Lyceum Volume IX Fall 2022

Lyceum

A Literary Science Magazine

Co-presidents

Meheret Ourgessa

Zach Baker

Treasurer

Meheret Ourgessa

Editing & Contributing Advisors

Gabby Rachman (Text Head)

Derek Dean (Text Head)

Gillian Doty (Visual Head)

Meheret Ourgessa

Yufan Lu

Editing Team

Gabby Rachman

Gillian Doty

Derek Dean

Design Team

Zach Baker

Frank Szaraz

Podcast Team

Yufan Lu

Bruno Hettman

Madeleine Campbell

Front Cover

Audrey Gibson

Zach Baker

Meheret Ourgessa

Aidan Cullen

A Mother’s Work by Emily Heithaus

Back Cover

Ayman Wadud

Media Assistant

Yufan Lu

Delia Preston Jordan Herrera

Maria Peacock Frank Szaraz

Editor’s Note

Dear Friends and Foes of Lyceum,

This semester marks the fifth year of Lyceum since its founding in 2018. Our goal is to bring the sciences and arts together through literary mediums, drawings, paintings, photographs, and other forms. All submissions come from the creative minds of Kenyon students, staff, and alumni, who time and time again have impressed us with their ingenuity. This semester, Lyceum welcomes a wave of new contributors, namely from the Class of 2026. We are proud to see such a great expansion of students involved in the artistic science community of Kenyon.

From an absurd comic about the terrors of Kenyon’s raccoon population to an essay on the reason we fear sea monsters; from the intersection of orchestration and experimentation to a visual proposal on how to rework our waste system; this issue explores the monsters we face in real and imagined worlds. While it can be discouraging to witness a world riddled with climate crises, political unrest, and a lingering pandemic, we can help each other by finding community. We hope that this issue provides you with consolation, laughs, and wonder.

We are incredibly proud to present this issue. It is because of all of our contributors, editors, designers, and supporters within the Kenyon Community that this magazine is possible. Our deepest appreciation to all of you. We hope you love this collection of works as much as we do.

Happy Reading, The Lyceum Team

Emilia Thompson

Birds learned to tweet long before we did: Fitness benefits for tutor songbirds by Lara O’Callaghan..................................................................................................24 Mother Nature by Fernanda Contin.......................................................................................27

Wounded by Gabby Rachman

The Invader by Jillian D’Herin..................................................................

Forest Trolls by Sofia Elizarraras...............

She says “I’ll only immediately help you when you’re a danger to yourself or others.”

by Halle Preneta.........................................................................................................36

you shadow knows everything you don’t by Shelly Kahn.......................................................38

Reflected

Shelly Kahn

you look in the mirror and you see eyes that are looking back at you - that are looking at you because they are your eyes and you are the person in the mirror. you look in the mirror and you see a face, and you see a nose and a mouth and lips and the lips that you are looking at twist when you make a silly face at yourself because they are your lips and you are the person in the mirror. you lift up a hand and wiggle all the fingers, and the fingers you are looking at and the hand they are attached to wiggle at the same time, in the same way. you take the same hand and lightly gather the skin at your cheek, pinching it and pulling it away from the muscle and bone that give it and you and your reflection its shape. the skin at your cheek moves away, and you can feel it, and you can see the skin in the mirror but your reflection does not feel the skin pulling away. still, the skin moves because the hand moves and because it is your skin and your hand and you are the person in the mirror.

you can hear rain falling outside and you can see lightning when it flashes through the windows in your room and you can hear your sibling talking to their friends and you wonder who is really listening and who is seeing and who is hearing. your ear itches so you scratch it, and the person in the mirror scratches their ear too but not because it itched. you wonder if you are a brain in a body or a body with a brain or if you are really anything at all. you wonder how the skin and the eyes and the hands and the bones and the cheeks and the lips you see in the mirror are you, and who decided they were yours after all. but you move your hand back down and ignore the way it curls inwards. you look at the mirror and can’t see your curled fist in the reflection, and you wonder if it is a fist, and how do you know that. you look down and see a hand curled into a fist. did it exist before you checked for it? are you and the person in the mirror the same if one had a fist and one did not? who are you, really.

you close your eyes for a moment and the person in the mirror disappears, because you can’t see them anymore. you wonder if you’ve also disappeared. you are the person you see in the mirror and your reflection is you but they are gone and you are not. at least, you think so.

you open your eyes again and the person in the mirror has opened them too, and you look in the mirror and you see tears dragging down their cheeks, eyes wet with salted liquid, chest rising and falling a little faster than you are breathing. you can’t possibly be the person in the mirror. you’re pretty sure you’d know it if you were crying.

you turn and walk away.

Bella Stevens

The Power of a Name

Sami Silk

What do you do when you hold the power of a name in the palm of your hand?

When you see the flutter of a wing, or the tip of a tail, or a peeking nose in the corner of your eye?

And how can we claim to have discovered something new, when everything around us, seen or unseen, is always new?

Always new, and yet impossibly old, just a cluster of atoms, reshaped and reused to be found by a wondering gaze or a curious glance.

Who am I, who are you, to name this creature who is anciently organic, like living compost?

Who are we to do so, when we ourselves are no different?

We, too, are living compost, ever-changing beings and so always new.

Ayman Wadud

Heartless Voids and Infinities: Why We Fear

Sea Monsters

Evelyn Miner

Content Warning: mentions of drowning, thalassophobia, sea creatures, natural disasters

“The sea has many voices, / Many gods and many voices.”

TS Eliot, The Dry Salvages, I

It is currently unknown if there are any truly universal myths among humankind, but if there are, the sea monster is a likely candidate. Virtually every culture with coastal access has filled the oceans with all kinds of fabulous and fearful creatures: Scylla, the Kraken, Aspidochelone, Umibōzu, Lotan, and the Bakunawa, to name just a few. Sea monsters have appeared in warnings, creations, apocalypses, voyages, theomachies, and all other kinds of myths, usually as embodiments of chaos, violence, and natural disaster.

Like the wildebeest inspiring Pliny the Elder’s mythical Catoblepas, many of these monsters are based on actual creatures of the sea, appearing as gigantic fish, tentacled creatures, or lengthy serpents. In fact, perhaps more so than any other sort of animal, creatures of the ocean tend to be interpreted primarily as strange and fearsome. Bears were often mythologically interpreted as predators or monsters,

but also as sacred animals and embodiments of strength –there are no such mixed feelings for squids. Throughout human cultures, we see a familiar pattern regarding creatures of the ocean: one of danger, malice, and disorder.

In this essay, I hope to investigate the reasons behind our aversion to aquatic life. We will necessarily touch on topics of psychology, anthropology, biology, and even the philosophy of horror, all in pursuit of a single question: why are we so fascinated by, and afraid of, sea monsters?

“No perceptible face or front did it have; no conceivable token of either sensation or instinct; but undulated there on the billows, an unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition of life.”

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, Chapter 59: The Squid

Aidan Cullen

To begin, we might examine the various evolutionary explanations for this collective fear of sea creatures. Thalassophobia, the intense fear of deep bodies of water, is one possible cause. It has long been known that humans are much more predisposed to certain fears than others – termed prepared fears. This term refers not to fears that are biologically innate in humans, such as those of quickly moving things (the “jumpscare” response), but rather ones that are more easily learned by humans in response to stimuli.1 These fears are universally those which would aid in the survival of humans, such as fear of disease, snakes, or social ostracization. Thalassophobia is a prominent example of a prepared fear, easily acquired through traumatic or otherwise formative events involving deep water.2 To terrestrial animals, aversion to oceans and other bodies of water can provide a useful advantage in regards to avoiding drowning, and thus predisposition to thalassophobia was selected for survival.

Those with prepared phobias need not directly experience the stimulus to acquire such fears: through a process called “vicarious conditioning”, a child might, for instance, gain a fear of a certain animal if they witness an older relative also being afraid of it.3 Given widespread cultural depictions of drowning, violent storms, and hidden predators, one might vicariously develop thalassophobia without any personal stimulus at all. Perhaps the most infamous example of this is the 1975 film Jaws, which is often credited with inducing a fear of beaches and oceans in a large portion of its audience.

Still, while the prepared fear theory might explain cultural fears of deep water, it does little to address fears of sea creatures specifically. With the exception of specifically predatory animals which fall under their own prepared fears, such as sharks, most sea creatures pose little direct threat to humans, and it is often the less threatening creatures (octopuses, starfish, whales, etc) that inform our cultural ideas of sea beasts. Squids, oarfish, and whales inspire monsters just as often as sharks or jellyfish. One might argue that these sea creatures simply acquire latent thalassophobic associations, but that seems hardly sufficient to explain humanity’s collective fear and fascination with such creatures – after all, we do not collectively fear birds, even as we have a predisposition towards fears of heights.

Perhaps there is another explanation to be gained from evolutionary psychology, however – one characterizing our imaginative fears of abyssal creatures not as evolutionary self-preservation, but as a lack of empathy. In other words, our aversions to creatures of the deep sea are not caused by a common thalassophobia, but a sort of species-xenophobia that finds us less able to emotionally connect with such creatures. According to a 2019 study by A. Miralles et. al., our ability to empathize with nonhuman animals is directly correlated with how recently we evolutionarily diverged from each other. In this study, researchers asked subjects to decide which of two animals they could more easily empathize

with, and used the aggregate responses to assign the various animals empathy scores from 0 to 1.0. Humans received the highest score of .874, with nearly all mammals getting a value of at least .70. On the other end, empathy scores seemed to hit a floor at a value of about .20, with virtually all invertebrates receiving scores at about that level. The bony fish and other aquatic vertebrates scored only slightly better, receiving scores of about .35-.40. Put another way, according to this study’s results, humans are able to empathize with creatures like lampreys, urchins, and jellyfish about as well as they can with a rosebush (empathy score .246).

This research suggests a wide gap in empathy between most creatures of the deep sea and humans, one caused by the wildly divergent biologies of each. This alone is still not enough to explain our vivid reactions to these marine animals and their ilk; after all, there are no mythical monsters modeled on the common rosebush. However, it is still useful as a foundation on which to build further explanations. Perhaps our collective fear is in fact “prepared” – not by an evolutionary adaptation, but by the limits of our empathetic understanding.

“But I have long regretted that I... used [the] Pentateuchal term of creation, by which I really meant ‘appeared’ by some wholly unknown process.— It is mere rubbish thinking, at present, of origin of life; one might as well think of origin of matter.”

Charles Darwin, Letter to JD Hooker 29 March 1863

In 2004, biologist Neil Shubin led a fossil-hunting exhibition to Ellesmere Island, a Canadian isle 600 miles from the north pole. There, his team discovered a curious specimen preserved in the rock. While at first the fossil might have seemed to just be a flat-headed fish, closer inspection revealed several curiosities – an unusually large pelvis, and fins with familiar, almost dextrous skeletal structures.4 It turns out that the Tiktaalik, as it was named, is an organic example of a key moment in evolutionary history – the development of terrestrial animal life. These large pelvises and hand-like fins would eventually develop into the skeletons of the tetrapods, who first emerged from the water in the late Devonian period approximately 375 million years ago. Those tetrapods would in turn evolve into all amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals we know today.5

While evolutionary knowledge of our origins is of course very recent, the overall impression that sea creatures are somehow older than us appears in many different cultures and contexts. In Babylonian mythology, Tiamat is a sea serpent and the goddess of the primordial saltwater, from which the first gods and monsters sprung.6 In Jewish and Christian mythology, God creates all sea creatures and “monsters” alongside the birds, one day before the terrestrial animals and two days before humans.7 In Hawaiian

mythology, the starfish, sea cucumbers, and urchins are the first animals born, followed by the fish.8

And yet, the idea that humans are themselves descended from sea creatures is seemingly entirely absent. In all of these myths, monstrous sea creatures are fundamentally different from land animals, and especially from humans. Indeed, many of these tales involve the killing of aquatic life as a precondition for humanity; Marduk fashions the earth and the sky out of Tiamat’s corpse, as in Māori mythology Māui creates the first islands from a fish he caught.9

Looking at a giant squid or a tangle of jellyfish tentacles, one can forgive our ancestors’ misunderstandings. These monstrous sea creatures do not merely look different from humans, they look different from what we think of as “animals.” In many regards, certain abyssal organisms seem to violate laws about life itself.

For instance, let us consider abyssal gigantism, the trend that creatures from deeper underwater tend to be larger than their shallower counterparts. Biologically, this trend is a sensible adaptation in many ways. Kleiber’s Law observes that metabolic rate increases according to about the 3/4 power of mass increase; that is, that larger creatures are more energy efficient, a useful adaptation in the often food-scarce ocean depths. 10 Similarly, Bergmann’s Rule points out that colder temperatures tend to select for larger creatures as well, as they have a larger weight-to-surface-area ratio which decreases the relative rate of body heat loss.11

Despite this evolutionary sensibility, many deep-sea creatures that exhibit this trait seem larger than animals

should be. The largest land animal is the African Bush Elephant, which weighs approx. 6 tons and can reach lengths of 24 feet.12 Compared to many deep-sea animals, this is hardly notable – among the whales alone, there are 15 species heavier and 14 species longer than the African Elephant.13 A smaller yet more dramatic example is the Giant Isopod, a deep-sea creature that strongly resembles the common woodlouse (aka the Pill Bug) but is about 30 times larger.14

There are, of course, many other strange and fearful ways in which deep-sea life can differ so sharply from familiar fauna. From the biological agelessness of the Immortal Jellyfish, to asexual reproduction of the Sea Sponge, to the incredible regeneration of the Starfish, many seemingly universal traits of the animal kingdom – aging, sex, physical vulnerability – are absent in certain sea creatures.

When this biological strangeness is combined with the impossible oldness of sea life and supported by the aquatic empathy gap, it produces the impression, even subconsciously, that deep-sea creatures are a fundamentally different sort of life to “normal” earthly animalia. Because they are so incredibly different from us, they must not be related to us at all. Little wonder, then, that when humans imagine what extraterrestrial life looks like, we so often turn to tentacles, suckers, and slime.

“From the beginning of creation there has been this feud between land and water... Remember the sea was once sole monarch, utterly free. Land rose from its womb, usurped its throne, and ever since the maddened old creature, with hoary crest of foam, wails and laments continually, like King Lear exposed to the fury of the elements.”

Rabindranath Tagore, Glimpses of Bengal, “Bandora, By The Sea”

On August 12, 1819, First Mate Owen Chase departed Nantucket aboard the whale-ship Essex for a two-and-a-half year journey. Her 21-strong crew sailed the Gulf Stream, reaching Cape Horn on the 18th of December, before proceeding to hunt 800 oil-barrels’ worth of whales along the western coast of South America from January to November 1820.

On November 20th, 1820, the whale-boats were lowered once again in pursuit of a shoal spotted off the lee-bow. Chase struck the first whale, but was forced to cut the line and return to the ship when its tail knocked a hole in the whaleboat. The captain and second mate soon harpooned another – but as Chase began to steer the ship in pursuit, he spotted a massive sperm whale, 85 feet in length, heading towards the ship. It soon struck the vessel with a massive blow from its head, causing the boat to begin to sink.

Emilia Thompson

Just as Chase ordered the pumps started and the hole inspected, the whale returned “with twice his ordinary speed, and... with tenfold fury and vengeance.”15 Ceaselessly thrashing and whirring, the whale again smashed the boat.

Less than two minutes later, the Essex was underwater.

In his memoir of the event, Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex of Nantucket, Owen Chase wrote: “I have no language to paint out the horrors of our situation... His aspect was most horrible, and such as indicated resentment and fury. He came directly from the shoal which we had just before entered, and in which we had struck three of his companions, as if fired with revenge for their sufferings.”16

Stories and legends of the ocean seeking revenge are surprisingly common cross-culturally. In Mapuche mythology, the sea serpent Kaikai vilu becomes enraged with humans and resolves to exterminate them and flood the world.17 In the Atrahasis epic of Akkad, Enlil threatens to flood the world because humans have become too noisy.18 In the lore of Dungeons & Dragons and its descendants, the Aboleths are a race of tentacled sea monsters who, resenting that terrestrial life has superseded their ancient species, plot to conquer the world.19

The concept of an inherent enmity between humanity and ocean life is a strange one, as sea creatures generally pose little direct threat to humans, at least compared to many terrestrial creatures. Perhaps this idea is indicative of a larg-

er relationship with the sea itself – throughout history, the ocean is the one terrain that has thoroughly resisted human settlement. While activities like boating and fishing are possible, even they are never truly safe. Waves, swells, storms, earthquakes, starvation, thirst, and drowning have all kept humans from venturing too far from the coast; in the words of Lord Byron, “Man marks the earth with ruin – his control stops with the shore.”20 To the imaginative mind, it is a small leap to consider these as not just natural features, but as vengeful forces meant to keep mankind within its limits.

“The shape is there, and most of us come to realize what it is sooner or later: it is the shape of a body under a sheet. All our fears add up to one great fear, all our fears are part of that great fear - an arm, a leg, a finger, an ear. We’re afraid of the body under the sheet. It’s our body. And the great appeal of horror fiction through the ages is that it serves as a rehearsal for our own deaths.”

Stephen King, Night Shift, Foreword

The specter of HP Lovecraft has loomed large over this essay. Considered one of the greatest horror writers of all time by many, his works perfectly embody the concepts we have discussed. Lovecraft famously begins his essay Su-

Linnea Parker

pernatural Horror in Literature with the proclamation that “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” He believed that the horror of his work was of a specific type he called “cosmic horror” – the fear that human lives and perspectives are so insignificant as to be meaningless in the grand scope of the universe. The true horror was not evil, but indifference: “There are no absolute values in the whole blind tragedy of mechanistic nature—nothing is good or bad except as judged from an absurdly limited point of view. The only cosmic reality is mindless, undeviating fate—automatic, unmoral, uncalculating inevitability.”21

The ultimate problem with Lovecraft’s model, though, is that it completely fails to accurately understand horror, both his own and the genre more broadly. Say what you will about Nyarlathotep, or Shub-Niggurath, or the Elder Things, but they are not ambivalent – cosmic, certainly, but not amoral. They demand human sacrifices, drive people mad, and wait for opportunities to destroy the world. The terror of the Aboleths or the Essex whale is not that they disregard humans, but that they feel active malice towards us. There is a reason The Call of Cthulu ends with humans trying and failing to stop Cthulu – the terror is not merely that there is something out there too large to care about us, but that there is something out there too old, strange, and violent to ever be controlled.

In his opus In the Dust of This Planet, Eugene Thacker identifies three spheres into which we can divide the world. The world-for-us refers to the portion that aligns with our perceptions – that we interpret as human subjects, and understand anthropocentrically. It is the portion that is, in some sense, for us. The world-in-itself refers to the concept of the “objective” world, that portion that is sought after by the sciences, that is in theory independent of human subjectivity. Finally, the world-without-us refers to existence as it occurs outside of our mental frameworks. It is the vision of a universe too large for humans, of depths that cannot be plumbed, deserts that cannot be crossed, equations that cannot be solved – that is not only independent of our perceptions, but actively avoidant of them.

In his usage of this framework, Thacker suggests that horror is in fact an attempt to understand the existence of the world-without-us, to catch a glimpse of it as through a mirror:

Briefly, the argument of this book is that “horror” is a non-philosophical attempt to think about the worldwithout-us philosophically. Here culture is the terrain on which we find attempts to confront an impersonal and indifferent world-without-us, an irresolvable gulf between the world-for-us and the world-in-itself...what genre horror does do is it takes aim at the presuppositions of philosophical inquiry – that the world is always the world-for-us – and makes of those blind spots its central concern, expressing them not in abstract con-

cepts but in a whole bestiary of impossible life forms –mists, ooze, blobs, slime, clouds, and muck. Or, as Plato once put it, “hair, mud, and dirt.”22

Once viewed in this way, all of our points about the horror of deep sea life come together into a clear picture. Because we struggle to empathize with them, they seem to be a form of life entirely separate from humanity. Their incredible age and strange biological features remind us of humanity’s biological and temporal limits. Their habitat remains the one location on Earth unconquered by humans, indicating our inability to fully understand or control our environment.

This, it seems, is the true reason we fear sea creatures so much. They are so unfathomably old, so biologically different, so unempathetic, so deep and inaccessible, they represent a living example of the philosophy of horror. They resist categorization, capture, or mutual understanding. They indicate a world that is so close to us, and yet opposes us. The sea and its creatures are, in a sense, the first monsters – grotesque, fantastical, perhaps impossible, and yet undeniably alive.*

Orchestral Experiment

Sami Silk

In a lab of brass, woodwind, strings, percussion, I stand apart, the conductor and composer of this orchestral experiment.

There’s the creak of a printer spitting out consent forms And the chchch chhhhhh of a clacking keyboard as I sift through gaps in raw data.

These mundane tasks surround me with echoes, A drum steadily beating out crisp quarter notes in 4/4.

From beyond the glass box that holds the audience above The pit of my little observation room;

A swishhh of book pages turning Or the muted thud of a fingertip tapping on a kindle.

Placed carefully atop the bridges of audience noses, My glasses lay like fantastical masks at a masquerade ball.

A silent symphony of crracks and brrrings and rummbbles Oozes out from the almost sealed door of my observational pit

And in return, the faint ringing of a hummm Slithers towards my computer, Crying for its mother–

But the cameras inside those masquerade masks Are still delicately balanced on a grad student’s nose.

Suddenly–

The timer goes off Me, waving my hands with passionate madness

As I conduct this xylophone to decrescendo.

With the echoing pound pound pound of a standing ovation, The audience beams proudly as the curtains of this experiment close.

Kate Berges

Kate Berges

Celia Schwartz

On Pinegroves And The Damage I Have Dealt

Bruno Hettman

I shouldn’t be here right now.

I never got permission from the pines to trample their roots, nor did the dying swallowtail by my feet tell me it was okay to photograph its final moments. Regardless, I sit here in spite of my destructive nature, Cemented in a stubborn refusal to acknowledge the chain pulled taught between myself and “human innovation.”

My frame is not steel and glass but marrow and light, I whisper to myself. My skin is not cellophane but something that breathes. My voice is not the hum of machinery but of swarms of cicadas. The buzzing of their wings is growing desperate now like an orchestra painfully aware that their weathered strings may not be strong enough to last another sonata and I can no longer tell over their cacophony whether this is

a) a confession, tear-soaked and abandoned at the foot of a crumbling altar,

b) a repentance, forged in an angry haste and still hot to the touch, or

c) a prayer, written only halfway before left to decay beneath a white wooden cross on the side of a highway.

I don’t think what it is will fix the fruitlessness of its failing affirmations, Nor will composition of frame or skin change the fact that the pine my frame rests against will one day wrap its roots around my feeble excuse for a skeleton and overtake it. No matter what my skin is made out of I cannot change that it is thin and fragile and moments from decomposition.

I cannot change that the low, defeated hum of my cicada voice has never been heard through the commotion of the Everything, and never will be. As the pines above me weep, I fall beneath a spell of shame and melancholy and wonder whether I will ever know the warmth that a bed of pine needles knows, housed beneath a temple of wood and sun.

I should never have come looking for this temple. My gaze upon it is a thing of sacrilege. My stride becomes unholy with every step I take. I can only be sure of my breath in that it is not venomous like the rest of me.

Our Need For Nature Audrey

Gibson

Upon exiting the living, breathing structure of academia that sustains it forever, the library, we see two other key structures: one of them, the most beautiful tree on campus, not the tallest, but with the most exciting branches, the leaves the best, the most variety of blending colors, hidden at night as there are few lights; and the other one, the lit stone of the church, shining greatly, gloriously, reflecting 2000 years of human glory, of glory coming not from within but from God. The church rings its pride, the church is lit, you can’t blissfully not notice the church. People with no desire for religion know where the church is, and are aware of it, whereas the tree is difficult to notice even by those who love it, even those who love nature, they still do not know where the tree is. Earlier today, and still now, I have a leaf in my hair, from when I truly was loving nature and lying in a pile of leaves, and everyone lets me know as if I should leave it. They all find it strange. What is it so strange about sporting nature? We are part of nature, and yet we find it noticeable, or incorrect even, to let nature on us. The tree stands quietly, but no one questions why the church bells ring, why we measure our lives based on the bells of a religion formed only 2000 years ago, compared to an earth humans have walked for hundreds of thousands of years, and on which leaves have fallen for far, far longer.

Emilia Thompson

Our forgetfulness of nature has only furthered itself. None of us wonder why there aren’t any passenger pigeons, for none of us lived when there were. None of us wondered why there were no bears in all of Ohio for none of us saw them. None of us wonder why there are so many corn fields and not so many forests covering nineteen-twentieths of our state, as none of us were there to see it. Our lack of appreciation for nature, our lack of respect for nature, has allowed and led us to forget it.

They have us think that we have to let this happen. But though they try to make us feel powerless, we are not powerless. Just by building boxes, we built bluebirds their coming back. We didn’t need to elect anyone to do it for us, we didn’t need to end oil companies, all we had to do was build. All of these things are necessary and important, but we don’t have to wait for them.

We have long left unnurtured our need for nature. But to those of us who are true, to those observant, to those who see and those who simply seek to experience life, the tree is here, everlasting, the bluebirds are here now, the bears are here now, and they will stay here every day, every moment that you are walking on middle path and beyond.

Sofia Elizarraras

The Importance of Getting Your Boots Wet Hannah Ehrlich

Tom, our outdoor ethics trainer, put six pictures in front of us: a gravel road, a mossy rock, a muddy trail, a wet meadow, a patch of ferns, a snowy path, and a turtle. “Arrange these hiking surfaces in the order of highest to lowest durability,” he said. The other camp counselors in-training and I sat in a circle around the table and immediately started shuffling the papers around with little debate. The rock came first followed by the gravel road since they were the most unbreakable surfaces on the table. We decided to place the pictures of the meadow and the ferns after the gravel since it is difficult to see footpaths in grass and brush. The mud and the snow came next, and of course the turtle came last (since nobody should step on a turtle). Once we had our completed order and smug looks on our faces, Tom said, “You’re wrong.”

The true order of the images was the gravel road, the snowy path, the muddy trail, the meadow, the ferns, the mossy rock, and then, of course, the turtle. To us, the durability of surfaces was defined by how much squelch would be created in our boots with every step rather than how quickly the surface would recover from the disturbance. With organs, blood, and bone, we knew that the turtle was the least durable of them all. After we decided to save the one animal on the table, we were so concerned with keeping our boots dry that we completely ignored the life that would be under our feet in those other situations, the moss, the grass, and

the ferns, believing that it was no big deal to crush them with every step. From the perspective of our boots, mud and snow are non-durable since they can seep through their seams and into the stitching of our socks, whereas grass and ferns can be crumpled under their soles and moved out of the way with rubber toes. Meanwhile, the reality is that snow and mud replenish quickly, but plants do not. From nature’s perspective, our boots are wrong.

All people who choose to venture out into nature, whether that be for a twenty-minute stroll or a twoweek backpacking trip, are expected to follow all the principles of Leave No Trace to ensure that they leave the wilderness in better condition than when they came into it. On that late afternoon, Tom was teaching us Principle #2: Travel & Camp on Durable Surfaces. The principle seems simple enough; all it is asking is that we stay on trail as we hike to protect the vegetation that surround it. However, when a trail that was once dry becomes six inches of goopy mud after an overnight rain, it is easy to step onto the ferns beside it “just this once.” The moments when we say “just this once” are when we decide to prioritize our comfort over protecting the nature we chose to be in, when the principles of Leave No Trace become a burden. Why is it that maintaining

Linnea Parker

our comfort is our priority when we go out into nature? Why is it that protecting nature becomes a burden rather than a pleasure?

Frankly, it is much easier to care about something when it has a face. The turtle we spared in the activity, for example, is something we prioritized because it lives similarly to ourselves. It needs food to feed its empty stomach; it needs oxygen to feed its beating heart. When its mouth curves ever so slightly, we think it is smiling, and when it hides away in its shell, we think it is sleepy or nervous. When a living thing has a mouth to eat and movements that reflect our human emotions, it becomes a being that we are more likely to protect. Meanwhile, when a living thing does not have needs similar to ours or the ability to express itself in a way we can understand, like a patch of moss or a blade of grass, it is difficult for us to see it as a being; it is difficult for us to even see it as a living thing. We just see it as a thing. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Native American biologist and poet, writes, “If a maple is an it, we can take up a chain saw. If a maple is a her, we think twice” (57). When we see large puddles in our way, our first instinct is to trample any of the “it”s that surround the trail before we, (a “her” or “him” or “them”) suffer the slight discomfort of wet boots. But those “it”s are living; they suck up sunlight and water and the air we breathe to slowly grow and spread their roots. Just like the turtle, they start from a few cells and become something

with a purpose: to thrive. No matter if they perform photosynthesis or strictly cellular respiration or if they have roots instead of legs, living things deserve to live as long as they can. Is a wet boot a good enough reason to steal a life?

The principles of Leave No Trace remind us that every part of nature needs to be respected before they can be enjoyed. Many of us who live in cities, like myself, seek a mountain trail to escape the gray concrete of our neighborhoods and immerse ourselves in the greenness of nature. As I climb a mountain, I sometimes anticipate the summit view so much that the trail and everything around it can feel like things that get in the way of the satisfying end. However, when I remember to put in the active effort to stay on trail and protect the little beings that grow beside or on it, the process of getting to the summit becomes just as beautiful as the summit itself. When I view moss on a rock as life worth protecting, it is easier to admire how each tiny fiber contributes to its round fluffiness. When I view a blade of wet grass as life worth protecting, it is easier to admire how peacefully it sways as little drops of dew cling to the slight bend that runs down its middle. When I view a fern as life worth protecting, it is easier to admire how it builds up from a long base of leaves into a perfect point. I am proud to squelch in my muddy boots, because it means that I not only get to escape into greenness for the day, I also protect the things that live to make nature green.

Linnea Parker

Linnea Parker

A Circular Economy

Ellie Haljun

“I made this collage in Color and Design with Professor Woolf. We were asked to create a collage based on a piece of text. Due to Covid my freshman year, I had to switch from laboratory research to a writing project with my research advisor, Professor Getzler. We began writing a minireview on chemical recycling to monomer (CRM). CRM is the idea that we can design polymers which degrade back to their monomeric parts and that these parts can be purified. Monomers are small molecules which can react together to form long chains. The long chains are then called polymers. Smaller molecules are much easier to purify than large ones, making monomers easier to purify than polymers. If we were able to use these polymer designs, we could degrade our plastics back into the starting materials. Those materials could then be used as input into the next round of polymers, creating less waste and requiring less input of new materials. This collage was created using found plastic and plastic I would’ve otherwise thrown away, like a Wiggin Street Coffee cup or plastic bags. I also used some of the plastic and stuffed a bag and bottle full to emphasize how we are creating such a sheer volume of plastic waste. The only true way to rectify this crisis is to design plastics that are made to recycle.”

Lara O’Callaghan

Birds learned to tweet long before we did: Fitness benefits for tutor songbirds

Lara O’Callaghan

Known for their beautiful, lyrical songs, songbirds are one of the most diverse clades of birds, consisting of over 4,000 species (Encyclopaedia Britannica). Their most fascinating behavior is the ability to produce such distinctive, elaborate songs. Much like humans, songbirds have a highly sophisticated form of communication. In fact, very few other animals learn vocalization through social interactions. During their first few months, songbirds learn and individualize a repertoire of songs essential for mating and territorial defense. Thus, song learning (also called song sharing) is crucial for their own fitness and survival. Yet, the question remains: how is this behavior advantageous for the adult tutors? What do they get out of teaching their songs to young juveniles? Or is this a competitive system where juvenile birds imitate the “tutors”? Though previous studies have explored juvenile song learning, a recent study, by Micheal Beecher and colleagues, examines if song learning is also favorable to adult songbirds. Beecher and colleagues reached a surprising conclusion: song learning in Song Sparrows supports a mutually beneficial relationship between the tutee and tutor. Not only does learning a repertoire of songs from a primary tutor increase survivorship of the juvenile Song

Sparrow, it also increases the survivorship of the tutor or adult teacher (Beecher et al. 2020).

“We often first think of bird song as a type of territory defense, or a mate attraction behavior,” says biologist and Professor of Animal Behavior at Kenyon College, Iris Levin. “Therefore, cooperation or some mutual benefit is not the first thing that comes to mind. This study by Beecher and colleagues [….] shakes the paradigm a bit.” Levin was not involved in this study, but as an ecologist who studies barn swallows and has published previous research on songbirds, she is excited by the implications of this study.

It may seem like the study of songbirds is an irrelevant area of research, but studies such as these are important because it may help us understand how to increase the survival of older and younger generations - through the preservation of tutor/tutee relationships - especially with decreasing populations. Furthermore, this may provide insight into human language development. Levin is intrigued by the possibilities for continuing this vein of research. “I’d be really interested to see whether reproductive success is also higher for these males who appear to be benefiting by singing the same songs.”

Linnea Parker

For songbirds, the process of learning a song is akin to learning how to play an instrument. Learning to play an instrument often requires a teacher of some sort, whether that be YouTube, a neighbor, or a private tutor. Oftentimes this teacher is unrelated to you but resides close by enough to give lessons. Likewise, songbirds learn from outside tutors rather than their parents. Within their first year of life, they build a repertoire of songs by learning and replicating the notes of their primary tutor while also adding their own style. By the time a song sparrow has established his territory, he has cemented his song repertoire of about six to thirteen songs.

There is considerable evidence that young male songbirds benefit from learning particular songs to attract a mate and reproduce. However, it has long been assumed that there are no costs or benefits associated with the tutor because these songbirds learn from unrelated members, and therefore song learning is merely a one-way relationship that increases the juvenile’s fitness. Beecher and colleagues tested these assumptions by measuring the survival of a tutee and his primary tutor in relation to how many songs were learned in a population of Song Sparrows, Melospiza melodia morphna (Beecher et al. 2020).

Beecher and colleagues conducted their field study in a park adjacent to the Puget Sound in Seattle, Washington. In order to first establish which birds acted as primary tutors, researchers recorded 78 juvenile Song Sparrows and 120 potential tutor sparrows. They then analyzed the recorded songs with something called a spectrogram. Spectrograms are computer-generated graphs that depict audio waves and changes in frequencies, essentially illustrating the different notes of their song in a visual format, much like voice record-

ings or sheet music. The spectrograms were used to compare a juvenile sparrow’s repertoire to the repertoire of their potential tutors. Based on the similarities in the spectrograms, the primary tutor/tutee relationship was established. Song Sparrow survival was then measured for approximately 6 years by taking a monthly population census.

The field study was designed to test two hypotheses: the mutually beneficial/mutually tolerant hypothesis and the competition hypothesis. The mutually beneficial hypothesis predicts that a cooperative or at least tolerant relationship exists. As a result, a greater degree of song sharing between tutor and tutee means they will survive and coexist longer. Alternatively, the competition hypothesis assumes the two individuals are rivals and as such there would be a negative correlation between song sharing and survival of the tutor.

The data seems to align with the mutually beneficial hypothesis because the more song sharing that took place, the longer birds tended to survive on average. This becomes especially clear when mutual survival is compared to the independent survival of the tutor and the tutee. Song sharing could potentially be an adaptive behavior that has evolved because there are few if any benefits when only one of the individuals survives (Beecher et al. 2020). Learning songs from older members of the population may very well be an intentional interaction that encourages alliances, collaboration, and group cohesion, however, further studies are needed to substantiate these conjectures. Overall, this study investigates if learning is ultimately competitive, as expected with unrelated conspecific relationships. What the study found was that song learning seems to be a cooperative behavior as seen in human communication.*

Linnea Parker

Violence in Early Spring

Dawsen Mercer

It’s when the ground is so soft you sink in a little, the ground welcomes you in a little, and you can see the cushion of grass fold around your footprint you’ve left a pockmark in the mud

It’s when ladybugs are young and trusting, haven’t learned about heavy hands yet haven’t learned that beauty isn’t always enough yet One crawls its way over the pads of your fingers confused when you cage your fingers around it Folding in, like moon closed tulips, poppies you hope maybe the ladybug will stay you think about crushing it to keep it with you you watch it unfold its wings like you never could and fly off to learn about fear from someone else

It’s when the mourning doves come home to hum the same song over and over the wind, like a mother singing a lullaby to a child that will not sleep, It’s when the gnats that float on the air currents look like dust motes caught in the afternoon light, trapping golden sunlight in the translucence of their cellophane wings

It’s when mice tuck their noses into the red hollows of downed birds When rain unearths rabbit skulls from shallow winter graves, leaving homes with two gaping socket doors for beetles and millipedes

It’s when no matter where you look something is moving, feasting, being resurrected or born

You try not to cause more pain than you created when you were born, at the end of spring, when spring is skipping and tripping over itself in eagerness into summer, You think that was probably enough, tearing out of your mother howling, like something so ravenous for life, it would kill to hold it for just a breath

You think that how violent birth is, is probably indicative of the rest of life maybe it’s foreshadowing for what you will cause again and again, even when you don’t mean it or maybe it simply intimates that man must be violent, because that is how they come

Not all people are bad, you promise, simply, everyone is violent brutality intersects with love more frequently than affection, And violence is not good or bad, it just is, and it is a gift, given when you rip your mother open And violence is not anger, anger comes home with violence attached to his hip like a tool belt for deconstruction and demolition

And by god you have known angry men

Angry men who puff up like cardinals, who spill not song, but wrath from womb-blood coated lips, who teach fear like it was their first language

And there are men women and people and children whose heavy hands do not hold ladybugs soft enough, who teach fear to them like it was their first language

And so your thesis has proof, and you get to endure the tiredness of being right about sad things pessimism, pragmatism, cowardice, at its very finest even when you’re wrong you’re getting something good and when you’re right, A rush of “I told you so,” potent as opium, before the sad thing starts poking and prodding your organs open, like new poppies breaking the soft earth above.

Aymun Wadud

My Little Monster

Grace Thompson

There’s a little monster in my brain. He plays in my hippocampus. He crushes my neurons, But mostly he likes to eat my serotonin. My happiness melts in his mouth like caramel. To him, it’s a delicacy He devours any bit he can find.

I try to flick him off my amygdala with little blue pills. They slide down my esophagus and stab at the monster with shards of joy. Then the shards embed themselves in the folds of my mind, Until the pain of happiness overwhelms that little monster

But he never dies He’s stubborn like that. I almost admire him. I wish I had his motivation But he ate that as well.

My brain is the playground, banquet, and battlefield of this little monster. I hate him.

I hate his gluttony. I hate his cowardice. I hate his destruction.

I hate how his little body weighs me down so much That he makes me sink into the ground. Until I’m so close to being six feet under That I have to drag myself out of the dirt every day.

I hate this little monster that eats my happiness. I hate that I have to live with him in my head. And I hate most of all that sometimes it feels like I’m not even myself. Like I’m not a person. I’m just a plate or a vessel for this little fucking monster.

The Invader

Jillian D’Herin

We heard the distress call too late.

I knew this even before we stepped foot off of the vessel, even before I shouted at our navigator to set our course to Earth, even before I fully managed to read every word. I knew.

After all, we were already so far away from home. If the call still hadn’t been responded to, it was hopeless. I was fully aware that we had no chance. It was selfishness alone that drove me to give the order. I had to look. I had to answer. One week of top-speed travel, and we made it.

The descent was quick, and soon I called the entire crew over. I met their eyes. Lyra, communications. Alistar, science and medicine. Rowan, navigation. “I don’t know what we are going to find out there,” I said, “but we received the call. It was vague.”

Even now, I could see the phantom text floating in my vision, blocking out my crew’s faces. “We can’t stop it. Help.” Even when I shut my eyes for the briefest moments

to blink, it was still there. I had stared at the words, the five simple words, for so long, they were branded onto my mind. Grafted into my DNA.

We got nothing more from our home. Lyra sent out a response every day on our way here, but with no confirmation our hails were received. I let out a sigh. “We’ll split into pairs. Lyra comes with me — Rowan and Alistar, stick together.” The three of them nodded.

I squared my shoulders, channeling an image of bravery I didn’t feel. “Suit up. This is an urgent mission.”

“Why suits? This is our planet,” Alistar said.

“We don’t know what infected them, and we don’t want to bring it to the rest of the settlements beyond,” I said. Even to me, the words sounded cold and unfeeling toward whatever had harmed our home. But they were a necessity. I didn’t know what was going to be out there. It was easier to shut down my imagination, to keep it from taking the lead.

As we entered the decontamination room, right before

Gabby Rachman

the ship’s entrance, I turned to Alistar once more. “Take samples of anything you find. Tell me if anything’s amiss,” I said. Acknowledgement flickered in his eyes as the door opened.

Our eyes were flooded with light. The brightness of the sun hit us, the true light a sharp contrast to the false light we had grown accustomed to inside the ship. Each of us shut our eyes, hiding away from the truth under the guise of letting ourselves adjust.

Rowan adjusted first, their voice small and shaking, “Oh, God.”

But there was no God beyond the door.

There was only green. A sea of monochrome. Unending, with no shifts in the texture to break it up. No changes in the color. The only changes were the bumps and structures hidden beneath. I blinked, trying to see if that would somehow change things. It didn’t.

I kneeled down, pressing a gloved hand into it. It was squishy, like moss, and thick. My fingers sunk into it, and it suctioned to me as I pulled them out. I shook my hand, trying to dislodge some of the moss-like substance off of my glove, but it stuck. I crushed some of it beneath my fingertips, letting it crumble and fall away.

“Be careful,” I said.

I was unfamiliar with what we should be seeing in this town. From the map, I knew that Alistar and Rowan were heading toward the downtown area of the town and Lyra and I to the suburbs and the source of the distress call, but I knew little else. We followed straight streets off of the GPS, seeing nothing of the road that was once here. From the bumps that must have been houses, no lights burned in the windows. There was nothing to catch our eye.

Nothing but this endlessness, this eternity, of unbroken green.

Lyra stared at everything in a strange silence. She walked beside me, careful not to stray too far ahead. The depth of it made every step awkward. We were coated in the strange substance all the way up to our knees, white suits slowly being dyed that same, immortal shade.

The world was silent. A complete lack of noise, like being out in the void of space. It was wrong on Earth. The quiet was all-encompassing, all-consuming. It was all I could focus on, with nothing to see. Quiet was more distracting than sound, in a way.

I was still focused on the quiet when my foot gave way underneath me, hitting against something hard. The ground suctioned to me, trying desperately to swallow me whole. “Dahlia!” Lyra shouted my name, trying to grasp my arm.

I reached upward, trying to kick as though I were swimming. Her arm grabbed my wrist and tugged. The visor on my suit fogged with my frantic breathing; my ears were clouded by my erratic heart.

Nothing but that deep, dark green enveloped me. The light from above grew smaller around my head, leaving only

my arms above the surface. Even though my suit provided oxygen, I felt lightheaded. Everywhere, the ground was touching me, squeezing in on me.

I could hear the crew’s voices in my ear pierce, Lyra’s frantic shouting as she tried to pull me up. “Dahlia! Come on, help me out here if you can,” she pleaded. One of the others was responding, but I couldn’t make out if the voice belonged to Alistar or Rowan. Maybe it was both.

My shoulder jerked as she pulled, and some of the plants cleared away. I did the same on the other side, and I was in the light again. I breathed heavily, hands shaking. From head to toe, I was covered in the plant. Even though it had not touched it, the sticky texture felt imprinted onto my skin.

Lyra’s arms wrapped around me, the force threatening to send us both into that endless green grave. “What did you trip on?” she asked. Her face was pale, her breathing shaky.

I turned around, running my hands down. I felt it.

My eyes widened.

I pulled, trying to get the ground to release its grip. It fought with me less than it did when I was stuck beneath that endlessness, letting the thing go.

But it wasn’t a thing I had tripped on.

It was a person.

A person who had been trapped underneath, presumably suffocated. “Alistar, we’ve found a corpse.” Lyra’s voice

was the only thing louder than the ringing in my ears, the blankness that surrounded everything but the body. “Looks like she suffocated.”

Her entire body was coated in that same green moss, from her clothes to her face, painting her in one similar shade. It took everything in me not to drop the body from disgust. From what little we could see of her face, she looked sickly, her face more like a skeleton with skin draped over it than a human with fat and muscles.

Lengths of her stringy, green-stained hair fell limp through my hands as I held her, cradling her emaciated neck. I felt each of her vertebrae beneath my hand, bumpy and thick. Her eyes were staring up at a sky that was beginning to look less blue than green. Dilated pupils filled her irises, the whites of her eyes shot through with stringy green lines. Entranced by a world that had been consumed.

Rowan’s voice crackled in my ear, “We’ve found a couple, too. Looks like the plant suffocated them?” There was a pause, and distantly Alistar could be heard. “We’re looking into it on our end.”

I dropped the body, unable to bear it any longer. The ground consumed it, letting it sink back down into its final resting place. My eyes burned.

“It looks more than suffocated,” Alistar finally contributed, “they’re emaciated.”

My shoulders slumped, the only grief I could show. Lyra lent me a hand, helping me to fully stand again. We continued our silent march once again, my eyes burning with unshed tears. Something about it felt off, like something was hiding in the crevices of the absence of sound.

Our steps let off an easy beat, a rhythm that slowly let my heart follow and slow down. Distantly, though, there was a slow, drumming sound that went counter to our steps.

I paused, Lyra stopping alongside me. She opened her mouth to speak but I raised a hand, silencing her. The drumming continued, low and droning. I shut my eyes, letting the sound cover my mind.

It was slow, heavy. Lumbering. And it was constant, never growing louder or quieter. “You hear it, too?” I asked at last, opening my eyes again. Lyra nodded once.

I clicked on my communicator. “Do you two hear that weird sound?” I asked.

A pause. Lyra and I continued walking before we got a response. “Yeah, we hear it, Dahlia. Don’t know where it’s coming from, though,” Rowan replied.

No one spoke, but the thrum replaced the need to. It filled my mind, choking out any thoughts. It wasn’t getting any louder, it wasn’t changing, but I could feel it getting stronger. Like it was wrapping around me as the plants did when I fell.

The buildings and streets around us were in similar conditions to the outskirts we landed in. We were near the suburbs, full of wide spaces and parks. There were no remnants of humanity left within it. They had all been consumed.

Entire houses were covered in the same soft, textured moss. Parks and bikes toppled over were left as chlorophyll ghosts, haunting the streets but unable to move. Hardly recognizable.

By the time the sun was past noon, we had reached where the call came from. I used my already stained glove to wipe off what looked like a sign from the building. “Research Center for Alien Botany,” I read it out loud. Lyra looked at me, a sort of silent communication passing between us. She nodded, and I opened the door. It fought against me, glued shut by the moss. I won the battle — looking in, I could see it won the war.

Lab equipment and a front desk were all consumed, similarly to the outside. Sunlight flooded the space, chasing away the shadows but leaving the alien substance covering everything. Still, in the darkest corners, it moved.

It was a slow, rhythmic moving, like a metronome. The green mass pulsed over the desk, a heartbeat, to the same pulse as that slow drone that still rang in our ears. Lyra stumbled backward, hand pressed to her visor.

I couldn’t move — I was entranced by the movement. I took a step toward it, my gloved hand extended out. I don’t know why, but I had to get closer. I had to find the source. There was a need, drawing me toward the center.

The research center’s hallways and rooms were a mess of blobs sticking up from the ground. In places, the moss was thinning, almost to the point of becoming translucent. I could see outlines of chairs overturned and, occasionally, of bodies. I turned my head away from those solemnly — they were beyond help. This was to be their burial place.

Lyra eventually rejoined me. As we went through door after open door, each one jammed open by the mass of throbbing green, we found it. We found the origin point. My heart raced in my ears — mixed in with the endless beat, it almost synced.

The lab was dark, with the alien crawling over the windows, leaking from the ceiling. Lyra pulled a flashlight out from her toolkit, shining it around. The mass of pulsating green retracted from her light as if repelled by it. It shrunk in on itself, the drone turning momentarily to a high-pitched squeal.

We moved in closer, broken glass littering the hard floor beneath us. “This doesn’t seem like a plant,” Lyra stated into the comm system.

“I know,” Alistar said, “it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before. You guys are at your location?”

“Yeah,” I replied, knowing I had to speak despite how difficult it was to form words. “We’re here. Looks like whoever was here before was researching Earth’s plight. You should come check it out.”

“Sending coordinates now,” Lyra said before I could even finish my thought.

“Alright, but something doesn’t feel right. I don’t think we should stay here for too much longer,” Alistar said.

“Yeah. Whatever this thing is, it killed everyone here. Who knows how much it spread?” Rowan said.

No one spoke as Rowan’s words fell on us, heavy and thick despite how few they had spoken. How much had it spread? Is this what the rest of the world looked like?

I turned off my comm. “Lyra, you sent out response hails, right?” I asked.

She nodded, “No response. Still nothing.”

My heart sank. I turned to the broken glass wall, pressing my hand against it. Even through the glove, I could feel the warmth of the mass here. I could feel it pulsating, the beat running through me. Within my chest, I felt my heart shift to match it. My legs shook.

The mass grew over my glove, and the thrumming grew. A slow death march echoed in my head. I shook it, trying to get rid of the sound, but it was impossible to dislodge. In my periphery, I could see Lyra’s mouth moving, but her voice was gone.

I yanked my arm away. The mass held on. It was strong, unforgiving, as I tried again to pull my arm out. It gripped on with the tightness of a vice. The beating roared in my mind as I struggled, pulling with my whole arm to free my wrist. I tried to back up, but my arm ached at the effort.

Finally, as I pulled my entire body back, my glove dislodged, freeing my hand, mercifully still brown and without any hint of green. I dug through my bag without answering Lyra’s endless questions, pulling on another glove carefully.

Through my panic, I clicked on my comm. The other two had to hear this. “Don’t touch it. It won’t let you go,” I said, my voice unable to stay calm. Lyra nodded once, carefully walking around the rest of the room. She held her tablet, taking pictures of the scene. “Take a video, too,” I told her.

The beating was stuck in my head now, louder than my own voice as I spoke, louder than Lyra’s breathing, louder than my footsteps. It was all I could hear. I yearned to press my hands to my ears like a child, but the helmet and my mismatched glove — one stained, one clean — made me hesitate.

The ground below us throbbed in time with the mass at the center of the room, covered in glass shards and, somewhere within, my glove. Although I had no other spares left, although I knew what would come of it, I yearned to press my hand into the heat again. To feel it, to let it take me.

I clenched my fist. No, no I did not want that. So why did it sound so appealing to let the mass take me over, to let it silence this endless beat that assaulted my ears? Would that be so bad? I reached my hand out but dragged it down to my side before I could do anything reckless.

Lyra looked at me strangely when she was done taking pictures. “Maybe we should head back now. We can come again when we have a bigger crew,” Lyra said, taking a step towards me.

I shook my head. “No.” I had no explanation, no reason

to deny her this request. I just did. The word left my mouth before I could think about it.

Lyra’s eyes hardened. “You’re not thinking rationally right now, Dahlia,” she told me. “I think we should go.” Her words were gentle; I could barely hear them over the drone.

Before I could answer her, Alistar and Rowan came in, cheeks flushed as though they had run through the gunk outside. Rowan’s eyes widened, their face turning pale. They stumbled, pressing a hand against the wall.

Alistar took a walk around the room. I could barely see him, all I could focus on was the thing in the center. The source. The heart. My hand — the one I had gotten stuck in there — seemed drawn to the thing, wanting to touch it again. Even as my brain knew better, my body did not. My fingers stretched toward it, even when I held my wrists down.

Behind me, the others were discussing something. But, through the droning beat, I heard something else. A hissing, high-pitched, like when Lyra had shined her light on the mass in the first place.

“Take me. With you.”

I stumbled back, the trance broken. I bumped into Lyra, and she grabbed my shoulder to help me stand back upright. “We need to go. Now,” I said.

Lyra stared at me. Alistar shook his head, “I should take some samples—”

“Alistar, we need to go.”

“Why? What happened?” He argued.

The mass at the center continued its beat, and its taunt in my mind. “You can’t hear it?” I asked. The three stared at me with blank expressions. My hands shook at my sides as my heart raced, the adrenaline within me telling me to run. To leave and never look back at this cursed place.

No one spoke. Everyone shut their eyes, straining to listen. I grabbed the flashlight from Lyra’s hand, shining it right on the center. It shrieked, the voice becoming frantic. “Take me, take me, take me. With you, take me.” The words became jumbled up as I shined the light on it, the beam wavering in my quaking hands. “You, take. Me. You. With. Take you.”

Alistar nodded once, “I hear it now. It’s screaming. It’s trying to tell us something.”

Lyra’s eyes widened. She turned off the light, ushering us out of the room. “Dahlia,” she turned to me as we stood outside the lab, “you touched that thing. Did any get on your hand?”

“No — I made sure of it.”

“Still, it got closer to you than any of us. Twice — you got taken by it outside, too. Maybe that’s why you could hear it better than the rest of us.” Lyra’s usually calm voice was turning nearly frantic as she explained her thought. “Maybe that’s why it’s trying to talk to you. It knows you.”

Rowan grabbed my arm, looking at the thick coating of the moss running up and down the sleeve. “We should come

Linnea Parker

back. With backup. We need to tell the other settlements,” they said.

I agreed with Rowan, but my head did not want to nod. It was a fight to make my muscles work the way they should. The voice was screaming in my head now, telling me to stay. To take it with me. Finally, my neck bowed, just enough for the others to relax. They were worried I was too far gone.

Leaving the research center, I heard the beat just as strongly as I did inside. It was screaming at me, begging me to stay. “No, no. Stay. Stay. With us. Us.” The words became frantic. It pleaded with me, screaming as though each step I took hurt it down to its deepest level. I felt tears burning on my cheeks but I didn’t understand why I was crying.

The cool grays of the ship were like a sight for sore eyes. Already, the bottoms of it that had touched the ground had new growth overtaking it. “It’ll die off in space,” I said as we got into the decontamination room.

Our suits were to be abandoned. We left them behind, inspecting every inch of ourselves to make sure none came inside with us. Even I was clean, despite Alistar’s insistence to check again before we entered.

The warm tones of the decor of our ship felt strange. Although I knew the decor to be a vibrant orange, every color was overlaid with a green filter. My eyes scrambled to adjust to the new colors, struggling to adapt to the sudden

lack of green. It felt all tinted with the green from outside, at least for a moment. My eyes hunted for the color in the ship, relief only coming when I saw none there. I touched the couch, feeling the plush texture. It felt like the inside of that mass’s heart. I pulled away.

Rowan began setting our path toward the nearest inhabited planet, so we could let our organization and the universe know. So we could be the ones to tell them that the homeland of humans had been consumed by something else. Something that wanted to consume us, too.

As we flew away, I stared down at the planet through the glass panes. It was a sphere of endless green, without any breaks. Any interruptions. And against the black sky, the planet pulsed. Even though I was with everyone else, and the sounds of the ship were deafening, I swore I could hear it pulse, too. Chills went down my body. There was something wrong. I knew this, just as I knew that we would never make it back to Earth in time.

I walked as casually as I could from the window to the decontamination room, where we’d left our suits to eventually be dumped. The door was sealed tight — nothing could get in from there. It was metal and should have been cold against my hand.

But it was warm. And there was a slow, rhythmic beat coming from the other side.

Gabby Rachman

She says “I’ll only immediately help you when you’re a danger to yourself or others.”

Halle Preneta

The fun part is, she doesn’t know I’m a danger to her yet. Love is like a virus, infecting others no matter how many precautions we take. No matter how many masks we wear or distance we put between ourselves, it always finds a way to carve a home out of our bodies. To make us lay sick in bed for days surrounded by tissues brimming with our own snot and saliva and shit. To make us dizzy and delirious and depressed, sit inside a black hole we never asked for. To make us wonder what we did to end up here. What we could’ve done to not. Make us suffer quietly, alone, in one room with only water and your soul and no way out but up.

Do you ever wonder what’ll happen when the universe dies? Will it just poof out of existence? Or is it a gradual decline, first the asteroids then the supernovas then the planets orbiting around the one thing that’ll inevitably destroy us all then the milky ways themselves until there’s nothing left? What happens then, in the darkness of nothing?

What happens, then, in darkness?

When you become the sun, hot and burning and angry at yourself for building this whole universe to begin with and now all you want to do is burn it to the ground?

What happens when you become a virus ready to infect others with your suffocating love, not caring who you take down with you?

What happens when you’re forced to sit inside a black hole you never asked for, feeling your soul slink out of your body, leaving you to become only floating atoms, both everything and nothing?

What happens when you feel everything yet want to feel nothing all at once?

What happens when you become destruction?

What happens if you already are?

your shadow knows everything you don’t

Shelly Kahn

skip-pop say your shoes on the concrete painted yellow-blue-black by the streetlight that flickers every third time you blink and the faded velvet expanse of a promised atmosphere and punctured stars; shadows distort behind you their gnarled arms of not-sleep not-light not-space defined by negatives how can you be what you are without knowing what you are not.

dents and rivulets of cobbled stone on too-red hands curled crescent moons on palms bigger than the curve disappearing above into spirals-ovals-eyes unsure it cannot decide what version of itself to be it is all a phase. ‘the witching hour’ whose doors creak-pop and shoes skip-pop three for each step who is following you and what do they know.

fractals pressed into closed eyes a sparkling disorder disembodied from bodily organs high-pitched like the metal collision the mental collision twisted you stepped too far down the stairs and the flight knocked the air out of bound lungs. ping ping bang does a human shatter or splat do you recognize the fingerprint of your mistake how could you mistake it for anything else.

white-scrubbed bone too clean like that round sea-green paperweight, lopsided with memories from not-you; broken beneath your shadow punched out breath like a fall on your back like you dropped from too high put it back together; now it sits overwhelmingly too-bright-blue too-perfect glistening with guilt.