LQ winter + spring 2016

winter & spring 2016 featuring andrew mitchell | cristina herrera mezgravis nika soon-shiong | louise meriwether stewart | niuniu teo

VOLUME 10, ISSUE 2: Winter & Spring 2016 Editors-in-Chief: Amy Chen + Abigail Flowers Financial Manager Magellan Pfluke Managing Editor Annie Graham Prose & Poetry Editor Alexandra Gray Layout Editor Brian Ngo

Associate Editors Nick Burns Amy Chen Abigail Flowers Annie Graham Alexandra Gray Maddie Han Nate Hansen Irene Hsu Janna Huang Brian Ngo Vivian Xiao

Copyright 2016 by Leland Quarterly | All Rights Reserved Stanford University | Giant Horse Printing, San Francisco

Dear Reader, If you thought we were going to take the editors’ note seriously for once, you’ve been horribly misled. We’re not. We’re sorry.

There’s some pretty damn good writing and some pretty damn good art in here, though.

Sincerely, Amy and Abigail

Prose

“Goats Town” by Andrew Mitchell on 10 “Frank’s Blue” by Francesca Colombo on 20 “The Worms” by Spencer Slovic on 24 “The Pros of Germ-X: Peripherally on Personal Hygience, Mainly on Sterility in Berlin Street Style” by Marin Tyne Reeve on 45 “Orange County” by Nick Burns on 54 “The Logic of Hustling” by Nika Soon-Shiong on 64

Poetry “the cellist” by Niuniu Teo on 9

“Rust” by Tyler Dunston on 19

“I tried to sell your heart on etsy once” by Juliana Chang on 22

“The Refugees” by Nick Burns on 41 “Home” by Andrew Mitchell on 42

“I was seven and the yard” by Andrew Mitchell on 43 “Blackberries” by Cristina Herrera Mezgravis on 49 “Theology” by Hannah Llorin on 51

“To Rest in Peace” by Louise Meriwether Stewart on 58

“Childish Things” by Claire Francis on 75

“How it Ends” by Juliana Chang on 76

Art

Photography

Ali Vaughan on cover, 14, 18, 52, 68 Vivian Xiao on 8, 76-77 Cecily Foote on 17, 27, 48 Jessica Shen on 34-39 Chase Porter on 44

John Murray on 20, 59, 73 Samantha Seto on 22, 56 Coraal Cohen on 40 Tyler Dunston on 50, 63, 74

Leland Quarterly | Winter & Spring 2016

Vivian

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Xiao

the cellist | NiuniuTeo

the cellist Niuniu Teo

the meds make his hands shake.

“I’m just happy to be out,” he says teeth showing through his smile. “it’s so good to be alive.” he is small on his bed and we are surrounded by the sound of trees knocking on the window with outstretched branches he’s started to keep a journal. his handwriting looks like it always has thin and slanted, with more loops than letters but still, when he tries to play, his bow jitters along the metal strings and the ancient melodies emerge clumsily like a child learning to walk

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Leland Quarterly | Winter & Spring 2016

Goats Town Andrew Mitchell

Dad has been a goat for ten years, and Mum should get her horns anyday now. Dad’s transformation was quite a surprise (then again nobody expects to fall off a boat and get chopped up by the prop) but Mum’s has been coming for quite sometime. It began as a small innocent cloud on the doctor’s MRI screen. When we saw the cloud become an obstinate fist, tightly balled in her brain, Dad didn’t eat grass for days. I brushed his hair in the evenings to show him how well I’d handle Mum’s coat, but there was nothing I could do to stop his bleating. Instead, we started planning for the future. Mum had me calling her Amethyst already to get used to the transition. Picking a goat name before you died was all the rage now, and Mum had chosen this ridiculous title (her birthstone) to rival her personal nemesis Joan. Joan had committed suicide several years ago, leaving behind a brief note that simply read, “I shall now be known as Princess Apple Dew.” Princess Apple Dew’s Empire biscuits had bested Mum’s rhubarb tart for the better part of the nineties at the local fair. Now Princess Apple Dew was the first goat on the taste committee and would make a point of spitting out Mum’s tart, which is about the only way a goat who’s digging her face into a dessert can look in the least bit dissatisfied. P.A.D. still struts around the neighborhood wearing her many blue ribbons like a toddler wears their first bowtie, head thrown back with pride.

At this point, quite a few of the neighbors I grew up with are walking on four legs. Death isn’t rampant in Port Glasgow, but its human population has been slowly declining since its shipbuilding hayday. There are less jobs building ships and even fewer places for people to live (goats aren’t too keen on giving up their property). Alan Alister, who lives two doors down, was the first goat I knew in Port Glasgow, or, rather the first formerly human goat that I knew. Of course I knew other goats before him, the ones that lived south of town and got driven around by dogs. You’d hear a story now and again about someone going and mingling with them, but most goats I know are content clinging on to their former humanity. Alan was no exception, coming from a long line of shipbuilders, working meticulously to ensure that everything good that came out of Scotland came 10

Goats Town | Andrew Mitchell

out of Scotland. Unfortunately, his legacy was cut short by a falling multi-deck segment of a ship’s hull. His coworkers watched him crawl from the wreckage and trot home, tail between his legs. Apparently his wife recognized him immediately.

He showed up to work the next day after his death wearing his orange vest like a saddle, with his small horns causing his hard hat to tip forwards in a sort of cordial greeting. His death forced him to move his office to the first floor (goats are bad with stairs). He still walks to work everyday and gives me a nod on the mornings when I get up early to make bread for Mum, which is something I’ve been doing since Dad started eating grass for a living.

My girlfriend Jessie, who I started dating when I was 14, still has two human parents. She’d always tell me that my dad was so much more understanding than her parents. “He’s a worse piano player, though.” I’d say back. We’d laugh.

Jessie had died on the Friday before her birthday. Her parents told me that you never know someone is allergic to bees until they are stung several times on the arm. She’d been home alone and her parents returned to see her pouting in the backyard, sitting the way a goat sits when trying to sit like a person. I keep telling her that if we are anything like the Alisters (Alan and Melinda are going strong despite dying five and a half months apart) we’ll get through. She looks at me as if to say you think I want to wear this pink sweater that I died in for the rest of my life? and I look at hear as if to say I hope so because I got if for you for Boxing Day last year and you said it was your favorite. Goats have a hard time changing clothes.

Jessie came over for lunch, unannounced. I was on my way to see Mum in the hospital when I saw her walking towards our front lawn. I offered her a bit of my turkey sandwich. She nibbled on my shoe instead, wanting to talk. I sat crosslegged and she nuzzled my face with her nose (her kisses were not bad but significantly hairier). I didn’t want to be the jerk that dumps his dead girlfriend, but things had changed. We’d try to go on walks together, but grass interested her more than I did. She rarely texted me back. She never did her hair anymore, and she kept eating Mum’s flowers from our front porch, which made P.A.D. very happy and therefore was a big no-no. Still, didn’t know where else to start.

“I just feel like we aren’t communicating.”

She grabbed a mouthful of grass.

“It’s not you either, I just think I need some time with Mum.” More grass. I touched her horns and she looked up at me. “I love you Jessie, and we can still, uh, hang out and stuff.” She peed on my shoe. I guess I deserved that. I went and picked one of Mum’s sea pinks and put it in Jessie’s mouth.

“I gotta go… um… see you around Jess.”

More pee.

Mum was sleeping when I arrived at the hospital. The two nurses hadn’t noticed me, and were whispering about how Maggie Cairn, a local city-councilwoman, had recently been accused of killing her husband’s mistress and then serving her to a group of city officials at a dinner party.

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Leland Quarterly | Winter & Spring 2016

“I swear it’s true. Councilman Joseph said he smelled goat in the stew.”

“That doesn’t mean a thing! Could’ve been any old goat.” They were having trouble keeping their voices down.

“What do ya think they taste like?” Nurse One was clearly enjoying the attention.

“How should I know! I’ve never had goat before. Well I’ve had goat but I’ve never had goat before.”

“How do you know it wasn’t goat?” Once people started turning into goats, goat consumption plummeted. Although you can usually tell by the t-shirt they are wearing or the occasional gold tooth, it’s better safe than sorry. After all, once you kill a goat, they’re dead.

“Stop it!” Nurse Two shrieked. They noticed me lingering by the door and remembered their duties.

“How’s she doing?”

“She’s a real trooper. We’ve got her on some medication so pain isn’t bad. We think she’ll stick it out for a couple more days.”

I expected as much. The nurses left the room and I woke Mum. “Mum, it’s me.”

“Amethyst.” She reminded me. We smiled and I told her about Jessie.

“I’m sorry to hear that honey. But don’t you dare dump me to the wayside when I die. I expect the royal treatment. You’re to take me swimming every Thursday and I want a change of clothes at least every other day.” We’d been through all of this before but it comforted her to talk about it again. Mum loved knitting, and she’d made a bunch of custom outfits for Dad when he first passed. Dad hadn’t had time to make final requests, and Mum wanted to make sure that I knew just how she wanted to be taken care of. Now she was halfway through a wardrobe full of attire for herself and I was going to be in charge of making the posthumous fashion decisions. Two small sweaters lay on the side table, half stitched together.

“Don’t worry Mum. I’ll take care of you.” She scowled at me.

“Amethyst.” With that, she closed her eyes and dozed off. The nurses brought me a pillow and a more comfortable chair.

That night I witnessed death for the first time. It starts with a protrusion of the nose. It was like her face was reclining in a chair, with a wispy white goatee (which have really made a fashion resurgence) as the footrest. Extending like large, ornate cupholders were her ears, swapping verticality for a horizontal life. Her limbs thinned as they retreated towards her body, hands closing and becoming dark and hardened. Her skin trembled momentarily and then gave way to slick brown hair, speckled with patches of white. I tried to imagine this process for Alan Alister, his flattened body being slowly inflated to smaller proportions. Dad must have been pieced back together, arms and legs gathering and thrusting themselves back onto his already hairy torso, beard shrinking to a manageable size. The horns, which were always different, came last. They began to protrude, got bored, and stopped only an inch outside her head.

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Goats Town | Andrew Mitchell

There she was, Amethyst, laying awkwardly on her back in a deathbed made for a human. This unnatural position seemed to rouse her and her eyes opened slowly. She tried to examine her new appendages, which were swimming in her hospital gown. Finally she noticed me and then the half-knit sweaters on the table beside her. Rolling on her side, her front two hooves reached for the knitting needles only to tip the entire bundle of yarn onto the floor. After struggling for about a minute, she held one needle between her hooves and lifted it slowly up to her face. There I saw the same look Dad had when he first climbed onto the piano bench after his death. I picked up the yarn from the ground.

“You’ll just have to teach me how to finish this.” This didn’t fix the emptiness, but she nodded and let me carry her to the reception desk. It felt like checking out of a hotel that we wouldn’t come back to. The nurses even showed up to say goodbye. I spoke with the doctor on our way out.

“Feel free to call us if you have any questions, and we recommend that you come back in the next year just for her routine check up, make sure you’re keeping her healthy.” He handed me a piece of paper. “Here’s a prescription, should she get moody or start eating plastic. The most important thing is support. Make her feel like she’s still your mom.” I thanked him.

That night I witnessed death for the first time.

It starts with a protrusion of the nose.

When Dad died we bought an SUV so he could ride in the back on road trips.

When we got to the car, I walked around to the back. No goat met me from the other side. Instead, she was sitting by the passenger’s side door, pouting.

“Come on Mum. It’s more comfortable back here.” She lay down completely.

I didn’t see the point in fighting, so I opened her door and she hopped in. A mile down the road, I noticed that she’d been looking at me and wiggling her butt back and forth in the seat since we left the hospital. Her back legs shot out at a comical right angle and her front legs dangled in front of her soft brown coat.

“Do you need to get out and pee?” I quickly realized the silliness of the question, remembering the numerous times Dad had done his business in the back with little regard for us up front. Plus he liked having control of when we rolled down the windows.

Then I noticed that she was buckled. I stopped the car and gave her my full attention. She unbuckled the seat and rebuckled herself several times using her mouth, each time following the act with a vigorous nod that left small holes in the leather seat behind her.

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Leland Quarterly | Winter & Spring 2016

Ali Vaughan

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Goats Town | Andrew Mitchell

“Not bad, Amethyst.” She emitted a high-pitched sound that resembled a ‘woo!’ and we both laughed at this triumph.

Most of the neighborhood was accidentally in attendance for our arrival (goats spend most of their days grazing on their front lawns) and this delighted Amethyst. I opened her car door and she hesitated, focusing on something behind me. I turned around to see Princess Apple Dew, mid-strut. She was still wearing the large blue ribbons and parading in a loop around her yard, which had become a thin dirt circle where she continually marched. She stopped when she saw the goat in the passengers seat. Amethyst made sure to lock eyes with her archenemy before she performed her new trick, unbuckling her seatbelt and exiting the car gracefully. Mum had told me that she didn’t want to walk around naked when she died, that it was crude for a goat to do so, but in that moment she seemed proud to let her fur shine. She swung her bare hips as she trotted inside and swished her tail in a figure eight. P.A.D. only resumed her strutting once the door had closed and we were inside.

The house was quiet except for the clicking of hooves on the hardwood as Amethyst rushed through to the backyard where Dad was probably sleeping. I hadn’t told him about Mum. I wanted to surprise him. So that’s how Dad found out his wife was dead, seeing her burst out horns-first of the goat hatch we put in our back door. They ran at each other and tried to embrace, Amethyst still trying to be human and Dad forgetting he was a goat.

“Dad, I present to you Amethyst.” He blinked hard several times. They just stared at each other while I stood between them. “I’m going to go inside to get some rest, you two have some catching up to do.”

I had to close the window in my bedroom to silence their chatter. I wondered what they were saying. I imagined what it would be like if Jessie and I had never spoken but still dated for all those years. Nothing to really catch up on except expressing our feelings. Not even an MRI can tell you what’s going on inside someone’s head. It can help you see the small white wrecking ball growing in size but it can’t capture thoughts. As I shut the window, I saw them try to embrace, Amethyst still trying to be human and Dad forgetting he was a goat.

When I woke up it was mid-morning. I’d slept for almost 15 hours and there were still goat noises outside. The house was quiet. I remembered that both my parents were dead and so breakfast was probably my responsibility. I headed downstairs and found two eggs and some rotten milk in the fridge. I settled on cereal and grabbed the paper. The front page read Public Servant Serves Mistress, Served Justice. When I finished the cereal, I made a list. Buy food. Get clothes on Amethyst.

Is it Thursday? The paper says yes. Take Amethyst swimming. That seemed like everything. It took forty-five minutes to load the car, and I now know how Mum felt when I was young. It’s very difficult to dress goats and then convince them that driving around in a car will be more fun than laying around in the back yard.

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Leland Quarterly | Winter & Spring 2016

“It’s Thursday! Swimming time.” I’m even talking to her like she’s a child, but it does the trick. Dad decided to come to, and hopped in the back, but not before Amethyst was able to show him her buckle trick, winning an approving nod.

Beach first, I thought, then market.

Mum never got me to swim growing up. It was too cold to want to, and I was too stubborn to be convinced.

“It’s good for your soul”, she’d tell me, but I didn’t buy it.

Today the sea was calm, and the waves hitting the land sounded like a dog lapping up water. I helped Amethyst out of her new clothes and she dashed toward the surf. Dad was second and much more timid, but he followed her in. He hadn’t been too keen on water since his death. I sat down and unfolded the newspaper.

Public Servant Serves Mistress, Served Justice. I read on.

Port Glasgow – City councilwoman Maggie Cairn plead guilty on Wednesday to killing a woman she claims was her husband’s mistress and feeding her to a congregation of public officials. Cairn’s husband was allegedly caught cheating by Cairn, and act that incited her rage and led to her violent response. In an interview Cairn had this to say about the accusations, “I wanted him to know how if feels to really lose something forever.” Cairn earned a life sentence from the jury and will be – I was interrupted by Dad nudging my shoulder. The waves had grown into small white-tipped hills.

“What is it Dad? Need a dry?” I gestured toward the blue towel’s I’d brought, gifts from Jessie. He nudged me harder this time and looked toward the water.

I followed his eyes and saw nothing. The world was covered in dark blue cloth that ruffled and folded in the breeze. The sea was boundless, and Amethyst was gone. I looked for her, I crashed into the oncoming tide and drenched my clothes in cold darkness. The water plunged my cries back into my mouth. The seagulls dove for traces of her hair. The pristine of the day was eerie. I couldn’t hear Dad’s low lament over the sound of heart pounding in my ears. Somewhere, the waves were carrying her quietly away. I reached around blind in the brine until I found nothing. My fingers lost their appetite for touch and I almost felt my own horns escaping from my brain as I dove deeper and deeper in search of her.

I didn’t stop shaking once I was dry. Warmth was still far away. Dad and I sat huddled together on the beach for three hours, scanning the cruel horizon.

Finally, the sea returned her body to us. In my head, Nurse Two and I agreed, “It could be any old goat.” Amethyst was probably just taking the long way round, embracing the vitality that she always got from swimming. I implored the waves to breathe life back into her, the same waves that had beckoned her to the depths.

Her weight was immense and I cradled her in my arms as the three of us bathed in the salt. I carried her body to the car and placed her in the passenger seat. I buckled her in. We didn’t leave the parking lot for an hour. Instead, Dad and I sat watching, waiting for one more miraculous transformation.

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art | Cecily Foote

Cecily Foote

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Leland Quarterly | Winter & Spring 2016

Ali Vaughan

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Rust | Tyler Dunston

Rust Tyler Dunston

a beautiful moment the rotting vegetables in your fridge a ghost that won’t leave you alone when you drink bourbon late at night listen to old records by thelonious monk that your uncle left you because his turntable broke in the seventies and yours is shiny blue and you can pack it up and carry it like a suitcase listen to old jazz on your phone when the plane takes off it makes you think of your uncle’s ex never married but totally in love for three months then she moved didn’t die or anything just moved away and then you think oh shit I forgot to throw away those bad tomatoes in the fridge they were good shiny red once perfect but they became like rusted metal so suddenly and now the house is going to smell like a dying thing

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Leland Quarterly | Winter & Spring 2016

Frank’s Blue

John Murray

Francesca Colombo

Frank ordered his alcohol before sitting down.

So, he questioned me, if x equals 27y divided by 5z…

His eyes gleamed with interest, almost as much as they did when the waitress brought him his gin.

And what did you get on your last math test?

What was that one point off for?

One thing about Frank was that he was predictable. Math was Frank’s safe zone, an area where he didn’t have to deal with tricky things like feelings and blame. Math was predictable, a man’s best friend, he would say, though it doubled as a poor attempt to find common ground with me.

I was also predictable when it came to Frank; minimal conversation, pain in my voice, and fear in my heart. My eyes traveled around the room, searching every inch for an escape, knowing it was the only way to survive dinner. Any point of connection was a another possibility for broken promises and disappointment. Frank, who was addicted to the country club lifestyle (among other 20

Frank’s Blue | Francesca Colombo

things), did not keep promises. When I thought of the pain he caused, I silently wished he would collapse there and then.

Later I told the policeman, I can control things with my mind. I didn’t mean to, though. My thoughts were racing and I just… I didn’t know he would die. You believe me, right?

Mid-sentence, Frank stopped breathing while staring just past my eyes, like he had seen a ghost that scared him into a stunned silence. I thought for a second maybe I had bored him to sleep, like I had at voice recitals, school plays, and, of course, the father daughter dinner dance. But then his stiff body clunked to the ground.

After what seemed like seconds, John, the impatient cop, walked into the room, searching for me.

What happened here?

My hands shook uncontrollably as I took a sip of water.

He just fell. He turned blue. And then he fell. It was the first silent moment of the night. At that moment all I needed was some peace and quiet. Of course this was the time God decided to listen to me.

John nodded and pretended to take notes, but instead doodled in the corner of the notepad..

Don’t worry, he’s conscious again.

The first words out of Frank’s mouth when he woke up in the hospital were who am I. And then I was able to feel sorry for this poor blue-faced stranger.

This nameless man looked so lost and innocent. This was not my father. The tenderness I felt so easily for this man who had the potential to be good disappeared as quickly as it had come when a hint of recognition reappeared in Frank’s eyes.

I just keep thinking about how blue he was. A deep blue, almost like a bruise all over his body, with the colors of his skin distorted in a way that still makes me shudder.

I wasn’t there when his chest rose and fell for the last time. I didn’t have any intimate last moment or revelation as he flatlined. Frank was never one for words of wisdom, so maybe he preferred avoiding that awkward ‘goodbye’ scenario altogether. Frank had been a businessman. He carried his always-buzzing blackberry, an infinite source of logic problems, and the shame of his mistakes.

That blue is burned into my memory.

The truest truth I can tell you is that Frank died that day. It’s also true that he didn’t. Frank is not a dead man; WhoAmI is dead, along with the innocence that read so easily on his face. I carry the guilt of killing a man. I mourn the loss of my father, because that night he fell and seemed to sink right through the floor and down to hell.

A true story about death is only about guilt, pain, and blue.

No one asked me what happened, there was no “John” who talked to the twelve year old trembling in the corner, and I never did describe that horrible blue. I couldn’t speak that night.

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I tried to sell your heart on etsy once Juliana Chang

here is Elmers glue between our palms. I stapled our knees together last week, prayed you wouldn’t notice, our feelings so sloppy poster-paper jagged, so wrinkled 3rd-gradevalentine fantastic, sometimes if you look closely enough you can see where they were pasted together by hand. we stayed up until four last month while I taught you how to sew: in, out, following the yarn with your fingers as it bloomed thin and translucent inside your shirt, we laughed so hard that night the walls started to paper mache your smile. one night

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Samantha Seto

I tried to sell your heart on etsy once | Juliana Chang

our bodies crumpled up so homesick we skipped lunch and dinner, I let you color the empty air in our lungs with crayola, washi tape my jawline out of tremble. we rebuilt each other sideways, not ground up, Tuesday afternoons spent molding the margins of your mattress. it was windy outside when I asked you for scissors once; things unraveled so quickly from there, I was picking loose threads out of the carpet for weeks. you draw your commas backwards. you hide hot glue guns in your hair. you are so full of bindered bullshit when you talk about Plato but you always knew the right way to unwrap presents: ignore all tape pieces, claw through the paper nails first, carve in deep and thick from the flesh, handwrite your heartblooms into the sheets so you remember this was real. so origami fragile, so bruised Gala organic i pray come winter, when the wallpaper curls yellow, honeyed handprints on your pillows start to fade, you, empty hands standing in your driveway, will remember this was all once real 23

Leland Quarterly | Winter & Spring 2016

The Worms Spencer Slovic

Worms are harmless. I don’t get why people are so disgusted by them. They don’t have eyes, like fish, or claws or jaws. They’re just one long digestive tract.

Worms are simple, as an individual organism, but as a group, that’s when they get complex. Multiple worms—preferably thousands—now that’s warmth.

Most people are afraid of the warmth. Most people are afraid of the worms.

I envy them, sometimes.

I’m no worm. I’m an average person, or at least as close as you can get. I live a normal life, have a normal job, normal friendships, normal routines and a normal appearance. I’m so normal you can call me Norm.

Norm just likes to play with worms. That’s all. He’s harmless, really, just like the worms, just like the warmth. He won’t make you watch; he’s learned to keep his worms hidden. Buried, if you will, beneath the soil. Worms and soil are inseparable. The only good worm is a worm underground, hidden, concealed in the silky warmth. They like it there. Norm likes it there.

But I am not a worm. I cannot live like a worm, in the warmth of the womb for my entire life. That’s no life for a human. From time to time I must emerge, to poke my head above ground in the rain and observe the city not with my eyes, no, but with my mind. With my own personal ball of worms, if you will.

I’m an ordinary guy. I swear. I just keep some things under the dirt, if you will. Like my own personal ball of worms. ~ 24

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The Worms | Spencer Slovic

My boss always combs his hair neatly to the side, swooped across his forehead, tucked behind his ears, but he can’t comb away its grease. It doesn’t look slimy, only smooth, like if I tried to touch it my hand would just slide right off and I’d never feel a thing. If he’s going to keep his hair gross he should at least give it texture. Uncontrollable slime like that needs some texture.

The office is empty when I get to work. I slide from cubicle to cubicle, and still, no one. As I’m about to sit down at my own desk by boss calls me into his office. He’s the only living soul here—something big must be up.

“You’re probably wondering where everyone else is,” he says, offering me some water. I decline. I had a cup of coffee his morning and the water would just dilute the caffeine.

“I woke everyone else up early this morning and sent them to a sushi place downtown,” he continues, rubbing his hand over his head. Does he feel anything?

“Sushi?”

“It burned down earlier today. Probably arson.”

“Is Denby already on the police angle?”

“Yeah, and Cruise is collecting eyewitness accounts. Not that there are many.”

At this point I’m hopeful. Since his promotion four weeks ago, I’ve been relegated to daytime robberies and clearance sales, nothing like the investigative work I usually do. Maybe he’s actually figured out how to use me in a, well, useful way for this paper.

“So what do you want me to do?”

“I was going to send you down there with Cruise, but Cruise told me to leave you free to do your own thing today.” He gives me a hint of a smile, like we’re in on the same secret. I’m not sure if we are.

“Okay. Thank you, sir.” I struggle to maintain my expressionless face in the midst of this rediscovered freedom as I stand to leave.

“One more minute, Norm,” he says, holding up a spindly finger. “I have no pretensions as to knowing what you do on these midnight investigations of yours, but I would like to offer some advice, if I may, to remind you of what this paper is looking for.”

I struggle to contain my grimace as I sit back down. He’s about to start on another one of his “lessons.” His hand gesticulations grow larger and grander as he prattles on, drawing attention away from his nervous eyes and wavering tone of voice.

“We’re a small paper,” he begins, eyes shifting skittishly already, “but from time to time, if we get something really special, some aspect or detail of a story that no one else could find, we can sell the story to a larger paper.”

Right. Like we’ve been doing for years. He acts like he came up with it.

“Like the Little Italy protests. What other paper figured out they were a front for the mafia? We sold that story straight to the Times.” He shoots his hand up like a rocket. He must have practiced that one. “Or the mackerel smuggling ring?”

These examples sound suspiciously similar to those used by Mr. Lawrence, our old boss, in his “motivating” speeches each morning. Maybe all newspaper 25

Leland Quarterly | Winter & Spring 2016

bosses just inherently like to listen to themselves speak.

“Like, holy mackerel, am I right?” He forcibly laughs at his own joke, expecting me to join in.

Instead, he loses my attention. I’d rather watch an airplane float placidly over his left shoulder than listen to his drivel any longer. This one’s a Delta, flying low over the New York City skyline towards JFK. The first time I flew on an airplane, the stewardess spilled hot coffee on me and I flipped. I literally flipped the tray table, spilling the compartmentalized airplane meal onto the floor. I had scars from the burns for a few years, one big splotch and then long lines from where the coffee dripped its way across my thighs. Now I prefer to go by train, keeping myself as close to the ground as possible.

A bird flies past the window in the opposite direction of the plane. They look about the same size from here, like two great rivals, machine and animal, about to collide in a battle for the ages above the concrete jungle.

In my line of work they like to say the early bird catches the worm. I don’t use that phrase myself, but I tend to work so late that the day starts itself over again and I end up being the earliest reporter out there anyways. It sounds like tonight will be one of those nights.

My boss has moved on to the inspirational part of his “lesson,” indicated by his rising, grandiose tone of voice, and his looking off into the distance like he really isn’t talking to anybody—which he isn’t. He looks like he needs some coffee.

Maybe it would clear his mind, or at least get it working quickly enough to come up with some real thoughts rather than regurgitating a conglomerate of clichés he’s heard over the past few days.

“—Thunder tonight?”

“What?” Maybe I should have paid attention to that last part.

“Rolling Thunder. The sushi place downtown.”

“Oh. Yeah. I know what to do.”

“Great.” He gives me a goofy thumbs-up. “I always know I can count on you, Norm.”

As I leave the office I look back to see him twiddling his thumbs and looking about the room. He looks lonely in there. Maybe he should just ignore my absence and keep talking.

If the fire was this morning I figure the police will have the scene all wrapped up by nightfall. After I leave the Herald I can spend a few hours at home before heading downtown for some seafood. ~

~

~

I get home around four and start brewing more coffee. It’ll be a late night. I feed the extra coffee grounds to my worms.

My apartment is in the basement of a six-story building, relatively short for the upper West side, and my bathtub is full of worms. About a thousand earthworms from all parts of the city are joined together in this tub, along with my 26

art | Cecily Foote

Cecily Foote

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vegetable-based—and therefore less smelly—compost. I mix the coffee grounds into the soil, letting my hand linger perhaps an instant too long in the worms’ tickling grasps.

Someone knocks quietly on the door. As I go to open it, they knock again, louder, as if they thought maybe I didn’t hear the first one.

“Hi Norm,” my neighbor Janice says as I open the door. Janice lives three floors above me and works from home as an online translator. She’s one of the few people in this building who actually visits. The day I moved in she came to welcome me, and I guess we’ve been friends ever since.

“Hi, Janice. What’s up?”

“Can I borrow an egg?”

Is that all? “Sure. You’re out?”

“Yeah. I’m making a cake for my friend Lola’s birthday and the recipe called for four eggs, but I only had three left.” She has one hand up on my doorframe but can’t hold my gaze and keeps looking down and away.

“Okay. Let me get you one.” As I start walking back towards the refrigerator, I realize I still have dirt on my hand and wipe it on my jeans. “Come in. I’m brewing coffee. Do you want any?”

“Um, yeah, that sounds good, thanks,” she says, making her way inside and sitting at my wooden kitchen table. I can’t help but notice the way she wraps her feet around the table leg.

I only have two eggs left; I give one to Janice.

“Thanks,” she says. “I could have gone to the store, but thought it was easier to check down here first.”

“Any time.” I pause for a second. “How are you?”

“All right.”

There’s more to it than just “all right.” Her niece, Alice, went missing a month ago, and, thinking I was a detective, she contacted me first. I’m not that kind of investigator, but I made sure there was a story on it in the next morning’s Herald.

Maybe she wants me to look more into the case.

Then again, she might just want some company.

“Cream or sugar?” I ask as I pour her a cup of coffee.

“Black.”

We both take our coffee black. I sit down across from her, and gazing over her shoulder I immediately realize I’ve left the bathroom door wide open.

I don’t know what the apartment’s housing code says about worms, but I’m pretty sure there is a rule against pets. As long as they don’t interfere with anyone else or make a mess or ruin the apartment… can’t a man keep his hobbies to himself? Not that I fear Janice would rat me out—that’s not the reason I don’t want her to see the worms. I’m deep in my thirties and shouldn’t be so concerned with what other people think of me, but for some odd reason I feel the nagging need to keep Janice’s view of me pristine. By the city’s current social norms, that means a view that’s worm-free.

Would I give up the worms for Janice? Maybe, I think, sipping coffee and 28

The Worms | Spencer Slovic

waiting for her to say something. It’s not that I like Janice, per se. She’s a good neighbor and a good person, and I’ve dated a few people here and there since moving to the city, but I don’t feel a pressing urge to couple up and settle down any time soon.

“Translate anything interesting recently?” I ask as her eyes start to dart about the room. The pristinely organized room, I might add.

“Only a few legal documents, mostly people wanting to see what their dead old Italian relatives actually left them,” she says, laughing.

I chuckle along in sympathy, sipping my coffee. I could go shut the door, but it might draw unnecessary attention to the bathroom and its contents.

“Hey, Norm, can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“What do you think happened? What do you think happened to…” Janice trails off, but we both know the word that would roll off her tongue next. Alice.

“I’ve told you everything I know. Everything I could find out.”

“Yeah, but what do you think happened?”

“Like, what do I imagine happened?”

“Yeah.”

“Imagination is a tricky thing. Usually false, speculative. As a journalist I don’t like to go there.”

“But as a person. I’m not writing any articles on this. No one’s listening.”

I don’t want to get her hopes up. I don’t want her imagination going wild, and with my help her speculations would only get darker. “I really don’t know.”

Janice looks at me with a tinge of disappointment. I stir my coffee. It’s almost lukewarm enough to drink.

“Can I use the bathroom?” she asks.

I can feel the blood rushing to my face. I try to think of a way to get her not to use the bathroom, but all I can think of is the fact that I need to think of a way of getting her not to use the bathroom, and I’m stuck in an endless thought loop. I don’t think I’ve breathed in a minute. My face is maroon. At least I look odd enough to capture her attention. Her eyes stay fixated on my self-suffocation, rather than looking for the restroom.

I finally catch a breath. Trying to look as natural as possible, I tell her that the toilet is clogged and that she should probably just go upstairs to her own apartment to use the bathroom.

She gives me a blank look and I can’t tell if she buys my lie or not. We go back to small talk but for the rest of her visit all I can think about is the bathtub full of worms twenty feet behind her.

After Janice leaves I start boiling a pot of water for spaghetti on the stove. I should shower and change into darker clothes—it’s almost time for me to check out the burnt-down sushi restaurant. Any other journalist would have been watching the news all day, but I prefer to work from the hard facts alone. I’d rather draw my own conclusions than borrow those of the talking heads up at channel seven.

I can’t help but notice a draft in the room as I undress and slip into the bath.

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The bathroom’s usually pretty warm, and today it was warmer than usual, so I opened the window, but now it’s getting a bit too cool for comfort. I climb out and close the window, but I’ve left dirty footprints on the gray tile floor. Gray is such an ugly color, I’ve decided, but I don’t dislike it quite enough to shell out the money to replace the tiles.

Hands gripping the slightly slippery sides of the tub, I close my eyes and sink into the soil. The worms keep it loose and airy, and the perfect consistency makes it feel like a cloud. The soil is warm from all the life and movement, and its general mucosity gives it the feel of a skin cream rather than a mud bath.

After I stop moving I begin to feel them. They’re hesitant at first, shrinking back from the strange new object in their home, but then they begin to slide over me, looking for any food I may have brought or the food they were eating before I came. I feel a worm slide between my left fourth and pinky toe, and I wiggle my foot a bit. It quickly moves away, but others aren’t so timid.

Pretty soon I’m surrounded, swathed in a writhing swarm of sliding, stringy oligochaetes. My skin wasn’t meant to have so much stimulation at once—I convulse against the bottom of the tub, several times slipping beneath the surface and forcing myself up to gasp for air.

A metallic clattering arises from the kitchen—the pot lid letting out steam.

The spaghetti must be boiling on the stovetop, but I’m willing to risk mushy pasta for another couple minutes. ~

~

~

I pause halfway up the stairs as I emerge from the subway. All I can see are shoes, millions of small black and brown rodents scampering across the concrete, tip-tapping codes on the surface of an underworld they don’t even know exists.

I’m sure you know about the subway system. Everybody does. But do you know about the abandoned subway stations? The closed-off subway tunnels? Did you know they’re teeming with life, just like the depths of the ocean? Homeless people, rats, drug dealers, teenagers drawn to the quiet to record their first mixtapes. They all make their homes down there.

Rolling Thunder is surrounded by police tape, but nothing more. The fire must have been put out quickly—the one-story building still stands and looks like it just came out of the toaster, not a raging inferno. I wait next to the smashed window for a moment, pretending to check emails on my phone, until the street clears and I slip inside.

I learned earlier that day that the owners of Rolling Thunder were Dominic and Francine Palamino. No criminal records, no feuds or incidents or notoriety to speak of. Nothing that would immediately suggest arson, yet that was what the editor-in-chief told me, so I’ll let that stay the default assumption. Maybe other Japanese restaurateurs had it out for them—Italians running a sushi place.

Imagine that.

The restaurant was probably pretty hip, back in its day—yesterday, I guess.

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Like many New York restaurants it’s deeper than it is wide, but they still manage to fit in a bar and a looped conveyor belt alongside a few tables. What really strikes me as I walk inside is the tree. A small apple tree rises from the center of the conveyor belt, its blossoming flowers still intact. The faux-leather seats that line the bar have proven to be flame-resistant, but the conveyor belt’s plastic segments didn’t seem to do so well and are melted together in a permanent snaking pattern around the room.

A light illuminates the restaurant and I duck down, but it goes away and I realize it was just a passing car. Staying low, I make my way to the cash register, but it’s already been emptied or looted, so I won’t find anything there. As I move past the leather barstools I notice they’re coated in a thin layer of ash. It doesn’t look like there were any customers in the restaurant when the fire started—or any people for that matter—because all the ash, on the floor, on the chairs, on the counter, seems perfectly preserved in sheets, as if the police didn’t even step inside earlier today.

The rear kitchen is clean. The fire doesn’t seem to have reached it. The charcoal stops at the door, and only a light dusting of ash seems to have blown in onto the white tile floor. If kitchen equipment didn’t start the fire, then the only other natural cause would be an electrical flaw. I stick with my theory of arson. If it was, they didn’t finish the job. With a bit of cleaning and a few fixes, the restaurant could open up for business again within a few weeks.

...I’m surrounded, swathed in a writhing swarm of sliding, stringy oligochaetes

Before I leave I decide to check out the inside of the conveyor belt. Maybe I’ll find something there that will actually make this investigation worth my time. I jump over the conveyor belt into the middle of the ring. The dirt floor crunches beneath my feet. Dirt? In a restaurant? The whole inner floor of the sushi-goround is covered in it. Not just covered, I discover, pawing at the ground with my shoe, but actually made of dirt. The apple tree grows right out of the bare-earth floor. Must have been a nightmare come health-inspection time.

Car lights flash through the restaurant again, but this time they stay. Looking out from behind the conveyor belt, I see that a car has pulled up almost to the door of the restaurant, its headlights shining directly into the windows. One figure steps in front of the lights, then another. I can only see their shadows from my hiding spot in the booth. They step through the smashed window as I shrink back down behind the conveyor belt. In the darkness I don’t think they see me.

“Let’s do it fast and get outta here.”

“Yeah.”

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“And make sure to get the kitchen this time.”

“Okay.”

“That’s where all the good stuff is. Gotta go kaboom, man.”

I think I hear a trickle of water, or some other liquid. They must be spilling gas on the floor. Footsteps make their way through the restaurant, pouring gasoline everywhere, just inches from my own head on the other side of the conveyor belt.

The footsteps fade. Silence, for a moment. Then a sound like all the world’s air is being sucked into the room, or like all the room’s air is racing to make its way out.

I scramble to stand up and leave, but it’s already too late. Flames surround me, covering the front entrance to the restaurant, the door to the kitchen, all the windows. I look around frantically for a way out, backing up against the apple tree.

I try to think and breathe at the same time, but I can only manage one or the other in this heat. There are knives under the counter, but knives won’t help me here. The flames are getting closer. A small pink apple blossom almost hits me in the eye, instead bouncing hard off my cheek. I touch it to find it is hard: plastic, fake. The whole tree is fake, I discover, knocking on its hollow trunk. It’s all made of plastic, suspended from the ceiling with wires.

I feel ashes landing on my skin. The flames are over the conveyor belt now, traveling along the ceiling. The fire isn’t warm; this is hot. Warmth is comfortable.

This just hurts. I do the only thing that comes to mind, or, rather, the only thing that comes to me instinctually. I dig. Down, into the ground, my hands working as fast as they can. The soil is surprisingly light and airy for being at the base of a tree, like it has a colony of worms, and my fingers dig through it with ease. In fact, the soil becomes lighter and lighter still, cooler and cooler, away from the hotter and hotter heat of the fire. Soon enough I’m on my knees, leaning into the hole I’m digging at the base of the apple tree, when suddenly the soil isn’t soil at all, but cool, cool metal.

A trapdoor. I fumble for a latch, finding a ring and pulling it open. Warm air streams out of the hole, filling my lungs for a glorious second before the fire encroaches on my find. The flames lick my face as I pull myself feet-first into the hole, but my shoulder catches on the side and I find myself spinning downwards through the air.

My left elbow breaks my fall as I hit a hard floor below, but my head follows soon after, slamming into the concrete. I can’t feel or move anything below my left shoulder. I writhe on the concrete, holding my head with my left hand, my other arm trailing loosely behind me. My gasps of pain echo and reverberate, and patches of the ground are wet, sticky. I think I’ve blacked out, but then I spot a flicker of orange through the hole in the dirt above me, far away.

A light, too bright, too close, shines in my face. I grope for it and it hovers back, light footsteps scampering away from me.

“Help!” I shout. “Help.”

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The light moves closer again. My head hurts.

“Don’t worry,” says a voice. A child’s voice. “You’ll be okay.” A little girl.

We need to get out of here. The fire will find us. The ceiling will collapse.

“The fire…” I tell her. “It… don’t…” I start, but the pain in my head is too much. The last thing I feel after the darkness is the drip, drip, drip of water from above. ~

~

~

Something about the worms changed after that night. I could never quite get the same feel from them again, the same sense of comfort, as day after day feelings of revulsion and regret crept in.

I’m not blaming Janice’s niece for this, or her kidnappers, or even Janice herself. I think it was more of an internal, personal thing that drew me and the worms apart. Maybe they weren’t what I was truly after, but an outlet, a displacement.

They were just a stage in my life, I guess, and I grew out of them.

A few weeks after the fire, while I was still on paid recovery leave, I started letting the worms go. I didn’t have a car or anything big enough to transport them all at once, so I would take the worms and dirt a bucket at a time out into different parts of the city, releasing them into parks, alleyways, abandoned subway stations. Soon enough they were all gone. I can take baths now, not that I want to—I shower.

But I can let people into the bathroom. Janice has started coming over more and more lately, and she can stay longer now that my toilet has officially been “fixed.” I don’t think she knows that I was the one who found her niece, but she might suspect something. I published the article under a pseudonym, selling it to the Times and not even running it in the Herald, so there’s no reason to expect that Janice knows it was me.

After I blacked out in Rolling Thunder’s hidden basement, I woke up in a hospital room. The fire trucks must have reached the scene fairly quickly again, spoiling the arson attempt for a second time. I think the arsonists got what they wanted, though. No one’s entirely sure how Alice ended up in that basement, or why someone wanted the building burned down, but I have my suspicions. I think the arsonists wanted Alice to be found. I’ve started looking into it, but I still can’t find anything.

The owners swear they didn’t know about the hidden basement, saying it must have been one of the sushi chefs, but I don’t quite believe them. The building still stands, again, but I think the owners are trying to sell the property now.

I walked by the abandoned lot one day to see them pouring concrete into the hidden basement. “Structural stability,” a construction worker told me when I asked what they were doing. I agree—an airy foundation won’t support anything.

Sometimes you just have to squash the soil down to build on top of it, compacting it densely, worms and all.

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Jessica Shen

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art | Jessica Shen

Jessica Shen

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Jessica Shen

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art | Jessica Shen

Jessica Shen

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Jessica Shen

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art | Jessica Shen

Jessica Shen

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The Refugees | Nick Burns

The Refugees Nick Burns

It is spring, still cool, and the caterpillars dangle down on threads from trees to startle university students who pass or unlock their bikes parked under oak trees to find the hairy bright things waiting on their seats, crawling between their handlebars.

A girl passing me on her bike shrieks and leaps off the seat, leg catching on the bar and beating at herself with both hands in the cool sunny morning. A day from now the trees will be sprayed, all the pilgrims curled up like small ignored monuments to anguish.

If we hate them, it is because they want to be safe and because we never think of the boats soon to return to Mytilene, or whether they have caterpillars spooling like angels down to earth at Idomeni.

Coraal Cohen

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poems by Andrew Mitchell

Home I never ate breakfast at the table in our first house.

The one we grew up in, with the flower couch and the tv set with the rabbit ears. The one with the bunk bed forts and the tiny backyard that became a baseball diamond every night after school. Instead I’d sandwich myself between the kitchen table and the old linoleum floor, right on top of the breathing vent, capturing its warm exhale with my blanket.

They have a fence now, you know. And some lions to guard the entrance. The crab apple tree is still there though and every time I bike by I remember how the fruit used to rot on the lawn.

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I was seven and the yard | Andrew Mitchell

I was seven and the yard was much bigger then so when you’d run to the other side to retrieve the ball I’d almost lose you in the haze but then you would reappear smile first and somehow I’d end up kicking the ball right back across the yard where you’d never let me go and I’m not even sure I know what it looks like over there in the haze and days have passed since the time when we didn’t get the ball back and I never thought that we’d get a new one because we still haven’t and I’m sure you are over there against the rotten fence looking for it still because I haven’t seen you either but I hope you know that I’m still sitting here cross legged with a handful of pulled grass waiting

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Chase Porter 44

The Pros of Germ-X | Marin Tyne Reeve

The Pros of Germ-X:

Peripherally on Personal Hygience, Mainly on Sterility in Berlin Street Style Marin Tyne Reeve

After only one of the 24 weeks I would spend in the city, I was sold on a bipartite theory concerning fashion in Berlin--namely, that sterility reigned as the predominant feature of the street style scene, and that this was the mantra of what it had ever meant to be cool, ever.

Sterile meant apathetic. Toxic, contemptuous of humanity, allergic to enthusiasm. It meant that if Californians liked their jeans to hug, Berliners limited interaction with their trousers to a terse nod from across the room. It meant wearing accessories as if for each one a fairy somewhere dropped dead. It meant exposed scalps, black stuff, slightly off-black stuff. Non-representational tattoos. Sweat stains. Prints really fucking interested in the connection between the Industrial Revolution and man’s crippling sense of lameness since the second half of the nineteenth century. Upper. Frenulum. Piercings.

Even the trashcans looked like breath mints.

From the no-makeup look to the no-torso-nor-upper-thighs look (see: guesswho’sbackbackagainLONGTRENCHCOAT’SBACKflashafriend), Berliners cultivated a harrowingly precise barrenness in their style that I found so cool because it both communicated self-sufficiency and, by extent, argued the existence of an immutable self that, you know, supposedly sufficed. And I wanted to know about it. The aesthetic vernacular didn’t want or need more than it was, which seemed to be an abstraction of what Berliners believed it meant to walk their streets, ride their trains, wallow in their dive bars. It was leather, dusk, and New Balance in picky permutations, and its exclusivity begged a tourist-like inquisition into just what kind of separates made it into the proverbial Berghain that was a Berlin-based wardrobe and why.

Because I was too intimidated by this ethos to ever pop a squat roadside a la Scott Schuman and solicit pictures of it, I’ll try to just describe the first jelly donut that impressed me.

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She was buying deodorant.

Two days in, local interaction thus far limited to my 78-year-old homestay mother and an admittedly color-conscious bowl of müsli, I was highly impressionable to fashion in any form and finally encountered it in a Kaiser’s, reaching for the Dove underarm spray I have since learned may not smell like armpit but does smell like ass.

Its vessel, a scrawny girl my age, was clearly a subscriber to the no-torso-norupper-thighs look. Her black boiled-wool coat fell past her knees in a slow arc, as soy milk into müsli, a naked couple from a garden, or an ass from its youthful tautness, its curvature rendering her form more than slightly reminiscent of a turtle. But, like, a hundred year old turtle that has seen aquatic tragedies you could never imagine. Her black jeggings clung to her not unlike bae of 2011, and her Apollonian white Nikes brought the visual essay to a gratifying conclusion.

Accentually, a sleek black box of a backpack levitated between her shoulder blades, and her hair was bleached spaghetti pulled into the most languid of topknots.

I here denote a languidness comparable to Cleopatra collapsed on a chaise lounge after leg day. This spawn of bun looked like it was concocted with both hands tied behind her back, maybe the coincidental occurrence of rubbing her head in a bowl of particularly autonomous hairbands. It was like a brussels sprout on the cusp of decay, the Enchanted Rose the Thursday before the Beast’s 21st birthday bar hop. Actually, I think the most apt way to describe this topknot would be a photograph of a koala I found while browsing National Geographic the other day, encaptioned, “Fucks? Nah, haven’t seen him.”

By National Geographic, I mean @fuckjerry.

Any fewer fucks on the part of this topknot and we’d have another form of retroactive contraception on the market.

Anyways, from the jacket’s indifferent levitation around her body to the untainted theme of functionality uniting her nonetheless formally successful separates, homegirl’s ensemble encapsulated the word I started carrying around with me after that like a barcode scanner and holding up to everything that moved for confirmation: sterile.

But this sartorial narrative of sacrificial utilitarianism--of riches-to-rags, so zu sagen--became increasingly storybook as I continued to comb the streets for free wifi. The sleeved body bag, the geeky footwear of yesteryear, and some leather receptacle more formally akin to tupperware than what Gucci churns out were the uniform of the residential female twenty-something, I realized, and its manifesto of solitude was diluted en masse.

I couldn’t have perceived on that toiletries aisle, though, as I peered down with sudden contempt at a jacket too fond of my torso to conceal its origins in 2012, that the freshness of deodorant girl was, in fact, wilting before my eyes; that her shapes had only to be witnessed fifty more times on the U12 into Kreuzberg to enter the same tired visual vernacular as my medium wash mid46

The Pros of Germ-X | Marin Tyne Reeve

rises and black high tops.

After enough iterations, I began to wonder in horror: could minimalism become basic?

Actually, here’s a better question: Could a feeling--like the intangible quality of sterility, duh dum, that gave rise to a minimalistic outfit--go the way of something fleshly like the Birkenstock fish, arbitrarily washed into the Mainstream, doomed to eventually encounter the Waterfall of Wedundancy? Or is there really something secret, inborn, and untouchable in Berliner taste that is not a trend but will always stylize the way trends are worn?

I floundered for the eternal.

Because I did continue to sense the novelty of nonchalance in other details around town, like in canvas sneakers so rekt they must have been catching bump residue from above, or in the Immutable Undercut of the German Youth, touched up between snacks and, behind Hefeweizen, the city’s second largest commercial export (source: My aß). So I let the word sterile and its connotation stay, its denotation submit to ongoing construction.

The only takeaway I could latch onto was that the city pared way down, and I was late to note that it worked.

But only recently arisen from the backwoods intellectual fermentation of Palo Alto, hungover on visions of yoga capris, North Face quarter zips and plush polyester onesies--any and all clothing that propagated the Western self-narrative of sexy-while-active, ready-to-fuck-on-our-next-camping-trip, etc.--could you blame me for being floored by an aesthetic that maintained it was cooler to look like the tent?

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Cecily Foote

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Blackberries | Christina Herrera Mezgravis

Blackberries Cristina Herrera Mezgravis

“A clear conscience makes a soft pillow,� spilled from the lips of a man that cheated.

He died, and with him, the truth, while his words are throned in my mother’s memory.

I wonder how much weight his head carried every time he lay beside her, the wife that now cries over his half-open casket stroking the glass that lies over his body: glued lips pulled tight into a grimace, pale hands fixed neatly over a suit, green veins stopping short of his fingernails.

Did his lover see the prickles on the lean, bowed arms before she drove her hand into the bramble or did she feel them dive into her skin, cutting through the ridges of her fingertips?

Did she feel she could burst dewed drupelets or was it the taste of rotten blackberries that stained her mouth when he did not think of his children?

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Tyler Dunston

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Theology | Hannah Llorin

Theology Hannah Llorin

I. I curled myself right into the underwing of a seagull while I was still brown with August, dark with humor committing that horrid crime of being 19.

We were obscene. I swear, I solemnly swear, on all the graves of all the lovers whose names we never knew.

Blank headstones. I chose all their epitaphs.

Hell if I know how they wanted to be remembered; everyone got Plath.

Yes, I was infatuated with you: I am still.

See: even now in your death I worship you worshipping me. We kissed on altars, on rooftops, in raindrops.

Typewriter keys on my spine and stanzas spilling out my mouth. Grains of sand in the sheets. Hands going south.

Landmines are occasionally detonated by thunder.

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Ali Vaughan

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Theology | Hannah Llorin

II. Afterward you whispered of a German word for the pleasure derived from one’s reflection in the darkened window of the cafe or on the quiet surface of a hypothetical lake.

I do not know the word. I know the word. I know the keening of a kingbird mourning the passing of its namesake. The desert rubbing itself into my skin. The feathers on my back.

The ink on my tongue; the age that I lack.

But the fact remains: I never cared for the dawn, nor its birds, nor its insistence on making me tea using a dirty mug and the microwave.

I can only offer what I left on the bedstand. —Thanks for last night and the Earl Grey.

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Orange Country Nick Burns

While it was happening Gerard was driving the golf cart with its big grippy tires down the rows of orange trees in the orchard. He’d started early with the dew still beaded on the grass but it had been some hours now and the sun was blistering, everything looked shimmery with the weight of it. Yet the orange trees gave shade and lent that piquant flavor to the air. Gerard was wearing one of those circular floppy-brimmed hats of the kind worn by old men after their doctors tell them to stay out of the sun from now on.

He sighted a palm sapling under a tree four spaces up the row. His foot pressed down on the brake, the cart rattling as it slowed. He took the short shovel from the passenger seat and stepped off the cart before it had entirely finished rolling to a halt. There was shade under the lowest branches of the orange tree, but as he brought both knees down upon the ground and crawled towards the sapling he could feel the snail shells breaking underneath him.

Snails, for some reason, loved the orange trees in the orchard. Uncle Jeremy had gone around all the trees in the orchard some decades ago and wrapped copper bands around the trunks, near the discontinuity where the rootstock met the scion, because snails shy from copper and wouldn’t cross the band. This had been on foot, too, before the golf cart became part of the landscape in the orchard.

But time had passed: copper had appreciated and pesticides had cheapened, so now clustered around the base of every orange tree’s trunk were hundreds of the corpses of snails and Gerard had instructions to strip off the bands where he found them and bring them back to the ranch where Uncle Jeremy had a pile going. Once he had enough, he’d said, Gerard could drive them all down to the scrapyard out past the town and keep fifteen percent of what the man there gave him.

Reaching to the trunk, Gerard found where the band overlapped itself and pulled on the end until it came off the trunk and went limp with the wobbly sound of thin metal, like the sound saws make when shaken. It was covered in verdigris. He put it in his back pocket.

Now with the shovel he set upon the palm sapling. With his hand on the shiny end of the handle and a foot on the blade he sank it into the ground. The sapling quivered as the tip bumped against its roots. It looked almost innocuous, 54

Orange Country | Nick Burns

at its base just a bulb that widened and split into three dark green blades, maybe a foot tall. But if Gerard didn’t uproot it it would harden as it grew and sprout fronds with toothy edges, it would steal from the orange tree. It couldn’t be allowed to happen.

Jeremy’s story for it was that when it rained the water would flood down from the hills and bring the seeds of palms down the drainage ditch and through the culvert. That’s why the sandy soil of the ditch between the orchard and the road was dotted with waist-high palms. Coyotes came and ate the fruit and then shat them out under the orange trees. Perhaps they took shade here in the daytime as well. Gerard had never seen a coyote in the daytime and he wondered what it was they did. If they slept, then where they did so. In the orchard he could consider these sorts of things, while elsewhere he could only accept them.

Gerard pushed the handle down and heard the subtle crack of the palm roots breaking as a shovelful of earth and leaves and snail shells was levered up, and the palm tree which was still connected to the clod of dirt toppled over and lay sideways on the ground. He picked it up by its end and smacked it down a few times until the dirt was mostly gone from the roots, and then crawled back out from under the tree. He couldn’t stop himself wincing as the empty snail shells crunched beneath him.

The sun fell heavy upon him and his knees hurt as he straightened. The day which had been put on hold was now resuming. He placed the copper band and the dead sapling in the appropriate piles in the back of the golf cart and collapsed down behind the wheel. Leaning over he set the short shovel on the passenger seat then sat canted forward with his arms on the steering wheel, hands hanging limp above the dash. Sweat beaded on his forehead. It was about time for lunch.

Gerard drove back to the ranch house with dust rising behind the golf cart and the tools rattling around in the back. The hills on the other side of the valley stood dry and faintly purple in the heat, the foothills dotted with orange trees spaced evenly as the dots on dominoes. Later in the afternoon he figured he would walk down along the dusty road through the fields to the town and the ATM where he’d deposit the cash he’d gotten from Uncle Jeremy these past couple weeks. If at the end of today’s work Jeremy gave him the cash from the past week then he’d have enough in his account to buy the ticket to MadridBarajas. He’d do it on his phone, then and there as long as the cash transferred to his balance and the internet from the Best Western was working. He could stand by the motel pool near Tenth and lean against the fence until the pages loaded, buy the ticket and then head to the burrito place on Howard that cooked with lard. The guy at the counter would test him on his Spanish and maybe Gerard would be able to tell him about his plans for the trip. Then he’d give Jeremy a call and see if he could pick him up.

Gerard turned the corner after the last row of orange trees and slowed down incrementally. The dirt of the main road was packed more loosely than that of the orchard rows and so it was best to drive more slowly, or else the dust that 55

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Orange Country | Nick Burns

would rise from under the wheels would gather on the leaves of the orange trees closest to the road and suffocate them. The dust was bad for the orange trees.

As the house came into view, there was some fragment of dull shock coursed through him upon seeing the porch bare of any pitcher of lemonade, but nothing after that surprised him. It was the same blackness which took the oranges after they’d fallen to the ground, this was all he could say to himself in his mind, it was something Uncle Jeremy had taught him. Pulling open the screen door with its skinny pneumatic hinge and pushing the door open there he was, somehow aptly on the floor, with a lunch plate smashed into shards of shiny black clay like the ruins in some Greek archaeological site.

Gerard turned him over and felt for any movement in him; the shards of the plate made a strange noise scraped against the floor by Jeremy’s broad still back.

It could have happened only moments ago. Or Jeremy could have been there for thousands of years; he looked like the residents of Pompeii or Chaco Canyon frozen with only an inkling of terror dawned upon them in their repose. New and old questions emerged on looking at him: the wide fleshy face full of life (was it wrong to say this of a dead man?), the hair still vividly black (did he dye it?).

To the phone Gerard went slowly, calmly, as if balancing on high. He dialed and told the operator what had happened, noticing some strange gentle singsong in his voice as he described what had happened, gave an address, said he was all right. Upon hanging up he went to the closet and took out the broom and the dustpan, swept up the shards of bowl and deposited them in the trashcan by the pantry. Then he plucked a potato from the sack and left the house.

He picked his hat from the post outside and went around back to his cottage with the potato which he fried up with butter and no onion. He sat on an orange log outside the cabin, eating in the shade under the lip of the roof. When the ambulance pulled up the dirt road towards the ranch house he was thinking of Salamanca in the evening time, the dry sandstone and the big Spanish sky, the bookstore closing its doors behind him and the verdigris on the cathedral’s façade. There would only be one cloud in the navy-colored eastern sky, curled like a trimmed juniper bush, and out in the countryside there would be orange trees growing in the foothills.

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To Rest in Peace A Crown of Sonnets by Louise Meriwether Stewart

“Well, aren’t we just in the dust and ghost of the Confederacy,” said Aunt Mae, as floorboards my great-great-grandfather laid creaked under our soles and summoned up slow tornados that glittered in columns—or brandished through bars—of dim December light.

We paused before his portrait, and I cringed at our eyes, unable to deny that mine on the glass looked just like his self-righteous glare beneath. “Would you look at that family resemblance?” admired Aunt Mae, inflating Uncle Lee with pride like a gas.

He told me the name of the source of my shame, and I didn’t stop him. I did not speak.

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photography | John Murray

John Murray

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Why didn’t I speak? Why didn’t I leave?

Is absorbing my history the same as accepting it? Or would it be worse a sin to plug my ears and sing a hymn?

I was ten and listened to my elder say, “Great-granddad Martin Witherspoon Gary was a Harvard-educated lawyer, two-term Senator of South Carolina, and one hell of a brigadier-general in the Calvary Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia.”—He didn’t say “Confederate Army” and will not say “slavery.”—Instead, he said, “His greatest siege killed forty-two thousand men of the Union and just twenty-eight thousand men of our own: The Siege of Petersburg, our nine-month triumph.”

Uncle Lee smiled at God and crowed on, “Pa was the last to leave Richmond in April 1865, and can you believe when Robert E. Lee kneeled at Grant’s feet, your great-great-grandfather refused to?

With a gentlemanlike tip of his hat, he rode through Appomattox and escorted President Jefferson Davis on down to your great-great-great-grandmother’s house in Cokesbury, Caroline,” stopping only to eat, sleep, shit, piss, pray, slay Yankees and gut freedmen.—I make up what gets left out,

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and it doesn’t make up for a thing.

They say, “with God all things are possible,” but how can there be redemption for this?— The Daughter of the Confederacy who led us three through my ancestor’s house delighted in animating battles framed on daisy-papered walls. In echoes, she and Uncle Lee recalled the general’s plot to oust the carpetbaggers, scalawags, and troops still terrorizing sweet S.C.: on the ’76 election’s eve, he summoned the Red Shirts to his lawn, incited and dispatched them before dawn to, said my uncle, “dissuade certain voters.”— Wikipedia says, “black voters by violence and intimidation”; the word “dissuasion” does not appear on Martin Witherspoon Gary’s page— Our Daughter-guide led us through his bedroom threw open balcony doors, and we followed her into winter’s dusk. “And here they were,” she said, arms wide like Jesus, “All camped out, fires burning, ready to take back the South.”

Embers glowed in her eyes, as she hummed an old tune, smelled smoke and heard Pa sing “Riding a Raid.” But Try the click of your trigger and balance your blade was not what I heard, nor were campfires what I saw and smelled.

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What I smell is human flesh in our stark trees, and what I see is a crossed flag waving from a truck that marches Main Street daily, honking by the barbershop no white man ever enters. The driver shouting “niggers” is one thing that I hear; another is the parting wish, “have a blessed day, sugar,” from the attendant to the ladies’ room that I can’t exit with a clear conscience.

I remember all of this while I look at the feet of my bowing neighbors, holding candles around the Peace Pole on the day after nine people, praying to the same God we address now, were killed.

God, did the killer visit that same house?

He was born just one month before I was, not a hundred miles further south.

Do we resemble each other? How can I make it stop? If I carry this candle back there and burn the damned place down, will it go away? Will lives be saved?

Or will the ash remain, settle and stir, settle and stir, incite and dispatch to dissuade peace by violence, massacre, intimidation? Until the Day our souls are summoned to eternal justice, must we drag our never-over past through its abiding dust and obstinate ghost?

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photography | Tyler Dunston

Tyler Dunston

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The Logic of Hustling Peggy H. Rosenbloom Department of Anthropology, a UC Irvine, California 92717 A Short Story by Nika Soon-Shiong KEY WORDS: structural violence, marginalization, gentrification, physiological chokehold, relativism

I. INTRODUCTION: THE EDGEWATER CORRIDOR Reggie accuses Felix of being “a racist motherfucker” and “bad for business” because of his intimidating panhandling style. He goes right up to people and touches them, hovers so long that they begin to smell the months of body odor that rest on his skin. His skin is a brown leathery texture caked with dirt. Felix howls with mirth and urinates into the gutter, facing out towards the passing traffic. Relieving himself, Felix pounds on the metal top of a trashcan at the corner of the street, chanting, “Fuck you, Reggie!”

Welcome to the Edgewater Corridor. It’s an industrial wasteland—an accidental space at the margins of the highway connecting San Francisco and Palo Alto, where homeless can exist out of the eyes of law enforcement.1 A young couple in a white BMW with a Stanford sticker on the back slows down next to the three of us, and the driver cracks open the window just an inch.

Poverty voyeurism is a habit I’ve gotten used to out here. The college boy with a shaggy haircut honks his horn. His girlfriend laughs and playfully hits him. It offended me for the first year of my fieldwork—when people stared or pointed at the abscesses on Reggie’s arm, a sign of his years of injecting with infected needles.

I would turn off my recorder and give pedestrians lectures on structural violence.

If they looked particularly smug, I’d touch on Reaganomics and the inequity of social services, corner them and share links to online petitions.2 I stopped when I realized people thought I was tweaking. Also, I understand the shock value here, and need to think through blaming two college kids for society’s blind spots.

“Motherfucker! I’ll fuck your girl with this dick!” Felix yells, turning his stream towards the white car. I laugh in spite of myself.

1 The Edgewater Corridor was a hub for shipyards and manufacturing sectors, but between 1962 and 1972 12,000 manufacturing jobs were lost and Edgewater residents were left obsolete workers. By the time the 1988/1999 dot-com biosectors hit, the Edgewater homeless were too marginalized to obtain employment.

2 In the 1990s, hospitals in the U.S. reoriented healthcare delivery towards more costly procedures for patients with private insurance. Instead of receiving rehabilitation or social services, the Edgewater homeless faced punitive containment.

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“You wanna step to me? Get out your car, boy! Jesus walks, bitch!” Felix yells at the two students, zipping up his pants.

Coping mechanism: an adaptation to environmental stress based on conscious or unconscious choice. Enhances control or gives psychological comfort. i.e. distracting oneself from a social situation.

Easter is tomorrow and I haven’t been home in three months. Mom will want me to make the deviled eggs and quiche that she likes. God, I hope she doesn’t make me go to church with her and Steve. I’m 80% sure I’m an atheist.

And Steve has the clammiest hands. So did Earl. Maybe it’s a stepdad thing. Get nervous around stepdaughter; beg for her mercy; hold hands to pray; sweaty, fat, and vulnerable. I’ll get through most of mass just fine. I like it when Father tells a story about how his kids did something cute that day–and how that means God is within all of us. But I can’t handle the eerie chanting.

We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty.

Felix stops peeing, but continues to bang on the metal trashcan in protest of Reggie’s criticisms. He picks up the can and throws it at his unamused running partner.3 It misses. Felix picks up and lobs the can again; this time, it flies a couple of inches from Reggie’s face. Felix’s high is kicking in. It was a speedball this time.

Maker of heaven and Earth, of all that is seen and unseen.

Reggie shakes his fist at the BMW as it drives away, a show of solidarity with Felix, never mind their current spat. I can imagine that the couple is still laughing as they continue on their commute to the city.

God for God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, one in Being with the father.

Felix blows a kiss at an African American woman in a Volvo who is now stopped at the red light in front of us. Unlike the Stanford pair, she frowns at his display. Felix makes a squishy baby face at her young child in the back seat, crinkling his eyes and pouting his lips. The toddler ducks his head down below the window.

Through him all things were made.

At this, Reggie snaps, slamming his hands onto Felix’s chest and pulling him close by the shirt. “Fucking pig! You fucking pig!” he yells.

“What are you looking at, white girl? Are you getting all of this? See what I deal with Peggy—this fucking PIG?” Reggie screams.

When the two men turn to me, Felix still in Reggie’s grip, my stomach drops.

I’m snapped out of my visions of church and back into my world of urine puddles and fighting, righteous dopefiends.

“I’m not looking at anything, guys. I’m here cause I wanted to talk to Tina 3 Reggie and Felix can’t each afford a bag of heroin to themselves, so they share needles, cotton, and all drugs.

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today.”

Tina is Reggie’s girlfriend. She’s also my go-to when things get violent between them (which is often).

“She’s probably fucking the new Latino boys back at camp,” Felix says, smirking wildly.

Reggie pushes Felix onto his back and throws the first punch. I whip out my recorder, which has been off until now. One of the youngster rock stars from around the corner walks over to the garbage can and urinates in the same spot Reggie did, daring anyone to call him a pig, too.4 I step closer to the fight, and back away once I realize that no one seems to be swinging for the face. I wouldn’t have been able to stop them, anyways. Both Reggie and Felix need the other to stay conscious, so I know I’ll be able to find them in the hole later.5 I walk up the highway to call my mother—to confirm that, yes, I’ll be home tomorrow for Easter.

As I walk up the highway, I put down my recorder and burner phone: a Nokia flip I use in the field. I learned quickly when I took out my laptop in a corner behind someone’s camp the first day out here. Felix lunged. That was almost four years ago. He’s forgotten the whole thing, but I still call it a mental victory every time the boys complain to me about “rich white people.” If only they could see the plastic, suburban womb I call home. The phone I use in front of them is the same kind Reggie had before he threw it at a Yemen storekeeper for not selling him wine in exchange for crack.

I look back behind my shoulder to make sure Reggie and Felix are out of view and sneak my iPhone six out of my jacket. I open Facebook and feel my heart beat faster as I scroll through through pictures of old college friends’ veggie omelets and man buns. After about a minute I feel ill. I delete an app. I open Favorites and call home.

“Everything ok?” Mom asks. I can hear the fear in her voice. “Peggy? Are you alright?”

“Yes, stop. I’m fine.”

“What’s going on?”

“Felix is high and Reggie’s taking care of him. Tina’s nowhere to be found, but she might be with one of the rock stars or the new Latino dealers at their camp.”

“You’re safe?”

Selective auditory attention: people focus their attention on specific words, their minds choosing not to acknowledge that which they do not want to hear.

“They’re just peeing in the middle of the street,” I say.

Mom laughs her barrel laugh.

4 Youngster rock stars are teenage crack dealers.

5 A shooting gallery in a recessed, V-shaped space underneath two freeway overpasses.

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“Okay, okay. You’re coming home tomorrow for Easter brunch after we go to church,” she orders.

“That’s what I was going to tell you.”

“Good. Hey, I’m going shopping today. You want to come?”

“Mom, you know I can’t leave. I told you, you need to stop asking me stuff like that, or I’ll stop calling.”

I poke my head down at the area below the highway, strewn with tents and forgotten shopping carts. I imagine the carts filled with parcels of my favorite fleece jackets and new jeans.

“Relax. Peggy, you need to relax,” Mom says. “What you need is to learn to just slow down. They’re not going anywhere. You’re not going anywhere. You need to take a break.”

“I’m coming home tomorrow, remember? I take plenty of breaks.”

“What about that boy you used to see, the nice one who was trying to start up a computer software thing?”6 “Matt was an asshole. That was forever ago.”

“Jeez, I get it. I’ll back off. So I’m going to make the pie and cake for Steve, because you know his sweet tooth. And you’ll make what you always make. And then I was thinking of just some fruit, some fresh coffee, some orange juice...”

“That all sounds fine.”

“Your sister won’t be joining us. We got a call from the center today and it’s going to be another month at least until she’s home.”

“You know I wouldn’t be home to see her much anyways.”

Euphemism: often used to increase the portrayal of a person’s position in a social network.

Megan is Steve’s daughter, who hasn’t been back since she dropped out from Chico State to spend the year in rehab getting off coke. She was my best friend in high school –its how our parents met. Megan always said she took after her Mom, who was “a total badass.”

6 Matthew Thomas, age 27, part time VJ and drummer, full time software engineer at HP. Self described “software guy at a hardware company.”

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Ali Vaughan

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The Logic of Hustling | Nika Soon-Shiong

II. PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION “Bunnymuff, pass me the pie?”

My fists clench underneath the small mahogany table where Mom and I used to do puzzles after school. When she came home from work we would blast Joni Mitchell and I’d finish my homework as she cooked. Over dessert, we’d work on our puzzle. 2,000+ piece jigsaws of oceanic scenes, rainforest canopies, the White House, the Mona Lisa… The puzzle would grow at one end of the table, and we would eat at the other. During dinner I’d steal glances at the pieces to try and get a head start. I wanted to impress her. It would take us a couple of months just to finish one, and then she would break it up right in front of me and put the pieces back in the box. The whole thing was a lesson.

With three people here at the table there’s no room for anything besides food, and I can barely fit my plate without bumping into Steve’s silverware. Steve, the accountant, who just had the audacity to call my mother bunnymuff. Traffic was hell getting to Pac Heights, Steve exists, and my feet are bleeding on account of having to wear heels for the first time in a year. Mom sees Steve reach for his third slice of cake.7 Mom pinches Steve’s arm in cutesy way.

“Babycakes,” she scolds. She’s wearing red lipstick. I’ve never seen her wear red lipstick before.

“Don’t call him babycakes. That’s disgusting. It’s what you used to call me.”

Binge-eating disorder: A bio-psycho-social disorder that occurs in 1/35 adults in the U.S. Characterized by insatiable cravings, often rooted in stress and dysfunctional thoughts.

“So, Megan isn’t coming home any time soon?” I ask Steve. “It’s good she’s facing her problems.” My eyes don’t give away any judgment as they trace the crumbs falling from Steve’s face.

“Peggy Rosenbloom, do not talk about that right now,” Mom says, her face burning the same shade of red as her lips.

Denial: One of the best-known defense mechanisms. Works to protect the ego from anxiety.

“No, it’s okay, hun,” Steve assures her. “You have a tough job, Peggy. You 7 Approximately 64 g of sugar have been consumed by the man in last ten minutes. Approx. 90 g of fat. The average man should have 37.5 grams of sugar per day.

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have to deal with society’s worst every day. It’s very admirable, documenting those things they do, and then not being able to do anything about it.”

“I listen to their stories, Steve. What people don’t get is that the lack of institutionalized listening is a part of the problem.”

“The problem is they’re nuisances,” Steve says, his voice finally rising. “There’s no logic to hustling.”

“The problem is no one’s eating the quiche,” Mom says.

“Did you know that Megan’s coke and my informants’ crack only differ by one chemical? Sodium bicarbonate. Baking soda. Crack is more impure, but they’re the same thing,” I tell Steve.8 “Peggy, Megan is a completely different story. And I don’t appreciate you lumping your dopefiends together with my daughter.”

“The jail sentencing disparity is 18 to 1.”9 “Megan is getting help. And who do you think is paying for it?” Steve points his knife to himself.

Tina is sitting in a wicker chair at a plastic table, looking like a pioneer farmer’s wife: she’s wearing cut-off jeans and a paisley cowgirl blouse tied in a knot at the belly button. I turn my recorder on as I walk down the uneven dirt path towards the camp she shares with Reggie. They have two makeshift rooms: one that’s a bedroom, with two sleeping bags on the floor covered by a blue tarp overhead, and one that serves as a living room/kitchen, which revolves around two stolen couches in varying states of decay. In addition to the couches, a chair and a turned over crate surround a plastic table, strewn with old needles, cotton, pipes, and a small potted plant. As soon as she sees me, Tina stands up and wraps me in her bony arms.

“Hi, gorgeous,” Tina says. “Long time no see.”

We sway together before she lets go and flashes a wide smile that reveals her two missing canines. Tina has beautiful, big brown eyes that match her dark skin.

Her nails are always painted red.

“You too, Teen. I worried when I didn’t see you the other day.”

“I heard the boys were rowdy. I’m sorry. He’s a greedy motherfucker, Felix.

I’ve caught him injecting on the sneak-tip.10 He doesn’t care about nobody. Not Reg, not me. Nobody.”

“I was just looking for you for my weekly check in.”

“Stay for dinner!” Tina says, pointing to a bag of groceries that she’s taken from St. Martin of Tours’ weekly giveaway. She hunches over the plastic table, 8 Crack cocaine is made by dissolving powder cocaine and baking soda in boiling water and then cutting the resulting paste into small rocks after it dries. Crack cocaine is less expensive because of the additive of baking soda, although the two drugs are chemically similar.

9 The Fair Sentencing Act in 2010 reduced the disparity between the amount of crack cocaine and powder cocaine needed to trigger federal criminal penalties from a 100:1 weight ratio to an 18:1 weight ratio and eliminated the 5 year mandatory sentence for simple possession of crack cocaine.

10 Taking more than his share of heroin from Reggie.

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where either she or Reggie has stopped halfway through preparing a quarter-gram bag of Mexican black tar heroin. In the plastic bag from church I can see a half chicken, an onion, potatoes, carrots, and a stick of vegetable lard.

“I’d love to, thanks.”

Tina throws a grill top over a metal trash bin that already has a fire going on inside. She takes a pot from the floor and combines the chicken and lard with unknown seasoning. Just as she takes a potato and sits down to peel it, Reggie emerges from the path I just walked down. He nods my way before giving Tina a peck on the lips.

“I’ve got it. You go talk to Peggy,” Reggie says, taking the knife and potato from Tina’s hands. She blushes and then looks at me, motioning for us to sit down on the couches.

“Want a hit before dinner?” Reggie asks Tina, as if he’s proposing an appetizer.

Tina wags her finger at him, turns towards me, winks.

“Suit yourself,” Reggie says. At this, Tina gets up to rummage through piles of plastic bags and clothing, eventually finding Reggie’s favorite pipe in a pocket of jeans: an airplane-sized Bombay Gin bottle with the bottom drilled out. She jumps up and holds the lip to his mouth, the body of the bottle facing away, lit.

She gives him a puff, pausing first to embrace him: stealing a kiss in the kitchen.

She sits back down. At the table, we fold some reusable grocery bags that are strewn on the floor, organizing them by size. I start humming.

“I forget where we left off, it was almost two weeks ago.”

Tina uncrosses her legs and leans back.

“Start where you want, Mama,” Tina says.

“We were talking about your family—your Mom and Dad.” “I was explainin’ my Mama. A single mother.”

“You said your Dad was from Puerto Rico?”

“That’s what my Mama’d say but she don really know. But he spoke Spanish.”

“Did you ever speak Spanish?”

“I know three words. Hablarme en español. I know three words.”

“Speak to me in Spanish,” I translate out loud.

“He’d come home in the middle of the night, and he’d be tweaking, and he’d run into my room and grab my ponytails and pick me up by them. He’d shake me, you see,” Tina says, shaking her arms in two fists above her head. “He’d say: Hablarme en español.”

Tina giggles and shakes her head, eyes glazing over as she stares at Reggie, who is still peeling the potatoes.

“Yeah. Those are the only words. We’d have to run to our neighbor’s house, the two of us. He’d be so angry. She always had a bag of clothes packed, in case he came back like that.”

“Who?” “My Mama. She had things just ready to go. That was how she was.”

“When did he stop coming over?”

“He went to jail. And then I moved in with my first boyfriend. I wasn’t 71

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tricking11 or anything, I was just fourteen. Came home one morning and Mama said, ‘Don’t you come back to my house dirty and empty-handed.’”

“What did she mean by that?”

“She called me dirty cause she knew I was with my boy and his friends. They were all in the army. At the Presido Army Base. Yeah, I would go and stay with them and sort of have a ball. They would buy me alcohol, cigarettes… Me and my one girlfriend from school with all these men.”

“But she was angry that you came home because you didn’t bring her anything?”

“She called him! She say, ‘Don’t you bring my daughter home without bus fare. She goes to school and she needs to eat. How’d you think she gon get to school?’ So he did—he came over to my house and gave me twenty dollars and twenty dollars for my mother. And then she was fine, we got along fine.”

A long silence passes between us, filled with sputtering noises coming from the pot of chicken and honks from the freeway above. Tina points upwards and sighs.

“Peggy, I’m tired. The cars are always going.”

“Tina…” I begin.

“It never stops, Mama,” she says. “It never stops.”

There’s nothing I can think of to say.

Reggie interrupts us by clinking a knife and fork together. “Dinner is ready!”

The chicken smells amazing. Reggie puts the food onto three plastic plates, chicken on one side and vegetables at the other. We gather around the table and rinse our hands gently in a used yogurt container filled with water. Tina moves her fork and knife to cut into her first bite, but Reggie slaps her hand down in one swift motion. “Say Grace.”

Bless us, O Lord, and these, thy gifts, which we are about to receive from thy bounty. Through Christ, our Lord. Amen.

After dinner, the three of us sit on a couch together, overlooking the rest of the camps. Felix runs over unexpectedly for a quick hit because he’s about to get dopesick.

“Do you want any food? We just made dinner.”

“No, go quick, my wife and kids are in the car waiting.”

Reggie prepares the bag that had been sitting on the table. He draws a used syringe. Felix stands close to him and stretches his head far to one side, straining it so that his neck veins are distended. Reggie injects slowly. Felix closes his eyes, exhales, and nods for a moment, eyelids fluttering. Before I know it, he’s gone.

Tina stays seated without acknowledging Felix, as if nothing had happened. She is staring at nothing with the same glazed look in her eyes from earlier. When he sits back on the couch, Reggie grips Tina’s upper thigh. He leans over and pushes a stray hair on her cheek back behind her ears. The sun is going down, and the sky is streaked with tangerine and pink clouds. Cars roar over our heads.

11 Tricking: the act of working as a prostitute.

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photography | John Murray

John Murray

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Tyler Dunston

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Childish Things | Claire Francis

Childish Things Claire Francis

She piles her playthings at the yearly altar, glitter bleeding from flagstone faults in time.

Apple skins coil like witches’ fingernails, while bleached mermaids’ rings still seep with brine.

Her thumbs rub along the teddy bear’s stitches and her dolly’s butterfly eyes (unblinking).

Shriveled braids snake from jewelry-box jaws, atop a film of flattened buttercups looped with untied string.

In the dust is a tarnished knight and pencil sword, gilded bronze by grubby palms, clutching a curled-cigarette Polaroid, frayed hair ribbons, and her stale cream-soda lip balm.

She nudges Nancy Drews under the corpse of her crib, along with pieces of pottery wind chimes, and she sponges the dais clean of memorial ash while humming her favorite faerie rhymes.

She burns off her fingerprints with an inch-long match – nerves numb to pirouettes of flame – and leaks fire onto the orderly shrine, the smoking shroud kissing the syllables of her name.

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how it ends Juliana Chang

III. two Julys ago, in the airport. we are leaning across borders, security checkpoints, and you are gripping my wrists so tightly my palms are turning white. it’s easy to forget that what Icarus did, that was flying too, even if only for a moment.

II. thousands of years ago, little hands dabbed together in prayer before little tongues carved out Athena’s name. once, here was holy. you point this out to me over Facetime, against a burning blue background of craggy island and sea, sunglasses perched on your head, sunburn bloomed on your nose. now, you chuckle, there’s a McDonald’s down the street from the Parthenon. we are learning the limits of landlines on land lines, discovering how time erodes the most sacred of stones. what is distance if not a lengthening of feet?

I stretch my toes and write to you in spondees, dactyls, stack my miracles feat by feat.

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how it ends | Juliana Chang

I. I am humming in pentameter. it is 30 minutes before closing time at Ikea and you interrupt me to ask how long a couch is meant to last.

I shrug. a lifetime? seven years. two restless tabby cats. as we walk the showrooms, point out the ugliest tables and the nice ones, we are too young to think of the first plane exit three months from now, too caught up in each other’s hemlines to ask how long. two missed phone calls. three unread emails. seven Facebook messages, one drunk girl slurring in your hallway. one hand across an ocean, feeling for a pulse that has long since stopped humming. two heads, and no one recalls which was the first to stop listening. when does a temple first start to crumble, and if it does, how long before we call it a ruin?

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CONTRIBUTORS NICK BURNS is a sophomore from Ventura, CA. JULIANA CHANG is a freshman from Taipei, Taiwan.

CORAAL COHEN is a junior from Fort Lauderdale, FL. FRANCESCA COLOMBO is a sophomore from Harrison, NY. TYLER DUNSTON is a sophomore from Chattanooga, TN. CECILY FOOTE is a senior from Austin, TX. CLAIRE FRANCIS is a freshman from Denver, CO. HANNAH LLORIN is a freshman from Baltimore, MD. CRISTINA HERRERA MEZGRAVIS is a senior from Valencia,

Venezuela.

ANDREW MITCHELL is a senior from Helena, MT. JOHN MURRAY is a coterm from Lake Oswego, OR. CHASE PORTER is a junior from Kentfield, CA. MARIN TYNE REEVE is a junior from Provo, UT. SAMANTHA SETO is a junior from Tampa, FL. JESSICA SHEN is a senior from Fremont, CA. SPENCER SLOVIC is a sophomore from Portland, OR. NIKA SOON-SHIONG is a coterm from Los Angeles, CA. LOUISE MERIWETHER STEWART is a senior from Elkin, NC. NIUNIU TEO is a senior from Sunnyvale, CA. ALI VAUGHAN is a freshman from Bakersfield, CA. VIVIAN XIAO is a freshman from Hong Kong.

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