Pendulum | Spring 2015

Pendulum spring 2015

Pendulum Board

Editor-in-Chief Catherine Zhu

P E N D U L U M

Editor-in-Chief Ann Yao Zhang

Director of Writing Katie Ying

THE LITERARY AND ARTS JOURNAL OF PHILLIPS EXETER ACADEMY

Directors of Art Millie Dunstan Emily Zhu

Faculty Adviser William Perdomo Editorial Staff Carissa Chen, Irene Chun Kaitlyn Kang, Brandon Liu Annie Ning, Alex Zhang

Spring 2015

Table of Contents Writing

Nips - Anonymous (questions)- Rachel Baxter

(for preeya) - Rachel Baxter mother of dragons, a sonnet (after game of thrones)- Rachel Baxter I Like to Think - Molly Bolan The Life Cycle of Cotton - Kelvin Green Shanghai Stampede - Dana Tung

Art

Hannah Sessler Heather Nelson Wendi Yan Carissa Chen Monica Acosta Alex Zhang Carissa Chen Margaux Morris

Letter from the Editors-in-Chief 1-2 3 4 4 5-7 8 9-10

11-13 14 15-16 17 18 19-20 21-22 23-24

Writing My Father Falls in Love Part I, II and III - Willa Canfield Dear Mom - Athena Gerasoulis Roots - Kevin Zhen Flood - Sabrina Ortega-Riek Happy Birthday - Majestic Terhune Akane: A Memoir - Carissa Chen In Memory of Yesterday - Will Li Falling With Icarus - Monica Acosta Smoke - Annie Ning Three Halves - Zoha Qamar A Lump of Dirt - Sara Michaels Hourglass - Joanna Zhang refrigerateur, a sestina - Rachel Baxter They Called Him Doughy - Tim Wu Who Are You? - Abigail Dagher What’s Your Default? - Maria Heeter hot chocolate - Abigail Garey This is What Love is Meant To Be - Anonymous untitled - Ariana Patsaros Brooklyn Bridge - Sabrina Ortega-Riek Cover: Alex Zhang

25 26 27-30 31 32 33-35 36-49 50-54 55-56 57 58-60 61 62 63-64 65-66 66-67 68 69-72 73 74

In The Pit and the Pendulum, the short story by Edgar Allan Poe from which Pendulum derives its name, a prisoner condemned to death finally finds a way to break free from the ropes that bind him. “For the moment, at least, I was free. Free!” he exclaims. Art possesses this power—the power to reflect the human condition, and rescue us from alienation. Art has the power to give voice to those without recourse. Art has the power to heal.

Exonians are known for their willingness to wrestle with challenging topics, and this issue of Pendulum is no exception. In these pages, Exonians write openly and honestly about grieving, growing up and beginning again. They write about the destructive effects of an uncle’s corruption, about witnessing the struggles of undocumented family members and about helplessness in the face of senseless tragedy. But they also write about the power of family and of love, and about the magic of finding beauty in this world—whether it is in quiet winter mornings or in the smile of an elderly stranger. They write about moments of solidarity and gratitude and their dreams for the future. Their stories allow us to recognize both the vulnerability and resilience in our own lives, and they allow us to find hope and give voice to our own experiences.

We have been helping to publish Pendulum for four years now, but this last issue is incredibly special to us. We are deeply inspired by the wisdom and strength in these pieces, and by the honesty and courage of the writers and artists who created them.

We would like to give a big thank you to our donors for their continued and generous support.

We would like to express our gratitude toward our hardworking Editorial Board for their efforts this past year, and to Ms. Lazure for judging our annual Hemingway Flash Fiction competition.

Lastly, we are thankful to the wonderful writers and artists on campus for supporting us and providing us with their talents.

Thank you, Catherine and Ann

Anonymous

v Personal Essay

Nips I am haunted by nips. They are everywhere. At my house in the crystal candy bowl near the TV, in every candy aisle at the super market, and dispersed throughout Mr. A’s house. The small solid candies come in an assortment of flavors, but the most chilling of all is Butter Rum. Nips are Mr. A’s favorite, and whenever my mom spots Butter Rum Nips, she buys all the boxes on the shelf.

Somehow, Nip wrappers always crawl onto the bottom of my feet whenever they get the chance, so I always wear socks when I’m home.

Mr. A is an affluent self-made businessman who resides right outside of Boston. His wealth from his excavating company and real estate holdings amounts to over $100 million. He met my mother over ten years ago on a construction site, and they have been in each other’s lives ever since. His daily attire consists of a $30,000 golden Rolex watch, Burberry jeans, and either a Ralph Lauren or Ferrari polo shirt. Unlike other eighty year olds, he sports a $50,000 indenture smile. Mr. A never believes he can leave his house with less than $1000 in his wallet because otherwise he feels “poor.” His thick Boston accent often is slurred after he’s had a few Manhattan’s on the rocks. Whenever I have to hug him, his Ferrari cologne lingers on me for the entire day. Being a creature of habit, Mr. A wakes up every morning at 6:00am, watches Fox News, won’t leave the house without shaving and showering, has breakfast with his friends at the same diner with creaky red leather stools, and then calls my mother to see how they will spend their day and sometimes night together. For a long time, their relationship had parameters ordered by “the Queen.”

My mother called Mr. A’s wife “the Queen” for her reckless spending, especially on trivial infomercial items. Due to the fact that Mr. A is an affluent, older man, his wife was suspicious of my mother and her motives for befriending her husband. She did not permit Mr. A and my mother to see one another, but they still managed their way around that. Mr. A had two cell phones: one for my mother and one for his immediate family to reach him at. When I was twelve, I had a nightmare and rushed to my parent’s room to get in bed with my mom.

My parents have not slept in the same bed for over eight years, but my mother kept the bed and my father slept downstairs on the couch. As I approached my mother’s room, I could hear her on the phone with Mr. A, which sent me back my room because I would have rather faced every ghost in my closet before I listened to my mother and Mr. A say they loved each other over the phone. They periodically went out to dinner together during the week, but never on Saturdays because that was Mr. A’s night with “the Queen.”

As soon as his wife passed away two years ago, the dynamic of their relationship completely changed. Their weekly dinners turned into nightly events, and my mother slept over at Mr. A’s for about three days out of the week. Sleepovers turned into weekend vacations to the Vineyard, which turned into week long cruises to the Caribbean, and this month my mom and Mr. A are spending the 1

month together in France. For years I regarded Mr. A as a grandfather figure to me, but more importantly a fatherly figure to my mother. Mr. A even helped my mother pick out a burial plot for my grandfather after he passed away. I vehemently opposed my mother going anywhere with Mr. A, but after I went away to boarding school, I didn’t know what my mother was up to. Their vacations, which seemed strange to me at first, eventually became normal. One evening during this past summer, I went out to an Italian with Mr. A and my mother. I asked my mother what Mr. A was to her and she replied, “He’s a companion.” Although Mr. A’s response after a few Manhattan’s was, “I’m so lucky that I found your mother. She’s my girlfriend.” When I heard him say “girlfriend” I felt the wind leave my lungs. Quickly my mother corrected him and said, “What he means is that I’m his friend that is a girl.” My parents are still married, but yet Mr. A regards my mother as his girlfriend.

Why? At the end of the dinner, Mr. A paid as usual and popped a butter rum nip into his mouth. Although these forced dinners were painful, they didn’t compare to social gatherings with his family.

This past Labor Day weekend, my mother pleaded for my sister and me to go to Mr. A’s house for a barbeque to end the summer on a good note. As we approached his mansion, my mom took out the remote she had for his garage door and we pulled into his marble floored garage. Mr. A’s four Ferraris, Rolls Royce, and mini excavator were perfectly parked. As we walked outside to the backyard, we were greeted by a mixture of glances and manufactured smiles on the faces of Mr. A’s family members. Five of his eight children were at the barbeque, along with his eight grandchildren. Three of his children refused to acknowledge my mother’s existence, so I have never met them.

“Hi __! How are you?” asked Mr. A’s daughter Diana.

As I answered her question she was preoccupied with fishing for the cherry at the bottom of her cocktail.

“Go give Mr.A a hug and a kiss,” my mother said.

I took a deep breath and mustered the courage to give Mr. A a kiss on the cheek. His wrinkled scotch scented lips planted a big kiss on my cheek. When Mr. A looked away I wiped my face to rid his scent. Even the Michael Buble Pandora radio station couldn’t ease the tension. All his family members circled him like vultures. Wiping his face at the first sight of food residue or fixing the collar at the first sign that it was out of place. The sad truth is that his family members are probably waiting for him to croak so they can battle one another for a portion of his fortune and assets.

After his family left, my mom, sister, and I sat with Mr. A in his backyard around the fire pit. He gently rubbed his hand on my mother’s back and thanked her for such a successful night. I felt like crying, vomiting, and screaming all at the same time. When I was a child I regarded Mr. A to be like a grandfather, but their relationship has developed into an indefinable companionship. Even though my mother and Mr. A had known one another for over ten years, I had thought of them as only friends. He was old enough to be her father, and until two years ago he was married to his wife of over sixty years. Near the fire pit there was a bowl of Butter Rum Nips, which reminded me of the inescapable candies that will always haunt me.

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Rachel Baxter

v Poetry

(questions) for preeya i asked the seasons how change feels and they said it hurts like hell i asked your walls how it felt to see you die and they didn’t say anything for once they’d stopped echoing your laughter and the ghosts of us sitting in your room~ two wounded creatures trying to patch each other up with bandaids drenched in lonely fled like they were afraid of the light wherever you are now i hope god or st. peter or the tooth fairy are being good to you and sometimes i pull polaroids of you out just to remind myself that there is evidence of your living that there is proof your feet made prints in the woods where we went to find silence your loss tastes like an archaeological dig like bone-dust in my mouth you seem like you lived so long ago from me already if i close my eyes i can still hear your bruises your sleepless nights introducing themselves to me one by one i never had enough hands to shake them all by the shoulders rattle them until they spat out your reasons for getting out of bed like an oil spill when you were anything but an accident i wish you’d grown up to be happy i asked you in a dream why you’d left me agonising in the interval created by “what if ” and you said i’m surprised anyone even heard the door close i asked the bird outside your window why it wails and cries at night it whispered the stars are so beautiful in the dark and pain is a song too.

(for preeya) i spoke to you today~

in the breathless syntax of the moss that covers the skins of trees green wet breathing growing the leaves and branches filtered in sunlight like looking up from under the ocean with the yellow-gold light pooling in spots not yet blotted by the oil slick i tried to talk to you but the words never fit my mouth just right~

it was like I was speaking a hand-me-down song too small for my grief i asked for a sign that you were still there all i heard was the chatter of the squirrels playing at predator and prey, and chasing each other from tree to tree before resting and sharing their food the dirt underfoot gave a little more gently and the branches sang when they cracked instead of letting out accusing snaps the forest seemed something gentler but i’ve still not discerned if it was just

nature’s kindness and protection or yours.

mother of dragons, a sonnet (after game of thrones) I hope my daughter’s born in blood and fire.

I hope she hatches hot coal and khaleesi~ And all she takes, she takes in sharpened iron And learns that happy endings don’t come easy.

In Summer’s peaceful days she’ll dance her joys But when war comes, tear off her princess dress And tear the throats out from the wolf-toothed boys Who dare presume that “woman” equals “less.”

She’ll conquer men with red paint on her lips And wear their deaths like gloves for fighting hands~ Burn men with wildfire, sink their wretched ships Until their kingdoms crumble all to sand.

She’ll step to claim the throne up gilded stairs And still her heart with waves of golden pride, While grief with all her warriors she shares Of those who fell too soon to take her side.

So daughter, my khaleesi, please be strong; May all be yours and may your life be long.

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Molly Bolan

v Short Story

I Like to Think

I don’t know her name, but I see her often. I like to think her name is Linda. Or Julia. Or maybe Charlotte. It’s hard to decide -- there is so much in a name. But she strikes me as a Charlotte.

She sits in the lobby of the nursing home where my grandparents live, the one right next to the women’s prison surrounded by rolling green hills. I always thought it was kind of funny to put an old folks’ home right next to a prison, but it’s not like if any convicts escaped their first stop would be Lakes Region Care Center. Even if they did, maybe they would feel some sort of connection, a kind of subtle and mutual understanding of their respective limitations. I like to think that they would get along, the escaped convicts and the old folks. Maybe play a little bingo or something.

She alternates sitting in one of three straight-backed chairs in that lobby, changing up her view every few hours. She has the kind of posture my mother wishes I could maintain, with her legs crossed delicately at the ankles and her spine parallel to the back of the loveseat. She presses painted lips together, a thin line of sangria that will sometimes lift at the corners if I smile at her first. It’s the most beautiful shade of lipstick I’ve ever seen, although I know that if I were to try something like that, I would look more clownish than elegant.

I like to think she has a watercolor soul. That perhaps she has lived in such a way that she left trails of pastels in her wake, mapping her journeys. I like to think that secret hues of her can be found in all sorts of places.

I like to think she drove herself cross country in a Volkswagen Beetle.

That she left behind everything that was not necessary to the continuation of her existence. That she belonged to that little car just as much as it belonged to her.

She probably grew up in a small New England town, not unlike my hometown, a town that she loved very much. But in the very same mountains in which other people found beauty she saw only her jailors. She lived among the leering peaks everyday with the fear they would one day collapse in on her. So I like to think she bought herself a Volkswagen Beetle and left.

I like to think she did things that frightened her. Like drove south. And I mean, deep south. Trace Adkins’ south. I’ve never been further south than Maryland, but I hear songs about it all the time on the radio when I drive into town and their melodies follow me down the aisles of the grocery store. She probably worked on a farm in exchange for board, and lived in an old refurbished barn at the edge of the cornfield. And though she was happy, the stars are different down there, she would realize, and maybe she’d miss her small New England Town. Just a little bit. Or perhaps the stars were the same and it was the darkness that had changed. The darkness would be thick in that barn on the edge of the cornfield.

Sticky. Noxious. And after too many nights spent at honky tonks and dive bars, I like to think she decided to leave rather than suffocate slowly, so slowly, down there in the south.

I like to think she drove northwest. She was contained by that little Beetle but more in a comfortably secure way than claustrophobic. It was as if her entire life had been folded and tucked and sealed within a pod of steel and glass. Things were simple. She could keep track of everything that was important.

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Gas was cheap then, and she probably stopped often to fill up, even when she didn’t need to. Adventures were different then, flowing freely, everything tinted with the colors of change. And she was more free than she had ever been. It was slim pickings for snacks at every stop, but every stop sold pistachios and seltzer water, so she was content. I like to think she met all sorts of people at gas stations.

Truckers and travelers and twisted souls. And maybe she found her soulmate at one of these stops. But not the romantic kind. The kind that knew all the verses to Bohemian Rhapsody that she could never remember and would ask her to to sew floral patches in torn skirts. The kind of soulmate that somehow knew sangria lipstick was the perfect shade for her. The kind of soulmate that, if the big guy upstairs had not made some kind of silly mistake, would have been her sister.

I like to think the two of them would huddle over The New Yorkers, searching for Gloria Steinman’s articles to tape to the dashboard. I like to think they would throw their heads back to laugh whenever they felt even the smallest inkling of joy. Her hair must have been soft and shiny back then, whipping around her face whenever she cranked the windows down. Perfect ringlets, the way I wish my hair would be.

I like to think that she and her soulmate made it to San Francisco, with its vertigo roads and color wheel buildings. They would have met so many new people. People with voices the two of them had never heard before. These new people surfed their own waves of purpose and would crash, sometimes violently, into those who lived as she and her soulmate once lived. Those who could not understand the world was changing. She probably learned things I will never know, understands the world and all its intimacies in a manner I can’t. Maybe she lost her soulmate to San Francisco and its tides. I once found a stack of wrinkled and stained postcards in the back of a thrift store with images of the captivating homes in Haight-Ashbury. The old man at the counter had told me Haight-Ashbury was a no-good-downright-improper place to be living back in the day, but I thought those homes were so captivating that I could almost forgive her soulmate getting so lost in that life.

I like to think she made her way to Seattle when the smoky clouds of San Francisco became too much for her. Or maybe she settled in Portland. And she lived in a beautiful apartment in with big windows and at last she felt free.

She found freedom in the rainclouds and city streets and her job as a barista at a tiny coffee shop. I bet she was good, too, and the regulars would allow only her to prepare their coffee. They were probably very generous, leaving tips worth more than their beverage but not as much as her warmth. And she fell in love, sometimes fleetingly with men, but most often with the little details of this gentle new life.

But something must have brought her back to New England. Perhaps her mother died and left behind a deathly ill widower. And she understood that the world had been kind to her for the better part of her life and it was time to give a little kindness back. She probably flew home, her first ever time on an airplane, and left her little Beetle behind. Every night she would sit with her father and smile as she told him all her stories. But maybe her father loved her so much that he broke her heart, telling her it would be foolish to even consider a continuation of that existence. She probably got married so her father could die with some peace of mind knowing she was not left alone. But she never felt more alone than when she lived confined by those mountains. Her husband must have 6

been a gentleman, probably wealthy. And they would go to fancy dinner parties and she learned she fit in best when her legs were crossed delicately at the ankles.

There probably weren’t many truckers or travellers or twisted souls at those parties.

So disappeared her life. And because people told her it was the proper thing to do, she probably had a few kids, but they were kids she didn’t really love.

Not because they were terrible children. But they were tethers. Chains around her delicately crossed ankles. And when her husband died those children put her in that nursing home next to the women’s prison because they didn’t know what else to do and couldn’t be bothered to take care of her themselves. She probably misses her Beetle very, very much. I hope I never miss anything as much as she misses her own history. Now she sits in that lobby and watches families like mine embrace parents and grandparents, exchanging stories of the world with arrogant smiles and dewy eyes.

But what do I know? She’s just a woman with good posture sitting in the lobby of a nursing home.

Kelvin Green

v Poetry

The Life Cycle of Cotton I sift through the rows of my mind, digging nine inches deep into God’s tilled earth for the white root of the cotton sapling; its pointed end creating a depression on the tip of my brown finger.

Lord, you said that no weapon formed against me shall prosper.

But, just as days pass and calendars change, It seems as if those words I read in the book you gave me are fading with time.

Oh Lord, where are you?

The gossypium’s precious petals peel back opening up to the radiant sun, their color equal to its light, of one accord, in peace and harmony.

You carried us on your broad back while we were Kings of Empires.

You were there when they took our children; stripped of their royalty, held in a wooden cage; Their cries collecting like water; the tsunami waking me from my nightmare— a salty, drop of sweat rolls from the top of my head into my eyes, tears run off into my ears.

“Where is my father!?” They cry.

Where is my Father?

The flowers fall to the earth from whence they came, their pods closing into a brown boll; shutting out air, water, light, trapping the fluffy white ball from freedom.

You were there when we became slaves, when we were packed like forgotten silverware in the bottom of a boat, the sea rocking and rolling.

Now, the heat of the south is unbearable and we long for time in the shade.

The metal bites our wrist, its surface conforming to our necks, our ankles.

No remorse, no relief.

Where is the shade to save us from the heat of oppression and racism?

The cotton breaks free; tiny seeds, to pluck — a tedious work.

Pulled from their boll, the downy substance clothes, feeds, and dies to be planted deep into the earth, only to rise again.

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Dana Tung v Short Story

Shanghai Stampede 8:50 a.m., January 1, 2015

Celebration to Tragedy. Deadly crowd. 11:35 pm. Stampede. Shanghai. New Years Eve. Utter Chaos. On the Bund. 36 killed. 47 injured. Unclear cause.

Amidst dreams of holding hands with my friends, of screaming out the car window, and of speeding uphill until we dive weightlessly off a cliff and onto soft, warm soil that bounces us higher into the pink sky, I roll off my pillow. Something is vibrating, swallowing my own giggles. Is it thunder? No. Is it voices? It’s speaking.

Revelers caught in a stampede. Live from the Xinhua Hospital.

I roll to my side, the cold wall jolting me awake. Startled. I blink to a mess of blankets and pillows around me. I shut my eyes. Let me dream on.

But no. She keeps on talking. Nonsense. New Years Eve. Worst Public tragedy. Shanghai’s most glorious Bund. Stampede. Suspected cause: people fighting over fake US dollars that fell from the sky.

Where? 36 killed. Is she talking to me? 47 injured. Her voice is ringing from a television screen that seems to emerge before me, overshadowing my pink sky dream.

Eyelids still dropped, I tiptoe out of my room only to realize I am no longer hopping on thick soil. Why is our television tuned so loudly? I stretch onto the sofa, digging in between couches for a remote control.

“Dana. Watch the news,” my father calls from behind, his voice resonating deeper than the news reporter’s. I widen my eyes, focusing on the screen.

A stampede had killed 36 people, 25 of which were women, mostly teenagers.

Teenagers like me. The Bund. Wait. I was there. Less than seven hours ago. I was there.

Number 18 on the Bund. Right there.

6:00 a.m., January 1, 2015

My parents stormed into my room, hugged my sleeping body, kissing my red cheeks. I was breathing. They caressed my hair, which curled over my pillow.

They inhaled my scent of sweat, fireworks, and strangers of yesterday. I was dead asleep but I was alive.

1:27 a.m., January 1, 2015

Click. Finally. I turned my key after poking it aimlessly in the dark. My fingers were as icy as the door knob after my short walk from the crosswalk where my best friend’s brother had dropped me off. Without awakening my dogs, I tiptoed to my bed and collapsed. Perhaps I was whispering a new year wish to my parents next door. Perhaps I was still smiling from last year. Perhaps I was already drooling over my pillow. The ringing of bells and fireworks encircled me as I sunk deeper into my soft blanket, far away from yesterday.

1:08 a.m., January 1, 2015

I unlocked my phone screen and checked the time. Let’s go home now. I tugged my friends and wrapped myself in my coat. A breeze brushed us from behind, carrying red papers and firecracker dust. A piece of green slip flew by. I thought it was a US dollar before others pointed out that it was fake. It was a green casino bill 9

with a joker face in a Happy New Year hat. It glided from a window a few blocks away, a club named M18. We laughed again. Perhaps it had signified our luck of wealth of this year. I leaned onto my friends, all of us breathing onto each other. Happy New Year. Loved my first hour of 2015 with you all. 2015. We are graduating.

12:50 a.m., January 1, 2015

Let’s head back. I can’t breathe. My feet feeling ever so flat from all the weight that had stepped on them. All sides of me pressing between friends, against strangers.

Shoulders between breasts, arms against spines, knees below thighs. It didn’t matter.

All we did was blink. Blink in the hot intimate breaths of the new year. Strangers pushing us forward, yelling that they wanted to see the Bund. I tightened my grip onto my friends and led our way to the left. From afar, a pink baby stroller seemed to float on top the crowd. A man must have lifted it over his head. The stroller was empty.

Finally we hit the building, turning and snaking out of the mass. We inhaled, securing the fresh absence of smoke in our cold lungs. Eight of us giggled, set loose though still holding hands. We skipped forward, never peeking behind us, never staring into the crowd of 2014.

12:44 a.m., January 1, 2015

My two girls are missing. My girls. A lady wailed, hardly with any space to wipe her mixed tears and sweat. Her shoulder trembling against my chest. All of us leaning onto each other. Under the street lights, her wrinkles deepened as she narrowed her eyes, lost in all directions. She searched as if she could see through the tall men all around her, see through the bricks and smoke for her girls. I felt her constant swallows, her blinks, her stamps. Amid the chanting people and fireworks from afar, I imagined her daughters’ cries. Their high-pitched calls of mommy. They reached outside the heavy shadows for hands, hoping that those soft, pale fingers were warm like their mommy’s. Yet, before I could offer any words, the mass to our right weighed on us, everyone leaning and stepping to the left all at once. I followed and marched aimlessly until her shoulder left mine, into other shoulders. We never touched again.

12:20 a.m., January 1, 2015

The first twenty minutes of 2015, I cuddled in layers of friends, strangers, and police, grinning at the warmth around me. They were all I needed on this new year. I imagined myself as a dot from the sky scrapers above. In the sea of Chinese on the Bund, I was just another young, energetic girl filling in, or more like squeezing in the streets and alleys between landmarks: the Peninsula, Waldorf, and lines of designer brands. We were embracing the faint, familiar smell of the river, the city, the new year.

11:59 p.m., December 31, 2014

Last seconds of 2014. We broke through the line of police who blocked most others from passing the last three blocks to the Bund. Sprinting and hugging those before us, we chanted along with the boundless echoes to a countdown.

Three.

Two. One.

Let’s dive into the crowd.

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Hannah Sessler

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Heather Nelson v

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Wendi Yan v

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Carissa Chen v

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Monica Acosta v

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Alex Zhang v

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Carissa Chen v

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Margaux Morris v

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Willa Canfield v Poetry

Athena Gerasoulis v Poetry

My Father Falls In Love Part I

Dear Mom (inspired by a quote by Pavana)

He navigated 2,138 miles of winding wilderness, but there on the green grass in early October, he was still lost.

Dear Mom, You are a walking graveyard Opening your arms to those who are looking for a place to rest their tired bones.

Lying in the dewey field, he watched the stars divide and replicate, waited for the earth to shake.

He kissed the sky and the next day, he saw the mountains. He ate the pomegranate seeds in a world of flaming maples, red leaves.

My Father Falls In Love Part II They planted roses, lilies, tulips, cosmos, phlox. He dug the dirt with his green spade, she sowed and watered seeds.

They tended gardens, mended blue jeans, watched the plants divide and replicate, pulled up weeds and whispered poems.

When summer faded, they held each other’s soil-blackened hands, walked to the edge of their mountain, and leapt.

My Father Falls In Love Part III They raked the lawn in early October and hauled wood in the old green wheelbarrow, dancing to the broken blue radio.

Snow capped their mountains and they watched the cells divide and replicate.

They read, and love notes marked the page.

He held her in his arms through those cold days and in January, two little girls arrived to whisper poems to, two perfect skies to kiss.

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You kept my bruises Underneath your tongue, even if they tasted like gravel. Bitter.

And you pressed my first heartbreak in between your palms, to squeeze out the last bit of toothpaste so I wouldn’t have to taste the blood from the first tooth I lost.

You tucked the blisters on my hands into your socks for another day And folded my worries into soft piles of dandelions.

You sipped my depression, And cupped it between the sharp valleys of your collarbones a sickly pearl necklace unclasped at the gentle nape of your neck.

Dear Mom, You hold your life between your teeth because one hand is on my knee and the other is brushing my hair Dear Mom, Dear Mom, don’t you know you are beautiful without jewelry.

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Kevin Zhen v Personal Essay

Roots

My father stirs some oatmeal on the stove with his right hand, while pouring a steady stream of white sugar into the pot with his left. The smells of boiled egg, melting sugar and oats fill the kitchen as he swirls the wooden spatula in small circles. The back of his orange polo shirt has faded into a pale yellow, and I know without looking that the front of the shirt is stained with mysterious chemicals. Without looking up, my father mumbles, “Did you ever wonder why your aunt is so rich?”

“Doesn’t she work at a stock company? Mom told me it was very successful,” I respond, keeping my eyes on the light grey hairs that cover the back of his head.

“Aiyah. Don’t listen to your mother so much.” He clicks the stove off and pauses. “There’s no way your Yi-ma could own four houses in three provinces with the stock company she runs.”

Pouring the steaming oatmeal into two large bowls, my father shuffles towards the dining table and lifts one of them to my nose. “You hungry?”

I accept the food with open palms. As the heat from the bowl travels into my fingertips, my mother’s words echo: These days, your father can only cook two things: oatmeal and Chinese pancakes. Worked almost all his life in a restaurant- chopping pork, frying rice- and can cook just two dishes in the house. I remember the way she scoffed and shook her head while she said it too, but two dishes were always enough for me and him.

Dad smacks his lips in between large gulps of oatmeal. He opens his mouth to speak, but closes it, as if the words have gotten lost somewhere in his throat. He makes a noise, some kind of low gargle or croak, and right then, I almost place my hand over his rough knuckles and tell him to forget what he’s thinking about, and just eat. But I don’t, and he exhales and says, “It was your uncle (Yi-jeurng). That’s why your aunt is so rich.”

My father lifts another spoonful of oatmeal, and as I stare into my father’s bowl I am reminded of the food we ate with Yi-jeurng on my first trip to China. Yi-jeurng’s bamboo chopsticks reached towards the center of a round table, clamped about a dozen scarlet pieces of roast pork and plopped them onto the china plate. “Every growing boy needs meat,” he said in his resounding judge’s voice while poking me playfully in the belly. Yi-jeurng’s cheeks wobbled as he spoke, and the fat from his chin made his lips curl downwards. He had black, bead-shaped eyes that could understand your intentions and long ears like the Buddha, which we believed meant good luck. He was a marvelous storyteller, and could bargain with merchants so well that they never wanted to do business with him ever again. He was a man with presence.

“Your Yi-jeurng,” my father says, “was a judge in the day, but a different man at night. He knew very powerful people, who told him to do dangerous things. The head of the Chinese FBI was his friend, and this FBI man, had a 27

girlfriend, a lover, in fact. His lover was this federal agent who worked in Beijing at the time, and told Yi-jeurng to find people to enter the government, to be governors of provinces, and future lawyers and politicians.” My father closes his eyes and shakes his head in slow wave-like motions from side to side, trying to forget the dark injustices of his home country.

“They rigged elections and changed test scores... He chose... people’s fate. Anyways, each time Yi-jeurng got it right, and one of the many kids he pushed into office succeeded, he was rewarded by the agent. He would come home, walking up the stairs... with garbage bags filled with cash.

During my first visit to China, there were endless shopping sprees for my sister and I, followed by vacations to the finest hot springs in all of Guangzhou. We lived in different hotels every night, except for that one time Yi-jeurng talked to the owner of the Chenglong hotel and convinced him to let us stay for a week, and even get free access to the water park. My sister and I loved every minute of being pampered, but I could tell my father did not.

“Yi-jeurng never told me, but your aunt did after he died. She said it was his work that killed him, and I agree.” Dad picks up the bowl with two hands, swallows the remaining oatmeal, and licks the bits of oats on his lips before setting the bowl back onto the dining room table. The wooden chair creaks as he leans back, and he throws one arm over the back of the seat in order to face me. “He was a good man, your Yi-jeurng,” my father announces while exhaling through his nose. “But China...China ruined him. If he didn’t do what they told him, he probably would have lost his job.”

“Anyways, Yi-jeurng stayed up until the sun rose playing mah-jong and drinking beer to find the people he needed to find. It was hard work. Corrupt work. It was dangerous, too. If anyone found out, they’d kill him.” Rising, my father makes small footsteps towards the kitchen sink. “That’s the problem with me,” Dad says as a trickle of water flows out of the faucet he just turned on. “I was too nice. Too afraid to take risks.”

After placing the two bowls on our plastic red drying rack, Dad wipes his hands on his navy blue pants, but then grabs a few paper towels as he realizes that he’s only getting his hands dirtier. He shakes his head left to right, and the loose gray hairs swing along with his head. “But I’ll tell you now, son, even though we were good friends, and even though most politicians in China were doing the same things at night, I never approved of what he did.”

I return to China a year after my father told me the story about Yijeurng. Yi-ma, my aunt, is 66, and she is crying at the cemetery where Yi-jeurng is buried. Her tears trickle down the wrinkles on her face and collide with the marble grave she kneels on. Rows of gray slabs align the cemetery, and each grave resembles a small solar panel as it collects heat from the afternoon sun. My mother and I stand shoulder to shoulder, watching Yima’s frail body shudder as she cries silently. Mom whispers to me that it is Yi-jeurng’s birthday and that he would have been 68. Fingers still clenching to the sides of the tombstone, Yi-ma murmurs “Sang yut fai loht,” the Cantonese words for happy birthday. Yi-ma 28

struggles to her feet, but finally she stands, heels digging into the earth.

Gazing once more at the image of on the tombstone, I imagine the many faces of Yi-jeurng: the solemn, unsmiling expression in the courtrooms during the day, the twinkle in his eyes as he played Mahjong at five in the morning, and lastly, the paleness of his face when he lost the battle for his life to liver cancer six months earlier. As my mother envelops Yi-ma in her arms, I cannot help but wonder about the poisonous effects of a man’s corruption; how it enters the individual and kills, how it later infects loved ones, and forces them to search for comfort from the few people that they can call family.

After our visit to Yi-jeurng’s grave, Yi-ma drives the three of us back to her apartment in Guangzhou. Weary from the journey, I close my eyes and sleep until I am awoken by a bump from a stone on the road. Unaware that I am awake, my mother turns to her older sister and asks in hushed Cantonese, “What did the doctor say?”

“I will need treatment,” Yi-ma mutters, eyes glued to the bustling highway in front of her. “The cancer is spreading.”

Later that day, my mother prepares three bowls of bland, rice porridge for the three of us. Yi-ma said she wasn’t feeling well and naps on her red plush sofa in the living room of her apartment. Round eyeglasses rest on her forehead, and her soft snoring breaks the silence of the hot evening.

“Your Yi-jeurng was a good man,” my mother mumbles. “When your father and I were just out of college, he got us both well-paid jobs as mechanical engineers. He always looked out for us.”

Mom takes small steps towards the low, square table in Yi-ma’s dining room as she tries to balance a bowl of porridge in each hand. I dash to help her, and she brightens, as if some great darkening force was just removed from her.

She sits on the edge of her chair, and points at Yima with a porcelain soup spoon.

“And your Yi-ma...” she continues, “Well, your Yi-ma is the reason I married your father. She set us up.” Mom and I both take simultaneous spoonfuls of rice porridge, but I spit mine out and scrape my tongue with my teeth, surprised by the heat. Mom laughs, reminding me to blow and scoop only from the top of the bowl before saying, “Remember zaizai (son). Family is always first.”

of carelessness while handling the brutal cleaver. But when he finished settling in and walked towards me, I decided that I would walk towards him, embrace the man who is my father and prepare for him to cook his dinner: a pot of oatmeal.

I take my dog out for a walk after the story, to process the information and digest the oatmeal. There’s a lake by my house and I’m always afraid of going into it at night, because there are shadows from gnarly trees that seem to bind you, but tonight I decide to be brave. Around every turn, there seem to be dark, unfilled spaces and I pace, confused and afraid, on the cemented pathways around the lake, until I see a glorious fountain. The fountain rests in the center of the lake, and is lit by an array of colorful beams at the base so that the water appears to be streaks of every color, all at one time.

The vertical stream of water is shot out like a high-pressure geyserand in the darkness, I examine the individual droplets that form the beautiful stream. Each ball of water is so determined, so clear and full of color on the way up towards the sky, but each ball always seems to get lost and lose that streak of red, blue or green on the way down as it prepares to plunge back down into the pool it came from. And as I stand there with my knees locked, staring into the fountain, while my dog sniffs some random patch of grass, it hits me that both my father and Yi-jeurng are descending droplets in the night.

Both are the fathers of Chinese families, with expectations to fulfill and jobs that kill them in slow, painful processes. Both are plagued by the responsibility to act as providers but somewhere on their prospective journeys, their paths diverged. My golden retriever jerks the leash, telling me to move on but in the end, I gaze at the colorless beads of water and wonder where exactly in the trajectory the corruption of great men begins.

On the night my father told me about Yi-jeurng’s past, he walked through our tattered, white, front door at 2 a.m. I remember how he turned to me with bruise-colored patches under his eyes, and tried to muster a smile.

I smiled back and nodded as he explained with heaving shoulders that one of the two other chefs was out sick and how there was dumpling sauce to mix, and earnings to calculate. But what he didn’t tell me was the truth that I already knew: that he went gambling at the Seminole Hard Rock Casino after the restaurant closed, and that he did it without fear of my mother punishing him, since she was in the frigid forests of northern Canada visiting my cousin. When my father reached to remove his shoes, I focused on the way his back curves from years of mixing soy sauce into fried rice. When he lifted his right hand to hang the car keys on the wall, I noticed another cut on one of his fingers from a tiny bit 29

30

Sabrina Ortega-Riek v Poetry

Happy Birthday v Poetry

Flood

Majestic Terhune

I found the box in my closet, the one with pictures of us.

Dogs bark in the blue night; there’s a coyote in the field of black-eyed Susans. The summer rains flood the valley; yellow on silver, the blooms floating; every star was the Sun. Flood the valley. The flowers wash out, the rain rips up the roots every summer.

You say happy birthday like You call me back with a solo shrug, bland “oops”, and quick laugh of a Googled joke. two days late.

I found the box in my closet of pictures I did not throw away six months ago. The bugs hurl themselves against my window seeking light, every summer, knocking. Let me in.

Let me in? You let yourself in. You let yourself in every time I leave the door unlocked, I leave my body open.

I found the clothes in my closet: your clothes that I still wear. The rains wash out Coyote Hill every year, every single year, we remain surprised by flash floods; attrition of symbiosis. Let me in?

You’re already inside, you’ve been inside the whole time.

I found the notes you wrote to me, all four years’ worth. In the summer there are spiders in the house.

The lock is useless: they can fit under the door.

Every time it rains it floods. Every star was the Sun yet we tear the apart the galaxy so easily.

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You wake me up like you are alone. yelling at self, dancing against floor, and every light reaching every corner. without seeing me against the wall.

You remember who i am like You drive. a cigarette between lips, volume up, and hands on burger with knees on wheel. everything passes. (misty.)

You love me like You work. prices per hour, eyes narrow in focus, and three paid vacations every year, with a signed paper’s motivation.

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Carissa Chen v Personal Essay

Akane: A Memoir i.

If you close your eyes, I’ll take your there.

Imagine 90210, sunset verandas, neon pink swimsuits.

Now dig into the left corner of your picture, right there beyond that large palm tree. It’s an anomaly: banal concrete streets littered with plastic bags and yesterday’s take-out, a strip from the fortune cookie clinging & abandoned on the sidewalk edge.

The rickety apartments are stone slab slate and your neighbour three blocks down has a clothesline that stretches from her window across the street. When you were younger, you loved guessing what she’d hang up to dry the next day: her Panda Express janitor uniform, a couple of socks, and sometimes, if you were lucky, her sparkling green kimono.

Her daughter was a nice girl from a nice family with roots in Japanese and Kenyan royalty. Her beautiful hair was dyed rose gold, her eyes a dark-ink moon, a bullet hole.

For halloween one year, the girl had dressed up as an empress and she was so stunning that a little boy got to his knees and bowed down to her feet.

Early on, her mother taught the girl about the women’s suffrage movement, about Empress Myeongseong & Chinese footbinding, about income inequality and incarceration, about the failures of oppressive people with hollow heads. “Say Equal Work Equal Pay!” or “Say abolish capital punishment!” her mother would sing as the flash of the camera went off. The girl obeyed.

And when she grew up, she was fierce to behold. Adolescence had been kind, blessing her with perfect skin and a perfect body. Boys eyes glued longingly to her collarbones, her porcelain thighs. You loved the way she slapped them when they looked too long.

The girl was seventeen, her name was Akane, and she ran away on December 12, 2010. ii.

Where they last saw Akane: The gas station looked innocent enough.

A sheet of snow covered the tips of a flickering rolex-red sign Flynn’s Station, Circa 1988 and the whole place lit an obnoxious LED white.

This had started the summer after I left Shanghai, the summer my mother’s abuse was still a dagger in my throat, a fish bone I could not yet swallow. It was the summer before Akane’s mother locked the doors of her bedroom, gifting her brightly colored vibrators shaped like penises in hopes of denying her lesbian sexuality. But tonight’s night is untainted. It’s an inoculating spell; our words spilling out like confessions.

Akane tells me about her French Revolution sex dream with Charlotte Corday. I tell her about how I hate the idea of meditation - that you can remove yourself from society is ludicrous.

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But what did we know?

We were barely women and thought of ourselves as deities. iii.

This is how your mother talks about Akane: “Perfect ____________________________________________________________ __ _______________didn’t she think_________________ _______________________ ____________________________________________________________smart girl _____________________ shame_____________________________________________________________ ________________________________selfish______________________________ her poor mother_____________________ ______________________________ ________________________________________________________________ _________________________ what a shame ______shock_________________ ___________________________________________________________________ __________________She would have____________________________why, poor lost girl _____________________________________________________________” In the past tense.

This is what you say when they ask if:

“you’re okay with what happened to Akane”

Yes. I mean, I didn’t know her very well.

This is what you do not say: You styled your hair so it looked like hers, dying the ends a honeyed auburn. You grew up with Akane the way most girls grew up with Barbie.

So when you began to see flyers AKANE HAVE YOU SEEN ME pasted against Flynn’s plaster walls, you feel the familiar fishbone in your throat and wince, your hair pulls you to the ground, and you rip the poster apart.

You run home and the sidewalk turns to acid - you can’t tell if the men on the sidewalk are illusions or hallucinations or reality.

And later that night you will dream: trapped in a maze of mirrors

all you can see is Akane

and her single-eyelids keep sinking

until in the mirror

they have covered her eyes,

her mother’s brightly

colored vibrators

like swords in her heart.

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and your mole keeps growing until it covers your face and I am clawing at my reflection and i curse my mother for never letting me cut off my mole and you curse your heritage for giving birth a face with single eyelids

And you’ll be alone five years later, staring at your plaster white walls on a dorm mattress that squeaks when you shift. You will be taping the lyrics Hey Jude on your wall, thinking about that time you and Jack and Eric and Preeya played the card game Mao and talked about breakups in orange plastic chairs. And the time that you walked through the art gallery with Preeya at night, trying to muster words about your mother’s bruises but only being able to talk about Akane instead. You want to tell somebody, anybody about the way your mother caved in and carved out her soul when she moved back to California, trying to find sustenance in a stranger’s penis and the blitzing California sun. Or the way she started screaming at night, crying out Chinese words you didn’t understand. And when you will be at Preeya’s funeral five months later, you will be thinking about Akane too.

Sometimes, you still like to imagine that it’s your face on the milk carton next to Akane’s because you think you’re also a little lost. Because everyone seems a little lost, like we’re all running away from ourselves.

And suddenly you feel the same stone in your chest, words you wish you had said to Preeya or your mom or Akane or your younger self rupturing like chains on your heart.

For the first time, tonight you will swallow instead, the fishbone caught in your throat will still throb, but this time you will not wince.

35

Will Li v Short Story

In Memory of Yesterday

At three in the afternoon, Annie was lying silently in her bed in the far corner of the apartment, her body propped up with pillows, her head positioned slightly to the right. She did not move and could not speak, and Carl wondered what she was thinking as he folded her freshly laundered clothing into neat, crisp squares and placed them inside a basket. Maybe, she was picturing the ocean, that time they had brought her to the beach, wheeling her across the sand, letting the grains settle beneath her trimmed toenails. How long ago had that been?

A month? Maybe, two? Carl could not remember exactly, the hours and days blending together like that Jackson Pollock painting Annie used to love, the one she had bought from some gift shop and hung above their couch many years before. In fact, nowadays, Carl could not remember a lot of things, like the last time he left the apartment to go out to dinner or spend a night with his buddies down at the bar. Yet, it occurred to him that he was no longer the forgetful one, and the thought made him smile sadly.

In the beginning, when Annie was first diagnosed, he had gone out and purchased a leather day planner from the stationery store down on Boylston. He had printed his name and address in dark, block letters inside the front cover and filled the columns with appointments and reminders: Tuesday, 2:00 PM, meeting with Dr. Sharpe. Thursday, 11:15 AM, plumber. But the task of writing and recording the details soon grew tiresome, the same tasks repeated over and over, and in the end, he decided to just use his iPhone, getting his son, John, to teach him how to set alarms throughout the day. He felt it vibrate now, the hollow rumbling against his thigh, and he stood, stretched his back, and walked towards his wife.

“Honey, I’m going to change the sheets now,” he said softly and slid his arms under her neck and legs, carrying her to the armchair in the corner. He leaned her against the cushions and, for what seemed like the hundredth time, tried to look into her deep brown eyes, the ones that he had fallen in love with that unseasonably cold September day. “What’re you staring at?” she had asked, her brows furrowed, her slender fingers gently cupped around a mug of tea. It was the first time he had stayed the night at her place, the two of them making love until the early hours of the morning. Sitting at the kitchen table, he had shrugged off the question, laughing awkwardly and making some improvised comment about her dimples. But he remembered her blushing just a little, a faint redness in her cheeks, and that was the first moment, he later realized, that he had experienced love. But now, Annie’s eyes were empty, the color of dirty February snow, and his presence didn’t seem to register. He sighed, combing her silver hair back with his tired fingers, the strands resting behind her ear, and then turned back to the bed.

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On the nightstand, there was a fresh vase of lilacs and daises swapped with the wilting flowers that had been there just that morning. It had become a weekly ritual, walking down the street to the flower stall to buy a new bouquet every Saturday. At ten, Carl sat by the door, waiting for Jennifer, Annie’s caretaker, to arrive before slipping on a worn pair of sandals and padding down several flights to the lobby. It was always something he looked forward to, taking his time to amble along the sidewalk, looking up into the blue Atlantic sky and not caring where he stepped. Sometimes, even if no cars were coming, he would push the button at the crosswalk and wait for the stoplights to change red, for the world to stop —if only momentarily— just for him. From there, it was a short walk to the flower stand, and the shopkeeper always had his order prepared in advance, the purple petals rolled into a worn piece of newspaper. All in all, the trip lasted around twenty minutes, and he was trudging back up the stairs before Jennifer was even finished feeding his wife.

But Jennifer asked to leave early that day, wanting to take her two small children to the aquarium, and Carl didn’t have a reason to deny her. “Call me if anything happens,” she said, slinging her bag over her shoulder. “Seriously, I can be here in ten minutes. I’ll steal I car if I have to.”

He envied Jennifer a little, if only for the fact that she still had a family, still had a life outside of this apartment. That evening, after she left, he wondered what she did in her spare time, if she filled her hours with knitting or running, if she slept in on Sundays. It occurred to him that he had never asked about her children, didn’t know their names or how old they were. Yet, Jennifer had been a constant in his life for the past few months, faithfully appearing at their door at precisely nine each morning, using her key to let herself in. For some reason, Carl felt a sort of closeness with her, as if by taking care of Annie, they both knew something that the rest of the world didn’t, and he made a note to ask her to coffee the next day, to have a real conversation. But even so, for the next twenty-four hours, it would just be Annie and him, alone, together, her shallow breaths mixing in with the humming of the air conditioning unit, and he did not know exactly how to feel.

Carl made quick work of the bed, stripping the linens and discarding the soiled pads. “It’s looking like a beautiful day out there, Annie. We should go out for a walk later,” he said as he crumpled the sheets together before throwing them into a dark plastic bag. “The weatherman said it was supposed to be a high of seventy today.” He grabbed the bottle of disinfectant that he had placed on the highest part of the bookshelf— out of reach from Annie’s curious hands—and sprayed down the mattress, masking the faint scent of urine with one of “Nature Breeze” as the label proclaimed.

It was the smell that made him stop and glance over at his wife, her cheeks sunken, skin sagging, hair brittle, and wonder how this all could have happened, could have gone so wrong. There were framed pictures of her hanging 37

along the hallway, of her hiking mountains and inching across frozen rivers. She used to buy dozens of cookbooks from the International section at Barnes & Noble, blindfolding Carl in the kitchen before slowly feeding him spoonfuls of green curry and delightfully salty stews. She was his first love, and even now, he hoped that still meant something. “Time for a bath,” he whispered, picking up Annie’s lifeless body, and headed to the bathroom.

That night, after a meal of leftover store-bought lasagna, Carl fed Annie her medication, numerous tablets in numerous colors and sizes, placing them one by one on the back of her tongue before carefully pouring a bottle of water down her throat. A little liquid dribbled out from the sides of her mouth, and he dabbed it up with one of his shirtsleeves. Later, as he rested on his side and listened to the sounds of distant cars, Carl had a feeling in that small space beneath his ribs, the place where his heartbeat met his stomach, that by morning it would all be over. That night, his wife’s breathing had been almost imperceptible, the blanket covering her chest barely rising with each inhalation, and he knew that as the hours passed, Annie’s lungs would steadily forget how to function, forget how much they loved the taste of oxygen, and then she would be dead. He closed his eyes, inhaled the dusty corners of the apartment, and did not cry, falling asleep also knowing that he would not stay up, would not be awake to call an ambulance when she first started gasping for air. ***

Sitting on the park bench, Carl could feel the thunderstorms approaching, the heat and humidity soaking his skin in perspiration, but it wasn’t forecast to break until later that day, and Annie did not seem to be bothered by the weather.

“Come, feed the…feed the...Come feed them!” she called out to him, hunched over by the edge of the pond, her palm filled with breadcrumbs. She looked almost normal there, with her thin figure framed by the lush greenery of the Public Gardens. He had dressed her that morning in a floral skirt and purple blouse, an outfit that she used to throw on casually around the house. It was how he best remembered her, twirling around the living room, and from behind, she looked just as she did twenty years before.

“Yes, I’ll be right there!” he answered. Annie turned back to the ducks, Jennifer right by her side, and he took one last look at his wife, wanting to remember the exact moment as though they were still young. “How’re the ducks, honey?” he asked and rubbed her shoulders softly, smoothing out the wrinkles in her clothing. Jennifer smiled and took a couple of steps back, leaning against the trunk of a nearby tree.

“Oh, they’re just fine. I like that small one over there,” she said, pointing to an upside down mallard, its feet wriggling in the air, its head submerged beneath the water. “He’s got character.” She threw some more crumbs, and the birds 38

amassed quickly in front of them.

“Reminds me of the time when Molly brought home that cardinal and just kept playing with it,” Carl said, and Annie scrunched her nose.

“Who’s Molly?”

“Molly was our cat. Remember? The gray tabby?” Molly had loved Annie, always curling up in her lap as they watched television together, purring incessantly.

“Oh, right. Molly. She was the devil, wasn’t she?” Carl chuckled. Today had been one of the better days, as though the skies had cleared in Annie’s clouded mind. At breakfast, she had recognized him for the first time in weeks, referring to him by name when he’d asked.

“Do you know who I am, honey?”

“Yes. You’re Carl, aren’t you?” He hadn’t really expected her to answer, only asking as a routine formality, and in the following moments, there had been a hot feeling in his chest.

“Yes, yes I’m Carl, your husband,” he had replied fondly and hugged her for a long minute, letting her head lay against his chest. “I’m Carl,” he repeated.

The memory loss had begun to quicken at the beginning of that month, her memory gradually sliced away like deli meat, a little piece every day. “The dementia’s getting worse then,” Dr. Sharpe had told him when he called. “I’m sorry Carl, but this is what usually happens. At some point, the medication stops working, and patients with Alzheimer’s start on a downward spiral.” He hung up soon afterwards, but not before the doctor had promised to send a pamphlet about end-of-life care to the apartment. “Carl, you’re going to have to prepare for it,” he said.

But he hadn’t wanted to think about it quite yet, to accept what was coming. The pamphlet had arrived in the mail, the pages filled with big pictures of elderly women interspersed with bullet points. He had mentioned it briefly to John over the phone, and Jennifer, who had done this many times before, had offered her own advice. But now it lay under a stack of documents on his desk, and he told himself he would finally read through it that weekend. But today was Friday, and Saturday still felt far away.

They stood by the duck pond for a little while longer, staring out at the willow trees and the tourists posing together on the bridge. They let the sunlight fill their eyes, the wind sweep through their hair, and they did not mind when a homeless man approached them, holding out a paper cup filled with loose quarters. Carl reached into his pocket for his wallet, giving him his last bills—two crisply folded tens— and nodding as the man mumbled, “God bless you.”

Later on, they had lunch at an expensive seafood restaurant, ordering lobster and baked clam appetizers and eating them all by hand. For the main course, the waiter brought out two gleaming filets of smoked trout, and Carl cut each one into small pieces and fed Annie bite by bite. Jennifer sat at the table next to them, enjoying a glass of red wine, and numerous times, Carl handed her his phone, 39

making her take photographs throughout the meal. They spent the rest of the day holding hands and wandering up and down the streets, never entering any stores, just walking. At one point, a boy, perhaps three or four, escaped the grasp of his mother and ran forward, dodging in between their legs. The woman apologized, wrapping her long arms around her wriggling son, but Carl had waved her away warmly, noticing the smallest hint of a smile on Annie’s lips.

As the sun began to set, the two of them once again found themselves in the Commons. The heat had dulled slightly so that it was now somewhat bearable, and in the distance, Carl heard the faintest rumble of thunder, the dark clouds just visible over the office buildings. Early on, he realized that he had forgotten to bring an umbrella and had almost considered turning back, to reschedule the outing for some other time. But Jennifer had convinced him otherwise, and as the day progressed, his concern had gradually faded. Sitting on a park bench, they watched a pair of fat squirrels chase one another, jumping and nipping each other playfully, and Carl felt the need to give his wife a quick peck on the cheek.

“Annie, I’m going to buy us some sweet potato fries,” he said, leaning over to whisper in her ear. “You just wait right here. I’ll be back before you know it.” Annie grew up eating sweet potato fries, and they had stuck with her since, becoming her guilty pleasure even when she was supposedly dieting. He had spotted a food truck down by the Park Street T stop and hoped that their saltysweet taste would help bring back a little more of his wife. He got up, letting go of Annie’s hand, and walked to the next bench over.

“Hi Jennifer,” he said, tapping her shoulder, and she looked up from her phone.

“Oh, hi! What’s up?”

“Sorry to ask, but do you think I could borrow a couple bucks? I’m want to go buy some sweet potato fries at that food truck over there, and they don’t take credit.”

“Of course. Let me just look for my wallet.” She began rummaging through her tote bag, fumbling through the plethora of items that one unconsciously accumulates over time: old receipts, dried out Chap Stick, the odd breath mint. “Sorry, I’ve been meaning to clean this out,” she said. “I don’t know how I’ve managed with this for so long.” He laughed fondly.

“Don’t worry about it. Annie was always the organized one.”

It took Jennifer another minute to locate her wallet, but she finally did, handing over a fistful of lint and crumpled bills.

“Thanks. I’ll be right—” Instinctively, he turned to look over at his wife, to assure himself that everything was still alright, but Annie was no longer there.

The bench was now empty, and the squirrels had disappeared up some tree. Carl stopped and spun around quickly, searching for any sign of purple fabric or his wife’s hunched form. “Where’s Annie?”

Jennifer stood, panicked, instantly understanding his question and jumped up onto the bench to get a better view. “Oh, shit.” She zipped up her purse, throwing it over her arm, and ran, motioning for Carl to follow. “Shit. Shit.

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Shit. Shit. Shit,” she repeated.

“Annie! Annie, where are you?” Carl called out, scanning the confused faces around him. They jostled their way through the crowd, bumping and pushing. Several people yelled angrily, and one rather large man with a black mustache pushed back, intending to start something, but Carl was already gone, running as fast as he old limbs and tired joints would take him.

It was then that they heard the groaning followed by a loud, highpitched scream. Annie was standing by the fountain, the water splashing loudly behind her, her brown eyes fixed open wide. A few people glanced over, alarmed, but no one stopped to see what was the matter.

“Annie! Shhh, I’m here. Don’t worry, honey. I’m here.” He approached her slowly, slipping his fingers around her stomach and tracing small circles around her navel. He kept whispering, “It’s Carl. I’m Carl, your husband. I’m here.” She was sobbing now, some of the tears catching in the wrinkles of her skin, her arms shaking violently. He buried his face into her hair, smelling the shampoo that he had washed her with the evening before, and quietly hummed a show tune, letting the vibrations travel from her skull down her spine.

“Where am I?” Annie asked, her breath still quick and shallow, her muscles tensed.

“You’re in the Boston Commons, honey. We went out on a date. Just you and me.” He slid his hands under her blouse, placing his calloused palms on her abdomen, skin touching skin.

She paused, dazed, and then asked, “A date? With you? Who are you?”

He felt as if he were choking, feeling the words caught in his airways. “I’m Carl,” he murmured, forcing the sounds to come out of his throat. “I’m Carl, your husband.” He repeated this singular fact unfailingly, stating a thirty-year old truth that was perhaps no longer true no matter how hard he prayed or wished or loved. Annie seemed to calm down afterwards, her breathing returning to normal, and the decision was made to immediately return home, to give her some familiarity.

The thunderstorms finally came as they boarded their train, slowly at first and then a sudden downpour. The rain whipped diagonally, spattering loudly against the glass. The train rumbled forward, and soon, Annie slumped into Carl’s arms, falling asleep on his shoulder. He liked the weight of her head against his body, liked the way her hair tickled his neck. Around them, passengers buttoned their raincoats and unfurled their umbrellas, but Carl couldn’t help but stare out the window, watching the city blur before him, the trees, bricks, and rain all becoming one. Lightning cracked through the grey sky, and he waited for their stop to arrive. ***

Jennifer showed up at their door around nine that morning sporting pink Nike running shoes and dressed in jeans and a t-shirt. She looked to be in her early thirties, young and full of energy, her blonde hair tied into a perfectly round bun. She was also quite tall, only a few inches shorter than Carl and a trait 41

that he had not pictured when they had talked on the phone.

“Mr. Bronstein? Jennifer Moore. It’s really great to meet you!” she said, grabbing his hand with both of hers and shaking it firmly. “Now where’s Mrs. Bronstein?”

But Annie hadn’t liked Jennifer, or more accurately, the idea of Jennifer, locking herself in the bedroom and pretending that her medication had made her drowsy.

“She comes highly recommended from Dr. Sharpe and the insurance company,” he told her the night before as they sat down to some Chinese takeout. He had rushed home from the office, dropping by the restaurant to pick up the order that he had placed under Annie’s name if only for old time’s sake. “I just—” he paused. “Every day when I leave for work, I’m not entirely sure that you’ll still be here when I get back, that you’ll be safe. To be honest, it worries me.” He took a bite of lo mein, twisting the noodles around his fork Italian style and stabbing at a piece of pork. Annie had once attempted to teach him to use chopsticks, guiding his hands to mimic the motion, but he had never managed to figure out how to grip them.

“I don’t see what the big deal is.” Her words were slow and measured.

“I’m fine. I can handle myself just fine.”

“Honey, you were hit by a car,” Carl said, looking directly into her eyes.

There was a forcefulness behind his words, almost as if he were reprimanding a child, and Annie was suddenly reminded of the times her husband had chastised their son many years before. “I don’t think that’s considered ‘fine’,” he continued.

“What do you mean? I wasn’t hit by a car!” She glared back at him, her mouth dry. “Don’t give me this bullshit. You don’t know…know what it’s like! I can’t go out…go out anymore! I can’t do anything! And now you’re telling me—”

“Yes you were.”

“Yes I was what?”

“Yes, you got hit by a car. I brought you home from the emergency room last Thursday,” he told her firmly, his voice low and rough. The hospital room that they kept her in had been very beige: the walls, the worn blanket, the thinly upholstered chairs. Everything had been beige, and Annie had always liked colors.

“I don’t want there to be a next time, honey. I don’t think I could live with myself. We are hiring her.” He shoveled some rice into his mouth and would not meet her gaze, effectively ending the conversation. For the rest of the meal, the two of them ate in silence, Annie only speaking to excuse herself, leaving Carl alone to clear up the table. But sitting on the edge of her mattress, Annie began to cry quietly, curling her knees towards her chest and muffling her sobs with a pillow. She had wanted to protest, to argue for the few small remaining freedoms she had left, yet, deep down, she knew her husband was telling the truth.

For the past few days, she had wondered where the bruises all along her left side had come from, desperately trying to remember slipping on the kitchen floor or bumping into a wall. She had been too embarrassed to ask Carl, but now, she finally knew.

42

Annie did not leave the bedroom until late afternoon when the sun was directly parallel to their living room windows. Its orange glow cast warm shadows across the walls and floorboards, making it feel as though she were no longer alone, as though there were others gathered in the room, hiding beside the bureau or behind the door. The thought comforted her. She had always loved the afternoon sun, specifically choosing an apartment on the far side of the building even though it overlooked a vacant lot.

It was only the two of them now, just her and Jennifer. She had heard Carl go out earlier, heard the door shutting and the sound of the kettle boiling.

Annie swallowed her pride and padded down the carpeted hallway, finding Jennifer in the living room reading a paperback and sipping a glass of tea.

“Hello,” she said standing uncomfortably in the doorway, crossing her arms across her chest.

“Hello Mrs. Bronstein! I’m Jennifer Moore. It’s so nice to meet you.” She placed her book upside down on the coffee table and jumped up to shake her hand.

“Please, please. If this is going to work, you’re going to have to call me Annie.”

“Of course. Is there anything I can help you with, Annie?”

“Yes.” She hesitated, biting the inside of her lip. “I think I’d like something to eat now.” And they both went into the kitchen. ***

Annie was no longer able to work as a part-time secretary at the office building a couple of blocks away. At first, she had tried, constantly writing herself notes on colorful Post-Its, placing them in the middle of her computer screen or on top of her coffee cup so as not to forget. She had always been good at coping, at adapting, once even spending a year in Argentina on a whim even though she didn’t know the language. But still, it hadn’t worked; her mind kept slipping. She forgot to return a few important phone calls, and after about a week or so, the manager apologized profusely before quietly asking her to pack up her things.

She didn’t have much, only a few photographs and some magazines, a small potted cactus, but during her lunch break –when she knew no one was looking— she snuck into the office supply closet and stole a few boxes of pens and highlighters. It had been her silent retaliation. Yet, she felt ridiculous leaving that afternoon, a medium-sized cardboard box awkwardly cradled in her arms.

Walking down the street, she avoided the gaze of other pedestrians, certain that they knew everything, could see it all piled up in her front of her. She quickened her pace. By the time she arrived home, she was sweaty and out of breath, unable to find the motivation to do more than unlock the door, and Carl found her that evening lying on the carpet, fast asleep.

43

In another life, Annie had been a nurse, graduating from nursing school as an above average student, although nothing too remarkable. At the time, it was easy to find a job in Boston, and she spent the rest of her days working in the same hospital in Cambridge, recording blood pressures and administering shots.

She bought seven pairs of brightly colored scrubs, each one for a different day of the week, and kept them freshly laundered in the top drawer of her dresser. Rarely was she ever late, only missing work twice in her entire career, the first for the birth of their son and the second for appendicitis, and after forty-three years, she retired as the most senior member of the hospital. Annie still remembered her last day when the entire staff threw her a going-away party, covering the lecture hall in streamers and balloons, the whole thing complete with a large ice-cream cake. Her job as a secretary had just been a way to pass the time.

But now, she spent most of her days drawing, searching the drawers around the apartment for interesting objects. In the bathroom, she found an old comb and in the bedroom, a broken stiletto pump. She took these items and set up a little studio by the window, throwing a bed sheet over a small table and unplugging a lamp from the office. Lounging on the couch, the television playing softly in the background, she spent hours sketching with a mechanical pencil, using her finger to smudge and shade, the side of her hand soon turning a dark gray. Carl came home early one afternoon to find Annie in the same position he had left her in that morning, legs crossed, back slouched, hand dancing across the paper.

“Did you eat yet?” he asked, throwing his house keys on the side table and opening the fridge. She looked up.

“Oh hello, love. What time is it?”

“Nearly five,” he responded slowly. “Did you have lunch?”

“Sorry?”

“Did you have lunch?” he repeated.

“Oh, it must have slipped my mind. There’s some stuff in the pantry. I’m sure I could whip something up if you’re hungry.” She didn’t move, and Carl shut the refrigerator door, slipping off his work shoes.

“Don’t worry about it, honey. We can just get some pizza or something.

What would you like?”

“Pineapple would be nice,” she murmured and returned to her drawing.

Before the illness, Annie had loved to read, spending countless summer afternoons in the Boston Public Library, checking out a backpack full of books that she lugged home every week or so. She began with the classics, The Great Gatsby, Jane Eyre, preferring the eloquence of the language and the richness of the metaphors, but gradually, she decided to delve into the contemporary, and for little bit, she even dabbled in young adult fiction, devouring a copy of The Hunger Games in a matter of hours.

“It’s so interesting to see what kids read these days,” she mentioned to Carl as they strolled downtown one day in late fall. She had forgone a jacket, protesting that the cold was something that “built character,” and let her hair blow wildly in the wind. “I can see why they like it so much. It’s quite entertaining, an 44

escape.”

But that was in the past. She could no longer focus long enough to finish more than a few pages, always losing her spot or rereading the same sentences over and over without it even registering. After a couple of months, she threw away her library card. ***

They took the red line from Alewife towards Mass General, gripping each other’s pale hands and watching as the college students emptied out first at Harvard and then at MIT. When they reached their stop, they stood in unison and walked off the train together.

Outside, it was one of those summer days that you looked forward to, the air cool, the sky blue, the trees green. They took the elevator up to the neurology department, which was on the eighth floor of the hospital: a clean, slick looking office with a glass wall in the waiting room that overlooked the northern part of the city, and as they waited in line, Annie could just make out the glinting dome of the State House.

“These are just some forms that we’ll need you to fill out. I’ll let the doctor know that you’re here, and we’ll call you in once he’s ready.” The receptionist handed them a clipboard and then turned. “There’s coffee and water around the corner.”

“Thank you,” Annie said, taking the sheets, and the woman nodded and smiled back.

The waiting room wasn’t very busy, and the two of them took a seat somewhere in the center, equidistantly far from each of the other couples. One woman who looked too youthful for this sort of thing was in a wheelchair, her skin tight against her face, her mouth open slightly. A rather handsome man sat beside her, and Annie cringed at the thought that two people so young could be sitting along side them in a similar situation.

“Don’t worry, honey. I’m sure it’s going to be nothing. It’s just old age,” Carl said, putting his arm around Annie and letting her fall into him. He crossed one leg over the other before grabbing a copy of TIME magazine, leisurely skimming through the pages and headlines. He showed her an article about healthcare— statistics about the uninsured—but Annie couldn’t keep her mind steady, and after exactly twenty-one minutes, Dr. Sharpe appeared at the door.

“Mr. and Mrs. Bronstein?”

“Yes, that’s us,” Carl replied, standing. They exchanged brief handshakes before following him through a maze of corridors, past examination rooms and beeping machinery. This was going to be the first appointment of many, Annie realized, and she wondered whether or not she would remember this route for the next time or the time after that.

Dr. Sharpe’s office was quite spacious with a large desk and a couch along the back wall. Numerous certificates and degrees were framed behind 45

him. He was a short and slim man with a dark beard and hard-rimmed glasses perched upon his nose. His facial hair hid his age so that Annie was not sure if he was thirty-five or fifty.

“So it seems we’re here about Mrs. Bronstein today,” he said pleasantly, flipping through her preliminary charts. “You’re worried about memory loss?”

“Oh, please, call me Annie. I can’t stand formalities. But yes, I guess you could say I’ve been having some memory issues lately.”

And she described what had happened, getting lost in the grocery store and then forgetting how to get back home. She had stood in the produce aisle for over fifteen minutes, not knowing what to do, before someone from the deli counter came over to ask what was wrong. He wore a canvas apron and had large palms, and Annie had been comforted by his presence. Yet she hadn’t said much, making up some excuse before assuring the man that everything was fine, that she was just easily distracted. He seemed unconvinced, but he hadn’t pushed further.

“Besides these incidents, has your memory loss affected your daily life?”

His voice was friendly but rehearsed, and she was certain that he had asked these questions hundreds of times before.

“Well, there’s been some other small things: losing stuff, forgetting phone numbers. I thought it was all pretty normal, that maybe I was just getting a little slow.” She chewed the inside of her lip, and Dr. Sharpe smiled sympathetically.

“How has your mood been? Are you feeling depressed at all?” She shook her head.

“No, a little tired, I guess. Nothing out of the ordinary.” He nodded and scribbled something down on his notepad.

“Okay, Annie, I’m going to ask you some questions, and I want you to answer them to the best of your ability.” He flipped to the next page of his clipboard. “What is today’s date?”

“July 8th.”

“What do you use to tell time?”

“A watch.”

“Spell ‘Boston’ backwards.”

“N-O…T-S-O-B.”

“Very good. Now I’m going to show you a series of pictures. Just name the item.” He took a stack of notecards from his desk and placed them on his lap. The first one was a dog, then an umbrella, and then a fork. She named each object one by one, and each time, Dr. Sharpe nodded approvingly.

The test continued for a couple more minutes with Annie quickly completing various other mental exercises. She added numbers, connected dots, followed a sequence of complex directions. Carl watched his wife worriedly, his right knee bouncing up and down.

“I’m going to request that we get some tests done,” Dr. Sharpe finally said, adjusting his glasses. “An MRI, an EKG, possibly some others depending on those results.”

46

“And what are you hoping to find?” Carl asked. He had always been the picture of perfect health, playing basketball in college and still going to the gym three or four times every week. Both of his parents had lived well into their nineties, and the prospect of more hospitals and doctor’s visits frightened him.

But Annie shushed him. She was a nurse and knew what these tests meant, what they were looking for. The dark blues and purples represented low brain activity, and she knew that was what they would inevitably find. She pressed her lips into a firm line, squeezing Carl’s hand reassuringly, and asked,

“How soon can we get them done?” ***

Annie bumped open the front door with her hip, letting the cold air billow into the small apartment, and set her shopping bags down in the front hallway. It was almost six, and Carl was still at work in the city, taking on some extra projects in hopes of impressing his boss. But tonight, she didn’t mind being alone. Earlier that month, they’d made plans for that weekend— a seafood dinner and a show— and she had been looking forward to it for days now, eagerly planning her outfit like she had once done back in grade school, like she was still fourteen.

She smiled to herself and walked into the kitchen, throwing her jacket onto the countertop before listening to the answering machine.

“Hi Mrs. Bronstein, this is Debbie from Northeast Dental Associates.

We’re calling about your insurance…” She sighed. She had never really liked the dentist, never liked the feeling of someone poking around in her mouth, and skipped to the next message.

“Hi Mom. Hi Dad. It’s John. Call me back when you get the chance.

Love you.” Beep.

“Mrs. Bronstein? Hi, this is the Boston Public Library. Just letting you know that you have a couple of overdue books…”

But Annie was no longer listening, filling a glass with tap water and drinking it in four large gulps. She missed John. Last March, he had a taken a job down in Austin before deciding to spend Thanksgiving and the holidays with his husband’s family in California. They still talked on weekends, and he emailed her pictures every so often, but it had been almost a year since they last saw one another. Maybe, after her husband finally finished his projects, the two of them could take a trip down to Texas and surprise their son on his doorstep.

She chuckled and imagined the face John would make if she and Carl showed up unannounced; her son had never been a big fan of surprises.

It was late February now, and the days were steadily growing longer.

Sometimes, Annie still had enough daylight to go out after work, to walk down to the park at the end of the street and sit by the frozen pond. She sipped tea 47

from a thermos and watched the sun set, returning to the apartment only when the streetlights turned on. But winter was not yet over—the groundhog seeing his shadow— and by the time she began to prepare dinner, the apartment was already dark. She turned on a lamp in the living room, letting the light trickle in through the doorway, and took things from the fridge: a red bell pepper, half an onion, a pound of ground beef. Working in the dimly lit kitchen, she diced the vegetables into a small bowl and browned the meat on the stovetop.

Chili was one of her favorite foods, along with sweet potato fries, and it was something Annie had grown up eating in southern Vermont. During summers in high school, she waitressed at the local restaurant, quietly observing and taking notes on the chef. Later, at home, she would try to recreate the dishes, testing out different variations of grilled tuna and sirloin steaks. She rummaged through boxes in the attic to find her mother’s old recipe books and tried those too. By the time she went off to college, Annie could whip up practically anything, and Carl always said that he had fallen in love after tasting her ravioli, proposing on top of the Empire State Building just a week later.

She dumped all of the ingredients into a large pot, letting the chili simmer on medium heat, and set the timer to one hour. She was about to sit down to a new novel when her phone began to ring.

“Hi Love,” she said, idly thumbing through the pages.

“Hi Honey. Are you free right now?” Carl sounded preoccupied, and in the background, Annie could hear the shuffling of papers.

“Mhmmm.”

“Do you think you could go pick up the dry cleaning? I forgot this morning, and I need that suit for this thing tomorrow.” He paused before adding, “I would go, but I can’t get out of the office right now, and I think they’re closing pretty soon.”

“Yeah, sure. I’ll go right now,” she replied, putting down her book. She wondered what Carl was doing at that exact moment, if he was writing some proposal or just lazily surfing ESPN. She tried to imagine him alone in the office, his face illuminated by a computer screen, a solitary head in a sea of cubicles. She wished he weren’t so busy.

“Thanks, honey,” He said, and she could sense him trying to end the conversation.

“Do you know when you’ll be home? I’m making chili.”

“Just leave some for me in the fridge.” Another pause. “I have to go now, but I’ll see you later. Love you, honey.”

“Love you too,” she murmured, but she wasn’t entirely sure that Carl had heard. She sighed and padded into the kitchen, turning off the stove and throwing on her coat. There was still some laundry to be done, the sheets to be changed, and she made a mental note to herself to finish it all before going to bed that night. Outside, the air had turned frigid, and her boots sloshed through the dirty snow as she made her way down the street. There were few cars on the road, and Annie enjoyed the city silence. Things would be better after this weekend, she told herself. She would ask Carl to spend more time at home, and he would 48

listen. Maybe he’d even use one of his vacation days to stay in on Monday, and they’d cook and drink wine and laugh. Maybe she’d even mention that trip down to Texas.

She’d been walking for a couple of minutes— her cheeks flushed a bright red— before she realized that she had forgotten her keys.

Monica Acosta v Senior Meditation

Falling With Icarus “There are no clear borders, Only merging invisible to the sight.”

Dejan Stojanovic, Circling

I’ve always been told that from a bird’s-eye view, the line dividing Mexico and the United States is perceptible. From above, you can see the Rio Grande, the defining border between Texas and four Mexican states. You can see, just a few miles west of Juárez, the expiring colors of a desert, like the shedding skins of the ripe Green Zebra tomatoes my dad used to pick out in the fields when he was my age. You can see the ruthless mountains where flora and fauna thrive in the harsh sultriness of the desert’s thousand suns. You can see the mango-like complexions of the Western tanagers as they wing their way in flocks through the southwestern parts of the U.S., midway through their yearly migration route. ~

There is an article in the Tufts Journal titled “Why Do Birds Return North After Winter—Why Don’t They Just Stay Where It’s Warm?” There are a myriad of reasons; life in the tropics isn’t as ideal as it seems. There are limited food resources, too much competition for the resources that do exist, a higher risk of infectious diseases and a danger of predators. Still, “It takes a great deal of energy to migrate back and forth,” the article reads, “and there are many risks along the way. A lot of animals don’t make it.”

I think about what that journey must have looked like to a flock of birds, soaring that high in the air, passing from one region to another. Maybe, if the Western tanagers from 20 years ago had been looking closely enough, their eyes would have landed on a woman, slouched over because of the weight of a 30-pound child on her back and with the miniature hand of a 2-year- old entwined with her own. It was a planned escape; she was leaving her home for another, headed toward what she hoped would be a better place where resources were abundant and she could live a better life. What was motivating her was the man she knew she’d find on the other side of her trek, the one with the job and the matching half of their wedding bands.

But the birds would have been too high up to notice the lines around her eyes that were wrinkled with fatigue like the clothes she’d been wearing for days, maybe even weeks. But I wouldn’t know exactly how long. Whether due to her fading memories or a purposeful forgetfulness, my mother tends to be a little reserved with the details.

And I think about how much easier that journey must have been for the birds. ~

Just a few strides into Pontotoc County on the outskirts of Tupelo, Mississippi, was a road that ended right outside the town limit, and at the end

49

50

of that road was a house. It sprawled along one of those two-lane gravel roads, and this was where my entire family gathered on weekends. It was a house with floorboards that complained all day long of the pounding that came with our presence, and critters that didn’t seem to get the message that our family get-togethers were “invitation-only.” This house was affectionately dubbed the “Hacienda,” although at the time I didn’t understand why. That’s the word you use for the country houses you see on those God-awful Mexican soap operas, with flowering courtyards and colonial arcades — it was amusingly ironic for my parents because that house was anything but, but I was still at that age where I didn’t understand what irony was, so I left it alone.

There was a large room in a corner of the house where chairs and tables were arranged in permanent disarray. It was there where we often sat during our treasured and spontaneous family gatherings, with my dad’s seven brothers, two sisters and their children. I spent most of my time with four of those children: Gabriela and Elena, who were two years younger than I was, and Daniel and Maria, who were my age. We had a lot in common, my cousins and I. We often became bored with our parents’ conversations — all they ever talked about was “in Mexico, we did this” and “in Mexico, we did that,” and all that did was remind us of everything we’d never experienced and everything they had left behind.

I remember sitting in the chair beside Tío Gustavo, my favorite uncle, and the smog-like stench of the cigarettes he seemed to wear on his clothes like perfume.

He had one of those Cap’N Crunch mustaches; it curled up at the ends and made his mouth seem like it was fixed in a perennial grin. But I knew that underneath that mustache was a smile that was dismal, reminiscent of better times. He came to the United States when he was 54, and he never quite picked up the different lifestyle. And even though this room we spent all of our time in was 10 times the size of the entire house where my dad and his siblings lived back in Zacatecas, it just wasn’t the same. They were stuck in the past, and because of it my cousins and I often felt forgotten.

So we escaped down a hallway to another room that was smaller and stuffier but away from their world that we never quite had a place in, so we didn’t really mind. We were 7 — or was it 8? – years old when this tradition began. My family is known for being late to everything, so I was always the last one to have to sneak away. We had another tradition; sometimes, we would stay right outside of that room where all the grown-ups were for a few minutes after we left and listen to everything they wouldn’t say while we were there. And then it was off to the other room, where we talked about what 8-year-olds talk about, but also about what adults talk about when they think we aren’t listening, about all the things they thought we didn’t know. We theorized. We came to conclusions that we knew they didn’t want us to come to, so we kept them to ourselves and within the walls of that small room.

And it was in that small room just a few steps away that I always found the faces of the four people who knew me the best, the four people I had known since forever. I recall the way I’d pause right before entering the room, standing outside just a moment away from turning the doorknob. I could hear their ban51

shee-like cackling, and maybe I’m crazy, but I realized that there was no sound sweeter or better than that. That was my home.

But the best and worst part about this home was that it was malleable. I remember once, on a Christmas morning, I turned the doorknob to find an extra face amid the usual sea of familiar ones, a cousin we’d never known we had. His name was Emilio, and he and his family had just gotten here from Durango. We became very close to him over the span of a few months, but on the two-year anniversary of his arrival, he and his family never showed.

It was another Christmas morning. Nobody asked any questions. None of the adults talked about what happened, even after I left the room. I went to where I knew my cousins would be waiting for me, and there they were, minus one. But I had nothing to report this time.

The next day, I would later find out, Emilio and his family would be deported back to Durango. ~

We had a lot in common, my cousins and I. Our fathers all worked as construction company supervisors, a job that sent them all over the country to monitor different sites, sometimes even for months at a time. They always left on a Sunday; I remember watching as my dad’s work truck swallowed the entirety of the concrete path before pulling out and moving away. My arms, which were waving at his truck seconds earlier, faltered and reached instead for my mother’s comforting ones.

I felt sorry for my mother. This was the only job my father could find on either side of the border for a man with an eighth-grade education, and one of the main reasons she followed him here was so that we could be together, so we wouldn’t have to grow up without a father. But it didn’t make much of a difference. I was 6, and then 7, and then 9, and then 13 before his absence became even more familiar to me than his presence. “It’s what I gotta do,” he’d say when we’d keep his car keys hostage, and it was what we had to do, too.

That was another thing we all had in common; there was always this cloud, this shadow that not even Mass could help, that hung over those Sunday mornings. A lingering feeling, always that irrational fear that there would come the day when our fathers wouldn’t come back.

Because sometimes people leave and they don’t come back. ~

It was like a scene in a movie, that day in the house on the edge of Pontotoc County when my parents announced that we were going to visit their old home in Mexico. I was ecstatic, for now I could finally see what all the fuss was about. At the time, I couldn’t imagine why we hadn’t done it before. But what I hadn’t realized was the underlying meaning of our trip. There was a reason we hadn’t done it before.

And it’s not until you’re older that you realize there are a lot of things your parents don’t tell you as a child. They keep things from you, to lead you astray or sometimes just to delay a little bit what you will eventually find out anyway — to keep the charade going just a little longer, because whoever said 52

ignorance was bliss knew what she was talking about.

But at that moment, I was no longer ignorant about our situation. We’d had our suspicions all along, my cousins and I, in the dark shadows of that room.

We’d had our suspicions; that yeah, we lived in the United States, but maybe we weren’t supposed to. But that was an issue we were good at ignoring ’cause that’s what all children who are good at being children do. But it was in that moment that our suspicions were confirmed.

Except now, I wasn’t part of that. Suddenly, all those trips to Memphis in the months before made sense. The fingerprinting, the signatures, the headshots.

I didn’t know exactly what that had to do with anything, but I knew it did mean something, and I realized that I was no longer part of the group of people who had to worry about police roadblocks, who couldn’t fly because they asked for IDs that my parents never had until now. The room was bustling and noisy, with “Congratulations!” and “We’re so happy for you!” floating around, and I reveled in this announcement. I thought I had experienced relief before, but that didn’t hold a candle to this.

And it wasn’t until much later that I found out that all of my uncles had sent the same application to the immigration office in Memphis. But they weren’t celebrating. And it was like a scene in a movie, when I turned around and saw the still figures of my cousins, and four pairs of defeated eyes staring right back into mine. ~

I’ve always been afraid of heights, but this newfound freedom of travel gave us the chance to visit, for what was my first time, a big city, so I agreed to venture to the top of the Empire State Building with my dad. He’s a sturdy, dwarfish little man, his height something I often tease him about but am secretly grateful I inherited. As we stood at the top with my hands clenched in a vice grip around my dad’s arm, I could feel wisps of wind threading through my hair and a dizziness that sweeps through when you feel like you’re about to fall off a great height. “See, mija,” my dad whispered into the crisp New York City air, “the higher you go, the more you can see.”

It was a clear day, and if the guy who brought us up here was right I could see up to 32 miles away. The view was spectacular. I could feel the tension in my shoulders roll off and away, and as I stood up there with seemingly no care in the world, I thought to myself that this was not high enough.

But how high is too high? How far can you go before you reach that point in the sky where the clouds begin fogging your vision, and before you know it you’re so high up that the continents blur together, and you find yourself so far away from what you thought you used to know very well? It wasn’t until later that I asked myself these questions, contemplated them, tossed them around in my head like flies that flicker in globes around lightbulbs.

But the thing about flies is that they never stop their motion. And I could feel them whizzing somewhere in the back of my mind, a nagging feeling lost in my own purposeful forgetfulness — another thing I must have inherited — that whispered the answer: not very far.

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~

I’m not quite sure when it all started. I have no clue when the ignoring began, or when my cousins and I started sitting at different tables in the school cafeteria. I don’t recall exactly when I stopped sharing a seat with Maria on the school bus, or when the snarky remarks replaced our easy conversation and became the only words we shared with each other. I could not tell you the exact day when I stood outside of that small room where I could hear their banshee-like cackling and, instead of turning the doorknob, turned myself around and walked back to the room with the adults.

My dad had started coming home more often. It wasn’t drastically more than usual, but he came far more often than my uncles, because flying from Maine to Mississippi was a lot easier than driving. The blood beneath my skin would no longer stampede to the rhythmic drumming of a horse’s gallop every time somebody asked the loaded, awkward question, “So…how did you get here, exactly?” Because that didn’t matter anymore. It didn’t matter how I got here, but what did matter was the fact that I could stay here in the U.S. without worry, and my cousins couldn’t.

We were so lucky. My parents and my two sisters and I, we were so lucky. And I knew it, and I let it get to me. In my head, I went too high; suddenly, I was back at the top of the Empire State Building, and I could see the faint outlines of my cousins down there on the sidewalk, like little flecks of dust. And I put them there. I put myself above them, because in my mind I was better than they were. I could feel my cousins pushing me away, and to be completely honest, I didn’t put up much of a fight.

And it was then that the four people who used to know me best didn’t know me at all anymore. And before I realized it, before I had any idea what was going on, they were gone. ~

I’ve always been told that from a bird’s-eye view, the line dividing Mexico and the United States is perceptible. From up there, you can see the Rio Grande, and the four bordering states, and the Green Zebra tomato deserts, and the woman who was once lost but not so much anymore.

The line is perceptible, but only if you look for it. Sometimes, at that height, you won’t sense the moment you cross from one world to another. I didn’t. You won’t sense the change, but it’s there, it’s there and it just happened and you missed it. One moment you’re on this side, and the next you’re on the other.

“There are no clear borders, Only merging invisible to the sight.”

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Annie Ning v Personal Essay

Smoke

That night, my fingers were clumsy in a way they were not when I played piano or braided my mother’s hair. I was torn between two aisles of our corner Stop N’ Shop, my eyes scanning the shelves a little too carefully, looking a little too conspicuous. Thomas was somewhere in another aisle, his casual gait serving only as a reminder of my own incompetence.

From time to time my peripheral vision drifted to the curved mirror in the corner, and I cringed as I watched my mistakes warping in its convex reflection. The stiffness of my hands—stuffed into my jacket pockets—was all too obvious, just like the way my eyes darted back and forth—cashier, mirror, cashier. Most of all, I felt the heat of blood stewing in my neck and on the surface of my cheeks, so hot that I was certain it scorched red on my skin.

I was infused with the irrational panic that my skin would bleed ink like stolen bank notes, that my fingers—once removed from the caves of my pockets—were stained. That would surely be a telltale sign of the two tins of candy I clutched in my palms—one pack mango and one pack mint.

Only later, chewing the stolen candy in the alleyway outside the store, did I realize how bitter it tasted. Stale cigarette smoke lingered in the air from the whiffs of vagrants that lived there long before me. Its fog didn’t bother me so much as the scent it left behind. The haze always disappears in a single breeze but its scent never leaves you; it leaches into your hair and your pores and your lungs, consumed with every breath.

Thomas had the façade of a ten-year-old boy but lacked the naivety, so he came out of the shop with triple the yield. No candy this round—just some bottled shots of Jack Daniel’s whiskey that smelled like the hand sanitizer I once kept too long in my fifth-grade backpack.

I wondered if the alcohol tasted as bitter as the candy did because it too, was stolen. I liked it better later, when it took the bitterness away. It never took away the reek of smoke, though, which stuck around long after the drunken shower, long after the skin was rubbed raw by my delinquent fingers.

Guilt never left me the way it left Thomas. Somehow in him it was transient like the vagrants in the alleyway, packing up their cardboard homes when the night was over. I saw him the morning after.

“The smoke’s gone,” he promised. “You smell fine. No, more than fine, you smell good.”

I believed him, but still could not shake off the stench of guilt that plagued my senses. The vagrant had long unpacked his cardboard box, laid out his blanket, and was here to stay.

I became obsessed with the corner Stop N’ Shop—it was the store I would go to and pay for ridiculous amounts of candy each day; when I found pennies and sometimes quarters on the road I would reserve it for the tip jar by the cashier.

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When my father checked under my bed one day and found stacks upon stacks of untouched candy in tin boxes—mango and mint— I knew that my obsession had come to an end.

“Explain yourself. Explain this.” He gestured hesitantly towards my collection. I averted my eyes.

“Clarify this for me—why do you have all...this?”

I had to bite my lips to prevent a sigh of relief from escaping. As I told him the truth about what I really did—the sin of my fingers—I let the smoke drift out of my lungs, and felt it float away. This time it didn’t stay. The punishment he gave me—two weeks of house arrest—seemed less than the burden I had carried and left under my bed.

When I called Thomas to tell him the story, he couldn’t understand.

“Wait—you had enough money to buy all that shit? Cheapskate. You could’ve gotten us a bigger bottle.” But he knew it didn’t work like that. It wasn’t that we needed the money so much as we wanted the high that came from committing the act.

Guilt was too much like the smoke that came hand-in-hand with the high, and I didn’t think it was worth it. Smoke, it only existed when there was something to burn—my innocence perhaps, was burned that night—and it stuck around too long after the act. I still remember vividly the smell of smoke from that first night. I remember the charred taste on the tip of my tongue, the thick fog clogging up my pores. And when I stop at the corner to buy milk instead of alcohol, I always spare some change for the tip jar, and for something else. One pack mango, one pack mint.

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Zoha Qamar v Short Essay

Sara Michaels v Short Essay

Three Halves

A Lump of Dirt

There are three halves to every tomato.

I jump from stone to stone, trying to avoid the grass and dirt; my mother told me it brings bad luck. I follow the path to the apple tree that was growing when Heather and I bought the house. She tells me to pick the three greenest apples for her pie. One, I pluck the apple closet to the ground. Two, I pluck the apple directly above me. And three, I pluck the apple Heather said was greener than our grass—which isn’t actually that green.

“Mr. Leonard.”

Across the garden, I hear the sizzle of chicken, and can smell the broccoli and carrots roasting. My stomach rumbles.

“Mr. Leonard, sir. It’s time to take your medication. Please go to the counter.”

My feet carry me towards the house. The path is colder and cleaner than I remember. I try to jump to the next stone, but my knee buckles and I fall onto even ground. The men in the corner exchange a series of hushed whispers as a girl grabs my waist, lifting me upwards.

“Oh no,” I mutter to myself. “No, no, no. It touched me. The dirt touched me.” I pinch my stomach like my mother taught me; if we cause pain to ourselves, God will forgive our sins. At the age of two, my short legs often missed the stones, sending me spiraling into the dirt. Mother would run over and pinch my stomach. I was embarrassed, and never left home without a shirt. Mother said if I kept stepping in the dirt, no girl would ever love me. But, the first time I was ever naked in front of Heather, her lips traced the bruises cautiously as if she was scared to cause me more pain. That was also the first day she told me she loved me.

“Mr. Leonard! Are you okay? You can’t be jumping around, I’ve told you numerous times.”

“Who are you? How do you know my name?” I snap back into reality.

“Mr. Leonard, it’s me Anna, Nurse Anna,” the girl in a white coat and blue scrubs responds.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know an Anna. But, it’s a pleasure to meet you, please call me Lenny.” I stick my hand out.

“Okay, Lenny. Please go to the booth and get your medication before group therapy starts.” She doesn’t shake my hand, so I decide not to listen, and jump to the remaining stones. I reach a counter closed off from the rest of the room by glass. A tall man with a clean-shaven face hands me a big red tablet.

“But I thought we were having chicken! I smelled it from the path.”

“I changed my mind,” the man rolls his eyes. I take the pill and stuff it into my pocket when he isn’t looking.

“Please go to group therapy now, they’re waiting for you,” he says without looking up.

I sit down next to a gentleman who hasn’t showered in a week. I ponder

The first is the half pulverized by some metal man and nuked with corn syrup and sugar. Churned and burned and turned into that creamy kind of slosh so smooth you don’t know the difference between chemical and condiment. Perfect tomatoes for crispy potatoes with sea salt and vinegar malt, the Frenchiest fries, the number one best seller reason why a diet dies. Hot dog, chicken nugget, hamburger, any way you tug it, the metal man and the chemical queen have you hooked and booked and back for more and more because bore and bore is a life with a laugh and that tomato half.

Chiseled and chopped, parsley topped. Onion oil brought to a boil. There’s something so perfectly pretentious about the second half of a tomato, and yet so arbitrarily attainable. It can be for me or you, for the curry made by the man tucked in the tunnel of the street, for the Parliament’s dinner dressing the meat.

Dancing in the kitchen, drifting over city livin. In palaces or a hut, in a family or home, with three people you love, or all alone. The second half of a tomato is the fresh and freedom and spark in self.

But the third half, the third half lies in rows, not shows. Behind the stand of the market, or beyond the stones of the store, the face of farm. In a world of bruise and brown, taken all the hits, the shits, the harm. The tomato you forgot because you picked and flicked it aside. The tomato you won’t recall because you reached for the ripe red one, because who wants bruised and brown or hits and shits? Not you, for certain. Because who wants to remember bruised and brown or hits and shits? No one wants to determine, of course, that package of pity, ribboned with remorse.

That’s why it’s called the third half. Because we’ve all hushed and shushed, betrayed the mushed, signed the pact and kept it in tact, to be blind and focus on the chemical queen and fresh picked leafy green. Play them with parsley or salt and malt all we want, we will try and try, fry after fry, but a thousand nuggets still can’t tug and shrug or side and hide the bruised and brown or hits and shits.

There are three halves to every tomato.

There are always three halves.

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moving, but he beats me to it.

“So nice to see you again, Mr. Leonard,” a blonde girl pats my back.

“Remember me, Nurse Anna?”

“Of course,” I lie, scratching the remaining white hairs by the sides of my ears.

“So how is everyone’s week?” Nurse Anna opens the question to the circle of dying men and women. A few of them respond, but the majority play with their fingers.

“A-a-are we playing bingo tonight?” A woman with blue eyes asks. “I-I-I gotta beat Len-en-eny.” She winks at me then quickly hides her face.

“I’m actually going to meet Heather’s parents tonight,” I say. A series of sighs are exchanged from within the circle.

“What’s the date today, Mr. Leonard?” Nurse Anna asks.

“Well it’s February 4th 1989,” I respond big eyed with a smile covering my face.

“It’s May 5th 2010 Lenny! You stupid rat,” an angry man with a long moustache screams. “We’re living in Good Vibes Community Center, not some home with a fucking path. ”

“Don-don-don’t be mad at Lenny. He-he-he’s confuse-ed.”

“And so are you!” the man retorts. “You can’t even get your words out.”

“Mr. Bill!” Nurse Anna screams. Silence engulfs the circle.

“Okay,” Nurse Anna speaks. “That’s enough for today, everyone go back to your rooms. Mr. Bill, can I have a word with you?” Men in blue scrubs attend to each of the members around the circle, except the old man who was yelling.

I’m led back to my room. The wooden door slides open, and I’m guided to my bed. The man tucks me in, with my head positioned so that I can see the white wall across the room. I roll over, and there she is. Her murky green eyes stare at me, as I play with her chestnut hair, which is neatly fastened in a barrette. My other set of fingers trace the freckles that cover her slightly scrunched nose. She wears the green sundress my mother bought her the first time I took her home.

“Heather,” I gasp.

“Lenny,” she says. “Did you get the three apples I asked for?”

“I-I forgot.”

“That’s fine, Ma doesn’t like apple pie anyway. My parents are going to be here in half an hour, Lenny. I have to run to the bakery, why don’t you go get ready?”

“I don’t want to go,” I say.

“But, it’s the first time you’re seeing them since the wedding. Plus, family is very important to me, and I hope it is to you, too.” She touches my hand. Her fingers are cold and send shivers down my spine.

“Lenny, are you okay?” Heather asks.

“Of course,” I lie. I try to hold her hand, but can’t seem to grasp it.

“Lenny, what’s wrong?” Heather starts to cry. I stare into my pocket with Bill’s words in my head. You stupid rat, it’s 2010. The red tablet dances between my fingers.

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“Lenny, you’re starting to scare me,” Heather screams.

With a gulp of water, I swallow the pill. I immediately feel a knocking sensation in my head, and sweat drips down my face. My eyes stare at the girl in the green sundress. I close them, and then open them.

“Lenny,” I hear her whisper. I flutter my eyelashes and she’s gone. I squeeze my eyes shut, my middle finger hugs my index. I open my eyes. My mouth droops downwards, and tears roll towards my cheeks.

“She’s gone again,” I whisper to myself. “Heather is gone.”

Nurse Anna knocks on the door before handing me a copy of a newspaper from February 4th 1989. ACCIDENT, ONE DEAD, the headline reads.

“Heather,” I hear my voice falter and can barely mutter her name before I fall onto the ground. I lift myself up and try to run towards the door.

Step—Heather waves goodbye with a smile plastered across her face. I’m going to get some bread from Archie’s Bakery! Step—I hear sirens across the street.

Step—Heather. Step—my hands are covered in her blood. Heather. I try to shake her awake. Heather! Step—sir, I’m going to have to ask you to move. Step—black suits and dresses. Step—Today we are joined to celebrate the wonderful life of Heather Pearce. Step—Heather’s wedding dress lies on the bedside table. Step— jagged collarbones glare at me in the mirror. Step—Mr. Leonard, you suffer from anxiety, and if you don’t try to fix it, it’s only going to get worse. Step—a lump of dirt dances between my fingers. Step—I don’t pinch my stomach.

I stick my hand down my throat, but I can’t regurgitate the pill.

“No Heather!” I scream, “Heather, please, Heather come back to me!”

My legs go limp and I fall onto the floor once more.

“Mr. Leonard.” There’s a knock at the door. “I’m here to bring you lunch.

They made your favorite, chicken and carrots.”

“It’s my fault isn’t it, Ma?” I mutter to myself as the lady lays food on the table adjacent to my bed. “I killed Heather—I touched it, I touched the dirt.”

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Joanna Zhang v Poetry

Rachel Baxter v Poetry

Hourglass

refrigerateur, a sestina

Rays of sun burst, shining with the radiance of a smile.

The game of time, beginning: Sunrise, sunset, the while.

Sands of time d r i p , r a c i n g .

Each grain Slipping away. From birth to youth to blooming, from colour to dull grey.

I remember lips pressing, pressed up against the refrigerator You made the light switch curtain us with black Night, and i giggled baby into your neck, your eyes Drinking up cool skin, till we were drowning You ran your hands down to hold my slender wrists And under the flourescent lights we called it love And baby, I never believed in love But I believed that you always kept my favourite drinks in the refrigerator And when I fell you got ice out for my wrist And caught me with large hands when I blacked out from pain and woke up drowning Until I learned to anchor my spinning eyes I never wanted to look people in the eye It offered an intimacy scarier than love You asked me why I wasn’t willing to drown Myself in your gaze, pounding your fist on the refrigerator And then there was not a chance I’d ever meet the blacks Of your eyes with mine, despite how hard you took my wrists And you left your identity printed onto my left wrist Bruising me jewelry with a matching set for my eyes CoverGirl always knew what shade to use for the black And I choked laughter when I went to buy “Love At First Sight Beige” to cover up the bruised ellipsis the refrigerator Left on my spine, wondering if I could drown In enough liquid foundation. You drowned me in i’m sorrys, in babys, kissing my wrists putting love notes on the refrigerator If i’d looked up I’m sure I’d have seen in your eyes That you never did it out of love But just to make sure I’d never black You out of my life. Still, it didn’t work--I tried to take a black Sharpie and cross out all the empty words you drowned me in with your notes, like never again and promise and love Until the page was all midnight and my wrists ached too much to open cans for dinner. My eyes Burned from the smell of the orange rotting in the refrigerator The bruises are gone from my wrists But I still carry the feelings in body bags under my eyes When I left, I took everything but the refrigerator

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62

Tim Wu v Short Story

They Called Him Doughy

Once upon a time, there was a fat and chubby boy.

He was made of 100 dollar bills.

When he moved into town, people loved him.

The kids at school played with him, the adults wanted to speak with him, and Sarah, Sarah always said hi to him.

As he spent more and more time with the people in the town, he got thinner and thinner.

Every time he played with the kids.

Every time he spoke to the adults.

Well, you can guess why he got thinner.

Everybody wanted a piece of the Chubby boy.

After playing with the kids, they’d say “There’s this new toy! Just this once can I have some?”

After speaking with the adults, they’d use big words, they’d talk about loans, and then they’d take some too.

The chubby boy knew what was happening, but he didn’t mind. He was happy giving up himself for other people.

But sometimes, there were the white-nose kids. They weren’t really kids, they were teenagers with white noses.

They always took more and they weren’t too nice about it. The chubby boy once saw them behind some bushes. One had a bill rolled up and in his nose.

“Are they putting parts of me in their nose?” The Chubby boy thought to himself.

But the chubby boy didn’t have much time to think. He wasn’t so chubby anymore.

Everybody wanted a piece of him. Everybody but Sarah.

Sarah asked him how his day went.

Sarah took him on walks where they could be alone. No more whitenose kids. No more adults. No more people asking for money.

“I love you,” The not-so-chubby boy told her on one such walk.

Sarah only smiled.

“My birthday is in a week. I’ll have a party, I hope you can come, and we can hang out afterwards.”

The chubby boy was delighted! He went out immediately to get Sarah a gift. He went to the jewelry store and asked for the biggest diamond necklace.

The storekeeper asked for a lot, but the chubby boy just grabbed bits off his stomach, his thighs, his arms. He was shorter now. And much less chubby.

When Sarah’s birthday came, he gave her the diamond, hoping she’d be happy.

She slapped him hard.

“I just wanted to make you happy.”

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Sarah helped him up and hugged him. She was the one who slapped him but now she was the one crying.

“Don’t you see? I’m losing you. When you spend money like that a bit of you is gone. I don’t want you to be gone.”

“It’s ok Sarah, I’d do anything to make you happy. I love you remember?”

So Sarah smiled.

She wore the necklace every day. But every day the boy got a little skinnier. A little shorter.

“You should stop giving them money.” Sarah said

“It’s ok,” the boy said “they need it more than me”

Lots of time passed and Sarah wore the necklace every day. Now on their walks Sarah had to carry the boy in her hand. He was too small to walk, and every day people went to Sarah to ask for more.

Sarah would run off and bring the boy on a walk.

One day, on another one of their walks, Sarah said “My shoulder hurts.”

Then, “my chest hurts.”

Then, she was on the ground.

The boy ran off to get an ambulance and rode all the way with her to the hospital.

At the hospital the doctor looked at her. The nurse looked at her.

“TALK TO ME!” the boy yelled. “we can save her.” The nurse explained “but we don’t have enough money. The operation will be very expensive.”

Sarah could hardly move, but she pointed to her diamond necklace.

The nurse looked at it. The doctor looked at it.

“This will be enough” the nurse said, we’ll work right away.

“No it won’t be” the doctor said looking at the boy.

“yes it will be” the nurse said, now confused.

“No it won’t be. I’m the doctor, you’re just a nurse. I know it won’t be.”

The doctor said.

The nurse tried to argue, but the doctor told her to leave.

“We’ll need all your money.” He told the boy.

The boy looked at Sarah, she was hardly breathing.

So the boy turned to the doctor. He said, “I’m made of money, use me.”

And the doctor said “excellent, now I can send my daughter to college.”

“What was that? The boy said,”

“Oh I said now we can operate on Sarah”

And the boy was gone.

When Sarah woke up, she felt her neck for the necklace, but it was gone.

She looked around for the boy, but he was gone.

The doctor saw how sad Sarah was.

He smiled at the picture of his daughter in his office, so regally framed on the bookshelf next to the Ultimate Blackjack Guide.

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Abigail Dagher v Poetry

Who Are You? Perspective: Cars turn into ants, carrying stock twenty-five times their weight Back to their families Illuminated highways run like veins through the heart Of a booming, bustling cityStrangers meeting for the first time, Cheers for a shiny new business deal, A woman in tears as her husband walks hand-in-hand with another But all I hear is silence, Or at least I try to “But Daddy” A little girl sobs searchingly for the suit-clad man next to her Who is as tangled as the earphones finding their way through a maze In his hands He balances a blush sippy cup and a statistical chart of America’s ever so increasing Divorce rate “But Daddy” I can’t seem to escape him These three hours and twenty-three minutes were supposed to be for just that Escape Time- to prepare mentally For coming across those identical hazel eyes And reflecting on anything but myself For inhaling a mix of Cuban wrapped Olivia Melanio cigars and Burberry cologne And having my nostrils burn in unfamiliarity For pushing myself into arms That don’t know how to embrace He’s as foreign to me as the U.S.A. stamp on his Jordanian passport And in crossing all of these oceans and countries and rivers and cities We’re both anywhere but home Instead we meet in 5-star hotel lobbies My uncle from Pennsylvannia is a white gloved bell-hop Rushed, my aunt from Michigan is giving directions to Boston’s finest Is it odd that I find more comfort in the monotone voices 65

Of unknown hotel staff Than him?

It’s not For he looks at life through blinds of money And sees only himself Look at me Perspective: Who am I? A child of a cheater A business deal A stranger A daughter, but Who are you?

Maria Heeter v Poetry

What’s Your Default?

Her default is to study Spanish verbs to dance until her feet bleed to meticulously plan her future step by blistered step to travel far and wide on strong soles leaping from embrace to embrace twirling amongst roses and compliments and she will be sure of where she is headed she will be sure of her religion and her sexuality and she will be alright and she will excel \\ \\ “The question, O me! so sad, recurring--What good amid these, O me, O life?

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Answer.

That you are here--that life exists, and identity; That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.” // // But what if my default is to sleep? to pound my knocked-off brand name guitar (made in China) and flinch at the hithing of my lithp, to say “Oh it’s fine, I’ll just be a writer,” when the last poem I wrote was three months ago and I read it with pride so many times that it turned sour so I gagged on the taste and watched a movie instead, a movie I neglected to finish.

I never finish anythi

Abigail Garey v Poetry

hot chocolate and i know that there’s a person-sized crumple in the snow somewhere pictures lining walls memories lining thoughts

& i think of you lights highlighting your eyes that i fell so fast into

they’re as deep as i imagine

the crevasse that took irvine

because i believe they made it

even if irvine didn’t fall into infinity and they hold me fast and i don’t know how to escape their hold and where’s houdini

because you sing so well and you like the thermostat too high so high that i catch colds and you don’t even get fevers from the sun that sparkles the sand warms the rocks to burning our feet and the snow you pushed me into is still there where you fell over the fence but you fall up stairs, normally and your sweater’s hanging in the closet untouched for years the pictures lie and memories accumulate and your eyes were so blue [but so brown] & why can’t i escape them perhaps when the snow melts and the icicles fall.

and i’ve lost the shape of you

and the look in your eyes

and it’s only reflected in mid afternoon sun come back? i’ll make you hot chocolate

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68

Anonymous v Personal Essay

This is What Love is Meant to be Like “Maybe we feel empty because we leave pieces of ourselves in everything we used to love.” - R. M. Drake 1. MY MOTHER LIKENS GOD TO EYES IN A MIRROR

I walk into the church alone, an unsettling finality as I close the heavy gothic doors. There are maybe eighteen students and faculty scattered along the first five rows of old and stubby chairs; some are alone, heads bowed, and others in clusters of two or three.

Emily, Rev, and a short boy I don’t recognize briefly turn around as I enter, but they quickly look back, gaze fixated above at Jesus’s jewel-toned, stainedglass eyes.

I look up at him too, thinking of the Marina Abramovic’s The Artist is Present. She sits, covered in a long red robe, across from you, a stranger, holding each other’s eyes for minutes on end in silence. I watched a video of her performance a couple weeks ago, saw strangers cry at the sight of being seen, and wished that I could be there too. There’s a psychological phenomenon known as the Eye Illusion in that even seeing a drawing of eyes can make us subconsciously give, make us kinder to our spouses, make us work harder and litter less. It’s disturbing, I think, pulling my eyes away from a holographic white-skinned Jesus (Jesus was Middle Eastern) to scan the room.

Finally, I take a seat next to Zoha, half-smiling, half-grimacing to her politely because there’s no word to recognize a stranger’s grief in English. I’m sorry, I wished she had left a note doesn’t feel right and her family deleted all her photos, are you ok sounds wrong too.

Even after all these years, I still experience numbness in Chinese. When my mother had walked me to Preeya’s memorial, she kept speaking in English and looking up at the sky. I wanted to rip the unfamiliar words from her mouth; hearing her fumble and try to fill the silence with English felt like some sort of sacrilege.

I wanted to shake her and force her to look at the ground, the dirt and soil where we are all laid to rest, not some floating angelic panacea.

And yet.

I didn’t and we eventually said goodbye at the church doors without looking at each other, her eyes still searching the cloudless sky in vain.

2. I DREW CHALK EYES ALL OVER THE NANJING STREETS THAT SUMMER

Waiting next to Zoha, I roll my sleeves into my palms and look down at 69

the brown and red wool sweater I had inherited from my grandfather. He gave it to me the summer before it all began, the summer before my brother would stop calling me Mei Mei then finally stop calling at all, the summer before I did not attend my father’s third wedding, the summer before my mother caved in and carved herself out.

That Nanjing summer was smothering hot, stifling rays and humid air like hallucinogenic nooses around our necks. In my grandparents’ cramped apartment, we tried to act normal like our feet didn’t remember a generation of binding, like our necks were not collared by the burning air. As if my father had not spent the three hour car ride screaming. As if my grandmother had not watched the ruthless red guards rampage her home and beat her ten year old body black and blue. As if my grandfather had not watched a soldier rape his mother in front of his own eight year old eyes, ruthless hands ripping her blouse, those cavernous eyes like God’s. Sometimes, I wondered if only the Japanese soldiers and the Nazis had been followed by drawings of eyes, we would not be left with soil tainted red from blood and proof of how cruel the human conscience can be. We did not want to think of the unnamed 300,000 dead we had inherited from this soil and so, instead, that summer, we laughed at melodramatic Chinese soap operas, we cooked red bean congee with special radishes, we pretended to feel nostalgic in front of cultural temples and museums.

That summer, my brother and I longingly devoured my grandparent’s love for each other, silently watching in awe. They would sit next to each other, hands held, at the dinner table; he spent hours walking around Nanjing every morning in futile hopes of curing the cancer spreading from his lungs and would come back with some useless treat for her - a small jade phone charm (although she did not have a cell phone), a small bound book with gold print about hymns and nothing, a small compact mirror with a buddha design on the back. This, my brother and I agreed (thinking of my mother’s bruised arms) was what love was supposed to be like.

And yet, I still wonder why my grandmother always wakes up crying.

3. MY BROTHER LIKENS LOVE TO A STRING AROUND YOUR NECK AND LIPS it was not fear that cracked your mother’s throat, fear did not bind her worn out heart to rib and bone. it 70

was your father that slit her lips and asked you why she could not breathe.

4. MY MOTHER, THE MAIDEN OF THE MOON

When she cries, my mom cries moondrip, the salted shine staining her cheeks pearlescent and luminous. When I was younger, I used to carry a thin glass vase to collect her tears in, imagining fortune PURCHASE THE MOON! LIMITED OFFER FOR ONLY $99.99! The year we ran away from my father, I collected 117 bottles of moon-shine. But nobody would purchase tears, not even a single bottle.

My mother was named after Chang-E, the mythical Chinese goddess and prisoner of the moon, the ying of the ying yang. As a beautiful young girl, Chang-E worked in the heavenly Jade Emperor’s palace where only immortals and fairies lived. According to the myth, she was banished for “accidentally dropping a vase.” But in truth, the Jade Empress had caught Chang-E in bed having an intimate affair with her husband, nearly slitting her throat before remembering that the eyes of the immortals in her palace were looking at her from everywhere. A queen could not cry. My Nai Nai always said that being a beautiful woman is the opposite of freedom. I do not know what she meant.

Banished to the earth and reborn as a poor farmer’s wife, Chang-E befriended Hou Yi, a young hunter with a talent for archery. And a week later, ten suns rose in the sky that morning, scorching of gasoline and burning everything it touched. I liked to imagine that morning the way I remembered that stifling summer in NanJing, the summer before it all began.

Hou Yi picked up his bow and arrow and marched to the horizon, adroitly shooting down nine of the suns until harmony was restored and the soil no longer sizzled. He became a hero, immortalized in poetry and songs. And yet, it was not enough. As old age began to creep along the wrinkles of their skin and the grey streaks of their hair, Hou Yi became infatuated with an immortality elixir. Night after night, he slowly concocted and found his single pill, hiding it safely beneath his bow and arrow. When the Jade Empress heard of their immortality elixir, she flew down to their home where Chang-E was cooking alone. The empress held a knife against Chang-E’s breast, threatening to kill her and Hou-Yi if she did not return the elixir. In panic or by accident or on purpose (no one knows), Chang-E quickly swallowed the pill and began to notice her grey hair grow black and long, her supple skin returning to a frozen time of youth. That night, when Hou-Yi returned to his beautiful, young wife he almost leapt from the door and shot an arrow at her chest in fury. As he pounced at her, eyes the way I imagined those 71

soldiers, eyes the way I saw my father, Chang-E screamed and jumped through the window - except, instead of falling to her death, she began to float and rise up farther and farther into the sky, eventually being kept prisoner on the moon, alone.

I know there is a moral to this story, but I don’t know what it is.

5. MIDAS AND OTHER UN-WASHABLE THINGS I HAVE INHERITED

I am the daughter of a father who sees everything in shades of gold; the body of my mother no different from the color of books or the moon, in his eyes, each a chunk of immortalized lustered, amber.

My father has always been the absence between my ribs, the hollowed edge of my collarbone a shadow of a man half-life, half-lie.

I find him all over me, a permanent stain clinging to my skin, a parasite. He’s in the gentle slope of my monolids, in the fullness of my lips, the coarseness in my voice, and the way my feet are made of glass and glue. I carry him the way my mother still carries his wedding ring, with disdain, a corpse of a once loved memory.

6. THE CHURCH IS QUIET

A couple more students file into the church, but it’s still glaringly empty.

Is this all that remains after death, I think, a handful of photos and a couple people with things to read. But then again, she is not unnamed like your grandfather’s mom or those slaughtered mercilessly those years ago, even their own names violated and left to rot.

The memorial begins and people start to sing songs about healing, about remembrance, but I’m still stuck on an afterimage of Preeya burned into the back of my eyelids, like those black and white optical illusions. She feels as if she’s both with and without; that this strange congregation of people have been somehow tied together by her love and memory, or whatever remains after love and death.

Jack goes up to speak, and I watch him limp to the podium, something dark and intangible covering his eyes. He speaks of how he can no longer remember Preeya, Preeya, Preeya, the shape of her body, the look of her bright eyes, whatever left is just a cruel stock pile of “important” moments, not a person.

And Rev walks to the podium as well, looking around and reminding us that pain is ok. As he scans the room, his eyes look straight at me as he says let’s start where you want to start remembering and I feel my lungs and ribs and throat shake.

I had forgotten what it felt like to be seen, to be named and recognized in this limbo between being alive and having half your family die.

This time, I look up to the ceiling as well, wondering whether Chang-E and my great-grandmother have been looking at me all this time.

I wish I could see their eyes.

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Ariana Patsaros v Poetry

Sabrina Ortega-Riek v Poetry

untitled

Brooklyn Bridge

Gemini-boy You question the validity of Moving planets and stars That are already dead by the time We look at them hanging like Coffins in the sky -I say: I believe in patterns I believe in an elegant universe.

Over thousands of years people started to notice the connections between personalities and stars -Created by a Spirit who wanted Paradise but also wanted Free will, so that along with Trees every night we look upon Forbidden Fruit, Spangled across the sky.

I am grateful that I am alive when I press a white button through a blue buttonhole, the way the soft fabric of my shirt brushes against my fingers on those January mornings when the sky is still dawning granite gray hesitant sunlight on my yellow-flannel bedsheets and the radiator clanks and shakes hot air into my bedroom.

I am grateful that I am alive when I spend my lunch break at a coffee shop drinking milky coffee, writing on the first soft clean page of a new notebook in ink that pours from the silver-tip pen like lemon water.

I am grateful that I am alive when I spray my perfume on my collarbones from a two-ounce bottle that cost me one hundred and sixty dollars and smells like the raw summertime of an orange peel— when I dress up in floral I can spray it on my wrists, and on my throat: as much as I want, because I bought it for myself on my birthday.

I am grateful that I am alive for the subtle flavors of living: lemon water, lattes, and hearing dry leaves crunching and clattering under my boots—the quiet shake of the planet making room for me.

I am grateful that I am alive because I read an interview once about a man who survived jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge—he said: “I saw my hands leaving the railing like so many hands had done before. So many other people feeling for the last time. And I thought, what did I just do.”

I am grateful that I am alive because I went to Brooklyn this summer, and stood on the bridge with my hands on the railing, looking out at ships and the blur of distant untraveled boroughs.

I think I will go back next summer; and maybe the summer after that, too.

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For the moment,

at least,

I was free.

- Edgar Allan Poe, “The Pit and the Pendulum”