Parrot 1, 2, and 3 Owen Keefer

Houston, 2027

Thomas Waddill ‘19

e are the fi rst time you seemed to come to from the long dark of W infancy, buckling your seatbelt in the back seat of the car, smooth hot vinyl, your mother driving you to the YMCA for a smoothie and a swim in the indoor pool, fractured sunlight frantic on the white echoing walls; we are your thinking of that moment, the moment’s tessellation into years, the way you can’t seem to get in back behind it. Were there things before? Did you forget them? Did they make it out of themselves? We are your empty apartment in south Boston, later, when you are more tired than you thought you could be, looking at the faux tile fl oor, hearing the empty echo of your knock on the wall for nuts into which to drill a bookshelf. We are the sour smell of the paper mill that would drift down from somewhere outside your childhood town when the wind was wrong and the long verdant grass stains on your jeans. You are in the sludge of the hottest day of the year in Houston, soaked, looking at a yellow slip held to the windshield of your Honda Civic. A parking ticket. Below a stinking Callery pear. We are your sweating in English class right after Phys. Ed. We are the sons of fl int and pitch; we are Titan! We are the fi rst time you had a nightmare that followed you into the morning, the inchoate remainder of something unsayable and horrible – the disembodied legs of your dog bounding up your stairs, threatening and surreal. We are your lethargic terror immobile in a beanbag, at the top of your stairs, watching the legs draw closer. We are Concerned for You – Help Us Help You! We are the residue of your fi rst wet dream, all embarrassment, all wonder. We are food poisoning on a Caribbean cruise with your family, during which you wrote your fi rst poem, something embarrassing about what if your vomit was the sea? When you plagiarized Wordsworth, your summer reading. We are your multitudes. The fact is, many of us are March 17th, 2009, your last year of high school. We are the weird hollow feeling of a night in a town big enough for its light to pollute the sky but small enough for its stars to poke through; the midnight dome felt scraped out, as if the town’s lowlight pushed back space just a bit. It was a grey concavity with orange bleed at its bases. We are your reminder to yourself to write this down when you get home. We are Dave, we are Josh, we are Abby, we are you in the cluster of water oaks in the northeast corner of Rogers Park, where you weren’t supposed to be. We are the soft intermittent patter of falling acorns, we are the perforated hush of torn leaves in Josh’s high manic hands. Josh was lying on his back at this point: now, a premonition, a shadow in reverse. We are the mildly acrid smell of pot and humidity and decaying vegetation, and we are the burn of your thumb’s pad when the roach fi nally reached you and died. We are Josh posing riddles, uncharacteristically talkative, and Dave and Abby answering them, and you laughing, laughing. We are the one that you’ll be unable to forget for reasons unknown to you: “I have no body and no nose. What am I?” Dave answered: “Nobody knows!” And we are your inability to stop laughing at that. You are high now. Nobody knows. We are the woody announcement of the water oak’s compromise, of cambium cracking, the crunch of its folding bark, all impossible, all happening. We are a book that said: “read these.” We are the quick scramble out, we are Abby’s murmured grunt, we are you all turning around to see her not out of the foliage; she is in it, she is below it, and she’s grunting “my leg,” so then we are you thinking how this is all just some kind of joke or cliché, but really happening right in front of you. We are the fact that you forgot for a moment the real thing that makes this all really truly fucking insane, as you will describe it to your friends the next day – the fact that Abby was literally talking like twenty minutes before about how hard it’s been recently that her mom lost her foot to diabetes, how we were wondering how in the hell and why in the hell someone’s foot needs to come off for diabetes and actually sort of making jokes about it whenever Abby seemed really cool about it and kinda started laughing – something about glucose and capillaries. We are her saying that the main thing, though, is how her dad just seemed to totally check out, so it’s really just Abby taking care of her mom, and her mom isn’t grateful at all – we are the way you are all listening, because that was kind of the point of this was to listen to her, sort of show her a good time, we are you all listening, thinking, damn. Worst of all, we are your pausing when the tree fell, after Abby was saying fuck, help, for at least six seconds. You weren’t pausing to run up to the tree – you and Dave and Josh were there almost immediately, trying to lift the thing. No – we are the fact that you didn’t immediately pull out your phone to call 911. We are your fi rst thought: fuck. This is it for me. You had gotten into college, two days before, which was sort of the reason you guys were out here – the reason before you fi gured you should include Abby because she didn’t seem to be doing great. We are your constant recursion to that moment of cowardly hesitation. We are the smell of sativa still hanging under the wet stench of the innards of a dead water oak fl ung out into the humid night. We are you fi - nally getting Abby out (without calling 911) and taking her to the hospital because her leg is fucked up and bleeding and possibly broken? It’s not – but her ankle is sprained. We are the suspicious look of the nurse. We are the Greatest Nation on Earth; we are above this, we’re over it, we’re tired of it, we’re really hungry and hoping we can fi nd something to eat in the next couple blocks or so, we are the long fl ight up to New York for a speaking gig at Columbia years later, we are you apologizing to a bumped shoulder, we are the fl ash of an old March: really, really sorry, Mrs. Dallory. You’d understand if we told you, if we just said it. We just wanted to show her a good time. We are every March, all March. We are the weird stench by the entrance to the Holliday Inn in Parksdale – was it Parksdale? Knotpark? Knotsdale – the Holiday Inn at Knotsdale where you and your parents and your sister crawled out of a car packed with pictures and china and two dogs and gallons of water and bags of clothes. 1998. We are the large man at the desk who charged you only half because of Christy. We are your mother saying if you ask one more time if David was evacuating (you could barely say the word) to Knotsdale too then she

would take your video player away. It was your second night on the road. We are the hotel carpet that looks like a mosaic of spilled cereal, or vomit. We are you watching your parents, not totally understanding what was going on, annoyed that they were constantly watching the news and would not change the channel. The next day you were still in Knotsdale. We are a “lake” rimmed with dead fl oating grass and your parents’ feeble attempts at entertaining you and your sister. We are Concerned for Your Safety – No Lifeguard on Duty – Swim At You’re Own Risk. Later your mother would take you both to a movie while your dad stayed back in the hotel room watching the news. We are the constant question: When are we going home, mom? Her answer: Nobody knows quite yet, sweetie. We are the constant alternation between newsroom and a man in a grey rain jacket and soaked suit pants in slanted rain. You would all go out to dinner at an Applebee’s, then head back to the hotel room. We are the picture your mom got in the morning of the third day from a friend who stuck it out back at home. Christy was down to a tropical storm, and moving on. The picture showed a white sky and a yard strewn with branches but no trees down, a house intact, Thank God. We are your parents hugging in relief. While they packed, you and your sister Ellie, her barely older than two at the time, started a game of tug-ofwar on the ground with one of your shirts. We are your remembering this trick you saw you cousin do where you pull and then let go and then the other person falls back. We are you letting go of the shirt, and your sister, Ellie, falling back, and her head hitting the corner of the bedframe with a reverberating, sickening thud. We are her cry loud and thin cutting through the paper walls of the Holiday Inn to your mom who rushes in and the surprisingly big red smear on fi ngers when she pulls them away. We are you watching on while your parents press wet reddening paper towels to the back of her head, asking you what on earth were you thinking? Get over here and apologize. Right now. And we are your sister’s voice going hoarse with the crying, and the way that you went outside in the hall and started crying with her because you didn’t have a choice. We are your sister in white and we are Josh next to her. You hadn’t seen Josh since high school, not until the bachelor party two weeks before, and your hug felt like what a stale bagel tastes like. We are the hard pew, the rivulets of grain you trace on the backrest in front of you. We are you leaving early from the reception, and we are the thought you’d have many years later that maybe the discomfort you felt during the wedding might have had less to do with the fact that you somewhere were guilty that you never kept up with Josh but rather because you knew, watching him all night, that he was the same person that he was in high school, a point of compressed gravity, a really nice guy at heart but someone who at some point just really needs to help himself and start seeing someone; Ellie called a year ago and said, We’re making progress, we really are, but you just really really need to call him, Noah. Really. Just talk to him. He still sees you as a close friend. No: you didn’t know it at the time, but when you left the reception early that night, your discomfort was because you saw it when you passed him on the way back from the bathroom – you saw a dead wet tree compromised somewhere deep in its rings, falling already, turning on a broken fulcrum onto the woman sitting far below. You didn’t call him. And you saw yourself letting go of a shirt, and letting Ellie fall back into the menacing corner of a bedframe. And now, here you are. You have left the house, your sister’s house, after a diff erent kind of reception. It is unbearably hot. The AC in Ellie’s house was no respite: the clouding weight of the weird shame at a suicide’s wake stayed hung. Ellie would barely look at you. Your dad said, nobody saw it coming. Nobody could have known. Nobody knows. March 18th, 2009: We are when you went back the next day, how you saw that the water oak was clearly dead, with the deep brown waterlogged naked splinters of the tree’s torn trunk jutting out into the suff ocating air seeming weirdly benign, just saying, Wrong place wrong time, buddy. We are the half fi lled Styrofoam cups of sweet tea with fl oating chunks of lemon in them left on Ellie’s mantle. We are the hollow clink of a baseball colliding with your bat, soaring out to far left fi eld, foul, hitting a long horizontal metal bar choked with bikes in clanging report. We are very sorry for your loss – let us know if there’s anything we can do for you. But right now, all of us, every single one of us, is a parking ticket, a square yellow slip, on your car, parallel-parked along the curb, facing the wrong way on the neighborhood street. The stench of the Callery pear in Ellie’s front yard is overbearing. You are soaked with sweat, looking at a yellow slip that says, You are not supposed to be here. We are the way that the heat seems like a threat, waves of heat up off the black asphalt, visible from twenty feet away. We are the broken slat in the fence through which your childhood dog ran when you were twelve. We are the clear yard under a white sky, the house okay. $33 until August 24th, at which time we will increase in penalty. Sift through us, resist us – all weightless, all inexact, all clustered, fl at, transcendent, luminescent, damning, diffi cult, aligned, unknowable, stinking, burning, yellow. Josh, still alive beneath the water oak, and his question.

Art by Owen Keefer

The Parrot 1 (bottom left) The Parrot 2 (top right) The Parrot 3 (bottom right)

Islands Beneath Us

(An Excerpt) by Katie Walsh

I’m a child by the sea as a child is by a sea somewhere. I pick up rocks in the sand and make them into windows. Isn’t that funny? Windows made out of rocks and sand, nothing that I can see anything out of, but what matters is that they are almost, kind of, windows.

I do this before I know that sand makes glass and glass makes windows. I’m fashioning windows out of windows. Everything is made of sand in some way. Maybe even me. I force these windows into the lump my hands have toiled over on this flat beach. It doesn’t have an inside. It doesn’t really have a structure. It is, after all, solid, opaque, sloping downwards every second I’m not building it back up. But windows anyways. To see what? What are these for?

Whoever wasn’t in this nearly-house would need a way to see the ocean that would wipe them away eventually in the tide.

We left the beach, the three of us then, her and him and I : Hot, warmly tired, eyes closing, burnt into my mother’s shoulder, tasting sunblock and salt in her broad back, I re-made her image out of the sun spots growing on the soft slope of her neck. That day she told me not to dig holes too deep because I’d fall into them. Sand suffocates life. Oh, but then why so many crawly things in between my toes?

Something must live there, why can’t I? There’s spaces there between each granule. Infinite space. More grains means more space between grains. What looks solid is actually vast emptiness. When she’s stretching her arms, muscular, across the horizon, reaching to the clean, cool fresh water in the public showers, I wonder if my mother’s smooth broad, tanned back is the same way.

I wonder if there’s a way she could disappear beneath the water line, bobbing up once or twice before falling away, disintegrating permanently to be carried to other beaches.

I think this in the way I notice that air bubbles from the sand when water rushes out of it. I think this before I can think it.

I’d look back at the thing I’ve built on the shoreline. The suggestion of turrets and windows softened into a rounded belly on the beach bed.

How long would it take to fall back into the rising tide? To lie flatly again against the sand without scar?

Whatever lived in what I’d made then (I thought: mermaid, sea captain, sea captain and mermaid kissing, evil crab king), the one which washed away and was rebuilt days and again by the plastic play tool box of memory must live there still.

Which is why now at sixteen looking at this home, straddling a sea wall which hides the hungry mouth of the ocean behind it, I’m confused. The most well-made home on the block, our home, seems vacant.

My dad said he built it pagoda style: a fortified castle with hurricane shutter windows. He said they were also sound proof. He didn’t specify whether it was to keep the sound out or to keep the noise in.

For the most part, the house is empty. My dad, tall and bearded with ever-clear eyes and sun-damaged skin, works odd hours. By odd hours, he means all hours. My mother nicknames him “Ahab,” which he sometimes likes.

“You’re obsessed with work! Your white whale!” She laughs over the slosh of wine one night, a night he doesn’t particularly like the nickname. I know this because I hear about it through the thick-ish wall that separates my room from theirs.

She says it too loud, like there’s a dry film on her tongue she’s trying to spit out.

“You don’t even read.” He says looking at her from the rim of his own wine glass.

His lips and eyes disappear in a sip.

She leans back, winding up, the way water recedes before it strikes back. They are now staring at one another without moving.

I leave before they crash forward again.

On most nights, long after the freight train running two miles from our home sounds 12:32 a.m., he scuttles back inside like a crab surfacing from his hole. He moves slowly and silently. He acts like he’s breaking into his own home. A scavenger: when he is here, he likes to pick things apart.

My mother is normally here but less and less present. Her eyes often strain above my head, as if I’m direct sunlight. Too bright and reflective to fixate on for too long. She’s mostly on the dock, cigarette in hand, peering towards the neighbors across the river. She is perfectly still, but I get the sense that she’s about to stretch her knees, that she’s going to move. I check again and again, every thirty minutes or so, to make sure I still see her shoulders fill out the horizon line.

We never lived anywhere that wasn’t ten minutes from the coast. Of the few things my mother demanded, this was one of them--an escape route.

A tropical storm, downgraded from a CAT 5 hurricane, gently rocked the beach during a weekday. School had already been canceled. My mother had been hoarding supplies: water bottles, flashlights, extra Xanax, things to keep us afloat.

But there was no real storm. It had died in the water before it reached us. Only a static clarity remained in the air. The opaque grey sky was broken by a pillowing wall of clouds edging away or towards us. We couldn’t decide.

My father was upstairs in his office, and had been for three or four days without explanation or apology. I only knew he was there by the infrequent echo of his footsteps, by the change in shadows his large feet made under the door way, by an odor that crep beneath the door, by the way my mother said, “He is absolutely not to be disturbed.”

When evacuation is too late, you have to wait out the wind. My mother squeezed open the shutter covering our sliding glass door and walked outside, letting her hand rise above her head to feel the air. She turned to my brother and I with an expression I can’t describe: somewhere between awe-stricken and determined.

“Get in the car. Grab a towel. You can wear what you’re wearing. We’re going to the beach,” she said to me as she snatched her keys off a hook with an urgency. She doubled back to grab sunblock. There was no sun left in the sky.