Green Blotter 2015

Green Blotter is produced by the Green Blotter Literary Society of Lebanon Valley College, Annville, Pennsylvania. Submissions are accepted from October through February. Green Blotter is published yearly in a print magazine and is archived on the following website. For more information and submission guidelines, please visit: www.lvc.edu/greenblotter

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GREEN BLOTTER Editors-in-Chief Kammi Trout ‘15 Nikki Wilhelm ‘15 Editor Hunter Heath ‘16 Art Editors Molly Gertenbach ‘16 Dylan Rigg ‘16 Fiction Editor Sara Urner ‘16 Assistant Fiction Editor Sydney Fuhrman ‘18 Poetry Editor Bethany Mary ‘15 Assistant Poetry Editor Jessica Coughlin ‘17 Design Team Molly Gertenbach ‘16 Dylan Rigg ‘16 Advisor Sally Clark

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CONTENTS If Winter Comes Black Cat Archaeology Palimpsest København i regnvejr An Apology Stadtmusik To be Philosopher is Inhuman model Dead Woman Angry Self-Therapy die Vergangenheit lebt noch Untitled Business as Usual model 2 afterlives Fairytales la lune de miel dreamcatcher Steph (The Selfie Project) A Ceramic Home Untitled One Year Brad Untitled Matt Owl Street Tunnel

Martin Groff Michelina Marsico Nicole Byrne Paul Ricks Scott Reagan Katherine Tozer Scott Reagan J.P. Goss Nicole Breighner Michelina Marsico Kayla Klugow Scott Reagan Billy Gartrell Ben McCormick Nicole Breighner Dani Neiley Audrey Reiley Susanna Betts Dani Neiley Rebecca Wohrhach Loren Smith Billy Gartrell Alex Thomas Nicole Breighner Hannah Dieringer John DiCocco J.P. Goss

Cover Art

Billy Gartrell

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1 10 11 12 13 14 16 17 19 20 21 24 25 26 33 34 35 38 39 40 41 42 43 45 46 47 48

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Dear Reader, Well, this is it. Another year has come and gone. This is our final issue as editors-in-chief of Green Blotter, and we couldn’t be more proud of the journal we’ve compiled for the 2015 year. Undergraduate work never seems to receive the recognition it deserves, which is why we continue to seek out the best writers and artists of our generation.

Every year we struggle to select the best pieces because the submissions are overflowing with talent. It is difficult to judge creativity because of its subjective nature, but we believe we have chosen the best submissions to represent undergraduate artists and writers.

As always, we are eternally grateful to our editing and design team for all of their hard work and dedication. It’s a relief to know we are leaving the Green Blotter in good hands after we leave. And, once again, the biggest shout out goes to our advisor, Sally Clark, who always supports and encourages us.

We hope you enjoy this edition of Green Blotter!

Sincerely, The Editors-in-Chief Kammi Trout ‘15 Nikki Wilhelm ‘15

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If Winter Comes Martin Groff Bill stood looking at the Plymouth thoughtfully as Wes was still making his way out of the meeting house. “Still drivin’ that ol’ Acclaim?” he asked when he heard Wes’s footsteps close behind him.

“Evidently.”

“How many miles ya’ got on ‘er?”

Wes thought a minute. “About a hundred thousand,” he said dryly.

“Sure kept ‘er in good shape,” Bill said, wiping a streak of dust from the burgundy paint. His eyes followed the red pinstripe from the trunk to the hood. Indeed, he could not find a scratch on the old car, though the conservative square design definitely betrayed its age. “Thinkin’ of gettin’ a new one soon?”

“Maybe.”

“I hear you can get a good deal on the ’99 Hondas still on the lots. They’re clearin’ out for the models of the new millennium.”

“Plymouth has always done right by my family.”

“I read an article predictin’ they won’t be makin’ ‘em much longer,” Bill replied.

“All the more reason to get another one while I still can.” A silence commenced between the two men, but the voices of the other township committee and community members continued to flutter around about them.

“You ain’t still mad at me, are ya’?”

“I can’t fault you for having your own opinion,” Wes replied quietly.

Bill sighed. “I’m tellin’ ya’, it’s what’s best for the community. Jack just opened that shop down at the corner. The new development’ll make lots ‘a business. And they’ll upgrade your road. The traffic shouldn’t be an issue for you or anyone.”

“You know what I think. I’ve spoken my peace, and you’re not going to change my mind.”

Bill tried to think of something to say, but before anything came to him he turned at a shuffle of footsteps. Wes’s elderly mother was approaching with her characteristic feebleness, his wife Jane at her side.

“Ah, Mrs. Divers!” Bill said with a humoring smile. “You look nice this evenin’, as always! Those pearl earrings! And that dress is very pretty—sky blue. It brings out your eyes!”

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“Oh, listen to you!” was all she managed to say; she was focusing most of her attention on her careful steps, and Jane seemed to be watching them just as intently, expecting some sort of a falter.

“Jane,” Bill said, greeting her with some uncertainty. “You were quiet this evenin’. I hope ya’ ain’t mad at me too.”

“No, not at all. And neither is Wes. He just has to get used to the idea. He’s always loved that field. It’ll be a big change to see it covered in houses.”

“And how ‘bout you, Mrs. Divers?” Bill said to the old woman in a somewhat patronizing tone.

“Won’t it be interestin’ to have so many new neighbors, all packed in ‘cross the street?”

“Oh, Bill, you know I’m too old for change. My husband used to till that field. I’m sure I’ll be sad to see it go, not that I’ve been able to enjoy it for several years.”

Wes opened the back door and helped his mother into the vehicle, and Bill peeked inside over his shoulder. Wes kept the seats as pristine as the paint, but the red plush upholstery was a definite product of the previous decade. “I hear you’re thinking of getting a new car,” he said to Jane.

“That’s the first I’ve heard of it,” she replied, “although this one is over ten years old now.”

“That’s nothin’. I remember that ’58 Belvedere Wes used to have,” Bill laughed.

“You think I don’t? He drove it all through when we were dating, and then after we were married, even when our daughter Leslie was born... and it was his father’s before that. You know, he told me once he was going to keep it for when Leslie went to college. But I wouldn’t have that. I’m sure he’d still own it if there had been a place to store it.” They began to laugh, except for Wes, and his mother who probably hadn’t heard the conversation.

“It was a good car,” Wes said with a seriousness that stifled their chuckling immediately.

“I don’t doubt it,” Bill replied with a sudden solemnity, “but... well, I guess I’d better get going.

It’ll be gettin’ dark soon and I still have some things to do outside.”

Wes smiled slightly and nodded as his old friend walked away. It was indeed getting dark, but the October twilights had been waning so quickly that Wes doubted Bill would be home in time to get any work done outside.

Once he and Jane were in their usual front seats, Wes looked back to make sure his mother was settled. She stared absentmindedly out the window as he started the engine and coasted out of the parking space. “Are you really thinking about getting a new car?” Jane asked.

“Not really. I would have told you first. But I guess it is about time,” he replied.

By now they were on the main road, heading toward home.

“Why were you so short with Bill?” Jane asked after a pause.

“We don’t see eye to eye on many things. It wasn’t anything personal. I’m just disappointed with 2

the decision they made tonight.”

“Well, I think it was inevitable. No one has farmed that field since your father died. You certainly didn’t want to do it. Isn’t that why you sold it to the neighbors in the first place?”

“I needed that money to pay for college.”

“Well, you didn’t major in agriculture. It was always clear that you wanted nothing to do with that line of work.”

That hadn’t been it at all. Mathematics, not agriculture, had been his talent, and that wasn’t something that was under his control. “Sometimes I wonder if you’re not on their side.”

“Well, maybe I am,” Jane said firmly, but not meanly. “It makes sense for the township. The developer is even going pay for road upgrades once the building starts.”

Wes puffed sarcastically. “Do you believe Bill when he says that’s going to counteract the traffic?

They’re not building one house on that land, Jane. It’s more than twenty.”

“You never seem to take Bill very seriously. Sometimes I wonder if it’s just because of the way he talks.”

“Jane, Bill and I are friends. We grew up together. Somehow, though, we just have a different vision for the community. That’s all there is to it,” Wes said with some aggravation.

“Why is it that you want that field to sit there? What good is it doing anyone?”

“Once they build houses on it, it will be gone forever. That part of our town’s history, and its humble simplicity will be vanished without a trace.”

“But what value does that have if no one is using it?”

Wes didn’t answer, and the car became silent aside from the rumbling of the road beneath it.

Finally his mother, whom they did not expect had even been listening, spoke. “I’m just an old woman.

I’m too old for change.” Wes hoped Jane didn’t think those were his sentiments. He simply couldn’t articulate what he really thought. He wasn’t even sure he understood it himself.

The car pulled into the driveway and sat shining a moment in the moonlight. Wes didn’t want to move. There was something comfortable there; the car was warm, the seat soft. For a moment it seemed that, perhaps if they didn’t move, the conversation would freeze also, and give him a moment to think.

Jane waited for Wes to make the first move; to pull the keys out of the ignition or open the door, but after a few moments of stillness, the placidity of the situation began to give way to a subtle awkwardness, and she opened the door and stepped out of the car. The noise of the latch snapped Wes out of his daze and he quickly exited the car as well, aiding his mother out of the back seat ritualistically.

She began to hobble toward the porch, the moon turning her white hair into quicksilver.

Wes did not follow; instead, he stood a moment looking out toward the field, the place whose 3

eternal fate had just a few minutes ago been decided. He stood watching the meadow, the woods, the marshy pond, all of which looked almost snowy under the light of the moon and stars.

“The idea will just take some getting used to. You just have to adjust—get through that time, and you’ll see things in a new light,” Jane said, walking around the front of the car. “It’s like Shelley wrote. If winter comes, can spring be far behind?”

Wes stared out at the scene a few moments longer, hearing only his mother’s shuffling footsteps and the breathing of his wife behind him. He turned halfway to her with melancholy smile, and replied, “The woods are lovely, dark and deep.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He was looking at the field again. “You quoted a poem, so I did too.”

“At least mine was relevant.”

Wes watched a bat twist through the air near the barn at the edge of the property. He wanted to go to sleep but it was still too early.

“Wes! Wes!” his mother’s voice choked out.

“Just a minute, I’ll help you,” he replied, rushing over to the old woman as she struggled up the porch steps. The railing was loose and he didn’t trust her weight on it.

“I’m just an old woman,” she said as he took her arm, “I’m too old.”

He didn’t bother replying, but held the door for her and watched her go into the kitchen without turning on the light. They had recently moved her room to the first floor behind the kitchen because she had become too weak to climb to the second floor. “Do you need any more help?” he called in.

“No, dear. Goodnight,” was the answer.

Jane was already heading up the staircase. As he followed behind her slowly he saw his mother empty her purse onto the kitchen table in the moonlight, and sit down on a chair underneath the telephone.

Jane went to bed early, but Wes sat up awhile in his office watching the meadow, something he had also done the evening before. Yesterday it had been different; he had seen it washed in the red rays of the evening sunset. The small marshy pond near the center of the field, which usually was covered in scum and debris, had cleared up somewhat since the first frost, and spots of clear water had reflected the evening sky. Vibrant like the trees surrounding the clearing, the scarlet tint had been more than his eyes could take in, like a deteriorated Kodak slide. As the light faded, he occasionally thought he saw movement in the field—horses near the pond. For a few moments he would watch, motionless, as the wispy figures walked through the grass and bended to graze or drink. Cows were heading toward the 4

barn to be milked, children bounding after them. But then he would blink, and they would be gone.

Were they memories or premonitions? Were the trees dying for a long winter, or were they simply planting seeds for next spring?

Tonight he was too late for the sunset, so instead he watched as the piercingly white moon rose; it was nearly full, and cast an impressive glow through the clear night. He watched it guide dreamy figures in from the field, pulling wagons of corn and hay in behind them, but vanishing before they reached the barn. It seemed to him the land was still breathing; there was still a spirit there that was calling out for life, for more history. Yet he knew he was not the only one who heard that call.

A wispy flicker. Startled, he stood up. It was not like the images he had been watching before.

No, this had been more real, more strange. Had he imagined it? He was answered when it came again, this time from further to the left of the pond, in a boggy area that in daylight he had observed was populated only by mossy, rotting logs. The blue glow flashed a third time there, and then seemed to draw back further into the brush like a lantern. It had frightened him at first, but it now seemed somehow peaceful, and suddenly he wished he could go out to it, to find it. Jane’s cat had crept into the room sometime during this show and was now sleeping in front of him on the windowsill. He had forgotten she was there until her ears suddenly perked up, their silhouette cutting into this view out the window pane.

They were twitching, back and forth, agitated. Her head shot up at the sound of a thump from somewhere from inside the house.

Wes had frozen at the noise, and watched the cat cautiously stand up and rush out the door of his study as if to investigate. Wes knew he should do the same, but was hindered as another sound met his ear: whispers. As the first black tone touched his ear, it seemed to send needles of cold into his spine, from top to bottom and up again.

He listened, utterly paralyzed for a moment, trying to make out what they were saying, where they were coming from. The words were jumbled, like three or four people talking on top of one each other. At first they seemed to be all around his head, in the air, coming from nowhere and everywhere, but gradually they receded into the core of the house. Yet this was even more elusive; whatever it was, it was inside, but he had no idea where.

Gingerly he turned his body toward the door. His lungs failed him suddenly, his stomach knotted, but it was only the shadow of a picture frame on the wall he had seen, at the height of a man’s head. He took a deep breath and tried to be rational. He had been immersed in the silence all night, conscious, aware. No one had entered the house, otherwise he certainly would have heard it. No one had stirred since his wife and mother had gone to bed, and he was sure the doors were locked. Perhaps he was hearing echoes of the past, like the visions he had been having not long before.

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But those sounds were there, they were real, they were almost tangible, so heavy that he was tempted to reach out and try to grab one of the voices. But still they originated from the core of the house, and he could not tell if it was one of the bedrooms on the second floor or somewhere on the first.

It occurred to him suddenly that perhaps they were coming from outside. Perhaps a group was preparing to break in, and this consideration disturbed him more than anything else had.

The hall was black as he stepped into it. Part of him longed for a light, yet he also was relieved to be immersed in the darkness, invisible and somewhat safe. He stopped mid stride at the sound of a very close creak. Had it been his own feet? He suddenly felt very cold and tired, a hard tiredness that seemed to physically press upon him. He longed to close his eyes, but the voices were continuing, and now he could tell that they were flowing up the stairwell from the first floor, winding around the banister, the shadow of which he saw laying angularly upon the stairs.

The first step, the second and third were overcome, and he was nearing a place where he could look around the railing to the hall below. His feet fast in their positions, he leaned his body forward, and strained his neck to look between the balusters. The whispering stopped, and he paused for a moment to consider what this meant. Maybe it had been the old furnace. This was the first time they had used it this year—there would be dust in the ducts, maybe cobwebs. That must have been it.

Comforted by the realization, he tried to peer into the living room, but it was too dark. The kitchen was easier to see, and he was surprised at how bright it was, bathed in blue moonlight, the rays of which seemed to beam visibly through the blinds of the window above the sink.

He stopped cold for the third time, trying to let his eyes adjust. He thought he saw a figure, motionless and doll like, or rather like a wax statue, sitting on a chair by the far doorway that led from the kitchen into the dining room. The coiled phone cord sat curled on its head where it hung from the receiver above, surrounded in wiry hairs, a mercuric color, though through the shadows he could not make out anything distinctly. It wore an old fashioned dress, sitting rigid and motionless, but still he could not see the face. Shadowed by the hair, it was like a black void in the blue scene, haunting and phantom-like, the faceless specter of death itself.

Yet as he watched it, it remained compellingly motionless, and though his eyes insisted there was some ghoul there, staring at him, his mind began to question it, and move his feet closer. He continued down the stairs and rounded the banister, walking across the hall and pausing at the kitchen entrance. He stared at the figure for a moment, and began to make out its nose and mouth, blank eyes, the moonlike pearl earrings and sky blue dress. She did not breathe, she did not move. He switched on the lights, but they cast a yellow glow and he turned them off again. Part of him wanted to call out to her, but there would be no answer. He walked slowly toward her, saying nothing. What could he do?

She was already gone.

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On November 3rd, an early snow glazes the cemetery where Wes’s mother has been buried.

Not far up the road, where the living still occupy her former haunt, the snow has drifted across two Plymouths: one shining vaguely purple under the powdery snow, the other, maroon, sitting venerably square with a “For Sale” sign in its windshield.

Faintly through the windows of the old house the sound of a news program is heard from the driveway—something about the end of an era, a once popular automotive brand to be phased out—but across the street, in the vacant field, it is quiet. Snowy and ilent, sitting silver under the gray sky.

But wait—do you hear it? Approaching from the distance, a sound metallic but gentle— certainly not a car in this weather, but too dainty to be the harsh blade of a plow truck. It’s getting closer, more articulate now; it seems to be the sound of bells, shaking on the harness of a horse. And now you can make out the sliding sound of a sledge pulled behind, gliding through the deepening downy flakes.

Faintly it comes into view, illusively transparent, the apparition of a solitary man and sleigh riding on the road, slowing down between the woods and frozen pond as the evening darkens. He pulls on the reigns and the horse stops, expecting to pause for but a moment, yet the driver seems more determined to stay, to simply watch the woods, to observe the snow filling every crevice of the tired, empty landscape. To watch it vanish under mounds of blank white cold.

The easy wind reminds him of his journey, and they take off aga n, the bells jumping back to life, passing by the warm house across the street, and slipping around the bend. As the sound fades into memory, you wonder if it had even really been there at all.

The first morning of spring, an occasion his wife had reminded him of the day before, Wes lay late in bed, staring at the ceiling. There was a crack in it, one he had never noticed, or maybe it was newly formed. It seemed to radiate from the light fixture in the center of the room toward the window, only reaching it about half way, but still glaringly obvious. He traced it a few times with his eyes, quickly and then slowly, noticing islands of plaster in a few places where the single crack had forked and then come together again, and a section where the crack was much wider than average. He wondered what he would need to fix it, and how long it would take.

By now the sun was shining though the blinds, casting yellow lines of light on the opposite wall.

Jane was still asleep; it was Saturday and there was no point in waking her. A beam of light reached from the window and terminated somewhere he couldn’t see, somewhere behind her back. He leaned up to peer over her shoulder but he still couldn’t discern where the ray ended. It just seemed to fade into nothingness.

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The cat was at the foot of the bed as usual, sleeping softly. Wes moved his legs a little and the cat’s head shot up, but her eyes still squinted, groggy. He watched her for a moment, expecting her to fall back asleep, but she did not. Her ears were twitching, and soon Wes could hear why. There was a strange sound outside, not quite like a roar, but not a moan either; it was a steady hum, and a scratching sound. And then he heard voices.

He slid out from underneath the covers. It was cold on his bare feet, and all he wore were light shorts. Grabbing a white t-shirt and pulling it on, he made his way toward the window and peered through the blinds. He thought he could make out some movement across the street, but the oak tree in front of the house was blocking most of his view. He realized that, though most of the branches were starting to bud, one of them was clearly dead. He looked town toward the ground to see how he might reach it, but it was hard to tell. Maybe it would fall on its own.

He walked quietly down the steps, becoming numb to the cold air. The vibrations from outside were getting louder; the walls of the house seemed to shake with it. Yellow sunlight was pouring in through the window above the front door, and he squinted as he approached it, unlocking and opening it.

Yesterday the green field had been there, flecked with early spring flowers. He had watched small early butterflies hopping from blossom to blossom, and seen a small herd of deer grazing with their speckled fawns. But spring was gone from this plot of land; today the only spot of color or life was the bright yellow bulldozer moving back and forth loudly. The rest of the field had turned into contoured mud. Already he could make out one of the street beds, the closest end of which was marked with a white sign announcing: “Coming Soon: The Meadows Estates.”

As he stepped outside, his bare feet scraping on the splintered porch reminded him he wasn’t wearing much. There wasn’t any reason for him to go further, but his feet carried him to the edge of the porch anyway.

His mother’s flower garden had not been tended since last summer; it was beginning to grow tall with feathery weeds. Behind the patch, the silver Mayflower logo of his car winked at him, fake chrome coated in plastic, stamped onto a grille that was stamped onto a car. Wes wondered vaguely what the pilgrims would think of their colony today. Not that it mattered; they didn’t live there anymore, and it was not their right to judge.

A group of men in orange vests and hardhats stood next to the vehicle at the edge of his property. They glanced over at him for a moment, their conversation pausing. They seemed to expect him to say something, but he was silent, and they went back to discussing their blueprints. What could he say anyway? It was already gone.

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The speed limit had been reduced in preparation for new traffic lights along Wes’s road, and he hadn’t realized it. That’s why he had been speeding. According to the old signs, the ones he had grown up with, he hadn’t been out of line.

“Where’re you in such a hurry to?” the officer said, not unfriendly.

“Nowhere in particular. I just wanted to go for a drive.”

“You know how fast you were goin’?”

“I guess around 60,” Wes replied.

“You realize this is a 45 zone?”

“No, officer. I actually didn’t know that.”

The policeman looked at him a moment through his sunglasses, and Wes listened to the silence, tainted by bulldozer engines. “You ain’t from around here, are you?” he finally said.

“No,” Wes sighed. “I guess not.”

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Black Cat Michelina Marsico

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Archaeology Nicole Byrne You’ve left me stranded in the record store, with thirty-year-old ballads cycling through the speakers trying to convince me that you don’t know what you got till it’s gone.

You’ve left so many impromptu excursion artifacts next to my nightstand, under my loveseat, in my medicine cabinet, my fridge, my bed,

There’s a film left on my fingers from all the times we tore up heart-healthy whole-grain stone-ground wheat bread into bite-sized chunks to feed to herds of Mallard ducks.

I’ve got no space for all of these outdated road maps, quotes from your favorite novella, Big Mac wrappers, the smell of your shirt.

I’ve got no room for you.

I’ve spent more time sleeping shotgun in your Chevy than in my own bed and that’s a memory that will reside in the curve of my spine for the rest of my life.

What am I supposed to do with this Ferris wheel and these bumper cars and all of these corn dogs and funnel cakes and bags of pink and blue cotton candy?

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Palimpsest Paul Ricks We have forgotten when the sun set on the shoulder of a god and the moon was pulled by horses, eyes wide with terror. Forgotten that the earth was curved, then flat and filled with monsters and the sky had gods and heroes before heaven, which was before it had only clouds of rocks and dust and nothing.

We burned libraries of papyrus and buried Hebrew scrolls deep beneath the bones of lost seas, and in a moment of nostalgia we erase trash from ancient streets and find misery a creation of modern times. We will banish it by forcing our memory down till it yields to revision.

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København i regnvejr Scott Reagan

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An Apology Katherine Tozer The twisting two-lane highways of the Midwest always help me exhale. I can drive for hours without music or conversation, just watching the landscape change. Past Chicago, the concrete fields and billboard trees turn to grass, wildflowers, and pines. These ribbons of life bordering roads make up a disturbing amount of America’s “wilderness.” I don’t think we should congratulate ourselves too heartily for the tufts of land we haven’t poured concrete over yet. The roadsides are undeveloped, sure, but hardly unadulterated.

A teenager in a decked out pick-up threw his McDonald’s trash out the window in front of me this weekend when I drove back to Indiana from Michigan. I noticed a pigeon picking through trash a little later on. It seemed like the universe was hoping to get a reaction out of me. Like my heightened awareness was punishment for attending the hippie-dippy conservationist conference in Lansing. My dad’s spirit, mocking me. He had worked in a manufacturing plant in South Bend and could never see why he should take a pay cut to limit the thousands of pounds of released toxins.

I wish I had counted the road kill. When I started driving, at fifteen, I used to flinch and focus determinedly forward when I saw road kill ahead; this weekend I studied it. Mostly squirrels, some raccoons, all at various stages of decay. By decay I really mean obliteration. The stages of decomposition depend on traffic. After the initial hit, untold numbers of subsequent blows grind blood, bone, and tissue into the road until it looks like an oil stain.

I saw hawks flying above and wondered if they played a part in the cleanup too. Hopefully they’re still hunters. I love hawks. I warned one away from the road under my breath, away from me in my ’97 Jeep Cherokee. It’s white, or it was once, with a bug shield on the hood like a uni-brow. The bug shield directs currents of air up above my windshield. Sometimes big bugs don’t make it over and I get to look at their splattered guts until the next gas station.

At the conference, an assortment of mousy and weathered business people and academics drafted pleas to our state governments on behalf of the Great Lakes. Among the proposed measures were to limit road building, expand protected land, and enforce pollution laws. The group spanned from late-twenties to mid-fifties, but our energy was younger, like my dad’s when he watched his Fighting Irish.

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I had NPR on my radio and GPS on my lap as I wound down the four-lane ribbon framed by trees, tall because there were no power lines to bow to. Then a meaty thump jarred me and there was more than bug gut on the glass. A flash of feather, a smear of blood. My breath caught, hands clenched, one on the wheel and one over my gaping mouth. I wanted to make some show of an apology, but I didn’t stop. By the time I looked back I couldn’t see it. Where had it landed? Could it be alive still? Were those feathers blue or brown? There was nothing to do but spray washer fluid and run the wipers back and forth.

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Stadtmusik Scott Reagan

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To be Philosopher is Inhuman J.P. Goss The sun rose pink over Lancaster; Its frozen rains came quick in tow— Here, we sense the passive and the active: To take the drag or pull: He is dragged by the way of the automatic hand-to-mouth; The Other, is my command— But that, even, impelled snowfully toward A closed fist, a locked grasp, an unwilling departure.

I suggest a dislocation somewhere in parallax: Take paper dimensions and fold them 104 times And everything flattens out— The ocular inversion becomes like-real; I’ll swim in that!

Puddles are dragged by the wind, whilst the pull thinks in spite Of I, its strange corpus of author, and opus Drags to the creature of appetite deign to call to order.

But a power powerless to its name given it: Destined desiring of sunnier metaphors— The alcoves of the thread, brought to just us Caesuras of what satisfies, in food, in just us The depth of image holds true: one cannot live on bread alone.

Thus, I muse and mull back to locks of hair and bellybuttons Waiting, in time—the deepening of time’s cloth Where my hand caresses her thigh— One can feel the gravity pressing on the heart, All the love that self-reflects, combs out the wrinkles, And has faith in the good inertia.

By this secular host consubstantiate And Other (surely a pleasing affair) is but moments away.

And she and I look so pretty together, 17

Our is of whom and what and the third conditional.

That which presses upon itself, the one dimension, Cannot disentangle from name or alliance, nor faith, Greedily picking at the oily ruptures, effulging in transparence, Contradictions care not for astrology, And whether you are poetry Is not important here.

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model Nicole Breighner

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Dead Woman Michelina Marsico 20

Angry Self-Therapy Kayla Klugow Tell me about how hard your life is and about how your mother didn’t love you like you thought she should have.

How she didn’t hold you close enough or rub your back when you were upset.

Tell me how you know you shouldn’t complain because at least you have a mother, at least she came to your soccer games in first grade and watched you sit down at the goalie line and at least she was at your track meets in middle school and stood alert at the finish line as you came in second to last and at least you knew who she was.

Tell me how guilty you feel for wanting more.

Tell me how sometimes it feels like you could pour your insides out before her with all their unsaid words and too-forced smiles and time-ripped moments of those things you really wanted to be, those things you can’t help but dig your fingers into and she would tell you pour them back into yourself, that she didn’t have time for that or, worse, look right past you as if you weren’t even there, weren’t fragmenting into space before her.

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Tell me how you want to reach your hands out for her, just to make sure it’s still her and just to make sure she hasn’t wandered back off into the void, wandered off, away from your needy hands and your wanting words and left you here to be without her while she’s right there beside you.

Tell me how you don’t, how you keep your hands rigidly at your sides, fingernails pricking blood from the pads of your palms because you’d rather not know, rather keep not knowing, rather go to bed not knowing if your meal was to ramen and frozen broccoli for the next week and trying to be quiet because she’s cocooned in her duvet and won’t move except for shuffled trips to the bathroom and frenzied rushes away to go God knows what.

Tell me how you wish it wasn’t like this, wish you didn’t have to live like this, wish your world was back the way it was before her depression and her anxiety and whatever else is needling at her psyche sunk their rotting fingers in and tell me how you feel just like your father for doubting her, for blaming her, for shoving the burden onto her when you can’t make contact with her anymore.

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Tell me how even if she beats this thing, even if she remembers that you need her, even if she starts making chili again, and singing off-key along to Shania Twain like when you were little, like when you were happy, that there’s still all these broken parts to both of you, still all these missed communications and odd silences and pieces between who you once knew and who you’ll know again.

Tell me how she wouldn’t know who you are now, how this has gone on too long and that you’re so different now you feel as though she won’t have met you.

How she’s like a stranger on the street with sad eyes and a wind-chapped face and if you brushed her hand both going for the free cookies at the bank, there’d be nothing there, she wouldn’t know who you are, wouldn’t know what your life is like now.

But, tell me how you hope softly to yourself, anyway, that things might be the same.

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die Vergangenheit lebt noch Scott Reagan

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untitled Billy Gartrell

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Business as Usual Ben McCormick On a long enough timeline, gravity kills everybody. Rich, poor, skinny, fat, Tupac, Mary Tyler Moore, it’s what we all have in common. Someday we’ll be pushing up daisies in our Sunday best. And one frigid night after fifty-four years of life, gravity sprawled Roland Gordon out like a busted yolk on the corner of Nicolette and East Thirteenth. A corner almost entirely void of human presence.

Except for me.

It doesn’t matter how cold it gets, a city government will close everything but its parking commission, one of any city’s only profitable ventures. They’ll declare martial law before we’ll stop giving out parking tickets. So there I was, a parking checker in my government-owned jeep whistling CCR tunes to my busted radio, when I witnessed gravity’s ruthless murder of Roland Gordon.

Most nights, Nicolette and East Thirteenth looks more like a colony of bees. Socialites and business types come and go, out to dinner or making the evening commute. But this night the streets were empty except for dead Roland Gordon and I. The crossing signal casting a long shadow over his body held a fading “DON’T WALK,” and tonight, Roland Gordon was much obliged. It was the sort of cold you enter the same way you plunge into water. With a deep breath.

His greasy black comb over matted to his head the same way his dead face matted to the pavement. His dead fat burgeoned out of his dead tweed suit and his dead socks didn’t match his dead feet, like a lonesome, poorly dressed and, yes, dead pancake. But the scene caused no commotion.

Nobody panicked in the streets, 911 operators sat silent by their phones.

Now I understand if you look at me and wonder why I didn’t bother to call 911 right away. It’s simply because, in the case of Roland Gordon, it wasn’t an emergency. No chance the guy was alive. I’d seen someone die before. I know what it looks like. Nobody else was around that night to get all bent out of shape, so I just kept whistling. Parked in front of a fire hydrant. Like any other day.

Every night before I go to bed and every morning when I wake up I do ten knee bends at my bedside to keep my legs in shape. Because I know gravity’s out to get me. When I was five I used to stare at my grandfather’s Gulf War Navy portraits. I didn’t understand how in the pictures he stood so tall and handsome, but now he needed my shoulder for balance. The wrinkles sunk his face and wilted his back. I didn’t understand what I know now, that gravity is a slow, inevitable killer. I stood as straight as a kindergartner could so he’d lean on me and say, “A man serves his country, grandson. A man goes to war.”

Now I went to war when I was eighteen, hunched in Humvees all over the goddamned desert, but I didn’t care for war and it didn’t care much for me. “Honorable” or “dishonorable,” it was an 26

amicable departure. One sticking me in a government jeep that, although not much better than the Humvee, at least let me sit up straight. That’s how I started dishing out justice in the form of parking tickets second shift, in the jeep with the city shield on the side in Oh-say-can-you-see-yes-we-can blue.

Just before I got out of that jeep to give Roland Gordon his ticket, minutes before he died, I did the same thing I’ve made a habit of always doing. I stretched my legs.

Doctors would later call it an aneurysm. That a neuron inside Roland Gordon’s brain exploded, collapsing his nervous and circulatory systems. That he was dead in an instant. That he didn’t feel a thing. That it was no one’s fault. That it could have been festering inside his (abnormally spacious) skull for twenty years. That it could have happened at any time. And it was only by pure chance it happened just moments after Roland Gordon found the parking ticket on the dash of his beige Toyota Camry. Still warm, the ink fresh.

It read, “EXPIRED METER: 7AM-7PM.” “$20 IF PAID BY: 12/24/13.”

“TIME: 6:58 PM.” That’s what they’d tell you. That it was all chance. Not that in reality the weight of life adds up one bit at a time. That things like traffic jams, fast food and your mother-in-law calling don’t have anything to do with it. That one day, we just don’t have the strength to get up anymore. That some dick writing a parking ticket written two minutes from its limit could have been the straw that broke Roland Gordon’s back.

I had just gotten back in the jeep and cracked my window for a smoke a quarter block down when I noticed the human groundhog squeezing himself from the ugly Camry. He must have entered the scene while I walked back to the jeep—I had thought myself all alone. He waved his arms and waddled up and down the block the way a penguin looks for its lost young. Or in this case, looks for the asshole that had the balls to give him that parking ticket in his hand. The blood in his cheeks ran red-hot for revenge and his body stiffened, as if Roland Gordon was about to boil over. We locked eyes and his charcoal irises vanished to white.

In the moment between watching the life leave Roland Gordon’ eyes and his fatty exterior hitting the ground like a rag doll, I knew I’d killed him.

I know because I saw it. Because Roland Gordon was looking for me.

Before making the anonymous call into the police station, (see? I’m not a monster) I finished my cigarette. I mean, why rush? When you know a man’s dead you just know.

‘Oh, but Jesus, answer this one prayer if you ever answer any!’ you think I’d say. ‘Please let this man live, he didn’t deserve it!’

Ha-ha, no.

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There’s no divine intervention, no second coming. Gravity is a constant. It has no gray area.

Just like parking laws, it doesn’t answer to anyone and it doesn’t leave anything to chance. They’re both coldly straightforward. I’d been to war and I didn’t see any action. But once you watch a man die, you know it when you see it.

“Ever watch a man die, kid?”

“No, sir.”

I was just an Orderly then, so young, whistling the new Clarence Clearwater Revival record while pushing brooms on death row at the state pen,. Everyone called death row “Block E,” but everyone knew what it was. And this particular day, a man wrongly accused of a double rape-murder was riding the lightning. He was tall and thin, wearing denim overalls. I think his name was Sam-something. We never called any other inmate on death row by his first name except for Sam. My boss was Corporal Donald G. Harris. Really he was a captain at that point, but he went by ‘Corporal’ like he did in the service. I caught him in the middle of his daily shoe polish. He was a good man. His door was always open.

“Then today you don’t start. You’re doing enough for ol’ Sam already. You stay here in Block E until 1700 hours. That’s an order.”

“Yes, sir, Corporal, sir.”

I dressed Sam all nice with the suit his family dropped off before I sent him to the chair. The Corporal quit over the whole disaster, Sam’s death, but I snuck in the side door and watched it all.

You’d be surprised how many doors you assume locked are open if you just try the knob.

I didn’t say much for a while. Days later I was given his suit back to mail off to the next of kin.

Standard procedure. They’d been washed twice, maybe three times, but they still smelled faintly of smoke and charred flesh. I folded them up and found the thrift store tag still hanging out the neck of the sport coat he’d died in, burned half off.

His family couldn’t afford Sam a real suit.

I cried silent, the way icicles drip, and walked myself to the Corporal’s office. His door had been closed for three days and no one had seen him. I knocked a few times before opening it. He was fumbling a tall can of Mickey’s when he saw me in the doorway. He moved his head to his hands and sighed.

“I told you not to watch.”

“I don’t think this job is right for me. I need a transfer,” I said.

The Corporal tried to straighten himself out, but his face trembled as soon as he found the words.

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“Me, too, son. Me, too.”

“The law is the law, right?” I offered.

The law. That got him to stiffen his back long enough to be my boss again.

“You’re eighteen, right?”

“Sir?” He reached for a pad of paper.

“Let me give you the name of a good recruiter…”

I may spend my days a meter maid, but I still know I’m smarter than the new police recruits that turned up at Roland Gordon’s body. The cops they send to a reported dead person are, at best, the B-team. I watched from the jeep, sipping on a tall can of Pabst as the alternating red and blue lights from the squad car ran over my face, patriotic and firm. Don’t judge. You do what you can to keep warm on days like this.

The government gets a lot of shit for not having enough police presence in sketchy parts of town.

But the reality is these rent-a-cops aren’t exactly who you’d want patrolling your streets either, fucking around with the safety off.

They stumbled out of the car. The lanky one elbowed his baby-faced partner in the stomach, giggling into the frosted night.

“Oh yeah? See what these say?” Baby Face says, gesturing to the tattoos on his knuckles. “’SELF MADE.’ Howsabout I tattoo your cheeks with these?”

“Sure,” lanky says, “if you can reach me with those scrawny arms.” He straightened a limb to Baby Face’s head, laughing before they wrestled into each other.

These kids of cops usually pass the academy’s physical tests with flying colors but fail the written ones at least a couple times. This particular job doesn’t take brains, but, especially in Roland Gordon’s case, it takes brawn.

On police comms, the dead-man-in-public is called a “6-1-4,” or “Sahara-Omega-Foxtrot.” A squad car, an ambulance and a black bag is what it means. A dead man had somehow become standard procedure. Business as usual. But something about it seemed real un-usual, even for me. From the quarter block down I was, I could see Roland Gordon still held my parking ticket. Tight like he might have been alive.

The cops’ job while waiting for an ambulance is to move the body out of foot or automotive “traffic,” which that night in the snow, falling faintly, faintly falling, consisted of no one. But they tried to move him from the pavement anyway. Orders are orders. The tattooed cop grabbed Roland Gordon by the wrists and the other grabbed him by the ankles.

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The amount of force people naturally apply in a downward direction is what we would call our “weight.” Our weight is the acceleration of gravity, which holds at a cool, undying 9.81 meters per second squared, multiplied by our mass. At 261 pounds in the registry (118 kilograms to scientists), Roland Gordon “weighs” 1,157.6 kilograms meters per second squared. A number that two rent-a-cops, muscular as they were, would fail to heave onto the dead grass away from the sidewalk.

The officers looked at each other as if the oversized teddy bear they went to lift had just turned to stone.

It’s easy to assume Roland Gordon had been many things over the course of his lifetime. He dressed like an insurance salesman and only a defensive driver could keep a decades-old car in that condition, but it’s pretty clear he was never a personal trainer. Besides, I know he weighed much more than 261 pounds anyway. Roland Gordon carried the weight of fifty-four years of late bills, insomnia, and parking tickets.

They managed to roll him face-up into the powder next to the sidewalk while waiting for the EMT’s to show up and take him away. Roland Gordon’s nose had broken off to the left from the fall. I couldn’t help thinking about if they’d fix it up for the funeral. If he even had a funeral.

I’ve heard people say that dying is like going home.

Before heading home I walked into the doorway of the corporal’s office, but I couldn’t push myself through the door. The thought of Sam in the chair or his charred smell made my diaphragm seize into the extra weight that had burrowed into the pit of my stomach. A weight I still carry. The corporal spoke first.

“You’re dismissed, kid.”

“It wasn’t anything like you said it would be.”

The corporal slammed a fist on his desk.

“I said dismissed! Now get on home. It’s almost dark—“ Never will there be a day that doesn’t give into darkness, gone is the paper these words were first printed on and inevitable is the day we will fall and never rise again. Roland Gordon didn’t look like a man who went home. He looked like a man who gave up. Who fought gravity for fifty-four years and quit, had enough. I don’t think anyone would look at his too tight tweed suit and say he did his best or even a decent job. Gravity got him and it didn’t really look like he bothered to put up a fight. Roland Gordon never did knee bends.

When the two EMT’s showed nothing changed except there was now a pulsating white light 30

alternating with the squad car’s red and blue. But they were equally useless, no traffic for them to direct.

Still no crowd gathered for Roland Gordon. Not a foot out of step in the whole world for a fallen man.

Business as usual.

The EMT’s entered the scene with a black leather bag lining a gurney.

“I don’t think he’s going to fit,” the tatted cop joked, shortening his fight against gravity 20 sec onds with each drag off his Marlboro.

“Another big, flabby boulder,” chimed in the partner.

There is no B-team when it comes to first-responders and EMT’s are aware of this.

These two took no interest in anything the academy graduates had to say. Besides, they’d lifted far larger men than Roland Gordon onto a gurney before. They bent their knees in proper form and lifted Roland Gordon by his frozen shut thighs and armpits. Then, in almost spectacular fashion, dropped him, cracking his head against the concrete.

Then they stared at each other as if the man made of stone they went to lift had just turned to lead.

Frustrated, the EMT with med school on hold pried Roland Gordon’s fist open and tossed away the parking ticket he, now almost a half hour post-mortem, still clutched. They tried once more and heaved him onto the gurney before whisking him away.

Roland Gordon’ last imprint on this earth, his snow imprint in the grass, vanished in a stiff breeze. The ambulance and squad car didn’t use flashing lights and sirens to leave the scene. Like I said, when you’re on the clock and the guy’s already dead, why hurry?

As soon as the cars were out of sight, I lit another cigarette, stretched my legs and got out of the jeep. On my way to that fateful corner I couldn’t help but think about how I only put work into half of walking, picking up my feet. Then I let gravity put them back down. Half of walking I didn’t even do.

Caught in a pavement crack was Roland Gordon’ parking ticket bearing my name. I took off my gloves, turning my hands a deep red as I reached out. The ticket shone in the moonlight, the familiar blaze orange strip flying down its left side.

I told myself, “The law is the law—“ “But the law is the law!” my mother yelled. “No more of this ‘he was innocent’ shit. Where is my rosary?”

My mom made a habit of praying a rosary whenever she got too worked up. She’s a straight shooter to a fault—never pulled over by a cop, never in after-school detention. She flew through the drawers while I leaned up against the stove, running my hands through my seventeen-year-old hair.

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Which was shaggier than it had to be. Because I was seventeen and I could.

“But it doesn’t always have to be this way, does it?”

She didn’t bother to look up. “I swear it’s here, where IS that damned thing?” she said, hands flying up the cabinets, trembling just enough for me to notice.

“Mom…don’t you—“ “For the last time!” She spoke in big, bold strokes, as if quoting a history textbook. “He. Was convicted. By a jury. Of his—“ “But what if they’re wrong!”

“They’re not!”

It might have been the cabinet door slamming. It might have been a depth of her voice I’d never heard before (or since), but I lost my footing and crashed straight down to the floor, hitting the back of my head on the oven handle.

My vision blurred, but I remember the good China wobbling back and forth. The one plate crafted in some sticky basement of our Austrian ancestors with the family crest in the center. It fell and shattered on the tile, one shard slicing a full inch just above my ankle.

“I…” my mom started, looking down at me, her bleeding son. “I…need a cigarette.”

I pressed my cig against the bottom left corner of the ticket and it caught fire, right where it says “MAKE CHECKS PAYABLE TO…” Letter by letter, it wilted at the mercy of the flame in a destruction without second thought or abandon. The smoke twisted upward in a seductive tease while everything else in the world fell at gravity’s whim. As the last bits burned, heat blistered my fingertips. I whistled “Down on the Corner” until every shred of Roland Gordon’s last stand against the world he didn’t choose, the one that never gave him the generosity he counted on, the one he trusted to never kill him, had dissipated into the winding smoke. Smoke that would never give in, never make contact with the cold pavement. As Roland Gordon did. As we all someday will.

“The law is the law,” I told myself.

“But theirs is not mine.”

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model 2 Nicole Breighner

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afterlives Dani Neiley We lived quietly, him with a chronic fear of double-decker buses and me, an unfortunate habit of collecting razorblades. The city never slept a wink so neither did we. We opted for the hot leather of taxicabs, riding all the way to the Brooklyn Bridge. The stars always seemed brighter there (though actually by the time their light reached earth they’re dead, he always told me). How romantic. I tried not to smile because at those moments, he reminded me of lemonade, melted popsicles, and barbed wire. I reached for his hand, but our fingers never touched.

We walked on eggshells that were actually creaky floorboards, the noise enough to send other tenants packing. A couple of city inspectors boarded up our building and tacked a demolition notice to the door: do not enter. I didn’t think I could leave.

In the mornings, he read Shel Silverstein and I wondered if the giving tree ever felt lonely.

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Fairytales Audrey Reiley 1 of 3

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Fairytales Audrey Reiley 2 of 3

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Fairytales Audrey Reiley 3 of 3

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la lune de miel or “honey, you DTF?” Susannah Betts distance hue and milky-blue something sad, something borrowed something sad, something borrowed something blue something blue and nothing new and same skies as Romeo once knew and same blue seas divide and still not clever and still not kind not kind to tell unburdened truth when truth unburdened burdens youth and every impulse the drunken text the drunken sext the urging-blood-pulse wrecks broken night-silence pre-pubescent calm the desperate pleading psalm the give me heaven clouds and angel-song in platonic comfort lives no danger harm no danger harm of swaggered walk skin-twined tattoo in muscle-sinewed something sad, illusory or true something borrowed, something salty, déjà vu white the clouds the shipsails and red licked-lightly lips and white the veils... …sticky-sweet the honey and red the bloodied moon… …our skies drained of blue

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dreamcatcher Dani Neiley A delirious dream: choking on blueberry cheesecake at the first restaurant you took me to, with a tiger chained to my ankle. Confetti consisting of peach pits and all the birthday cards I wrote you rain down on the floor. We’re waltzing on a checkerboard, wearing all white; I’m a pawn to your king, forced to move vertically, one step at a time. Cracks form in my cheeks from a fake smile and soon I am laughing alone, the sound is muted, I’m self-igniting in shadow. Goldfish asphyxiate in the water fountain as I sit at a typewriter with blood for ink, trying to come up with reasons why we failed.

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Steph (the selfie project Rebecca Worhach

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A Ceramic Home Loren Smith We live in a ceramic home.

A home we crafted with hands we so lovingly caked in clay.

A home we fired in the kiln to withstand the weather and wear.

A home we set on a high cliff that had shoals rife with white water beneath it.

A home from where we watched the celestial ceiling twinkle and shine.

A home we forgot to make a foundation for.

When we tried digging the foundation, the house cracked and we panicked and started blaming each other.

So we nudged the house a little closer to the cliff side.

Hoping the ocean would soften the walls but the lapping water did nothing to undo the kilns work and we learned then that all we could do was patch the cracks.

We tried adding more weight to the house hoping to weigh it down against high winds and rain that threatened to carry it away but the babies wouldn’t stand still oblivious to the cracks in our home.

And so when someone, worried about their own ceramic home, stole your weight away, our ceramic house fell and shattered in the rocks of the reef.

The water carrying each part of us to unknown shores.

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untitled Billy Gartrell

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One Year Alex Thomas MARCH you meet her in a coffee shop. you meet her online. you meet her in a bar where she is talking to her friends with a smile that could blind a prophet. you meet her in a bookstore in a city where it snows and the golden streetlights make the flakes dance like angels.

APRIL she is late to your first date. she couldn’t find her scarf. she couldn’t put down her book. she was catching up with an old friend at the bottom of the stairs where they filmed the exorcist.

MAY it has been three months and you want to see her more than four times a week. she comes over in yoga pants and you watch the politicians argue on cnn while eating take out rice. she drops her head into your shoulder asks you simple questions with big answers and you stumble with words that you think might impress her. you make love with a blinding passion that makes breathing seem superfluous and you are out of breath with only “the L word” on your parched lips.

JUNE she meets your parents in the summer and they tell you they love her. she banters about environmental reform with your father over dinner on the deck and tells your mother that she will not take no for an answer when she picks up a sponge and china spotted red with the sauce. your parents go for a walk with contentment smiles that you have not seen since before your sister left for college.

JULY when you open your laptop at work her pinterest is up and there are pictures of houses in new england and you fantasize about her thinking of a life, of a future with you. that day on your lunch break you make small talk with a jewelry store clerk about what you’re doing in his store. you don’t mention her by name because you still believe in curses. you still believe in love.

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AUGUST she does not stay over after dinner one night and you can’t sleep because your brain turns over the meaning of this scenario like your fingers would scan the edges of a rubik’s cube.

SEPTEMBER it has been a week since you saw her. you can not remember the last time that she texted first.

OCTOBER it’s over even though nobody ever called it quits. you know because she hasn’t talked to you in a month and last weekend when you brought another girl back from the bar you only barely hesitated before you removed her shirt, and her bra seemed to come off by itself.

NOVEMBER it started on instagram. it started on facebook. hell, it started on tumblr. you saw pictures of them together and she owned a smile that clawed itself out of the internet and got caught in your throat.

DECEMBER when the wedding invitation comes to your mutual friend she mentions it by accident and you spend that night at the bar until the bouncer pulls you out by the back of your neck. and outside it is cold as you stumble back to your apartment. outside it is snowing beneath the streetlights.

JANUARY the next morning your head beats like a bass drum and when you go to get coffee the barista smiles. you sit at a nearby table and half heartedly check your emails before walking out the door. you do not leave your number. you look through the reflection of the street in the window because you want her to watch you.

FEBRUARY you go home. you make tea. you take a deep breath because it is the only thing you can remember doing before you met her.

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Brad Nicole Breighner

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untitled Hannah Dieringer

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Matt John Dicocco

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Owl Hill Tunnel J.P. Goss

I Springdale sits in provincial minimalism. Apart it, shimmering quagmire of the city Evers on the slimmest part of the Matthidox River.

A mother and her womb.

Nearest the Evers Bridge, a college, incomplete, falls to peripheral ruin. Domino-Evers Vocational Institute. D.E.V.I for short. The clearest monument of abandoned human ability washed away and orphaned by the flood of ’78. Cars can be seen in the phantom edifice only vaguely at noon with their little headlight wipers to brush away the tears of some American dream.

Suckling, some people just never left but, the bridge sees hardly any traffic anymore—some thru-travelers picking their way to the interstate in the southern counties, ignorant of enmity in the pavement.

Maynard Price wandered through the fenny undergrowth of an untrodden wood beneath the bridge. The whites of his new shoes, slim and pliant, strewn with splattered mud. The consequence?

Well, twelve-year-old adventurers had little mind for punishment, little eye for grace.

It was the old baubles and bearable odors of decay that kept him attracted, moiling in their own swamp: a curiouserandcuriouser affair.

“Oh, wow.”

Bottles of tinctures, aspirins, colas all snug in a crisp and crusting surface, swimming like portraits amdist the reeds.

“Where’s the cool stuff? Where’re the pocket knives? Reicher found one.” He whispered in j ealous haste. He dare not speak too loudly: for somewhere, his mother could hear him.

Yet, he would frown as the dreamy scapes of his imagination slowly began to take shape of the real world more often, more impenetrably. I am an apothecary, my name is…Maynard Price. Who am I but?

Twelve was such a young age to witness disillusionment.

He’d wait until bottles would come to the surface, take them, and insert found bullet casings inside.

Clankjanglejangleclank.

It was warm for the first time that winter. He beat his way through the clutching thorns, not without injury, back onto a main path. The tire-tracks and heavy ruts were filled with ice: testaments to the boisterous twenty-somethings seeking an imbibing corner.

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This road leads to the flat shore, a spot popular for swimming. He and Reicher discovered it, then unafraid of its ominous Owl Street Tunnel passage.

Several new songs sprung from his imagination on the way down. Swayingly, he moved on the pebbles, careful to step on each one. He was surprised to see himself in the break of the trees. Interfered light gleamed off the water in jagged, conversant reflections through tawny branches.

A mind at play with all levels of vanishing fantasy, a nostalgic polysemous collage of nature scenes and spaces. With his hands in the muddy sand, he weighed the pebbles; when one was good he’d wash it off and skip it across the water, falling short of Evers.

It was an impossible goal but, “I’ll throw it over there someday.” Was the last thing he managed to say before scanning the trusses of the bridge, and eventually, catching the broken windows of an unused science building.

After ten minutes, or so, of static, “I only ever thought waves were at the beach,” he, commenting on the pitiful surf. In study, one of the rocks fell from his full, dirty palm. Half submerged on the shore, he contemplated its liminality. If he had had the words, one would hear something about the miraculous ability for systems in nature, in-themselves, co-existing, harmonizing, annihilating in the drab moments between every second, the infinity and infintesimality of all things, all at once.

But, suffice to the awe of innocence.

Gluttonous waves drew back, their calming froth wrapped around his shoes as he stood next to the ponderous, philosophical stone. Akin, they were, to comfort and clean.

Perhaps mom won’t know.

Silt and fish decay bubbled up to the carrying wind from under the ice. Seconds after realization of the smell, his tongue, lip-smacking, started to play around with the intermingling of the smell of cold and river. Like frozen cucumbers.

“Is this what ice smells like?”

Few trucks passed on the bridge’s lanes; garbage rained from its pillars on occasion. Beneath was a shadowy place, one that seemed to mimic the face of Evers: syringes, cigarette butts, used condoms, nudey mags, and all sorts of other paraphernalia Maynard didn’t quite understand. It was why he didn’t that would sum up the enormity of the bridge: strict and constant moralizing. Moreover, Maynard had never been to the city, never to experience it outside the world of opinion. It was pure evil to him and he didn’t know why.

An orange-soiled embankment ran to weathered concrete hexagons; Maynard felt the pull of his own feet. Down the parallax of the trusses, he could see the gritty color of river water stand out and lap at the piles of debris.

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Owl Street Tunnel that led to this place was a portal for ghosts, demons. From its morose patch of weeds and ticks, one wouldn’t be surprised.

Our story goes: pursued by the town’s laity, a young nun by the name of Prudence Henri ran beneath the bridge to escape. She had been dabbling in the occult, so it goes, and became pregnant.

Several babies in the surrounding area had suffered affliction and she was to blame. On the day she was to give birth, the town imposed God’s indignation by the torch. But, she, by divine forces sought the noose and hanged herself at the mouth of the tunnel. As they arrived, she gasped for air and the child fell from her womb and exploded into flames, carrying any witness indiscriminately to Hell. That was supposed to be fifty-years-ago, or one hundred and seventy-five-years-ago. Therefore, the devil lurks there with many souls, bitter for life, lurking there at night.

The water no longer interested Maynard, nor the college (ironically) rising out of the city skyline.

Behind him was a tall graffito with the heading of “Human Being” going thus: Existence Be—To be—being—been Existent Live—Living—Will live—not-unliving Breath Sense Brain—Cognition Creature Human Beauty—Passion Love Description—Deception Lust Man—Woman Unfeeling Grief Philosophy Hate Philosophy Grief 50

Unfeeling Man—Woman Lust Deception—Description Love Existence—Nothing Beneath it, a proclamation: “Fuck the World.” The vitiligo patches on Maynard’s face colored with sadness; he did not know the significance of either message, but individual parts: all were filled with hate.

Maynard heard shifting rocks from on the other side of the mound. It, simply, was call-response in all manners of vulgarity and grossness. Carefully, he made his way down the hill where his eye caught the smolder of a hobo-ring. There were bodies down the path and into the trees.

“Hey,” Maynard called. A path veered right from below the branches, where the red-headed vigilance of Matthew “Rat” DePaul rang up.

“Who’s the faggot?”

Maynard stood still as two boys moved to a vantage point. All he could think was how, “Mad their moms are going to be.”

A pause. Maynard had to laugh. They moved wearily just in view of Maynard. There stood, at the front, the disheveled and familiar face that made whole idea of mixing with “city trash” more tenable to him, though of suspicion for his mother. It was Reicher Broomer, Maynard’s best friend. Irene Broomer neé Rice was from Evers.

That Price clan was one of the best examples of Springdale isolationism, a purity of the communities. They, emphatically, did not like Evers kids, Evers parents, or any of the undignified waste that even suggested the name Evers. Bad, filthy, “open-air” child-criminals were born of and off that Bridge. There needn’t be a tally or record or hint of suspect to good the most pious and violent of rhetoric.

“Rat” was some middle ground. He was a mean child of Evers parents who moved across the Matthidox, sorry productions of their environment. “Rat’s” eyes had everything to be angry about: a reluctant victim who saw the whole living world a war, a constant tear on the face of Beauty. If it could not be approached or solved with rage and swinging fists, it was foreign. And growing up, he was becoming accustomed to new ways to spit at the world, and extending his knowledge charitably.

“Go up there,” “Rat” pushed Reicher. “Who’s it? Can’t see.”

“I can’t really tell.”

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“Then get closer, you stupid damn asshole.”

Reicher walked closer out into the open, into Maynard’s view. A smile arose, “Hey, Reicher! What’s up?”

“Reicher turned, “‘Rat,’ it’s Maynard. The Price Kid.” “Sixth-grader?”

“In my grade, yeah.”

“The hell does he want?”

“I don’t know, but he’s coming down here.”

“Rat’s” fists clenched. “He ain’t gonna tell anyone?”

“He shouldn’t.”

Maynard came down into the trees with full excitement. “Rat’s” teenage wizenedness looked angrily over him. “What do you want, patch-face?”

“Just sayin’ hi, I guess.”

“Well, come back some other time, dude. We’re kind of busy.” Reicher said suggestively.

“What are you building something or something? A fort?” “Rat” turned away.

“No. We’re, uh, doing something.” Maynard looked puzzled. How inexact.

“We’re doing grown-up things, patchy. Cigarettes.”

“You too, Reicher?” Who looked ashamed and turned his head, declining to comment.

“Yeah, and you better not tell anyone or I will take you down here and piss on your teeth.”

Maynard looked at him with obvious understanding, a troublesome frown came on Reicher’s brow.

“Hey, Reicher. What’re you doing tonight? We’re having stew. We could play the game.”

“I don’t know,” he whined subtly.

“What’s the game?” “Rat” demanded.

“No,” Reicher sighed.

“Well, we’re half-dragon orphans who came down from the Xuun-Zho monastery with the help of magical swords given to us by our masters. There’s a dark force in the world called Dragoon, controller of the darkness! It’s cool because it goes int—” Maynard’s cute little world was cut short by “Rat” laughing madly, “Oh, my God—that’s the gayest thing I’ve ever heard. You’re one of those anime faggots, huh? Reicher? Wow, you’re both so lame.”

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“It’s not lame, ‘Rat.’” “Whatever you gotta say, dude.” Reicher sucked on his lips.

“Not really, man.”

“You wanted to play yesterday. What’s up?”

“I don’t know, I’m just, I don’t know, I don’t want to play. We’re growing up.”

“We’re twelve…okay.” Maynard muttered.

Reicher stood on the precipice of two worlds, skirted by the smell and lingering fingers of cigarette smoke. The ground was all that could meet his eye. “Rat” had just finished laughing, “Hoo, buddy. You know what, Patchy? I like you. Here, I got an idea. I remember when I was your age, damn. Because I’m a nice guy, I’m going to help you. You wanna do something really fun? You come here at dark, we’ll have some real fun.”

Reicher shifted uncomfortably, “ ‘Rat,’ you sure that’s…”

“Yeah, I’m going to show patchy here what growing up’s all about. Come at dark.”

Maynard looked to the side, confused, “Come or don’t. But, you tell on us, I’ll kick your fuckin’ teeth in, after I piss on’em. Got it.”

A pause. Maynard shook his head.

“Good. Let’s go, Reicher.” “Rat” went down into the trees.

Reicher stayed behind, a darkness creeping onto his aspect. “Just come to my house. Wear something black.”

“Where’re we going? What’re we doing?” “Rat” yelled up at him, to hurry up.

“Don’t worry about it. Don’t tell your mom, please,” was his quiet response before departing.

Maynard back tracked up the trail and stared at the graffiti with a longer agreement.

A premonition.

Noon was falling into its antiquity; Maynard felt newly belabored. He returned home where the shadows were long. He had in his hand lemonade from the town store. Out back on the porch his knuckles turned blue from the water and soap on his shoes. The suede discolored grey while they dried: a wilting flower trampled underneath soil and dirt, petals rebelliously holding on.

A few hours later, Candice entered to the terse foyer, melancholia-accented. Near the door, Maynard approach, “Hey, mom. Is it alright if I go over to Reicher’s?”

“What for?”

“Dinner.”

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“Why?” She asked putting her things down cautiously. Maynard averted his gaze.

“He asked if I wanted to go.”

“I suppose it’s alright. My God, Maynard. You’re filthy. Weren’t you over at Reicher’s already?”

“No, I was just out.” She got closer and stooped down to him.

“Where, Maynard Christopher? Were you at the river?” He answered, beggarly, with a small inaudible pop. “Jesus, Maynard, what did I tell you about the river? It’s a filthy place. You weren’t with any Evers kids were you?”

A hesitant shake of the head, “Just walking.”

“Because you know what they’re like: the DePauls. Matthew is not a good kid, his house is filth, his mother’s trash.” I’ve heard it all before, Maynard thought. “That better not be where you were. Is that,” she sniffed. “Smoke? Were you smoking, Maynard Christopher Price?” The holy indignation rose to fever-pitch in her neck.

“No, there was a hobo ring. A fire.”

“By the river?” He shook his head. “Why did you lie to me?” He did not answer. “You did. You were at the river. Go down Owl street?”

“No.” She gave him a hug, clasped ardently.

“Oh, Maynard. Please don’t go down there. Did you hear about the oldest DePaul boy that just went to jail? Drugs, Maynard. Drugs. I don’t want you mixing with the trash.”

“I’m sorry, mom. Really, I am. Reicher wanted to go down to the river. I just followed him.” She sighed.

“I do remember being a kid, too, May. The Broomers…are good...But you are becoming a teenager, you know that, right?” He shook his head. “Fine,” she said after a beat. “You can go, but please, please for my sake, for your grandma, don’t go to that tunnel. She’s so worried about the new devil coming for you.”

“I know.” He said, hopefulness. “Can I still go to Reicher’s?”

“Yes,” she said. “You may. But you come home by nine, understand? Or I will call Irene. Got it.”

He smiled.

“Yes, mom. Thank you!” She smiled at him at made her way upstairs. His smile quickly turned ambivalent as the sun rested heavily in its mourning.

II At six, Maynard left the house in all black and made his way to Reicher’s, down the block.

Reicher was outside, austere and distant. “Ready?” Maynard said yes. Both of them walked silently in the blindness to the edge of town, the descent of the main street. There “Rat” and three other people 54

stood. Two guys and a girl.

“Patchy! Glad you grew balls. This is my brother.”

“Hey, little bitch; can it. What up, little dude? I’m Rooney. This is Blace. And that pair a’ titties is my chick. Say hello.” They did. Maynard looked at Rooney with the same apprehension one gets while looking down a basement. The girl caught Maynard’s attention: she looked young, spacey, and disaffected, her rigidly dolled-up blond waves where spastically everywhere. A mole on her forehead.

“What’re we doing?” Maynard asked.

“Pot, little dude.” He produced a bag of green flakes. “Here take a whiff. Dank shit, right?”

“Yeah,” Maynard said ignorantly.

“Let’s bounce.”

Foreboding walked alongside Maynard as they approached the Owl Street Tunnel. The clandestine alleyway that led up was disharmoniously musical.

“Quit lagging behind, patchy.” “Rat” would yell occasionally. Maynard felt the sickness as they were submerged in the darkness of the tunnel, its tribal markings exuding the dangerous occult and heartless primality of which the world’s discontents espoused. Before him, the wild dispassions of hate personified and the echo of evil ran on ahead, behind, along, beside in the pensive click on loose change in a pocket. The older people started laughing as the “pair a’titties” began to sway. In the commotion, “Hey, Reicher, should we go back?” Maynard asked fearful.

“Nah, man. It’s okay we’re all good. Are you afraid of ghosts?”

There was a pause. “Aren’t you?” Reicher did not answer.

The scenery was bleeding into itself as the slivered moon went behind fat ebon plumes. Maynard put his eyes down as they went to the opening by the river. Thoughts of the bottles, the apothecary, and how they were all drowning beneath the mud and snow floated mockingly. Those dialogues bled out and would not walk or wake again. In that moment, they stopped and Rooney pulled out this glass pipe, began smoking it. The horrid smell of “Burnt peanut butter, dude!” filled Maynard’s nose. He did not want to partake.

All seemed jovial after they had finished, “Rat” lit a cigarette and Reicher took one with reluctance. Rooney started to touch vehemently the back of the “pair a’titties.”

“Knock it off,” she slurred.

Desparation, conflict: an unearthly noise filled with perverse pleasure. The girl fell to the ground: crack.

She tried to stand, “Bitch, stay on the ground. Hold her.” He commanded.

III 55

Reicher and I just stood in fear as it all transpired and that greasy, miserable prick “Rat” laughed and laughed. I wanted him dead right there. The aggression rose until I, too, felt the pinch of hatred, of finality in the disgust of humankind. The sounds of wailing, blow after blow, as though there was a blade, stabbing, stabbing, stabbing made it through to an uncaring audience. There was…there was…

Running. Too much…

That was fourteen years ago.

Neither Reicher nor I spoke much after that, after Rooney went to jail again, after the corpse of a child washed up on that very shore, purple, bloated, inhuman. Five years ago, “Rat” committed suicide and Reicher left town.

I finished high school speaking in nothing but vomit and gall. Graduation seemed like liberation.

I went to college to study social work (class of ’02), still nervous and disillusioned to any good in the world. I’ve tried to forget. Tried. After I graduated, my mom found out from Vonda DePaul I was a part of all that and kicked me out of the house. The last thing my mom said to me was, “This is all your fault! You’re the reason all this Evers scum is moving into Springdale.” And she slammed the door in my face.

There were plans to build an apartment complex in Springdale and it was well under construction at that point. People were moving into a quieter atmosphere. Luckily, I could live and work in Evers so it wasn’t as awful as it could have been: my situation.

I was very surprised at the pleasantness of the city’s architecture and the small shops everywhere. Like flowers trampled beneath the soil and dirt. It wasn’t the grey cesspool I was brought up to believe it to be. I couldn’t hate, though I should have. One day on my lunch break, I went to this place called “Rio.” A nice little coffee shop with a nice little waiter. I smiled at her the one day while laying a tip and she smiled back.

I couldn’t hate, though I should have.

One day I decided to come to her and ask to go see a movie, to which she agreed, much to my delight. And wouldn’t you know it, we started dating after that.

Her name was Samantha Grin. A bit older than I, she was, and very hesitant to kiss, but I accepted her as she was, in all her quirks and eccentricities. She made me smile and she made the past seem, well, bearable.

As we kept dating, we decided to live together and she became more inviting of my touch. We lived in my apartment; the view stretching out over the Mattidox and onto the D.E.V.I campus. As it got warmer out, so too did my partnerly passions. She had a nice body and it made me feel quite nostalgic for a time gone by. Yet, nostalgia, the pain from an old wound, always was my demise. I spent days bed-ridden thinking of my robbed childhood, always blaming others. And yet, well, Sam was my 56

sun, my evening star, and yes, my clouds.

We woke one day to the smell of August, and I suggested, “Hey, Sam?” She turned over, the oil of the night slick on her forehead and nose. “Would you like to go for a walk?”

“Where?”

“I don’t know; it’s a nice day. Let’s see where we take ourselves.” She agreed and we got dressed.

The road we followed all wound around Springdale, on the cul-de-sac where I trashed my knee—I showed her the scar—the house of the hoarder lady, and all the mementos I held cherished.

While we stood on a hill, I gave her a hug and she smiled. “Where would you like to go now, May?” “I don’t know, we could just go down this road.”

“Owl Street?” Coldly.

“Oh, is that where we are? Huh, on the other side of town. Sure, why not? We can go to the river and skip stones.” I laughed. She did not answer right away. But, promptly, she agreed and we walked down the crack macadam between weathered houses.

IV “Holy God…” she said, hesitating. I turned.

“What’s that?” I asked casually. There was no response; but a mumbling attempt at a passive “nothing.”

“I’ve always thought it beautiful out here myself.”

“The Owl Street Tunnel…” she began walking, lilting, and drifting off from one vagueness to the next.

“Yeah, you know the legend of the old tunnel.” The hesitation was mine now. It didn’t feel right.

“It’s some old ghost.”

“Story, or the ‘story?’” Scare quotes.

“I guess. I don’t really know.”

“Huh, see, I always heard it was the devil. Least, that’s what my mom always told me to keep me away from this place.” She shifted with avoidant vacuity and a strange agreement.

All my hooks had yet to sink.

She was stepping into a pool of light, the way the sun hit her freshly exiting body from the dark.

Light and moss spilled from the same ledge. I, from the back, lagged behind to survey her ass in little shorts, maybe a little longer than I should.

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I hurried to her. The large splotches caught my periphery in all their irregularity. There was something about their defacement that clashed my memory of this place: traces of vomit and blood flecked in the corner, brusque declarations of nihilism, infanticide, Satanism. They were gone, just whitewashed by time and youth-group beautification projects.

But, I can’t forget that. Not the pity for the wounded, the abject contempt for life, and a woman.

A girl. It all smells like gasoline now.

I called Samantha several times at various volumes, but nothing seemed to penetrate this fog she was in. We seemed to be on different planes, in different times. Strangers. Her eyes were transfixed on the path leading to the water, the same muddy path…

I was much more innocent back then. ‘Thunderbolt.’

Opportunity strikes in the most inopportune places, but I fell back once more to take in what I could. Ah! She stands at the foreground of life, green and bawdy. How unaccustomed this place was to vivacity, as far as the past is concerned.

Evers was nearly invisible behind the trees.

“Sam,” I called without response. God, she’s got a nice ass. I just wanted to touch her, here and now.

We neared the swampy areas; cement chips in the patted down grass looked grey and pitiful.

“Watch out for the goonies, they’re pretty big. You know,” I chuckled. “We always called ‘em goonies over here. Springdale. I never knew why. A weekend activity. A real ‘hey-Teddy-yeah-wannago-throw-goonies-in-the-creek-crack-me-a-beer-asshole-let’s-go’ kind of thing.”

Faintly, she muttered ‘I know.’

She stopped near the edge of the swamp and bit her finger.

“Hey, Sam. Is something wrong?” She pulled ahead of me.

“No.” “Then why are you so…so, reticent?”

“I don’t know. Speak like a normal person.”

“I’m sorry.” She did not acknowledge. Somehow, my sexually distressed little brain saw this a peacock display of fertility and appetites. And I was all about that.

“No flowers may spring from her step, but I know one spring that sprung and it springs in wit.

Oh! I know its vernal panacea, for they are those sweet-winds who art named Samantha.”

Still nothing. I thought it was cheeky.

At the crest of the hill and the shoreline’s dry exterior Sam stood upright, smoldering. One 58

would even say bleak if it were the right setting. Yes, it was this shitty little beach that smelled of fish parts I was aiming for.

Her skin looked as pale as it did arrested oriented to the bridge, to the tree of apathetic progression. Suddenly, the light fell from the world, the stars were high, the nesting air a crisp, dewy smell. I heard the torment from this exact spot inflamed by my neglect, fear a single stream of cold sweat on my twelve-year-old brow. It sounds of murder, of hate. The vividness of nothing, of passionate despise—all played, here, before me: a tragedy of mankind.

I didn’t want to talk about it with anyone; save this inner world where it likely festers and rots like meat.

As with everything else, Sam’s curvature grounded me in the place where I was placed initially: hopefully in Sam. I hazarded a smooth glide between her arm and waist. Cloth reach the pads of my fingers, and with each wiry fiber, the humours of an entire lineage came afire, more intensely, more brilliant. I went in and clasped onto her waist with a kiss to the neck.

Her body went lax. “Hey, Sam.” I said with come-hither tone. She did not answer, just trembled and puckered her lips.

“I can’t,” she said.

“I love you, Sam.” “I know,” she responded. I ran my fingers down the front of her stomach.

“What’s wrong? Don’t say ‘nothing.’ I’m your boyfriend, I can help you.”

“You’re such a cliché.”

“Now that’s hurtful.”

“Stop being a little kid; you know I hate that. That baby-bae-bullshit.”

“Sorry. Regardless, what is wrong? You’ve been, well, distant ever since we went into the tunnel.”

“I-I-it’s nothing, really, Maynard.”

“That’s a huge lie.”

“No, it’s not. Don’t tell me when I’m lying.”

“But, I can see it. Did you come here for something?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“A sincere one.”

“One could say avoidance,” she struggled.

“Who or what?” I, confused.

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deal.

“It’s nothing.” I kept on kissing her neck while she spoke, making a mental nod-my-head kind of

“I don’t believe you.” A sudden pang of empathy crossed in front of me. The bridge. “You know,” I said after a little while of tasting her skin. “I’ve got something on my mind, too. Maybe we can share scars for a little while, huh? Maybe that’ll help.”

“I don’t see how.”

Haze started to fall over the water.

“Here: it’s an experiment. We can empathize. Well, I was nostalgic this morning, as you know and I decided that I’m kind of ready to come to terms with something…very traumatic.”

“What’s that?”

“I was down here one night with a friend and his buddies. They were drunk, I think, smoking dope. Anyway, it comes to the point where this girl that was with them and, this older kid—he’s in jail now—but, well, he” Oh, my god this is so hard. It was like a fucking knife in my throat—“He raped her.

In front of me. I just stood and watched and…ran away. I’ve never really been able to come to terms with that until now. With you here.”

She went limp in my arm, tightening. I felt the urge and lifted up her shirt from the back.

There, she turned to me and studied my face from what seem an infinite amount of space, time, and revelation. Suddenly, “Don’t you fucking touch me!” She screamed.

“What’s wrong, Sam?” “Don’t you dare fucking touch me. Get your hands off of me! You. You. You were there! It was you. You’re that patchy kid! I remember your fucking face, who could forget? You coward! How could you just sit there and watch and mock me! I was raped! Do you even know what happened?” She started slapping me, “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.” Tears came pouring down her cheeks. I tried hugging her, “No! You’re just as bad as they are—worse! I got pregnant from that and threw the baby off the bridge. I thought you loved me! How could you fucking do that? What is wrong with you?”

“Sam, that doesn’t make sense. I love you. Let me help you.”

“No, how could you? You didn’t before and you just watched. Get away from me!” After that she ran and I felt the enveloping darkness of my own inaction mock me at a distance, at an intimate distance. I am the filth, the banality of evil.

I realized that as the months grew colder. Sam did not call back. And it wasn’t until January, nearly a year later, they found a blond-haired body washed up on the Matthidox, near the Owl Street Tunnel, that I knew how ireful this bastard of a world could be.

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The sky mourned, compelled me to do the same. But, my tears were unwarranted, undeserved and would be until I could be forgiven. But, what God in heaven could forgive me?

Days after they found the body, a legendary snow storm hit, freezing the surface of the Matthidox as deep slabs. It got warmer out after and the river started to break apart. The bridge succumbed to the unforgiving law of ice. And finally the mother and child were separate, alone in the cruel finitude of existence, forever to be burdened by the truths conjured and confirmed.

To this day, one can hear the solemn wailing of ghosts and bitter souls, indebted to their victimhood, railing in the covered halls of the Owl Street Tunnel.

The End

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CONTRIBUTERS Susannah Betts is a senior physics major at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. Her poetry has been previously published in Issue 3 of Crab Fat Literary Magazine, and she currently serves as the fiction editor of the online literary magazine, The Fem. She dreams her writing could make you want to get to know her better.

Nicole Breighner is a junior digital communications and studio art major. Lover of art, cats, and the human race. Hater of bananas, comic sans, and the human race.

Nicole Byrne suffers from a crippling addiction to poetry and self-medicates with black coffee, avocados, and rock ‘n’ roll. The treatment does not appear to be working and she hopes it never does. She can be found online at http://www.nicolebyrnepoetry.tumblr.com/.

Hannah Dieringer is a sophomore attending Lebanon Valley College. She plans to receive a dual degree in business administration and art & art history, with a concentration in studio art. She prefers to work in 3D, but enjoys experimenting with different mediums. In the future, she hopes to work for an international art museum, which will hopefully give her the opportunity to travel.

John DiCocco is a senior BA music major, hailing from Chester County, PA. Although music is his main focus, John spends his free time taking pictures. He began taking photos his freshman year at LVC. His main focus in photography is portraiture but has recently started taking photos for concerts and events around the Philadelphia area.

Billy Gartrell is a senior digital communications student at Lebanon Valley College. He is thankful to be published by Green Blotter for the third and final time and is always honored to be involved in the project. He loves creating in almost any format and is excited to have two illustrations in the publication this year. Other than photography and illustration, Billy loves music graphic design, hiking, and having simple conversations with his friends. Upon graduation, he hopes to begin a career focused on graphic and interaction design.

J.P. Goss is a 21-year-old student from Thompsontown, PA. This is Goss’ first publication, though he has self-published a collection of short stories and one of poetry. He is currently attending Lebanon 62

Valley College to pursue a degree in English literature and philosophy. Check out his Hello Poetry account at http://hellopoetry.com/jp-goss/ .

Martin Groff is a senior English and German major, creative writing minor at Lebanon Valley College.

His writing interests revolve around the exploration of interpersonal connections, the passage of time, and the influence of the past on the present. Martin intends to start graduate school for English literature in the fall.

Kayla Klugow is an undergraduate creative writing major with a specialization in poetry at Southern Illinois University.

Michelina Marsico is an art and art history major at Lebanon Valley College concentrating in studio art. She enjoys working in various mediums but adapting mixed media elements within her artwork is her favorite. She uses art as a form of therapy which is present in a lot of her pieces. Future goals are to attend graduate school and later open up a non-profit art studio and gallery for other artists who can then exhibit their work. She also hopes to instruct classes within in her studio to keep the spirit of the art world alive.

Ben McCormick is a senior in Marquette University’s Honors Program majoring in writing-intensive English and secondary education. He is an editor on the Marquette University Literary Review and earned Honorable Mention in the 2013 Norman H. Ott Memorial Writing Center’s 50-Word Short Story Contest. Around this time he began writing music with a band and played Milwaukee’s Summerfest in 2014. He lives in downtown Milwaukee, but would like to move somewhere that gives less parking tickets.

Dani Neiley is a junior studying English literature and screenwriting at Chapman University. Three of her short stories have been published in Calliope, Chapman’s art and literary magazine. She likes writing about dreams and wants to be Charlie Kaufman when she grows up.

Scott K. Reagan is a rising senior at Lebanon Valley College (Class of 2016) whose two majors are German and international studies and minor is music. He spent the Summer and Fall terms of 2014 from July 1st until December 13th studying in Germany (Würzburg and then Berlin in the Fall), staying in a small village in Alsace, France for three weeks, and visiting Copenhagen (Denmark), and Poznan 63

and Warsaw (Poland). The three photos of Scott’s in this edition of Green Blotter are three of his favorites that were taken while abroad in Berlin and captured with German-brand disposable cameras.

In his spare time, Scott enjoys learning languages, playing and listening to lots of music, watching films and British (black) comedies, reading, and of course, taking photos.

Audrey Reiley is a studio art and art history major and business minor at Lebanon Valley College.

Paul Ricks is 19 and currently a sophomore at Sewanee: The University of the South. He has been published in Sun and Sandstone and The Mountain Goat.

Loren Smith lives in Logan, UT where he studies English and Spanish at Utah State University. His work has previously appeared in The North Central Review, Prairie Margins, Coup d’Etat, Enormous Rooms and the Red Cedar Review. In his free time he loves to travel. Some of his favorite destinations include Ireland and Ecuador.

Alex Thomas is a senior at Salisbury University.

Katherine Tozer is about to graduate from DePauw University in Indiana with a BA in English writing. She is from the south suburbs of Chicago, Illinois and will be tearing herself away from the Midwest next fall to teach high school English in New York City. She believes good literature helps both readers and writers enjoy being human and deal with all the challenges and contradictions that brings.

Rebecca Worhach is a junior art & art history major at Lebanon Valley College. She was the Fall 2014 Intern for the Suzanne H. Arnold Art Gallery and was the Spring 2015 music and art intern for the Lebanon Valley College’s Marketing & Communications Department. She is also a student editor for the Valley Humanities Review.

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