Levitate Magazine Issue 8

L E VI TAT E

THEMED DOSSIER: INSOMNIA

LEVITATE

Copyright © 2024 by LEVITATE literary magazine

All rights to the material in this journal revert back to individual contributor after LEVITATE publication.

LEVITATE Literary Magazine c/o Creative Writing Department

The Chicago High School for the Arts 2714 W. Augusta Blvd Chicago, IL 60622 www.levitatemagazine.org

ISBN 978-0-9995014-9-8

LEVITATE accepts electronic submissions and publishes annually. For submission guidelines, please consult our website.

Editors-in-Chief

Charlotte Hensley

Julissa Ortiz

Managing Editor Jenna Reasner

Lead Fiction Editors

Robin Barth

Nayeli Lopez

Lead Creative Nonfiction Editor Dayna Garcia-Ruiz

Lead Poetry Editors Shamiyah Hightower

Yamile Muñoz

Lead Themed Dossier Editor

Chaske Hunter

Lead Art Editor Adalys Cristobal

Contributing Fiction Editors

Contributing Creative Nonfiction Editors

Contributing Poetry Editors

Contributing Themed Dossier Editors

Contributing Art Editors

Lead Social Media Managers

Print Designers

Penelope Hammer

Allie Phillips

Kaden Washington

Charlotte Hensley

Noveli Lopez

Chaske Hunter

Julissa Ortiz

Maya Hernández

Karla Hernández

Adalys Cristobal

Mordekai DelGuidice

Noveli Lopez

Dayna Garcia-Ruiz

Julissa Ortiz

Karla Hernández

Mordekai DelGuidice

Kaden Washington

Maya Hernández

Noveli Lopez

Geoff Gaspord

Brian Brown

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Trigger Warnings

Levitate Editorial Staff p.vi

Cover Art: Reach for the Stars Annika Connor p.8

Fiction

Boy Sepideh Saremi p.9

Master Artworks in COVID Times (visual art)

Cold Noodles

Alter Egos (visual art)

Filed and Forgotten

The Dance (visual art)

Yacht Rock 101

Groovin’ (visual art)

Creative Nonfiction

Donald Patten p.13

Sascha Matuszak p.16

Tomislav Šilipetar p.28

Katarina Behrmann p.30

Howie Good p.37

Langston Prince p.38

Howie Good p.49

Children’s Church (visual art) Christine Williams p.50

Something More

Two Hands

Neha Musuwathi p.51

A.D. Warrick p.55

A photo of Leo taken by the writer A.D. Warrick p.63

Burned Out

Marcela Torres p.64

the idle infatuation of idiosyncrasy (visual art)

Marie Magnetic p.68

what fascinates the masses (visual art)

Marie Magnetic p.69

Still Standing

Good Night (visual art)

My Uncle the Hummingbird

Kayla Blau p.70

Howie Good p.73

Rachel Paz Ruggera p.74

Cat and Butterflies (visual art) Zoe Nikolopoulou p.80

Black Cat (visual art)

Poetry

As Fall Begins 2 (visual art)

America’s Child

Zoe Nikolopoulou p.81

Edward Michael Supranowicz p.82

Emalie Anne Marquez p.83

when they plucked luna moths from my teeth

Afternoon Nap

somewhere in the light

Srishty Sharma p.84

Cami Rumble p.86

Adonis Alegre p.88

We fought about where to park but from here you could smell the sea and mist off the river at the same time (visual art)

Minuet (visual art)

Kay Heath p.89

Mark Hurtubise p.90

Solo Dance Betty Buchsbaum p.91

Daisies

Water Splash (visual art)

Untouched

The End of a Sonnet

Neal Donahue p.92

Yusif Zadeh p.93

Eric Blanchard p.94

James B. Nicola p.95

Seven Days of Forever Nikita Fishman p.96

The Doll-Maker’s Admission

Jha p.99

Love Tokens (visual art) Howie Good p.101

Sensitive

Learned Grief Audra Burwell p.104

You Betcha 2b (visual art)

Edward Michael Supranowicz p.106 apple knowledge Cordelia Hanemann p.107

To Myself at Twenty-Two, Driving Through Youngstown

Blake Lynch p.108

Head in the Clouds (visual art) Annika Connor p.109

Themed Dossier: Insomnia Shadows (visual art)

In the Belly of the Whale (poetry)

H. Felix p.112

Believer (visual art) Aleco Smith p.113

One-and-Twenty (poetry) Paul Hostovsky p.114

The Insomnia Sequences (poetry) Francesca Preston p.115

Requiem for an Undead Soul (fiction)

Anne Anthony p.119

Pieces of Looking Glass (visual art) Beth Horton p.122

Gothic (poetry) Sean Eaton p.123

Anterior Torso Musculature (visual art)

Donald Patten p.126

Eyes (visual art) Donald Patten p.127

persimmon souls at night (poetry) Sienna Morris p.128

The Moon Is Leaving Us (poetry) Christina H. Felix p.129

Galactic Lilies (visual art)

Carolyn Watson p.130

City on the Moon (fiction) Annabelle Taghinia p.131

Forget Me Not (visual art)

Jennifer S. Lange p.141

TRIGGER WARNINGS

Trigger noun

A particular action, process, or situation that causes emotional distress and typically as a result causes traumatic feelings and memories to arise

Fiction

Boy forced/coerced underage marriage

Creative Nonfiction

Two Hands terminal illness, deathBurned Out depression, anxiety

Still Standing depression, anxiety, death of a child, school shooting

My Uncle the Hummingbird addiction, overdose, death

Poetry

somewhere in the light death

Seven Days of Forever terminal illness

The Doll-Maker’s Admission war, death

Spoiler sexual assault, suicidal ideation

Themed Dossier: Insomnia

The Insomnia Sequences abuse, depression, suicidal ideation, suicide

Gothic murder

Requiem for an Undead Soul death, abuse

City on the Moon forced/coerced underage marriage

Trigger warnings originated in psychiatric literature, notably about those who experienced post-traumatic reactions, for example “re-experiencing symptoms” such as intrusive thoughts and flashbacks due to sexual or physical trauma. Over time, the term has expanded to include potentially offensive or disturbing material.

We do not want our readers to feel uncomfortable without warning while reading. This page is to alert readers beforehand of triggering content and where in our publication it is found.

Healing begins with understanding. Thank you for reading.

–LEVITATE Editorial Team

Reach for the Stars

Oil on linen

Annika Connor

Annika Connor is a painter, SAG-AFTRA actor, and screenwriter whose creative endeavors are deeply intertwined. While she engages in multiple art forms, painting holds a special place as her primary passion. She finds that her experiences in acting and writing enrich her paintings, infusing them with narrative depth.

Connor’s insomnia has led to a unique creative process. Her vivid dreams inspire much of her work, with their imagery captured in detail upon waking. She keeps a notebook by her bed to immediately sketch or write, preserving the essence of her dreams before they fade.

In her paintings, Connor merges her love for storytelling with visual art, creating scenes that feel like stills from larger narratives. She uses visual metaphors and allegorical elements to invite viewers into a world where societal issues are subtly explored. Connor occasionally incorporates activism into her art, using it as a platform to advocate for social change.

Using traditional techniques with oils on linen, Connor’s paintings are intricate and rich, reflecting her meticulous process. Her work serves as a mirror to society, offering beauty and contemplation amidst the chaos of life. Through allegory and dream imagery, Connor’s art invites viewers to explore deeper into their own imagination and reflect on the world around them

FICTION

Boy

Sepideh Saremi She had not thought she would have a boy, and her first thought when they placed him in her arms was, “I have birthed my own oppressor.”

And her second thought was, “I grew a penis inside my body.” She was lying on her back while the doctor sewed up the damage between her legs, and soon she would have to take this tiny future-man home. And she would have to name him, which was a problem because she’d really only picked names for girls, and the only Persian boy name she liked was also the name of his father, and that was not a Persian thing to do at all, to name a child after a parent, so she would have to defy her culture in that way.

The boy was very pretty, even with a smushed face and head elongated by her birth canal. He had a lot of thick black hair, and it curled against his scalp, matted down by her blood. He looked right at her with his enormous dark blue eyes, and she said to him without thinking, “I’m your mom,” and immediately heard the narcissism in it and felt ashamed. What she should have said was “You’re my baby,” which would have been far more gracious.

She turned to her mother and said, “I’m sorry for everything horrible I’ve ever said and done to you and for everything I will do in the future.” She felt an understanding and kinship with her mother for the first time, felt connected to her and to all of the women in their family who had come before them, and then felt sad that her son would never, ever feel this feeling, would never be on his back with his baby in his arms while someone sewed back together the most intimate part of his body, that he would never fully understand her, because he would be limited by his biology. And maybe this meant he would never be fully sorry for anything horrible he did to her, and she heard the narcissism in that, too, and again felt ashamed.

She thought about shame, and about how both of her grandmothers had never left their homeland except to visit grown children, had hardly left the cities in which they’d been born, and neither had ever learned to read, and here she was now, a modern, educated brown woman in the Western world who had just given birth to a blue-eyed white male.

It was astonishing that so much could change in just two generations, that her husband’s half-white genes and her relative fairness had conspired to create a phenotypical result that wiped out thousands of years of darker-skinned Middle Eastern ancestry, including her own olive-skinned mother who stood crying at the foot of the hospital bed and her even more olive-skinned father-in-law who would visit later that evening and kiss her hand and thank her for this little white boy, though to his credit her father-in-law was not a chauvinist with internalized racism and would have kissed her hand for a little brown girl too.

The boy was too quiet, and a phalanx of nurses came in and took him from her arms to neonatal intensive care, and she cried with fear. Then they turned right around and brought him back when he rallied in the hallway. She’d been a mother for fifteen minutes, and already he seemed to be doing better without her participation.

She thought about how both of her illiterate grandmothers had been married in their young teens to much older men, old enough that now it would be considered child abuse, and how all they had done was bear child after child after child after child until there were more children than anyone really knew what to do with, and the older children raised the younger ones. Each of her grandmothers had had babies who had died, and neither of them ever got over it, even after having half a dozen more babies after the ones they lost, and she could understand that for the first time.

She thought about conception and sex. What must it have been like for her grandmothers to have had sex for the first time when they themselves were still children, with men who were twice their age? Who prepared them for that and how? And had either of her grandmothers, in the course of all that sex for procreation, ever had a single orgasm? She wished she could ask them, imagining they might be relieved to talk about it, though this was a projection of her own Western, overly

therapized mind. Some things didn’t have to be talked about, couldn’t be, without causing great harm.

The baby was rooting on her chest, and she held him up to her breast, where he latched on and started to suck hard. Her breasts were massive now, with areolae that had turned nearly black in color and doubled in size. They were unrecognizable to her, mammalian artifacts, and she wondered if they would ever be tits again, but perhaps it would be better for them not to be, because the thought of anyone besides this baby putting his mouth on them made her skin crawl. She looked at her husband and felt repulsed and annoyed and angry.

She looked for the first time at the boy’s body. Someone had cleaned him up and loosely wrapped a blanket around him, but the front of him was naked and pressed against her torso. He looked like a long, skinny worm with big thumbs, and he took his mouth off one breast and mewled for the other one, and her heart broke for him.

She thought about all the times that she had let someone put his mouth or hands on her body even though her skin had been crawling, and the magic trick she had learned when she was just a few years older than this boy, the floating out of herself until whatever was happening stopped. She had gotten so good at this that she wasn’t really able to stay put anymore, even if she wanted to be touched, and as a result there were blanks where memory should have been. She wondered if either of her grandmothers had learned this trick when they were being touched for the first time, how scared they must have been, and wondered if they had eventually learned to stay put.

It wasn’t all bad, of course, as she’d used the same trick while the boy had been slowly leaving her body over the last day and change. There were contractions, people in and out of the room, then poof, she was gone, the rest was blank. Now here was a baby, and here were some stitches, which the doctor had finished sewing, she realized.

She could feel the boy’s heart pumping against her chest. The months he had been inside her body, she had felt hollow, felt like part of her had been carved out and discarded in order to make room for him, and it made her feel broken and depressed. But she could feel the edges of something else inside her now, some other grief filling the space he had just vacated, something ancient and extremely sad, the grief of every mother who preceded her.

She started crying again and didn’t know why, and it would take her months to realize it was because she did not know how to love anyone fully, and that her inability to let anyone love her fully meant she would push away her own child. That this would break his tender heart, and very early he would have to sit alone in rage and despair, in the same ways she’d had to, unless she could find a way to stay in her body, stay with herself, and stay with him too.

Master Artworks in COVID Times (a series by Donald Patten)

COVID Anxiety

charcoal on canvas

Donald

Patten

Almost overnight, COVID-19 changed the way people interact with each other and with our own bodies. We live our lives in vulnerability during this historically significant time of disaster. The initial phases of the pandemic are behind us, but the virus remains and continues to be dangerous. The societal trauma this pandemic has caused will be remembered and felt by those who lived through it for the foreseeable future. In the past, master painters would depict historically significant disasters that happened to them as a way to cope. Artists of the nineteenth century depicted hardships and trauma in the wake of the Industrial Revolution that began the formation of our modern world. As an artist who is learning the techniques of masters, I have the opportunity to create long-lasting visual information that depicts the trauma of this pandemic. This series of drawings represents my experiences in COVID by revising past masterpieces to depict this embodied experience of trauma.

Café Terrace at COVID Capacity

charcoal on canvas

Donald Patten

Saturn Devouring His Sub charcoal

on canvas

Donald Patten

Cold Noodles

Sascha Matuszak

As long as he had been alive, Liu Peng had never witnessed a sky as clear as this one. On this most rare of days, during the last moments of the pear blossoms and the first breath of the rosebuds, he could see the Longmen Mountains in the distance. The smog and the haze that normally obscured them had been whisked away by the earthquake. His heart trembled, given the circumstances. This strange weather felt like a vast moment of silence for the dead and buried, a moment for the land to process what had just happened. There were new cracks to explore, rivers that followed new courses, and barely settled scapes where once there’d been homes.

The silence was more profoundly unnerving than anything he had ever experienced. Not as painful as heartbreak nor as consuming as jealousy nor as heavy as school—but so much stranger, as if all the worlds seen and unseen gathered to stand quietly witnessing. No honking from the highways, no cranes, no dump trucks, not even a motorcycle. The entire modern world had shimmered and vanished. There was only the wind. Even the birds perched silently, cocking their heads at the bright sun, as surprised to see it shine through clear skies as any other living thing in Chengdu. The city was encased in a sunny bubble of quiet aftermath, shocked and wide-eyed. It made it easy to pretend everything was okay, even though nothing was.

The news called the quake the most devastating calamity to hit China since the Japanese. The epicenter was two hours northwest of Chengdu, but they had felt it rumble in Beijing, in Tokyo, and in Bangkok. In the village of Ten Thousand Fortunes Unit Four, aftershocks shook them awake at night, and his mother swore she could still feel the earth move long after they subsided. Liu Peng’s joints ached, his calf muscles twitched as if small beasts fought beneath his skin, and he dreamed strange dreams of thick liquids poured down onto fleeing stick things.

On his most recent trip north with the relief crews, Liu Peng had seen valleys filled in with rocks and shattered roof beams. Bits of home

life stuck up from the tossed earth, fluttering flags of tattered clothes and ripped curtains. In the towns between Chengdu and the epicenter, bulldozers rummaged through concrete and rebar while Liu Peng and his classmates scrambled across rubble with volunteer construction workers shipped in from Guangdong. In Huawang, they looked for survivors, but all they found was more sad fabric and the smell of death, and the clock tower in the center of town frozen at 2:28 p.m., May 12, 2008. The quake had measured 8.0, and the Party had announced a death toll of 80,000 people. The symmetry of all those eights appealed to Liu Peng. It lent a thin layer of meaning to what seemed entirely incomprehensible. Boxed in nicely, it could be endured.

Liu Peng hadn’t slept much in the last two days. After arriving back at Unit Four just before dawn, he had gone down to his aunt’s convenience stand to sit with his mother and trade news and rumors with the rest of the clan. The sun rose like a halo behind Great-Uncle Zhuang as he reminded everyone that the earthquake had struck the day after Buddha’s birthday, which he interpreted as calling for the Chinese people to endure this catastrophe as sublimely as only the Chinese could. Later, as Liu Peng’s aunt served a breakfast of porridge and fried dough, Douzi’s grandfather marveled aloud at how he could see the Longmen Mountains from his window again, like when he was a kid. His words had stayed with Liu Peng, and he found himself distracted by the view, even as Douzi told him she was leaving for good this time.

A breeze swept across him and Douzi as she played with the grass between them. He felt brittle and easily swept away, like the dying blades she held in her palm. They sat in the hollow by the dead well, at the corner of three fields, bathing in late morning sunshine. She had on a white T-shirt that barely covered her navel and blue jeans that tapered down to sockless ankles and drab white tennis shoes. He had tried to get her to wear contacts, but she insisted on the black wire-rim glasses she said made her look smart. She still wore the frayed cord around her neck that he had bought in the city, and he watched it bounce gently against her collarbone as she spread grass between her fingers, letting it fall on a beetle making its way determinedly over the pile she had made. There really was not much to say, so he smiled and pretended to pull grass blades too. Another gust of wind bent the grass into new shapes as

a wispy white cloud drifted across the perfectly blue sky. He just wanted to stay here, with the sun on his face, in this forever moment, this forever vein, and so he stayed quiet and tried not to breathe too loud.

She turned her hand over, and he saw the little white scars on her knuckles from chopping vegetables. They had both been raised by brown-skinned peasant parents with calloused peasant hands, but Douzi had meticulously maintained her fair skin, while Liu Peng’s hands had gone soft in his years at the university. He had student’s hands now, and he wore student’s clothes. His dark blue pants were clean and pressed, and the sleeves of his white button-down were rolled up to his elbows. Still impossible to escape our peasant heritage, he thought, staring glumly at the scars on her knuckles and the thin layer of caked red dust around the toes of his black dress shoes. But they were trying.

An official letter from the local Party Secretary fluttered in his hand. It had arrived while Liu Peng was in the earthquake zone with his classmates, searching for bodies. The local government was reclaiming Ten Thousand Fortunes Unit Four for developers, the letter stated, and every family had to sign over their land in order to receive compensation. Furthermore, the letter continued, compensation would be doled out in payments over time, culminating in an apartment in the high-rise that would eventually replace the village. In the meantime, everyone in the village would have to find someplace temporary to live.

Her family had made a decision, Douzi was saying. They were moving across the province, to Chongqing, where they had relatives. Chongqing was a good twelve hours away by bus. It wasn’t that far, she was saying, but to Liu Peng it felt like the end of the known world.

“Never mind,” Douzi said, changing the subject. “Are you going to head back into the crisis zone to meet back up with the class? Or will you stay here all week?”

Liu Peng watched a tabby disappear behind a whitewashed farmhouse wall, then turned to watch a solitary old man dump water into the brown ruts of his fields. The sun beat down upon the back of Liu Peng’s neck, and he wished he had a nice wet towel like the old man’s to wipe away the sweat.

“If you come back with me, I’ll go,” he replied.

“Ah Peng,” she said, raising her eyes to his. “I can’t go back up, and you know that. We’re packing all week and then leaving on Sunday.”

“Then I’ll stay here with you.”

She was silent for a moment.

“I want to spend these days with you, too, but if I weren’t packing my entire family’s belongings into a truck this week, I would be out there,” she said, pointing vaguely north. “They need you out there. Staying here for me is just…silly, especially with so many more important things going on.”

“You’re right,” he nodded. “You’re absolutely right.”

“Of course I am,” she said with finality.

Liu Peng kept nodding, unable to think, let alone speak.

He remembered the electric shock that had swept through his body after Douzi had texted him the news about the letter and the developers and how her mother wanted to move to Chongqing. He and his classmates were staying in a village headman’s hut outside of the epicenter. The headman had slaughtered a pig for them, and they had eaten around a campfire, giddy with collective purpose and patriotic pride. He had just stepped away to call her and tell her about his day when her name flashed across his phone.

Sweating, dizzy, he had done the only thing there was to do: take what money he had and pay the headman’s son to drive him all the way back home that very night. His classmates called him a fool, but nothing could have stopped him. As soon as they set off, Liu Peng started telling the headman’s son everything, breathlessly, as if he could talk away the fever in his head and break the iron bands constricting his chest through sheer force of confession.

He told him about the first time he’d noticed Douzi, the pretty girl in the back answering a tough question in English class, and how he waited for her to break up with her first boyfriend, and those spring days back in ‘05, wooing her in Dujiangyan on the South Bridge above the rushing Min. He told him about drifting like a ghost through an entire year of school while she experimented with that older boy whose name still made him shudder, and how now her family was moving to Chongqing and this was his last chance to tell her how much he loved her and to finally ask her to marry him. The headman’s son barreled over the potholed roads, lighting his cigarette with the burning end of the last one, honking furiously at anything that crossed their path.

“We’ll get you there, brother,” he had promised. “And when you

two get married, I’ll come drink with you.”

Liu Peng then spoke of those first weeks after the earthquake, sitting in the back of a pickup with Douzi as she scanned the broken land, her jet black hair flowing in the wind. He wondered aloud if those early summer days in the hills around the epicenter would be the best days of his life.

“Your best days are ahead of you, brother,” the headman’s son had shouted. “Take heart!”

For as long as he lived, Liu Peng would never forget that wild ride, nor the headman’s son and his wild eyes, his cigarettes glowing fervently in the night as he swore to come visit when Liu Peng married Douzi.

Sitting on the hill by the dead well and playing with grass, the sun burning his face, Liu Peng remembered when he’d first asked Douzi to come with him and his classmates into the crisis zone and head north from Chengdu all the way to the epicenter in Wenchuan. To look upon the broken dam and see into the center of the earth with him. But she had insisted on staying home with her mother. Liu Peng imagined he’d see Douzi in every town. He looked for her around corners, on buses, and in relief groups just like his. But it was never her, only some other girl with a ponytail, wearing glasses and washed-out jeans. His throat swelled with sick regret for wasting that time, all that precious time he could have spent with her, all that time gone forever. He should have stayed here, in his village, with Douzi and his mother. He should have been the one to receive the Party Secretary’s letter.

He gazed down upon the characters on the page. He turned the letter on its side to see if some other message dropped out. The government had given every family till the end of August to sign over their homes and move out. Not even three months. Liu Peng still couldn’t quite believe it was happening, but he had done the math. Unit Four had sixty-six days left on this earth. If he thought of it as six million seconds, it felt much further away.

The thought brought to mind the long-winded speech Professor Chen had given on the last day of class before the earthquake struck. From moment to moment, the physics professor had said, systems move from one state to the next, each state giving rise to one of several new states, each with some new probability.

“But all the real action of the world occurs at the bottom level,” Professor Chen had declared.

At the bottom level, Liu Peng thought. Is that me?

Douzi stood up and brushed herself off.

“Come on,” she said. “I have to help my mom with lunch.”

She reached down to take his hand. He rose and they began walking back toward her house. Liu Peng was suddenly struck by how many times he and Douzi had strolled just like this, holding hands, down to get noodles by the bus stop into the city. He straddled all those times, all those iterations of him and the girl he loved, and through this forever time felt a coherent thought emerge through the hard lump in his throat.

“Hey,” he croaked, startling her. “Let’s get some of those cold noodles by the bridge.”

“Oh my God, that’s a great idea,” she cried, clapping her hands beneath her chin. “I love those noodles!”

They took the small dirt path down the hill through the bamboo grove, the one that went behind all of the houses, the one the cats used. Remember this, commanded a voice in his head, remember all of this. Liu Peng felt himself slip away into the embrace of no-time and no-place, before the quake and before the letter, into a fantasy of him and Douzi running behind the houses again, hand in hand like always.

The path turned to hug the house his cousin lived in. Douzi trailed her finger along the chipped white paint of the wall. Liu Peng watched her do it and did the same, feeling the soft sharp edges crumble at his light touch and fall below to join countless other white shards in the mud. He made sure to watch the mud form to their shoes and listen for the wet sound their soles made when they fought free. Lightheaded, he took care not to stumble and slip.

They left the shaded bamboo grove and stepped out onto the sunbaked pavement, walking slowly past the last house of Unit Four, Auntie Meng’s house. Popo, the dirty Pekinese who guarded this stretch of the path, the one with the massive underbite, yawned at them as one of her mutt puppies barked madly on its chain. Little Yaoyao’s toys littered the courtyard, and Liu Peng saw baskets of bean sprouts sinking into each other on either side of Auntie Meng’s doorway. Her television was on, and Liu Peng caught a flash of it through the open

door. An official with his sleeves rolled up was speaking to a reporter.

“We are striving together…” he was saying, but Liu Peng couldn’t catch what he said next.

The cracked pavement ran out the back of the village, between two mostly fallow fields filled with stacks of bricks and garbage and all the aunties’ side-gardens. The creek at the far end of these two fields marked the border between the twelve families of Unit Four and the nine families of Unit Seven. There was a bus stop at the border that went into the city, and that’s where the noodles were. It felt natural to pause at the threshold of the two fallow fields, just past Auntie Meng’s house, and wait for the breeze to cool them down a bit. Liu Peng released his hand from Douzi’s, wiped it dry on his pants, then took up her hand again, interlacing his fingers with hers.

In the field to their left, two rows of chives lay limp in newly dampened dirt, waiting to come back to life again. In a corner of the field to the right, a row of cabbage heads stretched out in the heat. Weeds grew wild along the pavement, jostling roughly with dead brown stalks and blooming rapeseed. Green vines snaked between the diamonds of a sagging fence, slowly strangling stray pieces of red and blue plastic. Beside him stood Douzi, smiling and gently swinging her hand in his. Another of his aunts, Auntie Pu, the one who had moved across the lotus pond, was pulling weeds from the cabbage row. Behind her, on the far side of a stone retainer wall, Liu Peng could see the ruins of a restaurant built beside the fields but never opened. She straightened, one hand on her hip, and called out to them.

“Where are you two going?”

“Hi Auntie Pu,” Douzi’s voice rang out. “We’re going to get a bowl of noodles!”

“Ah,” Auntie Pu grunted in reply. She turned back to her work.

“Are those bean sprouts behind those cabbages?” Douzi asked.

“Yep,” Auntie said, shielding her eyes from the sun. “If we don’t grab ‘em now, they’ll get hard and bitter.”

She eyed the two young people up.

“Douzi,” she said. “I heard your mom made a decision.”

“She did,” Douzi answered. “We’re moving to Chongqing to be closer to my Gramma.”

“Chongqing,” Auntie exclaimed. “Well then what are you two

going to do?”

“We’ll be fine,” Douzi said, squeezing Liu Peng’s hand. “Ah Peng will come and visit!”

“It’s so far…” Auntie Pu said, her voice trailing off.

Liu Peng almost staggered across the field to fall into Auntie Pu’s rough brown arms and sob, but Douzi tugged on his hand and pulled him along the path.

“Well, see you later, Auntie,” she said. “Off to get noodles!”

They reached the tiny footbridge at the end of the open path, where ten thousand mosquitoes hovered and buzzed. They ducked their heads and ran across, swatting at the mosquitoes and laughing. Liu Peng, surprised he could still laugh, looked down and saw the creek water was neon blue. He knew it came from some chemical factory upstream, but he had never figured out what exactly was happening there. Every so often the water just turned bright blue for a day.

“Hey,” he said, letting go of her hand. “Let me take a picture of you by the bridge.”

“By the blue water?” she asked, frowning.

“Yeah, it looks neat,” he said, pulling out his cell phone and flipping it open.

“I mean…it’s pollution, Ah Peng.”

“Whatever.” He held the phone up and framed her face in the blurry square.“Just smile.”

“Fine.”

Douzi grinned and flashed a peace sign. They both huddled around the phone and inspected the photo.

“The background is completely white,” Douzi said.

“Yeah, but you can see your face pretty clearly.”

“No, you can’t.”

“I mean, I know it’s you,” Liu Peng said.

“Yeah, but will you be able to say that in five years?” she retorted.

Liu Peng looked down at the picture on his phone.

“I should think so,” he muttered.

Douzi pulled him along, past the neon creek and onto the blacktop road. City folk were waiting at the bus stop beside bags of locally bought flowers, fanning themselves and checking their watches. The noodle shop was just ahead. Two men sat at a table there, each digging

into the steaming bowl in front of them. Sister Du noticed them coming down the street. She waved and turned back into the kitchen.

The powerful glare of the sun turned the shadows as sharp as knives. All thoughts burned away, and Liu Peng could think only of how to get beneath an umbrella at one of those tables. Yet even as they scuttled across the softening blacktop, Liu Peng reminded himself that this was part of the memory. Remember this heat, it will help bring it all back. Remember how slippery her hand was as she slipped away into her seat on the street side of the table.

Sister Du brought them two cups of tea and a plate of boiled peanuts, and they ordered two bowls of cold noodles. Douzi took a sip of her tea and unsheathed her chopsticks.

“How’s your mom?” she asked, snatching up a peanut.

What could he say about his mother that wouldn’t have him collapse even further into despair? Should he tell Douzi how his mother beat her chest in anguish and cried by their door every night? How she made Liu Peng memorize their family tree all the way back to the first Hakka clans who migrated here more than five hundred years ago? How his parents fretted over the fate of their ancestors’ graves behind the lotus pond? His father tried to keep their spirits up with stories about Liu family ancestors who had been scattered to the winds before, only to find a home again, and he reassured the family they’d do the same. We won’t be cut off from our roots, his father promised, because our roots extend to everywhere in Sichuan, we Hakka can survive anywhere. But I don’t want to survive anywhere, his mother cried, I want to die here. And to that Liu Peng and his father could only hang their heads in shame.

“She’s not good,” he managed.

“Has she made a decision about where to move yet?”

“Not yet,” Liu Peng admitted. “They’re thinking of Longcuan, but maybe Luodai. Depends on work, really.”

“Well, I hope they choose Longcuan,” Douzi said. “That way at least they’ll be closer to you. You’re still going to Sichuan University, right?”

“Yeah,” Liu Peng said. “How about you, are you still…”

“Of course not, silly,” she cut him off. “I’ll probably head to Chongqing Normal, or maybe the Teachers’ College.”

Chongqing Normal had a nationwide reputation for having pretty girls with low test scores. They said BMWs hung out by every gate, waiting to pick them up. Liu Peng couldn’t bear to think about it. He felt gas building up in his belly.

The noodles arrived. They were thickly cut and covered in sweet red sauce, green onions, and peanuts. Liu Peng hesitated before mixing the bowl; it looked like a painting he didn’t want to destroy. Douzi was already digging in, methodically covering the noodles in sauce and digging up chunks of meat and flavor from the bottom of the bowl.

“I saw your mother crying by the door the other day,” Douzi said through a mouthful of noodles.

Liu Peng nodded.

“Your family’s been here forever.”

“A bunch of generations,” he shrugged. “The Lius were one of the first Hakka clans to leave Fujian and travel to Sichuan. There’s Lius all over Sichuan.”

“All over China, you mean.”

They both snickered. He felt her gaze on him as he slurped noodles.

“Ah Peng,” she finally exclaimed. “You’re so quiet about it all! Doesn’t it bother you that your home is about to be torn down, that your mother sobs in her yard, and your ancestors are going to be crushed by twenty stories of concrete? You never have anything to say!”

“I’m here, aren’t I?” he shot back.

“What’s that supposed to mean? And besides, you came back for me, not for them!”

“I came back for you both!”

Douzi rolled her eyes, grinding Liu Peng’s already broken heart into dust.

“I just wish you’d get angry about something,” she whispered. “Show some passion. You’re so even-keeled all the time, it drives me nuts.”

“Douzi,” he said, in the quiet voice before the tears. “If anyone is nonchalant here it is you. Don’t play dumb. If you move to Chongqing, the most we can expect is a visit or two before you break up with me—” he spoke over her when she went to interrupt him— “If you think none of this bothers me, then you must not know me at all, even

after all these years. Everything about this bothers me. The devastation up north, all the dead bodies, the Party just wiping our home off the map without thinking, my mother unable to eat, my dad out of a job…you…you laughing and happy and pretending like Chongqing is a solution. Pretending like you don’t know the only thing in the world I can think about is you.”

Liu Peng was shaking. Douzi looked down at her bowl. In the silence, Liu Peng’s mind wandered. He saw mahjong tables by the village store, lit up from above by a single light bulb. He saw his mother talking quietly with one of his aunties. His father playing cards and smoking; shirtless Uncle Liu telling everyone who would listen about the cigarette factory and how little they paid. He saw the grannies in the fields with their granddaughters, pouring water onto the roses. Another Uncle Liu, the rose farmer, laughing and showing missing teeth and smelling of rice wine. He heard skinny village dogs baying at a stranger in the middle of the night and the nasally whine of the cabbage-hawker as he rumbled through the village on his open-faced tractor at dawn. And at every turn Douzi, just ahead of him, looking back and smiling.

“I want to marry you,” he whispered. “I want you to marry me.”

“Stop it,” Douzi said quickly. “I love you Ah Peng, I really do, but I don’t want to get married right now. I already told you that. I don’t want to stay here in this village and be somebody’s wife. That’s not for me.”

“But I’m going to Chengdu,” he whispered. “And I’ll get rich for you. I promise.”

She reached across the table to touch his hand. Liu Peng looked at their fingers entwined, his brown and soft, hers thin and white.

“Ah Peng, come visit me in Chongqing, okay? Every chance you get.” She locked eyes with him. “I’ll come visit you, too. I promise!”

“Sure, until you...”

“Until I what?”

“I mean…” he stuttered. “Until you…”

“Until I meet a rich man who drives a BMW and I marry him and never speak to you again? Stop being an idiot. We grew up together, Ah Peng, and I love you. I have no idea what the future holds, but I do know that you will always be in my life. Just because the whole world is falling apart doesn’t mean we have to fall apart too.”

Douzi irritably brushed her hair out of her eyes.

“You better come visit me for the National Day holiday,” she said. “Or I’ll never speak to you again.”

She imperiously stuffed a wad of noodles into her mouth and slurped. The end of one noodle shot up and hit her in the face. She hissed and wiped her face with a napkin. There was still one red spot on her nose, and another on the lens of her glasses.

“Stop gawking at me and eat,” she cried with her mouth still full.

Liu Peng nodded obediently, swirled the noodles into a dripping red ball, and then shoved them into his mouth. He grunted in approval at the sweet meaty goodness and the satisfying crunch of peanuts and green onions.

Douzi washed down her noodles with a gulp of tea.

The men at the other table lit up cigarettes.

A village dog barked madly in the distance.

The sun reached beneath the umbrella to tickle the back of his neck again. Above him a cloud swirled, a lazy breeze blew, and the two of them slurped and smacked their lips. Time stuttered, and Liu Peng felt a forever moment pass, and then another.

And another.

Alter Egos

acrylic and oil on canvas

Tomislav Šilipetar

Filed and Forgotten

Katarina Behrmann

Patrick was a curious boy in both meanings of the word—inquisitive and strange. At the age of newly walking and talking he followed a rabbit well past their property line toward the marshy area that adjoined his parents’ land. He wanted to see where this rabbit lived, how it lived, and who it lived with. It wasn’t until he heard his mother’s desperate screams for him that he realized he had gone too far. This curiosity would continue to duel itself as his greatest characteristic and the one which most endangered him.

Others around Patrick always took note of this strange absentminded behavior. A boy who wanted to know everything so sincerely but would only walk away with pieces of the stories he sought after. Persisting in knowing each detail of the bedtime stories he was read at night, he would wake up the next morning missing an intricate detail. Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother ceased to exist in his recall of the classic. Or asking strange questions like who is Gretel? As if there was ever a time that you would hear about a Hansel without a Gretel. And Cinderella in his mind never made it to the ball. She was still in her own little corner, in her own little chair. It wasn’t like he rewrote the stories he was told. There were just chunks of them missing.

Sleep visited Patrick night after night, and that’s when the real work started. The clerks in his brain awoke as he lay dreaming. It was time for them to clock in for their shifts. So they could begin filing his memories.

You see, there are three categories memories go under: Short and long term are the most well-known. But there is one category, a sorting place that mirrors its name, spoken of with an indistinguishable fear that can’t be easily identified. This place is known as The Forgotten. Files that fall into this ill fate are wiped clean to create space for new memories. This isn’t voluntary—it is necessary. Perhaps it would be last Tuesday’s breakfast or your childhood neighbor’s dog. None of that would matter because once it was moved into The Forgotten, it was gone.

Unfortunately for Patrick’s case, he had one too many clerks assigned to his brain. A gross oversight by the foreman in charge. The foreman was new to the job and it was his first time assigning clerks to a brain. His assignment was simple: the average human has exactly 486 clerks operating in their head. Therefore each of the memory departments should employ 162 clerks. However, The Forgotten department in Patrick’s head had 163. This inaccuracy would cause more and more of these memories to disappear. Core memories that weren’t supposed to disappear.

These memory lapses became more apparent during grade school. A teacher explained that Patrick had come to class every day this week asking the same question. She dismissed it at first, thinking it was some sort of joke due to the hushed giggles and sneers of his classmates. But the musing of the other students soon faded into unsettlement, and with Patrick’s curious eyes still looking to be answered by her, she realized this wasn’t a practical joke. He truly wanted to know if mammals could breathe underwater for the eleventh time.

In those adolescent years, doctors seemed to think Patrick had a learning disability that was hindering him from retaining information. They weren’t wrong. This extra filing clerk was hindering him from learning. But no matter what medication they prescribed, it never seemed to fix these lapses.

It wasn’t until high school that those closest to Patrick realized something more was going on with his brain. Claire, the girl who shared her lunch with Patrick in the fourth grade when he forgot his, was a longtime companion. Truly his only companion. She didn’t mind his forgetfulness because he was kind. Claire was bullied for too many reasons. Reasons that truly shouldn’t matter unless you were a bunch of insecure grade schoolers. But with Patrick, he was sweet even when he was being teased. Almost like his curiosity wanted to understand the jokes that were being made about him so sincerely that he wasn’t even hurt by them. They easily became a pair and throughout the years were inseparable.

It was Claire who first noticed the extent of the wide array of missing information that seemed to be disappearing. She began documenting it in a small purple journal, with a list titled Things Patches Forgot. One unremarkable lunch period during year nine, they were

sprawled out at their usual spot, a bench outside the old auditorium. That was when she noticed something truly unusual.

The two of them were both fans of superheroes, and they had created a few characters of their own that they would bring to life in hand-drawn comics.

“Oh! I know, then Professor Thalmor can call a ‘meeting of the minds,’ that’s how we can get them all to the museum!” Claire explained while sitting on the ground in front of the bench, hunched over a drawing.

“Yeah! I like that! But who’s Professor Thalmor?” Patrick asked. Claire’s head snapped up; she had been gauging that inquisitive face for years. It was pure, like a spark deep in his eyes. He really just wanted to know. It was at that moment Claire knew this wasn’t one of the countless doctors’ diagnoses that Patrick had received. It couldn’t be. It wasn’t about his ability to comprehend. It was his memories! Professor Thalmor was the first superhero they had ever created. It was Patrick’s superhero, hands down his favorite! He wrote a fourpage origin story for him in sixth grade. He created him, and now he no longer recognized him. This wasn’t the first long-term memory to get accidentally placed into The Forgotten. But it was the first time someone noticed.

Now, one wouldn’t think having an extra filing clerk in your brain would be such a big deal. After all, we have hundreds. The memories that are sorted into The Forgotten are very meticulously chosen by your foreman. So as each clerk clocks in for their shift, they press the release button for the file they are sorting. But every night the clerk who doesn’t belong presses the release button, and the foreman, not having prepared for this oversight, chooses a memory at random. One extra memory a night, 365 days a year for Patrick’s life thus far… Well, let’s just say he was accumulating massive amounts of missing information. Information that could be relearned during waking hours, but as soon as his eyes gave into that night’s sleep, they would be wiped clean again. By year eleven, Claire had documented enough evidence that she decided to present it to Patrick’s parents. She had categorized memories that would be considered short and long-term. Also noting the dates that he had known something that seemed to be gone now.

Patrick’s parents were a bit unsure how to digest this precocious

teenage girl presenting her graphs and data in their living room. Nevertheless, they were grateful to have someone in their son’s life who cared so greatly for him. They agreed that perhaps it wasn’t an issue with him retaining or learning new information but rather him forgetting it.

The rest of the school year’s weekends were spent with Patrick in and out of doctors’ offices and clinics performing various tests and studies. Claire would often tag along, and she continued to track Patrick’s lost memories. One weekend they kept him overnight to track his sleeping patterns. The results were inconclusive. Although there was a little extra brain stimulation during his REM cycle of sleep, it wasn’t significant enough to be considered abnormal.

This meddling of his mind also seemed to be taking a toll on Patrick. That curiosity that was so endeared by Claire and others seemed to be putting him in dangerous situations. First was the countless money he would give away to a man outside the corner store. It was easy to take advantage of him in this way, with phrases as simple as “You promised me yesterday you would…or don’t you remember?” Patrick was so used to being told he had forgotten something he wouldn’t even bother to question.

More serious situations would include him losing his way home from the movies, leaving the stove on at home, and getting in a car with a group of strangers.

By graduation, the doctors had ruled out everything from amnesia to early-onset dementia and so much in between. It was a bittersweet walk across the stage as Claire collected her diploma. Looking up to the crowd to see Patrick cheering loudly for her, rather than sitting with the rest of the class below. And by the end of summer, Claire was packing for college as Patrick’s family had decided he wouldn’t be returning to repeat his senior year and that homeschooling would be a better option.

The two friends sat on a familiar swing set found in the park equal distance between their houses. The early August air dampened their skin while they lazily rocked back and forth.

“I think it has something to do with when you’re asleep. Like, I’ve seen a direct correlation between knowing one day and then the very next it’s gone,” Claire said, thinking out loud.

“Yeah maybe, who knows,” Patrick agreed.

“Do you want to stay over this weekend? I figured we could conduct our own study.” She looked at Patrick, already knowing his answer would be yes.

That weekend Claire had big plans. The first being no sleep. They would stay up for forty-eight hours straight. She would track to see if there were any missing memories throughout those two days. Furthermore, she would revisit things that he had forgotten and reteach him about those memories. For example, Professor Thalmor, their very own superhero. She spent the whole first day revisiting that character with him. Also, other big things that had seemed to have gone missing over the years. Every ten hours she would bring up the Professor and a few other random things they had gone over to see if he remembered them. And he did! His knowledge of them only dated back to Friday evening when he first came over for the “no sleep” over. But they were intact—all weekend! Sunday night they said goodbye, completely burnt out from caffeine-induced insomnia.

The clerks in Patrick’s brain stood uneasy that weekend. They had never gone forty-eight hours without work. As they all stood, files in hand, waiting for their shift to start, the foreman noticed something odd. With equal clerks assigned to each department, The Forgotten appeared to have one extra. He instantly started to think about the one random memory he would pull night after night…but quickly dismissed the thought. It was an unheard-of miscalculation. One that he was surely not to question, as it was truly an honor to be assigned as a foreman. So even though it was unusual looking around at the sea of employees, knowing someone may not belong, that wasn’t for him to decide. He was to assign the files, and the clerks were to complete the tasks they were given until the assignment was complete. Deceased.

As soon as Claire awoke Monday morning she reached for her phone. Patrick’s parents answered. She politely asked if they could wake him up so they could talk.

“Hello?” a groggy Patrick exhaled.

“Patches, do you remember Professor Thalmor?!” Claire spat out.

“Who?” Confusion settled in as he wiped his sleep-filled eyes. Claire held the phone to her chest and cried. It wasn’t fair. Why did she have to remember when he couldn’t? She was angry. Her whole life

was attached to someone who was disappearing. Someone with whom she couldn’t create anything new, let alone visit the past.

“Hello?” Patrick said over the muffled phone.

“Nothing, never mind. Go back to bed. We can talk later.” She hung up.

Two weeks later Claire was settled into her dormitory with her brand new roommate, Elise. They were both studying psychology, and they became fast friends. Claire’s new friend. Her second friend ever, and it wasn’t her last. She did exceedingly well in her department, and by the end of year one, she was transferring to Tipletons University, in the School of Sleep Medicine.

She made more friends and more memories. She fell in love and fell out of love. She got a job and got promoted. Doing all this while never forgetting.

Her most honored work was a thesis she wrote that got her recognized in the academic community and furthered her path to graduate school. It was an essay about Patrick, of course. A study looking further into how our brains sort our memories after we’ve fallen asleep titled The Endocrine of Darkness.

In the past four years, Claire had returned home and visited Patrick a handful of times. Each time seeing his memory loss progress worse and worse. This time she sat in her car waiting to go in. The nostalgia nauseated her. Her parents were moving. Selling her childhood home. They had spent the weekend clearing and sorting their own physical representations of memories.

Claire’s hands gently ran over the cover of her old purple journal as she sat in her car outside of Patrick’s house. The first page was marked Things Patches Forgot . Everything that had happened in her life had been a direct reflection of loving him. Most of those things had been great. After a deep inhale, she stuffed the journal in her bag and walked to his front door. Ringing the doorbell, instantly his parents adorned her with hugs. Speaking over each other, congratulating and welcoming her. Looking past them, she saw Patrick’s legs running down the stairs. A sight she had seen so many times it was burnt into her mind’s eye. His parents’ chattering fell off as the two friends met in the middle family room.

“Hi! I’m…I’m…” Patrick smiled while he searched his mind

for who he was.

Claire pulled him in for a hug. Her eyes fluttered back tears. She always expected her file to go missing from his memory one day, but she hadn’t considered him losing himself. She held him tighter, and he returned the favor.

“Patrick. You’re Patrick,” she whispered. That hug lasted as long as she needed, and he would never be the first to let go.

The

Dance collage

Howie Good

My collages are made the old-fashioned way—with paper, scissors or razor, and glue. They are intended as a counterweight and rebuke to the colonization of culture by algorithms, AI, and other technological tools and corporate techniques. They are also meant to provoke an authentic response in viewers by combining images in a way that upends old habits of seeing. Lastly, the collages often represent a moment or episode in a story whose ultimate meaning remains an intriguing mystery.

Yacht Rock 101

Langston Prince

Chord, though only nineteen and a first-year in college, was, as far as any cardiologist might say, in love. With a girl named Jude. As many college romances begin, they were in the same Yacht Rock 101 class. On the first day of class, the day he fell head over heels for her, the teacher made everyone do an icebreaker. The students were supposed to go around in a circle and say their name and their favorite Steely Dan song. Simple, easy, and effective, and yet Chord dreaded participating—his classmates had only just seen him; now they had to hear his voice? His parents had taught him that social interactions like this were like surgery—they should be taken slowly and carefully.

Jude was sitting to the right of Chord and was going before him. She seemed excited to introduce herself, which frightened him. She said, “My name is Judith Pickett, but call me Jude. Like the Beatles song. In fact, just go Hey Jude if you need me!” Then she paused, expecting laughter. None came. Chord felt a twang of guilt as her hazel eyes passed over him, daring him to let out even a chuckle, but he was set in his ways. He’d found the joke quite humorous, but laughing at a joke on the first day of class was so unbecoming and forward that Chord had ruled it out entirely. This wasn’t high school in California—he was at a premier liberal arts college in Massachusetts! You couldn’t do things as silly as laughing at a joke on the first day of class here. But Jude was beautiful, and her joke had been funny. To make it up to her, he moved his laugh schedule up. Instead of waiting until the eighth class, he’d start laughing at jokes he found funny in the fourth class.

She continued, “You know … Like the Beatles song. Hey Jude. By the Beatles.” Again, she paused, expecting laughter. Again, there was only the painful and awkward roar of silence. “That was a joke,” she said. “Sorry.”

Then, she turned to Chord and prodded him with her elbow. Making direct eye contact, she said, “You’re next. Go.” She was blushing, embarrassment seeping off of her words, but Chord didn’t notice.

“You forgot to say your favorite Steely Dan song,” Chord

stammered. His heart felt like it was pounding out of his chest. He felt the compulsion to materialize a ring on his finger so he could propose to her with it. His mind raced, searching for an explanation: Arrhythmia? Unstable angina? Peripheral artery disease? But all the evidence pointed to something far more terrible: love.

Jude flushed an even deeper crimson and nodded. “Yes. Of course. My favorite Steely Dan song is…uh…‘Dirty Work?’” Then she turned to Chord and ordered him to quickly, please, take his turn. He did and mumbled through it, uncharacteristically forgetting the title of his favorite Steely Dan song because he was so distracted by how beautiful her long lavender hair was and by how her amber skin flushed with undertones of rose when she was embarrassed. The only thing he could think of for the rest of class was how badly he wished she loved him back.

Three months later, with their limbs tangled together between sheets on Chord’s twin XL dorm bed, Jude decided that they should ask each other questions to get to know each other better. Chord was skeptical. In the month they’d been having sex, Jude had never asked nor answered an even vaguely personal question. But since she was offering, he decided to throw caution to the wind. Chord asked, “Do you remember how we met?”

Jude made little attempt to hide the blank expression from her face. It took her twenty-seven long seconds before she recalled enough to begin stumbling through an answer. “Well,” she said, “first, we matched on Tinder. But neither of us messaged first, so…we didn’t message at all.” She glanced to Chord to confirm this was correct, and he nodded. “Then,” she continued, “like…a week later, we matched on Bumble. And I really meant to message you, I did, but I had essays, and I was so busy…” Chord could tell she was lying. To entertain himself for the three minutes she spent making excuses as to why she didn’t message him, he translated her lies into Swedish and imagined it was the Swedish Chef. It was mildly funny and almost distracted him from the bubbling hurt that came from being lied to by the only person he’d ever loved.

Jude wasn’t sure why she was lying. In truth, she had meant to message him and just hadn’t gotten a notification. An honest and frequent mistake made by dating app users everywhere. “...and the match lapsed,” she continued. “But then we matched on Hinge, and by then, I’d seen you more in class, and I’d realized you were kind of my type.” She put extra emphasis on the “kind of.” This was also a lie. After matching on Tinder, Jude began to pay more attention to Chord in class, and she quickly realized that he was, unfortunately, very much her type. When he talked in class, she noticed his voice was pathetic, like a sickly lamb’s mewl. Whenever he wasn’t sure of something, a shaky and fearful timbre infected his tone, which sent excited shivers through Jude’s body. And worse than that, she found herself with the impulse to tie up his long blond hair into a ponytail, kiss him, and see his eyes widen. He seemed like just the diversion she needed. But she didn’t want him to know that. “And then,” she said, “you messaged first with a deeply profound confession of love.”

Now it was Chord’s turn to blush. He had, indeed, professed his undying love to Jude over Hinge DMs. Oh, the inhumanity. And then he’d immediately apologized for how rude he’d been and for any offense he’d caused. Fortunately, she ignored it and asked how his day had been.

“And then,” Jude said, very aware of and pleased with the expression Chord was making, “we went on a date. And you know…” Jude wasn’t too eager to rehash how, after dinner, they’d had sex. And then how, after a few days, she texted him asking to do it again. “So,” she asked, “I’m curious. What made you fall in love with me?”

Chord only needed zero-point-twenty-seven seconds to answer. He told her that it had been really quite simple. The first thing she did to make him fall in love with her was to order him to talk. Chord loved being told what to do—it didn’t hurt that Jude was tall, buff, and beautiful. But in general, being told what to do was easy. It asked of Chord very little; he didn’t have to think critically, he could just do and not have to decide anything for himself. It was how his parents raised him, and Freud be damned, he liked it. The second thing she did was ordering him to talk from a lower social position. Jude had embarrassed herself in front of the entire class. Not once, not twice, but three times had the class witnessed her humiliation, and she still had the gall—no,

nerve—to order him around. Doing that made her the bravest woman, nay, human , that Chord had ever known.

She looked at him for a minute, making no effort to hide her mildly disgusted grimace. Then, without a word and without breaking eye contact for more than a second, she collected her clothes, put them on, and left. This wasn’t the first nor last time she had done this. Fortunately, despite not loving Chord, she would be back. ***

Chord was determined to make loving him as easy as possible for Jude. He made sure to compliment her regularly, especially on things one didn’t usually get complimented for.

“You know,” he’d once said, “you’ve got amazing posture. It’s sexy.”

He figured that was the only way to express the totality of his love for Jude. It wasn’t just that he loved her piercing gray eyes, or her sharp jawline, or her handsome face and roguish smile. He also didn’t just love her for her sly laugh, or for the fact that she refused to go to the gym on Tuesdays, or for how, in Yacht Rock 101, she only knew Daryl Hall’s lines but never John Oates’s. He loved her for all of that and so, so much more. If he could somehow express everything he loved about Jude, and pass a camel through the eye of a needle, then she might begin to love him back.

When they were apart, Chord never bothered or even contacted Jude. She always texted first, usually out of exasperation that he hadn’t contacted her. After two months of this, she confronted him about it.

“It doesn’t make sense!” she said.

“What doesn’t make sense?” he asked.

“That I’m the one always texting you in this…this…”

“Relationship?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head, “not a relationship . We don’t have relations . We’re in a…a…” The word didn’t come, so she continued, “Whatever. The point is: you love me, I don’t love you, so why do I always have to text first?”

Chord nodded and a slow, sad smile spread across his face. His eyes went somewhere distant, thousands of miles and dozens of years

away, and he said, “Well, it’s not fair, is it? I’m already asking so much of you, I just can’t bring myself to ask for more.”

It’s cruel to love another more than they love you. It hurt Chord in ways and places he didn’t know he could hurt. It was a hurt that burrowed its way through his spine and up to his brain stem. It made his muscles feel weak and shaky—as if they’d atrophied from years of lying in a coma. It gave him a looming dread. He worried that loving Jude was the most important thing he would ever do, and she didn’t even love him back.

Sometimes, Chord felt indignant. Why should it be his lot to be cursed with unrequited love? Everyone else got to be happy with their lovers, just not him. And it wasn’t that Jude was incapable of love entirely; she just wasn’t capable of loving Chord. Chord knew that if— when—Jude found someone she could love, he would be left behind. He was not a permanent fixture; she was just waiting for someone better to come along, and then she’d be gone from Chord’s life.

Most unfair of all, six months into their situationship (the name she’d taken to calling it) Jude offhandedly remarked that she was graduating soon. Chord was stunned. It felt like he’d been hit by a truck, and it showed on his face. Jude pretended not to notice. She’d never talked about her personal life because, well, she just didn’t want to, but now she felt guilty. Chord hadn’t known she was a senior. She’d never told him, and it’s not like she’d ever introduced him to any of her friends. They didn’t even talk in class unless they were grouped together. She’d liked how impersonal the relationship was, but now she was thinking she’d kept a bit too much distance.

In a vain attempt to rectify six months of secrecy, she began to casually, carefully, and rapidly tell Chord information about her personal life. Her friends, how her thesis was going, her career plans after graduation, et cetera. He couldn’t hear any of it.

Chord had spent his entire time with Jude wanting to know more about her. She was clear that she didn’t want him to know her and vice versa. There had been a universe of Jude just out of Chord’s reach. He’d wanted to ask so many things—least of all what year she was—but it

hadn’t seemed polite. After all, she’d made it clear she didn’t want to talk about it, and it wasn’t like they were dating—they weren’t even friends. They were near strangers who had sex sometimes.

To make it up to Chord, Jude bought him an expensive signed, limited-edition vinyl pressing of Bobby Caldwell’s 1978 album, Bobby Caldwell . It was a stupid purchase that she’d made on an impulse. It cost more money than she reasonably could afford. She’d originally intended to just apologize, face-to-face. Like a normal person would. But then, for some inexplicable reason, when she thought of doing that, her heart felt like it would pound out her chest, her mind raced, and she decided to buy the vinyl instead.

After Jude graduated, she slowly began to think of Chord less and less. She settled into her new job as an investigative journalist—a far cry from her major in biology—and fell into somewhat of a routine. She was good at her job and certainly didn’t hate it but felt unchallenged and bored. So she began to take on more and more daring and adventurous stories, ranging from a drag queen’s affair with the Sultan of Brunei to an interview with a man who had taken hostages and was throwing bombs at the police. She found herself experiencing, but not particularly enjoying, success. She met many people, saw many places, and did a slew of interesting things, but none of it seemed truly surprising. It all seemed like what she was supposed to be doing. Nothing was pushing her to go out of the mold and dare to be unique. She was not, as far as any cardiologist might say, in love. With anything. And she wasn’t sure why.

She felt as though there was a spark in her life that had been extinguished. And she didn’t know why or how or when it went out, but it was out. And now she was just left with liking life instead of loving it. At night she would lie awake and trace her life, day by day, trying to figure out where it all went wrong. She became determined to find the point where she’d last felt in love. She racked her brain to think of the last time she did something that truly surprised her.

On her thirty-first birthday, while thinking of Chord for the first time in nearly eight years, she figured it out. She thought of his

untrustworthy and lopsided smile, his tall and lanky frame, and how his eyes—which were the colors of the night sky—shone in the dark. She thought of buying that Bobby Caldwell vinyl. She thought of that stupid, stupid purchase that had financially disrupted her life for nearly a year. She wondered why she’d done it. Then, she realized. In that instant, she had fallen in love with Chord. And she still was in love with him. Now she just had to find him. So, she got to doing what she did best: she investigated.

Chord spent a long time missing Jude. At night, as he lay awake thinking of her, he could almost bring himself to anger over how she’d treated him, but his fiery passions would quickly retreat, and he would return to depressed melancholy. To distract himself, he tried to imagine a world where he never fell in love with Jude. A world where he’d never taken Yacht Rock 101—or maybe just sat one or two seats to the left. A world where love hadn’t exploded into his heart and made him do so many stupid, rude, and brave things, least of all telling Jude that he loved her. A world where he could be lying awake stressing about his Swedish class instead of a woman he’d only known for nine months. He considered texting or calling Jude to explain to her how he felt, but his emotions and thoughts were too scrambled to come up with anything he felt was sufficiently coherent. So he didn’t contact her. And as days wore into weeks wore into months wore into years, Chord’s window to contact Jude disappeared. By the time he graduated with honors and a double major in yacht rock studies and statistics, Chord had mostly convinced himself he was over Jude. His parents were proud of him and glad that he decided to major in yacht rock studies. After all, it was a respectable and highly paid field with a lot of career opportunities—not like that dead-end major statistics. God forbid their son shame them by becoming a statistician. They urged him to go into academia and become a professor, because who was more respectable than a professor? Not knowing a life outside of schooling, Chord agreed and enrolled in a prestigious California graduate school to become a professor of yacht rock and statistics.

Then, at the age of twenty-three, Chord won the lottery. He’d only bought the ticket to prove how statistically unlikely it was to win the lottery to a student. At first, Chord didn’t tell anyone, but word got out. Messages from friends and family poured in. Most told him to invest his money and maybe buy a house—it would set him up for a prosperous, normal, and sensible future. Chord relented, ignoring a nagging feeling in his gut. He spent months looking for a house near his university. Finally he found one. It was a four-story brownstone with enough space to raise a family but not enough space to seem eccentric or extravagant. In a word, it was a perfectly normal and sensible house for a prosperous individual. And Chord was almost happy. But that feeling of dread just wouldn’t go away. As he was about to sign the deed, Chord suddenly realized what was wrong: he wasn’t happy. With anything. And he knew why and just what to do.

Chord ripped up the paperwork and rushed back to his apartment, where he began to pack his bags. Four days later, in a single email, he notified his friends, family, and university that he was completely abandoning his life path as they understood it. He was dropping out of university, selling most of his worldly possessions, and moving to Stockholm, Sweden. A follow-up email informed them he’d been in Sweden for a few days already, so it was too late to stop him.

In Sweden, Chord enrolled in the Stockholm Maritime Academy, the premier maritime academy in Europe. While obtaining a captain’s license and studying sailing, he befriended a number of hearty seamen, seawomen, and seapeople, who were unlike anyone he’d ever known before. After finishing his education and getting his captain’s license, Chord bought a fishing vessel and named it Gaucho . Then he called up a number of his new friends and formed a fishing collective that operated out of the Baltic Sea.

His parents were dismayed. While visiting his apartment in downtown Stockholm, after making disparaging remarks about his unorthodox interior decoration that took inspiration from surrealist painter Max Ernst, they began to insist that he’d misunderstood the point of yacht rock. Yacht rock wasn’t music for people who owned boats—much less fishing vessels that sailed the icy waters between Finland and Sweden—it was music for people who wanted to own a boat. But like, a fancy boat. A yacht . Not a fishing vessel. Yacht rock

was music for sensible, normal people who only dreamed of normally exciting things. It was music for professors of yacht rock and statistics who dreamed of owning a yacht. It wasn’t music for crazy, abnormal people who were doing abnormally exciting things. It wasn’t music for Chord.

Chord knew the point of yacht rock. He’d majored in it, damnit! Storms would come at sea. Coaxed on by cold and warm air mixing over Scandinavia, dark and ominous clouds would spew rain and lightning. Baltic waves the color of the midnight sky would crash onto the side of Gaucho , tossing the boat around, threatening to sink it. Chord would scream orders at his crew while blasting the Bobby Caldwell vinyl Jude had given him over the ship speakers if just to drown out the thunder. And while he wasn’t the one taking the orders, and captaining a ship required a shocking amount of critical thinking, and he had to do so many rude, brave, and socially awkward things every day, and he could never ever wait for the polite or proper time to say or do something important lest Gaucho and its crew sink into the Gulf of Bothnia, Chord loved his life.

When those storms would break and it was just Chord, his sailors, and “What You Wouldn’t Do For Love” drifting gently from Gaucho ’s speakers, Chord would take a deep breath. In that moment, Chord could say he truly loved his life. He loved his life more than he’d ever loved Jude. At night, drifting off to sleep, lulled by the gentle snoring of the crew and rocking of the boat, Chord no longer wondered about what could have been. For as many mistakes and blunders as he’d made, for all the pain and misery he’d experienced, Chord didn’t regret any of it because it had led him to be on Gaucho , truly happy and truly in love.

Then, one day, while Gaucho was docked for refueling in Gothenburg, Jude found Chord. She’d been searching for a year, following breadcrumbs to Sweden. As soon as she saw him, she knew: it was Chord. But he’d changed so much. His long blond hair that she’d tied into ponytails was now accompanied by a scraggly beard. His smile as he greeted her was warm and inviting. His lanky frame had filled out; he’d become muscular and broad. His doe-like eyes now had a peace

to them that recalled waves lapping at stone beaches. And worst of all, as he talked, Jude realized his voice had changed. It wasn’t a sickly, pathetic mewl anymore but instead a confident, booming symphony full of happiness and gravel.

Trying to ignore the crowd of sailors who were clearly pretending to be busy while shooting suspicious glances at her, Jude cleared her throat and said, “You seem…healthy.”

Chord smiled and Jude hated him for it. His smile still had hints of mischief in the edges of his mouth, but it didn’t seem forced anymore. He seemed content in a way she couldn’t understand. She got the feeling that he knew something she didn’t. “I am,” he said. “I’m—”

“I’m in love with you,” Jude said, cutting Chord off. Her hand shot to her mouth, trying to stop the words, but they’d already come out. Trying to make the best of a bad situation, she stared into Chord’s eyes, waiting for them to widen and for his doe-like innocence and fear to return. They didn’t. He just looked tired and somehow a decade older than he had just ten seconds previously.

The two of them sat in silence for two of the most painful minutes of Jude’s life. Finally, Chord broke the silence. “That vinyl you gave me,” he asked, “how much was it?”

“$750.”

“How much would that be worth today?”

“$750 plus inflation.”

Chord sighed and pulled out his wallet, taking out all the American dollars he had in it. “Why don’t we call it $1,000?” he asked. Jude nodded. It felt like she’d been hit by a truck, and it showed on her face. Chord shouted a few words in Swedish to his crew, and they began to line up. One by one, they exchanged Krona, Euros, and IOUs for dollars. Finally he handed a thick stack of bills to Jude and said, “There. I’m buying it from you. You can do whatever you want with that money, but I’m leaving soon, and you can’t follow me anymore.”

Jude took the money as if in a dream and counted it slowly. It was exactly $1,000. “But,” she said, her voice breaking, “I love you. And you love me. I came all this way for you. Doesn’t that mean something?”

Leaning back in his chair and looking at the sky, Chord could only think of how beautifully blue it was. “That might be true,” he said. “But I think it’s time to move on, don’t you?” He made eye contact

with Jude, and she shivered. “It’s been a long time since we’ve seen each other. We’ve both changed. And I could sit here talking about how I don’t think you actually love me, that you’ve just convinced yourself you do, but that’s all moot anyway. The bottom line is: I’m afraid I’ll get hurt.”

“No,” she said weakly, “you wouldn’t. You were good to me, and I’ll be good to you.”

“You know,” he said, “I’m not the same person who fell in love with you. I’m not the same person you think you’re in love with.”

“I do love you,” she insisted. “I really do.”

“So what?” he exclaimed.

“What?”

“I mean—what’s to be done? I’ve finally found a way to be myself, and that’s just not compatible with being with you. I’m sorry.”

Jude sat in stunned silence as the Swedish sailors began to pack up and slowly board the ship. The wind picked up, howling like a jet engine in her ear. It was barely louder than the ringing in her ears and pounding in her chest. Finally, she quietly asked, “What if we’re destined partners? What if you’re the one ?”

“Then I’m probably making a pretty big mistake,” Chord said. Then he laughed. It was loud and warm and kind, not mocking at all. It seemed he was laughing at a joke that Jude had just missed. “Yeah, it’s possible I’m really fucking up here. But I’m willing to take that chance.” He stood up and walked to his ship. Within a minute, the ship began to leave. Jude slowly stood up and began to walk, then jog, then run toward the departing vessel. She stopped at the water’s edge and stared as Gaucho inched toward the horizon. Chord waved one last time, and the Bobby Caldwell vinyl began to play over the ship’s speakers. As the music began to fade and the ship grew smaller and smaller, Jude sat on the harbor, her feet dangling over the water. When the ship disappeared from view, she was left alone with the sea and “What You Wouldn’t Do for Love” still ringing in her ears.

Groovin’ collage

Howie Good

Children’s Church yarn on canvas

Christine Williams

I enjoy using nontraditional materials in my art. My favorite materials to work with are yarn and canvas. Using yarn to create shapes and visually appealing pieces is therapeutic for me. Research has proven that art can have a direct impact on not only the creator but the viewer as well. Art has been known to help relieve stress, lower depression levels, and help to enhance critical thinking skills. I like seeing how my work excites my family and causes them to try to figure out how I created it, like it is some sort of brain puzzle. I want my work to invoke both happiness and creativity in people.

CREATIVE NONFICTION

Something More

Neha Musuwathi

Picture this: It’s the middle of July. Venue owners all over the country of India might think the chaos of handling the events of a population this size would have died down a few weeks into the Indian school year.

But thousands of immigrants fly in from across the world to celebrate weddings, birthdays, and any of the numerous Indian holidays in between.

So, the extravaganzas begin again, and with that, the average second-generation immigrant is swarmed by relatives asking every question they can possibly think of, their love and curiosity showing through in an interrogation-like questioning. But no matter how much each one tries, they will always end with the same words before wandering off to reunite with even more extended family:

“Do you like visiting India?”

My answer to this question would’ve been an immediate “not really” (and that’s just to be polite) before the summer of 2023. Lugging four heavy suitcases with me to be taken across the world was not something I felt like doing that summer. Neither was getting all that motion sickness from traveling for over forty-eight hours with the excessive layovers we had over our three flights. I had to constantly check that my flute was secured in my backpack because the commitments to joining the marching band in the fall began the summer before.

But as soon as I arrived at my grandmother’s apartment, all these familiar senses came back to me: hearing the doves flying over the rooftop of the apartment building, the spices in the kitchen floating through the thin doors, the beep of the AC remote and my brother sighing in relief now that there was a temporary chill amidst the

never-ending stream of sticky, hot, South-Indian air. Even with the endless heat and mosquito bites multiplying across my exposed skin, I knew I could always count on mouthwatering meals brought straight from the kitchen to the wooden table.

My answer might’ve changed this year just because I saw fewer lizards scampering around the windows this year.

But it was something more than that: a stark realization.

Just a few years before, during the summer of 2019, my fourthgrade self had been destined to hate my next trip to India. As carefree of an elementary schooler as I could be, I had been eagerly waiting to do a few end-of-year celebrations in the classroom.

However, my mother had booked the flight a few days before the school year had ended. So instead of getting to have the slime day my teacher promised or swing on the swings for the last time as a fourth grader, I had to run all over the house to assist my mother in stuffing the suitcases as much as I could before they went over the weight limit. Thousands of dollars are dropped by Americans traveling to a country as far away as India, so every inch of the bags was used to full capacity.

The in-flight movies were enough to keep my nausea at bay for the first few hours, but in between watching Moana for the fourth time, the nausea crept up my throat. As each layover went by, it would subside until the cabin pressure of the plane would blast at me again while boarding.

I thought I could escape the sinking feeling once my feet finally touched the solid ground of the Chennai International Airport, but the trip wasn’t over; I still was shoved into the taxicab for a seven-hour drive during broad daylight, where it was hard for my body to justify sleep (and maybe my nine-year-old ego wanted to see how long I could stay awake).

Soon enough, my eyes fluttered open to the mansion (for Indian standards) that my grandparents’ new apartment sat on top of in Madurai.

And through a child’s eyes, that trip was a nightmare. Everywhere around the apartment building left my ears ringing, as we were next to the main road, all the vehicles honking at once in their own language.

All the aunties and uncles lovingly asking about my life felt overwhelming, and my only refuge, the shawl my mom draped on herself, was usually nowhere in sight.

The garments that my grandmother had stockpiled for me were too uncomfortable to the point where I would outgrow them even before I wore them once.

The visit to the Taj Mahal, one of my dream locations, was ruined by the excessive heat and my brother’s annoying antics.

And worst of all, my brother and I ended up with heads full of lice from the flowers we pinned in our hair in an attempt to appreciate the flora that couldn’t be found back home.

I was so focused on these negatives that all the truly beautiful things about my country, my second home, were impossible to see. But the beauty revealed itself again through the blue and pink inks swirling across the page of a bullet journal.

When I returned home, I collapsed onto my bed with one of my childhood best friends (after setting the AC to the highest setting, of course), and once we started talking, everything we loved about India just tumbled out of our mouths.

She had lived in India for a year and had complained about it the whole time, as neither of us had ever actually lived in any country other than America before. However, once she moved back, suddenly all she could think about was how much she missed the true friends she had made there without realizing it.

As I sat at home, locked down during the pandemic, India was all I could think about. How had our views changed so drastically?

As my mom started searching for plane tickets for our 2023 trip, a new feeling rose within me: Excitement.

With a pink gel pen, I started drawing every object I could think of that reminded me of India. The three-blade fans, the auto-rickshaw, the language of vehicle horns, the fashion.

In blue, my mom added the mosquitos, the peaceful temple visits, and the huge banana leaf full of food we would receive at those elaborate functions.

The truth is, no country is perfect. America is looked up to as the ‘land of opportunity’, and while it certainly is one, there are some imperfections nestled in all the praise. And however much America is loved, India is not, as a developing country with the stereotypes outsiders have created. Including my younger self, a second-generation immigrant.

But India was, is, and will always be something more.

The culture: the festivities, and the joy we Indians can receive from the simplest things.

The hospitality: the sense of belonging no matter where you go.

The food: every millimeter of it coated in love.

The people: their passion driving their country forward every day.

Every country is something more. Every person is something more. And every part of an individual’s identity is something more.

I might not be able to prefer sitting on the floor like the native Indian, and I might never get used to the heat or certain Indian foods loved by everyone except me, but I think I’ll be content knowing that I feel connected to something more in my identity, that I can finally love the country that is my other half and my other home.

Two Hands

A.D. Warrick

For months before Leo’s death there was an odd sort of reminiscence. The old group chat of camp friends from high school was active for the first time in years. The first new message, from my friend Jonah, sent sometime around early January, began:

“I know y’all know Leo has been sick off and on since high school and I know y’all have love for them and I wanted to give y’all a hard update.

This past November, they received a liver transplant. It was a good thing, but their body has had a rough time adjusting and things are a bit scary right now.”

I remember my heart beating faster in my chest, suddenly heavier. I checked when I had last texted. August. Leo had cut my hair, me sitting on a barstool in their brightly colored childhood bedroom. I’d held their little dachshund, and we’d talked about my brother, Phillip, and about the boy we’d both had a crush on my first year as a camp counselor. What it had been like coming out to our families. Leo told me about being on the transplant list, and they seemed hopeful. I had brought them some edibles too, and we’d both taken half of one at some point. By the time we’d parted ways, I’d felt light and joyful, laughing as I promised to come by again soon. I’d hugged them. Probably too tight for too long.

Almost every day that January, there were updates. Surgeries Leo was having, different meds they were taking, until it got worse. Words like intubation and nonviable . The kind of words that meant I couldn’t check the group message around other people for fear that they would ask me if I was okay. It was late when the news came. Almost midnight. Cloudy and cold, low thirties. February 4. I was awake, watching television but not really. I was looking at photos of us from when we were younger, softer. I relished the ones where Leo smiled, where I could see their slightly crooked front teeth, the deep blue of their eyes. It seemed centuries ago, and it also felt like yesterday. Yesterday that we sat giggling in the camp dining hall, yesterday that we had shared a blunt

over the kitchen counter at my old apartment, reminiscing. I knew, somehow, that they were gone before I read Jonah’s latest message.

Leo is watching out the back window of the borrowed church van, bright blonde hair glinting in the sunlight, and I sit next to them. My thighs stick together against the scratchy seat fabric, and I regret wearing shorts. Maggie leans on my shoulder, napping. In the rows in front of us, the other members of our youth group—Jonah, John, Alan, Phillip, Julian, Jane Ellen, and Charlie—are variously playing on their phones, whispering to one another, or folding Starburst wrappers into a bracelet.

Julian’s dad, Zoltan (who we all just call Zee), is driving, focused on nothing but getting us safely to the condo we’re staying at for the weekend. He’s our newly inducted youth leader, even though there’s not much to lead. Mostly we just hang out and lounge by the pond after church or skip the service to cook brunch, rehashing old camp gossip and pretending to talk about God when the adults are listening. Zee’s wife Lynne, our other adult chaperone for this trip, follows the van in her car.

I am mostly content working on a friendship bracelet, sharing whatever music Leo wants to listen to through one of their headphones to tune out the annoying dubstep that Charlie has somehow managed to play over the van’s ancient speakers via aux cable. Today Leo’s phone playlist is set to all hip-hop and R&B, Kanye West and Kendrick Lamar with a little bit of Rihanna thrown in. Mom and Dad won’t let Phillip and me have phones yet; they told me I had to wait till I was sixteen. I’m only a year away from high school now, and I’m getting tired of Facebook Messaging people on the family computer. Not that I have many people to message besides the ones I’m currently with. No one at my small private school cares much about me.

Leo blows a bubble with the gum they’ve picked up at the gas station, and I watch as it grows larger and larger until it pops, crackling as they pull it back into their mouth.

“How long do you think we have left?” they ask me. I shrug. I can see Zee’s eyes in the rearview mirror. I repeat the question to him.

“Almost there,” he replies. “Just a bit longer. Maybe fifteen minutes.” We are on our way to Julian’s family condo close to Greers Ferry lake and have plans to go tubing tomorrow, after watching horror movies tonight and scaring ourselves half to death over cheap pizza.

“What do you want to do first when we get there?” I ask Leo, after a moment. They have turned back to watching the soybean fields whiz by on the highway.

“It’s still warm enough to swim,” they say. It is early fall, maybe September, but in Arkansas, early fall is still in the eighties. Still warm enough to enjoy ourselves before the first little cold spell hits in early October. I nod.

“Honestly a swim sounds nice,” I say. The bright afternoon sun is beginning to peek into the van windows, making it sticky and warm, especially in the long-sleeved plaid shirt I insisted on wearing to encourage the weather in its slow creep toward cooler temperatures.

“Agreed,” says Jane Ellen.

“Zee, is there a pool at the condo complex?” Leo asks.

“Yeah,” he replies. I see him nod in the rearview mirror, glancing back at us. There is a smile in his eyes.

It’s not long before we arrive and pile out of the old church van to stretch our cramped limbs. It’s comfortably warm, just warm enough.

“I’ll order some pizza,” Zee says while opening up the back so we can get our bags. “Why don’t you guys go inside and get changed for the pool? It’ll be a while before pizza gets here, I’ll just come get you.”

We all nod enthusiastically, chattering amiably as we sort out our things and follow Zee to the front of the condo. We all go silent as we reach it. The door is a dark hunter green with a brass knob. I am watching Zee turn the key in the lock when an odd sense hits me. There’s something wrong. The hair at the back of my neck prickles, and I’m still trying to place the feeling as I look to Zee. He wrinkles his nose, and I see panic in his eyes. It’s the smell. This smell is particularly strange too. Rotting meat, but not like the smell of a trash can. Different, almost…sweeter. It’s a bad smell, one I can taste in the back of my throat. Sick, in the way that makes me think of infected wounds. “What in God’s name is that stench?” Lynne says, walking up from her car. She sniffs again, taking it in. I see the bolt of panic in her

eyes too. They immediately connect with Zee’s.

“Let’s get inside,” he says, opening the door in front of us after fumbling a moment with the keys. “Wait one moment, let me get all the lights turned on.” He goes inside, clearly taking a quick look around. Fresher air hits my nostrils. Whatever the smell is, it doesn’t seem to be coming from the condo we’re staying in. Before he can usher us in, we’re pushing past him, anxious.

“There’s one bathroom down here and one on the next level!” he calls. I linger in the kitchen, pretending to grab a glass of water as everyone else runs around exploring. I am hoping to catch a piece of Lynne and Zee’s conversation as they linger by the photo of them with Julian as a baby in the entryway hall. There is something wrong here, and the adults are deciding what must be done. I want to be the first to know.

“What are we supposed to do? Lynne, you know what that smell is,” I hear Zee say

“Maybe it’s just an animal, in the walls,” replies Lynne.

“Look. Look at the mailbox, all the mail in it. And the pile of papers by the door. It’s better to make the call than not. What if…”

“Fine. You’re right. But what do we do about the kids? It will scare them. How do we handle it? What if they want to stay somewhere else? We can’t pay for a hotel. Do we just go home?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. Let’s knock on his door and call the police if there’s no answer, then we’ll figure out how to approach the kids about it.”

“Good thinking. Just take it step by step. I’ll wait for them to go swimming, and then let’s do that.”

I finish filling my water glass and scamper up the carpeted stairs to the second floor, where I saw the other girls go. Maggie, Jonah, and Leo all look at me expectantly as I approach.

“Dude. What is going on?” Maggie whispers. “Yeah, what the hell was that smell?” Jonah says. I shrug. Leo glances around, softens their voice till it’s barely audible.

“It smells like a body. Like something died.” A tingle runs up my spine, and I shiver involuntarily.

“It can’t be. There’s no way,” Maggie replies.

“I heard Zee and Lynne talking,” I interrupt. “Zee is calling the

police if the neighbor doesn’t answer the door.” There’s a knot somewhere in my chest. I knew the smell was familiar. It smelled very subtly like…like my grandfather’s coffin. At the funeral a year ago they’d gone to great lengths to cover it, but it was there, oddly, underneath all the roses on the casket and chemicals like the ones my science teacher had to preserve the frogs we dissected. It smelled like the way the hospital room had smelled when I’d gone with my dad to visit a very sick friend of his a couple years ago. Like rot. Maybe I was just making things up, though, thinking the two smells were similar. It was here, though, somehow. That same feeling of closeness to something I feared. Here in this bright, happy place with my friends.

I’ve never seen a funeral service as well-attended as Leo’s. Phillip has saved me a place between him and Maggie, who’s flown in from New York. There’s a good number of us, Leo’s youth group friends, sitting in the back row of cushioned chairs, St. Michael’s stand-in for pews. I feel as if we are waiting for the priest and acolytes to process in, but they don’t. They won’t. The priest, Elizabeth, sits up front already, close to the altar, by Leo’s family. I fidget with the program I’ve been given. There’s a picture of Leo on the front, one from just before they got bad again. Their short hair is dyed a deep burgundy, and they have their glasses on. It’s a selfie, and they are smiling, looking at me, pleased, from the blue background. They would be pleased. I can almost hear their voice. I know they would have complimented my suit, making me blush as they pretended to brush my shoulders off, laughing. They would have asked me playfully where I had gotten it, and I would have thrown back jovially, winking and posing, “Oh can’t you tell? It’s the finest thing Armani had.” There is a button missing on my jacket that I didn’t have time to sew back on, and I am nervous someone will notice. A sense of relief washes over me as I glance around the sanctuary. No coffin. I forgot to ask Jonah if Leo’s family had decided to cremate them or to have a viewing.

I didn’t go in the last months to see them. I think maybe I wanted to but couldn’t face seeing them sick, unable to speak, couldn’t face the hospital room. I wanted to live forever in that bright memory of them,

of the hand they’d placed on my cheek just before I left. The “Love you, see you soon!” I’d yelled out the car window, grinning and waving as they’d watched me go.

By the time Zee comes and gets us from the pool, our fingers have started to prune in the chlorinated water, and we are all loud, shouting and laughing. Jonah is on John’s shoulders, Phillip on Alan’s, and the rest of us are cheering them on in a very badly matched game of chicken.

“Pizza’s here!” Zee says brightly, leaning over the metal fencing. There’s a big splash as Jonah uses this distraction to her advantage, pushing Phillip off of Alan’s shoulders. She starts a whoop of victory before John dunks her, and it turns to a yelp of surprise. Phillip laughs, popping back up out of the water.

We towel off slowly, hungry but anxious about returning to the condo. It’s not very far, right across the parking lot from the pool, and we meander toward it, glancing nervously at the building as we talk, wary. Fortunately, Zee has sprayed a liberal amount of air freshener and lit a stick of the sandalwood incense Lynne likes to keep around. There’s still a trace of that smell, but it’s more like it was at my grandfather’s funeral now. Distant. We rush to change, and Zee hands us all paper plates as pizza is distributed. We chow down and crowd around the faux-leather couch and the big lazy armchair in the living room. We find comfortable conversation, picking out a movie, but I cannot help but notice that Lynne stands nervously by the entryway, every once in a while going to glance out the peephole.

“ Mothman . We should watch Mothman . We’ve already seen Paranormal Activity , and it’s not that scary,” Alan says.

“Dude. I haven’t seen Paranormal Activity, ” John replies.

“And it is, too, scary,” I add, but Jonah interrupts: “Mothman does sound more fun.”

“Alright,” John concedes, getting up to get the Mothman DVD and put it in the player.

Within minutes the movie is playing, Richard Gere’s face filling the TV screen in the darkened room. The movie seems scarier than

it normally would be. I am completely absorbed, sitting on the floor, leaning my head on Leo’s knee while they sit on the couch, squished onto the end next to Jonah. Then, there is a knock. Everyone jumps, Leo and Jane Ellen screaming, then giggling. We hush quickly though, listening. There’s a deep voice, speaking clearly.

“Did you all make the welfare call for the gentleman next door?”

“Yes,” Zee says quickly. I can hear the tension in his voice.

“We were hoping you could let us through, into your backyard. It’s connected to the condo he owns, and we want to avoid breaking down the door if we can.”

“Yeah, no problem.”

We all stare bug-eyed at the two cops who walk through in their crisp uniforms and heavy boots. As they open the sliding glass back door, I peer out behind them, watching. They jimmy the handle on the door a few feet from ours.When they finally slide it open, the stench worsens. One of them steps back, brings his elbow to his nose, making a noise of disgust.

“Jesus.” I hear his muffled mumble. I bring my head back in, quickly snapping the door shut, trying to separate myself from the smell and the death and the fear.

“Should we keep watching the movie?” I say to the others, trying to smile.

The end of the funeral is the best part. Maggie’s hand grips mine, and we sing an old camp song together, for Leo. I think they would have liked this, all of us being here together for them. We eat cupcakes and Leo’s favorite watermelon Sour Patch Kids, watching the slideshow of photos of us that Jonah and Jane Ellen collected until everyone else has left. We make plans for dinner, the bar. It is not until I shut the front door behind me at home, late, after several drinks, that I collapse. I don’t turn the lights on. Finally, the lump in my throat releases, and I let the feelings take me. Let the void where Leo is meant to be expand until I am consumed.

It is late now. Leo and I are curled up next to each other in our sleeping bags on the floor of the “girls” side of the room upstairs.

“Do you think people leave something behind? When they die,” Leo asks me.

“What do you mean?” I say, in a low whisper. “Like ghosts?”

“Sort of,” they answer. “More like, do you think they can send messages? From the beyond?”

“Maybe,” I say.

“If he could talk, what do you think he would say?”

“I don’t know,” I reply. Leo goes quiet, closing their eyes and giggling, rubbing their temples.

“Ooooh, I think I’m getting a message,” they say. I giggle too.

“What’s he saying?”

“He says… He says…” Leo cracks one eye a little, smiling at me before closing it and exhaling, pretending to re-enter their trance state.

“It’s dark in here!” We both burst out laughing. We fall silent eventually, and when the cops finally leave, Leo watches out the window right above our makeshift sleeping space as the body is wheeled out, zipped tight in a black bag balanced on a gurney.

While they climb back into their sleeping bag, I take a deep breath through my nose. The smell is still there, underneath it all, and I am still afraid. They can tell. They reach their hand out, holding mine where it lies outside my blanket. We fall asleep like that, hands staying clasped till morning. A morning where death no longer lingers and we can be children again, playing by the lake, waiting for fall to come.

A photo of Leo taken by the writer

Burned Out

Marcela Torres

I light a match, hold a tiny piece of tissue next to it, and watch it burn. I immediately throw it into the sink. I light another match; this time I press it against an unpeeled apple. I watch it slowly burn and deteriorate the skin, changing its bright green color into an ashier green. It smells. I try to watch, but it makes me feel sick. While I watch it, I think to myself, “None of them will ever go back to their original state.”

Burnout. Two different doctors confirmed it. The psychiatrist was more precise, but it also felt like something that a doctor in that line of work would say. Something I could look away from. But a gastroenterologist performed a wide number of tests over the course of nine months—blood samples before I ate, blood samples three months later—and the tube in the stomach, scraping parts of my inners, was the ultimate test. There was no bacteria. There was nothing in there wreaking havoc. No entity that had violently occupied my body and decided to reject a very valid source of happiness. My inability to enjoy food, the restriction to bland floods and very little alcohol, the burning pains inside me were caused by what the doctor called being “burned out.” I felt queasy. Why were two doctors using this word? It sounded so foreign, as in belonging to developed nations and something that happened to other people. How did these two doctors based in Mexico City catch on to such a foreign trend? I’d only seen videos of white people who had self-appointed titles such as “life coach” or a title that included the word “holistic” use it. Why were my certified, trusted doctors using a foreign word to describe my pains? As it turned out, being burned out didn’t only mean that my stomach would turn against me. It gave me what, for lack of a more precious word at the moment, I will call “overcooked spaghetti brain.” It completely impacted my ability to think. Nothing stuck, everything slipped. Everything felt fluffy and slippery. It also kept me in constant survival mode. Both alert and constantly nervous, yet an overwhelming

sadness crept in too.

Fired. For breaking capitalism’s one rule and not being productive enough. Or perhaps it was how verbal I was about my state. It didn’t matter, the result was the same. Post-pandemic employment had been nothing but a dystopian nightmare. Working late now meant overexposure to a screen. Less time commuting meant more time producing. I might never own a home, yet I’d tried to save for it. I’d also tried saving for emergencies. I wondered if being burned out constituted one. My body screamed “You idiot,” and my wallet said “Don’t even think of it.”

There’s no severance package for those who are burned. We are like the used, melted candles on top of a birthday cake. No longer needed. I was told I “didn’t deserve” what the law requires in Mexico to fire someone because of my “poor results.” Yes, of course my results weren’t great. I wanted to scream “You burned me!!” because they did, they burned me. But screaming at a screen felt surreal, and due to a combination of womanhood and my own very personal childhood trauma, anger isn’t an emotion I easily tap into.

To get what I was lawfully owed, I would have to engage in a legal process. Hire lawyers. Build a case. And I was burned out. My brain couldn’t handle it. I thought of all of those who fought many years ago to secure our labor rights. After fighting, we as a society, as a nation, as humans, were granted those. Yet, self-preservation preceded human rights.

I got a voice note from a dear friend. As she was recovering from her own very personal burnout in New York, possibly the most expensive place I can think of to be recovering from it, we’d gotten into the habit of exchanging voice notes about our journey through emotionally abusive bosses and burned-out brains. She told me that a colleague of hers at her former employment had just died. A perfectly healthy man who was overworked just stopped breathing. His heart gave in to the troubles of our current work environments. He couldn’t keep up. I cried for a stranger. For his dreams. I sat and looked at the ceiling and thought to myself that I mustn’t do that to my heart. Days later a friend of mine living in Guadalajara who had a stress-related health scare in early December shared on Instagram that a second health scare came too close this time. I felt the nausea coming up, the warm tears coming

down. I cried for him, for his wife; I cried for the stupid mortgage that was giving them access to the ultimate millennial dream yet also killing him slowly. I cried for myself. I cried for all of us overproducing, for what?

“Just rest,” said the doctor. Rest while I use my savings? I thought. “They’re for emergencies,” I confirmed. My life couldn’t be at risk for a stupid job. How did it come to this? “You need to relax” was for when I had a job. When I signed up for yoga, listened to podcasts on long walks, got self-help books, signed up for therapy, got massages, went for hikes, bought meal plan deliveries so I could save time cooking and be less stressed. Relaxing while having a job had a high price. I’d thought I was investing in my health. But that wasn’t enough, as my brain was burned out in spite of all my efforts and so-called investments.

Transferring systemic issues to the individual isn’t a new thing under our current economic system. I believe a similar thing often happens around the world’s environmental troubles. I recycle and use public transportation everywhere. Still, the world needs structural changes before any of my behavior has any significant impact on the environment. I’ve gotten the feeling that burnout and the levels of exhaustion currently shared among many should no longer be left to the individual to solve. It’s a systemic issue. A silent killer.

I thought that getting a type of employment that promised stability and security was the trade-off in exchange for my dreams of becoming a writer. But the cold, harsh reality is finally sinking in. That wasn’t the trade-off I made. The sacrifice was my health, and if I am being very honest, it is actually deeper than that. The trade-off was my fragile, tender, and unique life.

Two different doctors confirmed it. I am burned out. I feel it. My insides burn with anything outside a bland diet. And my brain can barely keep up with tasks. But savings won’t last long enough. And the little dog I rescued to keep me company is aging and starting to need the vet more often. So resting feels like indulging. The bills are starting to pile up. All I can do now is cry. I cry every night before a job interview. If tears are my soothing mechanism, all of this soothing is going to dry me out. I wonder how my gentle soul will navigate the

uncertain future with toasted brains?

I research “burnout,” and most of the advice online tiptoes around the lines of: take care, seek help, drink enough water, rest. But this is my brain. It burned out. I look at the burnt apple and piece of paper in the sink. What if a chunk of my brain is burned like this? My brain, the one that lets me think, sing, hug. Be a friend. Be myself. What if it’s in ashes and it will never come back to its original state? I’m not just a list of symptoms.

Nobody wants to collapse from looking at a screen for more than ten hours a day, taking video calls, urging others to respond “before the end of the day.” None of it is life-threatening. There’s no hungry lion chasing me, it’s a stupid email. I think of the changes needed to prevent people from burning out, and I realize that they are mostly structural, as institutions need to get involved, regulation needs to be placed, employment hours need to be revised. I think of the labor rights movements and how I opted out of my very own rights just to be able to avoid more pain. Rest and relaxation, what a luxurious concept.

the idle infatuation of idiosyncrasy

acrylic paint and pens on canvas

Marie Magnetic

It’s as if I can see the loneliness behind everyone’s eyes in our society. People are afflicted with agitation, competition, and distractions in the name of shiny plastic pieces of consumable trash. We crave connection, leisure, and a slowdown of the chaos. Maybe truth and reflection will allow us to fully love and be loved. Self-love is great, but what about community care?

My thoughts behind this piece are of capitalism, consumer culture, self-deprivation, mistreatment of others, and all of the other ills inflicting pain amongst the peoples of the world. It’s like we are crying out for freedom, but we expect someone else to save us.

what fascinates the masses

acrylic paint and pens on canvas

Marie Magnetic

We live in a world full of complicated contrasts. Everyone wants to build a legacy, but is this focus futile?

Still Standing

Kayla Blau

I was told I would be inspiring young minds, shaping our future within primary-colored walls. Instead, I am a human Kleenex for all the holes in the public education system, whittled down to one-ply. There is absolutely no money for Kleenex in public schools—only see-through toilet paper and brown paper towels that feel like tree bark—and my nose is red and crusted underneath a black mask that pulls my ears off my skull, and I cannot scream or cry as it would further traumatize the children, and so I stuff it down, below my to-do lists of calling that parent about an “incident report” concerning the small human they are molding with their own two hands, and when I look up at the clock in my classroom after completing 1/16th of my to-do list it is 7:34 p.m.

My school’s steel doors and off-white walls and metal detectors remind me of visiting a prison. Some days I feel no different than a prison guard. We keep losing kids to youth jail, to overdose, to young hands taking young lives—their own and each other’s. The first period bell won’t stop ringing, even the morning after our student’s funeral, and we keep showing up. Until we don’t. Half the staff will leave before the first vaccine rolls out.

“How can you stay?” they ask.

Because my second grade teacher believed in me and showed great interest in Ida Turkey, the beloved character I dreamed up one November day in the eighties. Because I wanted to show up for young people in that way too. Because my student sends me an email five years after they graduate thanking me for believing in them, telling me that my support kept them afloat during a rough time. Because my fellow school social worker brought me my favorite triple ginger cookies when my cat died.

Because—let’s be honest—paid summers off. Because my student tells me through teary eyes they had to move out of their auntie’s house and the shelter they moved into is “old and gross and there’s no pillows there,” and I want to scoop them up and buy their family a home until I remember I can’t afford to buy myself a home.

Because guilt settles in the crevices of my spine when I lie down before finishing the evening’s paperwork, and even still, I rise and I rise and I rise, and because of that simple fact, a child knows that to someone, they matter.

Because beneath the soot of curriculum compliance reminders and behavior referrals is a photo of me, smiling with all thirty-two teeth at graduation, so sure I would change the world. Because Hilary Swank told us so in Freedom Writers, and Robin Williams had enough pencils for all his students without a GoFundMe, and neither one of them ever had a contentious parent-teacher conference. Because the majority of teachers are white women who came up watching Dangerous Minds , and everyone wants to be a hero. Because the term “white savior complex” was coined in 2012 but was harvested in underfunded classrooms across this stolen country since schools integrated in 1954.

I am drowning in complicity. Our union told us they’d do something about all this—accountability for racist discipline, equitable resources, more funding for social workers and counselors, even a livable wage. They gave us free donuts instead.

My reminder to take antidepressants is snoozed until it’s dismissed. The pill I thought would be a magic bullet is laid to rest with its comrades in the orange bottle, and speaking of bullets, there was a safety drill today on active shooters during my planning period, so I turned on a movie during small groups and swallowed the shame of being a Bad Educator, a rusty cog in a failing system overrun with bony fingers pointing at me, a school social worker so beyond burnout I am now a pile of dried-out markers and tardy slips.

When a fifth grader brings wine to school and says they want to drink it until they fall asleep forever and I say the district needs to provide more support for this kind of thing, my boss says “we’re not a goddamn psych ward” and orders me to enroll them in special education to get extra funds for the school, and I think for a fleeting moment how nice it’d be to be in a psych ward myself, far away from my to-do lists, with nurses that never press snooze on my meds and force-feed me Big Pharma until I float above the hospital, above the classroom, until my mind turns to gauze. I swallow how concerning that desire is. It is, after all, about the children. I stagger to my feet.

I’m still standing.

Even after the news of bullets riddling bodies in classrooms throughout the country, even after pandemic closures and Zoom class failures. Even after my caseload doubled and the budget for support staff was slashed in half.

Even after the special education paperwork formed a mountain range on my desk, the fault lines ripping open when all the contained classroom staff quit on the same day. They said it was “like Lord of the Flies ” in there. My first thought was “I wish I quit first.”

There is no amount of grant money that can reinstill my hope in this godforsaken profession, so I join the troops that count down the days until midwinter break, until summer, until my pension can be unwrapped like a promise for all my good deeds. This doesn’t make me a bad person, just a sponge in a drowning world. Constructing a raft with the tree bark paper towels, plastic spork as a paddle.

Good Night collage

Howie Good

My Uncle the Hummingbird

Rachel Paz Ruggera

When my uncle overdosed on OxyContin and died, he was reincarnated as a hummingbird. I don’t mean metaphorically, as in he lives on in our daily lives every time we see a hummingbird out the window and are reminded of him. I mean a literal, physical hummingbird that hovers just to the left of the water fountain he bought us but that we never actually used until he died. It just sat gathering dust in the garage until we found it one day and were hit with this familiar pang of guilt, making us drag it out to the backyard on a Saturday morning and go through the effort of plugging it in and providing a water supply for the pump, enough guilt to put up with the continuous maintenance it needs and the terrible gurgling, grinding sound it makes when it’s low on water.

But this one hummingbird—previously my uncle, remember— is unnaturally drawn to the fountain. It just flies around the brown, algae-covered basin, buzzing all the time, flitting overhead as if further guilting me for only just now bothering to set it up.

Don’t misunderstand me, I don’t believe in any of this wishywashy, mystical stuff. I don’t think there’s anyone out there judging our souls and keeping an eye on things down here, and certainly not this whole reincarnation deal—like sending a hummingbird back to torment me about a water fountain. But even I can’t deny the facts when I see them, and this tiny bird has been right outside my window for at least nine days now, with its beady little eyes staring right at me. I haven’t told my parents yet, and not because they wouldn’t believe me. No, my mom would take it as some heavenly sign that her brother’s spirit was trying to communicate with her. She just might go out there with a net and try to catch the thing. I wouldn’t put it past her. To be honest, I don’t want to tell my parents yet because then we’d have to talk about it. And I don’t think I can take another silent dinner with the sound of forks scraping against plates devolving into my mom sobbing across the table until I have to go over and tell her it’s alright, which only makes her feel worse.

Let me set the record straight: this is how it happened.

It’s a Thursday afternoon, although later the coroner would say he probably died that Wednesday or even Tuesday. I just got out of class from the annual culture fair my school puts on, where I had to give a presentation on the Polynesian Islands over and over again to different groups of students in French, or in English if our teacher wasn’t around. At the end of the day, my grandpa picks me up from school like he always does, and we’re talking about dinner—Grandma’s making pancit and fried lumpia, and she wants me to ask if Uncle Sal will come over.

I ask why she doesn’t just call him.

“He hasn’t answered his phone in a couple days.”

Instantly, a sinking pit opens up in my stomach, but I’m too burnt out to question it. The last thing I want to worry about is my uncle holed up in his apartment, skipping work to watch cartoons and drink Red Bull. So I say nothing; I lean back into the fake leather seats of my grandpa’s car and drift in and out of sleep, thinking about all the homework I have due next week as we drive.

That day, my parents are both at the airport, flying to Toronto for one of my mom’s business trips. I would later remember calculating the time difference in my head. They should have landed by now, maybe even be in a taxi heading to their hotel. Later, my mom would tell me she was sitting at one of those cheap airport bars, watching the suitcases and waiting for my dad to get out of the bathroom. She said she looked a few seats over and saw a woman crying. She was sitting alone with her drink untouched in front of her.

We are supposed to pick up my grandma, who is undoubtedly waiting at the door of the open garage with her arms full of carefully packed Tupperware. The lumpia in a separate container so they wouldn’t get soggy. Pandesal wrapped in foil to keep them warm. Instead, my grandpa wants to check up on my uncle first. Just to see how he’s doing.

Uncle Sal usually came over to their house once or twice a week for dinner. On days when I slept over at my grandparents’ house, I’d hear him let himself in (he had his own key) and wave at me from where I sat on the couch watching Nickelodeon. He would ask me about school, my plans for the summer, my upcoming piano recital, then

quickly move into the kitchen, out of sight. It was like he was ashamed to be there. For me to see him being there. To be at his parents’ house, having them cook dinner for him, give him groceries to take home, a fifty-year-old man living alone in an apartment with his two cats. On some level, I was ashamed to see him there too. I didn’t want to see him childlike, helpless, my grandma setting a plate in front of him at the dinner table right after she set one down in front of me.

We pull into the apartment complex. After a long day at school, all I want is to close my eyes and be alone in my room. My grandpa tells me to ask my uncle to come down. I swing open the car door a little harder than necessary, groggy and cranky, the back of my hair a mess from sleeping against the headrest. I can’t say no—my grandpa never asks anything of me. And besides, I don’t want him to have to walk up all those uneven stairs.

I would always remember that: How annoyed I was. How I viewed going up to check on my uncle as an inconvenience. Like someone had to take care of him again.

I climb up to the third floor and look back at my grandpa sitting in the car. I think he’ll be going through the mail that piles up in the glove compartment or crumpling up old lottery tickets to throw out. Instead, he is just sitting there, staring straight out the windshield. The parking lot disappears from view as I approach my uncle’s door. After knocking a few times, I pull out my own set of keys. I open the door and am immediately hit with the smell of cigarettes and piss. The scent is so strong it makes my eyes tear up.

Uncle Sal’s place has always been messy, but this time it’s an obstacle course to walk from the front door to the living room. I step over boxes overflowing with hoarded books and newspapers, photos framed but never hung on the walls, empty bowls and mugs with coffee stains. I forget everything that I came there to do. The only thing I’m looking for is where that awful smell is coming from. He probably hasn’t cleaned his cats’ litter box for weeks. Somehow, none of this seems out of place. Maybe my uncle started drinking again. He might have had a bad day at work. A bad week. There are still pamphlets from treatment centers on his coffee table, the pages held together by tape instead of staples so that patients don’t use them to hurt themselves.

I step in a murky puddle on the kitchen floor and track footprints

across the tile. One of his cats darts out of the bedroom straight past me and out the door that I left swinging open. My ears are ringing, but it’s completely silent in the apartment. I just can’t find where that smell is coming from. If only I could find it, I could tell Uncle Sal about it, then he could fix it. He just has to clean the litter box. And maybe open some windows.

When I found him, he was lying face down on the hardwood floor. He was like a fallen tree. Stiff as a board. Arms and legs straight and tight against his body. I don’t remember what I did, but my grandpa said he ran upstairs because he heard me screaming. He said one of the neighbors called the police. I was always sorry that was how things turned out. My grandpa shouldn’t have had to see his son like that. They took him away and cleaned up the apartment. Neat and efficient. Like hauling away a felled tree from the middle of the road. I stayed with my cousin that night since my grandparents were busy with the police and the coroner. He took me out for ice cream. I wasn’t very hungry. As I fell asleep, I could hear them talking outside my door. Over and over again, I heard them. Like a fallen tree, they said. He was like a fallen tree.

Does it matter if this is how it happened? This is the movie that plays on repeat in my mind, assembled from bits and pieces of overheard stories. I’ve imagined it so many times now it feels like a memory. It has in some twisted way become a version of the truth.

I’m afraid of the dark again. I haven’t been afraid since I was ten and would run back to my bed as soon as I turned off the lights. I’m afraid that I’ll walk into a dark room, turn on the lights, and see someone lying dead on the floor. Usually it’s someone I love. Something about being afraid of losing people, my mom would say, trying to therapize me like one of her clients.

I see him when I close my eyes. Lying on the tile floor, face down, blood pooling in a halo around his head. Uncle Sal. Salvador. Our Savior.

I remember once we were biking down Mt. Haleakala while on a family trip, my uncle and me. The passing hills and towns were a blur as we sped straight down the middle of the road, purple windbreakers flapping against our arms, tears forming at the corners of our eyes. My

vision narrowed to only the white and yellow lines of the road. Then, I was squeezing the brakes too hard, too soon, I was flying down the mountain, scraping my hands against the asphalt as the bike was thrown from under me. Uncle Sal ran over. I could hear my parents yelling in the background. He helped me stand up. He had been right behind me. A woman saw us gathered at the side of the road and pulled over in her car. She offered to drive me the rest of the way down. I was crying though I don’t remember being in much pain. I was in shock, my breath coming in shallow bursts, the sound a little kid makes after sobbing when she’s regaining her senses. This is how I felt when he died.

I remember my uncle picking up these little crabs on the beach and keeping them in a plastic cup so he could show me later. He went down to the shore by himself while my mom nursed my scraped hands and knees after my fall. I can picture him out there, turning over rocks and sticking his fingers into tide pools, bringing back way too many shells and even a starfish—still alive—bright blue and sticking to the rocks at low tide. It slowly died over the next week, its color gradually fading into a bleached yellow-white. He couldn’t help taking it. It was beautiful.

To tell you the truth, Uncle Sal was never content. He was always on the move, always fidgeting. He was anxious, an impulsive buyer, a hoarder. He had a different pair of sunglasses for every day of the month. He had the most distinct laugh. The kind that would echo off the ceiling and bounce around the room. An eyes-squinted, cackling kind of laugh. A knee-slapping, doubled-over kind of laugh. That laugh would get him in trouble. It would also make you smile so wide you forgot why you were mad in the first place.

Uncle Sal. I know he’d find it absurd to be a hummingbird now. I bet he would much rather have come back as a Siamese cat and lounged around in a favorite sun spot all day. But we take what we can get. Because I don’t know how my mom is going to move on without something like a hummingbird to latch on to. Something so fragile and graceful, so at ease in its own body, so utterly unlike my uncle that it would be hard to believe it were true if I didn’t see it with my own eyes. The hummingbird flits by my window in a blur of jade, emerald, a splash of ruby. Its little heart beats a thousand times a minute. My

mom is outside adding water to the fountain that has almost run dry. She looks so concentrated, in her own little reverie as she fills the watering can then pours it into the stone basin. She looks up suddenly, the hummingbird hovering above her head. They stare at each other for what feels like an eternity, wings beating so fast they seem not to move at all. Then, in the next moment, he is gone. I wonder if she knows it’s him up there.

Cat and Butterflies watercolor on paper

Zoe Nikolopoulou

Black Cat watercolor on paper

Zoe Nikolopoulou

As Fall Begins 2 digital painting

Edward Michael Supranowicz

I do not believe in formal artist statements. Art should speak for itself, and the artist should maintain a respectful distance and silence. I work intuitively and compulsively, probably believing that there are archetypes that are shared among us all but amenable to being expressed in one’s own individual style.

I have been creating digital paintings and drawings for the last ten or so years. It is a good fit to my personality and nature, being able to go forward, then back, then back and forward, not having to worry about wasted canvas. And digital work allows for sharing work with more than one person rather than just one person “owning” a painting.

POETRY

America’s Child

Emalie Anne Marquez

In the world where eyes are to be like water, with hair like a cascade of golden sand and skin possessing the grace of a blooming flower, lived our tickets.

Tickets to a country where love flowed like a sacred river, building us up as if building a monument and bestowing reverence akin to a king.

Possess such tickets, and America shall adore you, we say.

But we also ask:

But what if your eyes held the depth of darkness?

But what if your hair echoed the void?

And your skin wore the hue of night?

As black as pitch, no tickets for you!

Our voices, once a song, now mocked and derided.

“America’s boy, you are not,” She says, a prideful proclamation.

The land of hope and glory, how cruel She can be!

“For you are just not worthy…go on back to where you came from!”

In the land of the free, where liberty is for all, I am not America’s child. I am Mexico’s, Asia’s, not your child.

My rights, I dare not plead against a system turned against us. Our voices, seldom heard!

Daughters and sons of darkness, seek not freedom in a land so unfair, where thriving is reserved for some, and the rest merely a stare. America, be kind.

We, too, are your children.

when they plucked luna moths from my teeth

Srishty

Sharma

and from my vessel of memories, i nitpick one of my firsts. it’s yellowed and burnt from the edges, aged with time’s singsong.

“don’t move, Luna!” mum peered into my mouth, scraping the edges of my teeth. dad pinched his nose and stuck in the pincers; his surgical gloves reeked of cough syrups we gulped on cold Christmas days, but a young Christmas is already a thousand distances away. i sniffed and felt the coin-mirror at the back of my teeth.

“there’s the moth!” mum screamed; the pincers scraped again, and the first moth flew out of my mouth. i’d never hated them; they were beautiful to feel, but i was told it wasn’t natural, that we all bred butterflies, not ugly pastel things.

“almost done!” mum cried, and i took a breath of relief; crab-pincers were removed, surgical mask ripped off, and we had one huge family hug, the kind only a festival can kick in.

but in the air of our grand celebration, i ignored my moon-moths birthing once again, at the base of my larynx, dancing against my windpipe, whispering against my throat folds, striking a chord with my heart; it’s not an infestation, it’s not unreal or ugly, that’s me, my namesake, resisting a forced metamorphosis.

and i kept chugging rubbing alcohol and tea and honey on strict parental orders thereafter; but unnatural things don’t last long, do they? like poetry buds trying to sprout on the first arrival of dayspring, even the seemingly “ugly” ones bloom,

sporting souvenirs of the root that grew and the stem that thrived, embracing selfhood and the sun’s setting rays as the papery green wings of the friendly forest moss soar above with the evening air.

Afternoon Nap Cami Rumble

A plastic horse on my office chair the weary clean of the high-chair tray lunches with a toddler I narrate to myself since no one else in the world will be here to see or care they tell me I’m doing a good job as if I have magically arrived or got some sort of motherhood badge but yeah right I’ll never be good enough so we go on the car doesn’t start and shelves need paint and the heat wears me down like the torture instruments of old still the narration continues an irrational desire to write what I know

because what I know is how long the dishwasher takes and what kind of hair ties to order and where exactly the faucet leaks they say to write what you know but I suspect they never imagined a litany as numbing and insignificant as this nobody wants to know about this

somewhere in the light

Adonis Alegre

i saw her. i saw mom.

graciously lying on a deathboat in a whitewall sea hospital and floors too.

i brought auroras, grown in a cursive portraiture—both of us were her favorites.

“the stillness of nature can penetrate the war of the mind,” said she, “so don’t worry about me,” and smiled with mild sadness; i remember her honesty.

“i’m always here and there,”

she pointed to the flowers here and trees there as well, “happy birthday.” and she slept and slept and never woke up on my sixth birthday the next day.

i miss her. i miss mom.

graciously lying on a deathbox in a woodwall sea graveyard and grasses too.

i bought auroras, grown in a bitter-curse sixteen—both of us were her memories.

“i love you too—”

said i and said more. longer. i remember her honesty. she was here all along and all alone. i breathe and breathe and realize and remember-call that it is time, truly, the right time, today, to let her go…

We fought about where to park but from here you could smell the sea and mist off the river at the same time photograph

Kay Heath

Minuet photograph

Mark Hurtubise

Solo Dance

After W.C. Williams

Betty Buchsbaum

If, on waking alone in our wide bed, pale winter light streaking your empty side, I slip into my slippers, hike up my flannel nightgown trailing on the hardwood floor, and turn unsteadily, a slow one-and-two-and . . .

If I imagine I’m swinging myself out and back as you used to swing me in the Lindy Hop, grandkids egging us on as we aged, delighted to see us kick up our heels in a young people’s dance—

If I now stumble as I slowly turn, softly sing I’m clumsy, clumsy and stiff, yet keep on twisting right and left, partnering with myself—who shall say I am not picking up our moves where we left off?

Daisies Neal Donahue

He is the mountain gardener, a man of high ideals, sower of final dreams in the high country where cool winds blow.

From a crematorium he brings ashes in small containers, mixes them with seeds, hardy wildflowers guaranteed to grow, and spreads them in sunny spots on the mountainside where they will sprout, and the souls of those departed will know they are remembered.

Splash photograph

Yusif Zadeh

This project is an exploration of the minimalism of the city. The goal of the project is to convey the originality and authenticity of the urban environment, evoking an emotional response in the viewer and to show the beauty in the smallest details.

Water

Untouched

Eric Blanchard

Upon learning my love language equals “acts of service” and yours is “physical touch,” you refused to ask me for anything— not a single favor— lest I express my affection too loudly.

You could not let yourself value my help. You would not listen, which I guess is only fair, since I am rife with trust issues and can hardly bear to be touched. I would hold you, if I could.

I would shop for groceries, do your laundry, walk the dogs, clean the house, mow the lawn.

I suppose we had a conversation breakdown because we do not share a common tongue.

Expressions of love and loyalty are lost in translation.

The End of a Sonnet

James B. Nicola

I would not sing goodbye to you again so I did not sing hi to you again nor could recall how many years it’s been since I have crooned a tune of you and sin at the very sight of you

You didn’t see me one time in the public library years back You’d lost your looks I thought The light there was fluorescent though so Last night it was soft and I thought you looked OK

Just didn’t have a lot I guess to say Not even when you said

You haven’t changed

I only notice now how deranged I feel

But I don’t think I’ll think of you once these few final lines unsung are through

Seven Days of Forever

Nikita Fishman

Monday

In your eyes, I glimpsed fear the moment the doctor spoke: You have six more days You kneeled down, caressing my face; “I’m dying,” I said. “I don’t care,” you responded.

And that’s where it all started.

Tuesday

In a quaint cafe, we shared moments today; You gently placed a coconut slice my way.

Flashing your boxy smile, I couldn’t help but notice It wasn’t as radiant as before, perhaps a hint of sadness Despite its softened light. You made my day, forever— Thank you, my love, for remembering my favorite flavor.

I have five more days

Wednesday

We went out on a date today, the air chill and crisp; My red nose, a telltale sign, you found there. Playfully, but gently poking at it, your laughter in the breeze, Teeth chattering, a symphony.

Gingerly, your scarf embraced my neck

As you slowly pushed my hair away from my face. Just as I thought things couldn’t get any better, Your hand found mine, connection ever so sweet; Underneath the winter’s cold command,

Our fingers entwined, like a promise, stand.

I have four more days

Thursday

I couldn’t meet you today; I was out ice fishing with my grandparents. Forgive me, my love, for not answering your text; lost in the moment, I forgot about the rest. I heard you asked for me when you saw my best friend— Thank you for your concern.

I have three more days

Friday

The following day, your greeting wrapped me tight; A subtle warmth crept in, rising up to my cheeks. Hands numbly at my sides, I embraced the moment, Your secure hug, time well spent— How I wish it lasted longer.

I have two more days

Saturday

I spent every second with you today; You took me to meet up with your friends. From your hangout, you left early without hesitation For a picnic together, a sweet embrace.

You looked so adorable as you arranged the feast; A playful tease drew a pout so sweet. In every moment, my heart found its beat— Thank you, my love, for making today extra special.

I have one more day

Sunday

Today was my last day—our last day; I could feel the universe whisper it to me. You held back tears, yet your eyes couldn’t deny.

“I’m sorry,” I uttered, a suffocating weight on my chest. I was time—months, days, hours, minutes, seconds— We were a ticking bomb that threatened to go off any moment. You shook your head and said, “I told you I don’t care.”

In the quiet, our silhouettes merged and swayed As I embraced this very bedroom We made countless memories inside. I clasped your hand as I let out a labored breath; “I’m tired,” I admitted. You nodded—you knew what I meant. Only God knew how much longer I wanted this to last: Your face, your voice, your smile—the last that I saw.

“I’m happy, my love,” was the last that I said. I was glad to know you—even if it wasn’t forever.

Then sleep took over me; Our story lingered, a bittersweet flame.

The Doll-Maker’s Admission

Karina Jha

I began sewing ten months after the first building

Fell, pricked myself bloody making scarlet skirts and sleeves

I wondered how many dolls it would take to stop

Looking at the birdless sky

How many times I would have to explain myself to the dead

Children in my dreams

My favorite doll has dark hair and no eyes

She stands taller than the rest

Red beads around her throat

Red drips down her dress

I play at an art that others fight for

Live a life of luxury and cry over it still

My hands will never wrap the thread right

My dolls will always stand hunched over

Their faces crisscrossed with grief

I keep that doll under my pillow and she whispers to me at night

Tells me the Great Firebird is coming to save the country that is

Not my country

I take her truth and chew it over, feel it gather

Under the tongue

Spit it onto the carpet and take the doll in my hands

Rip at her limbs and hair

Remember again where the firebird comes from

It has been one year and the sky is still on fire

The fallen buildings clog the streets and I fumble

The needle and labor over my missteps for hours

Try to fill my head with something other than guilt and fabric

The bird that used to be mine is sweeping whole cities into flames

It does not matter how many times I check the door, the dolls will not

Forget my face

A locked house will still burn

Love Tokens collage

Howie Good

Sensitive

Meche Olvera

“You’re too—” is such a mouthful como chocolate amargo y nopales crudo do you find the words that tasty? a cheap weapon so easily spoken say it and the conversation sours burning under her flesh

“You’re too—” finish that sentence I dare you undermine her foundation you’re too you’re too you’re too dismiss guilt trip trips off the tongue say it emotional / manipulation gaslit —bitch fit how you use the word is tasteless “You’re too—” fuck you I’m what ? I am free where you think—try to corner me I am in my power when I feel everything

Spoiler

Alessia Fenwick

The worst part is

After the good-looking boy rapes her on the beach

She will think to herself she always knew

One day

It would happen to her too

She will think she is luckier than others

Even though he did not listen

He paid for her drinks and called her pretty

He took her hand and spun her around the room

She is lucky really

Before he buckles his belt and takes her back to the party

She listens to the humming

The waves and the crickets and the sand

She watches the moonless stars fading up up up

Not feeling anything at all

She lies there but does not sleep

Nor does she wake

She can only dream softly

Soft like the sea in September

She dreams and when her mind is tired

She returns her body to the water

Holds her breath and everything goes

Completely still

A blissful nothingness

The embrace of a thousand hands taking her home

Learned Grief

Audra Burwell

Numbness kneaded from atrophied bones

I’m a vessel emerging from dormancy

Learning to feel for the first time

Your fingers peel the frost-wraps from my newborn heart

An organ stunted by forced compression

Spreading crippled wings

I wander canyons of frozen stars

And realize I have forgotten how to weep

Lost for so long in endless winter

Memory is an ocean stretched thin

Skin swollen with the stories I’ve carried

Lives like blisters refusing to die

I never learned how to grieve

Absences became blank spaces on the page

Black holes pinwheeling across the amygdala

Each loss, an erasure of self

Hope slipping through a cracked sky

Clouds spilling the weight of my sorrow

I am a broken body

That must swallow the shape of emptiness

You Betcha 2b

digital painting

Edward Michael Supranowicz

apple knowledge

Cordelia Hanemann

seeds are in the core of the apple molten core at the heart of the earth bubbling out of the crimson cauldron : the apple knows the secrets

please, if you love me tell me you don’t love me

free me : the bird with the crimson wing stitched into threads of the dowager’s golden kimono, shimmering like new dawn

please, if you love me tell me you don’t want to love me

the desert knows nothing of heat the siroccos in my heart the volcano knows nothing of fire the froth in my throat chokes the hourglass

please, if you love me tell me you’ll never love me a frozen smile on the image of a painted madonna whose face sheds white moon shadows like vagrant egret feathers

please, if you love me

To Myself at Twenty-Two, Driving Through Youngstown Blake Lynch

(This is a poem I’d never show you)

One day, you will forget this version of you, wearing your emotions on your sleeve like a Golden Delicious apple bursting at the skin, its juice waiting for someone’s bite.

It’s no use worrying about whether you are so hurt that you use cornfields and churches like landmarks of loss.

You don’t need a speedometer to tell you’re going nowhere. You’ve got broken promises and an empty home.

Believe it or not, you will reach a point where you don’t even want to drink beer before you are forty, when you subsist mostly on seltzer and fruit cups.

There won’t be a time when you move faster than you do now.

Someday you will be who I am tonight.

So, with the stars shining above the car roof, relax, breathe. You were the best of my days.

Head in the Clouds

Oil on linen

Annika Connor

Shadows photograph

Carolyn Watson

Themed Dossier: Insomnia

Themed Dossier

A collection of artistic pieces, written or visual, connected by a central idea

Insomnia is defined as not sleeping when you should, but it’s more than that. The thoughts that come out at night can be both profound and existential, keeping us awake when no one else is around. At this darkest hour, the moon’s secrets are unveiled and things may become surreal, no longer what they seem. Shadows morph in the corners of our eyes, stirring the imagination to run wild with intrigue. The following works arise in the dead of night when the stars are at their brightest and the mind is entranced with their beauty—or the darkness.

In the Belly of the Whale

Christina H. Felix

She has spent her time angry enough to die. Held in place by an invisible history, by gigantic ribs. She survives, insulated by sticky pink whale flesh.

In womb-like darkness, worms and krill her only sustenance, she probes organs, seeking an opening. Weary of the muffled beating, she rocks herself into uneasy sleep.

Her child will be born in the belly of this whale: without sound, paste for skin, thin-haired, all bones, undigested.

Her child will wonder who to pray to when anger is no longer enough.

Believer ink on paper

Aleco Smith

Growing up in South Mississippi and witnessing the complex viewpoints on love based in Christianity, I found peace in creating horror. Whether this is a literal personification of the familiar monster under the bed or a metaphor for surviving trauma, the intention is not only to scare but to give a new perspective.

One-and-Twenty

Paul Hostovsky

When I was fifty-one with that kind of insomnia where you wake up earlier and earlier and drink lots of coffee and write lots of poetry, my son was just nineteen with that home-from-college-for-the-summer kind of mania where you go to bed later and later and sleep until two in the afternoon. The drinking age in America was one-and-twenty.

A.E. Housman was a classical scholar who wrote lots of poetry about doomed youth in the English countryside. No use talking to a lad of nineteen about waiting two years before starting to drink, especially when he’s already started drinking in college. Housman taught at a college in London and later at a college in Cambridge. One night we passed each other—me and the lad—like two sleepless ship captains in a dark kitchen at four in the morning. I was heading for the coffee. He was heading for the toilet. I could smell the booze on his breath from across the ages. “Dad,” he said, “I can’t believe you get up this early—what time is it, anyway?”

“Son,” I said, like a refrain, “I can’t believe you are getting home this late. It’s four in the morning!” Then we both sailed silently on in our opposite directions with our opposite wakes. But a few minutes later, sipping my coffee and scratching out a line, then putting it back again, I sensed him hovering tipsily in the doorway, steeply rocking. “I love you, man,” he said, a little drunkenly. And I knew enough of love, and I knew enough of poetry, and I knew enough of sobriety to know he meant it more than he could say sober. “I love you, too, man,” I said, gave the boy a kiss, and put him to bed.

The Insomnia Sequences

Francesca Preston

Breakdown #1

I’m in a relationship that is Unhealthy.

He quotes bell hooks’s book about love to convince me to stay (Meaning: love takes work).

I’m in a rental so tiny every time I get out of bed I nearly knock myself out.

He feeds me opium poppy tea & still I do not sleep.

One day he comes in while I am not there & puts gingko leaves all over the floor.

This is his idea of a big gift. Which I have to pick up.

In order to leave him I have a breakdown. One act enables the other.

Breakdown #2

This time I’m married. To a good guy.

I wear blue & white & gold to the wedding. My stepson climbs a tree over the tables.

Months later I stop sleeping. Why? I don’t know the answer.

On the way to the hospital he picks up hitchhikers.

I can’t believe it. Hitchhikers!

Later he said, I thought it would be good to get out of your own head.

Late Intermission (My Therapist Commits Suicide)

The voice on the phone asks, Are you sitting down?

I don’t get what this means & chirp Yes! as I lower myself to the bed, perfect listener.

She tells me & I start to scream.

It’s a formulaic reaction. Punch a nose, it bleeds.

Later I find out all the details. So much for therapeutic boundaries.

But I don’t get to read the suicide note because I chose to have it sent in the mail instead of by email.

(Who wants to have a suicide note forwarded like that?)

Someone obviously came to their senses.

Clients can’t read their therapist’s jagged goodbye.

Days go by.

I try to find a new therapist. They are all wrong. I stop sleeping.

Breakdown #3

I kept having images of jumping off the roof. In my head.

I told the doctor this. I meant it, I was worried.

She smirked: It’s not very high

Today

I know almost nothing about my therapist’s life.

I bring her my dreams, like marvelous cream puffs filled with important things & we talk about them on the phone. Sometimes I am sitting in my car. Sometimes the forest.

I am always aware of how you came to me, she said once.

I don’t need to ask her how she’s doing.

Requiem for an Undead Soul

Anne Anthony At the back of the church, my sister hides in the shadow cast by the life-sized St. Joseph’s statue, the stand-in father to Christ born of Mary, and I wonder where she’s been, wonder how she heard about Daddy, and wonder if she is sober still. As she steps forward, the sunlight, filtered through the stained glass window, illuminates her. She hasn’t aged well; her translucent white skin, a gift of Irish genes, is now leathery and more wrinkled than Mama’s. Her hair, once chestnut brown, shows wide streaks of gray. Her weight, a lifelong battle to manage, is at its lowest. The bones in her wrists jut out like oversized bangle bracelets. She’s lost that glow which lit her entrance into every room.

“Where’s Mama?” Mary Pat asks, and when I point to the front pew, she hurries toward her. The heels of her cowboy boots echo in the near-empty church where we were baptized.

Today is the first time I’ve stepped inside a Catholic church in twenty years. If I try, I can recall that young girl, recently confirmed, whispering fervent prayers to serve God. The odor of incense and devotion candles brings it all back. Every Friday as an eighth grader, alongside other girls, I polished the church pews. The fragrance of lemon polish often triggers those memories. Back then, I would glance to the front of the church where the eighth-grade boys rehearsed as altar boys. Every Catholic family clung to the unlikely belief that their sons, never their daughters, would become priests. Forty years later, girls still polish pews.

That my sister and I meet again at Daddy’s funeral feels miraculous, as if his absence leaves a void wide enough to let her back in. I once tried to explain how Daddy’s laugh crippled my little girl’s heart, but my sister worshipped him as her best friend.

I’ve wasted my life figuring out what’s real and what’s not. How do I describe a man who appeared kind to everyone except me? My sister won’t recall my face-off with Daddy while standing in the garden, bees buzzing about, watching Mama clip roses.

“You know, at your age, your mother looked like you. Very beautiful.”

I held my breath, waiting for the sting.

“You’ll grow fat like her.”

That inside a compliment he wrapped an insult not only for me but for Mama crushed the coward in me. Until then, I’d lived my life following his orders and pledging my allegiance. I fired questions: Why would you say that if you loved me? You do love me, don’t you? My sister won’t recall how I demanded he answer. She won’t recall how his laugh crawled down his throat, how his lips twitched in surprise and hardened before mumbling something about me learning to take a joke. She won’t recall since she left decades before with a high school diploma in hand.

Last evening, I slept poorly, tossing together the past with the future, thinking of today as tomorrow, and what it’d bring. How my heart would skip when the rattle of loose stones struck the wet lid of Daddy’s coffin. How I’d shelter Mama from raindrops in a limo yards from his gravesite, or how my sister would bang on the car window shouting, “Mama, I love you,” until I let her in. Intoxicated by grief and not drink, her howls drained across the back seat until she was so exhausted she passed out.

As my sister walks toward our mother, I can’t know what’s to come but have hints from last night’s wake. How I nodded when told Daddy was decent, a well-loved man, and how I’d be certain to miss him. Or how Mama never wept, breaking off from others to mourn her loss, unaware she’d join him in less than two years. She ignored those crowding her, consoling her, and trying to steal unwanted embraces. Her attention was consumed by photos of the man she’d married fifty-six years before, each sliding one after the other across a screen placed next to his coffin and so vivid, so real, she spoke to him as if alive.

I trail my sister down the church aisle to sit on the other side of Mama, who now holds her hand. Her rosary beads are in the other. Both Mary Pat and Mama denied Daddy’s malicious bent, labeled it “my thing” between him and me. They shared a blindness to the harsh pinpricks I felt in his company. Their numbness numbed me.

On that last night in his hospital room, dressed in a hospital

gown and so frail, he pulled down his oxygen mask, whispered dying words—though I had no idea he was dying—about my soul. Asked me again to return to the church of my childhood. Asked me to seek forgiveness for my sins. Told me he was troubled about the state of my soul. I told him to worry about his own and walked out.

I wished him dead. Chanted it to the rhythmic swipes of the windshield wipers; rain blinded the road home. What I meant, what I wanted, what I needed was for him to stop doing what he did.

Pieces of Looking Glass collage of photographs

Beth Horton

Gothic

Sean Eaton I.

It’s midnight and the snow is falling, heavily, so I take a walk through my neighborhood and marvel at the beauty around me. The trees are blanketed on every branch, the roofs of houses cloaked in ermine.

I walk a little farther than I normally do, despite the burden of my heavy boots. Turns out, down the road is a church I never knew. It stands vigilant in the cold, drawn and quiet in the night. A wreath hangs on its front door. Next door, the gates to a cemetery stand wide open, and who am I to refuse an invitation?

The sky is light enough to read by, courtesy of all the city lights, and choke-thick with the falling snow, so I stride past the gates amid the falling flakes. Inside, I’m amazed by the wide-open spaces, a whole town’s worth of future burial plots. So ambitious, this cemetery. Headstones are scattered here and there, squatting amongst snow-buried evergreen bushes. I walk through fields and fields of white, the trees’ dark silhouettes ringing a perimeter, old snow crunching beneath my boots, and hear the whispers of the dead call to me on the wind. The dead are so lonely, and long for the heat of my body to warm them on such a night. Perhaps they could be my love, they whisper, lost among the throes of time?

I pass the tombs of richer dead, and smell the scent

of decay brush my face on the breeze. Their doors stand open to the night, inviting me to join their ranks.

The otherworldliness of the night is getting to me. I walk on to a secluded corner and find myself before an altar, with benches and standing stones memorializing the bishops of this diocese.

On my way back, beneath some branches scattered in a pile, a little light so red glows brightly, buried beneath the fallen snow. I leave it be.

I stop to read a headstone, brushing snow away, and a bony hand breaks through the soil, grabbing at my pant leg. I scream and kick it away, and flee the churchyard for the living world.

II.

I cross the street and enter a neighborhood I’ve never seen before. I walk through street on street of houses, admiring some of those I pass. That’s a nice one. Ooh, that’s a nice one too.

Outside a house, a man who is shoveling out his driveway stops to watch as I walk by.

“Hey there,” he calls. I give a wave in reply.

“It’s a cold night. Fancy coming inside for a cup of tea?”

Against my better judgment, I agree, desperate for some familiar comfort now.

I follow him up the driveway to the front door, and he insists on letting me go first.

He locks the door behind him, then guides me to the kitchen, and busies himself with preparing a special brew. We settle at the table, and he serves me a cup. Watches me drink over the rim of his own.

I’m thinking the tea tasted funny when my vision swims, my head goes dim, and I pass out.

He doesn’t know he got the dosage wrong, that I’m resistant to medication, and I wake up during.

I put up a struggle, and I have to be bludgeoned to quiet back down again. Before the dawn I disappear into a dark-colored trash bag, stored in the garage where his family isn’t allowed, and the next night I’m disposed of safely, his wife and children none the wiser. I live such a secluded life that it’s several weeks before I’m noticed missing and a search is put out. My beautiful wool peacoat, scarf, and glasses are never found, cut up and disposed of in the dump. All that is found is security footage of me leaving my building in the middle of night, for reasons unknown. A few months or maybe years after the trail has gone cold, bits of my pelvis are found in the woods, along with a finger bone and a bit of ankle. They bear marks of being sawed, are identified as mine by DNA analysis. In such a quiet state as mine, my remains make headlines, but my family is left with more questions than answers. My perpetrator is never discovered. Many questions go unanswered.

Anterior Torso Musculature

pen and ink on paper

Donald Patten

Eyes

pen and ink on paper

Donald Patten

persimmon souls at night

Sienna Morris

i. what destiny is this, to be undivine? / you asked me when we were only softly braided by the bones into the universe. / so i gripped your hand to tell you that life was like a persimmon because it was. like something softly bruising but sweet and golden-dipped—haunting yet real. / and then you laughed, and the dawn bedsheets crinkle underneath my skin and i realize i was dreaming.

ii. i can’t sleep, then, because dreams— they like the way fear tastes written on me. so i pull out a journal and try to remember the way you taught me to write about life— like a memory-blurred film: press nostalgia into paper. not erase the graphite fingerprints. keep the smear of gam jeup. tap. put the pencil down. try to sleep.

iii. you come back to me. / and you’re a time-ghost, tesselating in and out of mother earth’s wish; / i saw you and you smiled, / held your hand out and gripped mine to remind me that life was like a persimmon. / then you ghosted again. / now i tell you that it’s hard / and i’m undivine-broken-tired. you say you are too, but that the golden has only started glimmering with the skies. / that there is something more—heaven-brushed and beautiful, like a persimmon.

The Moon Is Leaving Us

Christina H. Felix

The moon drifts away from this pale blue dot, leaving us mortals dazed. Just as you fly closer to the moon, she steps an inch away, maybe more distinctively retreating further gone from Earth— we can’t stop it.

There is a real force to slow ebbing, just as there is to fireball break-apart, as there was to the collision with Earth 4.5 billion years ago, first fashioning our moon to flow hot and molten, red in the black sky.

I wonder from this dark wolf’s den of an office if your vantage point above the clouds is clearer than mine. Do you glimpse the now-yellow moon slink sideways, notwithstanding what it desires for its future, and with whom?

Galactic Lilies

acrylic on canvas

Carolyn Watson

City on the Moon

Annabelle Taghinia

Every night, I stared out the window as I lay in bed. The moon shone bright, hung fat and luminous in the dark velvet sky, dripping light over my town. I imagined maybe there was a city inside the moon, so craftily constructed and technologically advanced that our primitive tools could never reach it. It would be difficult to be found in the city on the moon. I imagined that the city was huge and bustling, filled with love and intelligence and dignified women in clusters on the streets, the kind of women who pinch children’s cheeks and hand them candy, the kind of women who would compliment somebody like me if I walked past, the kind of women who wear whatever they want whenever they want and never feel ashamed or restrained. I imagined that maybe I could become one of those women. Girls would never have to be married to strange boys in the city on the moon. Girls could find love and dream in the city on the moon. Maybe I could be free, up in the city on the moon.

I’ve always believed that the night is for dreamers. I stay up until I can’t keep my eyes open, curled up on my bed next to the window, hair splayed over cotton pillows, hands pressed to the wall, knees pressed to my chest, wonder in my eyes. I stay up and I stare at the moon. I imagine the moon is a goddess like Earth, and maybe she sends her rays of light to remind lonely girls to dream. Sometimes I stare at the stars when the moon is just the faintest crevice in the sky, and I think about how they are suns far, far away, and I think about how we’re microscopic specks of dust on a speck of dust in a great, infinite rolling nothing dotted with burning balls of gas and spinning rocks, and maybe ours is the only one with girls and marriage and tea and cotton pillows and blood and curly black hair and flowers and life, but ours isn’t the only one with a moon, and isn’t that beautiful? Maybe there are infinite moon goddesses, and maybe there are infinite dreamers. Maybe the world is larger than our brains could ever comprehend, and maybe we don’t matter in the grand scheme of things, but maybe we do.

In the end, none of that matters for me because I am not a

philosopher or a scientist or even a man. My life is simple. I am one of many daughters. I listen to my sisters complain about their husbands, and I shun my suitors, and I am just a girl. I will never be free.

The heated air off the stove curls around my wrists as I stir. Green whirls in the blue pot. My wrist cracks every other movement as the thin bones of my wrist grind against soft tissue. The chatter of the kitchen covers the noise of the stew in the pot and the cracking of my joints. I am the only one who hears them.

My sisters are gossiping again. I inhale the scent of herbs, deep and warm. I’m not the youngest, but I’ll soon be the only one unmarried. There are no husbands or sons in the kitchen. My sisters gossip in hushed, complaining tones about the men they lie with every night, and I let it wash over me. This is the song of our women, the song I grew up dancing to. Their words have raised me. Maybe that’s why I scare so easily. The chicken sizzles in the pan next to me, the one my younger sister Delara is stirring.

“…can’t even run to the marketplace…”

“…ridiculous! It’s as if he doesn’t care at all!”

“…told him that I won’t give him another son until he apologizes…”

“…daring move, but I would do the same…”

“…wants another woman! As if I am not enough for him!”

I cover the stew and leave it to simmer in its own juices on the stove, then turn to start the rice. It’s already been cooked, and I taste my mother’s careful seasoning in the white grains.

“Hey,” a sister says. I turn, one hand still on the spoon in the bowl of cooked rice.

“Yes?”

Azar, the one who spoke, has abandoned her work and turned to face me. There’s fire in her eyes.

“Mother’s been complaining about you. When are you going to settle down and marry? Men don’t like flighty girls like you.”

I turn back to the rice, duck down, and pull open a drawer to find another pot.

“Hey, answer me!”

I pull out an old silver pot and coat the bottom with water and oil. The bottle of oil is slick in my hand. As I set it down, a rivulet of

oil slips down the dark glass and pools in the crevice where my thumb meets my hand.

“I don’t want to marry,” I say. I sound stubborn and naïve even to my own ears.

“She always says that,” another sister mutters. Delara, at my side, moves closer until our elbows touch. Azar scoffs and pushes at my shoulder.

“Wisen up,” she hisses. “You can’t run forever. Your legs will begin to give out.”

“Perhaps my legs will give out when I am old enough.”

Azar reels back. She has been married for almost a decade now. She has three children. She is twenty-five. I dump the cooked rice into the bottom of the pot and turn the heat up. My mother always says my tah deeg is the best in the family. It’s always crunchy and perfectly orange when I make it, she tells me. I turn back to the blue pot and the karafs and breathe in deeply. My mother is on the other side of the kitchen. She will interfere if I get upset. She always does.

“Don’t be a brat,” Azar warns.

I want to say many things. I want to say words that will sink into her skin like guided missiles and implode in the soft fat and muscle underneath, burst blood vessels and turn her face purplish-red with a cocktail of rage and wasted potential. Azar might have been a dreamer once. I say nothing at all.

“Don’t provoke her,” my mother says, sweet soothing balm. The mother is the matriarch of the kitchen. She stands shorter than us all, with one aged hand around a ladle and another fearlessly braving the heat of the stove, measuring with nothing but years and years of experience. Every meal tastes richly of the dusty sunshine and clean laundry of our childhood. My sister Azar is a mother, too. She has never learned not to bite back.

“You can’t lie to me and say you do not want her gone, . She’s an embarrassment to the family. She’s the talk of the town. Everyone whispers about the girl who runs.” Azar craves the cool power of cruelty, but she wields it like a child who hasn’t quite grown into the length of their limbs.

“Only the shallow care about what the town murmurs after they pass by.”

My mother is lying. I know she cares. She’s far from shallow. Azar, easily defeated, turns back to her work. My mother leans in close and plants a kiss on my cheek. She smells like rose water and pressed jasmine. I feel her lipstick against my skin. It’s something pink and subtle, a little taste of freedom for an old woman. My youngest sister, Delara, reaches around me to get a saliva-slick thumb against my cheekbone. She rubs away the trace of my mother, smiles, leaves me with her spit drying sticky against my cheek. Around me, the kitchen is alive with hands, hands made strong by labor and soft by sweet-smelling products, groomed nails and expensive rings clacking against the sides of metal pots and glass bowls, stirring and chopping and pinching cheeks and bringing a strong savory smell into the air. I let the mark of my sister’s care become tacky on my cheek. I inhale. It smells like family.

There’s a little hand mirror in the bedroom I share with Delara. It’s a small oval shape, just enough to see your face in. If you prop it up and stand far enough away, you can catch a glimpse of your whole body. My family loves to pretend that I cannot hear the things the neighbors say about me when they think I’m out of earshot. They call me nasty things, scorn me, ask each other, What kind of beautiful girl runs from handsome young men? I know what I look like. I have pale skin and long eyelashes, and I am well-fed, plump, and wide-hipped under my chador. Everyone thinks I am beautiful.

Sometimes I flip through the American magazines my cousinof-a-cousin smuggles in, the ones I keep in a stack under the loose floorboard right underneath my bed. I move the dresser out of the way and pull up that floorboard and sit on the carpet in my room for what feels like hours and hours, just staring at all the American girls with their slim figures and stylish, revealing clothing. Maybe all girls dress like that in the city on the moon. I catch myself looking at my reflection in the mirror and contrasting my body with those sleek American girls, with their perfectly curled hair and tanned skin and skinny bodies, nothing hidden, just free, and then I cannot help but notice myself. My eyes are drawn to the spreading of the flesh of my thighs as I sit, the rolls of my stomach, the way my skin practically becomes fluorescent in direct sunlight. Everyone says I am beautiful—why do I run, why should I run?—but I look in the mirror as it’s propped up against the wall on top of my dresser, moved to the side, my magazines splayed

over the floors, and I don’t recognize beauty in what I see. I wonder if they would call me beautiful in the city on the moon. ***

When I was eleven-turning-twelve, in the afternoon preluding the full moon night two weeks before my birthday, the mother of my first suitor came knocking. We were all gathered in the kitchen, my sisters and I, waiting for my mother to arrive and tell us who they were there for. Ten minutes later, just as we’d all grown antsy and begun to whisper among ourselves, the platter of tea things long forgotten, my mother walked in.

“Mahnaz,” she’d said, and my heart shot so far up in my throat I felt that I could have choked on it and asphyxiated right there, right there on the kitchen floor two weeks before my twelfth birthday surrounded by my female kin with the tray of sugar cubes and tea leaves left to gather dust on the counter long into the full-moon night. Sometimes I almost wish that that had happened. Instead, I did what I’d watched my sisters do many, many times before me, and I began to boil the water for tea. My mother left the room, and my sisters followed her, each stopping to press a kiss onto my forehead or cheek or give me a hug before continuing on, leaving me alone with the pot of water on the stove. The bubbling was almost loud in the silence of the kitchen. I could hear the chatter from the living room like the distant hum of a neighbor’s too-loud television set. The water began to boil, a swift, humming shriek pouring up from the depths of its water-logged lungs, steam fizzling from its spout. I wanted to scream like that, but girls should always be quiet and polite. Instead, I ran.

I didn’t run far, the first time. I ran out the back door and past five or six neighbors’ houses, ignoring the looks and the yells, before stopping at the beginning of a long expanse of untended land. The foliage grew thick and the greenery high. I parted the grasses like I was Moses and they the Red Sea, my unruly young legs trampling and

running and burning because I’d never run quite like this before, and as the weeds scratched and tore at my chador from my ankles to my waist, I could hear the birdsong from the trees and the anger and surprise tearing up my household from five to six neighbors’ houses and a long stretch of forest away, imagined the shock and worry and the wrinkles already beginning to form between my mother’s brows, and the twigs caught on the fabric covering my curls and pulled it back, head free, hair free, free, free, free, and then I stumbled from between two trees onto the edge of a small pond like I’d been born again.

I’m not sure how long I stayed there the first time. I know that the woman had come over in the early afternoon, and I know that I stayed there until the sun set and painted the sky in watercolors, and then as the light began to fade from the earth and the curve of the moon peeked over the trees, I stood up and brushed the soil from my clothes and walked back home. The grasses parted reluctantly around my legs, the trees clawed at the ends of my sleeves as I passed, and the birds flying above called my name, but I knew I couldn’t stay. I made a promise to myself, then. I promised myself I’d always return.

Now, almost four years later, my legs are beginning to grow tired. The suitors are coming less and less. No mother wants to marry her son to a girl who runs. My mother still searches tirelessly for a man to marry me, but she’s getting older and more resigned to my fate. I watch the dark circles under her eyes stretch larger, and I hear her grow more and more impatient with me, and all I can do is wonder when she will break. Sometimes I wonder if the breaking will break me too. Sometimes I wonder if I am broken already. What kind of girl doesn’t want to marry? What kind of pretty girl doesn’t seize the first rich, handsome man who knocks upon her door? I am an embarrassment to the family, and my legs are growing tired.

It’s late at night. Maman sent me straight to bed after dinner.

“Mahnaz,” she’d said, “you are still young. One day you will grow up and grow tired and stop running. Everyone tires at some point.”

I read the truth in the deep-carved wrinkles between her eyebrows. Please , they said. You are not the only one growing tired.

The milky moonlight flowing through our window casts a silvery glow over Delara’s sleeping form. It’s a warm summer night. The blanket smothers me; I cannot sleep. I escape the confines of the bedclothes and lay my body over the bed. I close my eyes, and the look on Azar’s face floats in front of me. She wasn’t just picking a fight, I recognize that now. The exhaustion in the lines of her face matches that of our mother’s, and even mine. On the other side of the room, Delara grumbles in her sleep and rolls over. She still sleeps peacefully, her young face slack and trusting. The sight of her, so open and vulnerable in sleep, makes my stomach hurt. Suitors have started coming to our house with her name on their tongues. I hope that I marry before her. I hope that I never marry at all.

I sit up. My sister stirs but does not wake. My nightgown has ridden up my thighs. My legs, pale and soft in the moonlight, are marred with small bruises and scrapes, some fresher than others. I press three fingers into a murky purple bruise above my right knee. Now when I run from suitors, my older sisters run after me. They’re tired of waiting around for me to come back. I had tripped over the edge of a road. A rock was underneath my thigh as I fell. My sisters found me there, doubled over and breathing hard, and brought me back home. The suitor’s mother left as soon as she saw the earth smeared over my clothes and skin.

The pain from the bruise is soft, unrelenting. I press harder. There’s a stab of hurt so acute I have to breathe through it. I lie back down and let my hand fall to my side. I stare out the window at the moon. She watches me, silent. I feel her disapproval. I get up.

The stairs do not creak as I go down them. My body is taut, overaware. Nobody would wake if I left right now and never returned. The kitchen is asleep, like all of my family upstairs, quiet and shadowed and trusting. I could do anything. I could tear this room apart. I could set this house on fire, go to prison and be quietly tortured or go insane or be killed, and this would all be over. I wouldn’t have to marry. I’d live a quiet eternity of suffering forgotten in the fires of Hell. At least then I would be the only one hurt.

I slip out the back door and sink down onto the grass in the backyard. I knit my hands together and adjust the position of my knees against the firm, dew-damp ground, and I stare up at the moon. She

burns herself into my retinas, this great goddess of the night, regal and silver and shining the brightest even among all those stars. I close my eyes. I pray. And I realize, after all this time, that the Moon makes no light of her own. She only shines with the love of the Sun.

I open my eyes. I go back into the house. This time, I am silent on the stairs not out of deception but out of caring. The women of the house are tired. I let them sleep. I am too old to be selfish now. The doorknob is cool under my hand. I kiss my sleeping sister on her forehead. I tuck myself into my bed. I think maybe in the morning I’ll burn my magazines.

The sun rises, as it always does. Dependable, like the sound of my family’s feet as they whisper down the staircase to a chorus of soft creaks and loud whispers. I rise before Delara and cross the room to shake her awake, whispering her name. She opens bleary brown eyes, and I smile before I can help myself. The sun’s heat caresses my back.

“Hello,” she whispers.

“Hello,” I whisper back.

“I had a dream last night.”

Sometimes I worry Delara will become a dreamer like me.

“Really?”

Her face is soft and bears marks from the creases of her pillows.

“I dreamed you left in the middle of the night. I was scared you wouldn’t come back.”

Her eyes are wide and searching. There’s an innocence in the brown of her irises, a curiosity, pure and whole and childlike. I feel a terrible burning in the back of my throat, like karma or bile forcing its way up.

“Oh, azizam, no. I would never leave.”

“What if you get married?”

I sigh. “Then at least I’ll say goodbye.”

She sits up and slides her arms around me, tucking her soft, sleepy face between my neck and shoulder. Her breath is warm on my collarbone, warmer than the window-fractured sunbeams at my back. I feel the shape of her words against my skin as she speaks. “I don’t

want you to get married.” Her chapped lips press into the curve of my shoulder. The pads of her fingers, small and gentle like flower petals, pink and easy to destroy, press into my arms. “I don’t want you to leave. I want you to be happy, Mahnaz- joon .”

“I don’t want to leave either,” I whisper into her sleep-mussed hair. Over her shoulder, I catch my reflection in the mirror. My dark circles look more like my mother’s every day.

We walk downstairs with her clammy hand in mine, clutching onto each other, fruit to its stem, awaiting the day something comes to pull us apart and swallow me whole. After breakfast, I steal upstairs with the matchbox and push the dresser to the side and the floorboard up and the window open. Married women have no time for fantasy. I think about my mother’s weathered hands, toughened from years of caring for us. She doesn’t even feel the heat of the stove anymore. I lean out the window, and under the watchful eye of the late-morning sun, I set fire to the pages and watch beautiful girls and makeup advertisements and colorful clothing curl and flake away into black ashes. A gust of wind takes the remains from the outstretched palm of my hand and carries them out into the sky. The few residual flecks bury themselves into the cracks of the peeling-away white paint and settle. Nothing short of burning this house down could get rid of them now. I close the window and put the floorboard and the dresser back into place. I walk downstairs, kiss my mother on her cheek, and begin my chores. The swirl of the soap in the water as I dip my rag in to clean the counter tells me something will change today. I realize I should have said goodbye to the moon last night.

That afternoon, a mother comes calling. Her son wants me. They leave me alone in the kitchen with the kettle boiling and the tea leaves waiting and the sugar cubes and prettiest cups prepared. This time, when the kettle starts to scream, I silence it. The water swirls amber with the tea. I stand and stare, let time slip by as the tea turns darker and darker. It is the rich color of the rust flaking off our neighbor’s fence when I pick up the tray and bring it out. My mother’s face flickers with shock when I enter. The woman smiles at me politely. I give her a smile in return and watch out of the corner of my eye as my mother’s face blooms like a flower in the spring. I set the tray down, pour tea into each cup, and leave the room. I hope this man’s mother likes me. I

sink to the floor of the kitchen and close my eyes for a long, long time.

Two days later, my uncle appears to take me to Mashhad to meet the boy. The boy is three years older than me. He likes me. He likes my figure and the paleness of my skin and doesn’t know or doesn’t care about my past. He wants me. He’s not terribly handsome or terribly rich, but he wants me. That will have to be enough.

On the night before our wedding, we are allowed to speak alone. It’s a full moon. He tells me he wants us to live in this city. Mashhad. Big. Sprawling. More free than the countryside of my childhood. Free like the city on the moon. I am glad I told my younger sister goodbye. The night when we marry is not a full moon. None of my family is here except my uncle and his wife. She smiles at me and pinches my cheeks and tells me she’s terribly proud. I’m hopeful, but I’m scared. I’m only fifteen. I don’t know my husband. But I am not special—I am just like every other girl, and I am not allowed to do anything but look pretty and pretend. During the festivities, my cheeks are pinched by hundreds of ringed hands I do not recognize. Dozens of red mouths smile down at me. I catch a hint of pink in the crowd, and it makes my heart pound, but it is nothing, an illusion. The night is cloudy. The moon does not smile upon the consummation of our marriage.

In the morning, my husband tells me he is in school or working for practically the whole day. He tells me I am not allowed out of the house without him. He tells me he wants me to be safe and protected. He tells me I am not allowed to let other men look at me. I must spend all day in our home. There is no freedom for obedient wives.

In the night, I stare at the moon. She still radiates in the sky, this specter of my girlhood, this reminder of wet grass and tall trees. This city has not given me any of the freedom I had prayed for. All I can hope for is that when my time comes, the city on the moon welcomes me with an embrace scented with flowery perfumes and pink lipstick stains on my cheeks.

Forget Me Not acrylic, ink, and metal leaf on paper

Jennifer S. Lange

Contributors’ Notes

Adonis Alegre was born and raised in the Philippines. He graduated from Don Mariano Marcos Memorial State University where he pursued his English studies.

Anne Anthony has been published in Flash Boulevard , Flash Fiction Magazine , Five Minutes , Brilliant Flash Fiction , Longleaf Review , and elsewhere. Her microfiction, “It’s a Mother Thing,” was nominated by Cleaver Magazine for the Best Microfiction 2024 anthology. Her short story collection, A Blue Moon & Other Murmurs of the Heart , was published in 2019. She co-edited an anthology of flash fiction intended for readers experiencing memory-changes, The Collection: Flash Fiction for Flash Memory. She is a senior editor and art director for the literary journal Does It Have Pockets. Find her writing at https://linktr.ee/ anchalastudio.

Katarina Behrmann is a self-identified creative and published writer residing in Los Angeles. Some past accomplishments include having a stage play produced off-Broadway in which an excerpt was published with Progenitor Art and Literary Journal. Most recent accomplishments include a creative nonfiction piece published with GreenPrints, a blog featured on Humans of The World , and a personal essay featured on Drunk Monkeys . Head in the clouds and heart on her sleeve, Katarina continues to create.

Eric Blanchard is a lawyer, an educator, and a daydreamer. He’s a child of the past and a charter member of Generation X. His poems have been published in numerous collections, both online and in tangible form. In 2013, the online journal Literary Orphans nominated his prose poem, “The Meeting Ran Long,” for Sundress Publications’ Best of the Net anthology. Eric has published two chapbooks: The Good Parts (Finishing Line Press, January 2020) and Beware of Poet (Fort Worth Poetry Society Press, June 2022), which was the winner of the 2022 William D. Barney Memorial Chapbook Contest.

Kayla Blau (she/her) is a queer writer and facilitator based in Seattle, Washington. Her work can be found in Crosscut , The Stranger , and the South Seattle Emerald , or online at www.keepgoing.press.

Betty Buchsbaum taught and was dean at Massachusetts College of Art and Design for twenty years. Besides essays, she has published a full-length book of poems, a chapbook, and poems in three anthologies and several journals. She lives in the Boston area. Buchsbaum has three daughters, eight grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren. These poems are addressed to her husband of seventy-one years who died last winter.

Audra Burwell is a creative writing major at California State University Fresno, pursuing a Master of Fine Arts degree with a specialization in poetry. Entropia is her first full-length published work, a dystopian fantasy multimedia collaboration featuring a fashion line designed by Fastened By Lyn and photography provided by Raven & Crow.

Annika Connor is a Brooklyn-based multifaceted artist, screenwriter, and SAG-AFTRA actor who embodies the spirit of a modern Renaissance woman. She is most known for her evocative watercolor and oil paintings. Connor’s work is characterized by symbolism and vivid imagery that sparks the imagination. A passionate activist and advocate for women’s rights, Connor’s paintings serve as a visual dialogue on various topics, from political commentary to explorations of beauty and nature. Her art often delves into themes of female identity and current social issues by utilizing metaphorical imagery to provoke thought and challenge societal norms. Connor blends beauty and allegory to captivate viewers and create compelling and enigmatic narratives.

Neal Donahue grew up on Long Island, New York. He earned a degree in English at the University of Oklahoma and served five years as a U.S. Navy submarine officer. He then taught elementary school in New England, incorporating poetry into his curriculum. Neal won a countywide poetry contest in Vermont and has had a number of poems published in small journals.

Sean Eaton is an emerging self-taught poet hailing from the hills of New England. His favorite writers are Amy Clampitt and Ruth Stone. He has been published in Arboreal Magazine , Young Ravens Literary Review , and Eunoia Review

Christina H. Felix is a poet from the seacoast area of New Hampshire. Her poetry has appeared in CALYX Journal , The Antigonish Review , Sky Island Journal , The Café Review , Common Ground Review , First Traces , and Soundings East and was featured on New Hampshire Public Radio and the Rice Pudding Poetry podcast

Alessia Fenwick is a French writer currently living in London. Born and raised in Paris, she moved to the UK in 2019 and graduated with a liberal arts degree from Warwick University in summer 2023. She was first published in the Danish anthology Censur in 2022 with a collection of vignettes about her parents and childhood.

In the winter of 2020, Nikita Fishman, fueled by the companionship of her first pet hamster, Humphrey, and the world slowing down in the pandemic’s quietude, embarked on her writing journey. Since then, she’s taken pleasure in writing everyday, resulting in the completion of two novels and numerous short stories and poems—some finding their way to publication. Some of her literary influences are Elie Wiesel, Agatha Christie, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Golding, and Betty Smith.

Howie Good ’s latest book, Frowny Face , is a synergistic mix of his prose poems and handmade collages from Redhawk Publications. His previous poetry collections have won a number of poetry awards, including the Press Americana Poetry Prize. He co-edits the online journal UnLost , dedicated to found poetry.

Cordelia Hanemann, writer and botanical artist, co-hosts Summer Poets in Raleigh, NC. Active with youth poetry in NCPS, she has published in numerous journals including Atlanta Review , Laurel Review , and California Quarterly ; anthologies including best-selling Poems for the Ukraine ; and her chapbook. Her poems have been performed, featured, and nominated for Pushcarts. She is now working on a novel.

Kay Heath (@Fogwalks, Instagram) is a photographer based on the island of Newfoundland, Canada. You can find her photography in 3Elements Review and writing in various publications. “Fogwalks” began as a way to combat seasonal depression on a foggy island, a project to learn to appreciate the small and delicate beauty which exists within every season.

Beth Horton holds degrees in creative arts therapy, social science, and healthcare from Niagara University, located in the Buffalo, New York area. Her love for art began as a small child, watching her father paint into the wee hours of the morning. She currently enjoys photography, mixed-media composition, and graphite pencil sketches.

Paul Hostovsky makes his living in Boston as a sign language interpreter. His poems have won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, the FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize, and have been featured on Poetry Daily , Verse Daily , The Writer’s Almanac , and the Best American Poetry blog. His latest book of poems is Pitching for the Apostates (Kelsay, 2023).

Mark Hurtubise published numerous works during the 1970s. Then his focus shifted to family, two college presidencies, and being a community foundation CEO. After four decades, he is creating again from the Pacific Northwest like a pregnant bird on a twig. Recently, his poetry, essays, interviews, and photographs have appeared in such locales as pacificREVIEW ; Burningword ; Ink in Thirds ; Tampa Review ; december; North Dakota Quarterly ; Stanford Social Innovation Review; University of San Francisco, interview, Alum News; Aji Magazine, interview with photos; Aura , Artist Spotlight; Penumbra , Editors’ Pick; Bard College Center/Study of Hate, filmed interview; Awards: MonoVisions and Monochrome ; and Art Impact Juried International exhibition.

Karina Jha is a Ukrainian-Nepalese literary enthusiast from Northampton, Massachusetts. She holds a BA in Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College in Boston, and her work is centered around exploring themes of femininity, multi-cultural identity, and the melding of fantasy and reality. She has won multiple awards for poetry, short stories, and flash fiction, and has been published in several literary magazines and by Wilde Press from Emerson College. To see more of her work, visit ipivonia.wixsite.com/portfolio.

Jennifer S. Lange is a self-taught artist creating illustrations for books, games, posters, and worldbuilding projects using a range of media from digital 3D modeling to traditional charcoal drawing, using figurative realism in small formats. When not working on projects, her SFF work is accompanied by story snippets providing

a look beyond the frame of the image. With her interests including anthropology, transhumanism, astronomy, and fashion, both character and architectural designs astonish with their eclectic mix of less-traveled paths. Jennifer lives in northern Germany with her partner and a lot of cats.

Blake Lynch is an editor at OTR Global, survived late-stage testicular cancer, and holds a JD from the University of Pittsburgh. Making his literary debut at seventeen in Chelsea Magazine , Lynch has since been published in fifty journals, including Turk’s Head Review and Two Cities Review . His plays have been performed at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and the BBC . Lynch’s third poetry book, “Hanging the Angels,” releases May 23, 2025, through Finishing Line Press with pre-orders available at the start of 2025. Residing in Charlottesville, Virginia, with wife Jessie and daughter Charlie, Lynch is currently writing his fourth poetry collection, Shoot the Piano Player , completing his second novel, and is a routine contributor to Listverse , where he is writing a series of articles about disappearances in U.S. national parks.

As a neurodivergent artist, Marie Magnetic uses color, form, and surreal images to make sense of humanity. Pulling from her experiences as a queer, Jewish, and Indigenous woman, she uses social issues and events from the everyday to explore society and share her experiences and inner world with her audience. Marie Magnetic (b. 1989, Jackson, Michigan) is a Chicago-based visual artist and is mostly self-taught. She was awarded a Bachelor of Science in psychology from Central Michigan University in 2017, working in social services and several library roles before returning to art during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Emalie Anne Marquez is an Illinois-based writer born in Des Plaines before moving to Chicago, then Arlington Heights. Her writing draws inspiration from the journey of her upbringing, and she uses it to write raw, provocative narratives. Currently a sophomore at Buffalo Grove High School, she is still exploring her cultural identity, knowing that it is not confined to her state. She can also be found on the lacrosse field or struggling to understand chemistry.

Sascha Matuszak is a writer based in Minneapolis. He was a journalist for many years, publishing in places like VICE, Guernica, Roads and Kingdoms, and the South China Morning Post before turning his focus to fiction. He was a finalist for both the 2018 Malahat Review Prize for Short Fiction and the 2023 Whitefish Review Annual Prize for Fiction, and he will receive his MFA in Creative Writing from Hamline University in the spring of 2024. Sascha is a dad of two boys, loves Powderhorn Park and Muay Thai, and is grinding away on a novel.

Sienna Morris is a high-school student hailing from Texas. She lives amongst dreams and the unbearable Southern heat and loves collecting nostalgic memories for all her art. Her work has been recognized by Tadpole Press, Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and forthcoming.

Neha Musuwathi is a ninth grader residing in southeast Michigan. Being Asian-American is a huge part of her identity, and she hopes she doesn’t lose her Indian roots. She loves anything pink, music, and science. As an avid reader and writer, she still has hundreds of unfinished stories she hopes she can finish one day while continuing to navigate her new high school.

James B. Nicola is the author of eight collections of poetry, the latest three being Fires of Heaven: Poems of Faith and Sense, Turns & Twists , and Natural Tendencies. His nonfiction book Playing the Audience: The Practical Actor’s Guide to Live Performance won a Choice magazine award. He has received a Dana Literary Award, two Willow Review awards, Storyteller’s People’s Choice magazine award, one Best of the Net, one Rhysling, and eleven Pushcart nominations—for which he feels stunned and grateful. A graduate of Yale, James hosts the Writers’ Roundtable at his library branch in Manhattan: walk-ins are always welcome.

Zoe Nikolopoulou is a self-taught watercolor artist from Athens, Greece. She is also a poet and translator watching inspiration taking shape on paper. She grew up surrounded by nature and was constantly drawing and painting as a child, hobbies which she pursued into adulthood. She discovered the magic of watercolors and continued to experiment with them. Soon after, she opened an NFT account to promote herself.

Meche Olvera is a twenty-seven-year-old queer second-year student in her MFA Creative Writing program at Fresno State University in California; she also worked as an editorial assistant and read for the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry contest in 2022.

Donald Patten is an artist and cartoonist from Belfast, Maine. He produces oil paintings, illustrations, ceramic pieces, and graphic novels. His art has been exhibited in galleries across Maine. His online portfolio is donaldlpatten.newgrounds.com/art.

Francesca Preston is a writer and visual artist based in California. Her work has appeared in FENCE , Feral: A Journal of Literature and Art , Fron/tera , The Inflectionist Review , RHINO , and Working on Gallery , among other places. Her chapbook, If There Are Horns , was published in 2022. “The Insomnia Sequences” is a five-part poem that follows Preston’s insomnia-based breakdowns beginning at the age of thirty-one. She finally received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder in 2023 and is grateful to be an advocate for those suffering from lack of sleep. Find her at francescapreston.com.

Langston Prince is a college student from Los Angeles. She has been writing for as long as she can remember and hopes to write for as long as she can. Over her life, she has accrued a litany of useless, unmarketable, and out of date skills that help to enrich her writing.

Rachel Paz Ruggera (she/her) is a research technician in a developmental biology lab and holds a BS in biology from Boston College. Her work is published or is forthcoming in Atticus Review , The Writing Disorder , and Outrageous Fortune .

Cami Rumble is a writer and stay-at-home mom who graduated from California State University Stanislaus with a degree in English. A member of the California Writers Club, her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in TMP Magazine , Teach. Write. , Oprelle Publications , and Poetry Breakfast, as well as several local anthologies. Cami lives in California’s Central Valley.

Sepideh Saremi is a writer and therapist based in Los Angeles. Her writing has appeared in The Fabulist , Bon Appetit , and Westways .

Srishty Sharma is a sixteen-year-old amateur poet from India. She is currently in the eleventh grade in high school. When she’s not writing, you can find her reading, painting or drawing.

Tomislav Šilipetar was born in Zagreb. In 2014 he graduated from the painting department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. In 2015 he became a member of Croatian Society of Fine Artists. In addition to many group exhibitions, he had a number of solo exhibitions in Croatia as well as in the other countries. He was the winner of the Rector’s Award for Excellence in 2013. His paintings are mostly made in acrylic, and their themes vary from solitude and isolation to the very existence of humanity in the society that condemns. He prefers simple colors and getting out of the box of academy restraints. In 2016 he gained the status of an independent artist.

Aleco Smith is a mixed-medium artist based in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. As a mixed-medium artist he has many backgrounds in the arts from the technological components of video creation to the traditional aspects of illustration and painting. Being in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, for twenty-three years, a part of his story is that he has always had a tricky childhood that led him to dark places. With the stability of a safe neighborhood but a rocky home life, he understood the challenges that were created by mental issues, religious indoctrination, and taught ignorance. This, along with biblical undertones, creates another layer of storytelling in Aleco’s work.

Edward Michael Supranowicz is the grandson of Irish and Russian/Ukrainian immigrants. He grew up on a small farm in Appalachia. He has a grad background in painting and printmaking. Some of his artwork has recently or will soon appear in Fish Food , Streetlight , Another Chicago Magazine , Door Is A Jar , The Phoenix , and The Harvard Advocate . Edward is also a published poet.

Annabelle Taghinia is a writer from New England. She is currently a sophomore in high school and spends her free time working on short fiction pieces and poems, including a collection of stories of Persian women. She enjoys reading poetry collections, realistic fiction, and magical realism.

Born and raised in the northeast of Mexico, Marcela Torres worked her way out of a notoriously violent region of Mexico, which led to her acquiring scholarships to study in both Paris and London. Marcela is a social scientist who has always been curious about human nature, which led her to work in various fields from non-profits to the tech industry. While living in small flats in the biggest cities in the world, she’s always dreamed of becoming a writer. Marcela is based in Mexico City and writes in both English and Spanish. Her genres of choice are creative nonfiction and fiction that taps into the complexities of humanity.

A. D. Warrick (they/them), or just Annika to their friends, is a current graduate student teaching assistant and MFA candidate at the University of Central Arkansas. They are currently poetry editing for Arkana and occasionally freelance for the Arkansas Times . They have poems published with Q&A Queer Zine , UCA’s Vortex, and more. When not writing, they generally like to spend their time obsessing over Magic the Gathering, pondering Mary Oliver while wandering the many state parks Arkansas offers, or singing karaoke badly at the local punk watering hole. If you would like to know more about them or their writing you can follow them on Instagram at @adwarrick, or present them with a pretty rock, for which they will offer in trade their undying love.

Carolyn Watson takes whatever she can find and gives it new life through her artwork. Her pieces include a variety of materials such as recycled plastic, candle wax, and many other miscellaneous items. She uses these materials across multiple mediums, with a particular focus on mixing the traditional and nontraditional. Watson has always been drawn to the items in life that are deemed useless. Ultimately, she may not use materials with their intended purpose in mind, but through her work, they can take on a new meaning. Her inspiration comes from her personal experience and observations, particularly the darker elements of life. Watson thinks of herself as a storyteller, but instead of words, she uses whatever she can find to tell her story.

Christine Williams is a Maryland artist. Her favorite medium to work with is yarn on canvas. She appreciates patterns and making various shapes by mixing colors of yarn and making a work of art.

She has taught various art classes including comic book composition, sculpture-making, basket-weaving, pottery, and drawing, just to name a few. Teaching art, and making it, is her passion. Some of her work has been featured in venues around the country. You can find her work in multiple international publications. Her work is also featured in both public and private collections throughout the nation.

Yusif Zadeh has been engaged in various types and genres of photography since 2011. His work has been published in many local and international magazines. His interest in photography has always inspired him to acquire new knowledge, look for interesting shots, and conduct experiments. His goal is to represent and promote his country, Azerbaijan, in the world. He is currently working on a book, Ordinary Baku , which explores the ordinary aspects of the city in an unusual way.