Parallax 2018

Parallax 2018 Editor-in-Chief: Emily Clarke Junior Editor: Delany Burk Poetry Editor: Alex Clendenning Jiménez Fiction Editor: Serena Woosley Dramatic Writing Editor: Kalista Puhnaty Nonfiction Editor: Cheon “Alan” Lee Editorial Staff: Alex Bishop, Bailey Bujnosek, Ryan French Visual Art Editor: Linda Santana Layout and Design: Omar Razo Creative Writing Department Faculty: Kim Henderson (Chair), Derrick Ortega, Abbie Bosworth, Marianne Kent-Stoll, Mara Lund Montaño Visual Art Department Faculty: David Reid-Marr (Chair), Daniel Donovan, Shaunna Lehr, Terry Rothrock, Linda Lucía Santana, Kyle Thomas, Joann Tomsche, Melissa Wilson, Rachel Welch Parallax Award Guest Judge: Victoria Chang Idyllwild Arts President/Head of School: Pamela Jordan Idyllwild Arts Academy 52500 Temecula Drive PO Box 38 Idyllwild, CA 92549 (951) 659-2171 Parallax Online: www.parallax-online.com Copyright 2018 Idyllwild Arts Foundation All rights reserved.

No work is to be reprinted without the written consent of the author and the Idyllwild Arts Foundation. ii

T H E

L I T E R A R Y

A N D

A R T

M A G A Z I N E

2018

O F

I D Y L L W I L D

A R T S

A C A D E M Y

6. Cure - Serena Woosley

23. Los Vivos y Los Muertos - Cristobal Ayala Roche

7. Time Is Water - Alisa Gannota

24. The Shadow of Grace - Bailey Bujnosek

8. Lila and I - Gabi Wackford-Muñoz

30. Suicide - Garfield Woohyung Jung

9. Untitled - Amy DaEun Kim

31. Chopsticks - Garfield Woohyung Jung

10. Immaculate Birth - Delany Burk

32. Yolks - Emily Clarke

11. Thinking Deep - Baslel Addisu

33. Camouflage - Garfield Woohyung Jung

12. Red Velvet - Adrienne Ferguson

34. The Art Room’s Floor - Ryan French

13. Wonder - Baslel Addisu

37. Relativity - Adrian Hernandez

14. Birth Certificate - Emily Clarke

38. Isolate - Alex Clendenning Jiménez

15. Remains of Hatred - Chloe Haeri Jang

40. Sugar Babe - Adrian Hernandez

16. 환상 (幻想) - Chloe Haeri Jang

41. Tomás - Adrian Hernandez and Tiva Tao

17. Untitled - Chuan Qin

42. Spaced Out - Bailey Bujnosek

18. Daughter - Haile Kusama

46. Adapt [1/3] - Jane You Kyeong Koo

19. Revolucionario - Cristobal Ayala Roche

47. Adapt [2/3] - Jane You Kyeong Koo

20. Marrow Cocktails - Alex Bishop

48. Reflection on a Paper Dimension - Delany Burk

22. Baile de la Vida - Cristobal Ayala Roche

50. Adapt [3/3] - Jane You Kyeong Koo

iv

51. Student - Jeremy Dezhen Xu

71. Untitled - Patrick Zhongwen Li

52. Child-Lock Hunger in Laxative Bottles - Alex Bishop

72. Dimensional Time - Serena Woosley

53. The Rocks - Jeremy Dezhen Xu

73. Untitled - Quinn Jensen

54. Parable of the Universe’s Condition in Tongues Alex Clendenning Jiménez

74. A la Vuelta de la Esquina - Alex Clendenning Jiménez

56. Booklet 1 - Johnny Huizhong Fu 57. Traumatized Children - Kayrie Brewer 58. Childhood Adventures: The Conquest and Razing of Love Cheon Alan Lee

76. Me - Rita Yirui Wang 77. Leaked - Rita Yirui Wang 78. Yellow Teeth - Delany Burk [WINNER OF 2018 PARALLAX AWARD] 79. Pacific - SooYeon Kim

61. Wonderland - Lily Jiwon Nam

80. Only Child - Kalista Puhnaty

62. One Way Ticket - Lynn Yixin Ling

82. Paraxod - SooYeon Kim

63. Separation of Time - Adrian Ocone

83. Purity - Yuga Yujia Li

64. Wicked Womanhood - Emily Clarke

84. Moisturizing Nigel Crumpet Jack O' Connor [NON-MAJOR CONTEST WINNER]

66. Border - Adrian Ocone 67. Why Do Dentists Have High Suicide Rates - Adrian Ocone 68. Biography of the Darkness that Lurks Behind Desire Kalista Puhnaty

95. 欲 - Yuga Yujia Li 96. About the Departments

70. Hidden - Olga Shalimova INSIDE COVER: 生死契 (Oil Painting) Yuga Yujia Li v

Cure

Serena Woosley

There was a glass of water on the kitchen table, chilled. We picked it up with our fingers. We took a bath. We scrubbed. We took a bite out of the soap with our mouths. Our stomachs were filled with water. We were filled with the energy from the water and the energy from the honeysuckle soap.

We bared our teeth. We were clean.

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Time Is Water (Pen and Ink) Alisa Gannota PARALLAX 2018  7

Lila and I

Gabi Wackford-Muñoz

Lila and I used to steal jelly beans from the candy store downstairs. Well, I did. I stole them and she watched. I did it to win her heart.

We split them: cool colors for me, warm colors for her. I hated the blueberry ones, but I never told her.

We had contests to see how long we could keep them in our mouths without chewing them. The winner got a share of the loser’s jelly beans. I always lost on purpose.

Then we’d wash our hands. The hot water ran over our fingers and we watched, entranced, the sticky colors on our palms melting down the drain.

We were too short to reach the sink, and we playfully fought for the stepping stool. Small as we were, the stool only had room for one of us. After shoving and yelling we’d end up each with one leg on the stool, our shoulders pressed together and our legs shaking as we tried to stay on.

Once, Lila lost her balance and fell forward, consequently dunking her perfectly styled bangs under the running faucet. I laughed at the look of her and she grabbed my collar. I nearly drowned that day. I went to heaven that day. Never before, and never after, had Lila spent so much time directly focused on me.

I got in trouble for the mess in the bathroom. I had to mop it up with some kitchen towels. I don’t remember how long it took. I spent the whole time thinking about Lila.

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Untitled (Digital Art) Amy DaEun Kim PARALLAX 2018  9

Immaculate Birth

Delany Burk

They bloom to life in crisis.

Gaining a following and breaking away from oppression.

They speak holy words creating faith with the miracles that dance upon Their fingertips.

Their enemies prevail, roses swatch across Their backs They sink below the horizon, return three days dead, become legends, become heroes, each one carries the same story Immaculate conception, glory and leadership.

This story shall go on as it has a creation story archetype preaching the words of many gods death is not the end.

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Thinking Deep (Lithograph) Baslel Addisu PARALLAX 2018  11

Red Velvet Adrienne Ferguson The children always played well together. They were all about six years old. They dearly missed their friend Tommy, who had gone missing a few months ago. By now, the parents had relaxed, allowing the children to go outside. They began to trust their quiet neighbourhood once again. Their cookie cutter houses and copy-cat lives altered the parents’ fears into confidence, feeding off of each other's apprehensions. Tommy was quiet and sensitive. He didn’t always fit in with the other boys, but the children never cared. On the street they threw balls, rode bikes, and acted out imaginary plots only they understood. They played every Friday evening at four, as if their internal clock wouldn’t let them do anything else. Ms. Jones watched them from her window as she slowly mixed eggs into the batter. She was rarely seen in the neighbourhood, only making an appearance during bake sales. Such a kind old lady, the mothers said. She keeps to herself, but she’s always sweet with the kids.

Today Ms. Jones was making them red velvet cake, which always used to be Tommy’s favourite. The children’s heads turned as they heard her voice, beckoning them into her house. A warm, bakery smell wafted out of her door and danced right under their noses. The mothers waved to their children as they filed into the house. Her decor was expected: old lady knick-knacks and unsettling old paintings.

Chipped porcelain dolls lined the shelves, frozen in their broken states. The only light on in the house poured from the kitchen. Wet flour clogged the drain, leaving the sink partially filled. A bag of sugar was on its side, spilt onto the counter. Why is there such a big mess there? With the sugar? one girl asked. Why, I put in extra this time, so it would be extra sweet, Ms. Jones replied, patting the girl’s head.

The children sat around the dining room table. It was dark wood with a protective cloth over it, so the children could 12 PARALLAX 2018

make as big of a mess as they liked. They squirmed in their chairs, not because the seats were uncomfortable but because they could not wait any longer. Ms. Jones walked in with plates of cake so large the children gasped. The frosting draped over each piece, like a blanket preserving the warmth of the fluffy sponge beneath surface. Ms. Jones smiled at the children, giving them the O.K. they needed.

Red and white littered their faces as they dug in, some without using a fork. The same little girl from earlier spoke in between her bites. I wish Tommy was here. This was his favourite cake. The other children nodded in agreement.

Oh, darling, Ms. Jones said smiling, Tommy is here. She looked down at the cake. It looked so very red.

Wonder (Etching) Baslel Addisu PARALLAX 2018  13

Birth Certificate Emily Clarke Mama throws me into the big, silver pot and waits for my body to boil. My chubby limbs have detached themselves from my torso. My left calf floats around me in circles and my right foot bobs against my tummy. Mama giggles and points to one of my hands. It is waving at her. The broth bubbles around my cheeks as I float. Mama cuts carrots, potatoes, and onions with a dull knife. The pieces bounce into our stew. One hits my nose and Mama tsks. She pokes at my torso with a wooden spoon until it detaches from my neck. She runs the handle of the spoon down the center of my stomach and smirks. My belly button overflows with broth. The knife gleams in the yellow kitchen lamp light. Mama turns the burner knob to high.

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Remains of Hatred (Digital Art) Chloe Haeri Jang PARALLAX 2018  15

환상 (幻想) (Digital Art) Chloe Haeri Jang

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Untitled (Digital Art) Chuan Qin PARALLAX 2018  17

Daughter

Haile Kusama

Found a prize to rip from brown earth and handle like a wilting baby girl. The chamomile becomes a beard with close breathing, turning you into an old, girlish man.

The grass is soaked, makes me crave swimming. There’s a reservoir near, draping itself like an expensive raincoat in the dark.

Last winter I cradled the door knob, a small ball to throw, thumb shifting to polish an underbelly. As the door fainted aside, my stomach grew lax and I, an old-guy line, straight-backed with the kettle whining behind me, first observed your left eyelid, thinly creased on a twenty-some face. Baby-hair crowded a round brow, seizing upon a static day and hairline I didn’t know was mine.

It has rained and washed. With shifting there’s a squeak, a quake and a squeal of body and rubber boot.

The lawn beneath us makes me feel cleaner than I am, as if it is my skin that has been cleansed into the wax and plasticity of a playground slide.

Chemical burns of the chamomile linger on your mouth and chin, mimicking fresh-crusted impetigo or the aftermath of some enthused devouring of heavily sauced spaghetti.

Smell the night. Promise I’ve rinsed it, promise it’s clean, fresh-packed, readymade in the crouched light. Can’t see anything but your tent-floating face. The reservoir hums as your face, the moon, hums.

And though I roll, a thin-skinned newborn exposed in light that is old and light that is late, there is only stillness at the stock of my stomach.

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Revolucionario (Linoleum Cut) Cristobal Ayala Roche PARALLAX 2018  19

Marrow Cocktails

Alex Bishop

Bend me into myself like a wire coat hanger Fold into my body, porous Velvet fog in your arms Soft and spilling Let my forehead be swaddled In the stretch between your chin And neck Let our long hair braid together Your dutch plait compliments my skin I turn pink in the sun You turn olive You turn me rosy Copper and dusty gold spider silk Our hair rusts together into a chain My cheekbones jigsaw your collarbones Grab the base vertebrae of my spine Let me succumb Draw me close to your waist Fingers sketching scratches on my thighs The curve of your pelvis digs Into the fissure between my hip bones Cracking them open, a silver tongue splitting marble I’ll put one leg over yours Thread the cartilage of our knees with fishing wire Make me feel fragile Hollow out my bones And consume the powder like marrow 20  PARALLAX 2018

I thought I wanted you to kiss me soft But I will give you me If you take me If you bruise me As long as you kiss them better.

PARALLAX 2018  21

Baile de la Vida (Silver Gelatin Photography with Acrylic) Cristobal Ayala Roche 22  PARALLAX 2018

Los Vivos y Los Muertos (Reduction Woodcut) Cristobal Ayala Roche PARALLAX 2018  23

The Shadow of Grace

Bailey Bujnosek

In fourth grade I had to write an essay about something in the window. I follow her gaze: a highrise. Has to be at least my short life I’d really enjoyed, and of course I wrote about 600 feet.

Grace. My parents got all up in arms when they read it–not towards me, but towards each other.

“Big thinking is for Texas,” I tell her. “Not New York–” “She’s obsessed with this girl,” my dad said, holding the essay at a safe distance from himself.

“It’s her only friend,” my mom said. She was making blatant glances towards me. You could tell she was trying to shut him up. I was trying to finish my food in peace. I gave up and left the room.

My next essay was, My Parents Tell Me Things They Shouldn’t. That shut them up.

“Let’s go,” she says. Getting up. Going. I take a second to look for my phone and find it in my pocket. Then I rush after her.

We end up at this fancy restaurant we probably can’t afford.

World’s freshest orange juice and made-to-order pancakes.

The majority of my day lies ahead. Unfortunate, because breakfast is the best part of many of my days. I blame entropy.

I didn’t tell Grace I’d written about her. She told me she wrote about learning to play the piano. She got an A. I got a C plus.

Before we leave we duck into the bathroom. Grace has to touch up her hair.

Nine years passed, and the grades I got in fourth grade didn’t matter anymore. Or that’s what I told myself.

According to most studies, your early performance in school is a surprisingly good indicator of how your life’s gonna turn out. There are prisons that buy beds based on the number of illiterate people in their area.

“You’re gonna be late,” I say. She’s looking in the mirror, into her own eyes. One hand is above her head, holding her bun in place.

But I’m not in prison. I’m in New York.

“I want to go to IHOP,” I say. Grace flops on the paisley sheets of her hotel bed until she’s facing me.

“We could go to IHOP back home in Texas,” she says.

“Let’s think bigger.” On the word bigger she looks out 24 PARALLAX 2018

“Don’t parent me,” she says.

I force a laugh. She’s nervous. I can’t blame her.

“Another pin,” she says. Her free hand dangles in the air, waiting. I hand her one.

A small child comes out of the stall behind us, then the mother. They edge towards the sink. I step to the side.

“Grace,” I say.

She pulls away from the sink, glares at me, before storming out. Sorry, I mouth to the mother. She lingers by the sink like she needs permission to turn on the faucet. Her mouth forms a tight line.

“It’s okay,” she says. I run out and find Grace already in a cab.

“I don’t feel ready,” Grace says. Head tilting, always tilting when she says ‘I’.

She’s looking around at other people. Some are crying.

Some are laughing. It’s like Toddlers & Tiaras, except we’re all grown up, well dressed, and the winner will mean something for the rest of their life.

“You’re the best pianist I know,” I say.

We reach the college, a cathedral-looking thing smothered in wood, and Grace runs out. She’s halfway up the steps when I realize she didn’t pay the driver. My shoulders slump but I shake it off. This is the biggest day of her life so far, and that’s saying something. Almost every day is big for her; she is assured by parents and teachers and friends that she is going to Make It Big any minute. The pressure must be back-breaking.

I pay the driver and make my way inside the building. It’s spilling over with teenage hopefuls. Half carry instrument cases that make them walk with a slant as they drag themselves down the halls. Those without cases, like Grace, are easy to single out. Pianists.

Most of their faces are morose, their minds contradicting themselves; a part of them hates it here–it’s murderous–but it’s what they’ve worked for their whole lives.

Lighten up, guys, it’s a college.

But that’s easy for you to say, I think. You don’t even have a college to audition for.

I can always rely on myself for encouragement.

Grace leans against the cedar wall of the waiting area, needlessly marked off in tape. It’s right next to the curtain so you can watch everyone else perform.

“I’m the only pianist you know.”

“What about Olivia?”

“She doesn’t count.”

We can hear Olivia playing right now. Three minutes ago we heard her weep goodbye to her high-strung parents.

“You’ll do great,” her mother said.

“Make us proud,” her father said. Such a dad thing to say.

You should already be proud of your daughter, sir, because she had to bleed across the keys, sell her soul to the devil, and shorten her life expectancy by ten years just to get to the little taped area behind the curtain.What did I have to do to get here? Take a plane.

Olivia’s easy to remember: she scrapes into last place each time. I’ve talked to her before, when I see her around campus, but I’m not in the music department. I’ve never had the chance to sustain a friendship.

Grace places her hand at the base of her neck and works it up the crispy, over-sprayed back of her hair. It’s swept up in a neat, auburn bun. We were almost late for that bun.

“I hope I’m better than that,” she says.

“I’m better than that,” I say.

PARALLAX 2018 25

“You’ve never played the piano.”

“That’s the point.”

Grace elbows me in the ribs and laughs, reinvigorated by Olivia’s awfulness. Olivia stops playing. The clock begins.

Five minutes. That’s how long it takes the judges to make a decision in sleek, black ink. The pens they use are sold by the school. They can write upside down, underwater, on the moon.

Olivia’s family collects her on the other side of the stage like she’s airport luggage. I see them hug her. Well, I see her mom hug her. Her dad stands beside them and mimes hanging himself. Olivia sees it and he blushes. They disappear behind the curtain, out of view. Now it’s just floor leading to piano leading to dark side of the stage.

We stare at the emptiness.

“Promise me you’ll be right there,” Grace says.

“Do you have a specific floor tile, perhaps marked off in tape?” I ask. My idea of wit. She’s the genius in this duo.

Grace says nothing.

“1495, come to the stage,” says a voice in the sky. 1495 goes to the stage. She sits down behind the piano and I walk to the other side.

Olivia and her parents are standing just outside the taped area. They haven’t left the room, haven’t left backstage.

They’re just there. Standing in a small huddle and trying to make sense of a lifetime of practice wasted. I don’t understand their devastation–there are other schools, other auditions. All her parents have to do is donate a few thousand dollars.

26 PARALLAX 2018

“Grace Meineke. Eighteen years old. Playing Beethoven’s Appassionata, first movement,” the voice in the sky says.

A softer voice from a judge’s mic says she can start when she’s ready.

Grace launches into the first measure without a breath.

They’re the right notes. I’ve heard them before, listened to her practice by folding and holding my body against the wall, because she says she can’t play when I’m in the room.

And yet she just asked me to stand across from her while she plays. Funny.

I stare at her bun because I can’t see her face. It’s tilted down towards the sheet music.

Musicians have to see something else in those pages besides the symbols and notes and lines. That’s all I see.

Grace is all I see.

She plays a wrong note, quickly gets back on track. A collective sigh of relief throughout the room: she’s not perfect.

Olivia whimpers and it distracts me from the music. Be quiet, I want to scream, but I can’t because I’m not paying attention to her. I’m paying attention to Grace.

Grace’s head arches backwards, lost in the beauty of whatever she sees on those cryptic pieces of paper. God. Maybe it’s God. “God, quit making excuses. You failed,” Olivia’s father says.

His eyebrows pull down hard and fast in between his eyes when he says the word ‘failed’. Maybe it’s like that with all the words that start with ‘f ’.

Olivia says nothing and her parents hurry away from her.

She’s still crying. She inches towards me, towards the tape on the ground. I don’t know if she knows I heard her conversation. She probably assumes I was focused on Grace.

Grace is nearing the end of her piece and I’m pretty sure this is when it gets tricky. It sounds like it does; fast, low, and high at the same time.

I wish she’d look at me with the intensity she gives to the piano. She’s never listened to me for as long as she’s been playing.

Olivia stands next to me, shaking her head and sighing.

“What?” I ask.

She looks at me. Knows I said something, doesn’t know what. It was drowned out by Grace messing up again.

She finds her place. Not as fast. Why is she speeding up?

Olivia puts an arm around my shoulder. Her eyes reflect the stage lights.

“Looks like your friend isn’t getting in either,” she says.

“You don’t know that.” I try to move her arm and fail.

“We all know,” Olivia says. I thought she would be one to avoid confrontation, and here she is. Her parents’ rejection has given her spite-fueled confidence. “She’s, like, third chair. She only wins because she’s pretty.”

“That’s not true,” I say. Grace is still playing. I thought this was the end of her piece. Maybe I was right in a more literal way than I thought. Once you start a performance you become enslaved to the piano.

Grace sees Olivia, whose arm still rests around my shoulder. Her face is contorted in panic and frustration: With herself for not playing the notes right.

With me for letting this pathetic girl put her arm around my shoulder.

With the piano, because no matter how many keys she presses none of them sound right and so she keeps pressing and Olivia half-leans, half-drags her body in front of me to physically turn me away from Grace.

I try to turn back around to see her killing the piano, but Olivia doesn’t let me. I only get a glimpse of the other kids waiting. I think they’re smiling.

Grace plays a jarring, completely out of place measure.

I can hear her breathing.

My legs ache. I sit down, still not facing the stage.

Olivia’s hair is not in a bun. It’s in a ponytail. It’s blond and short and curled. My hair is cut short too, because it’s easier to manage. Like being Grace’s friend. There’s never anything wrong with me, the friend, because I don’t do anything and thus don’t have the opportunity to fail.

“Now First Place Grace knows how it feels,” Olivia says.

“She’ll get into another school,” I say.

“You’re too nice, Laila.”

I lean away from her.

“It’s none of your business, anyway,” I say, and she shrugs.

First Place Grace practiced her piece for a month; she said that was plenty of time. Maybe it’s the overconfidence that got her, or the pressure.

I check my watch and see it’s been eight minutes since she started. Olivia and I have been sitting next to each other for eight minutes. I’ve never had someone I could sit in silence with—not even Grace, who’s been any type of friend I need up to this point: dramatic, funny, virtuoso.

PARALLAX 2018 27

I’m a magnet for questionable musicians.

“What are you gonna do,” Olivia asks, “when Grace moves the hell out of Texas?”

that showed it to my parents, convinced I had some unhealthy obsession.

Or maybe she wasn’t convinced of that.

Grace stops at that.

Idiot.

Or she stops coincidentally. Either way, she stops completely, and the voice in the sky says, “Next.”

Grace called me an idiot.

The judges don’t need five minutes to write down what’s been on loop in their heads: no, hell no, never.

Grace walks to me, to the tape square. I listen to her shoes tap, getting louder the closer she is. The small distance must seem infinite if you’ve just been rushed off stage for trying to squat there.

Not the teacher. The teacher said, “Laila, honey, why didn’t you write about how well you did at the recital?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Get up,” Grace says. It’s an order.

I wanted to say, Teacher, honey, it’s because I didn’t do so well. I quit ballet right after the first big recital, because Grace had just learned to pirouette. I couldn’t even do the splits, so clearly this was Grace’s thing, and I would have to find something else to be good at.

Olivia holds me down.

I still haven’t.

“Come sit with us, Grace,” Olivia says. She pats the linoleum floor and looks up so the sparkle returns to her eyes.

Olivia nudges me with her elbow. Aren’t you gonna stand up to her?

Grace doesn’t sit.

I do stand up. Physically. Olivia can’t hold me down, doesn’t bother. Maybe she expects a fight.

“Why are you sitting with her?” she asks.

“I can sit with whoever I want,” I say, but I’m talking from the floor so it’s hard to act dignified.

“You’re here to support me, idiot,” Grace says. “Remember?”

I remember.

I remember what I wrote my essay about, the happiest moment in my eight year old life: how proud I was of Grace for learning to do a pirouette before our first ballet recital. Then I gave it to my teacher. The rat. She’s the one 28 PARALLAX 2018

“Sorry,” Grace says. “It’s just that I’m upset, and you’re not exactly helping.”

“How am I not helping?”

I’m taller than Grace. I should’ve tried out for basketball.

“You weren’t even watching me, Laila.”

“It wouldn’t have made a difference if I was.”

“Right. Nothing you do makes a difference.”

“So I don’t need to be here, do I?” I say.

She says nothing. Pouts at the floor.

“I didn’t mean it like that–” “No, you’re totally right. There’s nothing I can do to help you get into a school, and if you get in I can’t come with you. I have to find my own school,” I say. “I have to live my own life.”

Grace loses it. She starts bawling more than Olivia was, and she doesn’t have any parents here to berate her.

“Let’s get out of here,” Olivia says.

Grace shakes her head.

“I don’t want to go. I want to tour the school.”

“Forget that,” I say. “We can go to IHOP.” Grace laughs but she’s still crying. I have the impulse to apologize for something, anything, but nothing comes to mind.

“I want to stay here,” she says. She’s resolute.

Olivia is tugging at my hand. We leave the taped circle.

Before I go out the door I look back and see Grace, talking to someone else’s parents. They pat her head. “It’s okay,” they say. “There are other schools.” It doesn’t sound vicious at all.

Olivia and I are outside. It’s bright daylight. Men and women stream past, shading their eyes to dilute the sun. We get off the stairs and join them.

I see my shadow in the street. It follows me. I bump into people as I watch it grow. Watch it shrink. I can’t tear my eyes away.

PARALLAX 2018 29

Suicide (Acrylic on Canvas) Garfield Woohyung Jung 30  PARALLAX 2018

Chopsticks (Drypoint) Garfield Woohyung Jung PARALLAX 2018  31

Yolks

Emily Clarke

I am a police officer driving up a curvy mountain road. My stomach grumbles.

A red RV whizzes past me. It rumbles down the mountain so fast that for a moment I think I may have dreamt it.

RVs are the kind of vehicle I like to pull over. I think it’s something to do with their size. When I have one on the side of the road, when I’m in control, when power bubbles in my tummy, I love my life.

My black on white SUV and the RV sit on the side of the road. My siren is still on. The driver emerges, shoes first: huge, red, shined. The legs are covered in yellow spotted tights. The dress is a rainbow with large, plastic buttons down the belly. I see the driver’s face. It is painted pasty and has a large, false tear rolling down the cheek. She is pretty except for the large, red clown nose. Maybe she’ll take it off if I ask her to. Maybe I can forget about the speeding ticket. Maybe she’ll want to go to breakfast.

“Do you like eggs?” I ask.

“I hate cops,” she replies. “I’m not like them. I’m selfless. I have real power.”

She honks her red nose.

“I always eat an egg just after I wake up,” I say, “but the carton was empty this morning. Do clowns eat eggs?”

“You’re not listening to me,” she says. “We’re disjointed.”

We embrace because that’s all there’s left to do.

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Camouflage (Graphite on Paper) Garfield Woohyung Jung PARALLAX 2018  33

The Art Room’s Floor

Ryan French

When walking into the art room you must put the plastic on your shoes, or walk barefoot through the room. You cannot break this rule or everything will fall apart.

You take off your shoes. It doesn’t matter to you if they get space dust on them anyways. You walk into the room and feel all of the energy of the universe whipping around your ankles, souls grabbing at your legs. You gently shake them off and take a seat. People laugh loudly while music plays in the background. Their laughter feels far away.

crying girl in the bathroom, was suddenly the most interesting thing in your world.

People whisper about you. They whisper anything that pops into their heads. They sound like gossiping women in old movies, talking about your strange habits. They speak of how you smell of patchouli, but how the stench of weed and liquor still cling to your clothing. They speak of how your pockets are overfilled with acorns, and how you scramble to pick up more when you see them, like you’re trying to find something you’ve lost. They speak about your brother, the only one you have left to keep you tied down to this Earth. These words no longer bother you.

You were both on the floor. You held her tightly while she cried into your shoulder, fearing that you might let her down if you loosened your grip by the slightest amount.

Every time she smiles now, you remember the first smile she gave you when she was in pain. It feels like a distant dream. Audrey feels like a dream. Always there, but never close enough to know if she really is.

Someone is tapping at your chair, and you turn to face them. It’s Audrey, the girl who put the whole club together. The moment she looks at you, it feels like you are not alone in your small isolated planet.

You first met Audrey in the school bathroom. She was crying. She was crying and wearing a large brown faux fur coat that covered her entire body. She was crying and wearing a large brown faux fur coat during homecoming.

She noticed you in the mirror while she was trying to tuck loose strands of hair behind her ear. You could see her freeze, pausing her crying to see who just entered. There was a moment of silence when she faced you. Audrey, this 34 PARALLAX 2018

You asked her what was wrong and she smiled, wiping tears off her face. Her girlfriend had just dumped her and said she was tacky. There was more to the story, you knew that, but you couldn’t ask at the moment. Maybe you’ll never be able to ask her what else was said between them that night.

She tells you to paint anything you desire in the universe.

Her proposition is oddly fitting to the day. Wondering if she knows that it is national Space Day, you nod, trying to contain your excitement. Audrey places the gloves and paints you need on your desk and walks back to her own art piece. You put on the vinyl gloves, necessary so that your hands don’t freeze off in the cold vacuum of space.

You get on your knees and let the whole universe envelop you. Other art students add new planets, stars, galaxies, solar systems, or even a new supernova to the universe every month. For a moment you stare at the stars, planets, and black holes on the floor, feeling small, but as if now you are the most important thing. Your untamed hair brushes your cheeks, going other directions. It seems like strands of hair are trying to touch the stars. For once you control this unruly universe. It tells you secrets that

have never been whispered to anyone else. It tells you to take care of the small plants you keep in your room. That your negligence is going to kill them one day. It tells you that you have two more days to return your library books before Linda the Librarian starts to nag you about them.

either. You stop, hand on the knob. Instead of opening it, your hand is drawn to one of your old flower crowns hanging there. It’s gathered so much dust that it has lost the pink and lavender pigment it once had. You put it on without even dusting it, not giving it a second thought.

You turn to see how you look in the broken mirror that seems like it could fall off its hinges at any second, and start seeing different fragments of yourself. The one who wants to be better in school, the one who wants to be a botanist, the one who cares about rules and returns library books on time, the one who wants to be so outlandish and different that people quake at you.

You try to ignore the warnings it has given you, and decide to paint a new star. A variable star to be exact, with twinkles of iridescent blue swirling inside with silver gray stardust churning around in a whirlpool like motion, with maroon in the center, as if it was keeping the whole star from falling apart. It’s all laid out in front of you, filled with past paintings that came into creation, changing the course of the cosmos. Once you’re finished, the star begins Laying down on the floor, you look at the indents on to twirl and gleam even brighter. You want to hold it, so your ceiling, noting that they make this room feel more you try to, but it burns you as soon as you touch it. unorthodox than if the dents didn’t exist at all. Closing your eyes, you think of the universe on the art room floor.

Instead of watching it pulsate, you pry yourself off the You feel the swirling cosmic currents weaving between floor. Coming back to the art room feels like you’re enyour fingers, letting the universe pull you deeper by your tering a bad dream. They all stare at you. You’re sweating hand into a space where no one has added their own buckets. There was something inside of you that adjusted ideas. You mimic the feeling of a paintbrush in your itself into the correct groove. It makes you feel unsure of hand, and begin to paint a small child. It’s you from the the past. Almost like the past could tip off of a balance past, you realize. You were sweet then. Nothing of the beam and come crumbling down, while the future is set real world had hurt you yet. You were someone different. into stone. You close your eyes for a split second and Someone who wore neon boa scarves paired with pastel remember what it feels like. It feels like your bones are dresses in the dead of winter. You were someone who was being crunched. You open your eyes and rub your thumb so different no one could look you in the eye. over your knuckles.

Squeezing your eyes tighter, you put down your hand, Audrey is standing five feet away, smiling. You start to and imagine what the universe could have been like if calm yourself with the surety that your knuckles will not you stayed the same. It’s not a thought you like. Thinking fall off at this very moment. about yourself is not a thought you like. Instead you think about the chairs in the art room with paint peeling off of Going back to your house feels like a daze. The walkway them. The chairs that have layers and layers of paint stuck feels slightly too tilted to the north, and the juniper trees onto them, to the point where the chair is permanently were going to whisper poetry into your poor, frightened sticky, never seeming to dry from the last coat of paint. ears. Your house feels surreal, like it belongs to some artist You can feel the rough, uneven painting strokes lining who isn’t you. Walking to your desk, you go to open the them, the paint sticking to your thumb as you brush drawers to smoke some pot. It makes you feel like you’re in across it. The chairs give you the uneasy smell of strong the universe again, even though you have no power there, acrylic paint, making you feel as if you are being poisoned.

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But underneath the chairs’ long metal legs lies the neverending universe that holds them up.

You feel as if the universe is calling out your name. That it is pulling you into a different reality. Then you wake up from your almost dream-state. Sprawled on the floor, tears dripping down your face. Instead of lying there, you get up and throw jars filled with mold away, wondering what used to be in there before new life took over. Instead of lying there, you get up to put your books in alphabetical order instead of letting them rot away. Instead of letting yourself rot away, you dust off your windowsill and place your plants where sunlight is their blanket. You give them water and read them a story to put their fears to rest.

You read them, Guess How Much I Love You? It’s nice. It’s the perfect scene you wanted when you were a child. To read to others who were willing to listen. Maybe you were meant to be in this universe after all.

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Relativity (Oil Painting) Adrian Hernandez PARALLAX 2018  37

Isolate

Alex Clendenning Jiménez

He dips his fingers into Mother’s foundation as if in doing so, he’ll get the identity his parents wanted.

He knows there is no honor in being who he is as his father spits out marikoi in his native tongue.

Then tximeleta, laughing. Butterflies play: spread winged imprints on his neck, split the bones in his wrists, push him against the wall, cut his windpipe off until he begs.

He translates it to maricón. The label crinkles on his backpack, accidentally sewn in a factory down the block in ’73. A mistake, the choir preaches during Sunday mass, so he buries the kisses on cheeks from friends behind magazines and neighborhood soccer games. His father makes him board the 4 a.m. bus. Weighed down by a single duffel bag, half-empty, and one backpack smeared with nail polish. Lost, are ya, pretty boy?

He knows marikoi, like he knows aita and ama and zer moduz. Knows the crayons and writing templates from kindergarten, learning cursive in second grade. Third grade Mother enrolls him in an ikastola.

Don’t forget your heritage, she says over their Sunday dinner. She almost forgot hers.

Tripping over z’s and tx’s, he ends his words in -ción. The street signs welcome him to a community, not a country. His tongue becomes heavy with jarabe and joder, replaces marikoi for maricón for te invito, va?

He sends in his resume and rents an apartment on main street. He adapts.

He wants to paralyze the world. Maybe his hairspray will fry the stage lights. He likes the strain: bone popping, sweat pooling post-mortem shows on his thighs, breathing punctures his lungs. Twenty-five is rough. His co-workers stop mocking his accent. The media catches on. They love him. A spectacle from a small town up north.

He covers old photo albums and gets a degree. No need for twenty year old memories. Reforms the studio underneath his main-street, high-end apartment and learns not to hold back. Kicked out of bars, kicked into rainy cobblestone streets. Marica, they say, cutting off the -cón. He likes to burn. A paralyzed self in selfdenial. No longer needs te quiero’s scribbled on wrong addressed letters or wrapping the green, red, and white flag around himself for comfort.

No need for draping flags over balconies, or lighting the argizaiola. Bulky heritage celebrated ten years ago on November 2nd. Saints aren’t worthy. His teenage body used to hold itself on thin candles wrapped around wooden planks, dependent on it. Now, departed from the self, he burns under fluorescent studio lights, sticks sweat on broken mirrors and framed masters’ degrees. He dips his palms’ skin into his lauburu keychain, pinches old butterflies into commas. Red ink sinks into his forearms, finally something permanent from home. Fifteen year accent slips.

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Breaks the seams, ends his career because he can. Douses the backpack with rainbows and 2005, fucks too much because he’s no longer the spotlight. There’s no need to please. The media picks him apart, destroys him in oversaturated pictures and white lies. Mother sends him a letter with a cut out newspaper article on him, maite zaitut scribbled on the back with a little heart. There’s no love under neon lights and midnight subway rides, not here. His voicemail fills up for the first time in years.

Kisses in back alleys, rough bites press into taut skin and open butterflies he hasn’t touched in years. He thrusts himself into a violence they would expect at twenty, not now. Thirty-five ain’t pretty, ain’t nothing like the youth. Violence comes with teenage denial, kissing classmates in bathroom stalls, touching sweaty curls post soccer practice, comes with just finding out. There’s no closure for burnt out candles and failed pretty boys. Nothing but snapshots on creamy photo paper and blurred memories of butterflies on his wrists.

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Sugar Babe (Oil Painting) Adrian Hernandez 40  PARALLAX 2018

Tomás (Found Object Installation) Adrian Hernandez and Tiva Tao PARALLAX 2018 41

Spaced Out

Bailey Bujnosek

The planet first comes to Jack in a dream, the most beautiful figment of any imagination. Black sands meet a purple horizon. Dunes form and shape silhouettes without blocking the view. It’s calm. Quiet. Peaceful. The antithesis of his planet.

There is no noise. It is spectacle without sound. Jack is all the more enticed by this silence. How rare to find that on earth. Just now, as he wakes up, he listens to his neighbors fighting, and hears his refrigerator buzzing. There’s a great rustle as he picks up the phone next to his bed. Who to call? He decides on his boss, the head of waste management at NASA. “Mr. Davis!” Jack says.

“Who is this?”

“It’s Jack. I dreamed about a new planet, sir. I know its coordinates.”

“What?”

“A new planet, sir. ” “That’s great,” his boss says, and hangs up.

Jack texts him the coordinates anyway.

Jack’s actions would get most people fired, cited as a lunatic, and thrown into an asylum.

for dreaming of a new planet, only for it to turn out to be real. Psychic, the newspapers say. Crazy, is preferred by his coworkers. They don’t see what’s wrong with the planet they’re on. They don’t hear as much as he does, though, so their ideas of earth are incomplete.

Only Jack has the big picture. When Mr. Davis tells Jack that on a bar bet he had some of the guys look it up and the planet is real, Jack asks if he can go and gets laughed at. The whole time he’s listening to the ceaseless tapping of the guy’s foot, click click click on the fresh-waxed tile.

He decides he has to ask someone quieter. Someone more important.

He gets a foot in the door when they hold the press conference about the new planet, and one of the reporters asks who discovered it only for Jack to be shoved into the limelight. After he mutters about his dream and gets some laughs for being just a janitor, ha, he’s shaking hands with the higher-ups.

Jack scores a meeting. He talks with the bigwigs at NASA. “You won’t have to pay me,” he says.

“Money isn’t the issue,” they say. “It’s safety.”

“Safety?”

But Jack is elevated in importance.

“Don’t you agree, Jack, that trained astronauts would be a smarter choice?”

“No,” he says.

At least, that’s how he sees it. It’s doubtful many of the other janitors are jealous of him getting all this attention

“Besides,” they say, ignoring him, “going to space is a big decision, one to let sit for fifty years before you realize

42 PARALLAX 2018

you’re too old to accomplish your dreams and you give up on them.”

“No,” Jack says. He starts a petition. Man must fend for himself in this noisy world.

But not by himself. 305,702 people campaign for him to go. And it works. NASA is forced by the hand of the people. And the hand of the president, who really wants to send a psychic to space before Russia does.

The trip is scheduled for three years from the announcement that Jack’s joining the expedition. He needs time to train.

The dreams keep coming. Jack’s supply is infinite. The planet, silent and looming, starts to blend with the real world. When he’s shopping for groceries, when he’s watching television, there are purple hues above him, black sand below him. And the glorious white noise. The dreams speed up time, pushing it forward like the future’s the only thing that matters, the only thing.

Jack spends his time exercising. It’s easier to do in zero gravity.

Another astronaut sees this and walks over to him, towering. His name is Mark Hill and he’s never been a janitor.

He watches Jack while pushing a hand through his gravitydefying blond hair. Mark smirks.

“This isn’t a prison,” he says. “You don’t have to keep doing that.”

Jack nods, straining his neck. He dips his arms and lifts the weights he’s holding without effort.

A thought flashes through his head that he tries to purge as fast as he can, because he hates the sound of his own voice.

It’s sharp and nagging. But it keeps floating back to the top.

You’re not real. This isn’t real. No one’s taking you seriously.

He stops lifting weights and drops to the floor. Mark steps over him.

Jack feels nervous, but he’s lucky. That’s all the other janitors can tell him.

Mark draws the short straw and sleeps next to Jack. The astronauts know he snores horribly, denies it to the end.

He kept falling asleep during their safety procedures class, forcing them to wake him with a splash of water in the face.

“Lucky you, Jack. We’re jealous of you. You get to go to space. Don’t forget us little people, huh?”

“Petitioners shouldn’t be allowed to send people to space,” Mark says. It’s their seventh night.

He hears their encouragements, hears what they aren’t saying: No one can hear you scream in space, Jack. The odds of dying in a horrific, eyeball-popping incident are one in a hundred, Jack. If you encounter other intelligent life, they’ll cut you up and eat you, but what a champ you are, Jack! Do it for America, and science, and the children. We’ll watch on TV and see if you explode.

“Okay,” Jack says. Mark isn’t satisfied; this isn’t good enough.

The journey will take three weeks. The planet is remarkably close, remarkably small. If you didn’t know what you were looking for, you’d pass right by.

Mark mutters under his breath.

“There are gonna be cannibals,” Mark says. He looks at Jack to see how he’ll take it.

“I’m not a child,” Jack says. “And alien cannibals would just eat each other.”

“What?” Jack asks.

PARALLAX 2018 43

“You’re not an astronaut. You’re a psychic.”

Jack doesn’t respond. He pretends to be asleep, knows he isn’t because the ship is flooded with clunks and whirrs, little tics that never stop chipping away at him.

Three weeks has never felt so long, partly because of the anxiety that grips hold of Jack each time he looks out the window. The other astronauts sit around talking, pointless chatter about their lives back home. They could be absorbing every inch of the world outside their window, burning images rarely seen by man into their minds.

But talking is nice.

Jack sees the planet before anyone else. He is glued to the window, enraptured with the stars and how still they seem, when the planet catches in his peripheral vision. It’s an orb that practically blends in with the darkness, a pencil smudge on the universe’s inked canvas.

“Look,” Jack says. They look.

“Oh,” one of them says. “We’re here.” They drip the professionalism of a real astronaut. Always stay stoic. Remind yourself: it’s just space. It will always be there, unlike Earth.

The astronauts go to the front of the ship. All except Jack.

He closes his eyes, pressing his forehead against the cool window. He waits for touchdown.

There’s a thump and a whoosh.

Jack steps out of the ship, caught between intense fear and uncontrollable excitement. His heart races, bordering on collapse. He gets to go first because he discovered it. And because the others are using him as a test dummy, to see if he’ll blow up the minute he touches the ground.

He doesn’t.

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Jack’s boots touch the sand: magic, sparkling black sand that depresses slow under his government-issue boots.

The other astronauts stampede past him. Mark even pats him on the back.

He collapses in the sand, unsure if he’s passed out or is awake, seeing his eyelids or the ground. Someone picks him up while cursing. Jack ignores it. He has found warmth. His dream world is reality. It’s a wonderful life.

Soil samples are collected. Temperatures are gauged.

The new planet is catalogued, registered, made into a real place.

Jack listens to the other astronauts’ breathing through the radios in their helmets. It sounds like shuffling papers, like footsteps in the snow. Like Earth but not, because it’s piercing through the silence of the planet, not the white noise of electricity, activity, world hurtling towards the future. There is no future on this planet.

The days trickle by, one after the other. The quartet sit on the ground, their eyes affixed to the dim outline of home, where they really want to be. Jack decides it’s time to tell them.

“I belong here,” he says.

“Ha!” Mark says. “You belong in a dirty hallway with a mop, Jack.”

“Mark,” one of the others says, but it’s passive resistance.

Mark shrugs.

“I’m staying,” Jack says. “I won’t go with you. You can’t make me.”

He waits for the next insult, for the fistfight. No one says anything. For the first time the silence isn’t fulfilling, because it’s in anticipation of a disturbance.

Jack runs off behind a sand dune. Not too far from the group, but far enough away so that they’re out of sight.

He listens to their static. Turns off his radio.

They won’t encourage him in his plans to stay? Fine.

He doesn’t need them anyway. Their only concern is getting home. Why even go to space if that’s how you feel?

Night falls. Everyone but Jack dreams of America, and science, and the children. Jack dreams that he’s a kid on this planet. He runs into the skyline until he disappears.

Of course he’s only on the other side of the horizon, past his line of vision, but he can think what he likes.

It’s his dream.

Where the rocket was, there is now the deepest sinkhole on the planet, scorched sand creating a perfect circle. Jack tries to move his arms again, doesn’t have to. Mark’s arm clears his field of vision. He can clearly see the ceiling of the ship. They’re in their regular beds, strapped to the wall.

But Jack has extra restraints.

“We’re going home, Jack,” Mark says. His voice is soft and pleasant. But that’s rare. Most noises are annoying, like Jack’s scream as the planet disappears behind them.

One of two dreams he has that night. The second one is strange. He’s back in the ship and he’s leaving. He’s surrounded by sound, drowning in noise. The ship creaks, the other astronauts are talking, and his head hums. He’s thinking about the future, about what life will be like when he gets back. Jack wakes up from the nightmare and has trouble opening his eyes. There’s a loud noise. White noise.

The ground shakes beneath him.

No. It has to be a tremor. A joke. Maybe a sandstorm giving him the feeling of a takeoff.

His eyes open to grains. They’re stuck to the glass of his helmet, forming a cheap imitation of a beard. He tries to wipe it off but can’t move. He’s still asleep. He has to be.

Jack should be watching the ship fly back to the planet he hates, the one that never shuts up. No more mess, Jack says to himself. Mumbles. He’s trying to stay calm, trying to reassure himself. No more poverty. No more war. No more anything.

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Adapt [1/3] (Digital Art) Jane You Kyeong Koo 46  PARALLAX 2018

Adapt [2/3] (Digital Art) Jane You Kyeong Koo PARALLAX 2018  47

Reflection on a Paper Dimension 1.

When I found my purpose I was flushing pens out through the eye of the sink deep in the belly of an office depot bathroom Surrounded by a wrapping paper digestive system.

When I found my conscience I was buried beneath the music of lightning, Munching on the continuous claps of manmade thunder and watched the rain pour.

2.

When I cut the strings for the first time I was laid out on an ice cube with white gold hair floating round in the pool of soap drippings I’d lathered When I pulled the springs from my mattress I twisted them around my neck and fixed my spine, they twisted into a knot in the atlas below my skull leaving my ribs in sharp and biting disarray.

3.

When I looked up in summer and saw the stars blink out I held my head and howled White and yellow daisies shot across the sky in spectral fluorescence.

When I was plucked from the cradle I was burned the blister on the edge of my foot reminding me of when my hands didn’t move like an unsure clock-face when I was urban and not a naked yellow support beam

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Delany Burk

4.

When I lay face down in the spiderweb I knew under the bone there was simple shattered glass as if bone were used to mask the slicing edge of always waiting for something distant.

When I woke to the fire alarm in my skull I knew this was not the first time I’d stood outside listening to the rain, or spent hours living in memories.

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Adapt [3/3] (Digital Art) Jane You Kyeong Koo 50  PARALLAX 2018

Student (Acrylic Painting) Jeremy Dezhen Xu PARALLAX 2018  51

Child-Lock Hunger in Laxative Bottles I draw smoke from stolen cigarettes Hunger tugs me backwards by the hair Until my neck angles ninety degrees Ladder bones clinking like porcelain coffee cups I cake my lungs in soot As polluted breaths dripping sand inhale Ripping my teeth with friction The air hiccups into my lungs as Urges for consumption Stop hitting like fireplace bellows Replaced by knotted, artery-clogged euphoria.

I can run on fumes longer than you think Exhaust pumping into my lungs until they cramp Pushed to the seams, the stitches stretch tight My chest expands as the rest of my body deflates.

I’m finally doing something right I crave the smog Not for the high of the heat But for the stocky soup feeling hunger holds.

I’ve never done hard drugs but The enticement is similar and lists the benefits My insides wither and outsides crumple.

The side effects are simple: Brittle nails crack in the beds Skin flakes from lips A crown of curls covers the pillowcase It is an abuse of control Manifesting in a scarcity of swallows.

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Alex Bishop

The Rocks (Acrylic Painting) Jeremy Dezhen Xu PARALLAX 2018  53

Parable of the Universe’s Condition in Tongues consciousness slips into orange juice glasses dying without human consent cymbals clash, their silent vibrations disintegrate atropos’ last string.

I met him under humming static. we left the state on overused subway tickets, fingers on broken frescos, flash photography in a millionaire’s mucha collection, smashed windows from a baseball bat, gold spilling into mouths; he teaches me how to scream. he thinks he came to me in a dream. in his tongue-tied silence, I think he wants to believe in us, still young, still good so he pours plasma into shot glasses, gradient reflects the crinkling plastic light, calls it Entities on the Rocks. melting ice caps, he says our destruction helps. silver rings fit for two, we drink until the cracks on our lips reflect fissures of oil rigs & fracking, he says I don’t understand, kiss me, baby, destruction is a made up hoax. the temperatures are off & he won’t believe me. we spent too much money on overthinking, willing our split, broken tongues to touch the cracks in our lungs, warming strangers’ homes, freeze the empty & wrap it with the splintered remains of mucha’s byzantine head, blue bow earrings, 54 PARALLAX 2018

Alex Clendenning Jiménez

orange hair cushions, use the walnut frame we tore apart with our nails as kindling. the scorched ground sings I told you so. he thinks that I, with my dried-out tongue, sipping on the last of his Entities—the Last Space, he says— clipped our wings too fast, held the empty too close, & digs glass into my fleshy remains. he was too late. he, not content, buried me, empty, under sacrificial lambs, waited forty days for my rebirth and kissed me as flies buzzed on chapel ceilings, our flesh rotted. where did he hide it. I am still looking.

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Booklet 1 (Digital Art) Johnny Huizhong Fu 56  PARALLAX 2018

Traumatized Children (Digital Art) Kayrie Brewer PARALLAX 2018  57

Childhood Adventures: The Conquest and Razing of Love Cheon Alan Lee I’m not entirely sure where I should start this story.

Context is important though, so I’ll start at the beginning.

Nothing more than that. At least that’s what I thought before seventh grade rolled around.

Back in fifth grade, I started going to a fancy boarding school. I stuck out like a sore thumb, since I was one of the only Asian guys in my grade. It was the start of the “Oh, where are you from?” storm that I’ve kinda gotten used to now, but back then that shit made me feel like a celebrity.

Like, there were oceans of white kids who had never seen a skin tone other than pale, constantly asking me how people in my home country lived and following me around.

It was pretty funny for the first couple of weeks, but it got annoying real fast.

Everybody remembers their seventh grade year. It’s the time when hormones start to kick in and the person next to you starts to look a little cuter than before. Love is in the air, and even though I was a fat motherfucker, I still felt the way my skinny friends felt: some of the girls in our classes were kinda cute. Of course, since we were seventh graders, that was all we did. Nothing more than that, honestly.

Anyways, I lost all my old friends when I moved to the States, so I needed some new people to hang out with. I’m not going to give any names, since I don’t want any of you tricky bastards looking people up online, so I’m just going to say this girl’s name was Samantha.

Samantha was pretty cool to me in fifth grade. Everybody liked video games back then, but the specific stuff I was into was only “appreciated” by a few people. Samantha just so happened to be one of them. Granted, we were fifth graders, so it’s not like our conversations were about how the “themes and messages demonstrated within the medium were exemplary” but more along the lines of, “I really love this character! He’s so cool!” We became best friends almost immediately.

Naturally, as any friends do, we wanted to stick together, get the same classes, that sort of thing. Some people poked fun at it, saying I was into Samatha, but honestly, I wasn’t even thinking about it. I had a whole gang of cool people, and Samantha just so happened to be a good friend.

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Then eighth grade comes around, and let me tell you, eighth grade is an entirely different beast. For starters, most of us actually have the balls to get girls’ attention now. There were already couples forming and the guys in our group got a little bit jealous. I mean, who wouldn’t?

There was a guy who suggested the most ridiculous thing I had ever heard of: how about if we just ask out the girls in our group? He said it’d be easy since we were already best friends and we had nothing to lose (which, by the way: duuuuude, there’s a lot we can lose from this). Of course, us being daring lads, we set out to devise a plan so that we could do it all at the same time and get dumped at the same time. Unfortunately, we had a slight drawback: someone leaked this info to the girls.

It was me. I tended to do a lot of dumb things in my childhood, but trust me, this isn’t the last dumb thing you’ll hear in this story. Looking back at it, I think I leaked it because I was absolutely horrible at keeping secrets and wanted to gossip like there was no tomorrow, but I also think it might have been because I didn’t believe any of us had a chance. But while my friends just gave up having anything to do with asking people out, a

little voice in my head asked, “Hey, how about you ask out Samantha?”

So, just to get it over with, I asked her out in the middle of the hallway between classes.

It was on a Friday, right after history class. We were all transitioning to our next class, which meant that there were a lot of kids clogging up the hallways, trying to push by and get to their classes. Right as soon as we exited the door, I tapped Samantha on the shoulder and asked if I could talk to her. Granted, there’s at least sixty kids walking and talking right past us, so when I actually gave the confession, she couldn’t hear the first time around. Once she did understand what I said, she gave me a neutral look, then walked away.

So, uh…anyway…after about a week, she said yes.

It was…how do I put it?

FUCKING ECSTATIC AS SHIT BRO HOLY FUCK I LANDED MYSELF A GIRL WHAT IN THE LIVING FUCK DID I JUST ACCOMPLISH I THOUGHT THIS SHIT ONLY HAPPENED IN PORN LIKE WHAT EVEN JUST HAPPESorry about that.

But I promise you, the people around me were absolutely thrilled, as was I. In a matter of days, I had moved up the social hierarchy. One day, I was just some nameless Asian kid who talked way too much about video games, and the next I was some kind of social prodigy. I gained all these friends who I never imagined would even give a moment out of their schedules to talk to me, and since this middle school’s social ladder resembled that in High School Musical, that meant I was in contact with the jocks and the popular girls.

We dated for about four months. It was arguably one of the highlights of my life. I bet if my life got turned into a three minute montage, at least two minutes would be dedicated to this event. Because things don’t get any better than this.

Now, since we were only in middle school, it’s not like we jumped straight into the birds and the bees. I know some dumbass kids did the deed back then, but this girl was like Catholic schoolgirl level of pure. All we did was hold hands and all the cute shit. Like, I remember in history class we’d sit next to each other and I’d stroke her hair while the rest of the class was watching a history movie. I couldn’t take her on too many dates, since I was a boarding student and she was a day student, but the few times I took her out I genuinely attempted to make them as enjoyable as possible.

We were the cute awkward couple, okay? One really fat kid and a hot girl clumsily trying to figure out what love meant.

Okay, I need to finish the story before I go back to my bed sobbing. Remember how I said that I sometimes did dumb shit for absolutely no reason? Well, here it comes.

I dumped her.

The thing is, being on the top of the social hierarchy brings with it a certain high. You get so overwhelmed with the constant attention and the pressure from others that your actions become fueled by emotion, not logic or any pre-existing knowledge. It’s the same factor that pushes people to do stupid things (like saying dumb shit around the people you like) in the heat of the moment, and I guess it’s what moved me to do what I did.

Of course, that was only half of the picture. The other half was that I personally felt, for a lack of better words, bored.

I felt as though the anticipation, the adrenaline rush of being in the early stages of a relationship was much more desirable than staying in a long term one. There was also the fact that my original group of friends no longer talked to me on a daily basis, and as they were my only “true” PARALLAX 2018 59

friends at this school, I wanted them back and foolishly believed that breaking up with Samantha would help with this.

So, just like how I suddenly asked her out, I suddenly broke up with her. During a basketball game, I told her that I wanted to break up. She was understandably confused at such a sudden demand, yet young Einstein over here thought that was all I needed to do to finish a relationship.

I just left on the spot. Not much else happened other than that. There’s no punchline, no grand conclusion. Most people stopped talking to me afterwards, and I never got my friends back. All the rewards I reaped ended up being for nothing, as I lost my position on the hierarchy. I graduated a year afterwards, an entire year flying past me, a blur.

All I remember was that I never talked to anybody during that year.

That’s really it. That was my grand, illustrious adventure into the land of love, a place I don’t reckon I’ll re-visit soon. Do I have any regrets?

Of course not. No sir.

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Wonderland (Mixed Media) Lily Jiwon Nam PARALLAX 2018  61

One Way Ticket (Drypoint) Lynn Yixin Ling 62  PARALLAX 2018

Separation of Time (Mixed Media) Adrian Ocone PARALLAX 2018  63

Wicked Womanhood

Emily Clarke

Male attention in biblical translation can be a form of grievance Eve was made from the flesh of a man, she was made to be only a companion until she indulged The world is confused by the globe of a woman’s stomach and rusty blood on a toilet seat I am starting to understand anger, guilt, and bargaining The only way to absorb my own helplessness is to be promiscuous Unwelcomed power lives in the hem of a pencil skirt or the snapped-strap slap of a lace bra Authority is birthed from the elastic band of a sheer, black thong Femininity comes with a dress code Soft skin is for hiding under cotton not plopping into drooling infant mouths, not suckling Men don’t want to see that shit… unless it’s in a magazine or a porn video or their hands 64 PARALLAX 2018

But women’s hearts are full moons, golden and craterous The rebellion is in our veins Our uteruses are bibles and Eve knew what she was doing

PARALLAX 2018  65

Border (Lithograph) Adrian Ocone 66  PARALLAX 2018

Why Do Dentists Have High Suicide Rates (Ballpoint Pen and Pastel) Adrian Ocone PARALLAX 2018  67

Biography of the Darkness that Lurks Behind Desire 1.

I have become anesthesia, gone into hibernation from the exhaustion of nothing. It’s infuriating, the burnout. I cannot find the rage within me. It lies under wave after wave of sluggish, warm honey.

2.

The reason you and I cannot meditate is simple: we are afraid of nothing. We are not afraid of the dark or what lies in it. We are afraid of what breathing horrors our minds will conjure up just as we are about to close our eyes. Voices tracing blades around earlobes, hearts coming up throats like vomit. To sit there, eyes closed, ducks on a black pond, waiting for nothing to explode into red, is a sure sign that we will wake up screaming.

3.

You believe in the nothing that comes after passion, after the labored breaths have faded and each human coils into blackness, just for a moment. It holds, like the elastic waistband of cheap panties pulled taut, until someone finally says “I love you” and the feeling fades. Instead of snapping, it collapses, sizzles into nothing.

4.

I know nothing. An airhead, I sit on clouds and bubble under foggy butter. You fill my cavities with things I love but do not care to understand: sweet nothings, intelligent phrases, ideas of perfection. I burn through them like marshmallow fluff, leaving dried puddles and crevices that sink into my split palm.

5.

Blind, deaf, and dumb; taste nothing, feel nothing, think nothing. Still my body moves and refuses to die, even as 68 PARALLAX 2018

Kalista Puhnaty

a lump that only finds existence in writhing with cubes.

Routine. Everyone works the same, everyone thinks the same. I’m better than the rest because I am made of clockwork. I know what they like. It surprises them, and they’re too busy with that to realize that I know how to please everyone but myself. I am blank parchment. I absorb ink and form words that have no meaning to me. The words are good to you: heat, love, beauty. I wouldn’t call myself fake because my face is an unpainted mask. I’m a shapeshifter, a please-all machine; meant to leave you both satisfied and wanting.

6.

I’m that leather jacket love. I wear lace underneath. Your perfect tongue could wrap around a lollipop and melt it.

I love your consonants at night. Solitude is nothing. The shower floor is my sanctuary. I am no stranger to locked doors. You, darling, are everything: you’ve made it past my stainless steel exterior to blink at my melted caramel center.

I may be abrasive, but I fall into you. We mix together like polymer clay. I am gentle gold with you. Alone, I am cold, hard iron. I’m not sure which version of me is worse.

PARALLAX 2018 69

Hidden (Pen and Ink) Olga Shalimova 70  PARALLAX 2018

Untitled (Digital Art) Patrick Zhongwen Li PARALLAX 2018  71

Dimensional Time (Novel Excerpt) Serena Woosley Vitale Edith talked often about thought and feeling, aspects common to the human experience. She pressed her thumb against the groove of her worry stone (that smooth, calming surface fitted especially to her little finger) when she pondered, and paused this when she expressed—as they forcefully passed through her—transmissions from some raised entity, or perhaps from another dimension.

This was most often in the library, at the table by the window, her words streams of straight thought falling from her as light does—uncontrollable, clear, so bright as to need further translation and often hours to decipher from such a beam, the immediate and immaculate implications on what surrounds.

Often, during a passage of thought, she would abruptly halt as if the connection had been severed, and then this would become an opportunity to obtain a small sandwich, or a package of nuts, or a stick of beef jerky. In this way she was not graceful; it was peculiar, it was beyond the scope of natural comprehension or expectation. And she was not enigmatic. Or at least, that word could not possibly be sufficient or wholly correct. She was something when she was at that window, in light and the light simultaneously, but at other times of day she passed by, very silent, very plain, solemn and faraway. One could always suspect she was far away, and most would presume not in an admirable way. The topic could, of course, be debated, had she ever acquired a sort of fame which would not have befitted her anyway.

To have taken Edith in your arms would have been a strange, impossible thing. She resembled a marble: too slight to be long held; glossy in an unimportant, almost 72 PARALLAX 2018

imperceptible way; and hard, all the way to the center; and cold unless caressed considerably; and colored not in one particular way, but as a blend. She was frightfully spectacular once examined, as long as the examination was whole and probing. To begin to understand her would take force and measure, patience and practice, and an absence of pragmatism. She was science and beyond science, as were her assertions. And indeed that was her area of expertise, of the scientific nature, yet still she studied everything else, and was insatiable in that way. Often she sat in a blue felt chair in the library, at the end of the stack, and fed herself, as she said. The only thing she was not particularly interested in was history, and especially United States history.

It was a cycle, she said: once read, forever understood.

Edith It was difficult for me to banish my inclinations. I had an immoral seed growing inside of me. I felt it, but I could not push it away. It was wrapped round some vital organs.

Do you want me to describe it to you?

Well, I can’t. You oppress me. It’s a wonder we’re speaking now, and you think it is an outpour, a deluded self-expression, oh so grand! Just because I don’t look at you. I cannot look at you. Your existence falters me. So, I’ll tell you. It isn’t different. This is your story.

I would see men—I wanted them near me. Old men, even the oldest of men. Perhaps only a certain breed, yes. Refined men. Or safe-seeming men. So safe I thought they wouldn’t look at me, but I wanted them to. I even maybe made it up in my mind that they were—looking—that they treated me a certain way. To this day I can never tell what it really was.

Untitled (Digital Art) Quinn Jensen PARALLAX 2018  73

A la Vuelta de la Esquina (Francisco Franco Bombed and Starved Madrid for Three Years) Alex Clendenning Jiménez

The body lulls the ears to sleep, compact and balanced, ringing hearing aids numb the body a delicate pinch of the needle hums.

A syringe of sleep invades the apartment: wilting daisies, its numbed memories spill into her eighty year old mind and open up reality, reminding her of air drops at nine years old.

Weeds sink into gravestones, trying to puncture life into string tied metal circles, push and pull under crypts unable to pry the heart into rebirth.

She mentions hunger: father killing passing street pigeons, hoarding hardened bread handed to younger sisters after midnight, hands trembling, waiting for heavy knocks and star-covered green uniforms.

Gunshots splintered the doors in her mother’s town, hissing with power their thoughts crawled into young boys’ minds, metal caskets flushed boys’ blood out, shells tossed into rusted pans.

Concentrating on control and compliance bullets kiss teenagers’ foreheads in bandanas of red and black, give them names to follow as seven cartridges stick to suffocating slacks, who, pinned to goosebumps, prick innocent skin from a mass grave dump.

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She prefers collapsed knees, twisting ankles in the park, thinks surgery would cut too much flesh and slice slithering leftovers until she can’t move, has refused change for thirty years.

Curved knots on knuckles force veins forward, arthritis thrusts pain into synapses as downpours lull the system, keep her past organized, not her sisters’ whimpers or empty bellies begging, no waiting for green coats, just hers.

PARALLAX 2018 75

Me (Drypoint) Rita Yirui Wang 76  PARALLAX 2018

Leaked (Mixed Media) Rita Yirui Wang PARALLAX 2018  77

Yellow Teeth

Delany Burk [WINNER OF 2018 PARALLAX AWARD] Selected by Victoria Chang

When I was fourteen I married a horse. Straight from her mouth lolled tales of open palms and emptychested sorrows, of black beauty and the mountain lion, and of lost loves and coyotes at dawn. Golden lies which dripped from her muzzle.

Once, she told me men had pulled the hair back from her collarbone and broke her pelvis in two. A bear trap had snapped around her ankle, but she walked without a limp that day. She’d wander over boulders in early morning sunlight, majestic unless she was seen.

She fed me blackened hay. I watched her spoon it onto my plate, and said nothing, for fear of insulting her cooking.

In a moment of anger she said, “Life is what you make it. So I’ll build us one. And you’ll follow, eyes spooned out, led on my leash. Or else, I’ll take your aces and spread them across the world map for everyone in sky and earth to see.” So I did, strung along on promises of greatness and threats or ruin, fearful of her intelligent tongue.

I never wanted her to make me say “You’ve turned me gold.” When I was with her, when her hoof pressed firmly down upon my skull, I was not gold, but bronze in silver plating.

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Pacific (Digital Art) SooYeon Kim PARALLAX 2018  79

Only Child

Kalista Puhnaty

A girl walks alone in moonlight, looking over her shoulder. Bare footed.

She wonders how asphalt would feel under her quaking feet if sunlight were to bring the brandings she now misses. The fog of her breath floats up to form a shattered ceramic vase, painted by harsh hands. Her arms and feet are bare, pale as the frost forming on the grass. She sniffles, remembers, walking to nowhere.

She tugs at empty belt loops. She used to be made of granite. Mother put her in the oven, expected bread. Now she just melts, always risks overheating. She turns on a flashlight.

Mother echoes in her ears. Words were her weapon of choice but she is now realizing where she got her skill as her lungs eat themselves alive in a flurry of emotions. The words have severed a few essential threads now, snapping the remaining fibers that clung to each other in a desperate attempt to hold her weight. She will not be coming back.

Chocolate with sprinkles reminds her of when she didn’t know anything. She eats to forget. She’s used it so often, she’s built up a tolerance. Childhood howling, immortalized in yellow streetlamps, soft 80 PARALLAX 2018

footfalls, and shaky breaths. She remembers ice chokers with charcoal pendants and pops another chocolate in her mouth.

Mother knew her daughter’s poisons, refused to buy antidotes, because Mother struggled to believe that her daughter struggled. She cannot understand why her voice is caged, why insomnia goes unheard. She shows Mother the dice that rolled a twenty for illness, but Mother does not believe her senses.

Now she walks to nowhere and seeks salvation from no god but herself. Light dances through her hair. She has her iron shoes, iron bread, and iron staves. It’s never too cold for an iced drink to calm her throat.

The word love should be sacred, but she’s used it to lie too many times for it to recover meaning. She still loves, but ever since Mother dragged it out of her throat, she won’t be able to speak the word for a long time. She must atone for her wickedness first, wickedness that was not her fault, but wickedness she must flush out of her system, molasses in her veins.

PARALLAX 2018 81

Paraxod (Acrylic Painting) SooYeon Kim 82  PARALLAX 2018

Purity (Oil Painting) Yuga Yujia Li PARALLAX 2018  83

Moisturizing Nigel Crumpet

Jack O’Connor

[NON-MAJOR CONTEST WINNER]

INT. MASTER STUDY - DAY The master study of the estate is tidy and spotless. Tomes are filed neatly along the bookshelves that make up the entire back wall, and implanted in the middle is a single fish tank. Along the walls are relics of the sea: a harpoon, a ship's wheel and a diving suit mounted on a stand in the corner of the room. In front of the bearskin rug sprawled across the floor, a massive desk and two armchairs stand. Sitting at the desk is a man, NIGEL CRUMPET (50s), wearing a finely tailored dark suit with a single monocle pressed up into his eye, examining documents. He stops his work to glare at a small bell on his desk. He impatiently rings it.

NIGEL CRUMPET Basil! I will not ring this bell again!

Nigel notices the sound of slow footsteps from outside his study door, and very slowly, the doorknob turns.

NIGEL CRUMPET While I'm young, Basil!

The door creeps open and a husk of a man walks into the room with shaking legs.

The ancient BASIL (90s), stands with a hunched back. His short, white hair is neatly combed. His tuxedo almost seems to drag down on him like anchors.

NIGEL CRUMPET Where have you been? I've been waiting for minutes.

Basil slowly makes his way across the room.

BASIL My legs locked up on the stairs again, sir.

Nigel turns his attention back to his documents.

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NIGEL CRUMPET You see? This is exactly why you're out of here by the end of the week. I swear, I'm losing my youth just looking at you.

Basil adjusts the volume of his hearing aid.

BASIL Excellent choice, sir.

Nigel pushes himself away from his desk and stands, after tucking the monocle into his pocket.

NIGEL CRUMPET But enough pleasantries. I want you to compose a letter for me.

Basil retrieves a sheet of paper and a pen from the edge of the tabletop. He squints at the paper. Nigel begins to pace around his desk.

NIGEL CRUMPET Address it to a Mr. Banner. Tell him, "I have the latest shipment. It was picked up by yours truly in the Great Barrier Reef just a few weeks ago. It's a rare one, and I expect double the price. Sincerely, Nigel Crumpet."

Basil's shaking hand scribbles on the page.

BASIL Is that all, sir?

NIGEL CRUMPET Yes, yes, that's all. Go on, send it. An illiterate courier on a legless horse could deliver that letter faster than you can.

Nigel checks his pocket watch.

NIGEL CRUMPET It's almost the top of the hour, Basil...

PARALLAX 2018  85

BASIL I will retrieve the bottle, sir. Oh, and I have a message for you. It appears your applicant, Mr. Bill Crane, will be arriving for his interview in two hours.

NIGEL CRUMPET Fantastic. Now there can finally be some productivity in this house!

BASIL Excellent choice, sir.

Basil shuffles out of the room. He hits the doorframe with his shoulder on the way out. Nigel breathes a sigh of relief. He pops his monocle into his eye as he makes his way over the polished fish tank in the middle of the bookcase. He taps the glass and stares into the beady eyes hidden in the dark grotto.

NIGEL CRUMPET You and I are going places.

Nigel laughs.

CUT TO BLACK. INT. PARLOR - LATER In the center of the parlor, Basil is struggling with polishing a pair of dress shoes. His hands can barely grip the rag properly and all it seems to be doing is further spreading the trace amount of dust that was on the shoes to begin with.

BASIL

(muttering) I did not survive the War for this...

Basil tosses the shoes away in anger. him. He stands up and straightens his but trips over a diver's suit mounted in the hallway. Basil attempts to get be mistaken for artillery firing.

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They suit on a back

only travel about a foot away from jacket. He begins to leave the room stand near the door. Basil collapses up. The sound of his old bones could

Sir? Help?

BASIL

INT. MASTER STUDY - LATER Nigel reenters the study with a handful of papers and sets them down on the desk. He's about to take a seat when he notices the sound of running water.

He stands upright and his eyes trace the room. Something isn't right... He cautiously walks around the desk and his shoes crunch on broken glass. He looks at the bookcase and stares in horror at the shattered fish tank.

Impossible!

NIGEL CRUMPET

Nigel's monocle pops out of his eye.

CUT TO: INT. CAR - LATER The seats are faded, the steering wheel is clunky and shaking, and one of the windows seems to have been duct taped in the corner. The driver, BILL CRANE (late 20s) adjusts the rear view mirror as he drives. Through the mirror, we see his tired eyes, dark hair and his stubble that looks like it needs a little work. He looks out the windshield at all the manors and estates spread out down the road, each one almost getting bigger the further he drives. Finally, the road ends at a massive, gilded gate, with the initials, "NC" carved on the plate. The driver stops the car. He attempts to roll his window down at the gate's intercom, but the window refuses. He inches the car forward and pops open the door. He buzzes the intercom with his thumb.

BASIL (through the intercom) Yes? Hello? Is this thing on?

The driver is about to talk, but the massive size of the manor and land takes his breath away.

BASIL (through the intercom) Mr. Crane? Is that you?

PARALLAX 2018  87

CRANE Uh... Yes... Yes it's on. It's Bill Crane. You were expecting me... right?

BASIL (through the intercom) Indubitably! I'll buzz you through.

Crane sits in silence as nothing happens.

BASIL

(to himself) Buzz.... which one's the... gate.... Ah! The gate slides open. Crane slowly drives through the winding path up to the manor-- the largest one in the neighborhood.

INT. PARLOR - MOMENTS LATER Basil opens the door and attempts to stand as upright possible. He squints at the man in the doorway.

BASIL Mr. Crane. So wonderful for you to come.

Crane stands uneven on his two feet and is still wide-eyed at the sight of the house. He wears a slightly wrinkled dress shirt and dark pants.

CRANE Thanks for the invitation.

Basil waves him in.

BASIL I'll tell Mr. Crumpet you have arrived.

Crane darts in front of Basil.

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CRANE What? Now? No. I mean.... How about you show me the house a bit?

Just to get a feel for the place.

As you wish.

BASIL

INT. HALLWAY - LATER Basil leads Crane through a hallway decorated in picture frames and mounted treasures of the sea. Fishnets, diving gear, harpoons, ships’ wheels, mounted sea creatures. There's barely any wall.

BASIL And here we have The Great Hall.

CRANE So, I take it that Mr. Crumpet... likes the ocean?

Crane walks in the center of the hall with his hands tightly behind his back, like the walls are made of glass. Basil quietly laughs.

BASIL Loves. He loves the ocean, Mr. Crane. One of the most important duties as caretaker of this house is to "remind" Mr. Crumpet of the joys of the ocean. At the top of every hour, I am to spray him with only the finest ocean water gathered from the shores of India as Ursula Major is at large.

Crane stops walking.

BASIL Only then, in that exact spot of the world, at that exact time do the ions settle... It is the closest the elements of this universe will ever come to... Perfection... Mr. Crumpet only expects the best. Bottles are shipped here at great expense.

Ummm. Okay...

CRANE

Basil stands in front of a large wooden door.

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BASIL I believe that you will do just fine in this interview, Mr. Crane.

You are definitely qualified for this.

CRANE Thank you. I hope this works.

He pulls out a series of note cards. Basil turns his attention to the master study, and to his surprise, the door is slightly ajar. Through the crack we can barely make out the destruction of the room. The bookshelves are broken and tomes are spilled across the floor. The desk's papers are scattered.

BASIL (from behind the door) Sir? Mr. Crane is here for his interview.

A quiet gargle answers and the door slams shut the rest of the way.

Sir?

BASIL

Basil opens the door and leads Crane into-INT. MASTER STUDY - CONTINUOUS Crane is shocked at the sight of the room. Basil doesn't seem to notice.

BASIL There you are, sir.

Basil extends his hand to the figure sitting at the desk. Crane stares for a second but quickly drops his gaze to the floor. Every once in a while he glances at the destruction around him.

BASIL Mr. Crumpet, this is Mr. Crane, the applicant. I'll let you two get to business.

Basil shuffles out of the room. Crane is gripping the index cards so tightly we can hear them creasing. The figure at the desk mumbles.

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CRANE(con’t) Ah, yes, of course.

Crane sits down in the armchair across from the figure. His voice catches as his chair lets out a loud creak, but he begins to read off his cards.

CRANE(con’t)

(petrified) My name is Bill Crane, and it would be a fantastic honor to work for you, Mr. Crumpet. I was once the manager of the hotel, The Kilbey. Sadly the business went under -- not my fault -- Despite whatever you may hear!

Crane changes the subject.

CRANE(con’t)

(meekly) Of course, that is not the topic at hand here...

The figure across the desk gargles and slurps. Crane lifts his eyes off the cards for a second to glance at his potential employer. We get a glance at the head of a large orange octopus, crudely shoved into the suit that Nigel wore previously. The octopus's bulgy eyes meet Crane's and out of panic, with a few tentacles sticking out of the sleeve, grabs a pen and violently flings it across the desk, every so often touching the paper. Crane immediately looks back down to his script.

CRANE I... Uh... I'm--I'm a great multi-tasker, something I'm sure that you would understand-Crane catches what he just said. The Octopus glares and stares him down. Panic quickly crosses the cephalopod's face, he thinks his cover has been blown when-CRANE Not that there's anything wrong with that, especially in today's society, Mr. Crumpet--sir! I mean, it was a compliment.

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Crane begins to punch his leg under the desk and curses himself under his breath.

The Octopus is taken aback. He looks at his suit and tentacles, surprised he hasn't been figured out. Crane turns back to his cards after a deep breath.

CRANE What I meant to say was that I'm a hard worker, I'm diligent, and I don't give up. It's traits like these that are the reason I am sitting before you today.

The Octopus nods and continues to absently draw all along the desk. Crane pretends to not notice this bizarre mannerism. But in the process, his wandering eyes trace the room once more. Crane focuses on the shattered fish tank and the glass along the floor, and finally, the closet door. Crane slightly leans in and can barely make out the shape of a pair of legs in the closet, and maybe... an arm? The octopus begins to slightly shake in his seat, and his suit begins to fall. His scribbling intensifies and in the heat of the moment, the octopus inks the paper. He quickly shrugs and taps the pen on the desk, acting like it exploded. But Crane continues to stare down the closet, the fish tank, and finally to the octopus at the desk. He's about to speak when a tray of food is placed on the desk before him, shaking him out of his thoughts.

BASIL One herring, and a glass of wine, sir. As requested.

The Octopus stares in excitement at the food. Basil walks around the desk with a squirt bottle in hand.

BASIL Sir, it is five o'clock.

The Octopus uses one of his free tentacles and devours the herring whole, while Basil squirts his head with the bottle. Crane stares. His eye twitches.

BASIL That's quite an appetite.

The Octopus shifts and spews the fish bones onto Basil's shoes.

Excellent, sir.

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BASIL

He takes the tray and leaves. The Octopus leans back in his seat and fixes his suit. He grabs the wine glass and chugs it. He sets it down and gestures for Crane to continue. Crane shakes his head to snap himself back to reality. He points to a picture on the desk and smiles awkwardly. The framed photo shows Nigel Crumpet, in diving gear, holding the orange octopus by the head. The tentacles are wrapped around the railing of a boat in a desperate effort.

Family?

CRANE

The Octopus swats away the inked papers and leans forward in his seat. He crosses his tentacles and waits. Crane notices the silence and immediately holds up his index cards and continues to read...

CRANE A wise man once said....

FADE OUT. INT. HALLWAY - LATER Crane closes the door to the study and lets out a long breath. He leans against the door.

BASIL It sounds like it went very well.

Crane jumps back. Basil seemed to have appeared out of nowhere.

CRANE I'm already on edge! Don't do that!

BASIL I will call you again if Mr. Crumpet makes his decision. I trust you can see yourself out? (under his breath) Oh God, please hire him....

Crane stands alone in the hallway after Basil leaves him to go tend to "Nigel."

From behind the door, Crane can hear Basil.

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BASIL (through the door) Sir, you look cold tonight, allow me to fetch you a blanket from the closet.

The Octopus screeches. The sounds of clanging and shattering glass rings out.

INT. MASTER BEDROOM - MORNING Crane shuffles through the wardrobe in the middle of the bedroom. His hair is freshly cut, and he's wearing a finely tailored tuxedo. He pulls out two sets of suits.

CRANE What will it be today, Mr. Crumpet? Shall we go with the grey or the black?

The Octopus lies in a bed that looks massive around him. In one of his tentacles is a cup of tea, in the other, a newspaper. The bones of a fish dangle in one of his other tentacles. He points to the black suit and gargles a wet answer.

CRANE Excellent choice, sir.

The Octopus sits back in the bed and sips his tea. His eyes wander out the window, where far in the distance, he can see the ocean in the horizon. But he turns back to Crane and holds out his tentacles to be dressed. Crane delivers a short spray from the ocean bottle onto the Octopus's head.

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欲 (Etching) Yuga Yujia Li PARALLAX 2018 95

About the Departments CREATIVE WRITING

VISUAL ART

Idyllwild Arts Academy provides an ideal environment for high school students interested in developing as writers. Our Creative Writing major, combined with the college-preparatory academic program, prepares students for writing fields in college and beyond.

We study all literary genres and round out our students’ education with public readings, a student-run print and online literary magazine, and excursions to cultural and environmental experiences.

Visual Arts students at Idyllwild Arts come from all over the world, creating a rich cultural and aesthetic mix. Their backgrounds are an important part of the community of visual artists and the school as a whole. The training they get at Idyllwild Arts gives them a broad foundation in the formal and theoretical aspects of visual arts.

Idyllwild students take charge of their own education by participating in writing workshops and literature seminars, and shaping individual tutorial projects around personal goals. We place equal emphasis on writing and reading, studying writers from many eras, continents, and sensibilities. Students develop an expansive background in literature and the fine arts, varied historically, intellectually, geographically, and culturally.

Classes are small, usually fewer than ten students, with department enrollment no greater than twenty-two students. Creative writing teachers at IAA are a mixture of full and part-time faculty who are experts in their field. Distinguished and emerging visiting writers teach master classes and provide feedback to students.

The faculty also come from many different backgrounds, which means the students are exposed to a broad spectrum of disciplines, including: drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, ceramics, digital and darkroom photography, jewelry making, architecture, and all periods of art history.

All of the faculty are practicing artists who show their work regularly. This is an important part of the instructional environment, as it means they are engaged in the same or similar challenges that the students face every day in the studios.

Students participate in competitions appropriate to their level, and senior creative writing majors are accepted into a variety of well-respected writing colleges and universities in the United States and beyond.

There is an emphasis on sequential instruction through the grade levels, so that all students feel they are developing a solid visual language, while they are also encouraged to develop a strong individual voice, which reflects their life experiences. This balance of the formal, practical, theoretical and imaginative aspects of art making is central to the way we teach and learn, and means that graduating seniors are not only well trained artists but are also aware of their place in the world.

Please direct questions to Kim Henderson, Creative Writing Department Chair, at: khenderson@idyllwildarts.org.

Please direct questions to David Reid-Marr, Visual Arts Department Chair, at: davidr@idyllwildarts.org.

96  PARALLAX 2018