Leland Quarterly, Vol. 5 Issue 3, Spring 2011

SPRING 2011 DEVNEY

HAMILTON CHELSEY

LITTLE SAMANTHA

TOH

LAUREN

YOUNGSMITH ZIXIANG

ZHANG

leland QUARTERLY 1

Leland Quarterly Spring 2011

leland

QUARTERLY VOLUME 5, ISSUE 3 Spring 2011

Copyright 2011 by Leland Quarterly, Stanford University All Rights Reserved.

Giant Horse Printing, San Francisco Editors-in-Chief: Jaslyn Law and Miles Osgood Managing Editor Graham Todd Senior Editors Stephanie Caro Johaina Crisostomo Grace DeVoll LiHe Han Elissa Karasik Kendra Peterson Samantha Toh Nathalie Trepagnier Katie Wu Associate Editors Caroline Ferguson Raine Hoover Rachel Kolb Ian Montgomery Zander Nowell Kara Runsten Harley Sugarman Ryan De Taboada Sarah Weston ZiXiang Zhang

Production Manager Jin Yu Art Editor Johaina Crisostomo Financial Editor Nathalie Trepagnier Layout Editors Brandon Evans Armine Pilikian Katie Wu Illustrators Alberto Hernandez Armine Pilikian Jin Yu Web Editors Tiffany Shih Jennifer Schaffer

Leland Quarterly: A Statement on Literature, Culture, Art, and Politics is a general interest magazine that showcases the very best in Stanford University undergraduate art and writing.

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CONTENTS

EDITORIAL STATEMENT

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ARTIST PROFILE Lauren YoungSmith

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FEATURED Inside a Levinthal Caroline Chen

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Maria Hummel & Narrative Healing Katie Wu

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NON-FICTION

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FICTION Baby Samantha Toh

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Knowing Death Samantha Toh

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DRAWING Temporal Self-Portrait Garrett Dobbs

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Flatland Drawing I

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Summer Dream Yanran Lu

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Mundane Atrocities Purun Cheong

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Strangers Chelsey Little

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Diamonds in the Rows of Dull Books Zander Nowell

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July Lauren YoungSmith

Introduction to Pathology Kendra Peterson

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Monster Dance Lauren YoungSmith

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POETRY

PRINTMAKING

Elementary Physics Kendra Peterson

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6,000 Miles Away Jin Yu

Lower Milford Nathalie Trepagnier

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PHOTOGRAPHY

Lagerst채tte ZiXiang Zhang

6채

Leaving Lake Tahoe ZiXiang Zhang

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ESSAY To Where Shadows Dance Inside Us Devney Hamilton

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PAINTING Color Anatomy Emma Webster

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Cover

Aiken Kate Erickson

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Brooklyn Kate Erickson

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Abandoned Sewing Tables Devney Hamilton

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On the Way to School Devney Hamilton

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Three Women in Turkey Devney Hamilton

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Seats in a Diner Yanran Lu

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Ramen Noodle Yanran Lu

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Lagerstätte

A fossil deposit of exceptional richness or interest.

- Oxford English Dictionary

On the shelf, a floral arrangement of teal-foam cerebrums sits near clamshells, collected from a sandstone fossil ridge while on an excursion in Mount Diablo— where the Chupcan natives, the devils, outwitted Spaniards in 1805.

After two centuries, a dozen relations have settled in their river meandering.

Beneath the Bible, a family photo taken in 1996—what are the sizes of these grains to me?

There are smoked fish in the freezer, conveying the essence of their lost pelagic in plastic bags, and crumbs on a half-eaten bagel seem deep Earth in origin—a matrix of volcanic ashes, roommate chewing at two in the morning.

In the shade, a stash of study-abroad brochures lithifies in time, and becomes mere impressions: Cape Town, Flor— the black fan a planeterium of spiral-spun lint: supper molluscs and sweet tooth.

On one cover, an African boy holds the hand of a smiling white woman while his mother stays behind: older, darker.

— ZIXIANG ZHANG

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“Abandoned sewing tables,� Urfa, Turkey, 2009, Devney Hamilton Leland Quarterly Spring 2011

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Mundane Atrocities — PURUN CHEONG

I’ve done some terrible things in my life. I’ve dropped ocean without all the saltiness that comes with drinking confused lobsters into pots of boiling water, watched seawater. And then have another, or a dozen. Jeanwithout remorse as they flailed around in a desperate Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the 18th century author of The but ultimately futile attempt to escape a searing death, Physiology of Taste, wrote of French revolutionaries who and eaten their sweet, chewy flesh with melted butter. would eat a gross (that is, a dozen dozens) of oysters in I’ve watched with fascination as a live octopus was one sitting before starting their meals. Even though it was hacked to pieces with a cleaver, dumped into a spicy red the food of royalty, it was a lot more affordable back in broth, and eaten with sesame oil as each individual limb those times, before years of overharvesting and several wrapped around chopsticks reflexively, as if in disbelief diseases depleted the oyster beds, sending oyster prices of its own death. I’ve smashed crabs open with a wooden through the roof to the altitude we’re familiar yet mallet, dug through the broken shells for the uncomfortable with today. slightest sliver of meat, and tossed the rest Oysters are bivalves—two-shelled Perhaps it was without any remorse onto a growing mollusks, whose ranks also include mountain of bodies. And no, I don’t and mussels. Because they inevitable that, as two clams regret committing these crimes against have extraordinarily strong muscles former New Englanders, that allow them to stay safely shut seamanity.

I love seafood. Some of my favorite case some predator wants to eat we gravitated towards an in eating experiences have revolved them, we don’t show the mercy orgy of gastronomical around devouring critters of the sea of killing these shellfish before in ways that would upset children who cooking them. Instead, we leave violence against have just watched Finding Nemo or The them to die somewhere in the cooking shellfish.

Little Mermaid. Come to think of process, coaxing them out of it, the scene where Sebastian their shells by boiling them nearly gets cooked alive by alive or smoking them out. the outrageously French chef You can immediately tell in The Little Mermaid always which bivalves were alive struck me as funny rather than and thus unlikely to give you horrifying. food poisoning when you drop them in boiling water, because they Lunch, May 15th, 2010. My cousin Clara react visibly to the sudden and deadly change in decided to treat me to a meal, as it had been my environment. So it’s often necessary to cook these birthday a few days prior. Clara had made it her animals while they’re alive and happy inside their mission to show me the best that Washington, D.C. had shells, even if you want to smash each individual one open to offer, so I found myself at Hank’s Oyster Bar, one of the with a rock à la sea otter. You just can’t take chances. better seafood restaurants in our nation’s capital. As two Growing up as a New England-Korean, I enjoyed my former New Englanders, perhaps it was inevitable that fair share of clam-based dishes. Clams in spicy seafood we gravitated towards an orgy of gastronomical violence stews, clam in plain seafood stews, creamy clam chowder, against shellfish. clambakes, deep-fried clams—I could go on and on. Every We started off with a round of oysters on the half- single time we cooked clams, my dad would explain why shell. Everyone should have the opportunity to taste a few we prepared the clams a certain way. He’d explain that the raw, slippery, briny, oysters served on a bed of crushed clams sat in a pot of water before we cooked them because ice. Sprinkle a little lemon juice, a dab of cocktail, then “that’s how we get the sand out of the guts.” When the only slide it down the hatch, and enjoy the sweet taste of the thing you’re digesting for hours is water, whatever else was

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in your system is naturally purged, helping those who are to kill it instantly, which would make my digestive system about to eat you avoid an unpleasantly gritty experience. extremely unhappy. But I shouldn’t have worried, the crab After we dumped the sand-free clams into the boiling was rich and crunchy and entirely edible but ultimately water, he’d watch as they cooked, pointing out, “Look, you too fleeting an experience. know that they’re ready because they’re waiting, and then For my transient pleasure that day, several oysters the heat is just too much for them, and suddenly they who had been chilled into a stupor were violently open up as if to say, ‘Ouch it’s hot!’” opened with a knife and severed from the shell that He’d chuckle as the clams open up one by one, protected them, a couple who might have still been alive suddenly and at the same time slowly. It always gave him asphyxiated in shot glasses of sake. A crab’s worst fears so much amusement for some reason, but all I see is their were confirmed when it was caught at its most vulnerable shells gaping wistfully as if to say, “But so much was left and deep-fried. It could have been a different meal, but unfinished...” I never understood the expression “happy the end would have been the same, empty shells left on as a clam.” beds of ice like broken bodies and puddles of bluishIn Japan, there is a rich tradition of ikizukuri, sashimi black hemolymph pool in the middle of plates like blood that is prepared alive. The sashimi is the freshest at the scene of a crime, mixing with drops that it can possibly be because technically, of butter or tartar sauce. Even if it isn’t the flesh isn’t dead yet. I saw on TV so obviously violent, like a lobster I have a theory how the chef nets a fish out of the roll with its warm, rich chunks of that we do such terrible tank and stuns it, usually with an lobster slathered in mayonnaise acupuncture needle applied to a things to seafood because they and placed lovingly in a soft bun, strategic pressure point, before if you think about it, that’s pretty are in many ways mysterious messed up. filleting the still-living fish. The sashimi is then presented on the Some people consider eating a and incomprehensible platter, sometimes arranged on the luxury item like lobster as sandwich to us. body of the fish in a macabre mockery filling to be a bit extravagant. Then again, of its former self, the fish’s heart still beating as lobster wasn’t always a food for the rich. Back it flaps weakly (it doesn’t have the muscles to move any when lobsters washed on the shores of Maine and people more than that) to the delight or disgust of the customer. could pick them up from the beach by the bushel, lobsters In some cases, the chef puts the skeletal fish back in the were a food of the poor. In fact, back in the 18th century tank to let it swim around while the customer finishes the some lucky servants had agreements so they weren’t first course, in order to keep it fresh for the next course, a forced to eat lobster more than twice a week. When the soup. Either way, I can’t imagine waking up to find that all wealthy started to notice that lobsters tasted delicious, my muscles have been surgically removed. It’s a great way the lobster was overharvested to the point that now the to remind yourself that what you eat comes from a living cost of lobsters at restaurants is always the dissuasive two creature (in this case, still-living as you eat it), but I don’t words ‘market price.’ know, it sounds expensive.

But lobster was relatively affordable in the New On the menu that day, there also happened to England of my childhood. My family would often go to the be a soft-shell crab sandwich served with homemade outlet stores in Kittery, Maine, and we would always have coleslaw. The crab is at its most vulnerable when it has lobsters for dinner at a nearby lobster shack. We’d order just molted, like someone who has just taken off their platters of shiny red lobsters with steam still rising from clothes to change into a new outfit. No one wants to be their bodies, smelling like warm seashells. As a kid I loved discovered when he or she is exposed like that, but crabs cracking the bright red claws and legs with a nutcracker are delicious when you catch them that way and deep- and picking out the meat with my fingers and dipping it fry them in oil. I wonder who first discovered that freshly in melted butter. It was so much fun, I always insisted on molted crabs could be eaten shell and all without severe having the claws and legs, leaving the less interesting tail gastric repercussions. It didn’t seem completely intuitive and body portions to my parents. I always thought I was or safe to me. getting the better deal, but only now do I belatedly realize I decided to get it since I had never had a soft- that my parents weren’t particularly upset about being shelled crab before, and they happened to be in season. forced to eat lobster tail since it’s the tastiest part.

As I looked at the crab legs sticking out from between Although cracking lobsters open and seeing the clear the lightly toasted buns suggesting that the sandwich juices flow out can be a lot of fun, it can get tedious by the contained one whole crab, I wondered whether the crab second or third set of lobster legs. I always wondered how had somehow willed its new shell to grow harder before lobster shacks prepared so much fresh lobster meat for someone snipped the soft area between the two eyestalks their rolls. The simple guess would be that they shuck them

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“July,” Lauren YoungSmith, ink and acrylic.

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all by hand, spilling bluish hemolymph and green organs with champagne or vodka, fine caviar is so expensive that all over their hands and clothes as they coax lobster meat even the smallest tins are priced at exorbitant numbers, out of the shell. Seems like a lot of messy manual labor. and those that come from Beluga, Ossetra, or Sevruga But a few months ago, I read an article in Wired Magazine sturgeons seem more like abstract concepts than actual about a machine affectionately known as the Big Mother food. There has been no time in recent history where Shucker to the employees of Shucks Maine Lobster. It’s a caviar has enjoyed anything close to the peasant food water compression chamber that pumps the water up to reputation of lobsters or oysters. After all, was it not 40,000 pounds of pressure per inch, or twice the force felt Shakespeare’s Hamlet who, regarding a play unappreciated at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. At such pressures, by the masses, quipped, “twas caviar before the general?” the lobsters are instantly killed as cellular activity ceases My opportunity to actually try caviar wouldn’t come and the flesh disconnects from the exoskeleton, allowing till much later. My family was having dinner at the Walker the meat to slip off like a crustacean glove. There was Hill Hotel in Seoul, and my dad noticed almost no mention of how quickly the water pressure immediately that on one of the serving tables rose, but I’m guessing the lobsters would was a small container of black caviar, He kept on feel it a bit as they were stripped alive complete with bone spoon. I tried and their organs exposed to very a little and found it to be salty but reminding us on the painful amounts of water pressure. otherwise unworthy of a revisit, drive home and many days It sounded like one of the freak but my dad had other ideas. Per accidents in sci-fi horror films after that how much caviar he usual dad buffet logic, eating as where someone accidentally gets much of the expensive dishes as trapped in a pressurized chamber, had eaten in monetary terms, possible would result in a profit, though the movies have messier so naturally, eating a lot of caviar although I don’t know if results. There was a picture of the would be the perfect solution. And he was telling us or shucked lobster in the article, and it that is precisely what he did. While looked surprisingly like an intact lobster, the rest of my family was trying out himself. only its body was a fleshy pinkish color. The different dishes, there my dad was, piling as naked lobster would have blushed with shame if the much caviar and crackers on his plate as was socially Big Mother Shucker hadn’t already blasted it into oblivion. acceptable, perpetuating a meal that never reached its On occasion I have gone beyond idle curiosity and main course. By the end of the night, to my mother’s felt what some may call a “pang of conscience.” I was great embarrassment his tongue was stained blue with the at a seafood buffet in Thailand, picking up some rock juice of who knows how much caviar. If the caviar was lobsters off the grill. Rock lobsters are the grey, flat, ugly indeed genuine sturgeon caviar, he must have cost the but perfectly acceptable cousin of the regular lobster. I hotel hundreds if not thousands of dollars. He kept on flipped one over and noticed a clutch of shriveled white reminding us on the drive home and many days after how eggs attached to its belly. It was a mother. To be precise, much caviar he had eaten in monetary terms, although I she would have been a mother. She had been carrying don’t know if he was telling us or himself. around her eggs, protecting them until they matured and A while later, my dad returned from a business trip hatched, at which point she would be released from her to some Eastern European country and brought home a maternal duties. small tin of caviar. We spread a little dab on some crackers But it was not to be. She was caught by a Thai and tasted it. The caviar was oily and salty, but I didn’t fisherman who sold her to the hotel restaurant along with know what else it was. My father made a face, and said, other rock lobsters. Imagine her fear as she fought for “You know, I don’t think the caviar at the Walker Hill space in cramped quarters with other rock lobsters who buffet was the real thing.” were no doubt eyeing her eggs to see if they would be a The “real thing” is harvested from sturgeons in the tasty meal. She thought the worst was over when she was Black and Caspian Seas. Historically, caviar was produced taken out of the bin, until a chef tossed her onto a red-hot by clubbing a female sturgeon and extracting the ovaries iron grill. She curled up and died in the flames, trying her while the fish was stunned, making the sturgeon somewhat best to make sure her children avoided the same fate she of a nonconsensual egg donor. This usually meant that was about to face. Even though I had no direct hand in the female sturgeons were no longer of much use to the her death, my first thought was, “what have I done?” My fishermen, so they were killed if the clubbing hadn’t done second thought? “I seriously hope those eggs don’t ruin its job already. Nowadays, most caviar farmers surgically the taste.” remove some of the roe from the females in a procedure The undisputed king of roe is obviously caviar, the similar to a caesarean section, allowing the sturgeons to black pearls of the sea extracted from sturgeons. Served live to produce more caviar to be surgically extracted.

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Apparently, we can’t harvest the eggs that the sturgeons temple and saw a local guide from a nearby boat toss a loaf have already laid like we do for bird eggs—I’m assuming of bread overboard into the water. The water immediately that’s because it would ruin the taste. exploded in a roiling mass of arm-length fish flipping I have a theory that we do such terrible things to and twisting over each other as they tried to grab a bite seafood because they are in many ways mysterious and of the loaf. The guide told us that these were temple fish, incomprehensible to us. Human beings have had a history because they could be found near temples where people of acting rather unkindly to that which they don’t know or would throw offerings into the water, and a popular fish understand, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we managed to to eat in Thailand. Sounded harmless enough. I learned make a culinary tradition out of doing awful things to the later that they were actually snakeheads, ferocious aquatic unknown. After all, we know more about the moon than predators that ate a variety of smaller fishes, rodents, and we do about our oceans, which are filled with fantastical birds, and most disconcertingly, could breathe and move and terrifying creatures. Some of the ones that have been out of water. Supposedly they’ve attacked humans (albeit discovered look and act in absolutely horrifying ways, underwater and only when protecting their young), like the giant squid, the giant clam, and the giant jellyfish. leading to some hysteria in the US about killer fish that There are a lot of giant things in the watery depths, things could crawl on land to attack our dogs and our children. that wouldn’t think twice about taking a bite out of a small It would be funny if it weren’t so terrifying. Good human child or push around a researcher trapped thing that they’re eaten with impunity in Southeast in a tiny, tiny submersible miles below sea Asia. Snakehead grilled on a skewer sounds level. Underwater, no one can hear you delicious.

As long as scream.

Here’s another heart-shriveling But scary things don’t always fun fact: scallops can swim. If you they fear us, we won’t come in large packages, and they’ve thought their piercing blue eyes and be overtaken by them. been discovered far before we rows of teeth-like feelers gave you invented deep-sea expedition the creeps, try watching a video of a Because I am convinced vessels. You may not have seen a scallop flapping madly as it propels that one day the sea people through lamprey, but you’ve definitely seen the ocean, no doubt creatures inspired by its funnel-like prowling for a human toe to bite off. will emerge from the mouth filled with endless rows of I feel like eating a plateful of seared ocean to enslave sharp teeth in countless science fiction/ scallops and enjoying every salty sweet fantasy horror movies, like the sarlacc in bite just thinking about it. Every scallop mankind.

Return of the Jedi. Eating a lamprey wouldn’t I eat will be one less trying to kill me. “But be the first thing that comes to mind if I found it scallops are plankton eaters,” one might argue, caught in my net (more likely I would be screaming and “there’s no reason why they would try to eat you or any sobbing hysterically while bashing it with an oversized of us.” This is true. They don’t try to eat us, because they object before flinging it as far as I could back into the know that we eat them. As long as they fear us, we won’t water), as it seems more like a creature that you would put be overtaken by them. into a pool in large quantities for the purpose of torturing For I am convinced that one day the sea people a dashing British MI6 agent and his buxom companion. will emerge from the ocean to enslave mankind. They’ll Vedius Pollio of ancient Rome had a similar idea, but go after the Japanese, the Scandinavians, all of those his plans to execute a clumsy slave by tossing him into a seafaring people to exact bittersweet revenge on those pond filled with lampreys was thwarted by the emperor who have decimated untold generations of undeserving Augustus. fish families. And of course, they’ll come after me. I But people do eat lampreys. Supposedly lampreys won’t—no, I can’t make any excuses for the horrible have a meaty flavor that many noblemen in the Middle things that I’ve done to their brethren. They’ll sentence Ages enjoyed while refraining from eating meat during me to a swift death for the inexcusable atrocities I’ve fasting periods. Queen Elizabeth II was served lamprey taken part in. They probably won’t honor my last meal pie for her coronation in 1953, and to this day lamprey is a request of clam chowder in a sourdough bowl, thinking it highly prized delicacy in southwestern Europe. But if you monstrously cheeky. If I had any last words to say before are the type who would enjoy lamprey stewed with rice a burly crustacean executes me, they would be to that and Portuguese spices, don’t overindulge. King Henry I of expecting mother rock lobster I ate in Pattaya: I am sorry, England died after eating too many.

I will always be sorry because I know you didn’t deserve When I was in Bangkok with my family, we took a what happened to you, but you were delicious with hot tour by boat through the canals, a day or two before the sauce. rock lobster incident. We paused briefly by a Buddhist

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Lauren YoungSmith Major: Art and English Year: Sophomore Lauren is an illustrator with aspirations to write graphic novels and do tattoo art, and she likes to draw creepy monsters.

The monster series is a calendar in-the-making in which each monster corresponds with a month.

Ink and acrylic.

“March�

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“August”

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“April”

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“November”

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“January”

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The Levinthal Tutorials are an integral part of the Stanford Creative Writing Program and are designed to allow motivated undergraduate writers to work one-on-one with visiting Stegner Fellows in poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction. Students design their own curriculum and are responsible for its initiation and completion, and Stegner Fellows act as writing mentors and advisors.

- from the Stanford Creative Writing Program website

inside a

P

oetry has a tendency to make tutorial for the winter quarter to see if people waffle. Everyone has a working one-on-one with a Stegner strong opinion about novels, be it Fellow might help me approach my their loathing for the IHUM-obligatory writing afresh. At first, I was nervous Middlemarch, or their closeted, guilty that I wouldn’t like my tutor, or that we love for Twilight. But poetry has a way would have totally different tastes in of inducing tongue-tied hemming along poetry. But my tutor, Sarah Den Boer, the lines of, “That’s pretty, I guess,” or turned out to be my poetic Fairy “That’s sort of weird,” and most Godmother. often, “I just don’t quite get it.”

The Levinthal Tutorial As my As a writer, I confess that is equal parts reading metaphorical I am equally waffly when it and writing. My chosen comes to editing my own Fairy Godmother, theme for the reading poetry. I am a spontaneous component was poetry Sarah gave me and irregular writer— as a response to some days I might scratch dress, carriage, and crisis, so my reading down a poem a few quick list included war white horses, but poetry (Here, Bullet minutes, other times I might spend days turning

by Brian Turner and once I got to the phrases and images Kalakuta Republic by ball, I was on over in my mind before I Chris Abani) as well as manage to turn them into collection dealing with my own. verse. But however I go about more personal moments my writing, I have always had of crisis (Geography III by trouble with editing. I can tell what Elizabeth Bishop and The Great I like or what I don’t, or I might have a Fires by Jack Gilbert). sense of what “works”, but I can rarely Every session, Sarah and I would translate my vague feelings of discontent start with a discussion of the week’s into specifics. After taking English 92 reading. My comments always started during the fall quarter of last year, in out broad and vague—“I really liked which I wrote a lot of mediocre and this” or “I didn’t like this one so much, unsalvageable poetry, I was starting to but I’m not sure why.” But wishy-washy get frustrated. commentary just doesn’t cut it when I decided to apply for a Levinthal you’re in a two-hour, one-on-one

LEVINTHAL

— CAROLINE CHEN

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“Summer Dream,” Yanran Lu, conté session. Sarah would nudge me with questions.

Which was your favorite poem? Why? What do you think about the poems as a collection? How is this different from the last collection we read? What about this poem made you find it funny?

Her questions impelled me to articulate my gut feelings, giving me a new awareness that taught me things about myself. For instance, I realized that I care a lot about how poetry sounds—some poets pay more attention to rhythm than others, for example. I also value a poet’s eye for detail, and particularly enjoy dashes of color.

In the second half of each session, we’d switch to my poetry and Sarah would give me feedback on the poems I’d turned in the week before. Often, I’d give Sarah one of my poems prefaced by, “I’m not really sure if I like this one.” Sarah, though, would return them covered with her notes, teasing out the elements of my poems and showing me the internal structures of my own writing. What I sensed to be an “awkward” verse, she could show me to be a moment of inconsistency in the context of the other stanzas.

For example, here is an excerpt from one of my poems, “Body.”

The desire, too, to subsist on steaming mugs of green tea on individual grains of white rice on drop by drop of tangerine juice spilling from each perfect slice and to live as if all that matters is ink and paper, and the letters in each word.

Then to pare down all excess: release the weight of the flesh on one’s shoulders, to whittle away, down to the bones of the skeleton.

In typically vague fashion, I asked Sarah if she thought that it “worked”. She responded the next week by saying she liked how the individually benign images became sinister together, but questioned if I was being deliberately selfconscious in the meta-section in the middle, and if so, why would I want to do that? It seemed so obvious, once Sarah pointed it out, but I had never considered the self-consciousness of those lines.

What Sarah gave me was the tools and the language to translate my instinctive responses to poetry into concrete categories and specifics. She opened my eyes to new ways to see my poems, raising astute questions to help me approach the editing process systematically. This is not to say that she reduced poetry to rhyme schemes or semantics—on the contrary, my new awareness for the elements and angles of poetry allowed me to enjoy poetry even more than before, by complimenting my emotional response with an appreciation for the poet’s skill. It has also allowed my writing to become more deliberate and carefully crafted.

For all she gave me, I am also grateful for what Sarah didn’t give me—solutions. Sarah never explicitly told me what to do—there was never one “right” answer. As my metaphorical Fairy Godmother, Sarah gave me dress, carriage, and white horses, but once I got to the ball, I was on my own. Now that my Levinthal Tutorial is over, I am excited to strike out on my own, equipped with these new tools, to see where my pen takes me next. ________________________________________ Read a poem that Caroline wrote for her Levinthal Tutorial online at www.lelandquarterly.com.

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Elementary Physics When I was younger they told me that electrons move constantly, that we exchange them every moment, many times over. I thought that if I touched something long enough, if I could dedicate centuries to constant contact, we would gradually become one another.

I could be part redwood tree or desk drawer, carrot, cat or stone. I could be part Eiffel Tower, part Wailing Wall.

(I hesitate to think how much of me would be socks and headphones.)

I could carry a bit of every person I’d ever hugged, fibers from every bed I’d ever slept in, a page of every book I’d ever read.

The world would dissolve into the soles of my feet.

And you would be, by now, my fingernail or maybe my right breast, my earlobes.

Then you would not be only you either, but everything you’d ever touched.

This is what I think of, still, after you’ve fallen asleep.

I do not know what this thirst is, only it’s for nothing so solid as we seem.

—KENDRA PETERSON

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About FLATLAND: collaboration workshop A collaborative exercise that utilizes collective-memory to reconstruct a still life. This is meant to reexamine memory within the context of seeing and creating while introducing a three-dimensional facet to drawing.

Students created a large still life and spent 20 to 30 minutes collectively observing the pile, actively memorizing. The pile was then completely covered with paper, and students drew on that paper, reconstructing what they remembered about the objects below the paper. —Reed Anderson

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“Temporal Self-Portrait,” Garrett Dobbs, charcoal

STRANGERS — CHELSEY LITTLE

It’s a subtle burning sensation you get when someone’s eyes are on you—you turn your head and there they are.

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Where do these things happen? The street. Bars.

Coffee shops. On buses, in transit. The middle ground between some place and no place. Maybe it’s the rushing motion, the time-travel, that propels two bodies towards each other, or maybe it is the stillness in the midst of the rushing, the stops that jolt you out of your seat, your reverie, your inner monologue. You stop, you look up, or you look back, or to your side, and there he is, someone you’ve never seen before. A stranger.

Strangers: two people at a coffee shop, standing in line, waiting to order. I had passed him on the street, noticing him only because I saw that he noticed me. It’s a subtle burning sensation you get when someone’s eyes are on you—you turn your head and there they are, green or blue but most often brown eyes looking into yours. He

didn’t worry me the way a stranger’s much waste on the road and time was “Chelsey, you can’t walk something that always passed over eyes sometimes do when you’re walking on a busy city street and my head when I wasn’t watching the home from school you see them see you and you feel like clock. With all the stops and the toil, it anymore.” maybe they want something from you. was taking me much longer than usual to Money. Sex. Tattoos on his arm, a shaven get home. Just as soon as I was rounding the head, a mustache from the seventies, hard eyes— corner of my street, my dad pulled up in his brown maybe I should have been uneasy but I wasn’t.

Nissan and vroomed next to me in a huff. He opened the We stood in line, and after I had ordered my hibiscus door and barked, “Get in.” I saw anger in his eyes and I mint tea, when I turned around to grab some sugar from was sorry I had made him mad. I was about to open my the counter, he stopped and said to me, “You have really mouth and say so but my dad was not worried about that. beautiful hair.” I smiled with lips tight because I hate my He pressed his foot on the gas and rushed to follow a long teeth and said, “Thanks,” in that reticent way somebody yellow Lincoln that had apparently been following behind who has heard something said many times over can’t help me very slowly as I stopped to collect all the trash. As but offer. soon as my dad pulled up, the car had turned around in A lot of my encounters with strangers occur in this a hurry and sped off but my dad was right on its tail. He way. The red hair draws them in, like some sort of magic, chased the car around the city for almost an hour before and they try using some remark about the color as an in. losing them, cursing the whole time and I just sat there “What are you reading?” “May I share your table?” “How not understanding. He told me later what had happened many licks does it take to get to the center of a lollipop?” and said, “Chelsey, you can’t walk home from school Strangers with candy is something you’re told to avoid. anymore.”

You can tell someone is a stranger if you will take candy As a child, I didn’t feel very fragile. I didn’t know that from them, without a pause to think, unhesitatingly sure I could be snatched up, taken away, that I could die. I’d of the safety of the exchange. If not, they are probably read fairy tales, of course, and I remember all the times a stranger. And yet when Halloween rolls my mom told me never to go inside a house My around, this is exactly what we do—we with a stranger, but the actual idea that red hair reels in take candy from strangers. Witches and such things could happen to me had goblins, they offer up their treats, their crossed my mind. Even then, strangers like a flame never fat meats, their golden fruit, when all right when it did, right when I was that never burns. they want is a lock of your golden hair. threatened in a very real way, it didn’t I was five years old, walking hit me. I didn’t understand why what I am harmless. home from school by the usual route. happened that day was scary until I was Just as I was leaving campus, I stepped on a older and now I can’t get this funny feeling plastic grocery bag and an idea came to me: I would out of my gut. I think, maybe I should dye my hair. pick up all the trash I see on my walk back home. Back My red hair reels in strangers like a flame that never then, I wanted to be an environmentalist and back then burns. I am harmless.

I believed being an environmentalist involved getting Witness: Waiting to meet a friend at the train station, large groups of people together with pick-up trucks and an old man in homeless garb, fat in blue flannel and giant black garbage bags and sticks with stabby-things old and Asian, comes up to me. I’m perched on some on them, traveling the countryside, picking up every concrete, reading short stories and he comes forward single item of trash one could find. I didn’t realize, back slowly, slow enough that I don’t notice him until he then, that what I was envisioning was more like being is about a foot away from me. I look at him and first, a prisoner. I continued on my walk, stopping at every I smile in the nice way that a nice person might smile bus stop and corner where bits of refuse had gathered. I at a stranger, acknowledging their existence but not plucked up every cigarette butt and gum wrapper I could necessarily inviting conversation. The man does not back find, slushy cups, paper bits, Dorito bags, all of it, and I down but continues his forward advance. I think maybe stashed them in the plastic bag I had found. There was so he is asking me for money, though he doesn’t say a word.

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I say, “I’m sorry, I have nothing,” but he continues coming open to this world. I was meant for strange encounters, even closer, leaning in towards me. It is then that I see his for the experience of mutual understanding, the lips pucker ever so slightly and I realize he is going to kiss recognition that there is something inside some foreign me. I lean back and shake my head and say, “No.” I say you that identifies with something inside me. This doesn’t it—I don’t yell it because I don’t think this man means happen with every stranger, not at all, but when it does, it me any harm. I like to think that I can tell when someone can make the world and all the bad things that happen in means me harm. The moment I lean back away from him it, seem a little less. Because mutual understanding and and shake my head and say, “No,” softly, the man floats the simple care that comes from this understanding rather away, a ghost. than from some sort of wanting, is possible.

What was that ghost thinking? Did he And it’s the beginning of friendship, of think I might be a ghost too, that my body love, even if only for a moment.

I was meant for would melt away with his, that my lips A muggy day in the city would be soft and pliable or smoky coupled with much walking and strange encounters, and free, like a drug you can breathe my bones ache. My foot hurts. for the experience of mutual in deep and smooth? I was taught I walk into a coffee shop, to be friendly, to be polite, to smile understanding, the recognition Mojo’s Daily Grind, a threeat everyone because who doesn’t floor place with a smoking that there is something inside deck, bright colored walls and deserve a smile? The issue, though, is that no one knows what’s behind cellophane-wrapped pastries some foreign you that a smile until they ask, until they step stacked up the side bar. Barrels identifies with something of coffee beans spill out onto the forward and lean into you and learn, without a doubt, that your smile was not floor, the best smell there is, and big inside me. an overture or an invitation. It was a kindness stuffed couches are everywhere, the turned bitter with misunderstanding. way they should be, just waiting for you to And yet, there he was, one soul reaching out for curl up with a book and a cup of joe amongst your fellow another. To bridge that gap takes courage or craziness caffeine junkies. but either way, it’s a leap and it’s exciting and it’s good.

I choose a couch in the center of the first floor room-I Mutual understanding is what the soul longs for and don’t want to walk any further. I take off my shoe and sometimes a stranger is the only person who can give us begin to nurse my foot, mewling ever so slightly, trying that. Maybe my attitude on strangers is shaped in part not to be too public about my pain but not really minding by that homespun humor of Will Rogers, the man known if someone notices. My inclinations are dramatic and I as Oklahoma’s favorite son, with his charmingly naïve tend toward the stage. saying, “A stranger is just a friend I haven’t met yet.” I He has a bushy brown beard. He wears a tattered certainly heard these words growing up from parents who cap, a t-shirt, some chacos. He’s talking on the phone in themselves were indoctrinated with this theory as young the stuffy couch across from mine, leaning over Oklahomans and were once strangers to one occasionally to grab his mug and gulp up another who met thirty-six years ago in a bar. his coffee, black. I try to forget my pain Many young lovers start off as strangers. and pick up a yellow book, brushing Scene: I’m studying abroad in Florence the top of my foot absentmindedly as working with a theatre group and a strange I read. The man, still on the phone, young man, a Florentine, walks up onstage stands up and walks around the table after the show. “I’m Tom,” he says in perfect that separates us, switches his cell from English, and extends his hand, giving me his right to his left hand, he sits down no choice but to take it. This moment next to me and places his right hand marks the beginning of a brief on the top of my foot. He holds romance. Later, he will tell me it there for a little while and that he was drawn to me by a I do not move. I do not feel flash of my red hair and the afraid, just alive, connected, words of his friend that asked, understood. He doesn’t “Is that your red?” Not yet. Always rub or stroke the foot which I the red. I wonder, was it my dad’s red hair hesitate to think of as mine, but that drew my mother to him? he squeezes it a little, pulsating his Maybe I was given this hair like fingers, sending human care signals my daddy because I was meant to be into the foot. And it helps.

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Lower Milford Give me a pen and I’ll map the township out – each rutted road, the last blackbird vocal in a gutted cornrow; at dawn, locals drinking diner coffee; Pork n Kraut night at the firehall;

hills that ring round, late spring

green-shawled.

Between the blank quarry and the stubborn drought, the hunter’s blaze orange and the red harvest oak, a fistful of earth and the concrete mall, the moon’s crooked curve and the batter’s swing, we walk the line between the country’s blunt beauty, and the developer’s western front.

— NATHALIE TREPAGNIER

“On the way to school,” Bitlis, Turkey, 2009, Devney Hamilton

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&

Maria Hummel

Narrative The concept of narrative medicine is, as of yet, unfamiliar to most. Distilled down to its most basic elements, it’s talk therapy. The theory is, every pain and every problem has a story behind it; accessing it practically is essential to both psychological and physical healing.

If looked at the wrong way, the approach may seem suspiciously Freudian – but the great thing about any artistic approach to tackling the human condition is

What inspired the concept of narrative healing, and what made you want to teach a class about it?

I’ve spent over three years in and out of hospital with my son, who has an acute auto-immune disease that causes thousands of ulcers in his digestive tract. Over countless experiences of relating his condition to doctors and nurses, I became aware of how important storytelling is in the medical culture. Patients tell stories of their illnesses and cures; doctors tell stories to other doctors and patients. A lot of knowledge is passed along this way.

In addition, I noticed that there seemed to be a current trend away from reliance on labs and hard medical data and towards understanding how best to listen to patients, even how to think of their illnesses as not merely an individual’s burden, but a burden of the individual’s culture, i.e. their family, their community. The radical concept that illness is relational (i.e. a product of shared relationships with others) vs. monadic (i.e. rooted only in an individual’s body) was especially interesting to me as a writer.

I began to ask: what are paradigms of illness and healing and how do they play out not only in people’s lives, but on the page? Is it possible for writers to learn something from the way doctors and therapists deal with narrative in their own work? What is narrative medicine, this new buzz word in medical circles? What is narrative therapy? How can I bring strategies from those practices into a writing class and how will it change how we think about our own constructed stories?

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What made you select your list of potential interviewees for the class? What is the common thread that ties them together?

All the interviewees bridge the worlds of medicine and literature. Three are doctors who write poetry or fiction, one is a narrative therapist, and one is a doctor who teaches writing classes to people with chronic illness.

I invited them because I’m dazzled by their work and I think they are seekers like the rest of us in the class.

They cross boundaries all the time. Take Chris Adrian, a Hematology/Oncology Fellow at UCSF who took a year off to go to Harvard Divinity School, and has written an insanely imaginative novel where the world floods and the only survivors are the staff and patients of a floating children’s hospital. I’m not just interested in how Adrian handles narrative as a doctor. I want to know what he thinks of imagination’s role in coping with the deepest questions of human suffering.

Do you think narrative healing is a concept that is more geared towards the healing process for the writer, or a learning experience for the reader? Who should be enlightened here – or is it both?

Both. I think any writer who confronts difficult memories begins a healing process by ordering those memories and giving them shape. Similarly, readers who have suffered similar experiences can experience some healing (or at least comfort) from actually having someone put their feelings into coherent form.

Healing that there are a million ways to look at it. And Maria Hummel, now in her sixth year of teaching, has a new one for the undergraduates at Stanford.

Her creative nonfiction course, Narrative Healing, explores a new perspective on the personal narrative – namely, that there are two points of view that define memoirs: the witness and the survivor.

Rather than relying on conversation to explore the difficulties of healing, Maria shifts narrative

medicine into the genre of prose, playing on the paradigms of illness and healing as they interact in every day life and on the page. The course explores the works of writers such as Alice Walker, Abraham Verghese, and Chris Adrian, culminating in student-run interviews with a group of men and women who, with one foot in both the worlds of medicine and literature, embody the spirit of narrative healing.

— KATIE WU

What are your thoughts on writing about experiences/ trauma immediately after they have happened? Do you think this compromises our ability to control psychic distance? A lot of writers warn against writing about things that are too fresh because you haven’t yet had time to develop “perspective” or “distance” from the emotional upheaval… do you think this is correct?

Yes and no. The Wordsworthian paradox is that poetry (and I think this applies to all writing) is both the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” and “emotion recollected in tranquility.” From my own experience, I can say that sometimes it was essential that I wrote about bad experiences right away, and sometimes I simply wasn’t able to. Maybe it has to do with scale and how incomprehensible the trauma is. For example, I wrote an essay about my son’s first hospitalization soon after it happened, but when a dozen of my students were killed on a field trip in Thailand, I couldn’t write about it for an entire year.

You’re also smart to ask about psychic distance.

Sometimes a writer’s struggle has to do with how removed you need to be in order to truly relate what happened. I once heard Alice Sebold talking about The Lovely Bones.

She said she wrote some of the first chapter, but when she got to the part about Susie Salmon being raped, she had to stop. Sebold herself had been raped, and she didn’t want to confuse her own experience with Susie’s, because Susie’s life had to be her own. So Sebold set aside the novel, wrote the story of her own rape (published as the memoir Lucky) and then went back later and finished The Lovely

Bones. She also said she remembered the details of her own rape much more clearly after seven years had passed.

You talk about witnessing and surviving; what are your thoughts behind this? Is there a distinct difference?

Can someone be doing both?

Most nonfiction writing begins from either the point of view of survivor or of witness. So either you’re grappling with some change or trauma you’ve endured, or you’re grappling with some change or trauma that you see in someone else. On a very basic level, you can see the survival point of view often in memoir, and the witness point of view often in reporting.

Nevertheless, the writer may not stay fixed in that point of view for the entire work, and when she crosses the boundary, a certain magic happens. Take Autobiography of a Face, a survival memoir if there ever was one. When Lucy Grealy actually starts crossing the boundary from survivor to witness, from describing the horrors of her own surgery and chemo to describing her secret visit to the horrible research lab in the hospital where dogs and cats are kept, she begins to unravel her own devastating self-consciousness at being an experiment for others.

What’s one core concept you’d like your students to take away from this class?

A core concept: We are meaning-making creatures.

All writing is a journey toward meaning, and whether you write as witness or survivor, about major trauma or subtle life changes, I hope the class will get you there.

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N

ever a fan of waiting, she was already thinking about the seats at ten minutes past.

Thinking about how sixteen hours before, her fiancé had spooned her on a 200-count sheet and reached between her legs, and she had asked instead, “The seats at breakfast places. You think they’re brown?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“The seats. Like at Denny’s… maybe I-Hop,” she tried to clarify.

The room had seemed too big for her question; even in the darkness she could tell how high the ceilings were, the edges trimmed with gold leaf. Don had touched her hair to fill up the silence.

“They’re brown or orange, usually.”

“That sounds about right,” she’d said.

Now, a flight to Phoenix and two hundred miles north, Suki noted that the seats in the K. were teal.

Reupholstering, the waiter told her when she asked, faintly puzzled that such a question should even arise.

Suki thought, Greenie. What a greenie. A decade ago, nowhere in these parts would have warranted such care. Now everything was newer, the tables cleaner, the waiters in uniforms and not the pell-mell outfits of a morning dash. Only one had stayed on, as far as Suki could remember, his hair rolled into dreads, a boulder of a man. Suki couldn’t for the life of her remember his name, only the way he would smile, sometimes, his canines showing, one yellower than the other. He came to her table, dawdling as he wiped down the surface, spreading the grease around on the plastic.

“Check, ma’am?” he said.

“No,” Suki said, because she wasn’t ready to go.

Because nine years ago she had been told, “Girl you gotta let go someday. You gotta let go.” She had learned this for nine years but now she was back, holding on again. Nine years late coming home, Baby had chosen to be later. So Suki ordered another coffee, then doodled on a napkin, a picture of a girl with a large head and a small body, a stretched to breaking point. Her silhouette: a lollipop. Baby.

But Don held on too. Two weeks ago she had been making their Friday pancakes, the sun low and creeping in, brushing the feet of the furniture. Suki had stripped the box of its plastic Safeway bag, poured, measured, cracked an egg. The shell broke clean, the whites strangely glutinous, clinging to her fingers. She had been stirring the batter, thinking about nothing, when Don appeared in the doorway.

“Let’s go out,” he said, reaching out as if to take

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BA

“Seats in a Diner,” Yanran Lu

BY

her hand. “My treat.”

“The pancakes.”

“I’ll take you anywhere you want to go,” Don said.

He smiled at her, and his teeth were small as a child’s.

“I want to talk,” he said, and Suki knew she couldn’t refuse him.

They had lived together for five years now in an apartment designed for artsy types. Old tenants, come and gone, had left their mark. Paintings cluttered the walls, an imitation Rothko, some abstract collage, a mash-up of colors and textures they had never bothered to sort. Leaving their place that night was a breath of fresh air, and on a Friday it was easy to be romantic.

Chinatown was dimming the way sections of the city do at their bed hours, the shop houses winking dark, the sounds of shutters echoing as shopkeepers pulled them shut. The symphony of a ten o’clock Chinatown felt familiar to Suki, who had, at some point before Don, frequently haunted the area at this hour.

From the streets of Chinatown she had pulled him into Sam Wo’s, two buses and a five minute walk from home. They crept up the stairs past a crowded, steaming kitchen, its wet floors gleaming. They sat on small chairs, pressed close together. Don hadn’t said much, maybe wondered at Suki’s choice, what with a waitress screaming behind them in a garbled tongue.

They could barely hear one another over the grating of chairs, the sound of plate to table like teeth grinding.

“I’m sorry,” Suki said about the noise.

“Don’t be,” Don replied, his face narrowing to the point of his chin where a shadow fuzzed. Suki felt a pang at his shyness. She wanted to put an arm around him, hold him somehow.

“So what do you want to talk about?” she said, and Don put his chopsticks down.

He said, “The engagement.”

“Oh,” said Suki.

“I mean, we’ve been engaged for a while.”

“I know,” Suki said.

“So,” Don said.

“So,” Suki replied.

It had been two years since Don had asked her casually over Friday pancakes. She had thought for a bit, said yes, but weeks had turned into months and the wedding seemed more like a far off dream, something to be saved up for and to require too much permanence for either of them to think about seriously. Still, the ring he had given her had signified something a little more committed, putting quick breaks and adultery out of the question. It had calmed Suki, although the reality of marriage had not.

— SAMANTHA TOH

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Ramen Noodle, Yanran Lu

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Leland Quarterly Spring 2011

Now Don was looking at her expectantly, his left eyeto grasp a piece of meat between her teeth from Don’s brow raised in the way he had, poking up from behind poorly held chopsticks. Sometimes she would miss the frames of his glasses. Two years. and have to laugh.

“It’s your turn not to look at me like that,” Suki said, At the end of the meal, the grease growing cold reaching for the water the old lady had poured into on the plate, Don mentioned the lamp that did not small paper dinosaur cups. work, the paint in the bathroom that had slowly They sat together in silence for a while, the topbegun to peel, an entire sheet bubbling from the ic descending upon them. The tiny restaurant was wall. a rectangular little room, wood-panelled and dirty.

“So many repairs,” he said.

Tables of four crammed themselves into the space.

“I’ll call Rory soon,” Suki said of their Suki shifted her weight and her chair lulled forlandlord, knowing as she said it that it’d take ward. him weeks anyway to get anything fixed.

They were waiting for the chow mein. Beef But Don did not leave it at that, instead one dish, chicken the other. The old lady clattered leaned toward her, his mouth straightening around on the landing where the cutlery was kept, the into a line. generic beige chopsticks and the white porcelain spoons.

“I mean our house,” he said, his voice oddly tender.

She banged them together as she picked them up, banged “Sure, call Rory, but our house. This place we have right them again when she put them down. Suki could hear im- now. It’s a piece of shit.” patience in the air.

“It’s not that bad,” Suki began, but Don said, “It is,” Because Don had been waiting. Whether or not he putting his dry palms over hers. expected her to be able to say something in such a short “What do you mean?” Suki said. span of a few minutes was not yet certain to Suki. As she “I’m saying,” Don said, then paused. “There are other took a sip from the dinosaur paper cup, a group of rowdy places. Better places. I’ve saved enough, you probably have high school students came up, sweatshirts emblazoned too, and if we get married. We’ll find a district where we and jeans skinny, their boots thumping on the stairs. They can get a bigger house too, in case our family, you know, were chattering about food, about chow fun and chow expands. We’ll plan it well, make sure you like the place.” mein. Suki’s stomach rumbled.

He glanced at her, self-conscious again. “How about that?”

She wished she had had a place like this to go to when Suki’s mind had stopped at if. If we get married, Don she was younger. They had certainly been broke as teen- had said. The word hung everything else in balance, and agers, Suki and her friends. At most they had visher hand felt cold in his. Don, she knew, ited one another, sometimes in big groups, was the man she had loved the most, sometimes in small ones, jumping into someone she had met out of college Baby in a place the cars of their uncles, fathers, brothwho had been different from her like Sam Wo’s would ers, and seeing where they would end college flings. He was serious, he up. Sometimes in the big groups make the place less cramped was calm. He did things with his there would be Baby, sometimes not life.

– most of the time not, Baby prefer- and more cosy, the fluorescent Suki, all of twenty-seven, ring just the two of them; she didn’t stared at Don, his pale, skinny bulbs less stark. Suki took like the noise, or talking to people she face and harmless eyes, his chin Don’s hand, wishing she didn’t care about. edged with scruff where the razor But when she appeared she was the had missed that morning. She was could do the same. life of the party, people wanting to sit by her, acutely aware of the texture of his skin, ask her questions, hear her laugh. She made dina little dry against her fingertips; the texing rooms they’d grown up in feel like something new, ture of his pants, a buttery corduroy, against her turned squat brown houses into vacation homes. Con- bare knee. People she could love, she knew, were hard to versations grew beautiful: they would be circled around come by. tables with their elbows knocking, talking about their day.

“What?” Suki said eventually.

Baby in a place like Sam Wo’s would make the place less “We can move out together. No rush,” Don said, putcramped and more cosy, the fluorescent bulbs less stark. ting his other hand on top of hers. “But I’d like to know Suki took Don’s hand, wishing she could do the same. whether we’re going to move out together, move into anWhen the chow mein came, their brief connection, other place together.” Together, he underscored, looking skin to skin, broke like a fast. Don took the beef and she at her. “I’d like to know.” the chicken, though occasionally they swapped food, their “I’d like to tell you,” Suki said. meal punctuated by a “here,” or “try this.” Suki would try “Soon?” Don said.

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“I’ll tell you soon,” Suki said, heart racing. time if they disappeared, these privileges with Baby. If she Don seemed satisfied with that. As he turned to ask would be hurt because Baby had forgotten her, or if she for the bill, Suki closed her eyes briefly, her mind jumbled. would be hurt because out here, in the barren red land she Marriage, she thought to herself. She’d give herself a week still thought of as home, Suki would have nowhere to go. to answer him, by the Saturday of next. She was sure – almost sure – what the answer would be, the answer that The sky eventually seduced in a sultry dimness, and so would change her life forever. She imagined Don’s smile far out from Tuba Suki couldn’t hope for a streetlight. The and looked forward to it. She was excited. ranch was still stout, its walls off-white against the sunset, Yet a sudden turn of events forced her to miss that but dusk had begun to reach along one face, shrouding deadline, for a letter from a girl named Baby arrived the it in its shadow. Here Suki pulled up on the precipice of following Monday, written on brown paper in a scrawling, some rock structure, the dust a weak red, the slopes covchild-like hand. It had been delivered on overnight mail, ered in grimy vegetation. Here she was, stepping out of sealed with a stamp, the red ink bleeding urgent. Baby. her rented Toyota, its wheels caked from travel. For a moBaby, a girl to whom Suki had once been evment there was nothing, only the wind, a naked, savage erything: life itself. Baby with her soft whistling. skin and small stride and shoul“Baby,” Suki called, “Baby.”

Baby’s ders slumping when she sighed, The wind came again, whirling. Suki felt Baby asking Suki to meet her suddenly like a child left in an open space, as surprised intake of in Flagstaff, Arizona for her though she were flying a white kite, small in mother’s funeral. My mom, breath in her ear, like she the distance. She imagined herself watching Baby had written, is dead. the fabric tossed in the air between large, inwas breathless from a visible hands. She imagined herself believing, climb.

Baby wasn’t late; Baby didn’t just for an instant, in something godly. A show. It was four thirty when Suki kite, that was all it took, and the door signed the cheque for her $1.75 coffee, opened, and Baby was there.

It was like leaving a dollar in tip and dark brown slush at “I knew you’d remember,” listening to an the bottom of her cup. Suki was glad to leave Baby said. “I mean, how to get the K. the way she had never felt glad before, ocean miles away from here.” as though she had grown out of time-wasting And without talking about their parched desert waiting, and cheap drinks. At five o’clock, she was the her hatred of waiting, or only customer in the diner. the hour she spent waiting, withplateau.

And perhaps it served her right that Baby out mentioning the teal, the cold teal wasn’t there. Come to the funeral, Baby had written, plastic moulding itself to her buttocks, the but Suki’s plane came in too late to make it proper, for the small of her back, and her isolation, Suki went forward, burial, for the rituals. grabbing Baby across her torso, trapping Baby’s arms.

“I still want to see you,” Suki wrote. “I’ll see you at the Baby’s surprised intake of breath in her ear, like she was K.” She had been very sorry. breathless from a climb. It was like listening to an ocean Now the light was angled parallel to the ground, miles away from their parched desert plateau. blinding through the windshield. Out along the road the ground was patchy with old ice, threatening skidding as Baby looked the same: dark, sinewy, tough as leaththe air bit, teeth ragged. Armed with Baby’s number in er. She still had those full cheeks that dimpled when she her pocket, Suki drove, the number simply insurance; she smiled, she had spider lashes, a little nose. And though didn’t intend to call. She remembered how they used to age had fattened her up, her hips filling out beneath the drop by, no appointments, no politeness, with the free- apron, she was still a stick of a girl, still a baby. dom reserved for people who were close. Baby, reaching “Drive all right?” up to her window and rapping, the sound clean enough “Wasn’t bad. Not too long.” to jerk Suki awake. The window ajar, Baby crawling in, “Liar,” Baby said, cracking a smile. “You must be upsetting a glass of water, rumpling textbooks. tired.”

“It’s goddamn bright out there,” Baby would say, rollSuki was, just a little, though not from the drive. She ing onto Suki’s bed, sweat and all. “I want sunglasses like was tired of looking at Baby, knowing that with Baby’s in the movies, you know? Like a superstar.” And her face, face came all the apprehension of coming back, of finally leaning forward, nose scrunched up, a laugh exploding being home. from her chest, meant that she was absolutely serious.

“You’re the tired one, I bet.”

Driving on, Suki didn’t know what she would do this “I’m not too bad.”

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“Brooklyn,” Kate Erickson

“Baby,” Suki warned.

“I swear,” Baby said. “I’m doing okay. I’ve got my pizza, my Coke. I got you. I’m okay.”

“But today—” “Today was pretty hot out for winter.”

“Yeah,” Suki said, as Baby let her hand go. “Yeah it was.”

The kitchen around them lay lit and untouched. Suki felt like their bodies had been suspended in the pale yellow glow – the color of paperflowers – of fresh oil for fry bread. Reaching back, Baby pulled her hair over her left shoulder, tilting her head so all of it hung down her chest, heavy as a curtain. The lamp above hung low-bellied and golden.

“Too much sunshine,” Baby said absently. “Today.”

“Wish we had that problem back there.”

“Where?”

“San Francisco,” Suki said. “It’s been a couple of cloudy weeks. Wo-oh, let the sun shine, that’s what my neighbor keeps singing. We don’t have enough.”

“Wo-oh,” Baby said. “Wo-oh, wo-oh. Wo-ohhhhh.”

“Like that.”

“Wo-oh,” Baby sang, then louder, “Wo-ohhhhh!”

She stopped and the room grew very quiet.

“Don’t do that,” Suki said, not finding something solid to pinpoint her accusation against, only trying to persuade Baby to relax, to open up, to tell her. “Baby, just – come on. Tell me.”

“What?” said Baby.

“How was it?”

“What?”

“The ceremony,” Suki said. Then, “The funeral.”

Baby puckered her lips, then relaxed them.

“I didn’t go,” she said.

“Oh,” Suki said at last.

“But I said I’m fine,” Baby said. She paused, then took her hand away. “I finally got my quiet and I’m giving it up for no one.”

She stood up, taking the dirty dishes with her and putting them on top of a stack, a tower of similarly dirty

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ones. Suki looked at her, her argyle apron in red and yel- Daddy,” not sure he would understand the concept of her, low, the colors fading. She noticed the bare feet, Baby’s Baby. yin-yang tattoo fading to green, her toes gripping the li“Drink water,” Don said. noleum as she scrubbed. The linoleum, those black and “Water the plants,” Suki said. white checks, still dazed Suki after all these years. Even “I will,” Don said, not hanging up, and Suki could tell where Suki sat, the same table mats stuck to the pine sur- that he didn’t want to, could feel the question in his voice, face, crusting over and stained from years of meals and the question he had asked two weeks before. But she hung spilled sauces and syrups. Suki’s forearms stuck to the up as Baby came throttling out of the den in a white dress, mats when she leaned, and pulling them off made a loud, sweater, and high-top sneakers, an old Pentax in hand. sucking sound.

“I called in sick,” Baby said. “Those bitches weren’t “Hey,” she said, then said, hesitating, “You’re not too happy.” okay.”

“Oh yeah?” Suki said, turning to face her.

Baby didn’t answer. Baby was still wash“But let’s go,” Baby said. “I brought the chips.” ing the dishes, and Suki didn’t want to reThe drive to Tuba was an even road out, peat her question. The water was going the grey today fitting the season. Clouds, Baby was going full blast now, splashing the plates mounting in curlicues, seemed to have at them with vigour, and spraying out onto the counter. squashed down the low ridges in the Baby stacked the clean ones to her flattening the landscape. Suki the stained yellow sponge distance, left, making a pile, some dishes still drove, distracted by the smallness of oozing dirty water, her gleaming with suds. A week’s worth herself in the car, crushed in by the of dishes. Baby was going at them great space, forgetting Don. hands moving rashly, with vigor, the stained yellow sponge They swung by the village, the brick violent. oozing dirty water, her hands moving walls rising out of the dirt, their roofs slantrashly, violent. ed only slightly, as if hoping for a baby snow.

“Baby,” Suki said. “Baby girl.”

Through the rearview Suki noticed wires criss-crossing She walked up to Baby and put her chin on Baby’s overhead, segmenting the sky above somebody’s roof – shoulder from the back, stooping a little to reach Baby’s green, Suki noticed further, surprised. A shanty, four pickheight as she rubbed at another plate, this one encrusted. ups. An abandoned tricycle in a yard. Baby cracked open Lasagne, some kind of pasta, probably. Cheese hardens a window and Suki breathed, cold and free, the dusty air after a few days. that lasted through Tuba proper where the markets and “I didn’t even have time to take care of her,” Baby said. the chain-link fences corralled people into a crowd. They “Those bitches at the restaurant sure make sure I don’t.” looped past the hospital, zoomed down an avenue with Suki was soothing her now, the blunt bottom of her scared dogs and low brown houses, and finally, at the post palm rocking on Baby’s hipbone, her fingers tapoffice where a man wearing low jeans came out ping a rhythm on the side of Baby’s apron, bawith a parcel, Suki nearly ran him over, saying dump ba-dump. She liked this famil“Fuck, fuck,” as they screeched to a stop. iar smell, remembered how they “You didn’t get any better at this had hugged the day Suki left for driving business,” Baby said. “But at California. Now Baby, arms least you stopped in a good place.” wet to the elbow, put down She pointed in the distance. Pizher sponge, turned around. za Edge, Suki read.

“Let me help,” Suki said, “My favorite place,” Baby said. “A loosening her hug. regular joint but I know the guy. He’s “What do you wanna do?” sweet, he’s cool.”

“I don’t know,” Suki said.

“Sweet to you?”

Baby took her in, her small round lips “Likes me, probably,” Baby said. “Whad’ya sticking out, as though thinking. think, like any other guy.”

“You’ve been gone too long,” Baby said. “Why don’t “Likes women?” you stay?”

“Likes sex. I’ll bet you he’s a horndog, but you want pizza?” Baby said, pushing open the door.

Suki called Don the next morning. He mentioned In the plasticky takeaway joint, Baby leaned over the some nice houses, said he would send her pictures, then counter, pressing her breasts together and saying the word mentioned a dinner. Suki said, “OK,” and when Don asked “Juan” like a catcall. Suki knew she’d slept with him, had her where she was now, she said, “Phoenix, with Mom and him over in her little ranch, fucked over the sticky place-

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mats and on the couch with the old knit throw. Suki could “Move,” Baby said. hear it in her voice, the flirt like a hook, but it had always “Baby,” Suki said, despairing, then, “I can’t.” been that way since they had met as the smallest kids at “Why not?” six. Baby with the boys in the playground, Baby with her “I can’t.” newest squeezes, the gossip and the rumors, Baby with “Suki.” her bookbag carried by another boy. Then in high “No,” Suki said, “Don’t,” she said, and Baby, looking school Baby wasn’t baby for her smallness but at her carefully, screwed her mouth sideways. because they had said, “She’d be a baby “Okay,” Baby said. mama all right,” but she hadn’t been, They ate together in silence, swallow after swaland the people wondering how low, Suki’s mind racing until she finally said, “And she did it, why there weren’t no you said you wouldn’t. You said you wouldn’t anybabies, how many she’d got rid way.” of.

“Wouldn’t what?”

“How many did you get “Give up your quiet,” Suki said, looking at rid of?” Suki had asked once, her, reaching out to wipe Baby’s chin, which had Baby curled up against Suki, her body a blob of tomato sauce. “You said you wouldn’t round and warm. Baby had said, “You give up nothing for your quiet. She’s gone now, just curious?” kissing her cheek and falling your Ma’s gone. You’ve had to deal with it for asleep, arm around Suki’s waist. years now, you’re finally alone. You’ve time Now they sat on a curb in the parking lot now, for you.” pulling at the pizza with their teeth, the cheese “You’re different,” Baby said, looking pendant from their chins, the bag of chips between right back at Suki. “And besides, you got it them. Too many unanswered questions, yet everything down, babe,” putting down her pizza. “I’m seemed normal. alone,” she said, wiping her hands off with “You come here often?” Suki a napkin. “I’m really alone,” she said, a nonsaid. chalance steeling her words.

And Suki wanted “Couple times a week.” to say, not forever, “To see Juan?”

Living in Tuba meant both chaos and “To eat pizza,” Baby said, silence.

The latter, deeper, could fill a valley. nine years was hardly picking at a piece of pepperoBut chaos was frequent, found in the forever. ni stuck between her two front small masses of people in schools teeth. “Whad’ya think, that I’m a and in markets, jammed in She didn’t want horndog too?” cars finding a place to go.

“Yeah,” Suki said, Baby grinning.

Suki and Baby had met to be the person leav“It’s been a long time and nothing’s in a chaotic sandbox one ing, didn’t want to be the day after school, in playchanged,” Baby said. “What years now, seven?

Eight? Since you left.” deserter, but Suki remem- grounds clogged with “Nine.” children. bered now that time “Well I say,” Baby said. “Feels like forever.”

“Hi,” Suki had said, And Suki wanted to say, not forever, nine years her legs scorching from a late crawls. was hardly forever. She didn’t want to be the person spring sun, and Baby had said leaving, didn’t want to be the deserter, but Suki rehello. membered now that time crawls. Especially here, From that afternoon on they had played after out where little tracks change but the sun and the school, making up their own world, stepping over sandmoon and it’d been nine years since. castles for princesses and pillow mountains, playing “You know I’m sorry,” Suki said, and this was spies or detectives. It had come to a point where they true now. had been clubbed together as sisters though they hardly “So why don’t you stay?” Baby said. looked alike, Suki much larger then and Baby just a pin“But I am, girl. Staying. I’ll be here ‘til the prick in the sand. Suki’s face had been plain and flat, weekend.” her nose slightly upturned, her teeth scattered when “No,” Baby said, and the inflection of her voice she grinned, holes from when the front ones been sprung like metal. “You know what I mean by stay.” She tugged out; they had stuck into the flesh of an paused. “I mean, move.” apple when she bit. The new teeth growing out “Don’s in SF,” Suki said, the words an instinct. were uneven, a little gap between the front two

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“Aiken,” Kate Erickson

that her mother would get fixed a good number of years later, when Suki was thirteen, brown hair stringy, her freckles merging into a tan.

Baby, on the other hand, had seemed nothing extraordinary, a brown little nut of a girl with two long braids, draped over her back when she hunched over sand buildings and people. Only a certain way with people made her somehow uncanny, a sudden brilliant smile when she looked up, bright as sun. Even children felt like they had been touched, that they had been liked by someone different. And Suki, that one afternoon at the age of six, had picked the right person, straight from the gut.

“Strange we got to be such good friends,” Suki said now, watching Baby drive, and Baby turning between rock outcrops said nothing, looking out the window instead to the orange-red stones craggy and gleaming, the distant town on one horizon, nothingness on the other.

“Guess where we’re going?” she said finally.

“Castle Rock,” Suki said, her throat going dry.

“Where the high school drop outs go nowadays,” Baby said. “Wasn’t sure if you qualified.”

“High school or college or whatever don’t make

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me that different,” Suki said, and as Baby pulled up, she cracked open the door.

Castle Rock was a deep outcrop of stone that grew redder with the sunset. At the bottom they picked their way between abandoned appliances and car parts, scanning the rocks for a good way up. Clambering up a rock face, Suki felt the familiar roughness under her palms that left white dry marks on her skin. It was a workout, her thighs flexing hard from too many years of disuse. It took them a good twenty minutes to get to the top, but there the wind was mild and they sat, Baby with her legs sticking out, Suki pulling hers to her chest, curled into a ball.

“Three days together,” Baby said. That’s what they had left. “Not too bad.”

But it was only three days. Suki wondered when it had started, her habit of being the one to leave. If she had learned from a childhood of working parents and lonesome days to remain far removed, always, from excitement. Because it had been nine years since coming home and Suki had been okay with that. Tuba had rarely crossed her mind, at least not in concrete detail. There was, after all, no legitimate reason to visit; Mom and Daddy had

moved back to Phoenix, retiring and aging on the west- stop. ern reach, and while she called them frequently, she loved “Someone just died,” she said. “Nobody likes death. them better from a distance. There was no other reason It’s awkward.” to visit than Baby, and Suki could not bring herself to go.

“I can imagine.”

“I’m scared to go back,” she had told Don before she “So I really don’t mean to be that,” Suki said. “Aggresleft. “There’s a knot in my stomach and everything.” sive, I mean.” She paused. “You know I love you,” she said.

“The visit will be over real quick,” he had said, and When she hung up, the cracked egg of sun was gathernow sitting on the top of Castle Rock, knot in her stomach ing back into the horizon, preparing for sunset. The light, and all, Suki knew two things: that she didn’t want this pale and thin, covered the low mounds of sand in the disvisit to end, and that she would be relieved when it did. tance. Suki was still in her pyjamas, the fleece sagging over “We’re here again,” she said. her toes, covering her red-painted nails, chipped at the “Back here, looking at nothing.” corners. By the window she could feel the cold winter air, “Talking.” brisk enough to cut through glass, sharp enough to make “Talking ‘bout nothing.” the weak light somehow brighter, such that everything in “That doesn’t make it any worse,” Suki said, and Baby the den took on a shade of color. She could appreciate it, hummed as if to agree. these sunsets on the high plateau. Though sun“Castle Rock’s still special,” Suki said. sets meant the day’s end, they also meant “Yeah.” watching TV with Baby or looking at her And now “It’s been a long time for me.” face lit by a flickering desk lamp, talksitting on the top “For me too,” Baby said. ing, Baby’s arm casually draped over “How long?” her shoulder. It soon meant no more of Castle Rock, knot in “Nine years since I’ve been of that. her stomach and all, Suki back. Strange, isn’t it, since I live For it was the last night. Just right by.” after dinner Baby disappeared, reknew two things: that she “Not since nine years ago?” appearing only after ninety mindidn’t want this visit to end, utes with two six-packs and a glow Suki said.

“Not since you left,” Baby said, on her face. and that she would be squinting out at the landscape. “No.” “All the way from Gray Mounrelieved when it did. tain,” she said.

And Suki, who thought she might reach across to touch Baby, did not. She looked “That’s far.” down at her hands, listening to scattered and “Don’t whine,” Baby said. “Can’t let you unidentifiable noises around her, neither knowing go without a party night.” what to do or say.

“Two six-packs though?”

“Being small doesn’t mean you can’t conquer the “I don’t want to be here,” she said, wondering if she world,” Baby said, a grin on her face. sounded whiny, and if the static made her sound whinier.

Two hours later, Suki thought she was going to hurl “It’s boring?” it up, all seventy-two ounces of the stuff. They had drunk “It’s taxing,” she said. She had forgotten that Don it like they were in their teens again, wiping beer on the thought it was a ritual funeral, something she couldn’t back of their hands, swearing loudly. Their swearing had give two hoots about. He thought she was there out of ob- gotten progressively louder too, Baby half-curled on her ligation, but Baby’s mother was different from a cousin or chair like a shrimp, shouting “fucks” and “bastards” deaunt twice removed. Don’s frivolity made her angry. fiantly, waving her arms and story-telling, just like in the “You’ll be home in no time,” he said. “Tomorrow”— old days. which was true. Nine years had passed quickly, and two “So that’s pizza guy for you,” Baby said. “That’s pizza days had been a blink. “What time are you getting in?” guy.”

“Afternoon sometime,” Suki said. “You’ve got the de“Juan.” tails.”

“Yeah, those dates we had. A good number, huh.”

“Confirmed?”

“How many months it been?”

“I’ll be there,” Suki said shortly, frustrated somehow.

“I don’t count.”

She imagined Don’s confusion, his mild look of worry, his “Well I think he likes you.” own annoyance at being miles away, unable to understand “Men,” Baby said. the terseness in her voice. “I’m serious, don’t overanalyse.”

“He out of the picture then?”

“Okay,” said Don, and Suki wasn’t sure if that was “I don’t know,” Baby said, and thinking about him, more concern that she heard, because she wanted him to her face softened. “He’ll find someone else soon enough.”

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“You mean you’ll find someone else soon enough.” catching it, looking at it with a contemplative expression “You don’t think pizza guy will?” on his face. Around him the city blocks towered, glinting, “I think he’ll be hung up for a while,” Suki said. in each building hundreds of lives operating simultane“So I guess maybe he’ll be around,” Baby said. ously.

“Good,” Suki said, relieved, glad that Baby wasn’t, at “I don’t know,” the TV said. The boy turned around. least for the next few weeks or months, going to be alone. The camera panned across his face, his freckles, his strawIn the silence that followed Baby flicked on a TV berry blonde locks, ruffling in the wind. Everything in show, blasting the sounds as loud as she could. For a mo- that instant was romantic, the boy’s uncertainty, his angst. ment they sat there, watching the sitcom, Baby laughing Nothing in real life was like that, Suki thought, and she absently, holding onto Suki’s right hand with her left, was bitter. There were lines of corny dialogue. Someone loosely, her thumb trailing over the lines of Suki’s palm. in the corner, crying and yet smiling. There was a good But by the end Suki was the only one with her eyes to the five minutes of sporting victory, and by that time Suki had TV and even then she wasn’t watching, Baby stroking her had enough, she was tired of it, so tired as she reached fingernails, stinging where the cuticles had peeled from over, grabbed the remote in her fist, and turned the mathe cold so she was stroking raw skin. chine off, triumphant. The sound blinked to a stop.

At the credits, Baby asked, “What’s Don like?” and “Whatcha do that for?” Baby demanded. muted the sound so that lights flashed on their faces like “I’m leaving tomorrow,” Suki said. “Why aren’t we a silent disco. Baby looked at her, absurdly secretive, head talking?” cocked to one side. Suki shrugged.

“We were.”

“Nice,” Suki said. “Nerdy,” not really wanting Baby to “I wanna talk,” Suki said, and her voice was strained, know, not finding the words. the noise coming up around the rough ball in her throat “Yeah?” Baby said. “You always that didn’t budge when she swallowed. went for the nerdy ones. Quiet, I Baby said, “So do it. Talk. Go.” bet. Short, maybe? Wears glassThe room once again drew into a silence ringing Nothing in es. Skinny? Yeah, skinny.” in Suki’s ears, and looking at the even surface of Bareal life was like “Yeah.” by’s jawline Suki ran her fingernails over the sofa.

“Smart?”

“I’m sorry,” she said plainly, and that, Suki thought, “He’s okay.” against the sound of nothing her and she was “I bet he’s smart.” voice was too loud for her to “He’s okay, I told you.” bear. She wanted to stop bitter.

“He call?” the silence, she wanted to “I called him a couple days ago, turn the lights brighter, emailed him too, down in Hogan.” get rid of the dimness, to “Good,” Baby said. see things, finally clearly, Baby paused, her face no knowing. Knowing why she longer psychedelic, pausing at had stayed away for nine years, blue, a reflection of a mineral water knowing everything that had ad, water tapped straight from the source. transpired, those nine years, in “You staying in America, right?” she said carefully. Baby’s life, knowing why she had not been there, or could “After you guys you know, get married and stuff.” not. She wanted to know why Baby could somehow say “Don’t be crazy. Why wouldn’t we?” now, so gently, “I’m not angry,” and Suki trying to find the “Just don’t get farther,” Baby said, intertwining their anger and not finding it felt that she had failed somehow. fingers. “What’d I do?” she said. “I don’t know what I’d “Don’t be sorry,” Baby said. “My life’s my life. The do.” pain’s gonna end sometime.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

Suki picked Baby’s hand up from where it lay, relaxed “You’re leaving tomorrow,” Baby said. on the blanket. She picked it up and looked at it, lifting it “Yes,” Suki said, and Baby looked at her, so matter- up before squeezing it gently. Butt of the wrist to butt of of-factly, like everything from the beginning had been set the wrist, finger to finger, their hands still matched, were in stone. still the same size.

Suki watched Baby’s face blanken. She was paying “Heart line,” she said thickly. “Love line, life line.” attention now to the TV, the ends of her brows pulled “Life line,” Baby said. “You can’t predict nothing.” downward as she tried to make sense of what was hap“We thought we’d know exactly where we’d be right pening. Someone on the TV was laughing, and in the now, back when we were kids.” next scene a boy was kicking a football up in the air, then “Hell, I was just pretending,” Baby said.

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“I thought I was sure,” Suki said. with white. It would only be right. And as Suki slept, Baby “That’s ‘cause you had real goals. I thought I’d be a moved her head slowly onto a pillow, tucking the blanprincess, but nobody’s a damn princess anymore. Smart, kets around her. Baby made a little cove where Suki’s body with a job, married, stuff like that, you had it right.” would rest, bobbing in her sea of loosely formed dreams “I’m not married yet,” Suki said. and fantasies. Then Baby headed back to her room, the “About to be,” Baby said, and Suki paused, said, place where she had grown up all her life. She thought “Yeah.” of them at Castle Rock, that last day so many years ago.

“You predicted right,” Baby said.

And what it had been was them, sitting there together, the They sank further into the couch, the loose stuffing sunlight in Suki’s hair, lighting up the browner streaks to swallowing them whole, two small girls, wrapped in their a fire red. blankets.

“It’s so hot in the summer,” Baby had “I’m scared,” Suki said. said. “You think it’s nicer where you’re “I’d be fucking terrified.” gonna be?” “...I thought I’d “Well maybe I’m more than “Sure,” said Suki. “In Califorbe a princess, but scared.” nia, there’s water.”

“It’ll be fun with Don,” Baby But Suki’s expression had nobody’s a damn princess said. “A long ride. But fun. Make been strange, the word nicer anymore. Smart, with a job, it fun. What color’s your dress?” too bland for even her, the un“Now?” exciting Suki. Baby had wanted married, stuff like that, you “You’re stupid. I meant for the to put her arm around her, tell had it right.” wedding.” her how the sun here burned like “I never thought about it,” Suki hell, but you’d be better off staysaid. She had assumed it would be white, ing with me. But as they sat on the and so she said, shrugging, “I guess white.” jutty outty cone of Castle Rock, the des“I expected better,” Baby said. “Considering ert stretched out so vast and empty, what we dressed up as.” a sandbox too big to hold them.

They laughed over themselves “All this sand,” Baby said. as kids and Suki felt a small twitch, “We’re going to lose each other.” like she was about to lose someAnd if they were going to anyway thing completely. Then, Don. maybe Suki would be better off Baby telling her not to be scared, leaving. Here, there wasn’t anyher small hand over hers, warmthing else, just minimum wage ing Suki’s knuckles. and long dry days, nothing for “If you love him,” she said, Suki, who could have so much “That’s all that matters.” And more. Leaving for cawwwwon her face was that small and llege, as Baby liked to say, was childish expression, a relaxation painful for everyone. But pain and a deep and profound knowlhad to end sometime, so Baby said, “You gotta let go edge that what she said was true. And Suki someday, girl.” She said to no one in particular, “You gotta knew that she could. She could love Don let go someday,” and Suki, not looking at her, but looking for the rest of her life if she wanted to. down at her own hands instead, had softly cried.

By midnight Suki was sleeping, her head lolling on Baby’s shoulder, and These are the things that Suki remembers and will for in her dream she was looking at her wedding a while: Baby’s last grip on her hand, Suki drowsy at six in dress, picking from rows of silk dresses, the differ- the morning, Baby already dressed for her work shift in ent styles, off-shoulder, halter, long-sleeved, with the a red polo and jeans. Baby had jumped under the covers cuffs pointed and slender at the wrist. She wanted navy, just the two of them, kissed Suki straight on the mouth, then she wanted red, and then she wanted green, a bright simply. stunning color like grass in nursery pictures, bright like a “Lock the front door when you head out,” Baby said, dream. She picked up a yellow, felt the fabric between her and left, a Baby goodbye. fingers, the silk transitioning briefly into lace. Suki in her

The plane ride was a bad one, bumpy and turbudream was very much like Suki in real life. Here, dream lent, which was strange because nothing linked Arizona Suki wanted a red one that lit up the hazels in her eyes, but and California but dry, cloudless air. Suki pressed her knew that she would end up with white, probably end up forehead to the cold of the airplane window, conscious of

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how many people had done that before her. The ground “Don?” she said. below looked frighteningly close, the tan arcs of mounIt took her a few minutes to realize that he was still tains chewed into by past rains, see-sawing into one an- at work, that this, for Don, was just any other day, Suki other. Sometimes there would be flatter farmland, cut coming home, Suki telling him, eventually, her answer. into darker green squares, though that was rare flying out She pulled her luggage through the corridor, the wheels into drier land. catching on the carpet and dragging up the corners. Her And Suki thought about what would be waiting for heart was still thudding as she struggled with the bag, her. Don would be waiting for her. Maybe he would have pulling it up and over the fabric, trundling it into the an expectant look in his eyes, leaning across their room’s room. There, the walls, red paint splashed from corner threshold to where the corridor arched, where Suki would to corner, shadowed the bed upon which they had lain be standing, her small suitcase in hand. together, bodies intertwined. There was the large closet in Maybe she would burst into the house into Don’s the corner, its dark oak casting a fat shadow on the floor. presence, his steady presence, the one that would rush Right across stood the mantle with the fake fireplace, the home to hear her answer. Her voice would be understat- tiles cool to the touch, juxtaposed in black and white, ed, but filled with happiness, the way she knew they did above which the mirror hung. Her face looked back at it in movies. her, narrow and pale.

“I do.”

As if moving through water Suki went Or maybe he would ask her a question to the window, the big bay window that first. overlooked the street where the cars Marry Don, “Will you marry me?” swung onto Oak Street. Noise filtered she said, wanting to Or maybe he would trail off, bethrough the double-glaze, wheezing cause the two of them would share a the open crack that Don scream it aloud to herself, through mind. had left, a window cracked open. but standing there, the flat Suki turned around, for some rea“Will you…?”

And to that she would say, “Yes.” son breathing hard. There was too in which she had lived for much Or more excitedly, “Yes!” Or perhaps light, too much, darting off so many years, she she would say nothing at all, but jump the pale parquet and biting into the into his arms and kiss him all over his walls, into her skin. She could barely could not. face, her mouth scratched by his furry stubstand, but meandered over to the closble of a beard. et, hands shaking, reaching in. She pulled The air now was chugging, the plane drawing closer. out her favorite dress, then held it up to the light, a Clicks resounded as stewardesses pushed the window pale curtain shrouding her in a temporary shade. Suki shades up, and everything was illuminated. The faces by chucked that dress on her bed, then her second favorite. her washed out in white, their eyes squinting nearly shut, She pulled out a shirt, a folded skirt, another shirt, then trying to capture a bird’s eye view. Down below the city a whole stack of them, manically, throwing everything bawled its sounds, pulling them slowly down. onto the bed one by one by one until clothes stacked up in At the airport, the cars veered into the pick-up lane, haphazard piles. Suki’s heart was throbbing in her chest, a full of smiling faces, and baggage thumped into trunks pained nerve, moving erratically as she moved, hands like as irregular as heartbeats. Someone by Suki finished his clockwork, her things spilling onto the floor. cigarette, grinding it into the ground with the heel of his Don was not home. He was not home, and Suki was. shoe, his jeans leg cuffed with a hole worn through. Suki In the big empty room, the high ceilings, the cold air felt her heart leap into her chest as she tried to catch a cab. whistling through the cracks, Suki closed her eyes. She She was sure now. leaned back against the oak, facing the window where The cab started and stopped in the city, swerving at the entire beauty of San Francisco tilted into her vision. amber lights and curving around hurrying pedestrians. The oak was cool against her scalp, the polish against her Cars honked and inched up inclines, crawling themselves skin. Marry Don, she said, wanting to scream it aloud to onto ridges, sighting views of the city down below. Suki’s herself, but standing there, in the apartment in which she cab was wedged in between. Finally, they pulled down the had lived for so many years, she could not. She could not, hill, right to the end, where an incline paused, licking flat because here, the wind, Suki thought, the howling wind, onto the Panhandle. Safe now, safe. Suki fumbled with her the sound it made, it wasn’t right. And sitting on the bed, purse, her hands shaking, pulling out a fifty and trying the sheets soft against her fingers, her body arched out, to calculate the tip. She was aching to burst through the squeezing down a sob, Suki said, “No.” She thought, Baby. doors, to announce her arrival.

But the door swung open to silence.

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FROM THE BLOGOSPHERE

Diamonds in the Rows of Exceedingly Dull Books

—ZANDER NOWELL Around 1940, a young (and drunk) poet named Charles Bukowski discovered a forgotten author in a Los Angeles public library when he randomly picked out John Fante’s book Ask the Dust from a room of “rows and rows of exceeding dull books.” Fante was from Denver, but moved to Los Angeles to write screenplays for the film industry, where he was one of the first authors to describe the life of a writer in L.A. Robert Towne called Ask the Dust the greatest novel ever written about Los Angeles. Later on in Bukowski’s career, he requested the reprinting and republishing of Fante’s works, so that Fante could be brought to the world’s attention. This goal has only fairly recently come to fruition, with Los Angeles dedicating a John Fante Square in the city only a year ago.

Another much more famous case of the discovery of a forgotten author occurred in the early 1970s. By that time, the author Zora Neale Hurston had almost faded into complete obscurity. Not even the vast majority of people in Eatonville, Hurston’s hometown, had heard of her or read her books. Now, Hurston has a strong hold in the literary canon, mostly thanks to Robert Hemenway, who published her biography, and Alice Walker, whose 1975 article in Ms. magazine reintroduced Hurston to the public and literary

consciousness.

These discoveries beg the question of what other great and possibly influential writers may be hidden by time or obscurity, and are only waiting to be found by someone willing to perform the search. I’m sure similar examples can be found in art, film, history, philosophy, and all the other humanities disciplines.

Sometimes humanities students forget that the disciplines’ canons are not set in stone– quite the opposite, in fact. They are constantly adapting and changing, and every student has the opportunity to participate in that change. Humanities students often face the stigma, and many times buy into it, that they study a dictated past – a fixed set of works or information that has been judged worthy by authorities before their time. But these writers, and the writers that revived them, show us that the world of the humanities is more than just dynamic, but rather still has room for wonder, for passion, for new discoveries, and for the imagination. All we need is the open-minded individuals who are willing to go on an adventure.

This piece was originally published on our blog. See more great online content and full issues at http://www.lelandquarterly.com.

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FROM THE BLOGOSPHERE

Introduction to Pathology

or, Obituary for Mr. X, 52 Years Old — KENDRA PETERSON

Our teacher leads us up to the autopsy room on the first day of class and leaves us there with instructions to “poke around” and “try to identify things.” The organs are spread out for examination on top of a surgical steel table and reek of formaldehyde. The liver and lungs are cut into clean slices. A thin layer of light brown liquid leaks from the organs to a drain in the center of the table. The spleen continues to bleed.

I am struck immediately by the thought that it does not exactly resemble a deli platter, which is not to say that I had ever expected it would.

Chris Bentham is the first to touch. Flipping two halves back together with the back of his fingers, blue in latex, he points out the kidney by its resemblance, reassembled, to a kidney bean.

Some of us laugh. I point out that I’m an English Major and shrug as though this explains away my complete ignorance of basic anatomy.

We go around. The heart is easy to identify, even for me. After a few minutes we are sticking our fingers into the ventricles. I think, today I held a man’s heart in my hands.

I want to remember, or perhaps just to be the type of person who remembers, that this is a man’s heart – this pumped blood, this beat faster during horror movies, this – this, in my hands – has felt. I try the word alive in my mind, this was alive, but it’s work, keeping the word steady.

“The man was obese”, Karen Lee, a striking thin girl in pink converses, guesses, forming the heart out of blue gloves in the air above her chest.

I move to the brain. I think, today I picked a man’s brain from a bucket of fluid and held it in my hands, its casing hanging down between my fingers.

To my left, Jennifer Conley tells no one in particular to stroke the liver. The liver, too, is huge – as large, I think, as my whole head. “It’s soothing”,

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she says, running her fingers along the neat cuts.

No one disagrees. A few people giggle. Watching her stroking it, I can easily see her in an armchair with a cat on her lap.

I want my eyes to water. I want to be light headed and need to step away from the table. I would like to be one of those people who are too sensitive for this, to be abhorred by the casual conversation two of my classmates are having about mutual acquaintances on the polo team while idly stretching out the intestine – but I am not.

The smiling, the joking, even the pink of Karen’s shoes beneath the table, feels somehow necessary. Perhaps not right, but I cannot, thinking about it, imagine the scene any other way. Chris Bentham readjusts his goggles with his bicep, raising his arm in the air like a child miming an elephant’s trunk. I go to stand next to him and he points my attention to the clean slits down the testicles, cringing sympathetically.

When our teacher returns he asks us to identify the organs for him. We are largely successful, but I am not the one volunteering the information. He tells us to stick our fingers through the liver to see if we can. If we can’t – “well,” he says, “that’s a problem.” I think, today I stuck my right index finger through a man’s liver. I try to come up with a comparison that is not just naming another raw meat.

When we’re done we remove our gloves carefully, flipping the one into the other, and throw them in a nearby bin along with our aprons. Class gets out at half past five, which is the same time dinner opens in the dormitory dining halls. I am hungry. ________________________________________ This piece was originally published on our blog.

See more great online content and full issues at http://www.lelandquarterly.com.

“Color Anatomy,” Emma Webster Leland Quarterly Spring 2011

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“I was sitting on my mother’s bed trying to get a good look at myself. It was a large bed and it stood in the middle of a large, completely dark room. The room was completely dark because all the windows had been boarded up and all the crevices stuffed with black cloth. My mother lit some candles and the room burst into a pink-like, yellowlike glow. Looming over us, much larger than ourselves, were our shadows. We sat mesmerized because our shadows had made a place between themselves, as if they were making room for someone else. Nothing filled up the space between them, and the shadow of my mother sighed. The shadow of my mother danced around the room to a tune that my own shadow sang and then they stopped. All along, our shadows had grown thick and thin, long and short, had fallen at every angle, as if they were controlled by the light of day. Suddenly my mother got up and blew out the candles and our shadows vanished. I continued to sit on the bed, trying to get a good look at myself.”

She will skip the stones across this still water where I once tried to drown the jealous burning in my belly and throw away my underwear that still smelled like God even after the red had dried almost black. She will skip stones across my unknown and then dip my head into the ripples that scare me. Then she will hold me there, combing my hair with fingers like love until my panicked gasps turn to laughter, clear laughter at the sky, because I will learn that I am not the only girl whose mother left her liverbroken.

(You have read these stories before. So have I. For the same reasons we’ll read them again.) We measured how far away we were from the eyeglasses we forgot on our jeweled aunt’s dressing table by sniffing out dew drops of pastness and dustiness of new, because we’ve all had new before. Retracing where our toes stubbed on our way out the door, stumbling because our glasses were still on our aunt’s jeweled dressing table and the blur without them threw some clarity on my mother’s absence. Her absence splintered my stubbed toe and when my blurred eyes cried I fell into our jeweled aunt’s lap. And she cried dew drops of pastness with me until we had a pool big enough to sail away on, the two of us.

To Where Shadows “Taking her head into her large palms, she flattened it so that her eyes, which were by now ablaze, sat on top of her head and spun like two revolving balls. Then, making two lines on the soles of each foot, she divided her feet into crossroads. Silently, she had instructed me to follow her example, and now I too traveled along on my white underbelly, my tongue darting and flickering in the hot air. ‘Look,’ said my mother.”

—from At the Bottom of the River

by Jamaica Kincaid

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We talk about the inside of ourselves as dark. Perhaps it is because our eyes, merchants of information who deal in shape, distance, and color, do not work there. The senses we use in the outside world leave us blind when we go inside. Platitudes frustrate us but we acquiesce. We call the inside of ourselves “darkness” and “silence,” and leave the mysteries to dig trenches between ourselves and our mothers. To illuminate our insides, we need to retrain our senses. Kincaid offers us a deal: if we agree to feel our way through her disorienting phantasmagoria of reptilian mothers, floorless houses, and blue-furred, androgynous, bee-eating desert creatures, then she can make our dark, silent

insides knowable, at least for a moment.

These disconnected, fragmented images are entirely her own, but our perception of them is entirely our own.

As we learn to make sense of them, we learn to make sense of the disconnected, fragmented memories and sensations so often relegated to the “impenetrable,” “dark,” and “silent” inside of ourselves. We find that if Kincaid’s foreign images, impossible creatures, and unsettling nonsequiturs can resonate with us, they must resonate with others.

With that common resonance, Kincaid makes a space where the private is shared, where knowing someone else’s mind is an utterly intimate experience. In this shared space, we can feel how we need our uniqueness to save us from the nihilism and banality of being just like other human beings—and we need being just like other human beings to save us from the loneliness and insanity of our uniqueness. Perhaps we do not have the courage to enter our most private selves unless we understand that in some ways we share what is in our most private selves with so many others. This is what we find at the end of Kincaid’s maze.

Before we can arrive at the end of the maze, we must let Kincaid lead us into a darkness devoid of plot and characterization. There is no sequence of events. The

see if it fits. We touch—dust, slime, the confusion of a mother’s slap, the forgotten fury at a beloved brother— before our eyes can warn us away. The odd corners we bump into remind us of parts of ourselves we thought we didn’t want to remember. Groping and stumbling, we find we fit more places than we would expect if sight, plot, and characterization had comfortably warned us away from this cool puddle of precocious independence or that cranny of rotten endearments.

Kincaid’s prose-poetry is uncomfortable. It defies the physical rules of tangible reality, the logical rules of cause-and-effect, and the psychological rules of emotional response. To keep reading, we have to trust that she will teach us if we let her. She teaches us how to read a story when sensory perception fails to prepare us for what comes next. A mother becomes a lizard and tells her daughter to look with her tongue. When we try to see with our fingers, familiar things feel different. We mistake them for the unfamiliar. If a sighted person goes blind, he must learn to measure distance with his finger span and practice time and again to identify objects by touch, literally strengthening a new part of his brain. When we agree to follow Kincaid through her pages, we agree to obey her when she tells us to look with our tongue. And she teaches us as she takes us in.

Dance Inside Us

— DEVNEY HAMILTON

“I” behind the stream of consciousness shifts constantly, never identifiable. The only structure Kincaid gives us is surreal images strung together on threads of sensation and free association: fears become cows which lead to the sky, and as she contemplates the atmosphere, a noise interrupts and becomes a box stamped “Handle Carefully” which reminds her of hospitals and having once passed a dead person. Yet at the end, we have a story complete with plot and characters: our own story, but composed of her images. Without plot or characters, at first, we must feel our way through her images because we cannot tell from one where the next will lead. We must touch everything before we know whether or not we’d like to, bump into every corner, and test ourselves against every image to

As if she were teaching us her own language, she repeats whole sentences verbatim. “What I have been doing lately: I was lying in bed and the doorbell rang. I ran downstairs. Quick. I opened the door. There was no one there,” and a page later, “What I have been doing lately: I was lying in bed on my back, my hands drawn up, my fingers interlaced lightly at the nape of my neck. Someone rang the doorbell. I went downstairs and opened the door but there was no one there,” and on the next page, “and I went back to lying in bed, just before the doorbell rang.”

She also repeats entire sequences of events with variations only in grammar. But the same words do not relate the same experience the second or third time around. These sequences work like repeated phrases in music. Her odd

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“Monster Dance,” Lauren YoungSmith, charcoal and sumi ink images work our minds like dissonant chords. The first time we hear a pattern of notes or a chord that does not fit into our framework of “normal” and “pretty,” we register only strangeness, and perhaps the ugliness we find in strangeness. Yet when the musical motif repeats, perhaps with slight variation, it gradually assimilates into “beautiful” music. Hearing a new musical shape over again creates a space for it to fit into our minds until it is beautiful, connects to other music we know, and builds an emotional response.

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Kincaid teaches us this language of imagery so that we may open ourselves up, as if to new wavelength relationships in music, to images that, after making us cringe or bruising us when we bump into them in the dark, resonate with our own plot material: the memories and emotions too complicated for us to write into the stories we would if we thought we could. The strange wavelengths of her giantess mothers, directionless boat trips, and shiny mud people begin to resonate with motifs already inside us. They also give us an inkling that other

people must have these ineffable memories and emotions the same bizarre images. Now if we can share Kincaid’s as well. images with other readers, perhaps these secrets that Dreams are the world of night illuminated. Kincaid’s bridge our lives with her images are not so ineffable - not transmorphing mothers, journeys that go in straight lines so unusual that we are alone in having them. Perhaps the but bring us back to where we came from, and anchorless nameless company of those others might help us share questions, all constantly shifting and cycling, closely those secrets in the world outside of fiction, the world resemble dreams. But dreams fade quickly as soon as we where we eat breakfast and take out the trash. wake. We have already started forgetting by the time we For Kincaid lights candles with her imagery in a place glimpse something our actual dream might have to tell where some self of ours, other than the one holding the us. So we may approach Kincaid’s images as a dream— book in our hand, may commune with other selves, like quite possibly all our own—on the page for us to read, the mother’s and daughter’s shadows. When her words study, and re-examine again and again until we learn on the page run out, we are left in the dark, still looking their plots. at ourselves. Now our gaze is turned inwards, where we Where is the plot in this maze of images? It is now know other shadows are dancing with us in the dark. underneath our memory, in moments of We would never have gotten there if Kincaid’s feeling we had to put away for our own images had not resonated with something sake or for others’. But of course it’s of our own and registerd in our minds If we agree to not the same plot as someone as beauty. feel our way through else will find. People walk In the end, Kincaid makes a around the same city block, pool where you can see yourself her disorienting phantasbut if you give them butcher reflected in all your uncried tears. magoria of reptilian mothers, paper and a permanent A pool deep and clear enough marker, their memories of floorless houses, and blue-furred, that the rendings between that city block at the same mothers and daughters might androgynous, bee-eating desert time from the same angle drip through your fingers and will be very different. These be beautiful for a moment when creatures, then she can make different people’s drawings— you share them with all the other our dark, silent insides mappings—of the city block mothers and daughters who have share ideas, even events. They read this story and have “watched knowable, at least for converse with each other. But they each other carefully, always making sure a moment. are unique in structure and emphasis to shower the other with words and deeds of depending on where that city block fits into love and affection.” She teaches us to see enough of each person’s idea of the world. what makes us call our insides dark to consent to its being In the fiction we read comfortably in the daylight, fully part of us and part of relationships, making what authors give us a plot lived out by defined characters. used to be dark beautiful.

They use images to help us find meaning in these other people’s plots. Kincaid gives us only the images to make The woman we call the river witch offers to take us what meanings we will. If we take time to assimilate to inside as long as we give her our eyes at the pine-framed her looping repetition and non-sequiturs and to let go of doorway. We give them to her to keep safely in the china our usual modes of sensory perception, those meanings cabinet next to the bookcase. How many hands can we hold will align into our own plots of growing up, of reluctant in our own, after we blow out our candles and grin stupidly returns home, of resenting expectations, of rejecting love, into the thickening black as she steps on the sparks with or of finding our independence. Trying to make sense of her sandy heels? We know it’s black because we breathe it Kincaid’s foreign images, we search for meaning in our cool and heavy in our throats. Whose hand is whose now own experience. The more foreign they are, the more is up to the stars and the way the pebbles fell in the dark. likely they fit into our secrets – especially the secrets that We dropped them as we stumbled in to remember our are so uncomfortable that we rarely share them with the ways home, but our pebble paths have only outlined an people populating our real world, or the secrets that are incestuous family tree upon the floor. The broken rules and so ineffable that we might not have known them ourselves confused mothers under our bandy heels are twisting our until we bumped into them in Kincaid’s labyrinth. Once ankles to remind us that they are our only map back to the we connect Kincaid’s foreign images with a plot that is door, where we gave her our eyes, and we will learn what entirely our own, we see our own secrets expressed in a they have to teach us only if we ask them for directions in book, a fictional space shared by an arbitrary collection this river woman’s tongue of the imagined past realities that of other readers, who must make their own plots from we buried because we were scared of them.

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knowing death —SAMANTHA TOH This is my grandma: she lies on the bed in a nightgown too big for her, arms poking out, curled as a shrimp. I’m looking at my grandma through my computer, my Dad holding up the screen to her on the other side of the world. Grandma looks at me.

She’s waving, Dad tells me, though I see that she still can’t move: she’s really just lying there and I can hear her noisy breathing. She’s happy, Dad tells me again but it’s hard to believe him. I want to know for myself. I want to touch my grandma. I want to tell her about the cow I saw today, but I’m thousands of miles away.

Annie and I were hiking the Dish today, I want to say. Annie and I were pausing on the path so narrow her pants brushed against my hand. Annie said, Look at the cows and there were two, close as we were, a little white one resting its head on a brown one, the grass this holy green around them. There was sun and the little white cow moved its head up and down, nuzzling into its brown companion. Annie took my hand into her small ones. Annie asked if she could kiss me. I said, I’m looking at the cows.

The white one, head bobbing up and down, loving, its eyes loving, it was so alive. Annie said, Don’t be silly. I said, I’m not joking. Let me look. I looked at the cows for a long time. Annie let go of my hand.

My grandma told me about cows once. She said, I had a little white cow.

Her family was rich, owning acres kind of rich, though our family is middle class now. I’m sorry, she said. I wish we were still rich. I wish we still had that little white cow.

She blinked and I could see her remembering. I loved that cow, she said, and it loved me back. She would sit by the cow, it would eat from her hand. She pet it. We were friends, she said.

Then they took the cow. They took the cow for meat. They took the cow for what it had be raised

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to do. They took the cow with its hair so soft you wanted to rub your face into its back and kiss it, nuzzle it, nose deep. Grandma watched them take it away, load it on a truck to the far slaughterhouse, her rich father’s hand on her shoulder as she shook like a leaf. But Grandma said, I looked at it and I thought it was crying. I was crying but it didn’t shed a tear.

She said, my little cow didn’t know death though it was coming.

I want to tell Grandma, I saw a white cow today and it didn’t know death. I saw it nuzzle and this time my cow is going to stay alive, out by the Dish where nobody is going to come get it. Here, I want to say, the sun comes down from between clouds and you can hear birds, the sound lighting up the rolling hills.

I want to say, I’m so close to paradise, my cow doesn’t know death.

I’m far away from my grandma. I watch my grandma on the camera, wanting to tell her about my cow. I look at her, half-closed eyes, small bones, meat sagging into old lady skin. Dad says it’s hard for her to hear now. Dad turns the camera away. Dad moves into another room. Dad looks at me. He says, Don’t cry, be a man, but I don’t care. I want to say, I should be crying. I want to say I should cry, because I know it, I know it’s coming.

“Three Women,” Turkey, 2009, Devney Hamilton

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Leaving

Lake Tahoe

foreign cars cruising, horsepower sprinting in exhaust, the bundt-pan valleys schism between gridded plants and tin-cast barnyards, the coming-passing of night so sentient it throbs when fallen leaves gather, and a palimpsest of the overdrawn sky (a herd of protostars in some galactic past, when chondrite meteors bull’s-eye on a puckered board), condenses warmth in roadside breakfast inns, stretching like lighthouse scannings from Pigeon Point, where skyward dervishes, like the peregrines in a National Museum of Natural History monochrome, roost in midair; out the window, weed thistles give penance to pine-winds, to the asphalt rapacity and heaving of the concourse, capillaries that pulsate between tobacco-spitting truckers, and the ginger-beards of America in baseball caps, as tentacle streets interweave in rituals of hopscotch, wiffle balls, and kneecap scabs, children now poking at fire hydrants with Philips screwdrivers, now asleep in the backseat of the Jeep Wrangler as Jimi Hendrix blacks out in near-nausea, now fathering men with carrots and ash twigs, now surveying the curbside sagebrush, as if the northbound road did not take them farther, (them in their youthful heaviness), as if they were never taken.

— ZIXIANG ZHANG

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CONTRIBUTORS

CAROLINE CHEN is a junior from Hong Kong PURUN CHEONG is a senior from Seoul, South Korea GARRETT DOBBS is a senior from Dallas, TX KATE ERICKSON is a junior from Carlisle, MA DEVNEY HAMILTON is a sophomore from Indianapolis, IN CHELSEY LITTLE is a senior from Austin, TX YANRAN LU is a senior from Houston, TX ZANDER NOWELL is a sophomore from Denver, CO KATIE WU is a sophomore from San Marino, CA KENDRA PETERSON is a senior from Santa Cruz, CA SAMANTHA TOH is a senior from Singapore NATHALIE TREPAGNIER is a senior from Limeport, PA NATALIE UY is a junior from San Antonio, TX EMMA WEBSTER is a senior from San Diego, CA LAUREN YOUNGSMITH is a sophomore from Denver, CO JIN YU is a senior from Jeonju, South Korea ZIXIANG ZHANG is a freshman from Ridgewood, NY

HOW CAN I SUBMIT TO LELAND? •

Leland publishes three times per year. We accept submissions on a rolling basis throughout the year.

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All submissions to Leland must be original, unpublished work. Please do not submit work that is also being considered by other publications.

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Leland accepts and encourages submissions in a wide range of disciplines, including fiction, poetry, art, creative nonfiction (e.g., memoir, campus culture, student life), reviews (books, movies, music) and political essays (fulllength investigative pieces).

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The editors of Leland are concerned first and foremost with the quality of expression exhibited in a work, and not in the genre of work itself. Our goal is to have quality content across a breadth of disciplines, so please do not be afraid to innovate in your submissions.

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There is no expectation in terms of length of essays, poems, or fiction. We request, however, that you send in no more than six poems at a time and a maximum of four longer pieces.

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In your e-mail, include: “Name, Genre” as the subject, Your full name as you want it published, Your class year, and Your hometown.

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