Leland Quarterly, Vol. 4 Issue 1, Fall 2009

Fall 2009 Jackie

Basu Brittany

Bennett Leigh

Lucas Sarah

Scharf Chris

Winterbauer

leland QUARTERLY 1

Leland Quarterly Fall 2009

leland

QUARTERLY VOLUME 4, ISSUE 1

Copyright 2009 by Leland Quarterly, Stanford University All Rights Reserved.

Giant Horse Printing, San Francisco

Editorial Board, Fall 2009 Editors-in-Chief Miles Osgood, Lindsay Sellers Senior Editors Jaslyn Law, Max McClure, Graham Todd Art Editor Johaina Chrisostomo Financial Editor Nathalie Trepagnier Design and Layout Editor Jin Yu Associate Design and Layout Editors Justin Calles, Juna Lee Web Manager Jin Yu 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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Ars Poetica, or What I’m Doing Here Say your madras shorts are dirty and I hate those shorts I could write Love is why I refuse to do the laundry

or If you love me, you should wear chinos.

It’s painting to avoid a conversation.

Like when you tell me the milk is sour, and then put it back In the fridge, I might write an ode to grocery stores Fluorescent promises of ten steaks for the price of one.

And in another book another wife has written About her husband who refuses to take off His madras shorts and replace the milk.

But she never uses the words husband, or shorts, or milk.

Hers is a page about anteaters, yet it’s clear She and I suffer the same.

You really should go to the store.

– lindsay sellers and the editors of Leland

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c o n te n t s

3 editorial statement

DRAWING

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Fiction San Expedito Max McClure

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Artist Profile: Chris Winterbauer

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Temporary in Skin Suit Graham Todd

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Wine Bottles Sabrina Bedford

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Sanctify Brittany Bennett

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Figure 58 Jin Yu

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Dry Creek Valley Sarah Scharf

Catharsis Nikiya Crisostomo

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PAINTING Animated Papers Johaina Crisostomo

Cover

Summer and Salt Aryana Khan

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PHOTOGRAPHY

Poetry

Le Cinquième Miles Osgood

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An American Nature Poem Leigh Lucas

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Afternoon Stroll Andrew McIntyre

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Loopy Austen Rosenfeld

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Jack Henry Andrew McIntyre

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By Zelda Leigh Lucas

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Eiffel Natalie Uy

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For Me Nic Reiner

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Sacre Coeur Natalie Uy

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Artist Profile: Jackie Basu

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San Expedito Max McClure

The town had grown too large, and so I decided to let some people go.

I spoke first to Mac Trueba, the founder of the town’s abstract realist photography collective. He was living with three friends and his wife in an apartment in the Colonia.

“San Expedito’s just grown too large, Mac,” I said. “We had the write-up in Coastal Homeowner’s, and then in Pacific Living, and it’s just gotten so popular that we’re too big for the zoning board.” I gave him two thousand dollars, a train ticket to Angangueo, and forty-eight hours to pack up. He was probably going to have to leave some of his bigger photos – the ones where he took pictures of bookshelves and stacks of things and then covered up bits with black cloth to just leave bands of color.

“You don’t like my photography?” he asked, and I explained that it was great, not really my thing, but great. “Is it because I married Clara?” was the next question, predictably, and although Clara was very beautiful (she had a small scar on her right cheek where her brother had shot her with a BB gun as a child that gave her a single, asymmetric dimple) and I had dated her in high school, that was not the reason, and I told him so. He said, “OK, Earl,” and was gone the next day.

That was good, I thought. That was very easy, and I checked back to see if Clara was there, but unfortunately and, in retrospect, predictably, it turned out she’d left with Mac. So I expelled his three friends as well and let the Valenzuelas next door expand into the vacant apartment. They had seven in an apartment that size, plus two seniors.

Then I spoke to Woods, out on Libertad and Hurley, and told him the same basic thing – Coastal Homeowner’s, Pacific Living, overpopulation, two thousand dollars, the whole deal – and he said, “Why do the yuppies get priority, Earl? I’ve been living here as long as anyone else.” Woods ran a kind of nude writers’ commune down there on the Crest, and it had gotten pretty popular in recent years, especially with the women.

“The yuppies aren’t the problem, Woods,” I said. “Hell, I hate the yuppies as much as the next man, but they aren’t exactly flocking to the city center, or San Expedito proper, even. The yuppies drop themselves out in the suburbs, and looks like Ralstonville and Boscovia’ll be absorbing most of them. The real issue these days is the city center, and what I 6

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would call an infrastructural problem.” Woods agreed that there was an infrastructural problem, but wanted to know what to do about the rest of the commune. I just kept staring at his eyes when he said this, because the rest of him was notably tan and I was having trouble taking that for too long at once. “Call them all together,” I said to Woods. “Offer them all the deal. Obviously the more we can take out the better.”

“Obviously,” he said. Forty-eight hours later, the commune was gone, and I was feeling so accomplished that I took a day off and watched a couple of ballgames I’d taped.

In the four days after that, I expelled two thousand three hundred and fifty-four more, mainly from artists’ collectives where people were living five, six, seven to a room, and this, plus the eighty-seven in the colony and the four folks in the apartment and a reported death (old age), left San Expedito with a population of nine thousand eight hundred and ten.

Nine thousand eight hundred and ten was just fine, and I called Vern at Coastal Homeowner’s to apologize about the message I’d left him when his article first came out, something about not looking forward to the attention this would bring us, we already knew we were a “nice little town with a creative spirit,” so we weren’t getting anything out of the write-up, something like that. I’ve known Vern since high school, and he’s always done right by me, but I think I lost my temper when I saw that article, thinking about the city center. Now that it was alright, I wanted him to know.

“Earl,” he said when I called. “I’ve already got a man on it.”

“Got a man on what?” I asked, and told him about the two thousand four hundred and forty or so folks I’d sent to Angangueo, saying I was sorry about that message.

“Well, it’s alright, but that’s just the thing, Earl,” he said.

“They aren’t in Angangueo. As I understand it, they’re somewhere in Ralstonville, forming a kind of posse. We’ve got a writer on it now.” I told Vern I’d call him back, and walked over to Ted’s. Ted Saxton was chief of police, had been for years, and he told me more or less the same thing.

“They spent the two thousand on rifles and leaflets,” he said, and smoothed a poster advertising the school district’s Ceramicist of the Year award. “None of them went to Angangueo.”

“Is there any way we can call them?” I asked.

“I don’t see why not,” he said, and turned to the phone.

“Le Cinquième” Miles Osgohod

He typed in two digits, then turned back. “Don’t you have Woods’ number?”

“I suppose I do,” I said, and called Woods.

“Woods,” he said.

“Woods,” I said. “How’s Angangueo.”

“Well, it’s fine, Earl,” he said. “How’s San Expedito?”

“Woods,” I said.

“Earl,” he said.

“Why did you all stay in Ralstonville and buy rifles?”

“Angangueo doesn’t want us,” Woods said. “So we’d like the nudist colony back, and so on.”

“What are the leaflets for, Woods?”

“Some of the boys put together some real nice protest poetry,” Woods said. “And a couple other folks threw some woodcut caricatures on there, too. The abstract realists have a photo series planned out.”

“And you got those rifles.”

“And we got those rifles.”

“Can I talk to Clara, please?” I asked.

“Who’s Clara?”

“Clara Trueba.” There was some shuffling on the other end of the line.

“Earl?” Clara said.

“How come you broke up with me?” I said.

“That was thirty years ago, Earl,” she said.

“Oh, OK,” I said, and I turned to Ted and told him we’d just have to let them back in. There was no way we could defend against two thousand hundred forty or so rifles and God knows how many leaflets.

I don’t expect them to make a statue of me when it’s over.

We’ll have to apply for extra funds from the state if we don’t want to end up condemning some buildings, especially in the Colonia. Even if we aren’t going to get the yuppies’ tax dollars, they’ll want to visit, sure enough. So that’s a couple of difficult truths that don’t lead to popularity right there, plus I’m an ugly man on top of that. There always has been a bias against making statues of ugly men, and I can’t say I blame them. I have a weak chin and a paunch. Some biases make sense, is all. Maybe it isn’t the kind of town you’d want a statue of yourself in, anyway.

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Chris Winterbauer Major: English Year: Junior Series based on songs off of Radiohead’s most recent album, In Rainbows.

Graphite on paper.

“This is Just a Nightmare”

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“Your Eyes”

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“Nothing’s Gonna Happen Without Warning”

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An American Nature Poem Come on, it’s just your opinion the TV disagrees with—do you know how human beings disappear? I hear silence in the pause of a trash truck backing up, when the hairdryer’s blown a fuse.

This program may contain some violent content.

Natural mango body butter— it’s new, I just picked it up from the store.

Lean in closer, you’re my brother so I want you to know statistics show that there’s not much hope—what is that buzzing?

The microwave radiating— it would be nice to do something so well.

Yesterday, through the window I saw the most beautiful thing—balloons tied to the neighbor’s mailbox. The yellow of thick paint, a rare raw stalk of green, black like a sore before blue. The world’s termites outweigh the world’s humans ten to one.

Can you picture it?

– Leigh Lucas

“You are My Center”

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N I Y R A R O MP

TE

m Graha

Todd

In a wonderful world where grass sprouts and divided cells sing the words of the Elevator Blues, which unofficially goes, “Give a little piece of the pie, we would all love to be refined,” Aaron Veedon was popped out and turkey bastered to breathing. His heart, the four-chambered rhythm machine already formed and months old, fluttered to a start without any maternal guidance. Every time his mother ate, sang, laughed, played records, got into a scented bath, or was touched gently on the back of her neck or along the skin that ran from her armpit to her hip her heart would flutter to start and Aaron Veedon’s heart would flutter to start and frankly Aaron Veedon had just about had it with all that bullshit.

He was out now and god of his heart, fellow traveler and disciple of it, too.

Aaron had a normal head (mushy and pointed) and had all the regular baby aesthetics going for him, at least for the first few minutes. Aaron was hosed off, but as the yellowing globs of

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T I U S N I K S A

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afterbirth slumped onto the sterile tile so did Aaron’s first few layers of mauve skin, sadly and with a plop. Aaron Veedon’s skin shined as onion paper does in its dull glossy way. From the brim of his felty top to his mouse’s toes there shown all the inner things that skin very often covers. Aaron Veedon was red, blue, and green and he never cried out. Instead he lay still, grabbing

He was out now and god of his heart, fellow traveler and disciple of it, too. at his toes, clutching, and rocking himself to a smile when he became restless. His heart, that four-chambered rhythm machine, pounded its thin seagrass tresses. The attending nurse didn’t quite scream, but rather sighed some breathy words and brought Aaron and his sheath into the Veedon’s room some minutes later alongside of a doctor.

“Have you been sleeping on your side, Mrs. Veedon?” the doctor asked,

fingering his nametag the way young doctors do.

“Is something wrong?” the druggedup, round-faced woman lulled, “I roll in my sleep sometimes, yes.”

“He’s got about 48 minutes left, I’d say.” The doctor tugged up his white coat’s sleeve and checked.

The Veedons began to move on, cutting orange slices and molding Mr. Veedon’s leftover parmesan chicken tin foil swan into a soccer ball. Aaron made friends quickly. He soared in protective footy pajamas in outstretched arms and greeted the lines of incubating infants, like all good people, without a movement of mouth or hand or arm, but rather with a noticeable movement of his insides. Nurses performed Shakespeare and Mrs. Veedon read Rilke. Albums were played, beginning with a Little Mermaid cassette and brimming over afterward and all together with David Bowie, Moonlight Sonata, and all the other smatterings of human culture the hospital occupants and staff could muster. Mrs. Veedon claimed that Aaron needed the fruit, not the pit.

Someone sat him down in front of a television and flipped through the channels in 2-3 second intervals twice

“Afternoon Stroll” Andrew McIntyre

over. He was given a world history lesson with all of the highly toted civilizations, modern and ancient, summed up into easily digestible sentences. He hit all the major world cities, which were set up in different rooms of the Intensive Care Unit on the second floor. Everything went smoothly until the few people setting up the Bratislava room got in a fight over the ethnic content. The smoke coming from the Asian rooms exasperated the Bratislavans even more and a rumble ensued. To fill the lost time Aaron was sent to and visited an NA meeting, a philosophical discussion concerning Plato’s Symposium, and a church.

Aaron had learned a lot during the time spent on his education, but he couldn’t help but to feel as if things were missing. He sat stagnant and watched the ceiling as the hospital crowd quibbled outside his window. They played happy music for Aaron and he cried. They blew trumpet noises through pieces of grass and Aaron turned his silent face towards them and thought: How he’d lost his poem. How he couldn’t bring himself to look Jacky, his love interest whom he’d met and traveled through half of the ICU’s Europe with, in the eye. How he possibly had been before and always would be condemned to a certain infantile nothingness.

Aaron drank coffee and smoked cigarettes and, in a few words, had an

artistic breakdown.

Mr. Veedon squeezed his temples with the tips of his fingers. He took Aaron up into his hands and became a maypole, the final minutes flitting away and they spun about the room’s tan equipment. And through red-lit veiny eyes the Veedons, father and son,

realized the slats of the window. The gentle, constant pressing of light. A light that did not stop for the doctors, the Veedons, or Jacky. Purple faced and hardly breathing the Veedons ran through automatic sliding doors and the halls of the hospital towards the sun.

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Sanctify Brittany Bennett

We didn’t believe when we first heard, because you know how church folks can gossip. Like the time the elders were convinced Sister Janice’s daughter had been turned into a lesbian when she began playing rugby in college. For weeks, we heard the grown folks whisper about how no girl should be playing football—it just wasn’t right—and it must have been that roommate who had come onto her in the middle of the night and turned her gay, until she showed up to Easter service holding hands with a shy boy and that was that.

We thought it was one of those things, but it’s not. It is, in fact, all true, and it did, in fact, happen six months ago, when Nadia Turner, who was knocked up by the pastor’s son, went to take care of it.

Nadia Turner was beautiful but she was a bitch, the kind of female who thinks she can talk to people any which way because she’s got looks. The type who’d always flash you this fake smile and you could tell she thought you hated her.

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All pretty girls think other girls hate them. Like they float through life with boy admirers flocking to their side, so the other girls hate them for it. We might not have those crazy, see-through hazel eyes or that light-bright skin with the long hair, but we’re pretty too. And we have way more to worry about than hating some pretty girl.

Still, it’s hard not to feel sorry for her that day when you picture her sitting on the metal table, shivering under her paper gown. This was in the nice clinic downtown, not in some back alley apartment where they grin at you with crooked yellow teeth before rolling up their sleeves. Here, the walls were painted lavender with just a framed painting of a desert island featuring a lonely koala bear clinging to a palm tree. Koalas probably don’t even live in palm trees. They live in forests. But maybe that wouldn’t be scenic enough, all that leafy green against purple walls. The furry koala against the palm fronds and the ocean—you were probably supposed to

“Summer and Salt” Aryana Khan Oil on canvas

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stare into the teal foam and imagine that you were lying out “Minimal discomfort,” Beth said. “Bleeding, but not much on a tropical island. Close your eyes and pretend you were more than a regular menstrual cycle.” pressed against grains of white sand, not against a metal table The doctor nodded, as if she was trying to encourage her in a sunless room. to ask more questions, but Nadia was silent. She watched the The doctor was a fortyish blonde with electric blue eyes nurse pile more tools on her tray, gadgets that looked like the who moved her head in little jerky motions when she talked. pickers and scrubbers at the dentist’s. It was kind of like that, She nodded earnestly to everything you said and smiled a dental appointment. Beth was a dentist drilling for a cavity, when she spoke, even if there was nothing happy about her and Nadia only had to close her eyes, open herself wide, and words. She probably did this to make her job more sufferable let her dig it out. and to put her patients at ease, but it was more unnerving Beth prattled on about the beautiful sunshine outside that than anything. No one is used to people smiling at them they’d be able to see if it wasn’t for the Bank of America next when they talk about cramping and bleeding. to them, and the nurse slipped the plastic mask over her nose.

When Nadia met with her three days ago, she’d “Just breathe in and out,” she nodded solemnly, touching her hand at told her. moments, other times patting her The daughter is not in church knee. The doctor told her that because she is being felt up in a bathroom if someone is meant to have children, they will, and if stall by the new boy, who is quietly they become pregnant too unrolling the nylons her mother insisted early and decide to end it, the she wore because ladies didn’t show their baby’s spirit goes back into the mother’s heart and waits until she bare legs in church. is ready.

Now, she should’ve Funny what things people tell you when known that messing with they know you’re not well.

Luke Shepherd was a bad idea. You “How are we feeling?” she asked brightly as she strode know what they say about the pastor’s kids. In Sunday school, through the door, her clipboard pressed against her white lab they’re running around the sanctuary, spilling fruit punch coat. on the pews. In middle-school, the pastor’s son is chasing “Fine,” Nadia said. after girls, flipping up their dresses, while his sister smears “Go-od,” she said, sitting down on the rolling chair as she on lipstick and glittery eye shadow that makes her look like flipped through Nadia’s charts. “And you took the antibiotics a harlot, Sister Esther says, as she drags her by the crook of I gave you? Good girl. Everything seems to be in order. Let’s her arm to the sink. In high school, the son is hunched in just take one last look before we get this show on the road.” the back pew, texting his latest girl, and the daughter is not Nadia lay back on the table, spreading her legs to let this in church because she is being felt up in a bathroom stall by strange, smiling woman peer inside her as she chatted about the new boy, who is quietly unrolling the nylons her mother the traffic on her way to work today—everyone must’ve been insisted she wore because ladies didn’t show their bare legs on their way to the beach, because it was just such a lovely in church. day outside. When she finished, Beth pulled from between They say the pastor’s kids are always the worst ones and her legs and told her that her cervix had dilated—they were it’s especially true when it comes to Luke Shepherd, that ready to begin. masterpiece of a man. Light-skinned with loose curls, brown “Now it’s perfectly normal to be nervous,” she said, as the eyes, full lips. Yep, we could’ve told her to stay away from curly-haired nurse began arranging a tray of gadgets. him.

“Is it going to hurt?” Nadia asked.

Like she would’ve listened anyway.

Beth smiled. God, her eyes were blue.

“It’s a relatively painless procedure,” Nobody knew when or how it’d all started because they she said. “And you’re going to be refused to publicly acknowledge it. But we could tell there asleep. When you wake up, it’ll be was something there. We could, anyway. It was all in the little over.” ways they looked at each other and touched. Like when Luke “But after. It’ll hurt.” would stroll into our young adult meetings, always long after

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they’d started. He’d drum a rhythm on Nadia’s head as he passed her chair and she’d throw him an irritated look over her shoulder, secretly smiling into her hand once she turned back around.

They were probably in love, but nobody knew because they wanted to keep it a secret. Or Luke did, anyway. He said it was because of his dad. When your dad was a famous pastor, your life was different. This was where Nadia would roll her eyes and say she wasn’t asking him to take her on a park bench, she just wanted to go out to dinner sometime.

“Because someone will see us,” Luke always said.

“And…?”

“And tell my parents.”

Here she’d fold her arms across her chest. “Why don’t you want your parents to know about me?”

He’d shake his head again. “You don’t know how they are.”

They’d been through this a few times before. Eventually she told him she understood, but she never did. His brother Kaleb didn’t have to hide. He and Aubrey could take pictures together and hold hands and attend events where they were complimented on their collective cuteness and cooed at when they nibbled off of each other’s plate.

We all had high hopes for Kaleb. At twenty, he was a saved, Spirit-filled child of God who could quote scripture and tell you what it meant, too. He’d been with Aubrey, Nadia’s roommate, for three whole years, and in that time, they had never had sex. And considering this, he had only cheated on her once, but it was just head, so it didn’t really count.

Still, Nadia tried to ignore the fawning over Kaleb and Aubrey. She pretended it didn’t bother her. And she saw Luke at least once a week, in the beginning. Sometimes she would cook for him. Macaroni and cheese with tortilla chips was his favorite. He would smile across the kitchen table, dipping his chips into his bowl of mac and cheese. She didn’t see how he could eat it, but he’d laugh with a mouth full of broken chips and say it was better than nachos.

Sometimes he’d undress her as soon as she answered the door. Sometimes he wanted to hurt her. She could tell from the hungry look in his eyes when he stared at her, or the way he flipped her over onto all fours, yanking her hair.

Sometimes he was gentle, kissing her before he even reached for her zipper, whispering things to her, sweet things. He told her she was beautiful and she knew she was, everyone did, but it was different when he said it. He didn’t call her beautiful like the dozens of boys who came before him, who thought it was the password. He always said it

afterward, when they cuddled in her bed or when she was hurriedly re-clasping her bra because Aubrey was on her way home, he’d stare at her and say, you’re beautiful, like he was awestruck and thinking out loud, saying words not meant for her to hear.

Sometimes he disgusted her. He wouldn’t answer her texts or calls, or he would respond with one-word sentences days later. Other times she wouldn’t see or hear from him for days and weeks. She should have expected this. All pretty girls think they can nail down their man, but they can’t, because there’ll always be some other pretty girl who’s willing to spread her legs for him, and that’s a fact. Still, Nadia told herself she didn’t care about his whereabouts, she wasn’t that wide open, and it wasn’t like they were married or something.

He could do what he wanted and so would she. But whenever he sent her a random note or appeared on her doorstep after his absences, she would forget he was ever gone.

Sometimes she disgusted herself.

The last time she’d seen him was on a Sunday, when he texted her at noon, said he had a dime, and he’d be by in a little. It was the first time she’d heard from him in over three weeks.

“You brought it?” she asked, when she answered the door.

He dangled the dimebag in front of her face, pinching the plastic as he passed the olive green blur in front of her eyes. Then he stepped inside, wrapping an arm around her waist and squeezing her to him.

“That’s the first thing you gotta say when you see me? Did I bring the weed?”

He was smiling down at her, a teasing smile, and she wrenched out of his grasp, pushing past him.

“No,” she said, shutting the door behind him, “it’s why the hell haven’t you called me in the past three weeks?”

He smiled sheepishly. “I like your first question better.”

“You’re not funny.”

Her arms folded across her chest, she stared him down, wanting him to look her in the eyes and tell her why he thought it was funny to hurt her. He ignored her glare, planting his hand on her shoulder and squeezing it. She swatted his hand away.

“Are you fucking somebody else?” she said.

“What? Where did that come from?”

“Let’s see,” she said, “you disappear for three weeks, don’t even pick up your damn phone—” “Are you fucking somebody else?”

“Yeah. All your friends. Happy?”

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He grinned. “You gonna let me watch?”

“Get out.”

“Yo, I’m jokin’, I’m jokin’! Calm down.”

“Get out. Go.” She grabbed his wrist, pulling him toward the door. She knew that once Luke planted his feet, she wouldn’t be able to pull him anywhere. Still, she yanked at his arm and he watched her struggle, his smile fading.

“Baby, no,” he said. “No, I’m not seein’ anyone else. It’s just you, okay? It’s been you, for the past three months. Okay?”

Then he pulled her close, burying his face in her neck as he planted kisses behind her ear. When he pulled away, he gave her waist a final squeeze.

“Now let’s light this shit up because you need to relax,” he said, fishing in his pockets for a lighter. “I thought you were gonna rip my head off right then. Is it that time of the month or somethin’?”

She didn’t realize it until later, after he’d slipped out her door and she was lounging in bed, still buzzed. She thought about what he’d said while he carefully licked the rolling paper, glancing over his shoulder as he told her, I know how you get. Last time you went crazy on my ass. It was only then that she stopped to think about how long ago last time had been.

Later, they lay together entangled in her sheets. Their bodies were sticky, damp, but they lay with their legs intertwined, Nadia tucked into the crook of his arm. She watched him as he snored, her arm wrapped around his chest, fingers spread on top of his ribs, when she heard the front door slam.

“Nadia, I’m back!”

It was three o’clock already. Of course Aubrey’d be back from church by then. Nadia wriggled out from under Luke’s arm and yanked opened a window, trying to let some air in

“Jack Henry” Andrew McIntyre 18

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to dilute the smell. Luke watched her, his head resting on You couldn’t really blame him for giving her the money. his arm, a smile forming across his face. He watched her Still, he could have given her the check to her face, no one struggle to hide the distinctive smell with the light breeze disagrees with that. blowing in through the window screen and he laughed.

Somebody should’ve known what was going on, Nadia put her hand over his mouth to shut him up, but but nobody did. Well, somebody did but not the right it only made him laugh harder. He laughed and kissed her somebody. Of course Luke knew, but he was the one who palm, making her giggle too. told her to do it in the first place. And everyone else who “Nadia?” Aubrey’s voice sounded louder. She was could’ve helped her…well, no one really knows when standing right in front of the door these types of things are happening.

“Yeah?” Nadia’s hand was still clamped on his mouth.

Aubrey would have stopped her but she was clueless.

“Um, is something burning?”

Too heavenly-minded to be any earthly good, like the Aubrey was hesitant, bless her heart. She wouldn’t even old folks always said. We thought that she would have acknowledge what her own nose smelled. known something, but she told us that “No,” Nadia said. “It’s just incense.” the morning that it happened—or Now he really started howling. She supposedly happened—Nadia In the end, covered his face with her pillow to seemed fine. When Aubrey everybody found out muffle his voice, feeling his chest asked her how she was heave under her arm. doing, she just shrugged, anyway. All it takes is one person “Oh okay,” Aubrey said. “Just looking up from her to overhear a snatch of conversation not be careful with that.” cereal as she smashed or to see something that doesn’t look Cheerios she didn’t Nadia heard her footsteps diminish as she walked across intend to eat flat against quite right and it’s over. You know the hallway and disappeared into the side of the bowl. how church folks can her room, closing the door behind Yes, Nadia was quiet but her. She removed the pillow from Luke’s she was like that sometimes. gossip. face and he smiled up at her, his breathing Now that she thought about it, it was slowing. She pressed her hand to his forehead, strange that when she told her that Kaleb pushing back curls. would be staying over that night, Nadia said nothing. The “We have to be quiet now,” she whispered. very first time they’d had that conversation, Nadia, who “I don’t care. I don’t care if she hears us.” was sitting at the kitchen table wearing blue-checkered “Yes you do.” boxers from an old boyfriend, her foot perched on the “I don’t. Not anymore.” chair next to her, stopped in mid-scoop, her spoon She kissed him to shut him up. It was better than clanging against the bowl as she leaned back in her chair, hearing his lies. a smirk spreading across her face.

“I see you, Aubrey,” she had said, nodding her approval.

You would think that it was the test that stunned her “Damn. It’s about time. I was about to say—” the most, but it wasn’t. That little plus sign that appeared “Whoa, whoa,” Aubrey said, waving her arms in front in the magic window couldn’t compare to the moment she of her like she was trying to swat down Nadia’s inference. received the check.

“We’re not—it’s not like that.”

She didn’t discover it in her mailbox or at the post office Nadia’s smile melted away, her eyes narrowing as her front counter. Instead, it was hand-delivered three days lips pressed together in a look of sheer skepticism. after she’d first told him the news, inside a white envelope “So you mean to tell me,” she said slowly, “that he’s with her name written across it. She found it wedged spending the night, but you’re not gonna fuck him?” under her door and as soon as she held the envelope up, Nadia wasn’t shy about her conquests. On mornings she saw the tan slip inside and she knew what it was. when she returned around nine or ten wearing the same The check really shouldn’t have come as a surprise to slinky dress from the night before, she’d flash a smug smile her. Maybe she didn’t think Luke was capable of such at Aubrey, daring her to ask about the recently unfolded heartlessness—not just because he gave her the money, events; and when Aubrey was too uncomfortable to but the way he delivered it and fled from her doorstep. bite, she’d tell her anyway, practically stretching out on

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the countertop and smoking the post-coital cigarette when Aubrey tried to eat her oatmeal.

“No,” Aubrey said. “We’re not.”

“Wait. So he’s gonna spend the night…and you’re just going to sleep.”

“Exactly.”

Nadia just shook her head. “How long ya’ll been together?”

“Two and a half years.”

“Three years, and you haven’t had sex once?”

Aubrey shook her head.

“No you have, or no you haven’t?” Nadia asked.

“Haven’t.”

“Damn. Is he gay?”

“No! He just respects me.”

Nadia shrugged, pouring more cereal into her bowl. Aubrey waited, expecting another one of her snappy comebacks, but she seemed to have moved on, more engrossed in her breakfast and the drama unfolding on MTV than in Aubrey’s intimate relationships. Then, once Aubrey placed her empty bowl in the sink and started toward the bathroom, she heard Nadia behind her say, “He’s gay.”

But that morning, Nadia barely reacted. She replied in monosyllable to Aubrey’s conversation starters and even her declaration about Kaleb received no response, no suggestive raising of the eyebrows or embarrassing innuendo.

Nadia was like this sometimes. Some mornings she didn’t want to be bothered, ignoring Aubrey’s attempts at conversation or avoiding her altogether. Some days she retreated so far into herself that it was just easier to let her be, rather than to drag her back into the land of the living. This was one of those days.

Aubrey had returned to her Biology textbook, ripping apart pieces of toast and dipping them into a glob of jelly spooned on her plate, when Nadia stood, dumping her bowl into the sink, waterlogged O’s splayed in the basin.

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“Do you think you could give me a ride somewhere?”

“What time?”

“An hour.”

“Can’t. I have class. You can take my car though.”

Nadia hesitated a second before she said, “Okay.”

Aubrey unhooked her car key from her key ring and slid it across the counter toward her. Nadia reached out for it, her hand slowly raking it off of the countertop.

Half an hour later, Nadia emerged from the bathroom wearing skinny jeans and pointy-toed heels, her hair pulled back into a high ponytail, large sunglasses obscuring her eyes. Slinging her large purse over her shoulder, she walked past Aubrey to the front door, pausing with her hand on the doorknob. Then she glanced back at her and said, “I’m going out.”

“Have fun,” Aubrey had called after her.

We asked Aubrey if Nadia seemed upset when she returned that night, but she said no, she just wasn’t feeling well. Female problems, you know how that goes. When she walked through the door, she did look a little unsteady on her feet, so Aubrey told her she should sit down. She kept saying she was fine, she was fine, she was fine. It was just cramps, she said, clenching her fists and breathing slowly, waiting for them to pass. It was painful just to watch, Aubrey said.

“Want some Midol?” she asked, putting an arm around her. “Or I could make you tea—” “No. I’m okay.” Nadia paused, her fingernails digging into her palms. “I’m just gonna go lie down.”

She rose to her feet, clutching her purse in her hands, but she didn’t turn to walk toward her room. She was staring at the couch, where there was a splotch of blood on her seat.

She cursed, and when she returned from the bathroom, she blinked back tears as she sprayed the cushion with stain remover and scrubbed.

Nadia discovered the thing about the check later. It was still sitting on her nightstand, preserved in its clean white envelope. She hadn’t spent his money. She hadn’t even opened the envelope. After staring at it for a minute, she finally reached for it, sliding her finger under the envelope and pulling out a tan slip of paper. Her name faced her in small, bold letters. She glanced at the date. Last Tuesday.

A day after she told him the news. The check was for a thousand dollars.

Her eyes fell to the bottom, to the part she dreaded, where Luke decided to sign off everything they had because she was a problem he needed to get rid of—but his signature was not on the line.

John Shepherd had endorsed the check.

In the end, everybody found out anyway. All it takes is one person to overhear a snatch of conversation or to see something that doesn’t look quite right and it’s over. You know how church folks can gossip. Mrs. Gaines, the pastor’s secretary, told us that one afternoon a hot-to-trot female marched up to the front desk, demanding to meet with the pastor. When Mrs. Gaines explained to her that the pastor was a very busy man, you can’t just walk into his office, you have to make an appointment first, the girl flashed a check in front of her and said that the pastor knew who the fuck she was, she wasn’t making a goddamn appointment, and

We were too stunned to say anything, but she didn’t wait for our response anyway. She stormed past us, car keys in hand, not looking back, refusing to look back.

For a moment, we had nothing to say. he better see her now. She looked so crazy Mrs. Gaines was half-afraid she’d reach into her purse and point a revolver at her forehead. Thank God the pastor was not in. The girl said she’d wait. She was young and beautiful, Mrs. Gaines said, who knew why she was so angry? She was a pretty thing but she had way too much attitude, Mrs. Gaines said, cursing like that and taking the Lord’s name in vain. Have mercy.

The only reason why we didn’t believe that she was the pastor’s young mistress, like Sister Robinson claimed, or even worse, his lovechild, like the head alto suggested, was because we saw her and Luke together.

We were leaving mid-week Bible Study when we stepped out into the parking lot and saw the two of them. They were sitting on a bench beside the church, and we probably wouldn’t have noticed them at all if we hadn’t heard her voice cutting through the evening’s stillness. Then we saw her, hovering over Luke, who sat hunched on the bench, his head in his hands.

“You lied,” she said, “you lied.”

He moved his hands from his face and looked up at her, starting to say something, when she punched him. Once, twice, three times, then she grabbed his shirt and shook him, yelling that he lied, he lied, he fucking lied. We watched, not knowing what to say. Luke was silent too. He sat there, taking

it all until she’d had enough, until she shoved him and turned to walk away. Then he reached for her hand and she yanked hers away as she started toward the rows of parked cars.

Luke sat slumped on the bench, his face back in his hands, shoulders shaking.

When she neared us, she narrowed her liquid amber eyes, her face twisted into a sneer.

“What the fuck are you bitches looking at?” she said.

We were too stunned to say anything, but she didn’t wait for our response anyway. She stormed past us, car keys in hand, not looking back, refusing to look back. For a moment, we had nothing to say. Of course we didn’t know then what we know now. So at the time, the only thing we could think was that Nadia Turner was still beautiful and that she wasn’t fair to all of us nice girls.

Later, Aubrey told us she still didn’t believe any of it.

Nadia and Luke didn’t even know each other and besides, if something was really going on between them, don’t you think that she, the roommate, would have known? Aubrey also doesn’t believe that Kaleb cheated on her once with that girl at the party, so her opinion doesn’t matter much.

For a while, we thought things might explode, but they didn’t. People whispered about it for a few days. Ladies talked about it in the bathroom as they reapplied lipstick and lotioned their hands in front of the mirrors. The old folks discussed it in between rounds at bingo. Then Sunday came, and the pastor delivered a sermon about the power of positive confessions that brought the congregation to our feet. We let the Spirit move us, joining choruses of amens! hallelujahs! let Him use you! and take your time, Pastor, take your time.

We harmonized with the choir, clapping our hands, swaying during the solos and dancing during the organ riffs. With the music coursing through us, we duked the Devil and stomped on serpents, our shoes crashing into the wooden floor in time with the drums.

By the end of the service, we were folding the church bulletins into fans, sweating with the rest of the saints.

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“Eiffel” Natalie Uy

By Zelda 22

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I. Tales of the Jazz Age

III. The Beautiful and Damned

Tonight the ambassador will have us for drinks.

Tomorrow, that lady we’ve never met, will say, “Oh you wouldn’t believe what dear Zelda said The funniest joke about an auto mechanic and the Prince of Wales...”

My collarbones pose like the jaw of a bluefish and that sweet way I touch your arm when you laugh even the most sensible man, the one there in the gray suit, will say, “You wouldn’t believe me but they absolutely glowed.”

The buzzing lily-cup - yellow and black in my hair, now in my eyes.

The twitch of poisoning, a voice inside that I don’t recognize.

The hair ribbons hung from the vanity are shocked to silence my dear it’s just me, it’s just me!

A shriek drowns him, then there are claws, then dark.

II. This Side of Paradise You wouldn’t dare to leave but you did, you do.

The clock will stay up with me, as my ballet slippers reconcile the melting ice cubes on the wooden floor.

You command the imaginary but my beauty races storms.

Watch this gold-hatted lover dance!

I use your drafts to put out my cigarette, searing the word splendor.

My dripping tumbler blurs the word money.

IV. Tender is the Night I heard the nurses in their tissued suits and peppery shoes turning the corners of this ward.

Like greedy hands to my breasts and deep breathing in my ear, the waxy dripping of the wires, the hissing steam.

I can make a warm bed from these embers.

I try to hold a thought of you, but after eight years the exact color of your eye eludes me.

– Leigh Lucas

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SCIENCE BY WAY OF STORY: An Interview with Mike Osborne Mike Osborne, a third-year PhD student in the Department of Environmental Earth Systems Science, teaches “Communicating Environmental Research Using Narratives and Stories” this quarter.

He talked to Leland about his love of literature, scientific research, and a quality zombie movie.

What motivated you to teach a course about narrative and the environment?

Zombies motivated me. The idea for a class started when I was having a beer with Miles Traer, a GES Masters student who’s been crucial to the development of this course. We talked about the apocalyptic rhetoric people use to describe global warming, and we immediately got onto a tangent about our favorite apocalyptic movies and books. Miles and I thought it would be fun to survey some apocalyptic stories as a way to envision the global warming worst case scenario.

Not all apocalypses are the same, though, and the best stories conclude with images of a world that you recognize in today’s world: empty skyscrapers, grass growing in the streets, rivers of blackness, bones scattered in the desert, drowned cities.

We recognize these elements in our everyday lives; these are environmental stories with the Earth as a main character.

The more Miles and I thought about it, the more the class became about science communication. In general, scientists have a reputation for being bad communicators. I’ve found that when any given conversation is running dry, I can always start a conversation about pop culture. So I thought, Why not apply the same idea to science communication? This is a humanities style class masquerading as a science class, using fiction to invite earth scientists to think creatively.

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In the course description, you write “the course takes an experimental approach to the challenge of science communication.” What are your hypotheses and some of your intended methods for this “experiment”?

That’s funny, I hadn’t thought of it that way when I was writing the course description. I guess I’m testing a premise I have that Earth scientists have unique imaginations, because they have to think about how the Earth acts on a spectrum of time and space scales. It takes a while to get your head around the idea of geologic time, so that when an earth scientist talks about something that happened 1.2 billion or 350 million or 20 thousand or 300 years ago the numbers actually mean something. Those kinds of numbers just sound big to most non-scientists. The same thing goes for space. Earth scientists deal with phenomena in nature on scales ranging from the molecular to planetary, and everything in between.

Getting comfortable with this spectrum of space and time is a humbling experience that challenges the imagination. So I guess my hypothesis is that this imaginative quality we’ve had to learn can be funneled into great storytelling when given the right opportunity and attention.

As for methods, I’d think the first thing to do is to get the creative juices flowing. I want to blend creative writing with science, and call it something other than science fiction.

More like science non-fiction, though that sounds kind of

corny. This class will probably be a ‘spaghetti at the wall’ kind of approach where we’ll try a bunch of things out and see what sticks.

What major environmental issues have been effectively popularized by story and narrative, and what elements of those stories do you think made them successful?

I’m mixed about An Inconvenient Truth. Al Gore did a great thing in bringing the issue to the forefront, but there are moments in the movie that feel like a prolonged political ad.

At the same time, I think that the global warming story is really tough to tell, because the problems are complex, the consequences are uncertain, and the impacts are so different from place to place.

language to be a good communicator. But if you’re passionate about what you study and you want people to understand it, eventually you will figure out a way to explain yourself.

Much of the discussion about communicating environmental issues revolves around instigating change— campaigning for policy responses to global climate change, raising awareness about unsustainable agricultural practices, reducing industrial waste, etc.

Is there such a thing as apolitical environmental writing and film?

Most people have some connection with nature that is very personal, and I think we all grapple with the significance of those connections regardless of political inclinations. It seems inevitable that when you paint a picture of an environment

Not all apocalypses are the same, though, and the best stories conclude with images of a world that you recognize in today’s world: empty skyscrapers, grass growing in the streets, rivers of blackness, bones scattered in the desert, drowned cities.

The problem with most environmental stories is that there is often a lack of human interaction, and therefore a lack of character. Let’s say you want to tell a story about destruction of coral reef ecosystems. The setting is fantastic, there’s tension and a sense of threat, but what you’re missing is a protagonist. The tendency is to anthropomorphize, but that risks coming off like a hippie tree-hugger. My point is that environmental value is not innate to an environment; it arises from human interaction with an environment.

there is an implication that you want to conserve and preserve that place. But I’d like to think that there are apolitical writings and films that only serve to explore our relationship to the environment without necessarily advocating a behavioral change.

What has been your experience in translating your own technical, scientific research for a non-scientific, popular audience? What are the particular challenges you face?

For me, there’s no point in pursuing knowledge for its own sake—it has to inform our lives and our decisions.

Over the past 20 years there’s been a movement to have more outspoken scientists, and I think this is a good thing.

Speaking out, however, can be dangerous because you risk the integrity and objectivity of your science. You have to remain unbiased if you want to be a good researcher. That said, it’s crucial for important information to be disseminated to the public, if for no other reason than to maintain trust in scientific expertise. It’s also important to get beyond some of the stereotypes people have about scientists, and this only comes through with more exposure.

Scientific jargon is probably the biggest problem. One thing that happens when you’re immersed in science is that you get used to the terminology of your field, and you forget that most people don’t use these words in their everyday conversations. People are usually hesitant to speak up and say they don’t know the meaning of something, so you have to rely on your ability to read your audience and anticipate what they will and will not know. You have to be conscious about

What civic responsibility do you think a researcher has (or doesn’t have) to communicate his/her findings to a nonscientific audience?

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“Sacré Coeur” hhNatalie Uy

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oopy L

When I went to Iceland my family said I wouldn’t know what to do with my luggage.

Their worries were like wishes.

Did you know 70 percent of Icelanders believe in Huldovolk? Now I believe the reason I go is to come back home.

There’s only one road in Iceland, a loop.

Loopy became a word we used to make time stop.

But in Iceland I climbed to the top of a glacier.

The air was so clean my face burned and peeled like a shape shifter.

(I thought I could learn to sleep here.)

The night I came home my brother laid awake sweating into his sheets.

I found him gripping the digital clock, as if to keep the numbers from shifting.

My family wouldn’t believe there are no loops in Los Angeles.

Even Mulholland Drive keeps going hilltop to hilltop until the pavement crumbles and divides.

– Austen Rosenfeld

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Jackie Basu Major: History Year: Junior Series based on a summer spent in India.

“A Rite of Passage”

“Sidewalk Stray”

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“Untitled”

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30

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“The Potato Vendor�

Artist name, Title of the Work, LelandMedium Quarterly Fall 2009 31

DRY CREEK Sarah Scharf

“Banyan Tree” Jackie Basu

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VALLEY My parents announced their divorce the same summer the vines contracted Phylloxera, a root louse, and began to shed their rich green leaves, revealing the sea of gnarled brown stumps below. For weeks, the groundskeeper had taken soil samples, leaves, bits of debris from all the vineyards and slowly, methodically produced a timeline of the spread. The disease, he concluded, had begun in a single source, a strain of Malbec grapes grown only in our vineyard, and had moved outward until the whole valley was contaminated. The divorce, too, began with a single source: my father having sex with a nineteenyear-old he met at the Pic N’ Save, and soon festered into his running away with the nineteen-year-old because he loved her and because she was pregnant with his child. I would learn the details of his relationship later when a letter arrived in the mail, sent from a PO Box in Boca Raton. But at the time, I could not tell that anything was amiss until one day I awoke to find two meticulously packed suitcases by the door and my mother chasing him down the narrow hallway screaming “Fuck you” over and over again.

It was not an entirely uncommon scene, as fighting was a constant feature of life in a house as small as ours. There were two tiny bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a common room, all laid out in a perfect rectangle with one hallway serving as the only means of getting from one end to the other. You could be at the entrance of the common room and look down the hallway all the way out the window in the furthest bedroom. And from that window, all you would see were vines extending into the distance in perfect parallel rows, giving the impression that there was nothing separate from this place, only an extension of the narrow cream hallway stretching into the distance.

My mother nicknamed the house “The Shoebox” when they purchased it fifteen years prior, a year before I was born. At the time, she told me, the name was given affectionately, a tender term capturing the coziness and perfect symmetry of the fading yellow home. But this was before the hallway was too narrow to accommodate my father’s great gut and she would have to lean against the wall to let him pass, his belly moving like a marble through a narrow tube. This was before the kitchen sink and the toilet began to leak on a regular basis and before the hinges on the front door became rusted and worn, making it difficult to get in and even harder to get out. Over time, she used the term with more and more aggravation. “This place is a fucking shoebox,” she would say to me as she retrieved the plunger to unclog the toilet for the fifth time that week.

She would emphasize the last syllable as if the word itself, box, referred not only to the house, but also to the town, to the valley, to life.

I had just woken up when I heard the commotion, and I came to my door to see this week’s offense. I was standing in my doorframe when I saw the two cream suitcases stacked by the door with care and my parents sprinting down the hallway, my father moving with an agility that finally validated his claims of high school track stardom. As he reached for his tan canvas bags, my mother lunged for his waist, falling instead into the depressed square of carpet where his bags had been a moment before. He was already out the door, running to the gold Buick that idled in our driveway with his young lover sitting in

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the passenger seat rubbing her belly and staring blankly out the window, not even turning to see what was going on. I ran to the living room window, jumping over my mother’s felled frame to see him. As he lumbered into the drivers seat, the girl with the blonde side ponytail and the dangly gold earrings recoiled slightly in what was, perhaps, reality setting in.

My mother righted herself behind me. She ran out the door, pulling her pink terry cloth robe tighter around her thin frame as she stepped onto the stoop. The car was already gone. It had disappeared onto the country road shrouded in oak trees and was making its way towards some unknown destination. She stood in front of the house, staring into the empty space. Her hair was wrapped taught in pink foam curlers, as it had been every morning since I was a little girl. I knew that they hurt her scalp because she would cringe each time she rolled an inch-wide section of hair. My father would always mock her, asking her what ball she was attending today. She would ignore him and continue on silently. I wondered if he could see how she flinched when she rolled each strand, and I wondered if he realized why she did it.

to see snow; she had come to see summer leaves turn to rich oranges and reds and float to the ground. It had been her understanding that these things happened on the coast, but she must have been thinking of the wrong one. She admitted to me once as she peeled an onion in the kitchen, giving her an excuse for tears, that she tried to paint the bridge as it was, cloaked in fog so thick that one could only see half of it at once, but she could not. She had meant to find the seasons and had made it to the wrong side of the country instead.

Then she met my father in a bar downtown and fell in love and stopped painting altogether because she had finally found her purpose for being there in that fog-cloaked city.

And besides, he told her, it was very confusing to paint a California bridge in the midst of a New England fall. And after a year of dating, she accepted his proposal and followed his dream of growing wine two hours north of the city to Dry Creek Valley, where I was born a year later.

That winter, my father gained twenty pounds and it snowed in San Francisco for the very first time.

She admitted to me once as she peeled an onion in the kitchen, giving her an excuse for tears, that she tried to paint the bridge as it was, cloaked in fog so thick that one could only see half of it at once, but she could not. She had meant to find the seasons and had made it to the wrong side of the country instead.

My mother had grown up in the South wearing pearls and attending debutante balls before she up and left for California and met my father, a successful insurance salesman in San Francisco. She did not know what she wanted to do, but her greatest dream was to paint the Golden Gate Bridge in all four seasons, and for that, she was willing to sacrifice the Ionic columns and sprawling yards of her family’s estate. Only after she arrived did she realize that she had miscalculated; San Francisco only had one season, foggy and grey. So she created fallacies, productions of white snow drifts swirling furiously around the jaunty red bridge. One hung in my room. It was so real that I couldn’t imagine the scene was not drawn from life. The small huddled frames of people shuffling across the bridge were so vivid that it was impossible that they did not live in this snow-covered world. But to her, the art was preposterous. She had come

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Standing now on the front step of our home, my mother seemed hopelessly out of place. She was tall and stately, her back perfectly straight and arms limp by her side. She would have looked at home among Eucalyptus trees, fragrant and willowy, but among the squatty vines with their twisted branches and thick middles, she was an oddity, a snowflake falling softly on the streets of San Francisco. She folded her arms, now, across her chest. I watched the back of her head, waiting for movement, convulsions of tears, any sign of life at all, but she looked unflinchingly forward.

What she thought during the time that

elapsed, perhaps three minutes, I do not profess to know.

Without bowing her head, she removed the simple gold band that she had received fifteen years before and cast it into the vineyard. It arched gracefully through the air, the metal catching the sunlight as it returned to the earth, an act of great significance and passion resulting in some tiny unseen crash. One day, perhaps, it would be implanted there and grow into something horrible, a vine with rotting fruit and withered leaves. She turned back to the screen door and for a moment we stood there, examining each other through the glass window. I searched her blue eyes for some form of shared experience or pain, but she looked into my face with neither acknowledgment nor recognition. I would later try to imagine the depth of pain, the absolute bleakness and despair that must have motivated that look, and I would try to forgive her for it.

The moment passed and she turned now, moving through the front door, through the common room, where I sat, and into the kitchen. She walked directly to the metal wine rack in the corner of the room. The rack held twenty bottles, all ours, each sorted according to year and type. It was as close to a scrapbook as our family had ever produced. She reached out and took a bottle off the shelf. She ran her fingers over the beveled paper as if it were the skin of a newborn child, delicate and pure. Today, I knew, a crew was coming to rip every last disease riddled vine from the ground. There would be no new wine for several years.

Perhaps she wondered if he had planned this, plotting his own escape to coincide with the destruction of the vines in hopes of creating some greater metaphor.

Perhaps she felt deceived by him and was furious with herself for miscalculating the sort of man he was.

“Wine Bottles” Sabrina Bedford Charcoal on paper

Or perhaps she had known what sort of man he was all along and simply hadn’t done anything. Her body language, her gracefully curled spine and impassive stance, revealed none of these possibilities. And the ambiguity of the situation, the lack of definitive emotional response, was terrifying.

Without warning, she flung the bottle to the linoleum floor with such force that the cork popped and wine burst from the bottle. Her body became fluid again, and it must have felt good to create that type of crash. The wine flowed outward from the point of contact, soaking the white floor in burgundy. Examining her work, she took another bottle and hurled it against the wall, grunting with exertion. The wine burst in a tremendous arc and coagulated in a puddle filled with shattered glass. She reached out to the wine rack again and again, her arms moving as gracefully as a dancer’s as she reached across her body to retrieve another bottle and flung it outward into the space. I was crying now, but I did not say a word. I was not really there. Like a wedding or a funeral, I could not claim ownership over the events that were transpiring, and so I bore witness.

Twenty bottles, in sum. My mother stood barefoot, surrounded by a sea of crimson red. She was a sea goddess, her legs smeared with wine and her sallow cheeks full and alive with color, the passion of the moment igniting her very being. The curlers had distended, unraveling tangled tresses of long brown hair that had, in recent years, become tinged with grey. She was fiercely gorgeous, a savage woman shown on the cover of National Geographic. I could have imagined her hunting down caribou or migrating across deserted lands. She could have painted the Golden Gate Bridge in a typhoon and no one would have questioned her vision.

I cried harder now, and I was shocked to discover that my cries were not silent. I, in fact, inhabited space in the same scene as she. My mother caught my eye and held my gaze for a second. And though her blood was coursing with adrenaline, though her stance was that of a warrior, stifflegged and brazen, her eyes showed only fear in its most basic form. It was the fear of the unknown, the fear of time passing without any logical sequence at all. It was the same fear of the savage woman in uncharted lands and the same fear that I had experienced when my mother told me as a young girl that Clancy, our Golden Retriever, was dying. It was a fear that one learns to suppress when it is no longer appropriate to ask questions such as “Where are we going?” or “Is there a God?” anymore.

“Don’t cry.” It was neither a command nor a placation.

I nodded once as she turned her head and walked unflinchingly through the puddle and down the narrow

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hallway, leaving perfectly formed red footprints of wine and blood on the cream carpet.

In such a small space, there is no room for chaos or calamity. Everything must be contained, compartmentalized, controlled. Spills were cleaned immediately because there was no way to avoid them, surfaces kept tidy because one could not work around them. Now, with my father’s absence, there was suddenly room for disaster, and the house seemed empty for the first time I could remember. Slowly, I set my feet down on the floor. They had been coiled tightly under me, and now they were numb. I tested each leg, putting a bit of pressure on it, followed by a bit more. Finally, I stood and got a mop from the kitchen closet. It was solid in my hands, the feeling of wood between my fingers telling me that this was real. This is a mop I thought to myself I am holding a mop and I am going to clean the kitchen. I knelt down and nicked my finger on a piece of broken glass. I watched coolly as a small bubble of blood formed and ran down the length of my index finger. I brought the finger to my lips and licked it off. This is blood. This is blood and that means that I am alive.

I righted myself and dropped the mop into the center of the wine, sending ripples through the placid lake. I moved the mop to the left, which merely extended the puddle outwards in that direction. I moved the mop to the right, but this created a similar phenomenon on the opposite side. I had never mopped before, but I knew that this did not happen when my mother did.

I pushed the mop frantically now, swinging it from left to right, and with each movement the mess seemed to grow in size, becoming more and more impossible to contain. I stopped. I dropped the mop and sunk to my knees, alcohol seeping into cuts and scrapes with a tingling burn that felt prickly and good. The shorts I wore had been white but were now turned a deep crimson. They would never be white again, but I didn’t care; the line between tidiness and disorder seemed too solid, and we had crossed from one side of it to the other. Everything in this house would be stained now, somehow.

Cupping my hands, I brought some of the wine to my lips; I wanted to taste what rage felt like. I had tasted wine all my life, and I had come to finally appreciate the taste, the undertones and blending of flavors that not only set each bottle apart, but each sip apart. Everything about a good wine, my father had once told me, changes. No sip should ever evoke quite the same response. The pooled wine tasted strongly of decay.

I took another sip and could taste the disease, the acrid taste of death which would soon be all there was. Surely the taste

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of rot had been there for years, growing with each successive crop, waiting to be discovered. A good wine changes, but it does not decay.

I lay down in the warm wine. Fruit flies buzzed hungrily around my arms and legs, and I watched as one rogue fly dipped down into the mess and became caught, its wings growing heavy with wine until it sank slowly, inexorably to the bottom.

Perhaps I dozed off then, or perhaps I was conscious, the boundary between the two so dissolved that it hardly mattered. Consciousness, as I understood the term, was the state of understanding your surroundings and affecting change through action. By this definition, I had not been conscious at all that morning. Now, lying in the pooled wine, the burn of my skin becoming duller, more distant by the moment, I was not sure that I had been conscious for a very long time. Perhaps the last night I was conscious was when I was ten, a girl in pigtails whose favorite hobby was running between the winding rows of grapes with arms outstretched in either direction. I would grab at the leaves as I flew past, tearing them from the vines and clasping them like wings.

My father would see me from the bedroom window and yell at me to stop, but I would not. I would flap my wings until I could felt as though I could take flight. Perhaps that is how it

“Figure 58” Jin Yu Charcoal on newsprint

is to be truly awake: exhilarating and a bit destructive, always at someone or something’s expense.

Was the girl in the passenger seat of the Buick alive? Did she feel as though the driveway held infinite possibilities at its end? More than my father, I thought of her. I would be haunted for years by her blank expression and wonder if whether, as an adult, she would wear her hair in a side ponytail if only to bring back the fleeting feeling of how she was as a girl. I wanted more than anything to have seen her face as she drove away and know if she was happy, if she was sorry, if she was conscious.

I was roused by the sound of footfalls. The oven clock told me that an hour had passed, though I could not believe it. It had been days since he had left. Soon, my mother stood in the doorway. Her hair had unraveled, the pink curlers bobbed uselessly at the ends. Her eyes were wide but vacant, and in her hand was a cigarette, which she moved methodically in and out of her lips. There was something sinister about the forcefulness of her inhalations, the slight quiver of pleasure as she released a white curlicue of smoke. The sight of my mother with a cigarette was as incongruous to me as would be the sight of our land without vines.

My favorite memory of my mother was when we went to the lake one oppressively hot summer weekend. We were on the edge of the boat with our big toes skimming the surface when, without warning, she rose and swan-dove into the lake, making no splash at all. She was under for so long, diving deeper and deeper, seconds passing with no sign of her. And just at the moment when it first crossed my mind to worry, the very instant when some reflexive fear began to kick in, she came to the surface, treading water and laughing to herself, her face radiant in the reflected sunlight. “Come in!” she said and I jumped in and swam to her. I had never been more thankful to her as I was for knowing to surface at the exact moment I began to panic. The very act solidified my trust in her and my certainty that she would always care for me. I did not know, now, how to reconcile this water goddess with the woman who stood before me, oblivious to my tremendous need.

She brought the cigarette to her lips once more and I looked away, ashamed to have seen her in such an intimate act. I could feel her eyes on the back of my neck, sizing up my jaw line and determining how much it resembled his, how much of him was still in this room. “Did you know I smoked?”

“No.” There was silence. She was waiting for more, perhaps an admonishment or some statistic about the consequences learned in sixth grade health class. She stood waiting for

anything she could fight against. “When did you pick it up?”

“Years ago.” She waved her hand in front of her face to illustrate this. “I promised your father I’d quit, but I guess neither of us paid much attention to our vows.”

“Does Dad know you smoke?” I said this, I think, to hurt her. Does he know, not did he. He wasn’t coming back.

She shrugged. “What does it matter now?”

“I was just wondering if you lied to him.”

Her mouth contorted in pain. “I never lied to your father, Lindsay. There are private matters and there are lies and you should damn well know the difference.”

“Which was the girl?” I wanted to take back the words as soon as I spoke them.

Surely the taste of rot had been there for years, growing with each successive crop, waiting to be discovered. A good wine changes, but it does not decay.

“You shut your fucking mouth.” She looked as though she could have hit me, and I started back a little on instinct. But she stood perfectly still, the muscles in her neck tense with rage.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I felt the sting of tears coming to my eyes, and in a way it was comforting to feel such a familiar response to pain.

She sighed and extended her arm down to me, but the act was just a gesture, an indication that it was time to rise; she put no effort behind the outstretched hand, and I pulled myself up from the ground, my legs trembling under the weight. We stood very close now, my eyes hitting the top of her chin. She released my hand and flicked her cigarette into the puddle of wine. She began to walk down the cream hallway towards her bedroom, and I followed. “Pretty dirty, huh?” She said of the carpet with a sort of reverence, as though she herself had planned those footprints.

Upon entering the bedroom, she opened the top drawer of her nightstand and took out a carton of cigarettes, placing it on the bed. The nightstand had been a wedding gift from a family friend, and in the corner was a painted grape leaf with the wedding date written in elegant white letters, “June 4, 1980.”

Surely she must have tried harder at some point to hide her cigarettes, maybe burying them outside or shoving them in

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the ventilation ducts. My father may have been oblivious to her transgression, but more likely, she stopped trying to hide it from him because it ceased to matter either way. It must have been tragic for my mother to abandon the elaborate plan to hide her secret and instead, place it beside the bed she shared for her husband to find or not find. And yet, however crassly and indifferently she hid her secret, I did not know.

She reached for a fresh box and opened it, pulling out two white cylinders. One she put between her pursed lips, and the other she extended towards me, raising an eyebrow in invitation.

My heart lurched as I examined the cigarette held between her trembling fingers. Had she acted out in grief or rage, I would have forgiven her, but all I knew in the pit of my stomach was disgust. “No,” I said. “I don’t smoke.”

“I know you don’t.” She smiled as if to say that I was incapable of such secrecy. “I’m asking you if you’d like to try.”

“Why?” “You don’t have to.” The cigarette bobbed like a pendulum in her mouth counting off the rhythm of her words. “It’s just I’d like a little a company and, well, who the fuck am I to tell you anything anymore?”

“You’re my mother.” I tried to put as much weight behind those words as I could, but even I could feel them dissipate into nothingness.

She took a lighter from the pocket of her robe and brought it to the tip of her cigarette. The end glowed red and smoldered.

She closed her eyes for a moment as if contemplating the validity of my previous statement; was she?

I reached out and took the cigarette, which was still extended towards me. It felt too light, too insubstantial to be anything at all. Shouldn’t the manifestation of fourteen years of deception be heavy? This felt no more harmful than an autumn leaf, yellowed and crackling on the ground; I could crush it if I wanted to. I rolled it over between my fingers, and I could feel the heat from my mother’s hands. I placed the cigarette between two pale lips, leaned forward, and waited while she lifted a purple plastic lighter to the tip.

The first inhalation burned my lungs like a fire poker and I couldn’t suppress a wave of coughs. My mother cocked her head in bland concern, and I blushed. I brought the cigarette to my lips again and this time, took a tiny, tentative puff. The taste was bitter but a bit sweet, and I let the smoke eddy in my mouth for a moment before releasing it, trying to taste the different undertones as I had been taught to do with wine.

I walked past my mother to the bedroom window. It was noon, and outside, the migrant workers were beginning to descend upon the barren grapevines, rolling into the base

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of the driveway in pickup trucks with windows down and Mariachi music blasting. Pretty soon, there were about twenty of them clustered at the lefthand corner of the vines, far enough that I could not make out individual features, dark-skinned and dressed almost identically in torn jeans and flannels. One stood in the middle of the group, gesturing towards the rows behind them. On command, the group split apart and each man grabbed a pickax from the back of a white pickup truck and approached a separate row of grapes.

The destruction process seemed sadder, crueler somehow, when meticulously organized. Each man started at the closest vine and, raising a rusted pickax overhead, cast it down onto the vine without any ceremony. It took three strikes, on average, to uproot each vine. After these three, it would topple to the ground, pulling up an intricate system of roots, thick and pale like gnarled appendages. The worker would then move onto the next, leaving the felled vine in the dirt to await the arrival of a white pickup truck that would take it away.

And in this way, carefully, methodically, rows of oncefleshy vines became battlefields, the forms of fallen soldiers unresisting to the Mexican who hopped out of the passenger side of the pickup truck and scooped their lifeless bodies into the back.

It took three strikes, on average, to uproot each vine. After these three, it would topple to the ground, pulling up an intricate system of roots, thick and pale like gnarled appendages.

The worker would then move onto the next, leaving the felled vine in the dirt to await the arrival of a white pickup truck that would take it away.

I brought the cigarette to my lips once more, this time filling my lungs with the sour smoke. I could feel my mother’s presence behind me coming closer to the window, and my body tingled with the foreignness both of the chemicals and of her. She came to the window and we stood shoulder to shoulder. “What are we going to do?”

“About the grapes?”

“About everything.”

I shrugged.

“Sun-Moon Lake” Jackie Basu “Everyone’s going to know.”

Our simple country house on the hill, our small happy family, all this would be revealed as a fraud; my mother could go into town with a cigarette in hand now, it hardly mattered anymore.

“Did you know about Dad?” I asked suddenly, surprising myself.

She stood still for a moment, her cigarette suspended in midair. She turned to me, and for the first time, looked at me. She opened her mouth tentatively, as if debating the correct word to use. “Yes,” she decided on.

I began to cry softly, not for her, but this time, for myself. Misdeeds, indiscretions, bad habits: the Marlboro box hidden in my mother’s nightstand, the nights my father spent with the blonde girl, all these things had been there, visible, all along, and I was the only one not to know.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I failed you.”

I watched as the rows of grapes outside peeled back to reveal their secret, the barren ground below. “Do you remember Sonoma Lake?” I asked.

“What about it?”

I wanted to tell her about the time she rose at the exact right moment. I wanted to tell her how I had trusted her so wholly and how I hadn’t been afraid since then.

“Nothing.” I said. And then, “You should paint the vineyard.”

She shook her head. “The plot will be empty soon.”

“You always painted what wasn’t there.”

She considered this for a long moment, eyes staring unflinchingly forward. Her hand trembled as she put the cigarette out on the windowsill.

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“Catharsis” Nikiya Crisostomo Charcoal, ink, and conté crayon on paper

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For Me I’m afraid the guy who cuts My hair someday will snap, talk Baseball, slide the razor down my face, pull My locks as we discuss the demise of the LA Times And use the scissors on my eyes Because he swears he sees a dotted line.

Last week I stood in line At the deli, watched the butcher cut Salami and sausage, his eyes Focused on the meat while he talked To the guy in front of me. “Sign of the times,” The butcher said, as he went to pull The pork, concealed hands as he pulled His pistol on the guy ‘cause he couldn’t stand the line.

For me, delis aren’t for meat now, Good Times Is on TV and I’m scared as channel 37 cuts Out—technical difficulties. I think of my talk With the blind woman, who says her eyes Hurt when she hears of my pain. Her eyes Blankly blink and she pleads for me to pull Her eyelids up past her forehead while she talks Of what it’s like in her darkness. I rub the lines On her cheeks and feel the curved cuts Carved by broken glass the time A bottle was broken on her face. “Sometimes…”

She doesn’t finish as I grab her body—my eyes, Open, strip off her clothes and my hands cut Through her crevices; from here she pulls Me into her darkness and we recite some lines From John Keats’ “When I Have Fears” then talk About delis and barbers and she talks About her fear of bats and the times She heard them scream while she dreamed, lying In bed while they heard her with their eyes And I think of the bats as her mirrors—pulled To her because they too live in darkness, cut Off—She cuts my hair, straight lines. I pull Away at times, afraid to talk. She lays down The clippers and leans in to kiss my eyes.

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– nic reiner

Contributors Jackie Basu is a junior from Palos Verdes, CA Sabrina Bedford is a freshman from Fort Worth, TX Brittany Bennett is a sophomore from San Diego, CA Nikiya Crisostomo is a sophomore from Glendale, CA Leigh Lucas is a senior from Bethesda, MD Max McClure is a junior from San Anselmo, CA Andrew McIntyre is a senior from Ipswich, MA Nic Reiner is a senior from Long Beach, CA Austen Rosenfeld is a senior from Los Angeles, CA Sarah Scharf is a senior from Los Angeles, CA Graham Todd is a junior from Royersford, PA Natalie Uy is a sophomore from San Antonio, TX Chris Winterbauer is a junior from Mercer Island, WA

How can I submit to Leland?

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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.

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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 (full-length investigative pieces).

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Submissions can be sent to lelandquarterly@gmail.com with “Name, Genre” in the subject line.

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Volume 4, Issue 1 Copyright Š 2009 by Leland Quarterly Stanford University lelandquarterly.com