The Torch 2014

t h e t o r c h. a literary arts magazine | 2014

e d ito r s ’ no t e .

I grabbed the strawberries with my left hand and ran them under the faucet, washing away the dirt I couldn’t see. I ate them one by one and looked out the window over the sink.

The sky was darkening over the trees. When I had swallowed the last bite, I looked down and saw the faintest red stain on the palm of my hand, and I washed that off, too.

Gracie Wise & John Austin Gray, 2014

art.

p o e t r y.

Bright Weather Betsy Marsch

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Pusillanimity Megan Pinckard

Griffith Park Julia Hembree

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Guinea Laura Little

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Wood-Fired Pitcher Trio Kristen Witham

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Findings Chelsea Cothran

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400 (O When the Saints) Ellen Cline

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The Hook and Climb Andrew Hamaker

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Curious Things Hilary Borden

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Crisis Stephanie Traylor

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Gale 24 Katie Williams

Cambridge Victoria Brooks

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fic t io n.

no n - fict i o n .

This Unreal Violence Andrew Hamaker

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Eclipse: July 11, 1991 John Austin Gray

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Down at the Beach Allison Bucknell

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Westward Grace Pepper

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P u sil l a nim it y Megan Pinckard

I’m not sure what Astaire had, but he had it, and he had it easy.

To take the soft hand of a lady waiting, to move the small feet Like charting out her heartbeat—it takes a brave pioneer to wear a tux, To claim I know the path because I know where I’m going because I’m getting us there.

Dancing is an intentional entrapment, to be locked In each other’s arms and out of the world. Me, I am caught By her red dress, emblazoned against the slate gray wall, her bare arms hanging cold, and So I straighten my tie, brown shoes clacking as I walk across the room to grab Some punch.

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B ri g h t Weat her Betsy Marsch Acrylic on paper 9" Ă— 12"

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This Unr e a l Viole n c e Andrew Hamaker

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“Daniel, get in the car,” my mother commanded, grabbing the stick that had been my sword and scepter for the past hour and throwing it to the ground behind me. She clutched her keys against the leg of her capris and fumbled for the one to our blue Ford Explorer. I watched her marching off, and I remember noticing that she didn’t even have her leather purse with her. “We’re going to the Murphys’.” She turned on me. “Now.” I hopped into the backseat, and my mother paused for just long enough to make sure I had buckled myself in good and tight before pulling out of our driveway and zooming down the road that would lead us away from our neighborhood at the edge of town and out into the back country. We lived in one of the nicer areas of Minton, West Virginia—which meant that our neighbors reseeded their yards each spring and set out sprinklers attached to the ends of garden hoses that snaked through the lush grass.

I was eight years old then and had barely outgrown one of my childhood frustrations. My father wasn’t sophisticated enough to buy a mower with a bag attachment like our neighbors had, and so our yard was always striped with fresh rows of cuttings. And whenever stray strands of grass would get caught in my socks or wet grass would cling to the bottoms of my shoes, I would step inside the door whining and fussing and my mother would console me and tell me to be a strong boy who did not mind getting dirty. When I pulled my shoes off, my mother would kneel down, stick her fingers into each shoe, and scrub them against the rough brown doormat until all the mulchy grass was gone. But she couldn’t do anything about the stains, and she told me I’d simply have to learn to deal with those.

“Why do we have to go to the Murphys’, Mom?” I asked as our car sped by the last of the neatly landscaped houses. The trees cleared, and you could tell where the

property lines of our neighbors ended by how the grass changed. It was no longer green as a stand of pines or thick as a sofa cushion but wispy and dirt-colored and mottled with weeds.

“There’s been an accident, honey,” my mother replied in an even tone of voice. She had on her sunglasses, even though it was cloudy out. “Mrs. Murphy’s gonna need us there.”

The road ran along the ridgeline of a row of hills, intersected at points by drives leading up to an isolated home or back down to one of the more important streets or highways. I didn’t like the open country beyond our privileged little woods because it seemed wild and desolate in comparison with the rainforest of grass my neighbors cultivated. Cow fields lined both sides of the road, and I could see the black lumps dotting the hillsides. Farther along, the cows stood right next to the fence, munching on the tall grass that grew under the gray wires that carried electricity. Every few links along the fences, a yellow tag announced the wires’ dangers. All the locals knew what the warning labels meant without ever having to read what they actually said.

Before long, we reached the steepest stretch of the road, and my stomach floated upwards for a second as the car flew over the hillcrest at full speed. It was exhilarating—like riding a spaceship. My mother never drove that quickly down this way. But when all my insides settled back on the seat, and I could see where we were, my spirits sank. To my right, between the road and the fence, there was an open patch of ground marked by gray tombstones like tree stumps in the overgrown weeds and grass. It was a family graveyard—as I learned a few years later—centered around a single broad monument engraved with the names and dates of a local patriarch and his wife. “There’s the Collises,” my parents used to murmur reverentially as we passed. Today, though, my

mother stayed silent, and I think that was the first thing to make me genuinely nervous.

We reached the Murphys’ place in less than ten minutes. They lived under the edge of one of the region’s patchwork forests, in a white house with white latticework all along its base and corrugated siding that made it look like an oversized trailer. The road swerved around the house at almost a ninety-degree angle, and at the middle of the curve, it met a dirt track leading into the woods. When we pulled up, it looked like something was going on down that way.

I stepped out of the car onto a dense layer of leaves, the brown debris of many autumns under the crowded trees. Not like our neighborhood, with its well-spaced trunks and plentiful light. My mother moved toward the house. Mrs. Murphy was standing on the front porch beside a couple of grim-looking older ladies, wearing white tennis shoes and a muumuu patterned like wallpaper and blowing her nose with tissues from a box under her arm. “Diane, you poor dear,” my mother cried out when she reached the front steps. She put her arms around Mrs. Murphy’s hefty shoulders, and Mrs. Murphy started bawling outright.

I had never seen a woman that large cry before, and it startled me, so I walked cautiously across the road to see what was happening on the dirt track. It wound along the hillside through the trees, about as wide as a lane of traffic. The triangular metal gate was wide open, and Jeff Gore’s battered yellow tow truck was backed into the middle of the track near the first turn around the slope. I could hear men’s voices yelling from the other side. “Okay now—hold it, hold it, hold it.”

I was nearly at the passenger door of the truck before I could see what was happening. All along its outer edge, the pathway had worn down from erosion. Now, just over the lip of the embankment, I could see the giant

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clay-stained rear tires of Mr. Murphy’s tractor. It must have gone sideways over the edge and flipped upsidedown, exposing the dark underbelly of machinery parts.

To my eyes, it was almost embarrassing to see it this way, with most of its America-blue body hidden from sight over the embankment.

Jeff Gore leapt up and leaned back over the chasm as if speaking to the tractor itself. “Yes—God almighty.

Somebody ought to tell them when they get here with the ambulance. There’s nothing they can do for him, unlucky bastard.” He wiped his hands on his jeans and turned his wiry frame in my direction. “Hey,” he exclaimed, “hey—you, uh, Daniel. Is that right?”

I nodded, trying not to let him see that I was shaking. All I knew of Jeff was that he lived at the bottom of the hill and sometimes ran his old tow truck for his son’s repair shop. And now here he was, a tall, frightening near-stranger, marching toward me.

“You better stay back. Get back from here,” he said, taking my shoulder and trying to turn me and shove me away toward the road. “We’ve got a load of work to do to drag that tractor back up out of there.”

I still couldn’t say anything, but I wandered back to the gate and grabbed hold of the top bar as tightly as I could as I watched Jeff disappear behind the truck. “No, not there. There’s where it needs to go,” I heard him shout as he guided the other men. The winch had to be attached in just the right place, I knew, or the tractor could slip and the weight of it might yank the tow truck over the edge, too.

I kicked at the uneven track beneath me. I was afraid that Jeff might come back around and yell at me again.

Something caught the toe of my sneaker for a second, and I looked down to see what it was. There was something that looked like a tiny plastic arm barely sticking out of the dirt. I knelt down to dig it up, tugging and twisting at it and scratching the loosely packed dirt un-

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til I had exhumed an old action figure, a pudgy man wearing a tan jumpsuit. It was streaked with orange clay, and although a lot of the paint had worn off and all the details were full of dirt, I could still make out the man’s facial features. He was smiling—faintly. I recognized the faded symbol on his shoulder, a red no-sign over a vague blotchy shape with hands. It was a Ghostbusters action figure, the older kind with arms and legs that only moved in one direction. I mustn’t have even been born when someone lost it, and it wound up buried.

“Okay, stay back,” Jeff shouted. I jumped up, clutching the figure. Jeff Gore was walking behind the tow truck toward the cab, which was out of my sight. The engine revved, a deep blast of sound that gave way to a steady pulsing rasp. The truck scraped into gear, and then ever so slowly, it started to pull forward, dragging up the tractor as if it were helping the hillside give birth to it. For a moment, the ugly underside of the tractor loomed up out of the hole it had smashed in the forest brush, and I took a step backward and wrapped my arm around the bar of the gate. Then the enormous back wheels came down, one after the other, and the tractor was sitting upright on the path.

Jeff had pulled the tow truck to a stop just a few feet short of where I stood by the gate. I saw the driver door open, and he stood up and leaned out of the cab and yelled toward the house. “Hey, Jessica. Jessica!” Far away on the porch, my mother heard him and turned around, and he pointed at me over the roof of the truck.

I watched her leap down the steps and stride toward me, and I shrunk back against the gatepost. Once she was across the road, I walked over to her with my head down.

“Ought to keep him away from here,” Jeff told her. “Mac Murphy’s down there.”

My mother nodded and put her arms around me. “Is there any way—”

“No. He got himself pinned between the mower and a tree. He was dead before any of us got here.”

“I see.” My mother’s jaw clenched, and she grabbed me by my shoulders and pushed me along in front of her to the road.

When we were across the street, she nodded at the action figure. “What’s that?”

“A Ghostbusters toy. It was buried over there.” I held it up to her. “It’s dirty,” I said, wiping the grit and dust from my hands onto my shorts.

To my surprise, my mother didn’t try to argue that it wasn’t mine and I couldn’t keep it. She just told me, “When we get home, we’ll soak it in a bucket of water.

That should get most of the dirt off.”

My mother sat me down with the grim old ladies on the porch, who were as silent as I was. In another couple minutes, the ambulance came. Mrs. Murphy cried harder once she heard the sirens. Jeff Gore met the paramedics at the head of the path, but they pushed by him without a word. A moment later, one of them reappeared to pull the ambulance around and back it down the path like the tow truck had done, as Jeff stood to one side and waved directions.

I didn’t know back then that they carried dead people on stretchers like people who were sick or hurt, and I imagined that the paramedics had just scooped up Mr. Murphy’s crushed body and thrown it in the back of the ambulance.

By then, other people were showing up, mostly women, and most of them closer to Mrs. Murphy’s age than my mother. Someone took the box of tissues out of my mother’s hands, and she came and told me we were leaving. We stopped only long enough for her to say goodbye and express her sympathy to Mrs. Murphy one last time. “I’ll call you tonight. Poor dear. We’ll fix you dinner sometime this week.”

Mrs. Murphy was still crying. Up close, her flabby face was dark red from where she had been rubbing it.

“He just went to Wilt and Brenda’s,” she sobbed. “He was just going to cut their grass.”

My hands shook so much that I thought someone had to notice. I was fighting a peculiar impulse. I wanted to show Mrs. Murphy the action figure I had dug up. I was sure that somehow, if I did, it would be important. It would help things somehow. I didn’t say anything—I couldn’t find the words no matter how hard I tried—as if even then, I knew I was foolish for thinking the two things were equal. As if even then I knew I was being childish. But I wanted nothing more than to hold out the Ghostbusters figure to Mrs. Murphy and say, “See? It’s alright. Everything’s going to be alright.”

My mother drove home much slower than before, and as she crested the highest hill and pulled up beside the family cemetery, she dragged the car to a complete stop. “I’m sorry, honey,” she told me. “I just need to gather my wits.” Her chin trembled as she spoke, and I could see she was wiping away tears as they slid down beneath her sunglasses. I reached for the Ghostbusters toy so I wouldn’t have to look at her, but it was too far away across the seat. So instead, I looked out the window at the graves in the tall, clumpy grass.

On a cloudy day like that one, the tombstones seemed like a permanent part of the landscape, like the white sky or the black cows. In my young mind I could hardly imagine that there had actually been a living person for each of those grave markers once. A cluster of little monuments stood closest to me—headstones for the family pets, as I know now, dogs and cats with names like Peanuts or Sarsaparilla. But back then I only stared and wondered if there was really anything buried underneath them, anything at all. And if maybe, whatever it was, I could take it home with me.

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G ri f fi t h Pa r k Julia Hembree

Digital photograph

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G u ine a Laura Little

We used to clamber barefoot into mango trees, cotton skirts bunched up and hoisted to our thighs, dusty feet dangling from thick, black boughs while orange nectar made sticky trails to our elbows.

We used to swear we’d adopt seven kids each, never get married, who needs men, but then again, that was Guinea, where men lead women like cows, good for nothing save making maafe, neat rows of corn, and babies.

We couldn’t walk through the market without a man grabbing our white wrists, squeezing our soft arms, calling, “My wife, my wife,” his ticket to America. We’d yank away.

Not yours. Not anyone’s.

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Find ings Chelsea Cothran

The cushion of vibrant moss on the fallen birch tree has always been my favored seat beside the pond tucked deep in this pocket of woods.

Well, I say fallen, but that’s not entirely right.

The tree simply couldn’t be bothered to fall all the way, it seems. Instead, it leans at a low angle, its top tangled in the strong struts of a nearby oak and its roots pulled from the dark soil and pointing towards the gray-bellied clouds that somehow are still reflected in the water so muddy that I crave a cup of hot chocolate by the time I leave.

To the right, near the well-worn trail that winds between the ferns, where the deer as brown as the water come to drink, rings of ripples lazily spread from where a turtle has thrust his head into the air. He clambers up the bank, a strand of stinking algae draped across his armored back, and crawls toward the congregation of turtles that sits huddled on the half-rotted log, as it does every day, soaking in the few rays of spring sun that filter through the overhanging boughs of cottonwood and loblolly pine.

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Behind me, I feel more than see the gaping, terrible gash in the tree line, torn by the winds of the tornado I was told touched down here first before it grew bored of the organic taste of tulip poplar and black cherry and jumped the highway to chew a man-made meal of brick and concrete and left ribbons of pink insulation and sprinklings of dorm room dĂŠcor to garnish the remaining maples left standing when at last it was satiated and the wind-whipped redbuds were still.

It’s here on this spongy seat of moss the color of jade, or maybe more like a rough emerald, beside the mud-soaked water and the gathering of turtles and the memory of storms, it’s here that Coleridge says I should find inspiration and imagination in the lines and laws traced in the ridged bark of the persimmons, but instead I find a feather, bright red, tucked between some blades of grass, and it is enough.

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Wo o d - Fi r ed Pit cher Tr io Kristen Witham

Stoneware clay 4" × 6.5", 4" × 7.5", 4.5" × 7"

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Down at t h e B e a c h Allison Bucknell

Late afternoon sunlight poured through the large windows that faced quiet Tamarind Drive, pooling on the colorful cement floors of my grandfather’s Florida home and silhouetting my father, who stood in front of a small gathering of less than thirty people. Some of them lingered in the dining room, nibbling on strawberries and cheese. The sounds they made as they ate got quieter when my father cleared his throat. He hadn’t prepared a grand speech; rather, he relied on his memory to give him words to say. Aunt Carol, alone in the front row of mismatched chairs, contributed more tears than everyone else put together. Thunder grumbled in the distance, and the wind rustled the fronds of the palm trees just outside the front door as I watched the forerunners of storm clouds skid low on the horizon. A few neighbors had situated themselves in the back row and on the sides of the room, their smiles brief and their hands twitchy.

My grandfather’s funeral was the first one I’d ever been a part of in my twenty-two years. Up until that day, death had only taken my gerbils and an aunt that I hardly knew. My grandfather’s death affected me, though it wasn’t because we had been close. In all the annual visits my family made to Fort Pierce, I can’t remember a time when my grandfather ever engaged in a normal conversation. My dad would talk to him, but my grandfather would reply with a simple “sure” or “I’ll be darned.” I felt like I’d lost something, but that something wasn’t my

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grandfather. It was hard to grieve over a relationship that had consisted solely of smiles and casual greetings.

My grandfather was a simple man who rode out hurricanes alone on the island when everyone else fled for higher ground, who paid for internet only to play online checkers and to check the stock market, who was content to eat a can of brown beans or a baked potato for dinner.

He was a stunt diver while he lived in one of the Dakotas, and he walked through the jungles of Panama as a young man. My grandfather always took walks around the neighborhood and down the beach to the jetty after dinner.

He loved that beach so much that he built a bench and planted it at the end of the walking path, where the scrubby trees and sea oats ended and the open sand began.

My grandfather didn’t want a fuss over funeral arrangements. The simpler the service, the better. About half of the people who had been gathered in the living room trailed out behind my dad as he led them to the beach, which was a short five-minute walk away. The beach was windier than usual because of the storm creeping onto the western horizon, over the jetty line. Skirts and pant legs flapped, and the few words spoken were lost in the wind. Aunt Carol, followed closely by my dad, rolled up her capris and waded into the ocean, the canister containing my grandfather’s ashes tucked against her side. Carefully, she unscrewed the lid and shook the ash onto the surface of the waves that had beaten the beach he’d lived by for decades.

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The procession back to my grandfather’s house was spurred by the scent of rain on the wind. The short walk was so familiar that I could have walked there and back again with my eyes closed. It had been five years since my last visit to Florida. Fort Pierce, my grandfather, the beach––nostalgia was beginning to get the better of me. I was the last person to reach the house, and immediately I went to the kitchen for two Ziplock bags. I walked back to the beach, alone this time, to collect my thoughts and comb the shores for seashells. The sun had been crowded out by the storm clouds that had begun to arrive in earnest, and the thunder was louder. I could see lightning in the darkest parts of the sky, and I felt the first raindrops as soon as my feet sunk into the still-warm sand. The stretches of beach to my right and left were deserted, and I felt peaceful as I waded through the shallows of the surf, making my way toward the jetty. The tide had gone down in the fifteen minutes I’d been away, and seashells littered the shore. Broken pieces stuck up out of the sand, and smooth halves, still intact, floated back with the receding water. I strolled, searching for shells and the evasive sand dollars that I’d hunted for on that beach ever since I knew they existed. The rain crescendoed all the while, and forced me to turn back when I was only half-way to the jetty. I could hardly see by the time I got back to my entry point; in fact, I almost missed it. I stooped, my soaked clothes clinging to my skin as I filled my second Ziplock bag with sand.

40 0 (O Wh en th e Sain ts) Ellen Cline

Stone, ash, and clay 120' Ă— 40'

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The Ho o k a nd C l i m b Andrew Hamaker

I lean over the wheel, driver of the loud machine, the steel-encased bed of garbage bags— white bags, black bags—and compacted trash.

I steer with my forearm, my wrist, or rotate the smooth black wheel with my hands at four and eight around the curves.

I only glance now at the two sets of side-view mirrors because I know every cruel turn, every climb, every way the road slopes and gives in to the shape of the land in the foothills of Asheville, North Carolina.

I glance, and I see reflections of trees and a gray, tweedy seat where John or Casey may have sat in the old days when we left the hopper open, mostly, and at every stop he leapt down, hoisted the heavy green can, and spilled it out into the open side of the truck. He was thinner than you’d expect for someone who did so much heavy lifting, and even at the end of his shift he’d jump back onto the low floor of the cab and lean out, holding onto the doorframe with an arm like a tree root, as if he lived for the seconds between houses when he could watch the green neighborhoods and mountains pull closer with the wind in his face.

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Now a claw replaces him, machine-brown, and as I roll up to the cans along the street, I pull a lever, and the claw unfolds from the side of the truck and with a puff of hydraulics closes around the rounded part of the can.

It lifts and tilts the green cup over the hopper and dumps out the garbage like chunks of half-melted ice. Dwayne drank Mountain Dew from a 24-ounce bottle, John brought a Nalgene half full of water, but some of the others came with large fast-food sweet teas or Dr. Peppers in Styrofoam cups that barely wedged into the cup holder.

I get it right now every time, even on the hills, as the tires grip and the truck peels to a stop at the exact spot where the claw can grasp the can, toss the trash into the exact center of the hopper, and only sometimes when I don’t stamp hard enough on the tall brake pedal, and the truck is still moving forward when the claw unclenches and comes down, and the green can jostles as the metal hand fumbles to catch it, I think of a man in a cotton-white v-neck shirt lifting and shaking, and of spare bits of trash, a blue potato chip bag or an empty sleeve of crackers drifting down the garden streets, and I wonder if the wind still blows wherever he finds himself.

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Cu ri ou s T h i ngs

Hilary Borden Graphite on paper 18.5" Ă— 24"

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Go west, young lady. Westward into the wild tangles of the untamed and unknown and unblemished.

Westwa r d Grace Pepper

Fields of emerald green stretch forever into the distance, the torrents of wind stroking the wild grass like a summer breeze off the sea and teasing my hair into a frenzy. The wind is just cool enough and the heavy sun warm enough to make you rejoice in living. I am a tiny spectator of the land, waiting for my grandparents to come out of the rest stop so we can be on our way.

The gray face of the schnauzer in the backseat of our car peeks out at me from the side window, as if expressing the same longing I feel to scamper across the endless field. Land and sky are kept apart only by a smooth line, but they seem to go on endlessly until meeting in some undiscovered paradise, a place no man could reach.

The afternoon of our departure was warm with the heat of a Tennessee June. The air was steamy, and our nerves were on edge as we loaded the car and said our goodbyes. My parents stood by as my siblings and I exchanged awkward hugs, then blithely reminded me to “keep us updated” and to seek out adventure. Everyone was a bit anxious, but our traveler spirits were layered with eagerness to be adventurers, ready to diverge from the main drag at the strike of our fancy. We piled into the champagne-toned Volvo—Papa in the driver’s seat, Nana next to him, and with me in the back, Mary Todd, my cousin’s dog, who we were returning to Fort Lewis, Washington. The baggage area of my cousin’s plane prevented Mary Todd from flying home, so my grandparents, lively seventy-somethings, volunteered to deliver her, collecting in return the joys of travel, experience of the country, and a chance to visit my cousin at her home.

And I, an adventure-sick nineteen-year-old, was fortunate enough to accompany them.

As we pulled out of the familiar, curved driveway, I craned my neck for a last look at the old brick ranch that was home, school, playground, and sanctuary to my

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four siblings and me for the past eleven years. Two of us have since moved away, but the memories linger: an imaginary house under the towering front yard maples; rambles in the dry creek bed out back; rainy indoor picnics and The Secret Garden on tape. For a moment, I remembered.

And then we set off with nothing but the road ahead.

Before the day was over, we passed St. Louis’ giant arch, the Gateway to the West, feeling like true journeymen. That night, after driving in confused circles through the sleepy side streets and busy roads of St. Charles, our stiff backs and aching legs thanked us as we settled into that blessed Comfort Suites. Mary Todd was more than pleased to trot about the hotel room and accept handouts of cheese from Nana. The confusion in trying to navigate a new city was the first sign that this trip would not be without some difficulty and gnashing of teeth. As we moved across the land, we welcomed each morning with just the right amount of energy to make it through the day, and it was with eager spirits that, two days later, we crossed the South Dakota line and I found myself in a haven of green fields and blue sky.

Though much of the state looks the same—flat, empty, “open sky country”—I can’t help but watch the landscape rushing by. It is midday, so Nana, turning to the backseat, away from her AAA guidebook, tells me, “If you see something you like, just holler and we’ll stop.

Mary Todd probably needs a break soon, too.”

But there is no sign of civilization along the thin ribbon of road until we all begin to notice the string of billboards: “Free Ice Water,” “Have You Dug Wall Drug,” “201 Miles Until Wall Drug.” The signs are innumerable for this apparently popular oasis in the middle of nowhere, Wall, South Dakota. When we get there, Papa and I go in to purchase some hotdogs while Nana stays with Mary Todd in the main outdoor area, complete with the advertised water fountain. Apparently, the pharmacist who bought the drugstore in the small town of Wall in 1931 never thought business would boom, even with the flow of people traveling to see the new

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monument, Mount Rushmore. It wasn’t until his wife suggested posting signs along the road advertising free water that business skyrocketed, and ever since, Wall Drug’s billboards can be seen on a 650-mile-long stretch from Minnesota to Montana.

We hit the road once more and glide smoothly through South Dakota and into Wyoming country until we glimpse our first of many mountain ranges, the Big Horns. They are majestic and uncommon after so much flat land. Patches of snow cap them like salt spilled from a saltshaker. The land immediately surrounding us settles into dull green hills and valleys with slopes so smooth and gentle, I want to fly over them and stroke them with the tips of my fingers. The weather is also changing.

We’ve added jackets and Papa a hat, but it’s bearable.

Following the trail of gray road, we cross into Montana, where the sharp rocks and stubs of trees overtake the smooth hills. A few miles in, a new scene bursts upon us: a wide open space, unlike the suffocating hills we have been through forever, a river—the Missouri, I think—and the sky a soft gray.

There is no way I can sit tight. “Papa, could we pull off the road and get out? Just for a second?”

Nana is eager, too. “Don, here’s a place to pull off.

Let’s get out for a few minutes.”

Agreeing that we all need a moment to absorb the moment and the landscape, he pulls into a small parking area overlooking a magnificent view.

For a few minutes, we walk along the expanse of rock overlooking the dark giant of the river and, further on, rows of tiny white windmills, barely perceptible. Again, we are spectators, miniature in the shadow of the rocky cliffs cradling the wide river under the immense furls of gray sky.

Under normal circumstances, I would be overly cautious, imploring younger siblings to “please stay back” and not approaching any possibility of danger myself. But I am not myself; I am intoxicated with the earth. Nana and Papa return to Mary Todd and the car when it begins to drizzle. The wind beats around my face, and I follow.

Cr isis

Stephanie Traylor At the edge of a New Mexico town (two thousand people, one stoplight) where civilization fades into desert, a clapboard cabin stands.

A young man paces the yard, bundled against the bite of October.

He looks up at darkness and breathes a puff of white vapor, eyes attempting to break the barrier between earth and thoughtless sky, but no.

The emptiness echoes with coyotes’ mournful moans, with the beating of his heart.

A sigh, a whisper: Anybody?

The porch light dies in silence.

Behind the gray clouds rolling in, he sees no stars tonight.

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Ca m b r id ge Victoria Brooks I only visited the slick, gray cobblestone streets, at every bend a cyclist or England’s best fish and chips.

At the corner of Bene’t and Trumpington the golden hands of Corpus glint in the sun while Chronophage, his greed insatiable, eats time with every tick, tick, tick of the glimmering clock.

At night the Climbers steal through the streets to scale the walls of Trinity. From their lofty perches they peer down at the city, the market only a speck of green, blue, red, and white.

On the River Cam, Sir Isaac built (or so they say) a bridge without a bolt or screw, but once apart not a soul could decide how to put it back together.

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G ale

Katie Williams

Chalk and charcoal on tar paper 30" Ă— 24"

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Eclips e : Ju ly 1 1 , 1 9 91 John Austin Gray

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“Let there be,” he flipped a switch, “light.”

The light moved from the pair of green-shaded lamps mounted on the wall, faster than anything in the universe, to the man lying in bed. He slid both hands from underneath the scratchy sheets and rubbed his eyes for several seconds before focusing them across the motel room to the wet-haired man, already dressed, standing at the light switch by the sink. The man in bed let out a wide yawn before saying good morning.

“Yes, it is,” replied the professor, who sat himself down on the bed closest to the bathroom to put on his shoes. When he was done, he began combing through his wallet.

Aaron cast off the flower-print comforter and began walking towards the shower, taking a change of clothes with him just as the professor had done. The water pressure was good, better than at home. When he shut the water off, he could faintly hear the professor’s voice in the next room over the low hum of the bathroom fan.

He came out of the bathroom in shorts and a t-shirt, his Dopp kit and dirty boxers under one arm, his towel hanging around the back of his neck. The professor was on the phone. Aaron packed his toiletries into his overnight bag and listened to the half-conversation.

“Yes, I will be sure to let you know if we change our minds, but thank you. Goodbye.” The professor placed the phone back on the receiver and asked Aaron if he was ready to go. Aaron nodded.

As they were leaving Tucson, Aaron checked the dashboard. The gas tank was mostly full. The trip-meter read 977.4 miles.

“We should make a pit stop in Yuma. How far is that?”

“Two-hundred, maybe two-fifty. If we don’t get into traffic, I guess we’ll be there for a late lunch.” They drove without much talking, their tires pulling them west. But since the earth spins eastward, you could think about them as mostly standing still, with the earth moving underneath them.

They stopped for breakfast at a Carl’s Jr. Grease made the paper under the professor’s sausage croissant look glossy and translucent. Aaron just had coffee. “Hey, what about that call this morning?” asked Aaron. “Actually, it’s none of my business.”

The professor swallowed. “No, no,” he said. He shifted his weight and the chair legs let out a metallic screech against the tile. “It was 20/20.”

“20/20? Like the 20/20?”

The professor let out one syllable of laughter. “Yeah, ABC. Barbra Walters. 20/20.”

“Good grief, Greg—what where you doing talking to them?”

A bell sounded as an elderly man and his wife walked through the door. “They called last week about having Cath and me on one of their shows. About missing persons. I told them we couldn’t do it.”

Greg’s sixteen-year-old son had disappeared five years ago. He was at a high school football game—told his friends he was going to buy a coke and didn’t come back. His car was in the school’s parking lot. There had been a massive search that went on for weeks: Have You Seen Brian Hadley? Greg and Catherine had been on na-

tional television for a few days, partly because Brian was handsome, wholesome—a baseball player—and partly because of Greg’s position at SMU. The case went cold in a hurry.

Aaron had met Greg seven months prior at a support group for parents who had lost children. The group met in one of the rooms at Cockrell Hill Baptist Church, which made Aaron uncomfortable, but his wife, on the oncologist’s recommendation, pushed him into going.

Professor Hadley was a leader in the group. He liked Aaron immediately, talked to him after the meeting, asked him out for coffee several times, then breakfast, then football games. The Mustangs were terrible that year. They had been since the NCAA had gone crazy with the “death penalty.” In March, Aaron came to one of the professor’s night-lectures on quantum mechanics.

“Yes, hello, I’d like to thank everyone here for coming tonight. Students, I’m going to assume you are here for me and not for the extra credit that a lot of the physics professors are offering. You know, I give a special lecture like this every year, and I always think I should have made the midterm harder, so we’d have a better turnout.”

The student manning the projector laughed.

“The title of my talk tonight is ‘Particle Wave Duality: The Paradox of Modern Physics.’ Now, we’re going to be looking at variations on the Double-Slit experiment, but before we get too much into the nitty-gritty stuff, into the calculus, I want us to talk a little about the big picture. That may sound a little weird, talking about quantum physics.” He waited again for a few chuckles.

“But the fact is, when we study quanta, we are deter-

26

mining what we can know about the universe, and at the quantum level, it’s difficult to pin down the way our universe operates, exactly.”

Aaron, sitting on the fifth row of the lecture hall, didn’t understand half of what his friend was saying, but he agreed with this uncertainty, especially with small things. Small things like six-year-olds and smaller things, like cancer cells.

Greg continued, “This is evident when you look at von Neumann, at collapsed wave functions. But that’s only part of the problem. Slide.” The projector clicked. “Sometimes what we observe throws us for a loop.” Greg went on for another 40 minutes, talking about particles, waves, about Schrödinger, which was a name Aaron recognized.

“So we can’t understand it fully, but we know matter, all matter, has the potential to act as both waves and particles. It’s really hard to get your mind around that.”

The week after the lecture, Greg mentioned the total solar eclipse that was coming that summer. “Something like that sure can put you in your place,” he said.

Aaron didn’t know how to feel about having a “place” like that.

They stopped for the night outside of San Diego, and the following morning, they crossed the Mexican border, following the other tourists, the cars passing one another, moving south on a two-lane road, the Pacific gleaming through a thousand passenger-side windows.

The drive was slow and quiet. Aaron and Greg had been planning this for weeks. They would sleep in their car on the beach. They would eat peanut butter sandwiches and

27

drink water from gallon jugs and try to feel like young men. Aaron spent a lot of time thinking about how he would never have been making this drive in another world, one where he was at home with his daughter.

Aaron spoke for the first time in hours. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Something sciencey.”

The professor thought for a moment. “The sun is so dense and massive and the chemical reactions in it are so complex that the photons emitted at its core take tens of thousands of years to reach the surface, but once they get there, it only takes them eight minutes to travel to earth.”

“Good grief,” said Aaron. “You’d never think that, just looking up at it.”

That night, they came upon a large camp—thousands of people, you could tell even in the pitch black, something about the sound of the air, the same way a big city never sleeps. The ocean air moved through their cracked windows, and the two men sweated in their sleep. Their arms squeaked against the leather seats, which were reclined as far back as the car would allow.

When they awoke the next morning, Greg busied himself with a folder of lecture notes. Aaron read slowly through A Brief History of Time, a gift from the professor.

After a few hours, around 11:00, Greg said it was time, and they got out and sat on the trunk. The other tourists did the same. Greg was looking from car to car, all around them, craning his neck.

The circle of black carved away at the sun in crescents, like a man excavating the earth, but faster. People peered up through welder’s glass or just squinted and turned their eyes as everything around them grew dark like night. The terror of it. The sense that the noonday sun was giving up on them. The ominous halo above their heads, like divine judgment. The crowd of voices went wild. Six minutes, fifty-three seconds. Neither Aaron nor Greg was counting.

Traffic heading out of Mexico was dense. The cars began to dissipate back on the other side of Tijuana, many continuing north towards L.A. Aaron and Greg drove into the sunrise, and in the morning, young, basking, Greg confessed: “I look for him sometimes. I know it sounds crazy, but even back there, or whenever I’m in a crowd, I still sometimes think that I’m going to see him.

He’s almost twenty-two.”

For one moment, Aaron knew there was some terrible comfort in the finality of a headstone. The sun cast a glare over everything—the sand, the road, the windshield.

“Greg.” The road beneath them got smoother. “Do you think he’s dead or alive?”

Greg looked down at his lap. His lips were pressed together, hard. “I don’t know. I....” He breathed deep.

“He might as well be both.”

The quietness of the road, the sound of motion, its silence. “I’m sorry.” The tires pulled on the earth beneath them. The flat desert around them didn’t seem to change, as if they weren’t moving.

They stopped again for breakfast, this time at an IHOP. Enough time had passed so that they could talk

now. Aaron sipped his coffee. “Greg,” he said, to a man with a mouthful of Colorado Omelet, “why don’t you want to be on 20/20?”

“Why would they want me to be on 20/20?” He paused as if his question wasn’t rhetorical. “That show wanted me and Catherine and two other families to just talk about it. National Television. And why? I asked them, why after five years do they care about how we are doing?” He stuck another bite of omelet on his fork.

“They said that they wanted to show the world the ‘devastation of losing a child.’”

“Why don’t you let them?”

“Human interest pieces… housewives watch them all over, hearing about some sad story that happened halfway across the country or the world. They don’t need to feel that. They don’t have the right to. It’s like they’re getting off.” He put the food in his mouth, chewed, and swallowed. “They can’t feel this. And even if they could, it wouldn’t make me feel any better.”

“What about the group? What about us? I think we share pain.”

“I hope we do.” He chose his words carefully. “But I don’t feel your pain when you talk about your daughter, just like you don’t feel mine when we talk about Brian.

It’s this. Eating. Driving. This.” He gestured over the table. “I have to believe you know what I’m feeling. I hope you know what I mean. I have faith in this.”

Aaron smiled. “Careful, science guy. With faith.”

They left the restaurant and got back on the road.

They sat quiet as the car headed east, traveling faster than the globe was spinning.

28

b ios.

Senior English and history major Gracie Wise may or may not sleep with her eyes taped shut.

Senior English and philosophy major John Austin Gray is what we talk about when we talk about love.

Sophomore English minor Zack Clemmons can levitate birds, but no one cares.

In sophomore English major Grace Pepper’s opinion, the best way to wake up is with omelets and Johnny Cash.

Olivia Skelton, senior English major, is the danger.

In the summer, sophomore English major Olivia Winters tends to her zinnia garden.

Junior art major Katie Williams is still trying to find a way to be a designer-illustrator-photographer-sculptor-aesthetician.

Senior English major Megan Pinckard is kind of like Disney princess meets Southern gothic.

Senior art major Betsy Marsch thinks the best part of senior year is walking barefoot through fresh clover.

Andrew Hamaker, senior English major, is never more taken by the world’s deep current of sorrow than when eating artichokes.

Julia Hembree, senior art major, likes men with muscles.

Senior English major Laura Little is waiting for the year King Uzziah dies.

When asked if she was a bird whisperer, senior zoology major Chelsea Cothran replied, “yes.” She was wrong.

Kristen Witham, junior ceramics major, is 50% cozy grandma and 50% reckless teenager.

Allison Bucknell, senior creative writing major, is all for running in downpours and grilled cheese with jam.

Senior art major Ellen Cline’s hands are little; her features are small; her shoulders slope down; she’s a lil’ guy.

Senior art major Hilary Borden struggles with things like bios because art.

Junior English major Stephanie Traylor has an imaginary pet dragon named Muffin.

Victoria Brooks, senior English major, used to have a pet hedgehog. (He is now in hedgehog heaven. RIP, Sushi.)

e d i to rs.

Gracie Wise John Austin Gray

e d i to ri al staf f .

Zack Clemmons Grace Pepper Olivia Skelton Olivia Winters

de si gn.

Katie Williams

f ac u lty sp o n so r.

Bobby Rogers

Uni o n Un ive rsi ty