature, photography, and artwork written and created by students of the Orange County School of the Arts, Santa Ana, California. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and artists and not necessarily those of OCSA. No portion of this book may be reproduced without prior permission from Inkblot. All work contained in this magazine is copyrighted by the respective authors and artists. Inkblot reserves the right to reprint all accepted work in any subsequent issue, anthology, or collection.

Inkblot Poster Art, Avalon LaFosse

Inkblot Staff Portraits, Rachael Kim

Senior Editors Suvali Dhanak susu hizon

Kate Hizon bunot baby aka keet Semilore Ola bulldog

Contributing Editors Bianca Badajos kk bubblegum

Marbella Bolognese Beya

Kathrine Habibi Voted Funniest In Inkblot

Lizzy Drew murder quota

Cassandra Kesig soviet sweetheart <3~

Faith Kim Faithy

Kai Matias-Bell Here for tax reasons

Christina Miles Jason Derulo as Rum Tum Tugger Kaon Suh cowgirl beebop

Visual Arts Editors Erin Choi kirbyknees

Rachael Kim Kimchi Princess

Avalon LaFosse LEMONHEAD

Corey LoDuca Roach Queen

Faculty Advisor Josh Wood Lisenced Dream Interpreter

TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S Marilyn, Betsey Yu................................................................................... 14 ya que estás lista / now that you are ready, Frida Jauregui.................... 15 The Phone Man, Tash Hussain................................................................ 16 Negligence, Corey LoDuca....................................................................... 24 SLEEPING ATOP THE DRAGON’S HOARD, Teddi Haynes............. 25 irrational2, Holland Fox.......................................................................... 27 memories i left in a box on my dresser, Isabel Hahn.............................. 28 JC, Frances Huang.................................................................................. 33 Jellyfish, Ashley Thornton....................................................................... 34 Alien Creatures, Ethan Lee..................................................................... 35 Food for Comfort, Amie Rehmann........................................................... 36 I Check to See If I Am Lucid Dreaming, Cassia Efthymiou................... 38 Portrait of Adriana, Avalon LaFosse....................................................... 39 Rosa Chews on the Sun, Bianca Badajos................................................. 40 Monkey Breath, Monkey Mind, Mollie Schofer...................................... 42 Chickens, Lauren Chudner....................................................................... 44 let my earth breath, Abril Rodriguez-Diaz............................................... 45 Johanna Park is very Cool, Trenyce Tong.............................................. 46 Father Dear, Courtland Jeffries............................................................... 47 Lettuce, Mia Soumbasakis........................................................................ 50 Untitled, Hannah Kang............................................................................ 52 Pamilya, Hailey Saga............................................................................... 53 Lizardtown, Kaon Suh............................................................................. 64 Che Guevara Pants, Chelsea Schack....................................................... 66 Untitled, Misu Zhang............................................................................... 68 Self-Similar, Seungu Choi....................................................................... 69 YOU ARE something TO ME, Anastasia Early...................................... 76 my neighbor is building a boat outside, Semilore Ola............................ 78 Weighing the Dice, Teddi Haynes............................................................ 80 Choking on Death, Rory Lowdermilk...................................................... 82 Untitled, Hannah Kang........................................................................... 84 Improvisation No. 2, Chelsea Schack...................................................... 85 A Seurat Painting, Jonathan Truong...................................................... 86 Possessions, Cassia Efthymiou................................................................. 90 Bitter Divinity, Avalon LaFosse...............................................................100 Great White, Ashley Thornton.................................................................101 Paralysis, Marbella Bolognese................................................................104 Spirit, Holland Fox...................................................................................118

My fishing tutor&me, Mia Soumbasakis.................................................119 Silkworm, Gaby Mikhail..........................................................................122 Complement, Quynh Anh Vu................................................................... 125 Neighborhood, Abril Rodriguez-Diaz......................................................126 saturation, Trenyce Tong........................................................................131 The Same, Isabel Hahn............................................................................132 Braces, Lauren Chudner...........................................................................135 Townie, Semilore Ola...............................................................................136 Self Portrait, Maggie McKelvey................................................................138 she discovers (for a living), Katherine Wong..........................................139 A Segment of Sanity, Rachel Tian...........................................................140 lore of a lineage, Bianca Badajos..............................................................142 17th Parallel, Jonathan Truong..............................................................144 Maya, Trenyce Tong................................................................................145 Cancer, Ashley Thornton..........................................................................146 The Sun Abandons her People, Anastasia Early.....................................148 Lemon Marmalade, Mia Soumbasakis....................................................150 Sacramento Still Life, Holland Fox.........................................................155 The Banjo Men, Lily Gerhard..................................................................156 Alternate Worlds, Tiffany Guo.................................................................159 Going for a Night Swim, Teddi Haynes..................................................160 Community Arts Yogurt (A Haiku), Sarah...........................................................................165 Electric Kitty, Kevin B..............................................................................165 Figurative Language, Sandie...................................................................165 Life, Isabella..............................................................................................166 Science Fiction, Sophia.............................................................................166 Three Sentence Stories, Kevin G..............................................................167 Michael Jackson, Christopher................................................................. 167 Magic Sword, Yahaira..............................................................................167 20/20/20 - The Special Vision Steampunk Festival Helios, Lizzy Hatch...................................................................................173 Atlas, Suvali Dhanak and Kaon Suh.......................................................174 JĂśrmungandr, Kathrine Habibi.............................................................177 cosmonauts, Fox Maso.............................................................................178 Oppy, Tobi Park........................................................................................180 I canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t see the break of sea and sky, Laura Chen and Katherine Wong.....182 Flor de Mayo, Amie Rehmann..................................................................184 Olm, Cassandra Kesig..............................................................................188 Geography of a Matriarch, Bianca Badajos and Kate Hizon.................190

Index.........................................................................................................195

For Toni Morrison — rest in power.

“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language.

That may be the measure of lives.”

Marilyn, Betsey Yu 14

YA Q UE E S T Á S L I S TA / N OW T H AT YOU A R E R E A DY FRIDA JAUREGUI

ya que estás lista, ya que ni te queda un estrago de ningún dia o año, puedo levantarme del suelo y verdaderamente observar; la introspección me envuelve y las dos sabemos que no es desventaja. en la cocina, me sentaba en la mesa, la que le sacaste cicatrices con el cuchillo de mantequilla. ya, debería haberte dicho, ya para de limpiar. ud estaba parada en los dos pies junto al comal con los huesos intactos (nunca usas/te las caderas para bailar). no sé si alguna vez me daré cuenta de que todo fue más más más mejor hecho por tí: el tallo de la flor rompida, más y más, todo lo que me pasó por el esófago, más y más, la manera en que camino a través del umbral. now that you are ready, and that you are left without the traces of any day or year, i can lift myself from the floor and truly observe. introspection engulfs me and we both know that this is not a drawback. in the kitchen, i would sit at the table, the one that you scarred up with a butterknife. enough, i should have told you, enough with the cleaning. you were on both feet at the comal, your bones intact (you never use/d your hips to dance). i don’t know if i’ll ever realize that everything was done más más más better by you: the torn stem of the flower, más y más, everything that passed through my esophagus, más y más, the way that i walk over the threshold.

15

TH E PH O NE M A N TA S H H U S S A I N

Time seemed to stand at a hazy stillness when I sat in the verandah of Rauf Chachu and his wife Haneefa Chachi’s bungalow. The one he inherited from some Britisher who inherited it from some Indian noble of sorts, then some Indian freedom fighter-turned-refugee during Partition and finally my long dead grandparents. The house was small and the verandah surrounded it on all sides like a snake coiled tightly around an immobile prey. Even in the summer I always preferred to stay outside, relishing the shade of the outdoor plastic canopy that gave the shadows a green hue. The back of the verandah looked out across a lush green carpet of grass surrounded by Haneefa Chachi’s prized fruit trees, this season’s harvest promising ripe oranges and mangoes with colors that I was convinced didn’t even have a name for. The fruit trees were the closest thing I had to a luxury and I always looked forward to the monthly carton of produce that Rauf Chachu sent home with me after summer was over.

There were times when my uncle claimed that Haneefa Chachi loved those trees more than she loved him. I think it’s true. It seemed to be only when there were dirt stains on her clean cotton shalwar that she truly came to life, the only time that she could ever love anything.

Otherwise she was mumbling to herself on a plastic stool in the kitchen while she removed each little pea from their gaping pods, hands weathered and wrinkled. The pale blue veins bulging from beneath the brown marred skin of her hands were a reminder of time passing and leaving Haneefa Chachi far behind.

The only time I ever talked to her was when we talked about the fruit trees.

16

TA S H H U S S A I N

Now I sat alone with basketball shorts much too big for me—I think they belonged to my cousin Bilal before he went off to college— and tightened at the waist by the white elastic band I borrowed from Haneefa Chachi’s sewing kit (she didn’t sew, it came with the dowry).

The faded t-shirt I wore was almost too small for me now. I had grown a lot since last summer; some even told me I looked “very healthy these days” and Ammi always told me to ignore them, even though in my mind I saw healthy as a compliment. Yes, I was healthy. I ate all of my food without a single complaint, even asked for more while my other cousins fussed and pushed their plates away. I would play soccer in the front lawn with the boys in the neighborhood and my older cousins after dinner, except for at the last Eid dinner. Ammi made me sit next to her the whole time. It took me a while to understand why. In the end I figured it was because I wasn’t as tall as the other boys. Ammi never seemed to argue otherwise.

Time had come to an absolute crawl. Even the flies that once buzzed frantically around the opening of the straw to the little carton of grape juice at my side slowed down to a communion around the edge of the carton, idly rubbing their tiny black hands together. I thought they looked like tiny villains in the middle of scheming, except now they were scheduling any evil schemes for after their afternoon nap. When it seems as if I could have melted between the white planks of wood beneath my feet, I find my eyes looking out across the yard at Haneefa Chachi’s fruit trees. They wander towards the left corner of the wall surrounding the yard where a stacked formation of crumbling bricks were barely visible behind the row of mango trees. I remember building that a few summers ago with the neighbor’s maid’s youngest son to smuggle empty glass bottles of pop (from the neighbor’s daughters wedding party) into Rauf Chachu’s backyard. On top of those bricks, we sat behind the trees and glistened with sweat as we fastened makeshift spears with sticks and broken bottles to try and pick the mangoes from the highest parts of the trees. We called ourselves Wild Men, banged our chests and scampered out of the way each time the spear we threw at the mango tree sailed back towards the ground. It would land in the earth with a thunking sound and before long the soft, fertile earth was covered in tiny craters and the remains of splintered Wild Men spears.

A white and gray cat sat atop the pile of bricks that were worn down now and had toppled over after the last monsoon season. I watch 17

INKBLOT

with newfound fascination as it licked red dust off of its paws. I am no longer alone. It doesn’t see me, instead swiping its paw over its head and leaving a smudge of red between its ears. It looked up from its work, acknowledging my presence from far away with half lidded green eyes. The red mark reminded me of the kumkum on the foreheads of the Bollywood stars in the movies Rauf Chachu rented from Movie Uncle at the bazaar. I stare back. The expression on its small face was stoic and seemingly uninterested, and combined with the makeshift kumkum on its forehead, it was almost comical to me. I go to stand up. Maybe we could be friends. The Bollywood hero cat seemed to have a different idea, because before I could get to my feet, it was deftly hopping from one brick to the next and disappeared over the wall with the flick of a red tinted tail. I sit back down again.

I hear the sound of the phone ringing from inside the house and look towards the screen door. Rauf Chachu usually answered the phone. Haneefa Chachi only answered when family members called on Eid, but it was mostly the other side of the line. It continued ringing a few more times before figured I would have to answer it myself. I peel myself from the plastic patio cover beneath my partially exposed thighs and head inside, following the sound of shrill ringing into the kitchen.

The landline rested on the brown tiled counter between discarded pots and jars of achar—one of Rauf Chachu’s more lavish purchases—its blue face flashing as it continued to ring. I reach on almost my tiptoes between two pots and take the phone in my hand, moving it to my ear as I press the button with the green phone icon on it. I would talk to my sister in New York from the landline back at my house, and I had a lot of pride in figuring out how to use it before Baba did. I only stopped bragging because it made him mad. I put the phone against the hair that perspiration had pressed to the side of my face and lean against the counter the way Rauf Chachu did when he talked on the phone, even furrowing my brow to prove my importance.

“Hello?” My voice was too squeaky to sound important.

“Salaam. May I speak to Rauf Shaikh?”

The voice was a man’s. It was deep enough to sound important.

Even deeper than Uncle Rauf’s.

I wasn’t sure what to say. Of course I could say that he wasn’t home and be done with it, but there was always a small thrill in talking to people over the phone. And I couldn’t think of anything better to do.

18

TA S H H U S S A I N

“He’s not home right now. He.... He went to the jungle! I think he’s going to look for tigers.”

There’s a pause. But the silence sounds almost amused rather than shocked.

“Tigers you say? Are you sure?”

I hadn’t thought this far. I wasn’t expecting him to buy into my little lie. I look around the kitchen, eyes landing on a worn mat on the floor in front of the ice box.

“Yes! Yes. He wants to turn one into a rug.”

The silence on the other end is interrupted by a small, grainy chuckle.

“I see. Do you have any idea of when he will return from such an expedition?”

It is my turn to be silent, gleeful and giddy at the way my impromptu story seemed to be unfolding. He even used a big word like the ones the adults would use in conversation with other adults. My chest puffs a little with pride and I shift against the counter. I wondered if the stranger was smiling on the other end too.

“No, but I will let him know you called.”

“O-”

My finger presses the button that ends the call and I quickly slam the phone back into the charger. #

I tried to tell Rauf Chachu about the Phone Man when he came home that night.

The air was thick with painful anticipation as the sound of the rumbling rickshaw engine on the other side of the gate filled the previously still silence. Rauf Chachu calls for Haneefa Chachi - it looks like he left his keys again. Haneefa Chachi simply grunts from within the house and I almost fly towards the gate, sliding it open with ease (with the help of car grease Rauf Chachu applied on it every Sunday) and stepping back as the doors pushed open towards the house. Rauf Chachu appeared from behind them and Rickshaw Uncle took the crumpled bills from my uncle’s hand, taking his leave with my uncle’s tired wave. I don’t think he had even seen me yet as he wearily began his trek up the driveway towards the house. I fell into step with his trudging strides, all the thoughts jumbling in my head as I tried to choose which one to say first.

19

INKBLOT

“Chachu, somebody called-”

“The gate, Zubaida.”

I falter as he continues towards the house, leaving me behind.

Eventually I turn and walk to the gate, looking behind me before placing one foot on the jutting metal frame of the gate and pushing off in the direction of the street beyond the gate to close the doors. They close with a bang and after everything was locked, I run towards the house and in my previously thwarted excitement (that now came back with a vengeance), I found myself ignoring what Ammi always said to me when Baba came home from work.

“He’s tired right now Zubaida, his ears will only work when he has had his food.” I wasn’t sure how that was even possible, but it was accepted as a rule that after a while I even found myself following, helping her set the table just so Baba could get his food and listen to what I had to say.

By now Haneefa Chachi had begun to set the food on the small coffee table in front of the T.V, Rauf Chachu seated on the couch as he half tuned in to the daily news. I walk into the living room as he unclasps his watch and leaves it on the side table.

“Chachu somebody called for you today.”

Rauf Chachu didn’t look away from the screen even for a second. Did he hear me? Did the man already call him? I take a few steps into the room and look towards the kitchen. Haneefa Chachi was watching blankly as a roti burned over the stovetop flame.

“Who was it?”

“What?”

“Who called?”

He still hadn’t looked away and managed to reach for the glass of water placed on the table before him.

“I... I don’t know. He just asked for you.”

Now he looked towards me.

“This is why you do not answer the phone while I’m away. I will answer the phone next time and maybe then we can avoid these foolish situations. Just be still! Life is fine! Go help your aunt with the food.”

He looks back towards the television screen.

I feel myself wilt a little. The Phone Man didn’t tell me his name. I move towards the kitchen and step out of the way to watch 20

TA S H H U S S A I N

as Haneefa Chachi follows the path of her nightly routine. From the kitchen to the table, food in hand, then back again. All the while I saw the way her eyes had glazed over. Rauf Chachu was now sipping a glass of water, Haneefa Chachi never looking up and somehow managing to stay out of the way of the television screen. She moves to place a plate on the table and bumps his arm. Water splashes onto his sleeve and he pushes her away, cursing to himself and causing her to drop the plate in her hand with a loud CRASH.

“Useless woman! How do I keep buying you new plates? With the dowry you gave me?” Chachu mutters angrily. Haneefa Chachi stoops down to gather the shards in her hands.

I keep my head down as I hold a dish of hot rice between my hands, testing to see if they would burn before I reached the table. #

Rauf Chachu moved the landline into his office the next day.

Haneefa Chachi cleaned up breakfast. I did not talk about the Phone Man or tigers. He left without a word, leather bag in hand and shirt pressed. I heard the rumbling of Rickshaw Uncle’s engine and the screen door closing before everything was silent once again.

It was late afternoon when I was out on the verandah again that the phone rang from inside. I was out in the backyard trying to put Bilal Bhai’s old cricket bat back together again. I froze at the sound of shrill, muffled ringing and look around. I wasn’t sure what exactly I was looking for or what I was expecting. I set down the bat but linger in the grass as I watch the screen door. No movement from inside. I remember what Rauf Chachu said.

I have to be still.

I have to be still.

I have to be still.

Haneefa Chachi wasn’t going to answer the phone, was she?

I look towards the fruit trees, still and drooping in the humid haze that fell all around them. I stand up, broken bat discarded and legs carrying me towards the house. The screen door slammed behind me and each ring was a warning that it was close to going away.

It is as I’m approaching the door that I pass by the master bedroom and notice the door is ajar. The room was dark but the whirring of a fan signals someone is inside and I see the silhouette of a form on the bed facing away from the door. I retreat and continue 21

INKBLOT

towards the office, but I stop at the door. The ringing continues from behind the door. I look behind me. The house was still. It could be the Phone Man. Maybe I could ask him for his name. I open the door and reach for the phone now on the desk.

Beep.

“Hello?”

“Salaam. May I speak to Rauf Shaikh?”

It was him.“He’s not here right now.”

“Still hunting I see?” He remembered.

“Well... Yes. But no as well. He...”

My eyes land on a crate used for mangoes, now reappropriated as a makeshift filing cabinet.

“He stole some mangoes from the Mango Goddess. She’s after him now.”

Ask him his name?

There is a small pause.

“From the Mango Goddess? What will she do when she gets him?” I chip a piece of wood off of the desk.

“She’ll... She’ll turn him into a mango tree.”

“A mango tree? Will he stay like that forever?”

I go to sit on Rauf Chachu’s chair and watch as the swirls in the shiny wood of the desk gnarl and twist into a tree. Solid and absolute.

“Yes. And he will have to go back to her orchard and make mangoes for the Mango Goddess every summer. Even if it is very hot outside.”

“What if she doesn’t catch him? Where will he go?”

I pause. I pause for a long time. “I don’t know.”

“W-” Click.

I leave the office and close the door behind me. Looking around the still house, I notice that the bedroom door was closed now. The living room and kitchen were empty, but the screen door leading out to the backyard was slightly ajar.

I step out into the backyard and notice that the once present sun had tucked itself behind gray clouds and raindrops made dark dots on the white wood of the verandah. Near the mango trees, I see a figure in pink shalwar kamis stained at the knees. She looks up towards the 22

TA S H H U S S A I N

trees and raindrops felt in fat drops onto her cheeks and squinted eyes.

I see the Mango Goddess look back at me and in that moment I have an answer to the Phone Man’s last question.

She didn’t want to catch him.

She didn’t want him to come back.

23

Negligence, Corey LoDuca 24

S LE E PIN G ATO P T H E D RAGO N ’ S H OA R D T E D D I H AY N E S

The dragon inside my stomach is three years old / it’s dead / when I lay down all the ash seeps horizontal to my throat / a heat I don’t retract from / I see the smoke from a whole burning house / mark out where it casts silhouettes against the street / cries muscle memory / prickles the back of my neck / and all the red expanses of me / rising and falling like construction / say a dragon exudes strength / expels breathlessness like my chest shaking inside its shell / say a dragon will sleep in my arms until I’m skeleton / say it will talon its way out from under my skin like breaking the surface of water / I submerge the two of us / and we exhale until our breath bottoms out / see straight through each other like stretched sheets of plastic refracting light / hardening in the absolute cold / rebirth is predestined / so I never was actually gone / the surface tension of the pool would not break / until everyone else was asleep / until I was so rested I wanted to be awake / one of the dragon’s heads lays on its side / its forked tongue fraying into split ends / eyes yellow on all sides / spinning in their sockets 25

T E D D I H AY N E S

like globes / I consume like the universe consumes nothingness / the dragon deposits its keepsakes in my pocket / dollar bills and spare keys and vestigial fingers / I say nothing about the hole / when I was first born I was praised for being so quietâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; my wings are trying to get my attention / my tendons tap me on the shoulder / I make eye contact with reflections in puddles / and the winged creatures I see when I rise too quickly / the skin around my eyes wrinkles for the first time / my eyelashes fall through the pocket my teeth / fall through the pocket / my hair my / claws my scales / and the dragonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s body piles at my feet / and in the debris I catch a glimpse of heartbeat / I was looking for it / I piece back the shards like mosaic / it becomes a mirror / my empty image hesitates behind the glass / like a dragon on a harness / like a dragon taking its master on a walk / like how being owned is almost like being held / how seeing vapor rise

from the steaming ground is sort of like breathing

26

irrational2, Holland Fox 27

ME M O RIE S I L E F T I N A B OX O N M Y D RE S S E R ISABEL HAHN

i. harry potter audiobook

I liked to press my forehead against the cold window whenever we rode in Dad’s old silver minivan. A red mark forming on my skin and my head bumping up and down, it was like I was getting a tilted view of the world.

Jamie would sit in this weird position when he got bored, his back sliding down the carseat, chin tucked in, arms spread out, his two feet inching towards the ceiling. He would tap the grab handle with the tips of his sneakers over and over again until Mom would glance back and tell him to sit still. She looked a lot less tired back then.

There was a purple CD wallet we kept in the front seat compartment, small and compact with a broken zipper. All we had inside were old Baby Einstein CDs from when I was in preschool and an audiobook of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Dad always insisted on listening to the book instead of turning on the radio. He told us to just sit back, that everything didn’t have to be so loud all the time.

When it got dark, I would look outside the window, my body slumped against the back of the seat and the narrator’s voice feeling like liquid as his words swam in and out of my ears. I would watch the moon move through dark tree branches and buildings, as if it was following the minivan, a secret friend that wanted to be with me wherever I went.

I remember always wondering if the moon could see me too, if the two of us had a special bond that no one else would ever know about. ii. old colored pencil set

My grandmother always had the same nature show playing 28

ISABEL HAHN

on her little TV. She lived in the old part of town, apartment 5C of the Garden Lake complexes. During hazy summer afternoons when the weather was more cloudy than it was hot, she liked sitting at the wooden table on her narrow balcony, family watching the television in her living room through the sliding screen door. Her favorite program was the one about the meerkats living in the grasslands, how their little heads would pop up from their scattered burrows and look around furtively. She used to tell me that it was hard to believe such an animal existed in the world.

I used to sit with her at the wooden table in a comfortable silence, with my flip-flops dangling from my toes. Sometimes I would bring my little set of colored pencils and draw on cream colored real estate notepads and the backs of the old restaurant flyers that would come in the mail. I drew and drew, with my grandmother dozing off, the TV in the living room droning on for hours.

“I like that,” she said quietly to me one day, eyes half closed and gesturing to the piece of paper I had laid out in front of me, a stray line of purple from my pencil traveling across the fading white.

I smiled, and she watched as I traced my finger over what I had drawn. Eyelashes and smile lines and light crosshatch shading over the nose. I picked the sheet up off the table surface, “It’s you.”

“Really?” She tried to sit up straighter. “Bring it closer, I can’t see very well.”

I did, and I remember how she took the crinkled paper out of my hands. “This is so nice, Amy. You draw so well, you know that?”

I laughed and lifted both my legs up on the chair to sit crisscrossed. “No, I’m–I’m really bad.”

She was quiet for a few minutes, studying my drawing with this look in her eves that I couldn’t quite figure out. Then she reached for my left hand and held it for a while, her fingers intertwined with mine.

“I want you to... I want you to know something.” She wasn’t looking at me, but staring off into space, as if she needed to search for the right words to string together. “I want you to always trust in all the talents that you have, okay? I want you to... keep them close to you.” iii. bundle of christmas lights

Our guinea pig, Simon, died on Christmas Eve about two years ago, my sophomore year. Aunt Fay had just walked in through the front 29

INKBLOT

door, carefully holding a large cardboard cake box, when I noticed him lying limp in his cage from my spot on the couch.

“He looks so peaceful.” Jamie said as I picked him up gently, his soft ear brushing against my right thumb. “It looks like he’s asleep.”

I remember wishing that when the time eventually came for me to die, I would look just the way Simon did in that moment.

Jamie got a shoebox from the garage and we placed Simon inside, covering him up with a piece of fabric. In shiny purple magic marker I slowly wrote Simon’s name across the side, looping the bottom curve of the s and the top of the o. His name looked so pretty written out like that.

We walked outside with our shoes slid halfway on and trudged heavily over to the far corner of the backyard. For a while we just stood there not saying anything, unsure of what to do next, as if both of us were wondering if there was a possibility that Simon was simply in the middle of a long winter slumber. Jamie sighed and stared down at the lid, tapping the sharp corners with his index finger.

Half an hour later, we were sitting beside Mom’s basil plants, both of our legs folded over to the side.

“Good-bye Simon.” Jamie said, holding the box close to his chest. His voice sounded so delicate, with an almost elastic quality as it moved up and down through the air. Slowly, he lowered Simon’s box down into the little hole we had dug up. I noticed how the dirt smudged the knees of his nice pants. From where I was, I could see the Christmas lights strung across my bedroom window on the second floor, how they kept flickering on and off in a rhythmic pattern. Suddenly, I began to wonder if there was a chance Simon was already looking down upon us, watching our tiny bodies move around in the backyard, cast in a colorful, muted glow of the lights inside my room. I looked up at the sky.

“I hope you liked us.” iv. seashell with pink on the edges

Micah and I drove down to the beach last September. I remember how I stretched my arm out the window, fingers reaching forward like I was trying to grab something in the air. Micah wanted to stay to watch the sun go down, even though I could see that he was getting tired. We spread a towel out over the sand, a few feet away from the shore. While absentmindedly sinking my hand into the grains of 30

ISABEL HAHN

sand, I found a shell with little grooves and a grainy surface. In the dimness I couldn’t quite tell what color it was, so I just pushed it into the front pocket of my light wash jeans.

“Have you ever tried saying your name over and over again until it doesn’t sound like a name anymore?”

“No.” “Try.”

“Micah,” He smiled. “Micah, Micah, Micah, Micah...”

He kept doing it, repeating his name until his voice began to trail off into a faint murmur. I turned to look at him, and saw his face relax as his lips continued to move without meaning.

Then he laughed, rocking back and forth on the wrinkled beach towel, brushing his cheek against his left shoulder. “It doesn’t even sound like anything now, just... syllables.”

“Do you ever think about,” I said, digging my foot into the sand, feeling the grains slide over my toes. “Like, how we just call ourselves the names our parents give us? Just like that?”

“There’s probably an alternate universe or something where we both have these completely different names.” He rubbed his eyes sleepily as he fell backwards to gaze up at the night sky, the stars like salt sprinkled messily across the surface of a black marble table. “And right now, instead of sitting at the beach we’re like, driving down a big highway, or watching a movie, or…”

The side of his face looked a shade of blue in the moonlight, and if I squinted my eyes I could see the freckles scattered over the bridge of his nose, grown dark from long hours in the sun.

“It’s kind of weird to think about, isn’t it?” His words were slow and drawn out, as he walked two fingers over to my open palm lying limp between our two heads. He stopped just as he was about to touch me, his index finger hovering over my skin. v. half empty tube of cherry lip balm

Mom let me take the car out by myself for the first time back in June, just three days before graduation and two weeks after I had finally passed the driving test on the second try. I remember Mom telling me that my hair looked too brown in my license picture, that I didn’t look like myself. But I liked how I looked different, and was secretly happy at the thought of slowly growing out of my younger face.

31

INKBLOT

All I did that day was drive over to Hallidayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s next to Sycamore.

I made a list in my head, a group of miscellaneous items I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t necessarily need, but wanted to buy anyways: a box of orange flavored tic-tacs, a bundle of green elastic hair ties, and a new tube of cherry lip balm. I took the long way there, the car trailing past all the single-toned cul-de-sacs and turning at the broken traffic light at the bottom of the hill. The dented mailboxes, the library, the strange looking tree with the twisted trunk, right next to the elementary school. All those curves and bends and sections of cracked pavement. All that painted beige that I used to think looked dull and sad. Driving through those streets was like walking into a room that you just moved into, with all your furniture and little possessions mixed up and rearranged into these different little corners. It is difficult to bring myself to explain it all, but I guess the only thing I can say is that there was this feeling, growing and growing at the bottom of my stomach and fluttering in my heart, a feeling that kept telling me that nothing was the same anymore.

32

JC, Frances Huang 33

JEL LY F IS H ASHLEY THORNTON

It only takes a small thing to make you happy / a baleen whale lives off of microscopic krill / a humpback whale wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be killed for not having a straight back / the world is diseased, but it is soft / relapsing in small waves, sweeter than salt / so peaceful, impeccable / trap. / An ocean without salt is a swimming pool / you are more likely to drown in open water than cold cloud broth / in safety there are children. In / a fine steak, there are knives. So / we get sicker and happier / kissing a barbarian sword.

34

Alien Creatures, Ethan Lee 35

FO O D F O R C O M F O RT AMIE REHMANN

He is sitting on the steps to his apartment when I walk up, a plate of muffins in my hands. I stop in front of him but he doesn’t stand, so I sit. Cars drift past us like rain clouds, their tires hissing on the wet asphalt. On the other side of the street is an old couple with groceries and a single red umbrella.

I offer him the plate; as if the problem could be solved with banana nut muffins.

He takes one.

“My mom made them,” I say.

He takes a bite.

“They’re good,” he says.

“I know.” My fingers pick at the plastic wrap. It is pliable and stretches and stretches until it snaps.

I look to the side and see that he is picking the nuts off from the top of the muffin. He rolls them between his fingers and lets them fall to the floor.

He doesn’t like nuts. I should know this.

It wasn’t important before, because before I would tease him for picking out the peanuts in his kung pao noodles because it wasn’t important to me but now it is and why did I forget that he doesn’t like nuts?

There are crumbs on his shirt.

“Any plans for the winter?” he asks.

“Just the usual,” I say. “Not much traveling. Might go ice skating though.”

“That sounds nice,” he says. “I’ll probably head up north. To 36

AMIE REHMANN

my parents. Help them with decorating and all that.”

He won’t look at me.

“That does sound nice,” I say.

He runs his hand over his head and I think to myself that he’s too young for his hair to be thinning. When he brings his hand back to his lap, there are clumps of it between his fingers. He flexes his hand, and the hair rolls away like a tumbleweed. Neither one of us acknowledge it.

“They said it should be an easy fix. In and out, they said.”

“Right,” I say.

“Only a few days.”

I nod.

The problem is sitting between us, baring its fangs and drooling seafoam all the while.

I want to tell it off.

I want to be large and menacing. But instead I feel small and underwhelming.

Maybe it’s because I know I could have done something more meaningful, like written a letter or climbed a mountain or made muffins without any nuts on them because I knew he didn’t like nuts and it was important to me, but all I have now are these damn muffins with nuts on them.

I hadn’t realized I was crying. The light from the streetlamps shift back and forth like a kaleidoscope while I cradle a half empty plate on my lap. We sit there for a while, like that. The one who should be crying and the one that doesn’t deserve to.

His shoulder bumps mine, and he says, “Can you hand me another muffin?”

Dedicated to Coach Bill

37

I C H E CK TO S E E I F I A M LU CID D RE AM I N G CASSIA EFTHYMIOU

It is pouring out, and I count the fingers on my left hand. There are five, but they turn to old leather as I count, pliable yet strong. My thumb is burnt from where I tried to cook once, establish adulthood, competence.

I let my whole kitchen catch fire, put it out with the rain.

I pledge to count my fingers once an hour, but with dream logic, I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t trust the clocks either. The minute hand spins backwards, and every number looks like a twelve.

When I have seven fingers on each hand, and the clock has thirteen edges, I am climbing a ladder underwater, getting deeper each rung I go up. I know I am dreaming. I let go, expecting flight. I freefall upwards, towards the ocean floor. I wake up sputtering sand in a harbor I have never seen.

I look at my hands. They are made of needles as they have always been.

By the edge of the water, a woman spins sand into silk, throws it into the water. Behind her, desolation. I call to her in my own voice. She works faster. Catch, release. The ocean overtakes her. I keep walking.

Her silk grabs me by the ankles, pulls me towards the riptides. I swim parallel, overcorrect for danger. I grab handfuls of water until I pull myself stationary. I loosen my fists into ten fingers.

38

Portrait of Adriana, Avalon LaFosse 39

RO S A CH E W S O N T H E S U N BIANCA BADAJOS

Rosa opens the door to let the heat rush in like a vacuum, inhaling the air of buzzing cicada song and waving palm leaves and snakes skinny with drought. I watch her gaze dance across the backyard, from dandelion weeds to cracked clay to the dip of the hollowed pool.

“What are we going to do with you?” she mutters. When I let the question float, her eyes land on me. If I was younger, I’d shrink like I always had, twist my form until it was thin and easy for her to chew on as if I was meant for easy digestion. I remember taffy-living when she sees me now, refamiliarize myself with notions of less space. But I don’t fix my posture, don’t feel my soles press against the dirty floor or sink my shoulders, even in the home where I learned to.

Mom hated her home looking lived in, so we spent any inbetweens working to make it seem as if we were never there. Our roof was the belief that everything had far too much earth on it and we lived under it, dusting the blinds and sweeping beneath and dusting the blinds again. Now, I swing a frayed broom, wisps adding to the dust falling in pretty little circles on the floor, and cleaning is mindless, mindless, easy. We scrub brown tiles, empty cupboards, wipe the smiling wooden suns on the walls until their baby faces can catch light again.

As they do, I remember how the sun would smile, big round cheeks and a squishy button nose, lips curled up towards laughter lines. As it crawls, smiling; as it sleeps, smiling; as it grows, smiling. They say if it vanished, we wouldn’t know for seven minutes. I wonder which divine bitch would disappear the sun just to watch us be clueless for a bit.

“Any of them.” Rosa slices fruit, her left hand resting on the 40

B I A N C A B A DA J O S

edge of the knife. “No- all of them would. They’d make an evening out of it.” And I can see it: infinite hands wrapped around sun until it snuffs out. Heat doesn’t travel as fast as light, so maybe the warmth could stay for a little longer. So we could still feel the presence of something whole and smiling an hour after it has gone away. My sister hands me a plate of watermelon and goes back outside. I imagine a star as taffy, slimming until it is two-dimensional and childlike. I wish for January, when the sun goes down too early and I live my free moments beneath the moon, along the coast, soft and unassuming of how much we can take or how much God does.

It is hard to avoid one room in a small space. We ghost around the the door, avoid an invisible border in the narrow hallway for the Lysol or Pine-Sol or Windex in the back cabinet. I’m packing away the photos on the wall. In the oldest, my mother’s grandparents stand in a stoney embrace. They’re frozen in the boundaries of film with worry lines, drooping eyebrows and eyes expressionless. I try to imagine them in laughter. My great grandfather has the same nose as my sister and mom, my great grandmother has my mother’s wide lips and soft eyes.

I’m not sure what I share. In my mind, I give my mother’s laughter to my grandmother, imagine her eyes scrunching up and front teeth flashing. I imagine my grandfather with my sister’s grin, eyebrows raised and mouth sliding upwards in one corner, a second from teasing happiness that she would swallow in the next. I wish for a naive January, undone. I wish she’d told me she was sick sooner.

The wooden suns were once our desert gargoyles-- watchdogs smiling in their own omnipresence. But now, Rosa and I are the foreigners. And the cicada song rings like an alarm. And I work, so sun-pressed I shrivel like raisins. Just how Mom would like it, I thinkher desert folding over itself to make us feel unwelcome. The kind of endtimes fit for the eulogy of a vanishing sun.

41

MO NK E Y B R E AT H , M O N K E Y MIND MOLLIE SCHOFER

There is a head in my chest and it gurgles inside of me. It makes the sound of a thousand congested doves. Achoo achoo. I eat tissues to keep it happy.

One day, it might even grow into a real person. Isn’t that lovely? One being can create another. Or, in other words, the regurgitation of DNA.

I want to put lipstick on you, because you are perfect except for your lips, which need more color. I think orange would look best, but you say pink so I go for “Candy Yum Yum” and it does the trick. You put “Desert Suede” on me, I guess that means you think I talk too much.

There is never enough salt in my food and sometimes I resent that. Though I stand my ground: I am a person that does not like salt.

Hopscotch hopscotch, hopscotch hopscotch. You put the stress on the hop and the scotch follows up like a sip of water. I am obsessed with the sounds of things, and I am obsessed with hating water. Water is gummier than glue, and expandable within the esophagus.

A conference. A meeting. A business. A corporate overlord.

Sometimes I wish I could call the cops. Sometimes I wish I had the guts to call the cops.

Sometimes simple things are better. Sometimes they aren’t, but 42

MOLLIE SCHOFER

sometimes they are.

My monkey mind gets the best of me. There are times when I just can’t control it, and there are times when I’m too tired to. So I let it run amok. It’s not so bad, though. I mean, it is bad. But I kind of like it this way. Maybe I should become a Buddhist Monk.

There are good times, of course. And there are bad times too.

Yes and no and fine and tippity-toppity.

I want to strip my shoes from me like plaster, and walk in the mud. I want to walk in the mud and feel all the little beetles undulate around my toes. I want to feel them, and I want to lie down. I’ll lie down in the mud and be half dirt and half human. And part beetle, too. So I can undulate around some other human’s toes. And fill them full of dirt.

Open your mouth. There are teeth in there, do you see them? A tongue too, do you see it? Do you see the ribs at the palate? Do you see how they guide? And the uvula. Hangs like a ladder down to your toes.

If you climb down it, you will sway. All the way down to your toes. And as you submerge yourself, and see the outside light begin to fade, you are the most you that you have ever been.

43

Chickens, Lauren Chudner 44

LE T M Y E A RT H B R E AT HE ABRIL RODRIGUEZ-DIAZ

Sometimes my clouds get in my way and I blow them aside. Sometimes when I look at my snowglobe creation parts of it are melting, my little people start to see it as a furnace, and they feed it metal and trash. I tell you, today was a bad day. They forget themselves, see.

It’s so hard to be God—if I so much as near my nose to the edge of my small marble Earth, their faces would freeze into icicles, and fall off. So l make them monarch butterflies and marzipan to keep them happy, then leave them be.

This in the hope that they forget themselves further—just stand there and follow the monarchs with their sticky eyes, clasping their sticky hands, letting my sticky Earth breathe for a moment, brace itself, before movement starts and they beat down on it again.

45

Johanna Park is very Cool, Trenyce Tong 46

FATH E R D E A R COURTLAND JEFFRIES

“You’ll be together again soon” has always seemed like a very morbid expression to me. I don’t know, maybe I’m missing something. I think I’m missing a lot of things.

It doesn’t rain a lot. Not here, at least. But somehow the ground is always made of mud, not dirt. The mud always seems a lot dirtier and no one but me is willing to wade in it for very long. I’ve always found the word “dirty” quite strange. Dirty means unclean, but if I’m describing mud as being dirtier, that’s not really true. It’s muddier, but that’s also not true because muddier doesn’t mean the same thing as dirtier. They both mean their own thing while also meaning different things at the same time. I think about it a lot. It bothers me.

Jane is calling to me again. Or, I think she is. I’m not sure if it’s her or my mother. I won’t respond either way. They know where I am.

In a few minutes, they’ll find me sitting in the mud like usual, and then I’ll be carried away back home again, like usual. And I do mean carried, by the way. Not ushered, not encouraged: carried. I can’t really find it in my body to move away from here. Not from him. My mind can scream and yell and beg for it to move, but my body won’t listen. Even walking here is not really a decision. I just find myself, sometimes, moving through the house. Then I’m out in the field, then down the road lined with pink flowers.

They’re never anything but pink. They never have been and they never will be. The road will simply always be lined with pink.

Otherwise it’s a different road. And if I took a different road, then I wouldn’t be led to where I am right now. If that happened, the cycle 47

INKBLOT

would be broken. So it won’t happen. The field will continue to be old, the road will never cease to be lined with pink, and I will always end up here.

So they carry me. They drag my limp, unmoving body along until they can gather enough strength to pick me up. If I had asked them a month ago if they would be able to carry me home from this far down the road, they wouldn’t have even considered it. I can hear my mother’s voice chiding me for being ridiculous again, and Jane’s laugh echoing as she wonders aloud how I possibly come to think about these things. How she’ll never understand me. I look forward to the day I understand me myself.

It would be nicer if Jane could carry me alone. I wouldn’t have to deal with Mother. Maybe she’d be less angry with me all the time if she didn’t have to get her dresses dirty so often. But we’ve tried that, and it never worked. The first night I came out here, it was Jane who found me. She had to go back for help when she realized I couldn’t walk. I enjoy Jane’s company most of the time, but her absence was appreciated. It gave me a chance to sit and talk with him a little longer.

Talking with people has never been my strong suit. It’s always been Jane’s and my mother’s. They can both sit with a stranger with nothing in common and within ten minutes, they have somehow found that they have everything in common. My father and I don’t understand. It’s ironic, really, because most of what my father and I talk about is the fact that we’re bad at talking. It seems that the reason we are so bad at talking with most people is because we have no interest in talking to most of them. When we do want to talk to them, we have no trouble. I want to talk to my father, and he wants to talk to me, and therefore we are very good conversationalists. But only when it comes to each other. And Jane, but those conversations take a lot more effort.

I have to censor most of my thoughts. She’d find them strange. Never with my mother. She’s far too straightforward for my taste. And I suppose I’m too abstract for hers.

Abstract. Bewildering. Confused. Ditzy. Dumb. I’ve heard the words whispered enough in my vicinity to know that they’re addressing me. It’s one of the few things that doesn’t bother me. Mother says it’s one of the few things that should.

I feel Jane and Mother on my arm, and Father starts to sink back into the earth. The mud swallows him up, but doesn’t smear on 48

COURTLAND JEFFRIES

his clothes. I look down and see the stains on mine and wish that I could follow him without needing to have my dress washed. It’s such a burden to make Jane wash my things, especially if I’m not there to help her. And if I followed Father, I wouldn’t be. I’d be down below with him, stuck in an eternally stimulating conversation of which Mother and Jane could not carry me away.

I’d be in heaven.

49

LET T UCE MIA SOUMBASAKIS

You receive a fortune cookie saying that soon there will be a lettuce recall due to salmonella, and you believe this fortune because you believe the woman who gave it to you, the one behind the cash register. You believe her because she said your food would be soggy, and it is, the noodles falling from your fork as if under anesthesia.

This recall is great news, you think, because you are and have always been a lettuce farmer making good-soiled, organic, crunchy, disease-free produce, sold in baskets in shopping plazas. What great sales you’ll have. You’re so delighted you decide to ask the woman behind the cash register out on a date, the honest one who smells like tear-free shampoo.

You two are about the same age; not quite old enough to be worried about death, but getting there. This is probably the reason she agrees, abandoning her shift to eat with you.

You wish you could describe her as youthfully, stereotypically beautiful, but you can’t, because you are an honest person, an honest person who appreciates honesty, and her hair is half-permed and her lips are like shriveled worms. There is a clear lack of lust in that.

She tells you a story about being a park ranger and becoming one with every waterfall, stone and bead of water, how she would lie with her back pressed into the rocks and breathe horizontally, legs scarred from climbing. You smile a southern smile and laugh a laugh of understanding and say how it reminds you of when your father first taught you how to plant a radish. That was back when you lived in a house in a cul-de-sac, slip sliding down plastic slides and scratching the ground with chalk.

50

MIA SOUMBASAKIS

You tell her about this, this truthful, nice-smelling, suburbanshadowed woman, because you just now realize that there’s a familiarity about her, which might be the reason you asked her for a fortune cookie in the first place (you usually keep to yourself, even when ordering food). You hate the thought that she might’ve known you in your youth, when you were spritely and desirable. You interrogate and discover that she too grew up in Boatman Village. This is a coincidence, almost impossible, but she acts like it isn’t, as if she is a wizard of fate. She empties a pink sugar packet into her water cup and says that she’s been wisened by all her years. You think this is a cliché thing to say and twirl your lips because now you are sure where the familiarity originates.

This is the girl who found you one summer while you were digging for diamonds in the sandbox. She befriended you, brought you back to her house, and asked you to help her pick out items for a garage sale. What stood out to you most were the icky lime green crocs, wearing at the edges, the bottom layered with dry sweat, and bought by a petite man who had grown too lazy to shop at malls.

After that day, she invited you over more and more often, always to talk and always to clean, to organize her books in alphabetical order and put her hair ties in the washing machine. You didn’t realize you were doing most of the work until much later, and by then she had already moved away (her things stamped with your fingerprints, packed neatly into cardboard boxes.) Now, as she rambles on about how she prefers to fish with nets rather than hooks, you still wish you could find some stereotypical teenage beauty in her, but only because this would allude to superficiality, a flaw. Once again, your efforts are fruitless, her dried worm lips talking on and on. You know that even pouring water on them would not bring them back to life.

Before she leaves, you buy her a lettuce wrap as a thank you, and when she can’t make it to your next date because she’s been diagnosed with salmonella, you offer her a discount on your freshly grown lettuce—buy 14 baskets and get the 15th free.

51

Untitled, Hannah Kang 52

PA MILYA HAILEY SAGA

INT. HOUSE - DINING ROOM - DAY - 2020 It’s live action. There are photos and flowers on a table in the corner dedicated to a sepia picture of a WOMAN, who stands alongside a MAN dressed in a soldier uniform.

Steam enters frame. The stove is on.

An 18 year old Filipina girl, HOPE, is hunched over the counter and calling a friend as her Lola checks the siopao in the steamer.

HOPE

I can’t wait to go to San Francisco for college! (beat)

Right, I’ll be leaving in five weeks. That’s a week

before the semester starts.

LOLA turns around and makes a motion for Hope to put down her phone.

HOPE

I’ll see you soon, Justin. Dinner’s almost ready.

Hope hangs up the phone. Beat.

53

INKBLOT

LOLA

You know, it’s not too late to enroll in community

college. There’s one in Long Beach you’d like.

HOPE

I’d rather not, Lola. Too close.

LOLA

But you’ll be so far from your family.

HOPE

I’ll come visit during the holidays. It’s not like I’ll be gone forever.

LOLA

But you won’t be staying with us. That’s what being

Filipino is about, Hope. You take care of your family

and they will take care of you.

HOPE

I don’t want that. (defensive, hesitantly)

Can’t you just let me be independent?

LOLA (beat)

You don’t care about this family, huh— HOPE

Lola, that’s not what I’m saying— The timer for the stove goes off. Lola gets up from the table and breaks eye contact with Hope, who looks shocked.

LOLA (with bitterness)

The siopao is ready.

54

HAILEY SAGA

Hope is unsure of what to say. She stutters a bit until her words come out in a whisper.

HOPE (quietly)

Lola, why do you care if I stay or not?

Lola looks down at the siopao. She takes the parchment from the steamer and puts it down onto a plate.

We see as the frame of the siopao gradually fades into...

INT./EXT. RESTAURANT - DAY - 1960 A plate of siopao on a restaurant table.

LOLA (V.O.)

It started with your great grandpa.

We move around the restaurant, eventually settling in on a middle-aged man by the name of EDUARDO. He holds hands with a WOMAN. They speak, but we can’t make out the words they say.

HOPE (V.O.)

Lolo Eduardo? He was the captain of the Philippine

army in World War II, right?

INT. DINING ROOM - DAY - CONTINUOUS Hope looks at the picture of the woman and the man in a soldier’s uniform. Lola picks up the picture.

HOPE

You used to tell me he was a good person.

LOLA

He was good for fighting in the war, not for what he

did to our family.

55

INKBLOT

(beat)

Your lolo’s mother was separated from her children in

the Philippines. They all lived with wealthier relatives,

but not with her. She would only see them when they

were on holiday, because she was poor.

Pictures are seen strung up on the wall. We begin to trace over several of the faces, eventually landing on NENING’s.

HOPE

But if Lolo Eduardo was the general, why was she

poor? Don’t they get a bunch of money— LOLA Shh, ading1. I’ll tell you.

INT./EXT. RESTAURANT - DAY - CONTINUOUS We see ESTRELLA CORNELIA, a middle aged woman, and her tenyear-old daughter, Nening, walking by the restaurant.

ESTRELLA

How is school? Is Tita Dolores treating you well?

NENING

I have a friend named Thelma! Tita Dolores lets her

visit sometimes! Oh, also, Manong Jun and Lola visit

on the weekends!

ESTRELLA

You should tell them to bring you and your brothers

and sister to visit me. I miss you all.

Nening smiles and nods.

They walk into the restaurant and stand there, waiting to be seated.

Nening looks off to the side and gasps, running towards Eduardo, who is 1

Young one 56

HAILEY SAGA

now in casual clothing.

She hugs her father, who takes his hand away from holding the woman in the seat across from him to wrap his arms around his daughter.

Estrella comes over, looks at the woman, then to Eduardo, who looks stunned. She feels jittery and begins to sob hysterically, a mixture of both panic and shock.

ESTRELLA

You said you were going to the headquarters, Eduardo— EDUARDO

Estrel, lower your voice— ESTRELLA

You said we could never go to this restaurant, because

it was too much money, but you’re here with another woman?

Everyone is looking at her. She takes Nening’s hand and brings her out of the restaurant, tears flowing down her face.

INT. DINING ROOM - DAY - CONTINUOUS LOLA

After that day, he left. He gave all of his money to his mistress.

Lola takes the picture out of the frame and folds it; Estrella is the only one in the picture now. She puts it back in the frame and turns the picture to Hope for her to see.

LOLA

As it should be. See? Hope smiles softly.

57

INKBLOT

HOPE

He had a mistress? What happened to Lola Estrella?

What’d she do about the family?

EXT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT Estrella picks at her fingernails. She is trying to hold back her tears, but they are flowing easily. It’s hard to contain them.

She looks around the room; there are many pictures of her and Eduardo, but everything becomes blurry due to the heaviness of her tears.

Nening comes into frame. She is dressed in her pajamas and looks hesitant to step near Estrella. This is not the mother she’s grown to know.

NENING

Are you still going to tell me my bedtime story?

Estrella snaps out of it. She shakes her head.

ESTRELLA

I’m tired, anak.

NENING

But you always tell me my bedtime story when I come

over. Why not today?

ESTRELLA

Nening, please go to sleep.

NENING

Is it because of that woman? Father brings her over

sometimes. I like her...

Estrella begins to sob, Nening trails off. She is furious, so tired with everything.

58

HAILEY SAGA

ESTRELLA

This is getting ridiculous, please go to bed.

NENING Mama...

ESTRELLA

GO TO BED! Nening begins to cry. She runs over to her bedroom.

Estrella’s expression softens. Her tears hitch and she goes out of frame.

INT. HOUSE - DINING ROOM - DAY Estrella is writing a note.

ESTRELLA (V.O.)

Nening, you deserve a better pamilya than what you

have right now. Your father has left me a wreck, I’m

sure that woman’s nice, but it hurts. You’re too young

to understand, you’d be lonely without your mother.

But I know father and that woman will treat you well.

I’m going to the river—there is something I need to

do. I’ll see you soon. Not today, not later, but soon.

Gihigugma teka2. A thousand times.

Estrella slides the note under Nening’s door. She looks at the river across the window.

Nening appears out of the room, exhausted with a teddy bear in her hand. Estrella looks back and freezes up. She thinks, did she read the letter already?

NENING

Mama, I’m hungry.

2

I love you (Cebuano) 59

INKBLOT

Estrella sees the note still on the floor, untouched.

NENING (CONT’D)

Can I have siopao?

Estrella sighs out of relief, smiles softly and goes to hug her close.

LATER Nening eats the siopao. Estrella is across from her, eating her own siopao as well.

She gets up and looks at the river. She shakes her head and goes over to retrieve the note from Nening’s room. She crumples it up and hugs Nening.

INT./EXT. ESTRELLA’S MOTHER’S HOUSE - MOMENTS LATER LOLA (V.O.)

She began to reach out to her sons and daughters

more often. At first, her family was reluctant since

she was newly separated from Lolo Eduardo and they

were shamed by the newspapers, but they knew they

couldn’t turn away someone in a situation like hers.

Newspaper clippings show up on screen. One from Gumaca City News, titling their headline with, “Daughter of Mayor Alcantara No Longer With Husband”. Another from Icaro Times saying, “Alcantara Family Unhappy”. One saying, “Family Quarrel in Alcantara Family Over Daughter’s Separation”. The last saying, “Alcantara Family Reunites With Daughter”.

INT. LIVING ROOM - DAY - 1980 LOLA (V.O.)

They told her to go to America, where they can start

anew. Your Tita Nening was able to go before her and

used all of her scholarship money to send her mother 60

HAILEY SAGA

and her siblings here.

ESTRELLA (V.O.)

Dear Mama, life is going fantastically in the states. All

of my children have adjusted so comfortably here in

the past few months after we were granted our

permanent residency, much more than me. I thank my

children every day for this opportunity. Although it’s

different from the Philippines, it’s exactly the change

that I needed after Eduardo left.

HOPE (V.O.)

Do you know what happened to Lolo Eduardo?

INT. ESTRELLA’S HOUSE - NIGHT Nening brings over a note to Estrella.

NENING

Papa died in the war.

Estrella stares at it blankly. She pushes it away.

ESTRELLA

It’s just us now.

NENING

Hasn’t it always been?

Estrella smiles softly.

She goes over to her bedroom. She lies down and sighs. A single tear comes down and she closes her eyes.

INT. HOSPITAL ROOM - OMINOUS Estrella lies down in a hospital bed.

61

INKBLOT

LOLA (V.O.)

Her children were there for her until she died.

We see Estrella’s eyes, which slowly close. The heart monitor flatlines.

LOLA (V.O.)

Do you remember her?

INT. DINING ROOM - DAY - 2020 Hope blinks to reveal tears in her eyes.

HOPE I do. (beat)

I do care about our family.

LOLA

Come over here, Hope.

Hope walks over to the stove next to Lola. Lola puts a siopao onto a plate for her.

LOLA

I care if you leave, because I’m scared you’ll never

come back again, just like Lolo Eduardo. (beat)

Just know when you’re feeling lonely, we’ll always be

here to take care of you. Gihigugma teka.

HOPE

Me too, Lola.

Lola hands Hope the bowl of siopao. An overhead close-up is seen of the siopao.

INT. UNIVERSITY - NIGHT

62

HAILEY SAGA

SUPER: SAN FRANCISCO, MONTHS LATER It’s a bowl of adobo. Dressed in pajamas, Hope walks towards her dorm room with the bowl in her hands. She is smiling widely. She opens the door to her dorm room. Hope’s phone rings. We see that it is her Lola calling. As Hope leaves frame, we focus on the pictures of her family on the board nailed to her door.

HOPE

Hi, Lola! I miss you! (beat)

Yes, I’m eating. I just bought siopao...

We see the pictures of the titos and titas, the kuyas and the ates, until we eventually land on two pictures: a picture with Estrella holding Hope at birth, entitled, “Mama Estrella and Hope” next to a picture of Lola with Hope at her graduation.

FADE OUT.

63

LIZARD TOW N KAON SUH

In Lizardtown, the Lizard King is chosen every century in a huge and highly lauded tournament of tears. Each and every citizen will spend their days wandering the city, weeping and wailing and moaning as loudly and as pitifully as they can. Slowly but surely, the sobbing will die down as one by one, each Lizard will grow exhausted from this elaborate display of mourning. Once one forfeits their claim to the throne, they must stand completely motionless, staring straight ahead at what lies beyond. They will become so still that you may be fooled into thinking they have become brightly painted figurines made of wood, but if you look very, very closely, you may be able to catch a suggestion of a sigh here, a strange little shiver over there. In this way, the town will grow almost completely still. But until the last mourner is left, the forfeiters will not be allowed to move an inch.

Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll happen, sooner or later. Usually later. After months and months of hoarse tears, there will be one Lizard left. The new Lizard King. Then this Lizard King will wear, not a crown, but a necklace made of bottle caps. They will be carried on the scaly backs of the lizard people to their sparkly lizard cave, where they will lie on a bed of moss and down feathers, looking up at a tiny hole in the ceiling where the moon shines down on their leathery skin. They will sleep and sleep, then sleep a little more, dreaming of warm suns and the strange sounds of fleshy fingers plucking against tightly drawn string.

After a few weeks of dithering in front of the mouth of the lizard cave, the rest of the lizards will creep in to watch the peaceful breathing of 64

KAON SUH

the slumbering Lizard King. They will crowd into the wet darkness, their heavy breathing echoing against the dark, damp walls. They will watch, mouths gaping open, the wispy dreams of their king play over their heads, animated by the streaming moonlight on a web of silky spiders. They will scamper back outside to the harsh bright world at the slightest movement of their sleeping monarch, but after a few minutes of muttering among themselves, they will slowly inch their way back in.

They will spend their nights watching the dreams of the Lizard King and they will spend their days dreaming of the dreams of the Lizard King.

In Lizardtown, no one gets anything done.

65

CH E GUE VA R A PA N T S CHELSEA SCHACK

I was a-walkin’ down the street To the rhythm of my feet All the girls give me a chance In my Che Guevara Pants, ah!

I was dancin’ in my kicks Showin’ girls my pantsy tricks Would you like my love, perchance In my Che Guevara pants, ah?

Muscles like a wooden beam Salmon always swim upstream I’ve got liberte in Nantes, With my Che Guevara Pants, ah!

Better salute Uncle Sam Good ol’ Betsy Ross in glam I scare patriotic aunts In my Che Guevara Pants, ah! dance break that becomes communist fanfare Got a special little trick and its hidden in Havana Gonna launch a special missile, call it Kennedy’s Banana It’s made of special atoms, and it rains down just like manna 66

CHELSEA SCHACK

I laid down with a woman and I think her name’s Joanna?

Or I’m callous and mistaken-Yeah the president is shakin’ We do the Fidel Castro dance In our Che Guevara Pants, ah!

67

Untitled, Misu Zhang 68

S E LF - S IM I L A R SEUNGU CHOI

18:00 Central European Summer Time on August 24, 2006 is when time started the process of ending. At 18:00 members of the International Astronomical Union sat in Room 3.3 of the Prague Congress Center, fiddling with their microphones, checking their watches, slowly going over what they were going to say in their heads.

Some of them were nervous, others were calm, but all of them had long streaks of sweat down their backs and a tingling in the far reaches of their heads they had never felt before. Between 18:00 and 18:01 time started to expand as the members cleared their throats and announced that it had been agreed upon that Pluto no longer qualified as a planet.

By the time the press conference had ended, at 18:30, time had burst like a festering pimple and ceased to exist. The horizontal plane of chronology was bent, tossed, sliced, and burnt. The present no longer rolled along the central axis of the universe, it veered off its course and remained stagnant.

At 18:30 Central European Summer Time on August 24, 2006 everyone in the world was sweating profusely. There was a tingling that could only be described as a metal cylinder circling over and over again above their corneas. Right as the tingling began to wane a brief image of an ordinary fish with a slightly upturned grin slipped through everyoneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mind and disappeared as quickly as it had appeared. If not for its ephemerality, the image of this fish would have been worshipped and praised, as it would have been widely regarded as the most beautiful thing anyone had ever seen. I was not in existence on August 24, 2006, but ever since the fire I remember the fish vividly. That night the fish appeared on the upper-right corner of my vision and never swam away, content to align its course with mine. # 69

INKBLOT

There were two of us before the night of the fire, afterwards there remained only one. I regarded it as a great loss, not because of the loss of life, of which there was none except for the rabbits who lived inside our school’s plumbing system. No, it was Lydia, or Eileen, I’m not sure what her name was—all I remember is that night her family moved to the Moon, some settlement on the far side of the Sea of Tranquility and I remember being jealous of her—it’s hard to imagine it now, but back then the Moon was only a dot in the sky and I wanted to spend 29.5 Earth days watching the Sun roll across the sky.

Back then we still counted time not because its nonexistence was too terrifying to confront, but because we unconsciously held onto its alluring vestige. We could still feel the orbit of heartbreak and desire or whatnot repeating over and over again in the absence of time- the nebulous caching of emotions was enough for us to feel as if we were moving forward. That night I was completely oblivious to it, as after noticing it I immediately forgot its presence, accepting it like I did the new hairs on my chin or the urgent magnetism I felt to the smell of sweat.

That night I sat in front of the charred remains of the locker rooms, taking in what smelled like burnt sweat, like my first kiss, like Mondays in October when you’re about to get sick but the person sitting behind you in math walks by and gives a brief nod, a soft greeting and the consonants that have stumbled together to make up your name have never sounded more beautiful to you. There were a lot of older people there too, the tectonics of their skin and the weathering of their features too apparent for me to ignore. They traced their fingers over the burnt desks, as if touching a piece of high school would take them back to that night forty years before that they thought they felt something with the person they had bumped into just a moment ago, as if it would tell this person who came with his lovely, beautiful wife and his two talented, incredible kids how much they had missed him, how much he had gotten under their skin, how much they still thought of him whenever they were alone, how much they wished he would remember them, even if it was obvious he had forgotten them. They would look at whoever they longed for, whoever they wished they had become, whoever reminded themselves of who they once were, whoever they had cut up their heart into itty bitty pieces for and would silently trudge themselves back home, trying to sleep away their thoughts.

70

SEUNGU CHOI

The school district moved everyone to Horace Mann two weeks after the fire. The tourist bureau gave all of us free helmets, visors, armoured gloves, vests, and boots, complete with the name of our city engraved in blue letters along each item. Horace Mann was in the civilian security zone, and we spent the first three days of class crawling on our knees and demining the road to get there, which stood between two landfills and a strip mall. By the time we got there the excitement of going to a new school had waned. In truth the excitement was meaningless in the first place, because we were all hurtling towards death. The absence of time left a void in which the vaguer the regrets and desires the faster you fell into the condition of dying. Vagueness is what kills you- the vague search for something to be loved, to be satisfied, to get that thing is what makes your cells shrivel and your heart stop.

At one point I had to meet Deirdre in the basement. She was half-penguin and worked as the school social worker. For some reason I remembered seeing her sometime before with a T-Rex tattoo on her thigh, frantically shoving a pile of tissues into her purse at the mall carousel, but I hadn’t seen her since. Deirdre told me that Horace Mann was staging a very famous production, the first of its kind in the country, possibly the first of its kind in the world. The production was a chronology, a to-scale exact replication of everyone and everything at Horace Mann—it was what the theater people called simulacrum, a play of signifiers. She grabbed my head, forced it down onto her table and pressed something sharp right below my left earlobe.

“This will help me get to know you better.” Deirdre said while pushing it deep into my brain, and I began to hear her voice coming not from outside but within my ears, as if she had shrunk herself and crawled into my eardrums.

Whenever Deirdre addressed me it was in the second person.

Ever three steps I would be directed to do something, to say hello or to bump into someone and they would know how to respond, all of us interacting with invisible strings pulling us back and forth and tying us up with one another.

“I think you’re cute.” Deirdre told me to say this to a boy named O, who was a grade above me.

Deirdre got me into a point of stasis with him, making us say the same endearing words of affection, making us give each other sly 71

INKBLOT

looks of desire, making me follow him to the restroom to do drugs only for everything to fall apart in the process. We were tracing our own steps over and over again, and what pained me was that I really liked O, and each time I looked at him I dissociated totally from the production, as if he loved me and I loved him. I still have never felt so cared for from a person, I still have never felt so desired—even if it was scripted, even if every time I talked to him I was treading Deirdre’s awkward notes of dialogue.

O invited me into the band storage room in Symphony Auditorium during lunch when Deirdre was taking a nap. It was almost Christmas, the air was cool and I wore a blue sweater, which I still breathe into when I’m alone. Without Deirdre’s directions I couldn’t speak to him—all I could do was stare at his arms while sitting next to him, slouched across from the drums. We looked at each other and laughed, consumed by silence. Our necks were at 90 degrees along the wall, he would talk about his coursework and I would swallow my spit longingly. All I could ask him was if he had ever kissed anyone before.

He laughed, smiled, then harpooned my neck with his fingers and our tongues flowed together like thick strands of kelp mingling and tangling and catching each other over and over again. It was delicate, tender, threatening, close, far, it was so many things all at the same time, it was the fact that I never thought that I was someone who could, who deserved to be felt for. In the darkness of the storage room I struggled to grasp onto something to hold onto—the taste of weed in his mouth, the way we rocked back and forth, the way he traced little shapes on my back in the process. At some point between when he tried to unzip my belt and when he kissed me again in the bathroom the fish swam up to my throat and slipped quietly into his without me noticing.

O and I kissed a couple of times after that, although this time Deirdre was in our heads. She would make us put our hands on each other’s butts and someone would come knocking on the stall door and we’d stay silent for ten minutes and then part our ways. I tried to tell him that my fish had gone into him and I wanted, no I needed that feeling, that feeling of fireworks, of sparks going off that time he had kissed me to bring it back to me, but I still liked him and I didn’t want him to think I was weird. Soon Deirdre stopped making us kiss, we would pass each other in the halls and look away, I would pretend to ignore him and he would do the same.

72

SEUNGU CHOI

After the school year ended they put on a performance of the production for the tourists on campus. They even built a model of our old school in the football field and burnt it down. They made a lot of high schoolers pretend to be old people pretending to be young. Each night you’d see a group of them tracing their fingers over burnt desks and watch each other to see who they thought they would long for, who they thought they would miss, who they thought would remind themselves of who they were sometime later on. I walked to Symphony Auditorium and passed an old man acting out the sophomore puking at the Spring Concert. In the band storage room there were two guys vaguely our age who were talking, looking down at each other, kissing, feeling, calling each other by me and O’s names.

Deirdre’s voice echoed through the back of my head. “They are you and O. They will go on to pass each other in the halls with an unspoken tension, you will fall in love with O over and over again and it will never be reciprocal.”

I longed for O in each recursion of our thing together, each time they staged our first time together and there will always be two different people and different audience members filtering in and out of the room watching solemnly with me. The room smelled like mothballs and sunlight.

The performance ended right before the school year started up again. The slice of the planet I inhabited was slowly being rotated away from the Sun and it was getting colder. Many of the performers had been left behind by the theater company, bombing had intensified in the Tri-State Area and they had nowhere to go in the winter. The old man acting out the sophomore puking at the Spring Concert would continue to be there every day, puking during the drug assembly and the Fall Concert and the farewell assembly for the retiring Principal.

I would pass Symphony Auditorium knowing that two people were sitting in the band storage room with one of their hands blue with the cold but still clasped onto each other. I would even watch four or five of them collecting fallen twigs from around the schoolyard and building a fire in the football field each third period, the fire becoming smaller and smaller as the days went by until the fire-builders themselves had disappeared.

At one point Deirdre had moved into a 1-bedroom somewhere inside the Hubble Telescope and was able to incorporate text messages 73

INKBLOT

into the production. Deirdre read these messages in my head with a monotonous, dreadful voice, but it was the first time O had talked to me in a long time, and I was excited. His first message was a question.

“like why are u in love with me.”

I thought about this question for a minute, unsure of how to respond.

“cuz ur cute and I felt like you cared for me and you made me feel things id never get to feel from someone, things that i’d seen only in books and movies.”

I had read that line, that line about “books and movies” before somewhere online and I liked the sound of it. I continued.

“and i feel like everytime i think abt you theres this fuzziness and just the notion of you kept me motivated for some reason and the awkwardness and ambiguity was for some reason so appealing to me.”

“and you still feel like this?”

“idk what i feel. i just know that i’m attracted to you.”

Deirdre violently coughed, clearing the phlegm in her throat.

“unfortunately, i don’t love you the way you love me, no. i’m sorry.”

“no its fine. thanks for dealing with me :).”

It was five hours and twenty minutes later that a meteoroid originating from the Kuiper Belt collided with the Hubble Telescope and sent it tumbling towards the mesosphere, where it was promptly incinerated. #

I followed O into the third floor bathroom. I knew he didn’t think about me, that if I ever popped into his head it would make him grimace or laugh or it would be as if I never existed. I slipped into his stall after he flushed and for one moment our chests were facing each other, our faces were twisted to the side to make way for each other and what I had hoped would be the littlest spark of electricity, a static shock but he looked down, I did too and I lunged towards the toilet bowl.

The fish was flopping on its side and I grabbed onto it, getting sucked into the toilet in the process. The last thing I heard was the sound of O washing his hands and the loud ticking of a clock directly above him.

I was swept down into a concrete channel carrying me and a crate of tangerines farther away from Horace Mann. I could see the holographic projection of the stars above me. Somewhere between them 74

SEUNGU CHOI

was Pluto, at least a representation of it. I could see Lydia or Eileen or whoever she was in her family’s car driving off somewhere in the wastelands towards the launch center, looking up at the full Moon and opening the windows just a little bit to smell dirt, soil, sewage for the last time, to feel the breeze push through her hair. I could see the rabbits clustered into a ball inside the pipe over Ms. Davis’ room, holding onto each other and closing their eyes as the metal around them slowly melted away and crashed on top of each other. I could see the way Deirdre sat in the basement of Horace Mann setting the rotation of the Earth, the changing of the seasons, the oxygen content in the air; the production had grown exponentially and now everyone was a participant, endlessly being directed to repeat the same mistakes, to feel the same hard feelings that slowly wore you down. I could see everybody who thought they felt something in the band storage room in Symphony Auditorium, from amoebas to cockroaches to me and O, the endless me and Os before and after me. I could see Deirdre in her cramped room somewhere deep inside the Hubble Telescope, itching the T-Rex tattoo on her thigh, craning her neck towards the window as she sees the Earth spinning a little too fast, she shakes her head, time seems to be going to quickly now and sits back down.

The fish turned towards me, spitting bubbles in my direction.

“There is no past, you silly, silly goose. Just a composite of different presents, different feelings and obsessions and desires and heartbreaks and those bittersweet feelings that make you sit down on concrete, watching the clouds turn from white to yellow to pink as tears fill up half of your eyes, and you’re smiling, smiling because you know that until your fingernails pop off and you take your final piss you will do it all over again, rehearsing the choreography of emotions you could never quite master.” I looked up, and there was Pluto, multiple versions of Pluto. They followed their trajectories on the very outside of their respective Solar Systems, watching the planets and feeling this intense longing, and this intense loneliness being pushed out to the periphery, 4.3 billion kilometers from Neptune thinking about the evening of August 23, 2006 when it looked at Saturn or Mars or whoever it was, whoever they think about or impulsively dial, whoever they felt could bridge the gap between their orbits. And I was one of them, following my own orbit, endlessly circling, longing, obsessing over, feeling things. I am Pluto.

75

YOU A RE S O M E T H I N G TO ME A N A S T A S I A E A R LY

YOU ARE something TO ME So I invite you to sit with me again in the kitchen of your apartment that’s so late on rent the pink slips have turned to packets and on your dingy couch with patches sewn in that need patches of their own until the whole couch became this abomination of fixes you didn’t want to make - you’d just wait until the whole couch disappeared and all that was left was an unnamable baby and a million little holes in your fingers.

WHY IS EVERY ROOM IN YOUR APARTMENT A KITCHEN And so you pass me a little dish of walnuts and hand me a nutcracker whose all clean shaven and missing a couple teeth by now and it feels so cruel to cause someone who trusts me with their jaw and their spine pain just so i can keep my teeth together; this theory would be true, however there is one simple fact that disproves it: A WALNUT CAN NOT CAUSE HARM But as my eyeballs slip out from my nostrils and bounce into the walnut pile you move yourself closer to my my finger nails, locking them into the table below us to melt into tar to encase our moment together but because I have my eyes on the walnuts I assume we’ve just become spit again and I have to wait for us to diffuse into the air get away from each other for a little while, maybe hurt someone else in the meantime.

76

A NA S TA S I A E A R LY

A NEW FORM OF EMOTIONAL LABOR, FOR THOSE TWO That wasn’t a good idea though because when your palms got sweaty they started to drip all over ourselves and dilute the black before you could isolate us again, the heat was something we couldn’t handle quite yet and so I blame you for invoking that situation in other words: you’re an arsonist that’s having a hard time keeping themself from burning up, and I find that charming in a person because hell, it’s not like I have any self control either, why else do you think I’m here.

YOU’RE JUST SO AMICABLE LIKE THAT When we’re swallowed up by the table and swimming in the silence, we start to remember the uncomfortability, the smell of inappropriate kisses and obligation hugs, we start to remember the taste of getting walked all over again and again, of our own weeds growing between our eye sockets and out of our gums and when our teeth get too weak to hold the weight of step after step above us eventually we start to feel that sort of bubbling in our eardrums, a whisper you can’t ignore that tells you so clearly that it’s gonna rain soon.

I’m just gonna tell you what I said last time: YOU KNOW YOUR APARTMENT’S TOO COLD FOR ME that’s why you couldn’t have me over, not even to warm up your hands on Christmas. I don’t think I can support the weight of the world anymore I’m sorry, I didn’t know you until I knew that paradoxical undressing comes to people when they feel like it’s so hot their skin is melting off and so, like some last ditch survival effort, I woke up in your bed tomorrow.

I NEED THE

PAINT TO DRY FAST ER

GRASS TO GROW GREEN ER

SALIVA TO STICK TO YOUR TEETH WHEN YOU SPEAK

TO ME SO I KNOW YOU’RE BREATHING, ALRIGHT?

you are SOMETHING to me

77

MY NE IGH B OR I S B U I L D I N G A BOAT O UTS I D E SEMILORE OLA

The shape is all staunch geometry, all angles, no mercy. There’s no curve to it yet, just wood stacked and nailed together on the blacktop.

I’m passing him with my bike, on the way to the store, my movement a desperate kind of rowing. I feel his eyes on my back. He catches my eye and averts like the sight hurt. He slows his movement, As if to say, I am not your neighbor.

I remember the four freedoms: freedom from want, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from fear. I remember Nina Simone crooning, melodies of I wish I knew how it would feel to be free spilling from her tongue like marbles, like mancala beads shaped by pressure.

My family has lived in our neighborhood for six years now. There are parking lots outside my house reserved for residents. My family has lived here for six years. I pass by the man hammering away at Gopher wood on the way to the store and my mother’s car is towed the next day.

I leave my house later determined to prove my belonging in silence and he is bent over the boat, more wooden sores than skin, and his eyes tattoo to my skin. It is not by accident this time. There are snarling teeth behind his eyes attempting communication. As if to say, why are you here. As if to snarl, go back, God is sending a flood. As if to spit, I am building an ark and I am taking everyone that lives here but the ones that look like you. It rained and I wanted to see if he would bring out his grand yacht-in-progress, bring Josephine Baker to shake banana hips on his cruise but not to laugh with her.

78

SEMILORE OLA

Love thy neighbor becomes metronome in my head. I pedal and I crane my neck back to check his construction’s progress but don’t see the bump in the road. I fly over the handlebars, blister animal underneath the afternoon sun, and only when I am on the floor does my neighbor look up from his blacktop workshop. Oh, he says. He chuckles, tells me to be careful. I’m still dizzy but pick up a pebble of blacktop. I let it roll in my hand, consider it with torture. It settles in my hand a dark, moist brown, as if melting into my palm, as if colored from my own flesh.

79

W E IGH ING T H E D I C E T E D D I H AY N E S

I only dream about things like going to the store or writing the first chapter of a novel or getting pulled over or getting my head smashed in or being zipped into another layer of skin or drowning or living in a tiny house with fifty other sad people or reliving all the times Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve wanted to kiss someone or forgetting how to open/close my fists

[I wake up and lie about what I was just dreaming about;

dreaming is the one time I feel unrestrained about eye contact;

I wake up like this every day] or each bone gently pulling from its socket like the peel off an orange or a navy, double-edged ocean passing over my body or remembering [manic] what skin feels like or hearing the same song over and over and over and over or climbing up a two dimensional mountain

[I run up the edge of a triangle, legs cramping;

potential energy is a bad omen;

I keep having recurring feverish dreams about terminal

velocity] or swatting the cloud that hangs in front of my eyes

[my line of vision is really just horizontal motion;

moving forward is never ending;

gravity is a hand gripping my ankle] or 80

T E D D I H AY N E S

lying down in my backyard with my dog or rising from the floor and immediately collapsing, my legs eaten by fleas or

[a clock that only counts down from ten] or sitting in an expanse of snow and begging my body heat to melt a circle around me or chasing my dog across the intersection right into a boiling river or

[oh god oh god my mind will always be the same].

81

CH O K ING ON D E AT H RORY LOWDERMILK

There are broken things that rattle around inside your chest, and there is a fine layer of numb coated over every square inch of your body. You remember in 1986, sometimes, that boy Michael who made you laugh, who convinced you to stay in San Francisco and then died a week later.

You think of trying to fit into San Francisco. You remember the fear.

You think of all the funerals and of you staying home, your 100 square foot apartment and the springy couch you bought at a second hand store. You think of the loneliness, even in a city full of people just like you.

Your mother called you every December and every July. When you talked, both of you pretended like you talked every day, updating each other on your everyday life things. Her new husband, Mark, and your medical school, her little dog Pedro and the mold that creeped into everything you owned. You flew to North Dakota for her funeral when Mark called you one day in June. Your beard, deep brown and full back then, tasted like tears and old. You started to feel old, then, like bird bones and brittle pine needles. Sometimes, despite your doctor mind, you wanted to spray W-D40 on your knees, ease the rust between your joints, rub wax into your scars, cover the ugly hurting things up until everything shone again.

Coming back to your apartment in San Francisco after hanging in the shadows of your own mother’s funeral, you think you’re sick of living in places you don’t belong. You think you’re sick of working in a clinic where hollowed out men shuffle through the door, where there’s a 82

R O RY L OW D E R M I L K

horrible unspoken truth hovering in the air like dust particles in the waiting room. You are sick of choking on death. And so you haul the old couch and place it on the sidewalkâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;press your hand to it, leave your fingerprints on it one more time, and then you drive.

83

Untitled, Hannah Kang 84

IMPROVI S AT I O N N O. 2 CHELSEA SCHACK

What if I told you to stick your What if you did what I told you tongue in cement and so you bend down to learn your and the cement dries around lesson each taste bud like kudzu vines on a house?

I wrap myself around you; You start screaming for help— My body is a plant that withers my body is my revenge, dear in the sun I love you, but I am killing you slowly, so You cut your tongue out.

I pick it up and place it in my it writhes there for a while; mouth and living is like a french kiss, or tasting the ground for hours— maybe it’s just breathing; the chickens still run with no heads way on you look at me like a weed I dress myself in dandelions and whacker and I still can’t get over your taste, You leave me running from my body like I’m a hallway made of mirrors.

I’m a flower tied into a knot.

85

A SE URAT PA I N T I N G J O N AT H A N T R U O N G

Do you believe in God? she asks.

I swat away a horsefly but it keeps trying to fly through my ear canal. A pause, a realization that the question is too big for the park.

Looking for an answer in the grass, I uproot a few blades and the smell is sharp again.

Not in singularity, I say, but like in the sense that I am god and like there is God.

That sounds narcissistic, she smiles. The fly doesn’t return this time but the buzz remains, a quiet ringing that is both the aftermath and the traffic below us. It doesn’t stop until I start humming, not consciously, of course, but a slow song in my throat that I don’t notice until we are standing and swaying our bodies to my music.

Do you notice how everyone seems to be dancing? she laughs, then starts singing too.

She’s right: the girl on the swing, an Italian couple with a picnic blanket, an old woman and her walker — all of us moving to the same rhythm. What an ugly painting this would be. Seurat would have to embellish it, or maybe when he painted Parisians strolling on La Grande Jatte the figures were something like these and the image was created from nothing. #

Dites-nous ce qui se passe avec vous, my uncle says.

I don’t speak French is my reply, and then I move the meat and rice to the right of my plate. A few grains of the rice remain so I push them tenderly with the tip of my chopstick.

Oh right. I’m sorry I forgot, he says, without repeating the 86

J O NAT H A N T R U O N G

sentence in English.

The plate is now empty in the middle, the way I like it. Even though the china is dull I still see my greyish outline in the porcelain; slipping and wavering in the light, I am framed by lotus flowers with vining leaves.

My grandmother is sneaking grapefruits into my bag when I go to the bathroom. She is worried that I am growing thin, says I look like a chopstick even though I gain more weight everytime I see her. Still, I take the fruit graciously.

In the bathroom I dry heave over the toilet. It is not just that I am thinking about being flushed down, but that I am enjoying thinking about it, feeling myself grow limp like a dead goldfish as I whirl into the drain. tell me someting about your day preferably good

Do you want to hear about minutiae

or micromanagaing? what a dream the 9 to 5 is!

It’s a living hey do you think that the fat cats are getting fatter? what are they feeding all of you in your cubicles?

They’re distracting us with corporate

benefits. But I think it’s a soy meat substitute. ie you don’t exist and you have no value lol

I am organizing Lysol wipes and Dial soap before I realize I am doing so. More or less, I’ve lived a life of symmetry. My grandmother calls it fengshui, which is why we re-organized my entire apartment so that my bed wouldn’t be beneath my windowsill. But ever since we did I started to dream in Vietnamese, which is to say that the delirium is not coming from outside. What I find is that when I step out of symmetry, everything begins to unravel. It is the reason I organize my closet by color.

87

INKBLOT

The smell of pho already sneaks beneath the door when I hear laughter, and I realize I am salivating. #

June. The June bugs are emerging from the loam soil, feeding on plant roots and causing a kind of general fear in the San Francisco area. Where do they go when it’s not summer? I am wondering how a living thing can disappear for so long and still exist when I see an old friend.

Long time no see, I smile. It’s rare to see people out and about in today’s climate.

What have you been up to? he asks.

Oh, you know, like errands and what not.

Did you hear about Sydney?

What about Sydney? I ask. We sidestep to the corner of the sidewalk so we are only acutely in the way of pedestrians.

She won the scratch-off lottery. Heard she’s buying an island.

I laugh in disbelief, watching him check his wrist-watch with a face like look-at-the-time. I wonder if I should tell him about my new job, that I’m doing good even though I don’t have an island (and then we’d both laugh), that I’m actually thinking about getting back into art.

He’s got to go before I have the chance; he gives me a cordial smile before brushing by a dying bougainvillea, causing the browning leaves to flutter into the street like a thousand moths. It is a beautiful tragedy, this bush crying its dead petals into the general chaos of a city. #

At the farmer’s market, I wander the rows of produce with an empty bag. My mother tells a stand of apples that I’m too picky in life to ever accomplish anything. Two boys next to me look at my mother’s butt, then the apples. Aren’t all apples organic? they laugh. The fatter one seems to know better but laughs anyway.

A crate of bruised oranges is full and unpurchased. I want to buy them to prove my mother wrong, to show her that I am capable of doing the most rudimentary of tasks.

Do you know when these expire? my mom asks a seller.

I’m thinking about the drive home when she asks, how it will be a long drive because of Sunday traffic—even though Monday traffic will be even worse. I’m thinking about the week to follow, and the hunch in my upper back that is already forming in my 20s from slouching over 88

J O NAT H A N T R U O N G

a computer.

I notice again the dance that we are all a part of. A woman in an ugly sun hat drops a jar of jam and it rolls away from her. When she catches the jar she examines it for cracks, then looks at me as if Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve provoked her. Then, ugly-sun-hat-woman grabs the crate of oranges first, as if to spite me, and I am left with my empty bag.

Yes, we are all dancing, perhaps quite awkwardly, but there is a clear landscape of bodies moving. I saw it then and I see it now: a Seurat painting, where we are all immortalized with brush strokes into a more beautiful form of ourselves. And when gallery walkers see it, they will gawk at its form, recalling a time when they were once beautiful too and wasted it finding the unbruised oranges.

Ready? my mother asks.

I nod and we leave the market with an assortment of things we do not need but thought looked fresh, things we bought in abundance that we bring to her car. I try to get in the passenger seat before remembering that we drove separately. I try to remember that I have my own home now.

89

POS S E S S IO N S CASSIA EFTHYMIOU

I arrive at Lilia Steel’s Intentional Living Community on the hottest day of the year with only a backpack. She greets me in a frenetic monotone, switching between a panting intensity and a calm drawl within the same sentence. She speaks with intention, everything converging on a single pointed edge, a conversational pattern everyone around her seems to pick up sooner or later.

Right now, she is whispering greetings to everyone who approaches, staring into my eyes with a warm concentration and saying, “I hope your flight was peaceful, Maia. I’m very excited for what you’re going to be able to do here.”

When she has made her way through the sizable and doting arc of people, Lilia steps back and addresses all of us. “We’ll regroup in a few hours. I want you all to think about what you bring here, and what you leave behind.”

Lilia Steel does not believe in forgetting what you leave behind you, in time or space, even for a second. I know this, and I knew this when I took a leave of absence from school, choosing this month of emotional presence and spiritual healing over hope of graduating in under six years. Even still, I find a part of me hoping I could be allowed to put off memory, just for a little longer. #

Lilia Steel believes death is a reset button. Lilia Steel believes in reincarnation, and she believes she is cognizant of every life she’s ever lived, conscious of the enlightening knowledge only a death can bring.

She instructs us to die just a few hours into this retreat, all of 90

INKBLOT

us lying on our backs on the bamboo floors of a well-lit room.

“I want you all to know that, no matter how you get there, death is painless. It is as calming and pleasant as falling asleep under soft sheets, or the best meditation of your life.”

She begins walking around the room, her footsteps falling heavy near my head. “I want you all to imagine being on your deathbed, what you would say, who you would say it to. What is the last thing you let yourself think about? What did you not do?

“And then, when you’re ready to let go?” she pauses, letting her soft voice resonate, “Let those thoughts disappear, and let yourself drift away.”

I strain to picture a hospital bed, or the bedroom I grew up in, but the deeper I sink into this floor, the more certainly I am freezing into the topography of a snowy mountain, the pressure of hypoxia in my eardrums. But, it is as painless as promised, and I am immobilized.

“Imagine your funeral. Imagine what those people have to say about you, and perhaps more importantly, what they have to think.”

I can see a funeral, a faint, fuzzy image of my mother’s blank face, an obligatory preacher, an empty casket. At such an altitude, it’s almost impossible to recover corpses. They freeze solid, heavy, glued to the ground. My first funeral would occur on the mountain, summithungry climbers stepping over my body, becoming a trail marker like Green Boots, Sleeping Beauty.

“Imagine further out. The longview of a world without yourself.”

Far away, from the summit of a mountain, Lilia Steel is instructing us to rise out of our demises, talking about how we have a new start in our lives, how we have died and come back and this new life is all our own. I am shivering. #

Lilia pulls me aside after. “Maia, tell me about your visualization”

“I was—I froze—”

She puts her hand on my shoulder, stopping me. “You were climbing, weren’t you?”

I nod.

“Just like your girlfriend was.”

I nod again. She pulls me into a hug, which feels soft and weak, 91

CASSIA EFTHYMIOU

like she has yarn in the place of bones.

“Do you know why this is the first thing we do? It’s because you’re a new person now. You have an entirely new life. This month, you can be the person you’ve always wanted to become.” She pulls away, and her assistants, the full-fledged members of the Community, swarm her, draping a coat around her shoulders, fussing with her hair. She is remarkably comfortable with all of this.

“You don’t have to be like her, Maia. In life, or in death. You can be anyone.”

“I will. And, uh, thank you.”

She watches me leave, with her assistants in an arc behind her, four sets of eyes watching. #

I start running every morning, a comfortable habit from home to cling to. After about a week, I look up and see a single hawk pursuing a flock of doves, diving towards them and making them scatter, getting close enough to each bird to bite, and then refusing to follow through.

They circle above the trail, flying at full speed but not going far. Maybe, staying close to me.

I find a mess of gray feathers on the trail the next morning, with a dove finally dead atop it, headless and framed by this throne on the trail. The hawk had dissected it, torn its chest open. I kneel down and stare into the cavity. It ate the heart, left an open, bloody hole like an incomplete taxidermy.

I step off the trail and tiptoe around the grave. #

Lilia Steel believes in the malleability of the human soul. Lilia Steel believes in the Akashic records and the collective unconscious.

Bluntly, Lilia Steel believes in possession.

She makes this clear one morning, arriving as we are eating breakfast.

“Good morning!”

A few mutters back. She stands perfectly still, as if she’s waiting on something.

With more commitment, we call back “Good morning, Lilia!”

She smiles.

“I’m very excited for you all today.” She takes a long pause, and then, with no apparent connection, “You cannot be possessed unless 92

INKBLOT

you allow yourself to be. Possession is not a violation, it is something beautiful and invited. Evil people will claim demonic possession, but there is no such excuse for evil actions.”

She seems to lock eyes with me.

“As you all know, we are not controlled by demons, or angels, or forces beyond our control. You are responsible for what you do, what choices you make, and what happens to you. You, alone.”

She holds my eye contact, uninterrupted, kind but intense, like all things about her. I feel warm, and targeted, and like I have a migraine coming on.

“But we are all holding onto things. From our past lives, and from this life. We are holding things, people, that hold us back. We must address those head on, talk to those who have wronged us. And luckily, we have everything, and everyone, we need to do that, right here.”

I get possessed a few times that afternoon. I begin, instructed

by Lilia, playing the ungrateful and very much alive teenage daughter of a woman I had seen only in passing these past few days.

Lilia whispers in my ear. “It’ll feel forced at first. Just let the feeling overcome you, let her daughter speak through you.”

I am terrified. I shake my head towards her.

She shakes her head. “You only have to act a little bit, at the beginning. Let her daughter’s soul into your body. Don’t reject it.” She looks at me, almost sternly, “You could really help someone. You can do good.”

The woman, Darla, is in tears almost immediately. “I do so much for you. I’ve given so much for you. You treat me like I’m nothing.”

She stops talking, and I realize she’s expecting a response. “I’m sorry.”

In the corner of my vision, Lilia purses her lips. I try again.

“I’m sorry that you think I owe you something just for being born.” She smiles.

“I’m afraid of you.” Darla says, looking at me with such intensity I want to cry too. And I do. “You’re a monster. I raised a monster.”

I play the role, filling in the character of a bratty teenager, and never having the opportunity to welcome a new soul into my body.

When Darla, wracked with sobs, hugs me and says, “I love you.

93

CASSIA EFTHYMIOU

I’ll love you no matter what, and that terrifies me. That’s why I want to hate you.” Lilia ends the scene by stepping between us.

“Maia,” she says, beaming like a proud mother, “good job.” She turns to Darla, “That was your daughter, wasn’t it?”

Darla nods, “Exactly what she would have said. It’s like she was in the room.”

“No!” Lilia Steel shouts, a little too excited. “She was in the room. That’s not Maia playing your daughter. That was your daughter, her subconscious, what she truly thinks. That’s the power of what we do here.” She lowers her voice, like she’s telling us all a secret.

“Normally, we talk, but we don’t communicate. We follow prewritten scripts, thinking we’re speaking for ourselves. We aren’t. We’re saying the same trite shit over and over again. But what we did here, that was communication. That was honest soul to honest soul communication, and in just a few minutes, Darla here had a breakthrough, didn’t you?”

Darla nods, “I haven’t said ‘I love you’ to my daughter in five years. I was too afraid.” I look around at everyone gawking and nodding, believing.

“Five years of talking and not one conversation! This was a conversation, and we are all so blessed to have seen it.”

It turns out, I am the perfect model of possession. The youngest one here, I usually end up playing daughters, who act out for attention, who isolate because she wants you to prove you love her, who ran away to another time zone and never answer your calls because of just one misplaced remark, you swear. Very little can resemble memories of my youth. I was quiet and responsible, wise beyond my years, the complement of my shadow of a mother. We were functional, living sideby-side, loosely tied by circumstance. There wasn’t much of her, or me, to pull from. So, against Lilia’s instructions, I act. It’s easy: to hear out the leading questions and act like every teenage girl in every movie.

Every time, Lilia circles back around to our group, looking more and more proud.

I’m able to put off my turn as long as possible. Lilia Steel is the one who forces it to happen. She pulls a woman, in her mid-30s and looking a little bored, from the crowd, and whispers in her ear.

“Maia, you know who you have to talk to, right?”

“Eva.”

She nods, solemnly. “I know this wound is fresher than many 94

INKBLOT

others here. This may be difficult. But we are all here to help you heal, and you can’t do that by avoiding the problem.”

No room for forgetting. “I mean, I have issues with my mom too?”

She chuckles, and, carefully, a few others do too.

“This is why you’re here, Maia, isn’t it? Let’s address it.”

The woman she picked out of the crowd stares blankly at me.

“Uh, hi, Eva.” “Hello.”

“I miss you.” I try, seeing how it feels.

“I’ve missed you, too.”

I stare into the eyes of this actor, wondering what archetype she’s pulling from, or if, by some miracle, I’m the exception, and she’s actually being possessed.

I must be staring for too long, because Lilia cuts in.

“Let’s focus on why you’re mad at her, first.”

“I’m not mad at her.” I sound like a child.

Lilia nods. “I apologize. You’ve been carrying a lot of anger since you lost her, and you’re not sure where to place it. Let’s try to figure it out. Talk to her.”

I look back at the woman, who looks terrified. “I guess, I wish you were more careful. I wish you had left when I had.”

The woman stares at me blankly. There is no chance for a soul to soul connection, but I can try to give her a fighting chance.

“At base camp. On Everest. I left the party because I didn’t feel ready. And then,” the woman looks fascinated now. I want to hit her. “And then, you made it to the summit. And you didn’t make it back down.”

Lilia nods, vigorously. “And I guess I kind of blame you for not being responsible. And I blame myself, for leaving. Like I should have tried harder to convince you. Or stayed.”

The woman finally gets the hint she should speak, “Maia, I wanted to live.”

“I wanted you to live too.”

“No, but I wanted to take in all the life I could while I was alive. I wanted to have adventures, climb Everest! I didn’t want to be boring and die while I was still living.”

It’s no use. “I’d rather you be boring, and alive.”

95

CASSIA EFTHYMIOU

“I can’t live like that. I can’t just go through life without taking every opportunity that came to me.”

Eva was not an adrenaline junkie. She was a mountaineer who was majoring in business and couldn’t stand haunted houses. I watched this woman go on, with platitudes Eva would never use about making the most out of life.

She’s doing exactly what I did. She’s lying through her teeth.

How did everyone else fall for this? She stops. “Do you understand that?

Do you understand me?”

I look at Lilia. I want this to end.

“Yes, I think I understand.”

And, then, praying it’ll make Lilia cut us off.

“I do understand. I can’t blame you for not being me, having my fears. I knew who you were and I chose to love that person.”

“Bravo!” Lilia shouts, like she can’t contain her joy inside her body. “Maia, that was a breakthrough.”

I force a smile for her.

“Of course, there’s always miles to go with grief, but this was a beautiful first step. What would this be called? Did we reach Base Camp?”

I stare at her, stunned. The assistants trailing behind her seem to circle closer, forming a protective shield.

“Okay! Maybe too grim!” She claps, like a reset. “Let’s get going to lunch, and then we’re moving on to some good old fashioned manifestation.” #

After our possessions, Darla starts joining me on my runs.

Darla talks a lot, and Darla is focused on the events of twenty years ago.

She was a dancer, rising star in a hierarchical ballet world I can’t quite grasp. She tore some essential ligament playing Odette, and has had a tenuous relationship with reality ever since.

“I’ve been working with Lilia for eight years now. She’s truly the best thing that’s ever happened to me.” She tells me on one of our runs, “When my daughter moves out, I might have to come down here permanently. Join the Intentional Community.”

I’ve been “working with Lilia” for six months, found her in the basin of an internet rabbit hole on my forty-second day back from Nepal, three days after I got the news about Eva. 96

INKBLOT

When we reach it, the bird hasn’t moved.

She stops and stares at it. “God, is this a demonic sacrifice?”

“There was a hawk.”

“I’ve never met a satanist hawk.” Darla pushes the body off to the edge of the trail with the outside of her shoe, slowly and precisely, like the world’s worst soccer player. She starts running again. I stare at the little body, completely destroyed, but still identifiable as a mourning dove from its tail. I push some dirt over it with my foot, wishing I could do a call, gentle but harrowing, garbled from any proximity.

From ahead, “You know, you can tell me if you’re killing birds.

I won’t tattle.”

I send love to the bird and catch up with her, “That’s not funny.”

“It’s kind of funny. My little devil worshipper.”

I pick up the pace. Darla is a better runner than me, faster with better endurance, and my Achilles is killing me. She matches me easily.

“I thought we weren’t supposed to believe in that.”

“Nobody can tell you what to believe in.” #

Lilia Steel never tells us what to believe in. Lilia Steel believes in the power of the internal guidance system, dictated by the intuition of tripartite mind and the crystal fragments in all of our souls.

We hike through the woods, and she wills the birds silent. She wills the sky golden-tinged and everything beautiful, like always.

She touches my shoulder, ignoring how I flinch, and draws a four-pronged star on my forehead with wet clay, repeating an incantation in Akkadian (she insists). “This is your compass,” she says, under her breath, between blessings, “and you can choose to follow it.

You have to.” #

There was a thunderstorm the next night, shaking the paperthin windows. I wake up before sunrise, in what becomes a brief break from the rain. I put my shoes on automatically, and take off towards the usual trail, praying for a birdless morning.

It starts pouring when I run past the spot where the dove was, and find a new pile of feathers, white this time, with no body in sight. I run past it without breaking my pace.

Above the tree canopy, birds are exchanging screams and howls.

97

CASSIA EFTHYMIOU

A dove is chasing a pack of hawks on the prowl, like it doesn’t quite understand what’s supposed to happen here. I watch a gray hawk catch a dove’s neck in its talons, and drop it to the ground. #

Lilia can stare into a person’s body, sense your tension and watch your digestion. Lilia insists nobody can trick her, because she can smell intentions. Lilia calls herself a seer, an empath, extrasensory.

She’s waiting for me when I return from my run. She brings me to a clearing, the rain now a steady drizzle, one of the Community members standing just within earshot, holding an umbrella and looking exceptionally bored.

“I’m so worried about you.” She is all high-energy now, no calming undertones. “You need to understand me. You need to understand that I can see your blood pumping through your body and I could access every thought you’ve ever had.” She pauses, like I’m supposed to have something to say to that.

“I know. I understand.”

“I can see the toxicity in your body. You have tumors growing in your bloodstream, you have poison in your blood. You have for months, and I’ve tried to protect you, and I don’t think you’re listening to me.

How can I help you, Maia, if you won’t help yourself?”

I can barely get out “tumors?” before she starts off again.

“You’re undermining me. This is a sacred place, and you can’t be undermining me.”

“I don’t understand, Lilia. What did I do?”

“You don’t have to do anything, Maia. I’m trying to maintain a specific energy here, and you’re the only one who is throwing it off.”

Off in the distance, a hawk screeches. She looks at me, knowingly, almost accusatory.

“This is serious, Maia. Your life could be in danger, and you aren’t committing. I know it’s hard, what you’re going through, but if you don’t want to fix it, then you shouldn’t be here.”

The rain is picking up again, and she paces in circles around me, entrapping me in a tightening hold.

“You can’t lie to me.” She spits on the ground, corporeal and vulgar, “I’ve been watching these toxins fester in you, and you do nothing to stop it.”

She makes a barely imperceptible hand gesture towards 98

INKBLOT

the assistant, who opens the umbrella and holds it over Lilia’s head, standing out of its covering.

“Maia,” her voice is soft, and calm again as I remember it, “you have a chance here. I want you to stay where you are, on this divine land, and just consider what I’ve been telling you.” Then, as she’s walking away, under the covering of the umbrella, “You are responsible for your own choices. You can leave at any time.”

I watch doves die all day.

99

Bitter Divinity, Avalon LaFosse 100

GRE AT WH I T E ASHLEY THORNTON

There exists a dream this godforsaken night, one where the boy squirms about at first, dolorous. His sustenance is gone, and all of his ribs glisten like jaded spoons. He sits in front of a foreign object.

It is square and has tubes that come out of the top. There is a buzzing sound like honeybees that’s coming out from it, and a zigzagged silver line on the film; the boy sits in front of it diligently, knowing that something mysterious will magically make itself discovered. This is not a window. He doesn’t know how, but where there was once a blank vision of plastic, a watery image appears. Where is the paintbrush, the boy wonders? It is nowhere to be seen, and yet it is here, not of pencil or paint but of the same substance that shoots stars upon his roof. His hands begin to vibrate, and he clasps them together so as to not make a sound. And there they are, crushed whitecaps, and he is enamored with the pixelated image. He had never seen such a thing. It is all very confusing, seeing that this is a dream, and dreams can’t wizard new inventions out of nothing. He has to have seen it just but once. Then there is the mountain crest, monumental as an aquamarine dragon, crispationed sluggishly, white flying on all sides like cirrus clouds. A small figure with skin like his is on the screen, and the small boy gasps.

This figure is probably older than ten, and it is unclear if it is a monkey or a creature more cutting-edge. Its chest is bare like a peeled pear or an undressed tree, and it is wearing a pair of blue underwear-like shorts, like the boy. He scratches his bushy coconut head. The black haired thing makes him discomfited, so he pinpoints his attention to the waxed ark it is on. It is a titanic chock of painted wood, hummingbirds dancing on the surface. The boy wants the toy, and he taps the surface of the screen. In a dumbfounding flash, he is on the vehicle, and has to stop breathing as to not yo-yo about like a drunken sailor and disinherit 101

INKBLOT

his balance. The brine showers his face, tickling his underarms, and he lets off a barbarous primate grin, his lion teeth bared at the wave.

It’s atrocious roar evokes war on the child, and his body shudders. A monsoon ripple five stars across one trunk, and he forecasts his dive.

The boy loses nerve, falling to his knees and holding on for prized life.

But that is not the case this time. Instead, he finds that his shivering is not because a dog’s yip hit him too closely, or because he accidentally stole a glimpse outside his guarded home walls, not because a stranger is pounding on his doorframe. This is something novel and rebellious— adrenaline, one of his many books might call it—and it gyrates, delicious and dangerous. The boy is electrified. He has a draconian, precipitous need to cry. What will happen? He does not like this feeling. It is so ambivalent, so tragically treacherous; it convinces him that maybe if he opens the door a crack the wild beasts and pigs won’t slurp him up like a rain puddle. He stands, then lets out his mute mouth, locked in the sweltering tropical zone. The wave hurtles him through space, and he is greedy, keen for this feeling. Though he is sure that somewhere, some ill one has said that tvs turn your brain into fructose pulp, he cannot help but suspend the stay of his soul, inside a Hawaiian dream, frozen in a standstill film. The great wave screams his name, sparklingly singing out, and he catapults his arms towards the sky, for his victory and liberty. There is a sunset, and it is the same vibrant orange singing of a mango, the clouds creamy and drippy in their places, acting chimerically on a gas stage. He plants his feet resolutely, as if that alone will keep him rooted inside a glass box. He is not counting on it. As he collides with the endangered borders that were set for his future, he fantasizes that maybe if he soars past it there will be a remnant of finality, the white horizon of answers. The boy pines for the windy blizt. When will he find another bliss undulation? He wants to know. So he steers his surfboard everywhere he can conceptualize, anywhere his imagination hankers to take him. Dory fish the size of cars leap out of the sandy pits and swells, soaring over him like kamikaze war jets, colors of the rainbow reuniting on the other side of cloud nine, kingdom come.

One towering shark soars from the blue. The great white is the most exhaustive, ceremoniously heavyweight creature the boy has seen in all of his honorable years of living. It has a blanketing white underbelly as extravagantly built as the perennial galleons that imported spices from Spain, the flavor of white a mixture of alfredo sauce and fat pearls. It 102

ASHLEY THORNTON

is a creamy pigmentation, and the boy wishes he could rub it with his bare hands. The salient fins are blue as the navy seal uniforms of men defending the Pacific and Atlantic, and their edges are rocky as the hulls of cruise ships, as if they could cut the bread of the homeland wide open.

The boy does not aspire to stroke and pet it, but to build a house of it with his muscular arms and use it as protection against strangers. The back arches like the undertow out of his stump neck, and the arch is like a bridge, a falling star connecting air and water, the train of thought.

He wants the body of it to fly him to the sun so that he can bask in the rays, have his last remainders of not so dearly held life be spent in the glory of a shining sun. The eyes of the beast are onyx black pearls, glass beads stained with squid ink and boat oil. They are crowded with all of the things they want to say, but the thirsty gaze is trapped by the inability to eat up English. The eyes are compressing their needs like a smoothie, channeling it into steamy stress that the fat fish releases by darting from wave to wave, catharsis booming when nourishment flies into its mouth. The boy wants to shield the eyes, or maybe take comfort at how similar they are to his own, how they also look trapped on their island of despair. The shark’s teeth are like meat cleavers, dipping up and down from their bloody diseased gums to chop up fish and seagulls into minced liver. They gleam like the morning’s breath on water, like pockets of a mirror, irresistible, making even the least subtle dolphin eager to accept and dive into her doomed fate. They are seashell colored, a pinkish rim decorating the crown. The shark’s meaty smile simmers in place, frying the boy under its fishy breath. If only he had the teeth of a great white, maybe he could be brave. But who was he to ruin this dream? He leans into his balmy surfboard alongside the fish colony, the wave bumping him up when his nose touches the waxed wood that smells of coconuts. It holds his hand as he plunges his forearms into the ice blue, surging onward with enterprising pride when he stands up and buttresses his biceps to the side like Christ the Redeemer. The board is hankering to gallop into enticingly gilded death and never look back. The boy pats the shark’s pancake nose, and it parts him a smart, submarine purr as the boy’s craft nosedives headfirst into the unfathomable, as the water compresses his neck, as the world glitches and becomes nothing but sea salt around him, the ocean with his hearth’s rosy eyes. The shark leapfrogs into the air, and breaks its winded spine as it tumbles down. Even great whites can plight blind.

103

PAR A LYS IS MARBELLA BOLOGNESE

INT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT There is an old fashioned 50s style TV. Static is on its screen. A picture appears on screen and an old fashion 30s cartoon begins to play. CAT, a little slouchy cartoon cat guy, walks out on the screen, visibly tired and drowsy.

NARRATOR

Too tired to function? Too busy to sleep?

Cat nods sleepy as it climbs into bed. Just as it’s about to close its eyes, an alarm rings on its bed stand. Other characters began to rush around in a busy manner loading endless papers into the little characters arms.

Cat cannot take the weight and falls over on the floor, proceeded by an anvil landing on top of Cat in a classic cartoon manner.

NARRATOR (CONT’D)

Well, we have the answer! Introducing Dream, the

sleep energy pill.

Cat looks up hopefully under the anvil, dizzy stars around its head. The word “Dream” appears in big letters on the screen.

NARRATOR (CONT’D)

Thanks to new REM technology clients who take the

Dream pill will never have to sleep again, and will still 104

MARBELLA BOLOGNESE

receive all the same benefits of sleeping.

The tiny round yellow pill is pictured in Cat’s hand.

NARRATOR (CONT’D)

Back at our headquarters our dreamers ingest our

special sleep serum, which allows them to sleep for

you. This allows our scientists to collect all that good

sleep energy the dreamers produce to formulate our pill, Dream.

One side of the screen shows rows and rows of little cartoon characters sleeping in hospital beds with sleep serum IVs in their arms. Little dream bubbles appear above their heads showing their happy dreams.

While the other side shows other cartoon characters taking the pill, going about in their everyday life and activities as the sun continually rises and sets behind them.

NARRATOR (CONT’D)

You can feel this great too! Escape your miserable

reality and try Dream today. The only thing stopping

you is sleep.

The little cartoon character smiles, happily convinced and pops the pill in its mouth. All of a sudden, stars fly up from its head and it walks out the door ready to take on the day. The TV quickly flickers out and everything is black.

CUT TO : INT. CAR - AFTERNOON MOM, a middle aged woman driving the CAR. LUNA, a teenager sits in the backseat on her PHONE. Mom is also on the PHONE talking loudly and boastfully.

MOM

Oh yeah, thank you! Yeah we are so proud to call 105

INKBLOT

Dylan our son! (beat)

The UN’s new Goodwill Ambassador... Can you

believe it, our little Dylan!

Luna looks up, annoyed.

MOM (CONT’D)

Exactly! That’s where a good Ivy education can take

you... I keep trying to tell Luna that...

As Mom quickly glances at Luna, she slouches in the back seat. Mom keeps going on about Luna’s brother.

The car abruptly stops in front of Dream’s headquarters. Mom is still on the PHONE. Luna opens the car door and grabs her SUITCASE. LUNA

I guess I’ll see you in a week, mom.

Mom ignores her still talking on the PHONE. Luna steps out of the CAR and shuts the door angrily.

EXT. DREAM HEADQUARTERS FRONT LAWN - CONTINUOUS Luna turns around to wave goodbye but her mom is already gone. Luna turns back to face Dream and walks up the path heading inside the futuristic, dystopian building.

INT. DREAM LAB - EVENING Luna is standing in a crowd waiting. A disheveled looking girl, RILEY, runs in behind her. Riley accidentally bumps into Luna knocking off her GLASSES.

LUNA

Hey, watch it!

106

MARBELLA BOLOGNESE

RILEY

You watch it.

Riley and Luna glare at each other. Just then DR. LOU, a very important looking lady in a lab coat walks in. The crowd’s commotion comes to a halt. Her heels click behind her as she slowly walks to the center of the room and stops. Upon seeing the crowd, her face lights up as she opens her arms in a welcoming gesture.

DR. LOU

Wow! Just look at all of you!

She hurries over to the crowd. She begins grabbing people’s hands and shaking them and progressing down the row. Luna rolls her eyes.

DR. LOU (CONT’D)

I’m Dr. Lou. It’s so nice to meet you! And you, and you.

She reaches out to shake Luna’s hand and pauses. She looks at Luna like she is a specimen. Then she continues down the row shaking more hands. Finally Dr. Lou walks back to the center of the room.

DR. LOU (CONT’D)

Welcome, young interns, to Dream. This is the sleep

serum lab, where most of you will be spending your

time this week. You are going to be making sleep

serum here. Not only that, you’ll be working with

some of the top scientists in the world.

A murmur pours over the crowd.

DR. LOU (CONT’D)

You all should be very proud that you have been

recruited to this selective internship. (beat)

It’s getting late, and no one is allowed to be roaming

the halls after hours. In a moment, you are going to 107

INKBLOT

be dismissed to your dorms. Nice meeting you all! I’ll see you all in the morning.

Right as she is about to open the door to exit, she pauses and quickly turns around.

DR. LOU (CONT’D)

Oh I almost forgot! It’s the most important rule in the

lab. See that big tank of sleep serum over there?

Everyone looks at the TANK. DR. LOU (CONT’D) (slowly)

Do not pull the RED LEVER on the SLEEP SERUM

TANK. Under no circumstances whatsoever. We take

following rules very seriously here. (she sighs)

Okay well that’s that! Off to your dorms. Sleep tight.

Everyone exits the room.

INT. DORM ROOM - NIGHT Luna walks into the dorm room exhausted. She plops her bags down on the floor and sprawls across her BED. As soon as she is about to close her eyes, Riley appears in the doorway. She gives Luna a cold glare and storms over to her bed unzipping her LUGGAGE aggressively. Finally she talks.

RILEY

How are your glasses?

LUNA

Fine. Why do you care?

RILEY

Because we’re gonna have to live together for a week.

Might as well try to get along.

108

MARBELLA BOLOGNESE

LUNA

I guess. I’m Luna by the way.

RILEY Riley.

This is far too awkward. Luna whips out her PHONE and begins texting her mom: Hey mom. I’m here. Still alive, if you care. Good night.

Luna’s finger hovers over the send button. She hesitates and locks her phone screen instead. She goes to sleep.

FADE TO BLACK INT. DREAM LAB - NEXT DAY Luna and Riley are working on batches of sleep serum. They keep glancing at each other, and making more batches faster and faster.

Riley walks away to grab something leaving her batch unattended. Luna pours TALC in Riley’s batch. Riley comes back upset to find her serum bubbling turning a murky color.

INT. HALLWAY - AFTERNOON Luna and Riley are walking back to their dorm in silence. Luna is smirking and Riley is angry. Riley finally breaks the silence.

RILEY

What is your problem?

LUNA

What do you mean?

RILEY

I see talc on your hands. I’m not stupid. If you’re

gonna sabotage someone at least do a better job of

covering it up.

109

INKBLOT

Luna hides her hands behind her back.

LUNA

Maybe I wanted you to see.

RILEY

What are you trying to prove?

Luna does not respond. Riley stops and looks around nervously. Luna doesn’t notice and keeps walking. All of a sudden there’s a loud banging down the hall. Luna stops now too.

LUNA

What was that?

RILEY (scared)

I think we’re lost Luna looks around.

LUNA

We should check! What if someone is hurt?

RILEY

No way! Haven’t you heard the rumors about the

Dreamers program? Dream has done a lot of questionable things.

LUNA

Why are you even here, then?

Luna walks towards the noise. Riley hesitates then follows her.

RILEY

Fine! Let’s see if the rumors are true.

They approach the door where the banging is coming from. Luna reaches out to open the door, but Riley grabs her hand.

110

MARBELLA BOLOGNESE

RILEY (CONT’D)

We shouldn’t even be here right now. Let’s go back.

Luna shakes free of her grasp.

LUNA

What are you so afraid of?

Luna turns back to the door. All of a sudden a man appears at the window of the door. He hits his body against it over and over. Luna and Riley jump back. The man looks terrible, sickly, far beyond sleep deprived.

MAN (crying)

LET ME OUT! LET ME OUT! HELP! HELP! DON’T

JUST STAND THERE! HELP ME! Riley grabs Luna’s hand and they run away.

CUT TO: INT. DORM ROOM - EVENING Luna quickly shuts and locks the door behind them. Riley sits down holding her head. Luna is pacing.

LUNA

Let’s try to be level headed here. Maybe that man had

a bad reaction to the Dream pill.

RILEY

That was not a man! What would you call that?

Luna doesn’t respond. Riley stands up.

111

INKBLOT

RILEY (CONT’D)

Luna, don’t sugar coat this. What you saw there was human experimentation.

She begins to sound as if she’s quoting something she’s read.

RILEY (CONT’D)

When people volunteer to become dreamers some of

them are never seen again. Family’s of dreamers have

tried time and time again to sue Dream, but they always lose. (frustrated)

Dream is really good at covering their ass.

LUNA

But they’re just rumors.

RILEY

Keep telling yourself that. I’m going to bed early.

Riley lays down in her BED. Then turns over to face Luna.

RILEY (CONT’D)

Luna? I know it’s kind of pointless to ask YOU to

make a promise. But after what happened today,

promise me we’ll, you know, stick together. No matter

what or where we go for the rest of the week.

LUNA (beat) Okay.

Riley turns out the light on her side of the room and rolls over in her BED to face the wall.

FADE TO BLACK

112

MARBELLA BOLOGNESE

INT. DREAM CAFETERIA LUNCH - AFTERNOON Luna and Riley are eating lunch. A JANITOR is cleaning the floor behind them. Riley slams her FORK down on her PLATTER. RILEY

I’ve lost my appetite. I just can’t stop thinking about

that man. Correction—thing.

LUNA

Keep your voice down. You never know who’s listening.

Luna glances at the janitor behind them.

RILEY Right.

LUNA

Here’s the plan, we’ll just stick it out until the end.

After this, Dream will never ever hear from us again.

As far as they know, we don’t know. Leaving the

internship early will make us look suspicious.

Riley nods in agreement. A strange hand taps Luna’s shoulder. Luna and Riley turn around to meet the janitor.

JANITOR

Are you two interns here for the summer program?

Luna looks at Riley then eyes the Janitor.

LUNA Who’s asking?

JANITOR

They recruit Dreamers from this program. You’re

lucky if you only stay a week.

113

INKBLOT

RILEY

Why are you telling us this?

JANITOR

Telling you what? I’ve got cleaning to do.

The janitor looks across the room then quickly down again. Luna looks across the room too and spies Dr. Lou out on the balcony watching them. Luna quickly gathers her BOOKS on the TABLE. LUNA

Come on Riley let’s go.

INT. ABANDONED LAB - THE NEXT DAY Luna and Riley walk into the lab. It is dark and dusty Luna reaches for the LIGHT SWITCH and tries to turn it on, nothing.

RILEY

Are you sure this is where our lesson is today?

LUNA

This what the paper said... maybe it was a misprint?

Luna reaches for her PHONE and turns on its flashlight. Her and Riley begin exploring the Lab. They scour the counters. Luna finds a BOTTLE of dream pills and stuffs them in her pocket. They see sparks coming from a broken machine in the back. They walk closer. Riley grabs Luna’s arm to stop her and shakes her head as she points to the wall where there is fresh blood. They turn around to quickly leave, but hear a low moaning from the pile of dusty blankets under the flickering machine. Luna inches closer and pulls off the blanket to find the Janitor bleeding to death. Riley gasps frozen in fear. Luna grabs her and they run.

INT. ANOTHER HALLWAY - CONTINUOUS Luna and Riley bolt down the hall. Alarms start blaring and guards’ 114

MARBELLA BOLOGNESE

footsteps echo after them. While running and trembling, Luna grabs the BOTTLE of dream pills and takes out two and pops them in her mouth.

RILEY

Did you take those from the lab? And did you just take

two?! That’s enough to counter a week’s dose of sleep serum!

Luna stops quickly to hand Riley the bottle.

LUNA

Exactly. Here, take some, too. We aren’t becoming dreamers.

Riley reaches for the bottle, but it’s too late. In that instant the guards finally catch up with them and knock them out. Everything is black.

CUT TO: INT. DREAMERS ROOM - NIGHT Luna wakes up in a HOSPITAL BED with an IV full of sleep serum in her arm. She takes it out. She gets up drowsy and tired. Luna looks around, she’s in a long room with rows upon rows of hospital beds next to each other. It’s Dreamers. Luna spies the door. She begins to walk toward it as best as she can. She’s almost there, when she sees Riley.

Luna looks at Riley and looks back at the door. She quickly scrambles over to Riley and unhooks her sleep serum IV. Riley slowly wakes up.

RILEY (slurring) What’s happening?

Luna grabs her by the arm and helps her up.

LUNA

Come on, we don’t have much time!

115

INKBLOT

LUNA and RILEY begin to stumble towards the door. They open it.

INT. HALLWAY - CONTINUOUS Luna and Riley are more awake now and are sprinting at full speed.

They are frantically searching for an exit. Finally, Riley finds something.

Double doors and an exit sign.

RILEY Look!

They rush towards the door. All of a sudden, the elevator behind them dings. It’s Dr. Lou. Luna and Riley are frozen with fear.

DR. LOU

Girls? Leaving so soon?

Luna and Riley slowly turn around to face Dr. Lou. In that instant, the two guards charge towards Riley and Luna. Luna ducks and the guard misses her. Riley doesn’t react as quickly and is captured. Luna, not sure what to do, bolts in the opposite direction. She can hear Riley down the hall.

RILEY

No, Luna! Don’t leave! You promised! You made a promise!

Luna wipes tears from her eyes but keeps running.

INT. DOOR OUTSIDE OF DREAM LAB - DAWN Luna stops. Hands on her knees, and is hyperventilating. She sees another exit in the distance. She’s trying to gather her thoughts. She looks over at the Dream lab. Specifically, the giant SLEEP SERUM TANK through the window. Luna’s face lights up. She has an idea.

116

MARBELLA BOLOGNESE

INT. DREAM LAB - CONTINUOUS Luna runs up to the SLEEP SERUM TANK. LUNA

Don’t worry Riley. I didn’t break my promise.

Her hand hovers over the RED LEVER on the tank. She quickly pulls it down. Nothing happens. A beat. She hears alarms blaring in the distance. Then people begin to run by her. They are all dreamers, hundreds and hundreds of them, rushing past the lab window and spilling out into the lobby, out the main entrance doors, free at last.

INT. DREAM LOBBY - CONTINUOUS Luna steps out into the crowd, searching for Riley. She pushes through the crowd. Suddenly Luna is knocked over by a girl rushing past her.

The girl turns around. It’s Riley.

RILEY

I am so sor—Luna!

Luna stands up and dusts herself off.

LUNA Let’s go.

FADE TO BLACK END SCENE.

117

Spirit, Holland Fox

MY F IS HI N G T U TO R & M E MIA SOUMBASAKIS

We laze on wet plastic and pass notes back and forth; it goes like this:

Oil. onions))) Ogle @me Plie patented Parented bibbed?

Bidding Boracay Retrify iffy

You must’ve realized “retrify” isn’t a word, goddamn you.

“The fun you two get into on fishing trips,” dad

would say later, (for lack of a better use of breath.)

I think you’d like to know more about me than scribbles, so I send you a box of bubbles in bubble wrap, petally, precarious, not to be shaken. It reminds you of a sink and you say we should get back to the lake, or else the fish might swim away. We’ll wash them later.

You’re so fun, you’re so fun fun fun fun FUN. Trip over myself and fall right back up and over again, tumbleweed up on my luck fun.

119

INKBLOT

“You’re so discombobulated,” dad says sometimes, (but never as an insult.)

Teenage-girlish.

“To fish a fish, you need good worms. Without the worms, it goes downhill.” This is obvious, but you indulge me; you let me stab the plumpest worms with hooks. I am childish with that worm blood.

Next, wet plastic, then notes back and forth. (Neither of us are deaf, but communication is more meaningful when it’s irrevocable, right?)

Throw the hook and that’s about it, right?

throw the hook hard, like a swingset.

That doesn’t make sense.

You know it does.

It does, goddamn you.

I throw very hard, but here enters the plot: I fished a fish and it fished me back in.

Excuse my past tense; it’s hard to write and fish at the same time.

A fish is petally, precarious, and dangerous beyond belief. You told me this from the get-go, but only now do I know what it means. It means a dependency on something that has no real form; it means enough teeth to fill the gills and make them into mouths, too. It means a lot of strength in a little body and unphased 2D eyes in the face of a hook stabbed through the upper lip.

The fish fishes me back in but I don’t think I have the prerequisites to be a fish.

For example, I do not know how to surf. I tried, once, and fell off the board many— You realize that I got fished back in.

You shout shout shout SHOUT; you don’t think I deserve to be down there.

For the wellbeing of me or the fish, I am not sure.

120

MIA SOUMBASAKIS

“You really are so funny sometimes, you know, I never had a fishing tutor when I was your age.”

(It’s obvious who says that.)

That is not an effective way to be substantial.

(: sorry for letting you fall in

(: it’s alright, the fish have substance too.

Comeon, come on, fish before they swim away

121

SIL K WO RM GABY MIKHAIL

I sit on the window sill watching. It is almost translucent, its small eyes at the top of its head unaware of my presence, its body segmented, curling into itself before unfurling and moving slowly closer to its destination. It is so alone. I don’t know how it got here, a single silkworm on a windowsill in a college dorm room. I have been here for a few hours. My mom dropped me off a while ago. She left as soon as she came. Leaving my things on my doorstep and a kiss on my left cheek, she drove away. I don’t know the next time I’ll see her. But I have my kiss on the cheek and my roommate’s name and I guess that’s more than my silkworm.

So I turn my mind to April. The only name I know in a ten mile radius is hers but she hasn’t arrived yet. We picked each other out though, through one of those forced roommate surveys which catalog students like bedspreads. Hers was the only one with a picture. I think that’s why I chose her; the concreteness of it. Her brown hair and dull brown eyes, pudgy face and freckles made it all seem real. She goes to bed late and wakes up early—I go to bed early and wake up late. She is dirty. I am clean. She likes jazz. I like blues. It confused my family when I picked her but I wouldn’t give her up. She is now the only thing I know about this place. I don’t know why she picked me—I didn’t provide a picture or really fill out the form.

We talked on the phone a few times. She spoke of her hometown in Wyoming, and from where I stood it was hard to imagine what she described of the place. Empty fields for miles, then dark mountains growing out of nothing and tall white men on horses that spoke of “better times.” I told her about California. How I hated the hot 122

GABY MIKHAIL

weather and was looking forward to the east coast seasons, how I would miss the way people walked and talked, the way I knew the place. I guess that was hard for her to understand too.

She told me about her mother and father, married at seventeen and pregnant at sixteen. Her mother is a waitress in a bar and her father is a patron down the street. Neither of them really expected her to go to college, but when she got a scholarship I guess they were fine with her leaving. She was happy to go; she didn’t sound like she thought about it much. She didn’t seem like the type of person to look forward to or away from anything. She seemed untouchable. So I told her about my dogs. And my cat. And my friends and my house and my parents and my fish and my favorite teacher and my worst enemies and my favorite book shop and my favorite coffee shop and favorite place in that coffee shop. I couldn’t tell yet if she truly cared but she didn’t seem to mind either. I guess the obscurity may have fallen away but she didn’t seem committed to it. On paper I was still a question mark.

I guess the promises she held for me too had fallen away.. I have been trying to create her in my mind for weeks. But she takes no physical form despite having a face, and every time I think I understand what I created, something appears inconsistent and I take apart the whole puzzle in an attempt to find where the last piece fits.

It doesn’t matter though. Now what matters is what time she goes to the bathroom and which closet she wants. But she hasn’t arrived and I’ll have to wait until she gets here to figure those things out. So I’ll go to lunch alone.

Before I leave I look back at the silkworm. It is still moving. I wonder where it thinks it’s going. Maybe it doesn’t.

In college the freshmen walk in packs. Huddled together and giggling, wearing the same thing and looking the same way. They talk about a plane crash from a few weeks ago or recent breakups in old friend groups. They all blend together as they walk past me or beside me or around me. I get lost twice on the way to the dining hall. I don’t mind.

I don’t try to figure out where I am going.

When I find the dining hall it is 3 pm. It has cleared out now and all that is left are a few students, sitting alone dispersed throughout the room. As I eat I think of April.

She told me once that she likes insects. It was one of the few 123

INKBLOT

details she offered up freely. She said that seeing something so small made her feel large. That understanding how helpless they were made her feel more in control. She wondered if that was the way God felt about us.

Maybe she’ll want to keep our silkworm.

I return to my dorm. April still isn’t here but the blind silkworm is still moving. It is shuffling its way towards the end of the window sill. It still doesn’t see me. Alone, it doesn’t truly look behind or forward or around, it just keeps moving.

I turn on the news in my room. They are still talking about the plane crash. They show a picture of a girl. With brown hair and dull brown eyes and a pudgy face and freckles.

And the blind silkworm keeps moving. `

124

Complement, Quynh Anh Vu 125

NE IG H B O RH O O D ABRIL RODRIGUEZ-DIAZ

Darkness. Not subjective, hard-to-see in, dusky type of darkness. Upon closing my eyelids now I cannot describe it, because even then an orange tinge pervades and I feel like I can almost see through my eyes.

No, this is simpler. An objective absence of color, absence of light: black. Do not ask for more description, for I cannot tell you how cool or warm, how humid or dry, how loud or quiet it is. All I can tell you is of the black. Somewhere inside this black there is a swimming street, unfurling and looping through space.

Your messy braids float around your face. You flop onto your back, sink a bit further into the creases of this void. Slip, slide, through the loops in the unworn street, tumbling through the void.

Somewhere along this nothingness, the invisible sidewalk has tongues. These tongues branch off the main path, coil and uncoil and find their ways into the mouths of square houses. Throughout the void, these box houses are shiny black plastic, unperceivable building blocks.

Glide on your stomach, push away. When you do this you propel yourself forward with no effort; it is like you’re pedaling full force on a stationary bike with no resistance. Giggling, you let the current you’ve created take you forward.

Here—stop—feel with your smooth, outstretched hand.

You’ve hit the smooth edge of one of the square houses. Ninetydegree angle, a slick cube. You slide down, slip along the house’s wall. No windows, no rooftop, no telephone wires or satellites.

Updownupdownrightleftupdown. Who knows where you are right now.

As your feet touch the ground you find a doorknob, somehow. You grab 126

ABRIL RODRIGUEZ-DIAZ

hold. Around you the void shifts.

And you can see! The inside of the cube is pink and very tiny, even for you. You crawl towards the far wall, passing a quaint, wooden mini-bed the size of your head. You bat playfully at a cream-colored lamp hanging above you. As you move along the oatmeal-colored carpet, you realize you’ve crushed the tiny wooden dolls that were strewn out on the carpet with your knees. Buzz. Faint buzz. A cluster of little people buzz below you, all dressed in cream linen. They are gathered around a glowing fireplace. Golden embers. Little sparks float towards your face, land on your cheeks like small freckles. The tallest of the four looks up. Her eyes are large and brown and are cocooned in round wrinkles.

“Have you come from outside? What were you doing out there, little one?” The woman gathers her downy white skirt and climbs onto your knee. She brushes off the wood specks then stands on her tiptoes, arms out, balancing, and reaches for your hand. Tenderly, she pulls out a rag and wraps it around your bleeding pinky. #

That night we eat our first dinner together. You sit at the too-small table with us and this is the first time in your life that you experience glow from the food on the table, elbows brushing against each other, different sized glasses, clinking, cheers and a mother serving her golden pasta to everyone else in talavera bowls, chipped and mismatched.

Among the chatter, you scan our faces and linger on mine. My hair is also black and in braids. #

My mother sweeps up the remains of my dolls. Your parents come knocking at the end of the night. By this time you and I are on the floor, playing pretend and using lavender jumbo marshmallows as little people. When my mother opens the door a bit of the powdery glow from inside spills into the dark street, like miso being stirred into soup broth.

Your parents are so tall. They are adorned with stark white diamonds and the champagne glasses in their hands glitter sharply. Our wooden porch creaks and sinks under their weight. Your mother holds out her empty hand. And so you go. We are three. #

You come to play every so often. Sometimes my mother gives 127

INKBLOT

you a bath or sews a patch over a hole in your jeans. Once we are five, we’ve grown used to helping her set the table before family dinners. And every meal you taste honey, and all of us speak in a buttery glimmer.

With time, the two of us coincide in size. Of course, I have gotten older and taller and my hair is longer. But you’ve approached my family’s size and you don’t have to hunch at the table nearly as much anymore.

Lately, your parents don’t come for you anymore. Instead, they send a bright white diamond that calls you back to wherever you’ve come from. Each night when the diamond comes, I walk you to the door and you disappear into the black. Somehow you always find your way back. #

I know the shape of your face more than I know my own. With each day I feel us melting into each other a little more in this lively, rose-tinged house. Our elbows, shoulders, knees: ends and edges, are a golden dandelion honey blend, soft and tender where we connect. When you are not here, my edges are raw and sensitive, burning gently as the faint air cycle whirring in the tiny house blows by.

Every time I open the front door for you, you bring in a faint plastic draft and black flecks from outside flutter from your coat. On your twelfth birthday I bake you a cake and my mother makes you your favorite food. Our warm and glowing state maintains itself; reflects off of the chandelier and the silverware and each others’ teeth. Everything is sparkling after dinner and all of us dance around the table. It’s ten o’clock and the diamond hasn’t come. So my mother tucks us in.

A week passes before the diamond manifests on our dinner table. As you get up from the carpet and brush yourself off, my sticky shoulder aches from where yours unstuck itself. #

I’m sprawled on the downy carpet, flipping through our memories. They are dusted with gold turmeric in my mind and come off on my fingers. Although they glitter against the light, the more recent ones are tinged with a bit of that murky outside feel. These days feel different. You come later and later each time, and I begin to feel nervous after you leave. I can see you in the blackness, descending down invisible dark stairs without me. # 128

ABRIL RODRIGUEZ-DIAZ

I’m setting the bright tableware alone one night, humming to myself. My mother keeps glancing up at me from across the room and I avert my eyes, clutching a worn bowl in two cupped hands. I swallow the saliva that builds up in my throat. My stomach hurts and tells me to feel guilty, but I can’t think of what I could’ve done. The night isn’t any less lively and the table isn’t any less crowded. The glasses don’t clink any quieter and my elbows still brush against all the glowing, warm people at the table. Halfway through dinner you show up, carelessly throw back the door. The candles are out and our dinner is forgotten as I go into the corner and come back with a chair and a plate for you.

You sit down at the corner of the table, legs to the side, hunch down and eat. I bend down and ask you where you’ve been. You tell me only that you were out. The round, dirty plate stays at the table after you’re gone and I look down at it, stunned. It is a mocking expression of your early departure; the only sign that you were ever here.

I don’t know what the hell you do out there in the nothingness.

You don’t come for months and then stay for days and then leave again.

The dark outside doesn’t tell me how much time has passed, how many days or how many seasons. But we fall into this cycle and I find myself able to tell time and count our past years. Over your time away you’ve grown again, reverted to the size of the giants outside.

One night I hear a creaking and a crash outside. My mother and I find you on your back amidst splintered wood, a broken porch.

She goes back in to call for help while I look down at you into the dark, perched on the edge of the house. You’re draped in diamonds the size of apples and your hair is streaked with silver. You look me up and down and I shrink in, hug my arms around my loose linen dress. When my mother returns with everyone else we haul you out and bring you inside.

The ground beneath the carpet creaks under you, your necklaces weigh your head down, and diamonds trail behind you, thumping heavily on the carpet. My mother leans over to wrap your bleeding forefinger in a soft rag. You turn your back as she does. Then you rise, teetering, and limp to the front door without looking back.

When I flip through my golden memories and their reminiscent stardust comes off on my fingers, I want to throw back the door. I want to run outside into the black and chase you down, wrap my arms around you and shake you, rattle your bones.

Go away, integrate yourself into that slick, plastic feel outside.

129

INKBLOT

When you want to, come back, eat my mother’s food, dirty the carpet with your diamonds and the outside filth. Sneer at the chipped talavera bowls you once passed to the table with so much care. I don’t need to tell you that I’ll always be here to open the front door.

130

saturation, Trenyce Tong 131

TH E S A ME ISABEL HAHN

Eighth grade I used to walk down to the strip mall with my best friend at the time twice a week after school. When it was October we never thought it would be January and when it was January we never thought it would be April and when it was April we just wished it would all slow down. We had the same kind of backpack, gray with a black zipper lining. I had a pin from the bottom of my desk drawer stuck on the front pocket, but then it fell off. She had one of those metal enamel pins from Disneyland, Mickey Mouse waving with a smile.

Together we would walk along endless sidewalk cracks, listening to bad music, watching cars as they sped past us.

We went over to her place one day towards the end of the year; it was part of the complex that was right across from school. It was May by then, warm enough to wear t-shirts over light wash jeans. Summer was so close we felt that we could reach out and touch it if we tried. We ate leftover dinosaur nuggets from her fridge and watched TV shows on her dadâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s old laptop and talked about boys and pool parties and trips to the beach once school ended. I talked about the house we just moved into, how it had that new house smell that either disappears after a few weeks or grows into our noses, giving it the impression of disappearing.

She started talking about high school, and suddenly I found myself growing so tired, like my body was a withering yellow plant in the sun.

I laid down on the carpet floor of her bedroom and from there I could see out her rectangular window, at the sky and the tops of trees and egg white clouds and I wondered if life was lived upside down would birds fly at our feet?

Right after our promotion ceremony the first week of June, I 132

ISABEL HAHN

found her beneath the big tree next to the front office. It felt strange wearing nice dresses, looking at shiny versions of each other. She said something about it being the last time we would ever be standing underneath that tree as students there. I wished I could hear her better, but everyone was buzzing around us, it was almost electric. We only had a few seconds; her dad was already in the parking lot, telling her to hurry up. I hugged her, the paper of our flower bouquets crinkling together, and deep down I already missed her, I was missing her, I knew I would miss her, even though I knew she wasn’t really going anywhere.

It was warm when I got out of the car in front of our house on Meadowsweet. The door slammed shut and the heels of my silver shoes click-clacked across the pavement of the driveway. With the days growing gradually longer, it would be a while until it became dark outside. I wanted to write a letter to my future self, so I could read it years later and reminisce on how things used to be. But it was impossible to find the right words to describe everything that was going through my mind, the questions I had, the memories, good and bad. All I could put down on paper were messy scratched out letters in pink gel pen and useless doodles in the margins. So I sighed and gave up, lying on my bed as I watched the sun start to set, the sky a color a mixture of clementine and raspberry sorbet, a picture divided into a million pieces by my screen window.

Later that summer in July I turned fourteen at my grandparents’ apartment. Fourteen on the fourteenth. I remember talking to my mom that morning, standing in front of my grandpa’s open closet door and the fan blowing air at the skin just above my collarbone. The clothes that spilled from the shelves smelled like my grandpa, of medicine and old cologne and the reclining armchair in the living room. The mirror was dirty, and if I positioned myself in just the right way stains scattered across my face like creamy flowers sprouting on my skin.

“Om-ma, do you think I look fourteen?” How much I desperately wished I could grow out of my baby face, of cheeks that were too round and eyelashes that were too short. I pinched at the skin below my eyes. “Do you think I look older?”

She wasn’t quite paying attention to me, sitting cross-legged on the floor mattress. Sighing a bit, she looked up at me. “I think you look exactly the way you’re supposed to.”

133

INKBLOT

In the afternoon I wore my favorite shirt, the one with the lettuce cut neck and rainbow stripes, and left to walk around in the humid weather with my brother, chewing on the popsicles we had bought from the corner store that was right next to the subway station.

Melting sticky on our fingers, we walked along broken brick pavement and searched for stray cats that would often lay around the dusty power generators. The trees extended their branches over our heads, filling the air with a kind of deep green that didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t exist back home. We walked over to the playground and swung back and forth on the swing set that we used to ride everyday when we were younger. I leaned my head back, as far as my body would let me, and listened to the cicadas sing their stinging songs. I thought about how in precisely four years I would be an adult. Something about it scared me so much I shot back up and tried to focus on something else, anything else: my feet stretched out into the air, the sun-stained cars in the parking lot, my brother swinging beside me. He asked me if I was enjoying my birthday and I said I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know, feeling my stomach go up and down and in endless loop de loops, thinking to myself that everything just felt exactly the same. But then again maybe I was thinking too much. Maybe change just came in ripples rather than waves.

134

Braces, Lauren Chudner 135

TOWNIE SEMILORE OLA

we move with concrete ease, bodies gushing wet cement and sticky like watermelon post-chlorine. make the streets a mountainy body. there is no grace following the cling of chlorine like dish soap residue, like curfew on the cranium, like my hand on yours. i know that you will let me go, and all we will have is passing eyes and dented hands remembering skin curve, to see each other again and again in this labyrinth we cannot rub off, stickers and eraser shavings like shedded skin. # ask me why i asked for home in this city, sold my teeth, braces glinting and glowing like tripwires laid out across the road. iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll only call the new silvery body the precipice of Something and never reach it. cull my mouthâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s supermarket cavern of teeth. i watched girls tuck in their elbows and hide mellow ruddiness in the wings of ladybugs on teen boy arms they curled around like vines on long brown tree bodies. willing away agency. praying, to be graceful like you. mother, ambidextrous, real. # at the curb of the convenience store, i hand the city orange juice and it shudders before turning away. my throat becomes a useless, saccharine, sickly body. i lost my tongue under the ceaseless march of tires and jungle gym and suburban brick. for what now seems so long ago, there 136

SEMILORE OLA

was a way to salvage what i’d lost in the palm oil hopscotched through the valleys of my lips’ muscle smeared in oily gloss. then, there were words for the new terrifying mammal i wanted to be. for an adult. a swelling ram with real horns. i no longer know. or scavenge my way towards consonant. i just want to see the sky, honest. now my tongue swivels and curls like roadkill in my hands, smoothed sheer along my palms in a shimmering silicone haze. the curb turns away. as does the city with it. i curl into myself fetal like a newborn, and kneel as if i’m praying. forget i am not, or how to pray, or what praying is at all. nothing is left to be given but empty streets, quarantine. my tongue scowling in my cupped hands. as if to sneer that i ever assumed ownership.

137

Self Portrait, Maggie McKelvey 138

S H E D IS C OV E R S ( F O R A L IVING) K AT H E R I N E W O N G

a paleontologist once told me her bones could lift the world. she showed me, let me stroke the splintered ridges, run my hands along the epiphysis grooves. in her closet is a collection of old relics, and she asks if i want to be fossilized. i tell her no, but she pours the pitcher anyways, and my skin cumulates honey that hardens into an amber prison. i’m left to collect dust. an astronomer once told me that the secret to finding extraterrestrial life was to look inside. i press my face to the telescope’s eye and see myself plastered along the partitions, and she collides into my soil with burning, sweating, kinetic energy. i am a floating cadaver, bruised with imprintations of craters, trapped in time until quantum mechanics can invent a device to fish me out of this well. a civil engineer once told me how to fix myself. she said build bridges from your heart to your head. if you use up all your materials now, you’ll end up broke and confused. well i’m confused right now. so my hands reach for planks of wood and i build a dam, stack the logs into syncopated staggers until i get a wall that is too tall for her to climb. there are splinters lodged into my palm’s silver linings, and the reservoir erupts into a wave of white foam. gone is the dam, gone are the nonexistent bridges.

139

A SE GM E NT O F S A N I T Y RACHEL TIAN

as the sun dries our damp bodies, i think to myself that iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve never seen anything quite as still as that oak branch hanging above the lake from a single strand of spidersilk. even as wind tickles my toes and strokes my hair, it holds its vigil, a stalwart soldier amidst sifting sand, a world in flux. i wonder if it will concede to vanity like we did; two dandelions assembled from flecks of fragmented dust. you ask me what i am thinking about and I say, you. a young man from the mountains tells me tales of towns spun from birdsong and golden milk coaxed from the bellies of lions and goblins dancing around rosy flames. the buttons on his sleeve soak in a syrupy sweetness foreign to this eternity of malaise. i lament, for his words are contrived, rooted in barren silt. my senses swell with the scent of citrus and sweetcorn and i wait for him to return to his mountains before sucking tar past my lips, pushing the ripening flames that lick up my throat back into the pits of my belly.

140

RACHEL TIAN

it was the silo mentality that ruined them; meticulously ripped into clumsy paper squares. each wispy shred lives alone in a house full of others, vagabonds—told to lower themselves to the least common denominator, they kept dividing and dividing and dividing until they were so small any further division would make their molecules spin. as i scrub our ancestral pride away with sand and sinew, they finally understand that luck is but a factor of talent. music is, by all means, the language of the lost. you elucidate—a testament to the race against our own shadows that gnaws away at our bones, corrosive. the sticky simplicity of flight as you explain it stuns me; one final step toward mirth is all that remains. eyes turned skyward, i am flung into burning blue by my mother’s lullaby. an angel by the name of Shame weaves his feathers into my spine and braids the strands of my consciousness. i embrace my paltriness through broken ballads and pocketed planets.

141

LOR E O F A L I N E AG E BIANCA BADAJOS

here in my family of creation myth, i am two weeks old: mama zoyla molds her folklore out of my clay, kisses the corners of my cheek and leaves a small imprint on my body. my freckles are a soothsaying i am here, mija, i am here. There has never been a word like “enough” in this fable, so her fingerprints leave an indent from the time spent dancing between our chins. holds my baby body in her arms and marks my hip with her palm. today: and after missed phone calls, long disappearances, periods of no words passed between my mother and mama, she, nodding at the soft stamps on our complexion, teaches me the importance of lineage. ¡mira! look how i’ve crafted you in my own image. they are the same place... we are the same place. maternity began behind my mother’s navel, beneath her belly. today, she becomes mother through the way she pursues her lips. she raised us catholic, so there are no millenia leading up to my body. only reimagining, only painted stone and seven definitions of self left under the sun to ripen into permanence. in mosaics, the color red is the most gorgeous to glow through, yet my cheeks cherry in spite of me, and i’d been writing in alleluias for certain saints that my mother would sing about, before she ever told me about our lineage in multitudes, or that God would only ever exist in the shades we cannot see. grounded in her voice, this was enough. she’s always placed her belief in the one thing no one can see. i used to imagine understanding would come to me like the sun kisses 142

INKBLOT

thrown across her body: gradual, wild, unavoidable. my mother and i, grandmother and i, i think we keep time the same way, passing years watching our own skin ruin, teaching our daughters not to fear the inevitability we pass on the bridges of crooked noses and reason. growing up, she began to mother through mozart, said it’d make us smarter. said when the sound waves sink past her navel, seep into womb, maybe staccato lullaby would hum greater life into new brain. and i know that i couldn’t explain it well enough to convince anybodyneither can she. but this myth is hers. and this is mine: i break down my own composition. imprints of thumbs and pinky fingers on canvas; soft kisses sunken into my texture, immortal bruises and a big pink scar from shattering a mirror on my way to sleep. i can only tell you of my body through delineating echoes, purse my lips at the thought of it all, laugh like my mother. so i try to leave traces of myself on everything i meet, through kisses, color, scribbles- just as mama zoyla does, with our matching birthmarks, with our ability to always find the audacity to believe, even when we know we are wrong. i’ll keep my pretty truths close to my chest, which is an instinct that i know i inherited from her. one i know she taught herself, in the same way i know we are living our own creation myths.

143

17t h PA RA LL E L J O N AT H A N T R U O N G

In my dream, my mother is a colonizer and my father colonized. With her she brings a catechism, a few Latin syllables, the 17th parallel, and an M-60 — and we all know which one fires the loudest shot. It is funny, how a man can be malleable but the glottals and the diphthongs never flatten out, how if you cut him into cross sections you’d see red all the same. In our Volkswagen my father is still throwing up entire villages, which is to say that he is coughing up ash and nothing more. He is scared of the smoke clouding his periphery: look forward or go blind. So we look forward and see uniformed bodies that we cannot help but drive over. It’s the Socialists, they’ll say, always trying to burn everything down. My father salutes, not so much colonized as evacuated, mouthing: we gotta get outta this place, if it’s the last thing we ever do. My mother, clutching her stomach, holds an embryo that hasn’t yet chosen which pole to hold on to: North or South, East or West.

144

Maya, Trenyce Tong 145

CAN CE R ASHLEY THORNTON

Shells of red on short legs, now turned to blue in the heat of the hearth.

She is a psychic woman—her best potions have been brewed in her

home, and Her magnus opus will be crafted of toe shaped coral and moonshine, in

no way Will her best meals be baked at someone’s feet. The underwater magna carta Is handed to a select few, and if she gives it to you, then perhaps you are Bedecked from a lobster armory and your bleeding claws have some merit She will lay out the sand dollar cushions, for her energies and gilded chests, Not for yours. Pirating is punished by fate, revenge is carried through without So much as lifting a chela. Her pharynx is flat, and permissible hardly to Strangers, the coin slot in a safe, as narrow as a Pacific island eye.

Hurricanes are managed here in her den—she’ll just fan them out with the Fin of her silken kimono, and wordlessly, the brutish tempest will

repent and Go, feeling oh so sorry for his ways. He will not invade her mystic capsule Again, he will leave it alone to sparkle on its own terms. The crustacean Life is lived at the bottom, and her predisposed ill will towards sea level 146

ASHLEY THORNTON

Have sent to her pad the gifts of coral leiopathes and octopus sponges.

She is intuitive to the flow of the ocean. All exists in levels of divination, All is felt in patterns, all becomes ecstatically radical when carried through With a gold-and-paint wave.

147

TH E S UN A BA N D O N S H E R PE O PLE A N A S T A S I A E A R LY

When the sun pulls its blanket over its head it leaves the ground with the warmest goodnight kiss. Her sweet nothings make the earth blush as she shuts her eyes to the sky. She holds the sleepy animals to her skin, and as she begins to doze off, she snores loudly with the rhythm of the crickets. But the seduction of the night takes her over.

She is restless when left alone with her thoughts. The moon gives her the words of the sun, and the heat of her cheeks turns calloused feet into the backs of old cockroaches. Most have forgotten the gentleness of the sun here. The air inside their house suffices them; if they were to go out on these nights, they’d be dazed in the heat of these streets.

Their skin would turn red and sweet from the love in the air. The people ignore the good morning kisses from the sun in favor of bathing their skin in the cold air of metal vehicles. Cockroaches lie still unto the shade. They cannot shake the deadly sunshine from their shells, so moving away from the shade would be a death sentence. Occasionally one creeps out for long enough, only to be hit by a car or to be baked by the careless love from the sky.

One such roach was draped in red cloth. He didn’t scurry too fast, much preferring to take his time in the little shade that he could afford between sidewalk cracks. A single cigarette was the only item that wouldn’t weigh him down. He’d been sheltering under a pile of apples for some time now. The owner of which had thrown them out after discovering a couple dozen were being feasted upon by a thick colony of mold. The cockroach liked to listen to the apples simmer and would drink the sweet puddle that ran like a river between them. But he couldn’t stay any longer after the mold had embraced most of the dozen 148

A NA S TA S I A E A R LY

or so left; it had blackened the apples to an unsavory taste. The sun had long said its goodbyes to the apple cores, which were nearly charcoal by this point, so he draped himself in a shawl to protect himself against the radiation from the white concrete. On his way out he swiped a forgotten cigarette in hopes to give it one last kiss, as the roach was quite the romantic.

The cockroach could not see, but he knew it was dark because he could not feel the feet of his shadow. He had once approached the body of a fallen friend and couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t help but look at them, the way theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d grown soupy in the face and the little moisture left in their body had been extracted. The smell though, the smell could turn one mad.

Perhaps with disgust, or hunger, or maybe even lust? This is why the roach didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t look at the bodies, instead preferring to keep his eyes on something, anything that could be seen up ahead.

There was nothing, nothing besides endless looming towers with locked doors. The white Sahara had not treated his knees well. At some point or another he slipped on the thought of a puddle and could not feel the urge to rise, so he took off his shawl and lay on it facing the stars running across the sky like how his ancestors used to hide from the heat.

The cockroach knew he was going to die when the concrete had burnt through the part of the shawl his back lay on. He wrapped the cigarette with his fingers and pressed it against the concrete, the smoke cooled his face and freed itself into the stagnant air like a genie in a bottle, so he whispered that he wished to die. As he cigarette came to his mouth, he took in the musty air before releasing his head from his neck and allowing himself to crust the sidewalk with his skin.

149

LEM O N MA R M A L A D E MIA SOUMBASAKIS

He hadn’t visited her in years, not since he was an infant and she got a massive, streaky-visioned headache. Allegedly, she was allergic to him. Allergic to her daughter’s baby. She claimed it had nothing to do with the fact that this was the child of her least favorite daughter, the one who had quit her job at the pizzeria and spent the next five years using endowed money from her father’s death to pay for rent and for weed. The selfish one, she always called her.

When the selfish one first looked at her child, she couldn’t help but scream; it was like white play-doh doused in cranberry juice, something icky she’d have to care for more than she did herself.

When the grandmother first held her grandchild, she heard her daughter’s scream and got the searing headache; her nose crinkled as a sort of yellowish stripe crossed her vision. It was the clearest vision she’d had since she went blind at nineteen.

Years passed and she let letters trickle back and forth between her and her daughter as if on a faulty clothesline. Even gifts, large gifts, were sent back and forth: braille books, pots and pans from infomercials for her and tents and grasshopper-catching nets for him. Whenever the thought of meeting up came into question, she would push back, because she had a fever, or her plants were ripe, or this was the last day of the Michael’s sale and she had to get felt to make new oven mitts. She kept her “stereotypical grandma life,” a woman putting care into all the little things—a cactus with flowers instead of thorns.

She figured if she had spent the beginning of her life in hiding, she should do the same until the end. It would be poetic that way. She needed time, anyway, to remember why she was hiding. Whenever she 150

MIA SOUMBASAKIS

thought of him, whenever she thought of the headache, she saw the yellow of camels and street signs, a yellow sunset running behind her.

And yellow hair, of course. She remembered her.

She was superstitious, scattering mint leaves around her house to protect from ghosts and stopped going to doctor’s appointments years ago. She’d fired the caretaker who used to walk her to the grocery store or movie theater and convinced herself she would stay away from her grandson because he was a spear of sight, because sight was her nemesis.

Every night she lay in a porch chair out by her pool and imagined what the moon would feel like, like the crust of a pizza or bubbles in a ziploc bag. Sometimes, she’d fall in the pool walking back inside, but she didn’t mind. It made her feel youthful, masked the raisins forming under her fingertips.

One day, she received a call from her daughter’s house, a liquidy ring echoing through the Play-Doh walls of her house. No one called except for telemarketers so she usually avoided the phone, but today she had a headache and couldn’t stand the ringing. She answered.

It was not at all what she expected. It was her grandson.

He was young, maybe nine or ten, his voice loud, filling.

“Grandma, I want to go to your house to make a family tree,” he said. Even his voice was ticklish.

She was taken aback, her feet sweating in their slippers. The warmth of his voice nestled somewhere deep in her head, sparking flecks of—of— something.

Something she could catch, like fireflies. She shamed herself for feeling so uplifted, tried to remind herself of her self-sufficiency, her complete satisfaction with her lack of sight.

He must be having a playdate, because voices tangled together in the background, sweet, sort of jingling. “What would happen if you ate an eyeball?”

“It would go on your forehead!” The average ear probably wouldn’t have been able to hear that, but she had had much practice.

The rest of the children roared with laughter until a curt voice carved into the noise. Her daughter.

“Yes,” she said despite herself, “yes, of course you can come over.” She could see the yellow streak now, the one she wished didn’t 151

INKBLOT

exist and still haunted her with cat hair, camel hair, human hair, gentle yet wild. “We can make lemon marmalade.” #

Lemons were essential. Large lemons, yellow. Yellow is the color of gold, butter and ripe lemons; that’s probably what would be told to children when learning their colors. She traced over the bumps, little flicks of expression, scattered language, very aware of her grandson fiddling with a McDonald’s toy at her counter. She closed her eyes and tried to taste butter in her mouth without any resentment. It was surprisingly easier than she thought it would be, soft and mellow. She licked the corners of her lips. Gold. Like a lip ring shining in the sun.

She licked the drained puffiness and tried to feel the yellow.

“What are you doing, Grandma?” His voice was like a life unfolding towards her. She shivered.

“The sun is yellow, yes?”

“I don’t know. I’m not allowed to look at it. Do we need lemons?”

Her lips were yellow, she was sure, warming her tongue against them. Yellow like the sun overpowering the weak will of a sunflower, curving the petals down until they touch the stem. A yellow stem, of course, like the neck of a pumpkin or the handle of ripe celery.

“Yes, boy. We need lemons. This is lemon marmalade.” She didn’t want to be like this, she realized, she wanted to be able to love her grandson with the core of her heart. She wanted to be the motherly sort of yellow, the type that makes yellow soup or yellow sauces and pulls back curtains in the morning.

And yet, somehow this wasn’t achievable. Light and crisp, soft around the edges, but also slightly grey. Paint my fingernails yellow, that’s what she had said to her around fifty years ago, back when she could see. He didn’t know about her. Not many did.

Did they really run away on camels? Did they pause when the traffic lights indicated so, or did they travel through? She struggled with the concept that with your sight leaves your memories, physical embodiments of her life. She wanted power, she wanted prominence— she couldn’t stop thinking of her, the girl, the one with the blonde hair, so blonde it was constantly slick and shiny. In the overarching story of her life, of course, this girl was not more than a weekend, a second, a moment of a thread fraying from a blanket. It would be more fitting 152

MIA SOUMBASAKIS

if she found her real family intriguing, she thought, people like her daughter.

She sighed in an internal type of way. Her daughter was like salt, something that absorbs. She never thanked her for giving birth to her, never acknowledged that she had to carry a ginormous, lemonshaped sack on her torso for months on end, bumping into walls and tabletops constantly, knowing she’d never be able to see her daughter.

“Grandma, do I blend the lemons?” He was only nine, of course not. Her disdain poisoned her tongue and the walls of her mouth, she wished harder for that sympathy to wash over her like a highlighter.

“Sure, baby.”

What if she could start again?

What if she was a chicklet, small, the size of a teacup like her first pet. Baby skin, soft skin. Light and airy, eggs made sunnyside up.

“Grandma...” Like the quality of his voice, “How does the blender work?”

“Just press that button, the one next to the three smaller ones,” she said. What if he stayed here? He could swim in the pool with her at night, describe the openness of space, letting the stars surround her, spherically leaning to her and providing confirmation that the Earth is round, that she could be an asymptote.

“Stay here,” she offered, first as a whisper and then slightly louder.

“Stay here.”

He only laughed, that laugh shocking the electrons in her body; she twinkled.The blonde girl laughed, she thought. Maybe not that heartily, maybe with more control, but still with the same lovability of his laugh, with the same ability to make the air impenetrable. She hadn’t heard laughter in so long.

“Yes, sweetheart, it would be like that. Like laughing, like lemons, like all the time.” She tried on her best grandmotherly voice.

But what about my friends, what about my mom?”

“There are buses, you’d never be too far. Yellow buses.

“But-”

“Camels, too, great big ones with long necks.”

“Grandma, I don’t think—”

“Not to worry, I can feed you, I have lemons and love enough, or so I hope. You’d be very well taken care of.”

153

INKBLOT

She couldn’t hear his response, for at that moment there was a “pop” noise of plastic and a spray of liquid around the room, lemon juice shredded to the air. Yellow was practically leaking, stealing the walls and her vision.

Was that what the hatching of a chicklet was like?

154

Sacramento Still Life, Holland Fox 155

TH E BA NJ O M E N L I LY G E R H A R D

No one except the man without instruments at all knew how the Banjo Men got into space. Even the Banjo Men themselves thought that they had been there since whenever space began, which is if space even has a beginning, middle, or end in the first place. It seemed the Banjo Men were always there with beards down to their toes, shorter than your mother, halfway clothed or not at all. The men with banjos in space didn’t need oxygen either, just the light from the stars and the sound of strings. They floated around the solar system, sometimes getting lost in the greater milky way.

Some of the people on Earth had mistaken them for dimmer shooting stars, but they made little musical noises when they passed by, and therefore they were not shooting stars. After all, stars are mute except for their usual SHROOOO as they slide across the troposphere.

The Banjo Men laughed often, too, a full belly’s worth. Bouncing around the blackness, singing tales of places and folks that no one else knew.

Likely places and folks who were lies in the first place.

The men traveled in groups called flocks, which were close to the human phenomenon of a family. None of them remembered how they met, except at one point they ate lunch on asteroids, parts of Saturn’s rings, and were like brothers—but it wasn’t like any of them thought too deeply about their origins, for nothing bad ever happened to any of the Banjo Men. It was as if the planets were such heavy objects because they were filled with grief, something the Banjo Men never had to carry.

That was except for Frank, who took a nap on the moon at half past noon. Like most naps he took at this time and place, he laid on his 156

L I LY G E R H A R D

back, with arms behind his head. He had the longest beard of the Banjo Men and so it worked mighty fine as a blanket. He put his banjo on his chest, closed his eyes, and dreamed of bouncing with his flock and singing to tardigrades.

When half past noon turned near to 3 o’ clock, Frank winked one eye open. It was a sad wink because he knew something was missing the moment he did it. What he came to find was that his banjo, his birthright, his people’s passion was gone before he was old enough to even retire to Neptune. Maybe it just slipped off his beard (beards were often quite slippery slopes), but he walked around the moon, rightside up, upside down, and right side up again and couldn’t find it.

Frank’s banjo was gone and likely for good. Once a banjo left, it would never come back. At least that’s what legend said, and the Banjo Men’s legends were never wrong.

When Frank told his flock about what had happened, there was no eye shy of water.

Tears floated up, staining satellites natural and manmade.

Most of them had never felt the sensation of dejection. As said before, nothing bad ever happened to the Banjo Men, especially the kinds with beards as long as Frank’s. So, for seemingly until the sun exploded, Frank had to float and bounce in the solar system without playing a folksy melody with his troupe, simply singing blues acapella, longing for the return of an old friend.

The others would never leave Frank even though he was now just a man; they would never leave one of their own behind no matter the circumstances. In fact, each and every one encouraged him that he did not need a banjo to be a Banjo Man. Except Frank would say, somber and honest:

“It’s called The Banjo Men, not The Banjo-less Men.”

And the flock would nod their heads in solidarity. They’d give Frank sympathetic pats on the head and float on.

Sometimes Frank would go back to the moon, and look under the rocks or go into the caverns he hadn’t yet searched, hoping that his banjo was waiting for him after all these years. Maybe it had grown limbs between the fateful hours of noon and 3 o’ clock and regretted that it ran away, although every time he looked the only company he had was moon dust and astronauts’ footprints.

And this was how Frank then lived, occasionally getting 157

INKBLOT

sympathetic smiles when people saw his banjo-less arms. That was until, in the rearview mirror of Frank’s eye, he saw something so strange: a woman. She looked like Venus in her shell, swimming in space. Her hair was long and white, and her cheeks were the color of axolotl skin.

Something about her was familiar. So he winked with one eye to try to understand whatever it was and whatever that meant. And perhaps the universe has no answers and the way it flows is just rhetorical questions that should be left to swim in every direction except to you, but Frank winked with one eye and he could’ve sworn her hair looked like strings.

That her arms like fingerboards and eyes like turning pegs. He couldn’t believe it but he decided to drift away from his flock to her.

She spun in circles as if to show him all the ways she was a catch amongst the sea of oddities and she was. However when she finally saw him levitating there, she stopped her spinning, and looked at him with a strawberry smile.

“Frank?” She asked. “I thought I’d never see you again.”

But she had, and it seemed that Banjo Men legends weren’t always true. Sometimes your banjo leaves and comes back a beautiful woman, and there’s nothing sad about that. As it turns out, having a wife was much better of a life to live than strings. On an asteroid close enough to touch the Rings of Saturn, Frank and The Banjo Woman were married.

Everyone came, even from other solar systems: the Violin Gentlemen, the Bagpipe Lads, the Harmonica Fellas and more. No eye was left without water then, either, but this time the satellites both natural and manmade were stained with happiness when they floated up.

For the rest of space and time, Frank and his Banjo Woman sang happy duets of love and life and their friends. Sometimes they’d slide across the troposphere too, the loudest, most musical thought-to-be shooting stars astronomers and stargazers had ever known. And they lived happily and peacefully with no need to know where they came from, just the way the heat of the sun felt on their backs, having quiet picnics on dwarf planets, never losing each other again.

158

Alternate Worlds, Tiffany Guo 159

GO IN G F O R A N I G H T S W I M T E D D I H AY N E S

the neurotransmitter is absent but it still makes a language that sounds like a door falling off its hinges there are chemicals afoot

vacantly imbibing shadow in the dim light of refraction the fact of light rays being that some rays will hesitate before escaping their tunnels & stay there some percent of nothing space displaces my bloodâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s oxygen content a blank still indicates that there is a something there are certain words that get triggered out of my mouth only when the streetlamps on the highway are out my sentence less sure when oxygenated brain strung from a wire bracelet/there is no time that is exponent enough for me to come back to how i was before i wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t/ the very last atoms in the universe lazily rotate into each other like blind birds just enjoying the wind my pathways tie into a knot of their own volition /define touch starvation as inward spiral/

say an imperative sentence.

handwrite your name until

it actually starts looking like a real name.

format your sentences in such a way

that it makes a hole in the reader.

160

T E D D I H AY N E S

this all looks unsettlingly like bruises white sunlight bursting through a foggy morning its brains leaking out of its sockets i keep talking and talking and talking like the promise of sleep my parents sleep before sundown all alien, or vampire who likes to grow too big for her bones because rapid eye movement hurts too much

in my bed i clutch myself to myself, warm wading through the nebulaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s computerized color it is almost as pretty as losing my shell a breath of presynaptic bliss before it remembers most nouns are fearful by default, so i have also tried to alter my brain (or blinking but sightless ghost) i repeat for as long as the universe widens it takes too long for it to happen forever

totally id-driven, i cough up fake blood into a napkin lay upside-down on my bed and feel my stomach pushing up on my teeth sick cells steam and rise in the body is soluble into other body facial cavity bloodletted, post-traumatized wearing the same shirt you died in

leaked out like microbes my nervous system lost the squirming onto a glass slide boundary of the nerve

161

The following works are from elementary school students in our Community Arts Outreach class. This course is a special partnership with local schools and community groups, in which the high school students of the Creative Writing Conservatory teach the skills they have learned to their young peers, mostly in the 3rd and 4th grade.

This year, our class coordinated with two elementary schools and an afterschool program, reaching more than 50 students each week. Lessons can range from poetry to screenwriting to worldbuilding to comic book creation, and the relationships made in this decade-long class are something both older and younger student looks forward to each session.

When the pandemic forced schools into lockdown, our class turned to the web to create virtual activity books the students could either fill out online or print out and complete at home.

We hope you enjoy this sample from our sessions.

COMMUNITY ARTS

YOGURT (A HAIKU) SARAH

I ate the yogurt I took my whole life to eat But it was so good

ELECTRIC KITTY KEVIN. B

Once upon a time on kitty island there was a superhero called Electric Kitten.

He has electricity power and flys with his powers. He got the powers by a strong thunderstorm that had different colors, and it hit him but he did not know he had powers.

Electric Kitten was peacefully laying outside getting his belly rubbed by the giant hand that came from the sky.

FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE SANDIE

The trees bowed to me like a queen.

The lady talked so much that it made my head melt.

The leaves changed outfits as the seasons passed by.

165

INKBLOT

LIFE

ISABELLA

Life is an adventure School is a denture Life is fun School is a drum The sea is blue The sky is, too Check it, I’m cool as ice Nobody can stop me when I entice I’m sharp as a nail I keep it fresh like a whale

SCIENCE FICTION SOPHIA

Boom! Aliens are invading earth! Oh no... are they friendly?

What do they look like? Are they gonna kill me? I have so many questions right now, and my brain is going crazy. Soon I’ll build another planet, and no people will be safe.

45 minutes later...

There, I built it! It’s gigantic! It’s... it’s... a shoe! Every single ant can fit in there. All we need to do is get the strings, tie it up, and no more UFOs can catch us. If they do, they’ll make us disappear, maybe even turn us into ashes! The UFOs make my shoe disappear. I’m disappointed because there’s nothing I can do. Oh no! UFOs, don’t take me away!

166

COMMUNITY ARTS

THREE SENTENCE STORIES KEVIN G.

Five little farmers’ shirts are blue and their ears are small. The five little farmers were lost. They find their way back with a smart friend.

Caterpillar eats pickles and plays soccer. Caterpillar is losing in soccer.

Caterpillar eats a lot of pickles to be better and wins.

Elephant drinks soda while they’re in the garden. Elephant drops soda.

Elephant takes real good care of the garden and it’s good.

Seth has an idea to make a circus. Seth doesn’t have anyone to build with. Finally, somebody wants to build and they build it perfectly and this was Seth’s favorite day.

MICHAEL JACKSON CHRISTOPHER

167

INKBLOT

MAGIC SWORD YA H A I R A

168

20/20/20 - The Special Vision Steampunk Festival Twenty events in twenty days to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Creative Writing Conservatory at OCSA, honoring conservatory founders James P. Blaylock and Tim Powers, the Godfathers of Steampunk

Art by Salem Haight

H E LIO S L I Z Z Y H AT C H

We learned how to inhabit the warmth of a place is what my mother tells me when I ask, as a child, why half the world is empty of people. I’ve heard that the other half is where monsters live—giant untameable beasts and a cold that leeches all the heat from things. The sun is a gift from above, she reiterates.

Where the sun goes, we follow, our planet a heliotropism machine. I read online that the most common fear is a fear of the dark. It’s one of those evolutionary bugs: the antithesis of exposure therapy. In school we spend a week learning about the rarity of REM and object permanence: how our eyes move east in our skulls like sunflowers and how a thing can lose itself in itself. A girl raises her hand and says she can’t sleep unless the windows are open, too afraid that she’ll blink herself out of existence; says she remembers dreaming once. In comparison we only have a half day learning about the other side of the world.

Our teacher tells me what my mother cannot about rotation and permeation, how everything we have is nothing more than a statistical miracle. My mother tells me that that kind of thinking is what gets people sent to the other side after they die. I don’t tell her about my fixation on closing my eyes as tight as I can until the whole world turns to grey matter. In the city where I live, the buildings make the earth feel like its own ball of light: mechanical instead of chemical. The skyscrapers yearning upwards like competing plants with solar panel petals. But sometimes, when the sun is low enough and the surrounding buildings tall enough, it almost looks like we’re on the other side: everything cast momentarily in shadow.

173

ATL A S S U VA L I D H A N A K a n d K A O N S U H

At the end of the day, maybe the world is just a little girl Under the weight of her sturdy body, your shoulders become hunched, your head is pulled to the ground, and breaths have to be forced out of the nose in quick, heavy pants.

Her clammy fingers wrap around your throatâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;

you remember how

before you or your mother or your grandmother

there were two suns, two mothers

with their own mothers and their own grandmothers

together they had two thousand daughters

far too many to balance on their outstretched palms

or their shoulders that, in their old age, began to slope like mountains

so they spiraled into each other//

and built a home on their own backs,

where their daughters could stretch their limbs and grow into

their own curiosity Her wispy hair tickling the back of your neck.

Her raspy breathing in your ear.

Something wet trickling down your back, which burns quietly underneath the sun.

Her tears have stopped a long time ago and she has grown quiet.

She buries her face into your shoulders and you stumble.

You think about collapsing to the ground and staying there, cheek 174

S U VA L I D H A N A K A N D K A O N S U H

pressed against the damp grass. You imagine the weight of the girl on your back gently pressing you down into the crumbling earth. You dream of drowning.

remember:

the suns’ daughters were mischievous, too

the rebels cannonballed away from home, explosive and definite

the quiet ones stayed close to their mothers, occasionally

building sediment castles on nearby planets

the gentle ones stretched their arms, sticky fingers reaching to

pet monkeys and mucous frogs through holes in foliage,

tickling the happy leaves on their way down, playing with the

cohesive trampoline surface of water and teasing the fish just

below, picking fights with the clouds and their children, and

retreating to their mothers’ backs when rain and snow overran

their playground “I’m hungry!” she shrieks.

the hungriest daughters munched on ice caps and dust particles,

sucked the ice off of comets and spit out the rocks like cherry pits

consuming every speck of dust that crossed their paths You look back at her.

She giggles and cups your chin with her little hands.

It doesn’t hurt. It’s mostly the scraps that she takes, the pieces of you that you’re better off without, the detritus, she calls it; the surprisingly precocious word stumbling out of her sticky lips.

You don’t need it, you think as you break off another piece of your crumbling fingers to share with her. She takes the piece and pushes it into your mouth and as the bitter, ashy taste burns your tongue, you swear you can hear the faint laughter of the sun.

the next time the sun’s daughters come out, they’ll stretch their arms again, 175

INKBLOT

smooth and unfold their muscles as they reclaim their playthings,

reach out to hold your hand

you wish you could play with them You close your eyes, swaying, and you can almost feel the warmth of the sun slip right through you.

176

J Ă&#x2013; RM UNG A N D R K AT H R I N E H A B I B I

It stretches as far as it can, teeth to tail, this is god to the outsider, mouth twisting around all that can fit forever.

He moves until he is weak, cranes his neck to see that the snake has made its way around the world and now is jailed in struggling movements. There is no difference between the two, beginning and end, because this is where life begins and the outsider is hungry. He makes do with what is in front of him, like the aurora, and rows forward.

What can we do but save ourselves? Take the mangled bits of what is leftâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; Scattered and knotted together until something that will last winter.

The world serpent constricts, tightens its hold while it molds the earth, wood into something it finds a shape that it thinks familiar. It tucks it under its chin, against the soft underside of its neck that strains to make one end meet the other.

Outsider rocks on the water, ice drifting past.

The aurora stares back at him, wide eyes made for staring down the father, blinking and empty colors with no intention It has grown too big to fit farther than the godâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s palm.

The outsider salvages, picks up bits of thread and thinks of reaching up to aurora, heaving off a scale and using it as a cover while god look on swaying under its weight, he would struggle until capsizing into the water.

177

CO S M O NAUT S FOX MASO

Sometimes when I’m caught looking off into the space between atoms, rest assured I don’t like to think of malice and evil.

Instead I like to think about the fruit flies of ‘47, and how far they flew.

I think about what they thought. what they did. and what they didn’t realize, because after all, flies are pretty dumb.

I wonder if they thought about the void, wondered why the ground became harder to reach, and why their fragile eyeballs melted from under their wings.

I wonder if their funky phosphorescent finite brain functions could begin to think of what they got themselves into, and the 68 miles between them and any fruit in the world.

They probably didn’t because after all, flies are pretty dumb.

Flirty, fantastic, fruit flies couldn’t fathom the stars. they couldn’t focus their lenses on the solar flares, or vibrate their thorax at a frequency similar to the sound of two black holes swirling into each other. I wonder if when they fell back down to nazi germany they understood dark matter, Even though humans don’t. because after all, humans are pretty dumb.

I wonder if those fruit flies felt the need to explore. Felt the need to weaponize orbit, take vengeance on the Earth and punish her for the crimes of withholding her most succulent, sweet mangoes.

178

F OX M A S O

But in all honesty, i take more solace in thinking that they didn’t know any of that. they didn’t know of the atmospheric pressure that nearly crushed their exoskeletons. they only thought of the adventures they’d have back on earth, and the promise of overripe bananas.

179

O PP Y T O B I PA R K

the first thing she remembers is the descent.

Air burns around her, cushions blooms over base. a tug from her gut, then pull, parachute, panic. it is only her first day, and she is already unravelling.

As she touches land, There is A quick evaluation. Her body is unscathed, so she sets out.

As tread touches the rud of oxidation, particulate slips into her joints but itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s okay. sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s built for this.

We send messages in shards, and she returns the favor shows us secrets of a world beyond, of a surface dust-rusted beyond our own, Of eclipses and trails and sandstorms and moons When she passes, she calls to her scientists. A storm of Unprecedented magnitude swirls around her.

They know she will not survive this one.

180

T O B I PA R K

In their eulogies, they refer to her as machine, or life, or both.

How human it is to be mourned, to gain pronoun and name How human it is to phone home, as the dark swallows your earth and leaves you, glass eye, gaping and blind.

181

I CA N’ T S E E T H E B R E A K O F SE A A ND S K Y L A U R A C H E N a n d K AT H E R I N E W O N G

My feet tread heavy on the hard rock terra below. A dry sea extends for miles beyond me. Immortal night envelopes the ill sky.

Town is long gone.

This desert is Earth’s flaky skin, fractures that split the ground into independent islands. Each crevice is a capillary, an empty vein that extends into larger cracks. The hot winds slap my shoulders, blisters crust my lips.

I saw the lesions grow on the people around me, the people that I loved. I was the only one left, and maybe I’m immune to the disease— or maybe I’m the carrier.

That night, the house was swallowed in silence. The door did not squeak, nor the floor creak with my wary steps. I was captive in a glass case of water, enthralled by its dangerous beauty. My fingers slipped into the sockets of my eyes, silvery liquid gushing into my hands, escaping through my fingers; I wanted to stop seeing myself, stop my heart, stop it all—

And when fingers started to claw my throat, I almost gave in.

Barreled against the wall—I knew: that was how my family’s legacy would end. Insanity and ruin.

My humble town is far behind me: the campfires families 182

L A U R A C H E N A N D K AT H E R I N E W O N G

gathered around to sing lullabies for the children, the clay huts that stood strong against the weekly sandstorms, the gritty dirt I drew pictures in with my fingers.

Now, my hands scrape the loose sediment, crawling on all fours as a desperate but mute scream tears through me. The windâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s current pushes my gaunt figure. Shards of rock fly into my face, blinding my vision and clogging my lungs with debris. A piece of glass lodges itself into the ground in front of my hands. In its reflection is a girl I can no longer recognizeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;matted black hair, alien eyes, skin the texture of the endless desert.

Then, I see it. The skyscrapers behind the clouds of dust, ones that touch the polluted sky and are illuminated with vivid, dancing lights. They are stars that tuck me to sleep every night, and I know that I have to go there. I belong there.

My hand reaches to grab the buildingsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; sleek obsidian walls, but the lights evaporate and fall between the fissures of my fingers. The pain in my throat is secondary to the hope that stands in front of me, the city that multiplies by two, by three, by ten.

183

F LOR D E M AYO AMIE REHMANN

I grew up surrounded by sunflowers, they were practically relatives. The kind of relatives you just can’t seem to avoid no matter how hard you try.

They crept everywhere. It was a bit of a pass time; to stomp on bugs on the way to school and look for the flowers on the way back.

They were tiny landmarks that I could trace my footsteps with, naming each rolly polly and snail all the while.

This activity lost it’s joy not soon after a late summer’s evening. A squirrel had fallen prey to the neighbor’s cat, which I then chased off with a broom. Perhaps it would have been mercy to let the cat finish the job. The squirrel was still breathing while blood pooled from it’s belly and mouth, filling the grass like a miniature swamp.

I had never seen flowers grow so fast.

They crawled around its legs and clutched to the fur on its bloated stomach. I don’t think the image of yellow buck teeth and wet olive eyes will ever completely leave me. To this day I’m still picking the olives off my pizza.

The early mornings were spent with my mother. I don’t remember a time when she wasn’t coughing. The floor was always riddled with golden flower petals. Sometimes they would get stuck in her throat and she would be bent over the toilet for hours.

On good mornings she would pluck the flowers from her hair and chin with shaking fingers while I watched from the bathroom counter.

“Did I get them all?” she would ask.

“No. Above your ear,” I’d say, and then she would purposefully 184

AMIE REHMANN

check the wrong side.

“No, the other one!”

Then she would laugh and I would laugh and in seven years I won’t go into that bathroom ever again because of the silence and the many bottles of perfume that I just can’t throw out. Only now when I look at pictures do I notice how pale and frail she was. I purposefully close all the photo albums and keep them under my bed. I fear that looking at them will alter the memories of how I saw her; strong, warm, and capable.

When the funeral passed, I made sure to stomp on sunflowers every day on my way to school.

After my mother’s untimely death, Uncle Ron took me in. He was gentle yet firm, giving me a sense of normality with chores and family game nights. My favorite was Tuesday nights. We would stay up till midnight playing blackjack and he wouldn’t mention my bedtime and neither would I.

He was never shy to tell stories of my dad over a cup of whiskey (a cup of milk for me). The stories were usually retold over and over, each time with as much enthusiasm as the last. I humored his failing memory by listening intently with small smiles. I didn’t realize something was truly wrong until sunflowers began growing out his ears.

When I pulled on them he would wince and slap my hand.

“Do they hurt?” I would ask.

“Not as much as losing your train of thought,” he’d reply, before going back to his story.

Within a few months, he had grown a crown of sunflowers.

They cradled his head, sickeningly beautiful and I sometimes wished they had been thorns instead because at least then it’s true nature would have been clear.

He began forgetting the little things, like where he left his keys and since when did you live in my house?

After a year and three months they covered his eyes. Every night I grabbed the scissors from the kitchen drawer and trimmed the flowers. By morning, they would have already grown back.

I think his loss of vision made it worse. Being in darkness made it so much easier to lose track of time. He would call me by my father’s name, and ramble on and on about preparing for the April Showers.

185

INKBLOT

“Do we have enough food in the bunker?” he would ask.

I learned it was easier to play pretend. “Yes. Don’t worry about it.”

“The bombs are coming. They’re coming. It’s always the lights that go first.”

“It’s okay, Uncle. The lights are just turned off, that’s all.”

In school, the war had always seemed so distant. For the most part, we didn’t even pay attention to the destruction it had caused.

To us, it had just always been. Sal and I would sit at the edge of a particularly large bomb crater, chewing sunflower seeds and seeing who could spit them the farthest. More often than not they would get caught in her blonde hair and she’d spend the rest of the day picking them out with a pout.

Yes, the war felt untouchable as any other history lesson. But there was something more tangible about it when a living relic was right in front of you. Uncle Ron would rock in his seat, mumbling something ‘bout “damn fools” and “wasted youth,” and would only calm down when I brought him his tomato soup.

The worst nights were the ones when he relived the days following the April Showers.

“So many. So many...”

“So many what, Uncle?”

“Flowers. So many flowers.”

He was most silent on those nights.

The rest of the time was spent indoors, or chasing Uncle Ron whenever he strayed too far. When a soldier brought him home in the middle of the night I was advised to get him “proper” help.

So I packed his bags with Sal watching from the doorway. It was mainly folded shirts and bathroom essentials. I told myself that he would be coming back eventually so I didn’t bother to pack him much else.

I took him to the nursing home. It smelled like a hospital, which is to say it smelled like rubbing alcohol and had the distinct feeling of ‘I don’t want to be here’ by all of its inhabitants, including the staff. The lobby was quiet, donned with yellow wall paper. It had plastic plants and artificial smiles to go with it. Those who were still sane were in denial. Old women would trade tips on how to prune their sunflowers just right while the men grabbed scissors and cut their own straight off.

186

AMIE REHMANN

I would visit Uncle Ron every Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday.

Then I would visit him every Sunday and Thursday. Then every Sunday.

They said he passed away in his sleep.

I was fourteen years old when I stood in front of three headstones all under the same last name as mine.

The cemetery was always in full bloom; a golden deathbed of sunflowers. It was the perfect breeding ground for them, with plenty to eat. From afar it almost looked like heaven. They were by far the brightest in the entire city.

Uncle Ron’s burial was quiet. There was no audience besides the sunflowers. They would sway in time with the pastor’s speech. It was something over dramatic and over rehearsed. Something about life growing in death just like the sunflowers.

I never wore yellow after that.

The days following were slow and uneventful. I returned home, and Sal would bring over supper every other night with some excuse or another about how her ‘ma made too much. There wasn’t much support for orphans, the world had other problems to worry about in the aftermath of the war. I don’t think it would be at all dishonest to say Sal and her family kept me from starving.

Moving on was made difficult by each trip I took outside. I saw sunflowers everywhere I went. They twisted themselves around phone poles and up chain link fences, invading every nook and cranny. A silent infestation. One that is so easy to ignore until it is choking you.

On the days where I couldn’t make myself go out, Sal would come over and we’d play boardgames over some hot tea. Things eventually got easier.

It was the easiest when I held her hand in mine. Or when we sat up at night laughing over stories, or when we laid with our backs to the floor in comfortable silence. It wasn’t until we were both seventeen that she ran her fingers over my face, a question in her brown eyes turned gold by the sunlight. In return I tucked a strand of blonde hair behind her ear. And in that moment she made me believe that maybe yellow wasn’t such a bad color after all.

187

OL M CASSANDRA KESIG

I place my thumbs in the hollows of their eyes and insert myself there, between ball and socket. My index folds back the tragus, traces the shell of their ear and I scratch away at the waxiness, the baklava layers of dirt and dead skin that flake away when provoked.

When sun is absent from the cathedral ceiling and sound is absent from the walls there is only the impression of the Stranger and the brocade darkness as a cloak. I am feeling out the mountainous planes of their face with intentional hands, not sure if we’ve already met or if I’m out of touch, forgetting each person’s salience, feeling my way over a hydra for some time quantifiable only by the quality of my skin, the easiness of my joints. The word is at the front of my mouth, and then gets lost between the breaths.

I can’t help but feel that vengeful gods stole the world from our eyes a thousand years previous, retribution for some original sin, and now hold it aloft about their human colony; blind, fumbling things that can’t get away from each other: copious.

Stranger takes me by the neck with their thumbs poised over my thyroid and brings me to the bottom of the ocean, where we can get to know each other. We compound ourselves with hands on faces and shoulders; I am trying to commit them to memory: snub nose, elastic hair, dry eyes rolling around in their skull.

We meet, finally, at each others hands. We make a cat’s cradle. We knit 188

CASSANDRA KESIG

our fingers together with thick needles. We wait for our palms to sweat and imbibe the other, lovers in need of organs but all the soft meat in my stomach has turned to liquid and been consumed by acid, gelatin instead of muscle. We have nothing to do with each other.

After some time quantifiable only by where my hair falls on my back, we part and pass through each other, as the days pass through us, treasurehunting for someone or something elsewhere, without knowing how elsewhere is different from here.

189

GEOGRA PH Y O F A M AT R I A RCH B I A N C A B A D A J O S a n d K AT E H I Z O N

the big bang split deity into thousands. if spacedust you gazed upwards on the first day, you might have even seen it. these celestial bodies, sisters and their scattering out past andromeda. your auntie earth centered her gravity in nothing but the pit of her belly as she collected into a sphere of dust and light. arms wrapped around her malachite knees, her eyes folded into sleep, and this is how our creation myth begins: auntie and her sisters tumbling into interstellar darkness, pulling cosmic debris into orbit. spiralling out of momentum, she roots herself in the curvature of spacetime. from her, you can learn a little selfpreservation. in the beginning, she was hesitant. defined her purpose through freedom, even with a planet outstretching from her navel, but auntie gave into her form, evolved into earthly body in a blink- a reluctant matriarch taking up the same responsibility of her sisters. you could study the way she sunk into slumber beneath the ocean every other equinox, how water dragged its veil across every muscle. when she ground up the ash to make terrestrials she watched them drink and wait. drowning, gulping more time than water, from their existence a question sprung of nature and nurture. coming of age is a season itself. if adolescence leads even deity to naivety, then it is motherhood that shakes her. auntie earth could never be ready to carry her people, yet when the tendrils of light returns to her cheeks, 190

B I A N C A B A DA J O S A N D K AT E H I Z O N

it is uncertainty, still, that allows her to settle on mending the fabric of her own skin. and so dawn begins when she lifts her forearms, when she straightens her back to let the trees grow tall, light diffusing towards every corner. she says there will be and so there isâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a fluttering of leaves gold and an overflow of grain that scatters across the land. breezes yawning, stretching over continents. she guides shadow to the small village just below her sternum, feels the collective sigh of the people, and it is no longer duty which binds her to them; rather, the exhale of a lullaby that comes with making home.

191

“We won’t die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens.”

— Tony Kushner

INDEX BADAJOS, BIANCA | Senior, Creative Writing

Rosa Chews on the Sun, Prose, 49

lore of a lineage, Prose Poetry, 142

Geography of a Matriarch, Prose Poetry, 190

BOLOGNESE, MARBELLA | Senior, Creative Writing

Paralysis, Screenplay, 104 CHEN, LAURA | Junior, Creative Writing

I canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t see the break of sea and sky, Prose Poetry, 182

CHOI, SEUNGU | Sophomore, Creative Writing

Self-Similar, Prose, 69 CHUDNER, LAUREN | Freshman, Visual Arts

Chickens, Ballpoint Pen, 44

Braces, Oil on Wood Panel, 135

DHANAK, SUVALI | Senior, Creative Writing

Atlas, Poetry, 174

195

EARLY, ANASTASIA | Sophomore, Creative Writing

YOU ARE something TO ME, Poetry, 76

The Sun Abandons Her People, Prose, 148 EFTHYMIOU, CASSIA | Senior, Creative Writing

I Check to See If I Am Lucid Dreaming, Prose Poetry, 38

Possessions, Prose, 90

FOX, HOLLAND | Junior, Visual Arts

irrational2, Digital Art, 27

Spirit, Ballpoint Pen, 118

Sacramento Still Life, Oil, 155 GERHARD, LILY | Sophomore, Creative Writing

The Banjo Men, Prose, 156

GUO, TIFFANY | Senior, Visual Arts

Alternate Worlds, Digital Art, 159 HABIBI, KATHRINE | Junior, Creative Writing

Jörmungandr, Poetry, 177

HAHN, ISABEL | Sophomore, Creative Writing

memories i left in a box on my dresser, Prose, 28

The Same, Prose, 132 HATCH, LIZZY | Senior, Creative Writing

Helios, Prose Poetry, 173

HAYNES, TEDDI | Senior, Creative Writing

SLEEPING ATOP THE DRAGON’S HOARD, Poetry, 25

Weighing the Dice, Poetry, 80

Going for a Night Swim, Poetry, 160

196

HIZON, KATE | Senior, Creative Writing

Geography of a Matriarch, Prose Poetry, 190

HUANG, FRANCES | Junior, Visual Arts

JC, Charcoal Pencil, 33 HUSSAIN, TASH | Senior, Creative Writing

The Phone Man, Prose, 16 JAUREGUI, FRIDA | Sophomore, Creative Writing

ya que estรกs lista / now that you are ready, Prose Poetry, 15

JEFFRIES, COURTLAND | Sophomore, Creative Writing

Father Dear, Prose, 47 KANG, HANNAH | Grade, Conservatory

Untitled, Color Pencil, 52

Untitled, Color Pencil, 84

KESIG, CASSANDRA | Junior, Creative Writing

Olm, Prose Poetry, 188 LAFOSSE, AVALON | Senior, Visual Arts

Portrait of Adriana, Oil, 39

Bitter Divinity, Oil, 100

LEE, ETHAN | Junior, Digital Media

Alien Creatures, Pencil, 35 LODUCA, COREY | Senior, Visual Arts

Negligence, Textile Art, 24

LOWDERMILK, RORY | Junior, Creative Writing

Choking on Death, Prose, 82 MASO, FOX | Sophomore, Creative Writing

cosmonauts, Poetry, 178 197

MCKELVEY, MAGGIE | Senior, Digital Media

Self Portrait, Digital Art, 138 MIKHAIL, GABY | Junior, Creative Writing

Silkworm, Prose, 122 OLA, SEMILORE | Senior, Creative Writing

my neighbor is building a boat outside, Prose Poetry, 78

townie, Prose Poetry, 136

PARK, TOBI | Junior, Creative Writing

Oppy, Poetry, 180 REHMANN, AMIE | Senior, Creative Writing

Food for Comfort, Prose, 36

Flor de Mayo, Prose, 184 RODRIGUEZ-DIAZ, ABRIL | Sophomore, Creative Writing

let my earth breathe, Poetry, 45

Neighborhood, Prose, 126 SAGA, HAILEY | Senior, Film and Television

Pamilya, Screenplay, 53 SCHACK, CHELSEA | Senior, Creative Writing

Che Guevara Pants, Lyrics, 66

Improvisation No. 2, Poetry, 85 SCHOFER, MOLLIE | Sophomore, Creative Writing

Monkey Breath, Monkey Mind, Prose Poetry, 42 SOUMBASAKIS, MIA | Sophomore, Creative Writing

Lettuce, Prose, 50

My fishing tutor&me, Poetry, 119

Lemon Marmalade, Prose, 150

198

SUH, KAON | Sophomore, Creative Writing

Lizardtown, Prose, 64

Atlas, Poetry, 174 THORNTON, ASHLEY | Freshman, Creative Writing

Jellyfish, Poetry, 34

Great White, Prose Poetry, 101

Cancer, Poetry, 146 TIAN, RACHEL | Junior, Creative Writing

A Segment of Sanity, Poetry, 140 TONG, TRENYCE | Junior, Visual Arts

Johanna Park is very Cool, Oil on Canvas, 46

saturation, Genre, Oil on Canvas, 131

Maya, Oil on Canvas, 145 TRUONG, JONATHAN | Junior, Creative Writing

A Seurat Painting, Prose, 86

17th Parallel, Prose Poetry, 144 VU, QUYNH ANH | Junior, Visual Arts

Complement, Oil, 125 WONG, KATHERINE | Junior, Creative Writing

she discovers (for a living), Prose Poetry, 139

I canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t see the break of sea and sky, Prose Poetry, 182 YU, BETSEY | Junior, Visual Arts

Marilyn, Lineoleum and Ink, 14 ZHANG, MISU | 8, Visual Arts

Untitled, Ballpoint Pen, 68

199