Catch Spring 2021

C A T C H

SPR 2021 Issue 2

SPRING 2021

VOL 53 - ISSUE 2

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR Hello there reader,

Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in his poem “Spring”; “Nothing is so beautiful as Spring – When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;”

We can’t wait for you to partake in our celebration of the new season, the remarkable things people are creating, and the place I love so dearly. Welcome to the second issue of the 53rd volume of Catch Magazine, it’s an old practice but here we see it arise anew. We are all so lucky to share it.

Catch would like to thank our advisor Cyn Fitch and the English faculty members. Thank you to Brent Pflederer and the Premiere Printing Group, Missy Kratz, and all of the people that helped along the way. Thank you for reading something that was made by people that care a whole lot. Catch is elated to keep publishing and remain a part of a community that loves art and words so passionately, we are honored.

Thank you, I love you so, Veronica Sefic Editor-in-Chief

EDITOR IN CHIEF Veronica Sefic

DESIGN

Phelix Venters-Sefic Shae Salts Frankie Williamson

S T A F F

COPY EDITOR

Frankie Williamson

PUBLIC RELATIONS Shae Salts

POETRY

Lily Lauver Matrice Young

DRAMA

Sebastiano Masi

ART

B.P. , Brianna Perry

ANALYTICAL NON-FICTION Kaitlyn Cashdollar

FICTION

Aditi Parikh Samuel Lisec

MUSIC

Lily Gates

JOURNALISM Sadie Cheney

CREATIVE NON-FICTION Carlos Claudio

2019

International Pacemaker Award Finalist Associated Collegiate Press - Minneapolis, MN

2016

International Pacemaker Award Finalist Associated Collegiate Press - Minneapolis, MN

2014

National Program Director’s Prize Association of Writers and Writing Programs - Fairfax, VA

2009

International Pacemaker Award Finalist Associated Collegiate Press - Minneapolis, MN

2008

International Pacemaker Award Associated Collegiate Press - Minneapolis, MN

2005

International Pacemaker Award Associated Collegiate Press - Minneapolis, MN

2004

International Pacemaker Award Finalist Associated Collegiate Press - Minneapolis, MN

2003

National Program Director’s Prize- Literary Magazine AWP Program Director’s Prize - Fairfax, VA

1985

National Program Director’s Prize- Literary Magazine AWP Program Director’s Prize - Fairfax, VA

1983

National Program Director’s Prize- Literary Magazine Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines- New York, NY

A W A R D S

ove you <3

CONTENTS

POETRY 013

An image of the willow tree behind my grade-school ca. 2005 - Sarah Lohmann

014

Christina - Christa Vander Wyst 015 Driving By - Ashley Pearson 016 Missing Subject of a Breakup Poem II - Bee Pea 017 Toll Roads - Samuel Lisec

019

Metamorphosis - Samuel Lisec 020 When a Woman Becomes a Boat - Jaime Lam 021 Tuesday, 3/26/2019, 9:51pm - Sarah Lohmann 022 Windshield - Samuel Lisec

DRAMA 025

Outside - Matrice Young

ANALYTICAL NONFICTION 073

“Leaving me unsure of my own eyes”: Scopophilia and Racial Entitlement in Valerie Martin’s “Property”- Chi Le

084

Advancement of Racial Equality in Titus Andronicus - Aditi Parikh 090 Systemic Oppression and the Construct of Individuality within Marginalized Groups - Shae Gabriel

FICTION 101

Connective tissue - Sarah Lohmann

123

Guest advocate - Lily Lauver 126 By the sea side - Erin Cosgrove

ART 139

Then, there, that porch - Ingrid Wasmer

141

Fern - Louise Rossiter 143 I Don’t want to Remember / Don’t be so Dramatic - Madelyn Turner 145 Adolescence - Madelyn Turner 147 Me and Mine - Ingrid Wasmer 149 Sucker Punch - Phelix Venters-Sefic 151 I am a Woman / She is a MONSTER - Madelyn Turner 153 Would you like some breakfast? - Louise Rossiter 155 Bad Habit - Madelyn Turner 157 Databending - to slip - Phelix Venters-Sefic

MUSIC 161

The BDR Project - Brandon Roberts

JOURNALISM 165

BIPOC student demands show history repeating itself - Sarah Eitel

171

Looking at the contrast in assault and legacy - Caroline Clink

174

Students revive KADSA to support disabled community - Carlos Flores-Gaytan

CREATIVE NONFICTION 181

Traces - Jaime Lam

183

Little Girl to Something More - Shae Gabriel 185 Nostalgic Winter - Jaime Lam 188 My Way Home - Sally Bessette 193 Say Somethin’, Do Somethin’ - Matrice Young 195 Lost & Found - Shae Gabriel 199 Anagnorisis - Matrice Young 200 One Last Goodbye - Sebastiano Masi

P O E T R Y

An image of the willow tree behind my grade-school ca. 2005 Sarah Lohmann

Tonight I spring into the grass and unto you, divine, my eyes will flit. The wind remarks the two of us come both alone; intending not accompaniment nor to stain the glowing silence here. And yet, together now, we lie. As broken rosebud, heavy lilac boughs atop descending, your uneven breathing floats too far beyond the curtain, green and fresh, or rather just a touch beyond my grasp: an inch.

013

Christina Christa Vander Wyst

The summer before kindergarten I spent every afternoon at the house across the street sucking on crayon popsicles. She went

by Stina, and I liked that if you pieced my name and hers together you’d get something like Christina.

Her basement housed the Barbies we played with, dressed up, sent on quests to the shower where Gartha held them hostage.

We ended the day with rainbow mouths and linked arms and a promise to do the same tomorrow came with nothing more than a parade of moving trucks and the silhouettes of a girl and her Barbie doll.

014

Driving By Ashley Pearson

from What the Living Do by Marie Howe The grass is overgrown, but in the dead of winter, its brown wisps only stick up from the ground. There is a stranger’s car parked in your driveway. I can see its rusted backside from a mile away.

I am no mechanic, but I think the back left tire is flat. Someone needs to check its pressure. The ice hugs the car’s exterior; I think it’s been sitting there for a few days or weeks now...

There are other things piled in your yard now too, you know: a month’s worth of garbage, a burn pile, a child’s playset, the remnants of ten trees, a faded snowman. I know you would hate it too.

And, every time I drive around the wretched block, no matter how dark it is or how fogged my windows are, like a car wreck, I cannot look away.

At some point, I realized I had to stop driving backwards into my blind spots, straight into what I can not see: the remnants of things so far away...

But, still, I stare at my reflection in the rearview mirror, blinking, looking left and right, and I think of you and how this is living, breathing, steering, and thinking in the driver’s seat.

From behind smudged windows, between the cracks of a bowing roof, or from the winter snow... Speaking of being alive and breathing in my passenger seat, do you think of me too in yours?

015

Missing Subject of a Breakup Poem II Bee Pea we are living in the age of empathy we are living in the age of mass terror are less afraid of vulnerability are less afraid of compulsivity poorly is my only form of organization only handsome in hierarchy it’s not rude if i have trust issues it’s not explanation if lust is misused there were frogs falling from the sky we envied them so easily sensate to Earth humbly fulfilling Leonardo’s dream now we are situated in hindsite, furious. how could you leave such a place? it didn’t work out, he was a chronologist i knew i was as vestigial as the goddess of eating dirt it didn’t work out i was an eschatologist i knew i lingered like the goddess of door hinges

016

Toll Roads Samuel Lisec

I follow semi trucks through one street towns— my headlights dashing on the broken yellow line.

We Have What You Forgot, a sign at the gas station reads.

Inside, a boy takes a clock off the wall.

Silos glint in the hills like miniature tin-castles in a feudal Wisconsin countryside. The wind flaps everything I got inside. Now Entering The Village of Superior, I finally see it— all water and the bridge something to speed over.

The orange diamonds tell me not to pick up hitchhikers, but I am not alone: a crowd

017

of turbines blink in the dark. Clouds and billboards run up the highway. Lavender grows wild in the shoulders.

018

Metamorphosis Samuel Lisec

One last walk for us, along where moths throng the street lamps.

I think they must go all night—a frenzy on every block. Some fly so close they cast shadows onto the street, like birds unseen.

How much of their lives do they spend hitting their wings against the wrong moon?

All night is a terribly long time to stay confused. Eventually, the sun rises, and they can forget all they have

done.

019

When a Woman Becomes a Boat Jaime Lam

I wish to meet the mother who inhaled oceans drifting through state lines as she cast away her lover’s afterthought use of her. Young body of soul, her daughter’s desperate grip in her palm, first son creating beneath her ribs.

Swollen with him, growing away from what a father was and shouldn’t be, she fell love splintered across her. To stay afloat, she stopped being to become a boat—carving out herself until the shell of living brought her children to air.

020

Tuesday, 3/26/2019, 9:51 pm Sarah Lohmann

for my mother, like everything else. every night, i muffle loud with louder so i can sleep. how deep my ears, i think they go, so far and wide with leather trunks and airplane tunnels. where will i go, they, these louder want to know, but i’m not interested in goodbyes just yet. i think there’s still so much time, and i can hear it; like wind across the field on your grandmother’s farm, where you picked berries in the summer with your sisters. the grass looked, then, like

forever. i wonder if you can hear

the waiting: summer and nighttime until we part.

021

Windshield Samuel Lisec

That is all the time we have: one earring’s worth in the felt dish, necklaces retired on the bureau—the quiet look a body makes in the mirror.

Under each waterless bridge, a wind, a carriage, what shields hide. After the mayoral race, a strip of blue signs with stars stuck in the ground

win the vacant lots.

022

D R A M A

OutSide Matrice Young

ACT I INT. HIGH-SCHOOL AUDITORIUM - EVENING The large auditorium of a school in a city that’s equivalent to CHICAGO. The seats are burgundy, the walls are cream colored, and it looks like a regular high school, honestly. However, this auditorium is a bit different, in the fact that the two entrance doors are on either side of the stage. This auditorium is one of the smaller ones in the school, less seats overall but still at a decent capacity. The room is full of Black people, varying shades of brown mixed into the crowd an assortment of colors. The smell is cocoa butter, hairspray, a deep fruity scent. The people in the auditorium are dressed in different styles of dresses, mostly fitted, and suits, colors from bright pinks to deep magnetic purples. Hair and makeup is done, there is loud laughter, talking, a mixture of both deep and feminine voices. People are lounging, sitting on the back of chairs or on the arms, leaning against walks, hands are moving and overt body language. Everyone is comfortable, everyone is happy.

Girls are playfully swatting at boys arms and yelling “Quit!!” in higher pitched tones, people are sipping bottles of water, and the crowd of teenagers and their families is fun.

A TALL WOMAN with curled black tresses in a fancy dress runs up the aisle and throws her arms around a young teenage girl, similar in looks, MO’NIQUE, squishing her against her chest. Mo’Nique hugs her mother tight, her coral nail polish glistening against the crystal patches of her mother’s dress, much too sparkly for an event like this.

TALL WOMAN Baby! You looked so beautiful up there! I’m so proud of you.

JAMES scoffs, fingers tugging a single one of his comb-coils, letting it go, and then pulling it again after it bounced back, the coils were diamond parted perfectly. His legs were spread out into a wide V, slouched against the cushions of the auditorium seat. It felt more uncomfortable than usual, and he fidgeted every now and then. His right leg, riddled with anxiety, couldn’t sit still. The leather shoes he wore

025

made a muffled squeak from it. His elbow sits on the armrest, his face tight with tension, eyes boring holes through the entry door. His other arm draped lazily over the back of the clumped seats. His bookbag was tossed off to the side of him. He couldn’t figure out how he truly felt.

Annoyed? Jealous? Hurt?

TJ, a scrawny late teen whose skin color is close to sandalwood; plops down into the seat next to James.

TJ Still waitin’ huh?

Today Tj’s dreadlocks are neatly braided back in tight cornrows, and he wears a violet suit, a lavender handkerchief in his breast pocket. His mother spared no expense.

James scoffs lightly. He tugs one of the strands of his hair and slides his fingernail through it. He’d spent the entire week working on the hairstyle. He huffs, twirling it back into place with his finger after he pulled it apart.

JAMES Yeah bro, she said she was gon’ be here. She just ain’t walked in tha do’ yet.

Tj is quiet, he glances toward the door, where their teacher MRS. WILLIAMS, stands at the stage podium with PRINCIPAL ABRAHAM, a balding lighter skinned man with gray hairs in his beard. They talk to excited parents, share the occasional laugh or two with the students.

They have no more awards to give out, the ceremony ended a few minutes ago. Tj clutches his folder with his own achievements inside.

TJ No offense J-man but..I don’t think she’s comin’. Shit’s already ova’ and, Tj waves his hand to the students and their parents exiting the door.

TJ (CONT) Folks’ is leavin.

James smacked his lips to make a ‘tch’ sound, rolling his head to his

026

friend, his upper lip up slightly and his nose upturned. Stank face.

JAMES You ‘on’t even know whatchu talkin’ bout man. Ain’t nobody asked fo’ yo damn opinion anyway!

Tj gasped, looking flabbergasted as he smacks his chest in disbelief.

JAMES (CONT) Walkin’ round lookin like’a Oompa Loompa in them clown shoes and that purple suit, nigga. Take yo ass on!

Tj let out a huff of a laugh, shaking his head, and then clapped his hand on James’ shoulder, squeezing affectionately.

TJ Least I’on look like Shirley Temple.

James rolls his eyes, but he can’t help the toothed half grin he gave his friend as he elbowed him. Tj sucks his teeth and gives a quip of an ouch before he rubs his side.

TJ (CONT) ‘gentle nigga! You know I’m Damn fragile!

Both boys shared a laugh at that JAMES Fragile my ass! Just cause you built like a damn toothpick don’t make yo ass easy to snap. Fuckin’ twiggy lookin’ ass gone stab somebody to death with yo bony ass elbows Both boys laugh again, James’ face relaxing before it falls silent between the two. A beat happens, James chest visibly inhales before he speaks again

027

JAMES (CONT) Naw man but foreal. Ain’t like her to be late, not ta’ shit she was buggin’ bout befo’ hand. She been prayin fo’ this shit for tha last few months bro, and she was doin betta’ and I been doin’ betta’. Promised Grams, ya know?

Tj nods his head in understanding. His face darkens just a bit as he thinks of his own past: His dad hadn’t made it to his eighth grade graduation, but he showed up to the afterparty crystal eyed, loose lipped, and drooling venom, slinging the butt of his fist at his mother.

He didn’t see his father much after that, never forgave him either. He inhales and exhales the thought away.

TJ Yeah. I know. When’s the last time you called yo mom’s anyway?

James shifts uncomfortably.

JAMES (Quieter) Like a few days ago? Makin’ sure she and that dude, her caretaker or whatever his ass is had the right information. Didn’t want them gettin’ lost and shit.

James wasn’t even sure if his mother knew what high school he went to, for a moment. He thought back about it.

JAMES (CONT) Yeah..Cause granny used to show up to the school for the most part, I’on even know if she knew where it was when she off the shits.

TJ Yeah. I get that bro.

A beat.

028

TJ (CONT) (Quieter too) But you gave them the right one, maybe some shit happened and they changed they policy or some shit? Ain’t it weird a rehab let people out anyway?

Tj bites his lip to stop himself from saying more.

TJ (CONT) Actually.. hol’up. I’on even know.

Back when Big Dawg was in rehab I’on even think they let them niggas out at all.

James shrugged his shoulders.

JAMES Yeah sure whatever bro but my moms in a place, it ain’t no whack ass good nut house or some shit. She ain’t nuts. Just hurtin’ and shit. Lotsa’ folks be hurtin’ and shit. Plus she been doin’ good in them therapies or whatever. They be givin’ Grams reports and she be lettin’ me see ‘em.

Tj was listening quietly. James let out a slight snort.

JAMES (CONT) They got them mugs in there dancin’ and drawin’ n shit, like them white people be doin’.

Tj snorts.

(Laughing) What?!

TJ

James finds himself grinning wolfishly himself.

029

TJ (CONT) (Higher-pitched, accented, proper) And today class, bend like ostrich.

Feeel the ostrich. Beee, the ostrich.

We are one with the nature, aren’t we?

JAMES (cackling) Bro stop! One of them mofo’s gon’ crawl in yo window in the dead’a night and take you to one of them suburbs or some shit, gon be like one of them niggas from Get Out! Besides, it ain’t like that or whatever. I heard they get to make up they own dances n’ shit. Can you imagine a bunch’a old folks up in there hittin’ the quan and dougiein’ they asses to bed? Shit’s wild bro..

TJ ... Bro, bro, bro. But what if they do? Like what if they put them on some Just Dance shit and let them loose?

JAMES .... A’ight nigga I think you then lost yo shits a little. I’on think they even allow electronics in there though. Ma ain’t got no cell-phone and I bet the internet makes shit worse for ‘em. Probably lookin’ up dealers and shit. Seein’ if them drug houses been raided or not.

Tj nods his head.

TJ Yeah, okay, valid point-Suddenly, a shift is felt in the air. Visible in the physical manifestation of the crowd. Tj quiets too, head perking up to see where the silence originated from.

030

Heavy boots cause an echo against the thinly carpeted room. The soft clink of a belt and the static of a radio being contacted and then withdrawn sounded, ending with a robotic click.

Several backs straighten, the chatter dies down and the room goes still, all the eyes alerted to the door. Ice cubes rock against each other in James’ chest and he swallows hard. Unlike the others he looks at the ground, staring hard at his shoes. A tingle started, squiggling its way up from the base of his spine, cold and wet.

There stands a white man, MCCARTHY, between 5’8-6’2 with a dirty blonde crew cut and dark green eyes, between the ages of 20-22, dressed in a cops uniform.

The Principal recovers first, teeth gleaming and eyes a bit too squinted.

He rubs his hands together as he speaks, semi nervous. The two speak, several rows of seats down, near the entrance to the auditorium, while James and Tj sit in the back, towards the top.

PRINCIPAL (voice higher pitched, speech faster) Officer McCarthy! Hello! What a pleasant surprise. How are you? Is there anyone that you need to talk to or see? You can use my office if you’d like.

McCarthy shakes his head, one hand rested on his waist, above his patrol belt, above his gun. The other rubs his chin as his eyes scan over the crowd, ignoring the fear and animosity from the crowd. His faded green eyes seemed to brighten when they connected with the dark brown ones of James. James looks away, leg bouncing harder. Tj looks back and forth between the two and then inhales quietly through his nose.

TJ MCCARTHY

(Quietly)

Bro.. Ain’t that yo copper No thanks, Mr. Abraham.

friend? What he doin’ Not really here on here...? buisness.

031

McCarthy turns back to Abraham, James sinks into his seat a little more, legs spreading out and taking a deep inhale.

JAMES MCCARTHY (Quietly)

I’on even know, man..

Heard from one of my buddies today was the award ceremony, and I was

just lookin’ to check in on James. Mind if I do?

Abraham shook his head quickly and gestured to the crowd PRINCIPAL ABRAHAM By all means, officer. If the boy’s done anything wrong McCarthy casts Principal Abraham a hardened look as the man in question shrinks back. James watched but the sight of cops passing the doorway caught his attention instead.

Begin Flashback.

INT. HIGH-SCHOOL HALLWAY- DAY The hallway of the high school is semi-packed. Students are loud and boisterous with their friends. The hallway full of students of majority black descent, the occasional latinx person in the mix. People were calling out to each other, loudly in the hallways, carrying books and chatting with friends by their lockers, playing music at medium to low volumes. SCHOOL RESOURCE OFFICERS (SRO) were posted at every corner, some patrolling, gauging in on conversations and breaking up groups too large, or standing around and intimidating them.

James stands by his locker with Tj and Mo’nique. Some conversation going on between the three of them.. Tj and Mo’nique the most animated, hands flying, bodies moving naturally with huffs and raising voices. The normal excitement of a black teen. James leans against his locker with a raised eyebrow, watching amused and giving the occasional laugh.

PAUL, a black boy, taller and more average in size than the other two boys walked up. He was dressed in their school uniform as well, along

032

with a grey Hoodie that was not the brand or logo of the school. It was simple, no markings or anything either. He grinned as he approached his friends, raising his hands and parting their sea.

PAUL A’ight A’ight! Ya’ll niggas on some dumb shit anyway. Everybody knows you niggas always need somethin’ new to fight over. So why don’t I present you, with this..

Paul looked both ways, then crouched down and placed his bookbag on the floor. The SRO takes notice and starts to approach.

PAUL You guys won’t believe what I just got.

MO’NIQUE Another one of your scam items?

TJ Sellin’ pencils and hot cheetos again?

MO’NIQUE Last time I brought some cheetos off yo ass the shit was spoiled. I ain’t trustin’ yo shit again never PAUL (laughing) Naw Naw it ain’t even no shit like that this time bro. I ain’t even sellin’ shit! Really I just got-As Paul reaches in his book bag, two SRO officers surround the group.

One of them is white. The white one, SRO 1, nudges his foot to the bottom of Paul’s bookbag, and the entirety of the teen group stiffens.

SRO 1 Yeah Paul, what’s in the bag? I’m curious too. It’s not weed, is it? Or are you selling condoms or something

033

again?

SRO 1 (CONT)

Mo’nique’s stance becomes visibly tense, borderline aggressive.

PAUL Man, you too close. Back up. I ain’t sellin’ nothin’ bro.

MO’NIQUE We ain’t even done nothin’. Why you all up in our space? You ain’t in nobody else space and you peepin’ in on our conversations like we up to somethin’-TJ Mo, relax. Is cool. Fo’real.

SRO 1 Did your mom not teach you respect your elders? Don’t talk back? And it’s all just friendly conversation. Just curious.

SRO 2 Paul we just don’t want another run in like last time. Whats in the bag?

PAUL It ain’t nothin’ harmful man.

Paul closes his backpack and goes to stand up. He doesn’t want to show them, and they’ve already invaded a space and conversation that wasn’t theirs to intrude on. He is frowning. SRO 1 grabs him by the back of his uniform shirt and tugs him back.

SRO 1 That’s not what I asked you, Paul.

Just show us what’s in the bag, makes it easier.

034

SRO 2 (quieter, but firm) Woah, wait. You didn’t have to grab him like that..

All the teenagers tense when Paul is grabbed. He immediately shrugs himself out of the older man’s grip and upturns his nose as he snatches his bookbag and steps closer to his friends. Mo’nique gently urges Paul towards her. The two officers step back.

MO’NIQUE TJ You can’t put your hands on Bro you ain’t have to grab him! That shits harassment!

PAUL Man don’t touch me! I ain’t did shit to you bro! I ain’t gotta show you shit! You walked up in our convo, bro.

SRO 1 You’re disobeying an order, either show me what’s in the bag or I’m taking you to the principal, give it here.

PAUL For what man!? Thats bullshit! You ain’t got no cause to be on my ass like this SRO 1 Oh yeah? Keep disobeying orders and its obstruction of justice. I could arrest you for this.

PAUL Man, bullshit! No you can’t! Ya’ll can’t just be arresting folks for nothin.

MO’NIQUE He can invoke his right to silence.

JAMES Ay, he ain’t in no violations or nothin’ he ain’t gotta show you..

035

SRO 1 No, he doesn’t but we have probable cause with past offenses.

JAMES What offenses?

SRO 2 Well.. Paul has been caught with illegal possession of drugs..

PAUL It was a milligram over!

SRO 1 You’re under twenty-one, smart-ass.

Don’t forget the selling and distribution of foods PAUL (Interrupting) my Little sister was sellin chocolate for a fuckin’ fundraiser!

SRO 1 (Interrupting, louder) And firearm look alikes!

TJ I remember that one, is was a nerf gun! We legit have a nerf club at the Y tuesdays after classes, man SRO 2 Still.. possession of firearm look alike is illegal on school grounds..

SRO 1 reaches forward to snatch the bag and Paul immediately jerks backward, body thumping against the locker before he moves out of the circle the officers have them trapped in. Meanwhile, the hallways move as normal with the occasional onlooker.

036

SRO 1 I can still put you in violation of school dress code! Those Jordan’s and that sweatshirt aren’t apart of school policy. I can get you detention-PAUL You can’t just take my shit man and touch me man! And you ‘on even be on everybody about these damn dress codes!

Paul shakes his head. He can’t take another detention, it’ll lead to in-school suspension and he worked this weekend. His job didn’t care about his school issues. He couldn’t do it in school suspension, he couldn’t take more time off.

PAUL (CONT) Fine! Damn! It ain’t even that big a deal! See! Paul opens his book bag to reveal a Nintendo Switch Lite, grey colored, still in the box with a Mortal Kombat 11 and NBA 2k20, still wrapped in their plastic packaging. Paul frowns.

PAUL (CONT) See?! Ain’t even no big deal! Damn!

SRO 1 and 2 look, and SRO 2 nods his head.

SRO 2 Yeah, its just a kid with a game SRO 1 (interrupting) Where’d you get that? How do we know you didn’t steal it?

Mo’Nique, Tj, and James all stare in disbelief before Mo’Nique walks up.

MO’NIQUE He showed you what he got and he don’t need to prove nothin to you!

037

PAUL Bro is you fuckin’ serious? Really?

SRO 1 I’m just checking, You never know.

The hallway bell rings, the hallways mostly clear except the few wandering students and the 6. SRO 1 and 2 back off, and SRO calls to a student he sees straggling in the hallway.

SRO 1 Hey kid! You’re late to class.

SRO 2 You guys better move on, okay?

James, Tj, Paul, and Mo’nique frown, gathering their things and scoffing as they head off in the direction opposite of where SRO 1 is walking.

End Flashback.

INT. HIGH-SCHOOL AUDITORIUM - EVENING MCCARTHY (O.S.) Hey man, how’ve you been?

James jumps, brought back to the present as he looks up at McCarthy to see him standing beside him, Tj having moved off to the side after nodding his head to McCarthy and going to join another group of friends.

James eyes glance over to Tj for a second before they catch a glimpse of McCarthy’s gun. He stiffens. The seat creaks from the movement. James can’t help but wish he could be the seat. At least when they fished the bullet out he’d still be usable, and maybe it wouldn’t hurt as much.

JAMES I’m alright, Officer McCarthy.

A beat.

JAMES (CONT) Ceremony, you know? Everyone’s supposed to go in case you get somethin’. Plus, it makes the staff

038

JAMES (CONT) feel better, and a lotta the teachers get a hoot out of seeing us dressed fancy.

McCarthy quirks an eyebrow, yet he knows the formalities are reactive.

MCCARTHY Oh yeah? How’d that go? Any interesting awards? They still do the class clown stuff?

McCarthy smiles that bright, thin lipped, white toothed, sharp pointer smile he always does. James doesn’t consider him a Pig, but a white cop is a white cop. The rest of the auditorium was beginning to chatter again, quietly, and more alert than before. James and McCarthy have eyes on them, but mostly with a collective community fear, animosity, and protectiveness.

MCCARTHY (CONT) Honorable mentions? Special guests?

James stiffens, the ice in his chest turn to rocks and smash into the bottom of his stomach. His eyes sting, though he doesn’t cry. He exhales deep from his nostrils and shakes his head, avoiding McCarthys gaze.

No. The one person he hoped to show up, didn’t.

JAMES Naw, man. No special guests.

James’ leg starts bouncing again and he wipes his sweaty palms on his pants. Don’t get sad, it is what it is.

JAMES (CONT) I got an award or two, but it don’t really matter though.

MCCARTHY That’s great news, James. You don’t sound too quirked though. You should be proud of that, man! It’s hard to get acknowledged for your effort.

039

James shrugs. Yeah, he drug his grades up from the gutter and got more involved in school and less involved out of it, but what did it matter when his inspiration hadn’t shown up? Tj frowns a little from where he stands, listening in as always. He tilts his head to gaze back and he and James eyes meet for a second. James squints and looks away. Tj frowns.

McCarthy shifts before he clears his throat and speaks.

MCCARTHY (CONT) How about I take you for dinner to celebrate? Your choice.

James’ posture changes. His leg stops bouncing and he seems to perk up at that.

JAMES Really? You sure? You still in yo’ uniform and stuff tho.

MCCARTHY Yeah, man, I’m sure. It’s easy to change outta’ this and I promised you and your Ma that if you did better this year I’d treat you, didn’t I? JAMES Yeah but you- Well, you know. Lies get flung around the hood often- or half truths, or whatever.

McCarthy nods. He understood what he meant. His kind weren’t very dependable for Black people. He knew that. But he wants to do better, be better. He inhales, that’s why he became one. To fix the shit that was broken. Or try to, anyway.

MCCARTHY Yeah James, I meant it. Wherever you want.

James was quiet for a moment in thought. He glances around and sees the majority of the people have either cleared out or slowly slipped back into their conversations.

However many eyes are trained on the cop. His presence is invasive,

040

and they want him to know it. They want him to feel the fear they’d witnessed, felt, heard. They want the cop to know that he may not be the one who did it, but he is part of the system that did.

The police were for white people, and always would be. James bit his lip. He felt that way too, however, the assistance McCarthy had given his family complicated his feelings. Life was never that easy.

He stands up and drags his bookbag up from the floor, the contents rattling. A few of the parents in the room tense, ready to move if something were to happen. Instead James simply shrugs his backpack on, nods his head to Tj who nods in return.

JAMES Yeah, I’d like that. Can we go to the Uncle Remus on 47th?

ACT II INT. UNCLE REMUS - EVENING. Its nighttime, the soft zoom of the cars riding past can be heard outside. The neighborhood is its usual lively self. Customers coming in and out of the restaurant, as per usual. Some standing in line, others chatting with each other in loud voices. Conversations about basketball or newest songs in the rap industry. The restaurant’s patrons are all Black, as are the workers. Some people are standing in line or leaning against the wall, others sitting and watching the television as the news plays.

For the most part, people seem to be in decent spirits. Dressed casually in joggers, hoodies, jeans. Men sagged, Nike’s were clean, and people looked both worn out and faded, but content.

None of the people in the restaurant are kids, but occasionally a loud crowd of teenagers stroll by outside, laughing and talking amongst themselves.

By the wall, James and McCarthy sit face to face with one another, a small stack of napkins beside the both of them, their food pulled out from the bags but sat in them still. James’ suit jacket is off, and McCarthy is only in a white T shirt and a pair of dark blue cargo pants. Occasionally the eyes drift to McCarthy, laughing a bit as a MAN calls out.

041

MAN The white boy can handle him some sauce, huh!

McCarthy chokes slightly on the fry he was swallowing, his cheeks turning red at being called out so suddenly. He is the only white guy in the building, after all, so its obvious who was being spoken of. There’s a common trail of snickers, and James even snorts at the comment, saying.

JAMES Awe bro it’s all mild sauce! Mild sauce ain’t even spicy!

McCarthy turns away in embarrassment, laughing and giving a light shrug of his shoulders.

MCCARTHY I’m sure I could handle some hot sauce too.

Several of the people turn to McCarthy in astonishment, eye’s wide and nodding and nudging each other.

MAN (Hyped) Oohh?! White boy can handle some heat?

Aight!

The man laughs and walks up to the counter, leaning on it. The WOMAN at the counter raises an eyebrow and looks at him. He grins.

MAN (CONTD) Ay sweet Mama, let me get one of them hot sauces.

WOMAN Aight Darnell, don’t kill the boy now.

She laughs, shaking her head as she reaches back and hands him one of the little cups. James is laughing, McCarthy’s face is turning even redder.

042

MCCARTHY (whisper) What did I get myself into..

The man walks over and laughs, dragging a chair with him and spinning it before sitting down and leaning on the back of it. He sits the cup of hot sauce down near McCarthy, and James is doing his best not to howl.

DARNELL Alright, go’on then white boy.

He looks between McCarthy and James, grinning. The man is dressed in a hoodie and sweatpants himself.

DARNELL (CONTD) Give it a try.

JAMES (Laughing) Mix it with the mild sauce and it ain’t even that bad if you can’t handle it.

MCCARTHY Oh boy. Okay, okay. Fine.

McCarthy throws his hands up and laughs, there is whopping from some of the other patrons, and some who are only paying feign interest in the conversation. Even the woman at the counter is leaning over to watch, and lightly urging the cook to take a peak too.

McCarthy, with no choice, dips a few of his mild sauce covered fries into the hot sauce and then eats them. He blinks, gaining composure before he gently drizzles the hot sauce over the rest of his food and the restaurant patrons get more excited, hollering in excitement. Darnell stands up and pats McCarthy on the back, hard enough that he coughs and laughs.

DARNELL Ayy!! You go white boy! Got a lil flavor in you and now you ‘on know how to act!

043

He laughs, grabbing his chair as the woman calls to him.

WOMAN Alright Darnell! Let them boys eat!

Come get yo food.

DARNELL (Wiggling his eyebrows) Oooh and I’m boutta get me some good ass food too. A’ight! Enjoy ya night ya’ll.

He laughs, patting both McCarthy and James on the back, and James waves and bumps the back of fists with the man.

JAMES (laughing) A’ight, see you later man. Eat good.

Darnell picks his food up from the counter and a few other people tell him goodbye as he leaves out the door. There are a few shaking heads before the restaurant quiets a bit and McCarthy and James go back to eating.

JAMES (CONT) Ay! So I ever tell you bout wha had happened wit my bro Tavion?

MCCARTHY Maybe? What happened?

JAMES Buddy knew he was posta be comin’ to my house to game and shit for a few hours right?

McCarthy nods his head, following along JAMES (CONT) And we get in the doh, and I’m like ‘aight nigga you know how my moms is you gotta take dem shoes off cause I ain’t cleanin’ up after yo dirty ass’

044

JAMES (CONT) and he like ‘aight man its cool and I’m like aight good, you wont sometin’ to drink? He like yeah so I go off to get the Cokes an’ when I come back, I smell sometin’ foul Foul?

MCCARTHY

JAMES Yeah! Foul! Like somebody rotted some eggs or some shit in the garbage so I go ay bro you smell that?

MCCARTHY Yeah? And then what happened?

JAMES Tay ass like ‘naw bro I’on smell shit’ and I’m like ‘naw it stank, did yo ass fart or somethin?’ I crack open a air freshener cause I’ma boutta spray this bitch cause that shit stank.

James smacks his lips and shakes his head.

JAMES (CONT) So I spritz spritz that shit in the front room, scrunchin’ my nose and shit, then I look down and this nigga toes out! His socks look like they was posta’ be white instead this shit look like he got comin’ off these fumes motherfuckas!

McCarthy finds himself laughing as James continues the story, James only getting more animated and excited, arms moving and being his natural goofy self.

045

JAMES I’m like ‘nigga thats yo feet! When the last time you washed them motherfucka’s? and he comin’ up with excuses and shit talm bout ‘naw man these my special socks.’ Nigga what?!

‘Special socks my muhfukin ass! Them bitches gon’ leave a stench so damn strong my mama gon’ smell that shit when she get home!

MCCARTHY (Laughing) And did she?

JAMES (grinning and speaking) I told ‘im! If he don’t put them stanky ol’ jockstrap smellin’, piss stained lookin’ socks back in them musty ass shoes, I was gon’ kick his ass out! This nigga big toe was hanging out his sock and I’m like that bitch ashier than concrete! Nigga toe lookin like a walnut or some shit!

Told him to put his nasty as feet away! I’ma just vaccum when he leave.

McCarthy and James are laughing now, James grinning and even the Woman is laughing behind the counter, paying attention to the story.

JAMES (CONT) Da mu’fucka looked sharp enough to cut glass! That shit was nasty man! Now I know why my moms and them was always on that lotion yo feet shit, mu’fucka walkin’ round with feet outta’ the or some shit! Grunge McCarthy laughs, shaking his head as he wipes his hand off and takes a sip of his drink, then speaks.

046

MCCARTHY Sounds like your friend needed Gold Bond JAMES Fuck that! Nigga need’a get rid of the whole foot! Shit ain’t comin’ back!

James and McCarthy continue to laugh, James shakes his head and lightly taps the table.

JAMES (CONT) I swear! I’on think he wash between his toes eitha’! But da’ truth? He ain’t never washed them socks, says they lucky ‘cause errytime he wear ‘em, Kobe make’a winnin’ shot! I’on believe in luck that damn much, def’ not enough fo’ my socks to be smellin’ likea’ wet dog The restaurant has quieted down quite a bit from the commotion earlier, the low lights making the area warm and cozy. The restaurant continued running quietly, a few more people coming in, getting their orders. The Woman answering the phone and writing down orders before passing them to the chef in the back. A moment later the door dings and a TALL MAN walks in.

The TALL MAN is as his name describes, Tall. He is dressed in a dark t-shirt, a heavy black hoodie, a pair of old worn out dark grey sweatpants, and worn designer shoes. He is tired. He moves precisely and with weariness. His hands are taut, and his eyes are deep set and hard.

His beard is clean, his cut is clean and short, but the slight curve of his back indicates he’s worked for it. He is heavy, and his skin is as dark as molasses. He brings a smell with him. Weed, sweat, grime. When he orders, his voice is deep and heavy and weary, as is the obvious crinkle of his forehead. James watches him, quietly, his face firm and quiet. He knows it, and he feels it. The OutSide.

The news plays some story and the Tall Man takes his slip, sitting down in one of the chairs and letting his hooded eyes watch the television.

For a moment, his eyes connect with James, and the two share a quiet mutual blink before the Tall Man’s gaze turns back to the television.

047

James looks at his food, quietly. His face is somewhat crestfallen. He is thinking of how hard the man’s life must’ve been, and how hard his life will be. He is thinking of the drugs and what they did to his mother, he’s thinking of his time with Peanut and what the drugs could’ve done to him, if he’d taken them. He thinks of how lucky he is, how lucky, how lucky, how lucky.

McCarthy glances up, and he can see the shift on James’ attitude. He licks his fingers, tears apart a wing and tilts his head.

MCCARTHY (City accent creeping out) So James? What about those awards? You said you got something, right? What did you get?

James shifted where he sat, clearing his throat and attempting to brush aside some of his thoughts. Right. He was making moves for the better.

He was. Besides, McCarthy’s reminder proved that. He felt pride swell in his chest at the thought of his sports team, and the scholarship he’d wiggled in for himself. He was doing good.

JAMES I had got some awards for good Sportsmanship and fo’ best improved Academically. Turns out somehow I’m twentieth in our graduatin’ class and I got a coupla’ scholarships. Mostly for that Star one for them City schools, go two years there then I can go to a big one afta’. I also got sum medals.

He thinks of the image of himself beside Muhammad Ali is what he thinks of, and he feels even more pride swell in his chest. The back pats from his teammates and coaches, the sound of the crowd, and his friends chanting his name, he grins bright.

JAMES Best Boxer baby! I’m out here!

Representin’ my people! Da next Muhammad Ali! You just wait!

048

McCarthy grins, nodding his head. The Tall Man from before glances over to see the excitement that the two have going on in their seats by the wall. He gives a quiet smile to himself and shakes his head.

JAMES (CONT) I’ma be big and you gon’ see me on tv one day and think ‘Ay, ain’t I take that lil nigga to dinna’ once?

MCCARTHY (laughing) Probably not those exact words but, something close to it, I suppose.

JAMES A’ight okay so I trust you not to be sayin’ nigga and shit but when you see me on that screen bro hit me up! I’ll take you out and shit like you then did here for me!

MCCARTHY You know what.

McCarthy leans back in his seat, grinning.

MCCARTHY (CONT) Maybe, once you’re rich and famous and I’m an old retired detective.

A beat.

Its quiet for a moment. The fan blowing and the news playing lightly in the background. James and McCarthy sit in a comfortable silence for a second before James speaks again, wiping his hands off on the napkin.

JAMES (Quieter) Favor for a favor bro. You ain’t treat me like no dumb hood nigga or sum charity case or none’a that. I still ‘on like Cops, but I do like you. You ain’t so bad.

049

James scratches the top of his head with his pinky finger, careful not to let any leftover sauce get into his hair. McCarthy nods his head in understanding. He hesitates, almost to say something but decides against it. He decides to let James talk.

JAMES (CONT) (hesitant) You helped me and my moms a lot, and I’m thankful even tho’ I be actin’ funny sometimes...

James stops. He doesn’t know what else to say. Emotions are hard, and McCarthy acted like a big brother figure for him. He shifted where he sat, and McCarthy nods his head and smiles.

MCCARTHY (Soft, but careful) Yeah, no problem James.

A beat. Both are quiet and lift their drinks to sip, then connect eyes and McCarthy’s eyes narrow for a second.

MCCARTHY (CONT) Toast to good faith and dreams?

JAMES Is you on that lucky shit cause you Irish?

McCarthy gives a huff of a laugh and rolls his eyes.

Probably.

MCCARTHY

James laughs and both do a toast, cans clinking as they lift their heads back and take a sip of their drinks. At the same time, the woman speaks.

WOMAN Numbuh 10-4!

The tall man, with a bit of extra effort, lives from his seat and brings his heavy steps toward the counter to get his food.

050

ACT III INT/EXT CAR - EVENING James and McCarthy are in McCarthy’s car, a 2012 Chevrolet Cruze (or of similar model). The car radio is playing a news station. Outside is active. The city and neighborhood is dark except for artificial light, telephone poles and cares and apartment complex lights. The neighborhood is older, more run down. The buildings are faded in color and the people are tired.

A DARKMAN in a black T and baggy black pants holds onto the legs of his DAUGHTER who sits on his shoulders, her small hands resting on his balding head, her barrettes clacking. James and McCarthy watch the two cross the street at the stop light.

They drive past black men playing basketball at the park, dressed in shorts, dark, tall, loud. They drive past working women in groups and near cars. They pass groups of men huddled around outside of old bars, rolling dice and playing cards.

A group of BLACK KIDS, no older than 13 wait to cross the street with pickles and hot chips and laughing and talking loudly, dressed in range from tight to oversized clothes. As the two wait at the light and the children begin to cross the street, James and McCarthy get snippets of their conversation.

KID 1 Yeah! It didn’t make any sense! The cop stopped Pookie and said he looked like a man they were looking for.

Pookie ain’t even 14..

The conversation muffles.

KID 2 (Loudly) Me too! I was in the sto’ the other day and ...

The further away the kids walk, the more muffled their voices and the conversation becomes from them.

051

KID 3 They ain’t never followed me... ...light skin! (loudly) Black Monkey!

KID 2 KID 3

KID 1 (Also, loudly) Ay! Shutup! ... you wanna stay friends..?!

McCarthy continues driving, and at another stop James sees a BROTHA leaning up against the side of a wall, dressed in baggy black clothes with a Durag on. He smokes his weed, puffing and inhaling, his night over and done with. A SISTA walks up beside him, scantily clad and rubbing on his arm for a puff. He shoves her off and she comes back, begging. The Brotha grabs the Sista by her chin and blows smoke in her face, and the both of the people giggle before he leads her off and into the building they’re against. James frowns.

James turns his head to the radio, sighing his voice is weary.

JAMES McCarthy you be listenin’ to some weird shit. Why you always got the news on? Never jam to no tunes or nothin’?

MCCARTHY I do listen to music. But it’s nice to know what’s going on out there. I get enough of it on the job, but I don’t think you’ll ever really do if good you’re not always listening and paying attention. You can change the station if you want.

James leans forward and flips through the channel stations, eventually stopping on the Gospel station when “Not to Us / Good love” by Steve Malcolm plays.

052

JAMES Yeah but like.. You know that’s goin’ on already. Why suffer more than you gotta?

A beat.

JAMES (CONT) My granny used to watch court shows all the time and I’d see her watchin’ the news and you know..don’t nothin’ ever good come from that. Do mo’ harm than good.

James quietly nods his head and sings along to the music every few lines or so, picking up the parts that he knows by heart. McCarthy finds himself nodding along to the beat as well.

MCCARTHY Gospel with some extra beats huh?

Never heard it like this before but it’s got a good feel to it.

James snorts and there’s a moment of Silence.

MCCARTHY (carefully / hesitant) Hey uh.. you still go to that church on Independence?

James shrugs his shoulders. He hasn’t much since his grandma got sick.

JAMES Sometimes. Why? MCCARTHY Been thinkin’ about going back to church lately. Funny enough I think I’ve been gaining more faith since I became a cop.

053

JAMES Like congregations is always kinda corrupt but they praise and worship is always turnt. Tambourines and singin’ and piano and my cuz Tyrone bring his drum sometimes. It really pump you up and they sermons ain’t half bad, but the actual members spread gossip a lot. But uh...

James eyes McCarthy carefully.

JAMES (CONT) It’s also a black church and they gon’ def’ look at you funny when you walk in. Why you wanna go to that one?

McCarthy laughs. A blush begins to creep up on his face. James thinks, a series of memories flashes on screen.

FLASHBACK. EXT - A CHURCH, CORNER STREET. DAYTIME. Memory 1: A white passenger van sits outside of a church. On the side, spray painted in black is “Send the Niggers Back to Africa” Behind it, one of the windows in the church has been smashed through from the outside. A CHURCH MAN and CHURCH WOMAN, both in their late 50s and dressed formally stand in shock, the two look distressed before the church man pulls out his phone and dials a number.

Memory 2: There are a variety of worried looking BLACK PEOPLE crowded around near the yard. There are 2 police cars and FOUR OFFICERS there, one of them is McCarthy. One of the OFFICERS is talking to the church man, the pastor. McCarthy is interviewing several other people.

Memory 3, through James eyes: McCarthy is conversing with IMANI, a young dark-skinned black woman dressed in a puffy armed button up shirt and a black skirt, along with her stockings and church flats. Her hair is a pretty styled 4c afro. McCarthy is interviewing her, but their body language appears to be more than just the crime. Both seem just a tad bit shy, gushing, and even a little friendly. James watches the two with Tj and Mo’nique. Tj nudges James in the arm, wiggling his eyebrow. Mo’nique slaps Tj on the arm, and he rubs it with a mouthed ‘ow’.

054

End Flashback.

INT/EXT CAR - EVENING James makes the realization after the memory. He smirks, his voice taking on playful.

JAMES You tryna’ go causea’ Imani?

McCarthy chokes, his face becoming redder and redder at the correct accusation. Oh boy. He looks back and forth from James to the rode, shifting slightly in his seat and shaking his head.

MCCARTHY (embarrassed, rambling) What? No! No. Nothing of that sort. I just- the music? Your grandma. When I met her, she said a lot of good things about the church and said they were always welcoming. put on the You church music and I just figured I was looking for a new home anyway! and you go, your family does, and the church folks seemed nice.

James finds himself laughing, whole heartedly.

JAMES Yeah yeah but Imani be smellin’ do nice and shit. Coconut and tea tree oil. Always dressed nice. I’on really know her too well but I know she be in charge of the youth group. Think she in college too.

MCCARTHY Y-yeah but that’s not why I’m trying to go there! Not really. James, really?

JAMES Well, I heard ha’ say she thought you

055

JAMES (CONT) was cute. I ain’t no cupid or nothin but. You know?

McCarthy rubs his face, still blushing and trying to cover for himself.

He sighs.

MCCARTHY Well, I do think she is an attractive woman and everything... but that’s not my main reason, really.

McCarthy fixed him with as best of serious face and glare he could muster.

JAMES (laughing) Ah’ight! Ah’ight! I ain’t gonna encourage her to sit by you then since!

It ain’t like that McCarthy rolls his eyes and gives a huff of a laugh. Shaking his head. As they drive past, there is a bit of commotion up ahead. There is a cop car parked on the sidewalk, and a MOTHER with her hands up and a crying TODDLER (female, 3-5) at her side. McCarthy slows the car down as they approach, both his and James’ attention drawn to the scene.

MCCARTHY What the hell..?

As they get closer, it becomes clearer that shit has hit the fan. There is a STORE OWNER yelling at the woman, and a WHITE COP with his gun out, yelling as well, his gun focused on the woman and then at the crying child. Around them, people are peeking out of their apartment windows, phones and cameras at the ready.

JAMES Yo what the fuck..?

MCCARTHY (Hastily, interrupting) Hold on James, stay here. I’m going to go check this out.

056

McCarthy pulls over to the side of the street, leaves the car running and reaches into his glove box to pull out his gun and holster. He grabs his badge as well and gets out of the car to go approach the situation.

James stays in the car, watching McCarthy and shifting in his seat. As he watches McCarthy approach the scene, the White cop turns his gun momentarily until McCarthy shows his badge. The cop looks relieved as McCarthy walks up, his hand on the butt of his gun. There are snippets of the conversation that can be heard, including McCarthy’s questioning of the event, and the store owner becoming more enraged. The toddler only cries louder, and the mother lowers her hands to comfort her, only for the cop to scream HANDS UP!

WHITE COP

MCCARTHY Woah! Woah, okay, its okay, calm down.

Here- Ma’am, may I? McCarthy carefully lowers to his knees, watching the Mother and carefully asking if he could comfort the toddler. She continues to cry, stepping behind her mothers legs. Mother tries to comfort her child, telling her its alright.

McCarthy carefully speaks to the child, eventually gently rubbing soothing circles onto her back, and after more comfort, getting to the point where he can pick her up, and she curls into his shoulder. He holds her, carefully, and puts a hand out to the white cop. He lowers his gun, hesitantly, after what appears to be McCarthy’s firm talking.

James watches, but he jumps as his window is knocked on. As he turns his head, at his window is LEROY. A black man dressed in dark but fresh clothes, older.

LEROY Ayy, if it ain’t lil Jay-man. What’s up lil dawg?

James hesitates only for a moment before he rolls down the window and quietly fists bumps the man.

JAMES Ay, Wassup Leroy. Yo..what’s going on?

057

LEROY Awh man, you ain’t even gon believe this shit! I was in there gettin’ me some Henny and Shanice was in there buying snacks and shit. Lil KayKay was tryna’ sneak an extra honeybun and Ahmad caught her. Nigga pulled a gun on them! Sayin’ they was tryna rob him. Can you believe that shit? He called the cops, and then fat man there show up with all this yellin’ goin on. Shit got crazy. Ahmad ass talm bout Shanice was threatening him with a knife. Everybody started yellin’ and shit again and Shanice threatened him in’frona’ the cop and he pulled his piece.

JAMES Bruh.. Its just a lady wit’a kid tho..

LEROY Shits all I’m saying. And its a damn honeybun. Fucker in his shits over 50 cents.

JAMES A fuckin’ honeybun? He could’a literally just let her have it. She just’a kid.

LEROY Shit you’d expect. Don’t nobody like Black folk though. Shanice ain’t even gotta tab with him or nothin. Shits crazy.

Yeah..

JAMES

A beat.

058

LEROY Ay, so how’s ya moms? Ain’t heard from her lately.

James shifts in his seat.

JAMES Yeah she..She been busy, ain’t had time to keep up.

LEROY Oh? Ain’t like her. Usually get a call about a gram. She mad? Got a new plug?

JAMES (stiffly) Naw man, not as far as I know.

Oh?

LEROY

A beat.

LEROY (CONT) So whatchu doin’ ridin’ round witta cop anyway?

JAMES Its.. McCarthy. You know, White Boy Liam? McCarthy’s folks? His ma used to own that lil restaurant and his pa worked janitor at the school on 74th?

LEROY Oh yeaah, lil white boy who used to try and hoop in Marquette Park a few years ago. Ain’t know you was friends wit’ him.

JAMES We..We cool, man, yeah. He decent.

059

LEROY Fuck he a cop fo? Member him. He had mo’ potential. Five-O on some bullshit? Ain’t his fam immigrants or some shit? Mofo gon deport his own folks?

JAMES Naw, he secon’ gen. And he say on some give back to the people shit.

LEROY (Scoff, disbelief) Give back to the people shit? Fuck he think this is? A crime show? A pig is a pig. A fed is a fed. A cop is a bitch-nigga tryna’ fuck us over.

Back at the scene, it appears that the situation has been resolved.

SHANICE is holding KAYKAY now, and a new cop car has appeared on the scene. McCarthy looks weary. He begins making his way back to the car. Leroy becomes jitterish.

LEROY (CONT) A’ight. I’m boutta head out. You be careful hangin’ round that nigga James. Tell ya moms hi for me.

James nods, hardly paying attention as he does a handshake with Leroy and he leaves. A few moments later McCarthy gets back into the car and he sighs. ....So they good?

JAMES MCCARTHY (Tired) Yeah, just.. Store keeper with a trigger finger and an over excitable cop. I can’t believe he pointed a fucking gun at a child. A child..

McCarthy seems crestfallen, demeanor is less energetic, and more

060

lethargic. He rubs his face again and shakes his head before putting his gun and badge back away.

MCCARTHY (CONT) (weary) I got another cop on the scene to help deal with it. The gun-happy cop needs to be demoted. That situation didn’t require a gun or the escalation, and that store owner had a gun without a permit. I hope that kid and her mom can even sleep tonight..

JAMES Shits fucked up man..

MCCARTHY It is. And I know its because they were Black. That wouldn’t have happened if it was a white kid.

Doesn’t matter if its a chain or local either..

James is quiet. He nods his head and plays with his phone strap.

JAMES (quietly, unsure) yeah.. I mean, it be like that though.

Folks be followin’ us at the sto’ like we boutta steal shit. Mufucka’s holdin they purses close and shit. Don’t nobody want they shit.

MCCARTHY I remember seeing it as a kid. Hanging out with my friends in middle school and seeing Pitor stuffing his bag with headphones and my friend Destiny being followed by the security guard. Made me want to be a cop, to stop shit like that, and like this..

McCarthy gestures to the scene in front of them. Red and blue lights

061

are still flashing.

MCCARTHY (CONT) from happening. But you know.. for as much bullcrap as there is, there’s nothing like helping someone, and stopping shit like that from happening.

JAMES ... But ain’t that a lotta work? How many cops in there be wanting to fix shit like you?

MCCARTHY (laughing sadly) Not as many as I hoped, honestly. It’s all cops stick together, and a bunch of bullshit racist ideas rooted in the early 1900s imbedded in our texts. No training to work with diverse groups, just how to use a gun and how to cover your tracks. I even hear the dispatchers respond differently by race.

McCarthy sets the car into motion again, beginning their drive to James house once more. They pass the scene of the cop cars, Shanice and KayKay watch them leave.

MCCARTHY (CONT) There are two mentally ill women we get a call about often. Ones white, Ms. Miller, and ones Black, Mrs. Jackson. They disrespect Mrs. Jackson and act like her calls are annoying, while rolling their eyes and biting their tongues for Ms. Miller. Its bullshit. During my probationary period, I went with a senior officer to help out Mrs. Jackson. She was calm, and the officer still treated her like she was hysterical. I take

062

MCCARTHY (CONT) the calls for her now. No more bullshit.

James nods in affirmation. Muttering something in agreement. What can he really say to something like that? The car ride becomes naturally silent. However a moment later James’ phone begins to vibrate, and as he tugs it out of his pocket and looks at the caller ID, he panics for a second, hurriedly answering the call. We only hear James’ side of the conversation.

JAMES Hello!? Yeah, yes. This is James Flowers.

McCarthy glances over at him, then turns the radio down some so he can speak. James’ demeanor changes, tense and growingly agitated.

JAMES (CONT) Whatchu mean- No. Yeah. Yeah. It was at Canady High. Yeah.. They said she could be on supervised release today so she could come visit. I know- yeah uh.. West? Wasn’t West supposed to be going with her?

McCarthy shifts uncomfortably. He knows exactly who this phone call is about, and he becomes sorrowful again too.

JAMES (CONT) (Voice becoming tight) She what? Yeah- Can.. Can I talk to her please?

McCarthy turns a corner before he reaches a residential neighborhood.

He parks up against the sidewalk, between other cars. The house he stops in front of is modest, smaller, older. James’ grandmother’s home.

The house has heavy curtains and a gate surrounding it. The grassy area of the sidewalk is clear, the sidewalk cracked and weeds grow up from between them. Pop cans crushed in the street, a pair of old cream gym shoes hung from the middle of the telephone line, bouncing gently in the soft Spring breeze. McCarthy turns the car off.

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JAMES (CONT) Ma, what the fuck!? You relapsed?!

ACT IV EXT. JAMES GRANDMA’S HOUSE - EVENING. James is angry but holding it in. He leans into McCarthy’s rolled down window and nods his head. His backpack is slung over his shoulder and his expression is hardened.

JAMES (clipped) Naw, man. I’m cool. Thanks for the dinna’ and the ride.

McCarthy looks concerned. He leans in to the other side of the window where James is.

MCCARTHY Well alright, you’ve got my number.

You need anything you call me, ya hear?

James nods his head.

JAMES I got it. Thanks.

He leans his fist forward to McCarthy through the window for a fist bump.

JAMES (CONT) I ain’t gon’ do nothin’ stupid I’m cool, fo’real.

McCarthy stares at him for a moment before he nods and raises his fist, bumping it back gently against James’ own.

MCCARTHY Alright. Take care.

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James nods and then shifts back and away from the car. His anxiety is showing again, leg bouncing, fingers squeezing his book bag straps repeatedly.

JAMES Yea, you too. See you.

He turns his back on McCarthy and then hurries up to his home, trying to keep his frustration in check as he does.

INT. LIVING ROOM / DINING ROOM - EVENING The house is empty, but it is clearly lived in. Couches, coats in the closet, shoes at the front door. The house is mostly neat, little angel figurines placed on top of the tv stand in the living room, blankets folded over the end of the sofa. The house was once full, and yet now, as James walks in, it isn’t. The house seems empty.

In the back of the dining room is a cabinet with mirrored doors, inside is filled with old China, the kind that people don’t get to touch. There is also a butter cookie tin inside, likely not filled with actual cookies.

There is a long cabinet, covered with a frilly laced tablecloth. Ontop of it sits framed pictures of James as a child, his mother, his mother as a child, other family members, and a Jesus Figurine sitting at the end.

An old handmade quilt is placed over the back of the couch, design fixed with flour bags. It’s old, but in good condition. James stops to stare at it for a moment, rubbing his fingers over the material before he shakes his head and kicks the back of the sofa with his knee. He turns off, mumbling to himself and beelining straight to his bedroom.

INT. JAMES BEDROOM - EVENING James bedroom is like any teenage boys bedroom, aside from the punching bag hanging from the ceiling in the middle of his room. He has a dresser, a tall dresser, a desk off to the side of the door. He has a rack full of shoes and his dresser is covered in things from deodorant, cologne, to little folded up pieces of paper and a few hair products (Brush, durag, detangler / conditioner). His bed is made, the sheets plaid or solid color, and for the most part his room seems clean, a laundry hamper sits in the corner at the foot of his bed with clothes lazily tossed in, however.

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James shoves open his door, angrily entering and beginning to undress.

He throws his bookbag and begins yanking off his shoes, all the while a voice over starts of his MOM in the background. His Mom’s voice is high and airy, hinted with a tired from a long, long life. James voice in the voice overs is disappointed, tired, and clipped. Both voice over voices have a light echo to them.

MOM (V.O) Heeey baby.. Mama missed you..

JAMES (V.O) Missed me? Where you? I thought were you was doin betta’! Said you was You doin betta’!

MOM (V.O) Baby it ain’t.. it ain’t that easy. I am.. I am doin’ betta’. I just- it was only a little and I’m a lot calmer and relaxed when- I wasn’t going to get crack, it was weed.

A beat.

MOM (V.O) (CONT) You’ve been doing better too ain’tcha?

How’s my mom? She doing any betta’?”

JAMES (V.O) Ma, she bleedin’ inside. Whatchu think?

James continues taking off of his clothes, his movements becoming increasingly more aggressive as he visualizes the conversation from the car. He throws his clothes haphazardly.

JAMES (V.O.)(CONT) She’s still conscious. Made a joke about my hair bein’ nappy. Thinks you’re home now, wonders why you don’t visit. Losin’ ha’ memory some.

A beat.

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JAMES (V.O.)(CONT) (softer) But yeah Ma, I’m doin’ betta. (slightly accusatory) Whadda’bout you?

His face scrunching up, releasing, scrunching up. He mutters to himself. He paces, hands raising, lowering, grasping at his hair. He kicks his desk and hisses.

JAMES (CONT) Fucking--!

Clenched jaw and anger, his attention draws to his punching bag. At first he just kicks it, the bag hardly moves. His frustration becomes more evident and he kicks it harder, still, hardly moved. He assumes position and throws his fist, the bag sways.

MOM (V.O) Baby.. you know I love you. I’m tryna’ get better. It’s just.. just these streets. They do all sortsa’ pain to you. They took your dad.

A beat. James becomes more frustrated. He punches the bag again, with more force. His facial expression mimicking his frustration, anger, hurt.

MOM (V.O) (CONT) (Wearily) ..Gave me a little somethin’ to hold on to... You know this world ain’t fit fo’ us. No matter how many times they then built on our backs to make it.

James grows more frustrated. His punching becoming more rapid, more angry, more intense. With each punch, as they build, a series of scenes (listed below) occur on screen. The heavy thwack of his fist hitting the punching bag.

SOS. INT. HIGH-SCHOOL HALLWAY- DAY Paul snatching himself out of the SRO’s grip.

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INT/EXT CAR - EVENING McCarthy looking tired, frustrated, red and blue lights flashing over his face as he sits in the car.

EXT. THE CHURCH - DAY The van, the vandalized church.

EXT. THE STREET - EVENING The men playing basketball, sweaty, tired, and laughing. The kids crossing the street.

The Darkman and his daughter.

INT. UNCLE REMUS - EVENING. The Tall Man looking at James, his expression neutral.

EXT. THE STREET - EVENING The Brotha grabbing the Sista by her chin.

Leroy, smoking against a building and counting money. Shanice and KayKay, watching James and McCarthy leave.

[NOTE: Visual of Shanice and KayKay matches with the dialogue Outside Ain’t got no place to go but in.]

MOM (V.O) OutSide ain’t got no place to go but in.

James punches become more rapid, sweating from how hard he works his body. We can see the strain of his muscles. His eyes are red, watery.

We hear the heavy thwacks of his fist, see the bruises sprouting, hear his heavy breathing. Silent tears.

INT. LIVING ROOM / DINING ROOM - EVENING The figurine of Jesus sitting in the dining room by the picture frames flashes.

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JAMES (Sobbing, strained) Goddamnit! Fuck! FUCK! James throws another heavy punch before he slams his forehead against his punching bag. His heart beat is wild, his skin is flushed. He is running on adrenaline, tired, hurt, upset. He sinks to his knees, face pressing into the bag still as he sobs.

JAMES (V.O) Ah’ight ma. I trust you. You gotta try harder. You can’t be tellin’ me to do better if you ain’t doin no better! I do what I’m post’a do. I pray. I kept my head high. I stopped hangin’ out wit Peanut. You gotta quit them drugs ma, you ain’t doin nothin’ but makin’ stuff worse on you. We already got enough problems as it is.

MOM (V.O) I know baby, I know. I promise I’ll do betta’, just.. keep doin whatcha doin’ and thangs gon’ work out alright. I’m sorry I ain’t make it to the ceremony but I know you did great, I got a letter from yo teacha about what you’d been nominated fo’ and I’m so proud’a you.

The voice of WEST, a white man in his 40s speaks.

WEST (V.O.) Times up Mrs. Flowers. Say your goodbyes.

MOM (V.O) I gotta go, but don’t you worry ‘bout me.. I’m gon’ be alright. We was born into struggle, and we gon’ breathe and work through it. Ain’t gon’ let the stank kill me.

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Flashback Begin: MOM (V.O) (CONT) I love you, baby, you know that right?

INT. LIVING ROOM / DINING ROOM - AFTERNOON Memory: James sitting at the Dining room table, food being passed around. Two black women sit at the table with him. One of the women, GRANDMA is obviously older. Everything from her style to the way she acts portrays a healthy older Black woman. The other woman, Mom, acts as a young middle aged Mother who had a son young would. Boisterous, happy, active. We don’t see the women’s faces, only their body shapes, we hear excitable talking, laughter, happiness from this time, an echo, fading out.

End Flashback.

INT. JAMES BEDROOM - EVENING The fading laughter leads into James quiet shuddering breaths, him in tears and curled into his punching bag.

JAMES (V.O) Yeah ma, I do. I love you too.

End.

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A N A L Y T I C A L

N O N F I C T I O N

“Leaving me unsure of my own eyes:” Scopophilia and Racial Entitlement in Valerie Martin’s Property Chi Le

In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey argues that the film spectators using a male gaze engage in two different activities. On the one hand, they voyeuristically enjoy a character –– usually a woman –– being punished and controlled. On the other hand, they derive narcissistic pleasure from identifying with someone onscreen, often the central male protagonist. In Property, Valerie Martin employs similar scopophilic elements to construct the distorted perception of the white mistress, Manon, symbolically through the spyglass and mirror, thereby exposing and condemning Manon’s racial entitlement. Whereas the spyglass represents Manon’s tendency to derive power from voyeurism, the mirror is a manifestation of her narcissism in perceiving Sarah –– her black servant –– as her double image. However, unlike the film spectator whose scopophilic tendency is encouraged by traditional Hollywood cinematic apparatus, Manon finds her vision subverted, shattered, and even turned against her. By examining the way scopophilia functions in Property, this paper argues that the spyglass and the mirror represent Manon’s perverted worldview, and therefore their destruction is a direct challenge to her racial entitlement. The disintegration of scopophilic fantasy in Martin’s novel shows that the gaze conceptualized by Mulvey is not necessarily a male gaze, but that it can be a female/lesbian gaze in a relationship charac-

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terized by a power imbalance.

In her essay, Mulvey uses Lacanian psychoanalysis to explain the way classical Hollywood films employ the male gaze. Women’s lack is important in structuring the symbolic order because it gives meaning to the phallus in a binary relationship. Mulvey discusses how the male gaze always posits the audience as a man looking at women.

Since the women’s lack represents the fear of castration, film has two ways to deal with it: 1) by positing women as erotic objects, using the narrative to punish or somehow reclaim the women, or 2) by making us identify with the man, who fetishizes the women and thus negates the fear. Regarding the first scopophilic activity, Mulvey explains that it “arises from pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight” (Mulvey 1175). Traditionally, women connote “to-be-looked-at-ness”: they are both looked at and displayed, functioning as “erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium” (Mulvey 1175,1176). This voyeuristic pleasure is associated with sadism: “pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt (immediately associated with castration), asserting control of subjugating the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness” (Mulvey 1177). Sadism functions well within a narrative, where events transpire and lead to the punishment of the women.

In Property, the voyeuristic side of scopophilia manifests in Manon’s gratification from watching slaves subjected to violence and degradation. Addressing the power derived from voyeurism, Stephanie Li comments that: “Manon’s gaze is the most significant power she has” (Li 245). Li discusses the scene where Manon watches through a spyglass as her husband and slave master, Gaudet, forces the naked enslaved boys to huddle onto a swinging rope and drop themselves into the water. Gaudet later beats the boys until one of them becomes sexually aroused. As he punishes them for this act, Gaudet takes pleasure from proving that they are nothing but mindless brutes. Li observes that Manon watches “not to discover what will happen next but because she wants to see the brutal scene unfold” (Li 245). The erotic descriptions of the slaves expose Manon’s desire to sexualize the boys and the violence inflicted upon them: “The boys rub against each other; they can’t help it. Their limbs become entwined, they struggled to hang on, and it isn’t long before one comes out of the water with his member raised” (Martin 10). Since Manon is the narrator and we look at things from her point of view, the scene denotes an unaddressed sexual aspect underlying Manon’s observation of the brutality. Moreover, like a spectator watching a film, Manon enjoys the show at a safe distance, maintaining “a separation of the erotic identity of the subject from the object on the screen” (Mulvey 1175). Though Manon is disgusted by Gaudet finding

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sexual arousal in violence, she is complicit through her act of voyeurism. Later in the novel, Manon exhibits sadistic pleasure when she learns to make this degradation her own by sexually assaulting Sarah.

As Manon sucks at Sarah’s breast, she imagines herself being viewed by others: “Manon wants her perversity to be seen, as if by having witnesses to her attack on Sarah she will gain new power and shed the confines of her social position” (Li 250). It is Manon’s position as a white woman that allows her to construct the fantasy and enact it in real life.

One aspect Li neglects to elaborate in her discussion of voyeurism is the way Manon is eventually pushed into the role of someone being stalked and deprived of power and security. While an audience can voyeuristically enjoy the subjugation of female characters from the other side of the screen, Manon is vulnerable to subversion of power every time she is being viewed by the enslaved subjects. In the novel, voyeurism works both ways. It is how the masters perceive the slaves, but it is also how the slaves regain power from the masters and expose the latter’s insecurity. Regarding Manon’s vulnerability, Li briefly discusses it by pointing out: “Manon is only made guilty when Sarah looks at her” (Li 246). As Manon nurses Sarah’s breast, she reflects the way Sarah’s gaze repels her because, “Just as Sarah’s gaze indicted Manon for looking at the fighting slave boys, her gaze here would affirm the white woman’s guilt and perversity” (Li 251). This argument can be further complicated when we consider that through the progression of the novel, the threat of the black gaze becomes something much more sinister to Manon as she confronts the possibility of the slave’s uprisings.

Despite several hints of the upcoming insurgents, Manon is woefully disconnected from the reality of a slave rebellion. She dismisses the risk again and again as she once says to amuse herself, looking out from the window: “I don’t see any signs of an uprising out here” (Martin 79). Nonetheless, every time the idea of slave rebellion penetrates Manon’s worldview, it is tied to her fear of being watched. This brings us back to the scene where Manon catches sight of a black man from the window in the middle of the night: “a negro dressed in a white shirt and loose breeches that whipped around in the wind” (Martin 30).

His presence deeply troubles Manon, undoubtedly because he signifies the possibility of a revolt, but the fact that, “He was standing very still, his arms crossed, gazing up at the house,” also recalls her fear of being detected, or of having her gaze returned (Martin 30). This moment of fright is reminiscent of the scene where Manon wakes up at night, only to discover Sarah, with “her wide eyes watching me, and I thought, She has been watching me like that this entire night” (Martin 18). While Manon derives perverse delectation from witnessing black slaves suf-

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fer, their gazes elicit terror from her, for she cannot understand their intentions the same way she cannot read Sarah’s expressions, whose emotions are off-limits to Manon.

The threat of the black’s gaze is amplified when Manon visits her mother’s house, where she hears whispering between a man and a woman in the middle of the night. Unable to identify the source of the voices, she finds herself thinking: “I’m going mad” (Martin 73). While there is no confirmation that she is being watched by whoever is talking in the dark, the eerie scene denotes the feeling of being closely observed: “One voice, then another, then a pause. I turned onto my back and lay still, listening. There was nothing… I closed my eyes. At once the whispering began again… I slipped out of the bed and knelt on the bare floor. The voice stopped; there was no answer” (Martin 73). That the voices cease every time Manon opens her eyes or when she attempts to locate the source of the noise evokes dread and apprehension. The scene depicts Manon as someone who might be observed but is made helpless by the fact she cannot identify whoever is speaking or watching her.

The terror-induced paranoia is replicated and intensified during the night when Gaudet’s house is taken over by black insurgents.

This time Manon feels with more certainty that she is being watched: “High against the jamb, the upper part of a black face with only one eye showing peered in at me. In the same moment I saw it, it slipped away, leaving me unsure of my own eyes” (Martin 80). Despite being discovered, the eye only disappears for a moment before returning to peering at her in the dark: “When I looked back at the doorway, there was the single eye again, watching me” (Martin 80). Whoever is staring at Manon is not disturbed by or afraid of her presence. Rather the gaze of the black individual almost paralyzes Manon and renders her powerless, transforming her into the target of voyeurism, who no longer occupies a position to reject or return the gaze. There is an uncanny inversion as the roles are reversed. Whereas Manon, a white woman, once derived power from witnessing slaves subjected to violence and humiliation and fantasizes about being watched as she sexually dominates her black slave, now she surrenders her power through the act of being watched by the black insurgent who has invaded her home. Like the slave boys whom she spied through the glass, Manon is at the mercy of a voyeur.

Manon’s home, where she can perform the white gaze to assert power over the enslaved, is now made uncanny by the reversal of roles: the black voyeur subverts the power of the white and becomes her horrifying inversion.

The slaves’ revolt in many ways destroys and reshapes the way Manon sees herself and black slaves. After returning from the forest,

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where she has been hunted down by black rebels, Manon comes home to discover: “The spyglass was dismantled and lay in pieces on the carpet, there were the gashes in the dining table, a curtain down, a mirror shattered so that only glass splinters remained in the frame” (Martin 100). The spyglass has been used by Manon to voyeuristically engage in the suffering of slaves. It has secured her a safe and privileged position where she assumes absolute power to watch and savor the debasement of black subjects, where she is insusceptible to the power of the black gaze. At the same time, the novel demonstrates that this constructed worldview shatters and collapses as Manon becomes the target of voyeurism. This separates the ways the gaze operates within a story screen and in reality. Whereas a film spectator can freely take voyeuristic satisfaction from watching women being shamed and mastered on-screen, the screen through which Manon indulges her sadistic gratification is the construct of her subjective world. The damage to Manon’s spyglass, caused by the people who Manon perceives as inferior, embodies her failed fantasy of voyeurism as well as the reality of her racial entitlement. Manon now has to confront a world where the power she gains from voyeurism is subverted and turned against her.

Whereas the spyglass represents the voyeuristic side of scopophilia, the mirror in Property is an object of narcissism and is associated with the constitution of the ego. The shattered mirror symbolizes another significant way Manon sees herself and others, for it represents her relationship with Sarah, who Manon once believes to be her double.

Regarding the narcissistic aspect of scopophilia, Mulvey states that it “demands identification of the ego with the object on the screen through the spectator’s fascination with and recognition of his like” (Mulvey 1175). Since men are reluctant to be sexually objectified, the audience is encouraged to identify with the central male protagonists –– the active figures who advance the story and control the film fantasy. As this identification occurs, “the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence” (Mulvey 1176). Whereas the women are erotic objects, the male characters become “the more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego conceived in the original moment of recognition in front of the mirror” (Mulvey 1176). This narcissistic aspect explains how Manon perceives Sarah as her doppelganger, but Manon’s perception is further complicated by the fact that she filters the image of Sarah through both the spyglass and the mirror, thereby demonstrating that she considers Sarah as simultaneously the erotic object and the ideal ego.

In Freud’s “The Uncanny,” doubles refer to people “who are to be considered identical by reason of looking alike… one possesses

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knowledge, feeling and experience in common with the other, identifies himself with another person… similar situations, a same face, or character-trait, or twist of fortune, or a same crime, or even a same name recurring throughout several consecutive generations” (Freud 9).

Through the progression of the novel before the insurrection, Manon continuously sees Sarah as her double and strongly wants to perceive a connection between her and Sarah. She tries to make conversations with her servant, guesses her emotions, predicts the meaning of her expressions, and even adopts Sarah’s mannerisms to annoy her husband: “This unnerves him. It’s a trick I learned from Sarah” (Martin 13).

Despite her resentment at her husband’s infidelity, Manon seems to have a grudging respect for Sarah, admitting: “on those occasions when she bothers to speak, she [Sarah] makes sense” (Martin 13). More importantly, Manon is pleased that Sarah and she share intense hatred and resentment towards Gaudet, as she admits to Dr. Sanchez: “And this one [Sarah] suits me. She hates him [Gaudet] as much as I do” (Martin 35).

From Manon’s perspective, Sarah and she are united on the same front, stuck in the same circumstances: they are both subjected to Gaudet’s patriarchal domination. Neither wants to have sex with him, but neither can accuse him of rape.

The complex way Manon perceives Sarah is best characterized in the scene where Manon watches Sarah in the mirror as the latter brushes her hair. Manon closely observes Sarah through the mirror, noting the details of Sarah’s face and hands: “I looked at her reflection, her face intent on the task, a few drops of moisture on her forehead… I watched her long fingers smoothing back the waves at my temples; she watched her hands too, looking for any gray hairs to pull out” (Martin 16). On the one hand, we know this is not the first or the only time Manon’s voyeuristic streak manifests itself. Manon’s craving for Sarah is exposed because Sarah is the only person Manon gazes at so attentively, and this is another example: “Her hair was all undone, her eyes bright, she was wearing a loose dressing gown I’d never seen before” (Martin 42). Manon tends to describe in detail the way Sarah looks, and this is the kind of attention that she has never given Gaudet, her own husband. The mirror now functions as a glass material where Manon can justify her intense voyeuristic observation of her servant. On the other hand, it can be understood as the manifestation of Manon’s narcissism and her reliance on Sarah in constituting her ego. While their reflections are side by side, Manon is occupied with Sarah’s image rather than her own, reinforcing the idea that they are two of the same person. According to Mulvey, the scopophilia rooted in voyeurism and the one stemming from narcissism, though different and contradictory as they are, can function in the same text: “This tension and the shift

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from one pole to the other can structure a single text” (Mulvey 1177).

Manon sees Sarah not only through the mirror as a double, but also looks at Sarah with the voyeuristic intents that rely on the vision of a spyglass: Sarah is the person who Manon perceives as her own reflection, but also the one who she wants to possess and subdue.

The notion of Manon and Sarah functioning as uncanny reflections of one another is also evident in Martin’s focus on bodily fluids, in particular milk, which is closely associated with Sarah, a mother who has to feed her own infant. Manon sucking on Sarah’s breast has to do with her attraction with Sarah as much as the death of Manon’s mother, which prompts Manon to assert dominance over Sarah, to indulge in her desire to cope with the sudden gap in her life now that the support from her mother is gone. There is an uncanny inversion as we recall that black fluids ooze from Manon’s mother’s white body while white milk comes from Sarah’s black breast. After being stained by black fluids, Manon grasps for balance by seeking Sarah, entranced by the “white drop formed at her nipple” (Martin 59), a direct contradiction with the decay of her mother’s corpse. To counter the black invasion of her mother’s body, Manon dominates the black body and replaces the black fluid of death with the nurturing white milk, as an attempt to re-establish her identity as a daughter and as a white woman.

Sarah being positioned as Manon’s mother also recalls the Lacanian idea of mother as the child’s first mirror. When the mirror stage occurs, we “literally see ourselves in a mirror while metaphorically seeing ourselves in our mother’s image” (Bressler 134). By observing these images, we come to recognize ourselves as “independent beings who are separate from our mothers” (Bressler 134). At the same time, we see our mothers and whoever we project onto as an ideal self, and yearn to become this complete and unified ego. Even when we recognize ourselves as separate entities and find the desire to become a total unity illusory, we still long for our mothers. In relation to the Lacanian mirror stage, Mulvey makes the case that the screen is reminiscent of the mirror in that it “has structures of fascination strong enough to allow temporary loss of ego while simultaneously reinforcing it” (Mulvey 1175). Immersing ourselves in the fantasy world of films and forgetting the ego “is nostalgically reminiscent of that pre-subjective moment of image recognition” (Mulvey 1175). In the scene where Manon nurses Sarah’s breast, Sarah becomes Manon’s mirror image insofar as she functions as Manon’s mother. Manon’s inability to ascertain whether it is she or Sarah who sighs with pleasure also indicates, “Manon’s longing for her servant and a desire for fusion” (Li 250). The fact that Manon is likely to have a black wet-nurse as a child also reinforces the idea of Manon reverting to the mirror stage, where the child yearns for her

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mother figure, who she misrecognized as the ideal self.

It is unlikely, however, that Sarah sees herself as Manon’s double. Manon’s view of Sarah only goes so far as the extent that she can project her feelings and perception onto her servant. This is particularly true when she sucks on Sarah’s breast, thinking: “I closed my eyes, swallowing greedily. I was aware of a sound, a sigh, but I was not sure if it came from me or from Sarah” (Martin 60). Manon’s projection on Sarah is complete as she does not only dominate Sarah through an act of rape, but also interprets Sarah’s body entirely in the way that she desires. Sarah’s gaze does not direct at Manon: “She’s afraid to look at me, I thought. And she’s right to be. If she looked at me, I would slap her” (Martin 60). Knowing that Sarah’s gaze might condemn her or affirm her guilt, Manon considers the physical abuse she would inflict on Sarah if her servant resisted her sexual violation. There are many possible explanations for why Sarah refuses to look at Manon, but like any other time in the novel, we never get to know what Sarah is truly feeling or thinking because her character is always filtered through Manon’s skewed perspective. It is only after Sarah flees from the estate that Manon admits she does not understand Sarah at all: she cannot comprehend why Sarah wants to run away after Gaudet is dead. As Manon tries to reach a horse so that she can escape the insurgents, she is met with Sarah’s surprisingly violent resistance: “She turned on me in a fury, tearing at my face with her free hand, her sharp nails digging into my already wounded cheek” (Martin 86). Sarah’s attack on Manon’s face recalls Manon’s intense observation of both herself and Sarah as Manon watches Sarah brushing her hair. Sarah tearing at her face destroys Manon’s illusion of a self-image that she believes is somehow reflective of Sarah. Just as Sarah refusing to look through the spyglass “is a rejection of both the master’s vision and his tools”, Sarah’s assault on Manon’s face is a rejection of being seen as Manon’s double (Li 246).

The illusion of doubling is also shattered when Manon runs into the woods, finding herself surrounded by insects: “Insects flew into my mouth and eyes, buzzing louder and louder until I couldn’t hear anything else” (Martin 87). This is not the first time Manon’s space is being invaded by insects. It also occurs when she orders Sarah to kill a fly “landing on the mirror and crawling over our reflection”, as an attempt to keep their reflection clear and defined (Martin 16). The insects now flying into Manon’s eyes signifies the breakdown of her worldview: the way she perceives herself and Sarah is no longer clear, and in fact, she realizes she cannot see at all.

Ironically, after the revolt, Manon and Sarah continue to function as inverted reflections, even though Manon has been disillusioned with such a view. The uncanniness is expressed in the way that both

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women escape by disguising themselves as their opposite. As Manon is hunted down by insurgents, she is forced to smear mud all over her face the way she saw the blacks slaves had done. The next morning, Manon finds herself looking “at a black hand”, which is her own, but for a moment it becomes unrecognizable even to herself (Martin 88).

Despite Sarah’s rejection of them being mirror images, Manon covering herself with mud to look black is an inversion of Sarah dressing like a white to avoid capture. What leads Manon to see through Sarah’s ploy is the mannerism and eye contact she observes from the shoemaker, Mr. Gaston: As I thanked him for his kind words, he lowered his eyes, then raised them again, and with a slow smile inquired how he might be of service to me. Something in his manner, perhaps it was only the irritating lack of deference, reminded me of Sarah. We discussed my shoes and parted agreeably. When I was on the street, I thought of how he had lowered his eyes modestly, then the suddenness of his redirected gaze (Martin 114).

The white man’s lack of deference reminds Manon of the way Sarah has behaved. This is how Manon initially recognizes the possibility that Sarah disguises herself as Mr. Roget, a white man, though later Manon claims that the reason for her suspicion comes from the observation that a sick man would have brought a boy with him, instead of traveling with a woman and a baby. Just as Manon becomes unrecognizable to herself, and perhaps even to Delphine, who asks “Is that you, missus?” when Manon returns home after the night of insurrection, Sarah becomes indistinguishable from white subjects by acting like “a presentable gentleman”, a role she plays so well that according to Manon’s aunt, “Everyone Mr. Leggett interviewed remarked on his aristocratic manner” (Martin 135). That Sarah presents herself as a male also mirrors Manon’s desire to embrace masculine qualities and claim the patriarchal power for herself. This craving manifests in the scene where Manon nurses Sarah’s breasts while recalling her husband: “This is what he does, I thought” (Martin 60). The scene is framed as a sexual assault tinctured with homoeroticism. Regarding Manon’s exploitation of Sarah’s body, Amy King writes: Becoming voyeur to her own actions gives Manon stereotypically masculine qualities, for she now watches herself just as her husband watches the adolescent slaves

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during the perverse games he constructs for the purpose of inflicting sexual shame to assert his own authority. While Manon observes these games with disgust through her spyglass at the beginning of the novel… she makes the masculine master’s rights of sexual exploitation and voyeurism her own during the nursing scene (King 225).

From Manon’s point of view, Sarah has experienced what she, a white woman, never has: “She [Sarah] has traveled about the country as a free white man” (Martin 137). This is, however, only Manon’s projection of her feelings and desire onto Sarah, who likely never feels relieved or relishes in the taste of freedom during her journey through the South. Manon’s pursuit of Sarah is “one way of affirming her racial entitlements though she will never have the sexual and gendered freedoms of a man” (Li 253). It is also a way Manon reestablishes their identities as doubles, by continuing to project her feelings onto Sarah and remind her servant of their shared circumstances: “He [Walter]’s as much your responsibility as mine” (Martin 139). Despite Manon’s resentment and disgust towards Walter, the boy is their connection to what she considers to be Manon’s and Sarah’s common past. Plus, by sarcastically inquiring Sarah about Gaudet’s and Walter’s alikeness –– “Does he remind you of someone?” –– Manon attempts to reassert her illusory bond with Sarah through their mutual hatred towards Gaudet (Martin 139). Ironically, when Sarah actually speaks to voice her personal experiences, reminiscing about her time in the North where she was treated as or at least almost as an equal, Manon scorns and finds the idea absolutely ludicrous. Manon’s narcissism prevents her from considering her black servant as an individual, but instead always a manifestation of her own feelings and perceptions. This demonstrates Manon’s disconnection from reality as much as her inability to see Sarah as anything else beyond her own mirror reflection.

This essay has discussed the way Valerie Martin employs scopophilic elements to illustrate Manon’s false worldview through the notion of spyglass and mirror. Whereas the spyglass reflects Manon’s tendency to derive perverse delectation from watching black people getting abused and humiliated, the mirror represents her narcissism in insisting on perceiving Sarah as her double. Sarah is the person who Manon both identifies with and wants to control and master. The destruction of these objects signifies the collapse of Manon’s worldview as a slaveholder. This suggests that while scopophilia can function without a screen, its power can be negated and subverted. By examining the function of scopophilia in Property, the essay shows that anyone,

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male or not, can employ the gaze to sexualize another individual who they have power over. However, this power is neither impervious nor permanent. When confronted with reality, the worldview constructed by the gaze is always threatened to fracture and disintegrate.

Works Cited Bressler, Charles E. Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice, 5th ed., Pearson, 2011.

Freud. “The Uncanny.” Translated by Alex Strachey, 1919.

King, Amy K. “Valerie Martin’s Property and the Failure of the Lesbian Counterplot.”

Mississippi Quarterly The Journal of Southern Cultures, vol. 63, 2010, pp. 211-231.

Li, Stephanie. “Valerie Martin’s Property: A Neo-enslaver Narrative.”

Mississippi Quarterly The

Journal of Southern Cultures, vol. 68, 2015, pp. 235-255.

Martin, Valerie. Property. Vintage Books, 2004.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts

and Contemporary Trends, edited by David H. Richter, 3rd ed.,

Bedford, 2006, pp. 1172-1180.

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Advancement of Racial Equality in Titus Andronicus Aditi Parikh

Shakespearean plays possess a persistent undercurrent of racial, social, and cultural commentary coursing through their storylines.

A definitive product of his times, these creations leave readers wondering if they are mere signs of his ignorance or in reality his ingenious, radical, socially-aware nature. In Titus Andronicus, the racialized nature of Early Modern society rises to prominence through the distinctive depictions of the white Romans, darker Goths, and societally inferior Blackamoors. Interestingly, race extensively propels forward the conflicts imbibed in this tragedy, ranging from the Romans’ hatred for the barbarous Goths to Lucius’s inhuman treatment of Aaron’s biracial child. Thus, through this essay I will investigate whether Shakespeare can be considered a promoter of racial equality, with reference to the audience responses his writing in Titus Andronicus invokes. I will analyze the villainous roles and plotlines attributed to Aaron and Tamora, the dark exceptions to the white-washed scape of Rome. The understanding of their diabolic depictions will be supplemented by an exploration of the ruthless treatment shown to them by the Romans in the play, which in turn humanizes them as antagonists. The arguments will build-up to the realization that irrespective of Shakespeare’s own social views, his works do have the effect of raising awareness about racial equality amongst his audiences, both contemporary and Early Modern.

The primarily negative depictions of Aaron the Blackamoor and Tamora, the Queen of Goths, epitomize archetypal representations of their respective races in the world of Titus Andronicus. Their villainous portrayals are conflations of both their own nefarious actions and the Romans’ reprehensible attitude and treatment towards them.

Tamora’s quest for revenge against the Andronici clan drives her to commit extremely heinous acts, making her appear intensely villainous in the eyes of the audience. She becomes obsessed with obtaining revenge and is portrayed as being willing to go to any extent to find her vengeance: “I’ll find a day to massacre them all” (Shakespeare

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2.1.453). Here, she demonstrates that she is willing to smash any and all moral and ethical bounds in her bloodlust and her quest for revenge, furthering her image as the dark instigator of all the violence that follows in the play. Not only does she encourage the rape of Lavinia but she even goes as far as committing blasphemy by adopting the habiliment of the God of Revenge to entrap and defeat Titus. Through her, Shakespeare makes a critique of appropriate and inappropriate femininity which is a manifestation of her inferior racial identity and villainy. Not only does she engage in an affair with a Blackamoor, but her willingness to stoop to seduction and the usage of her body to defeat her enemies, further demonizes her in the audience’s eyes: “If Tamora entreat him (Titus), then he will…” (5.1.96). This line clearly shows her confidence in her ability to sway any man using her feminine wiles, making her seem all the more detestable to audiences. Shakespeare’s choices in Tamora’s cruel characterization thus serve to intensify his audience’s aversion towards her race.

However, Tamora’s racial identity led to her persistent mistreatment at the hands of the Romans, leading audiences to question their hatred for her. The barbarous Goths were recognized by Early Modern audiences as possessing an inferior whiteness in comparison to the “pure” Romans. Tamora, in line with this racial standard, is demeaned by the Romans from the very first scene of the play, despite being the queen. The audience’s introduction to Tamora occurs in Act One Scene One, where she plays the vanquished and now imprisoned queen begging for mercy on the life of her son. As her pleas fall on deaf, unyielding ears and her son is sacrificed, a sharp power dynamic quickly emerges between the Goths and the Romans by placing Tamora in a position of significant inferiority and helplessness.

Lavinia, Titus’s sole “perfect” daughter, then becomes Tamora’s foil who amplifies her destructive, vengeful, and immensely unladylike qualities, and symbolically represents the power imbalance between the Goths and the Romans. In Act Two Scene Three, this stark contrast between the two women –– and by association their two races –– is brought to the foreground. Despite Tamora’s marriage to Saturninus, which made her the Roman Queen, Lavinia, her subject, felt like she had the right to assault Tamora’s character, unprovoked, due to her relationship with Aaron: “Under your patience empress/Tis thought you have a goodly gift in horning” (2.3.66- 67). Here, Lavinia shames Tamora for being an infidel, in the very same breath as she gives her the respect of being the empress, showing how little status means in Roman society if you are of a darker skin color. Even as Lavinia implored Tamora to stop Chiron and Demetrius from violating her, she felt the need to use Tamora’s darker skin to remark at her wicked, sinful nature:

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“Tis true the raven doth not hatch a lark” (2.3.149). Lavinia dehumanizes Tamora for her darker skin color by comparing her to a raven and comments on her inability to birth sons of a superior complexion and disposition than her own. In this instance, the daring shown on the part of the otherwise respectful and subdued Lavinia was a clear consequence of the pre-existing power difference between the two women resulting from their skin colors.

Thus, Shakespeare’s depiction of Roman superiority over the Goths condones his audience’s mistreatment of people of color. However, in the intensity of the Romans’ persecution of Tamora for her Goth identity, the audience also becomes forced to reckon with their own biases and prejudices, even if only subconsciously. The audience cannot help but notice how much easier it was for them to hate Tamora, a darker-skinned woman, than it was to hate the equally destructive but white Titus or Lucius Andronicus. Through the demeaning treatment meted out to Tamora by the Romans, such as in the sacrifice of her son and Lavinia’s abuse of her, as well as her racially-tied proclivity for exaggerated evil displayed in her quest for murder, the audience’s own racial attitudes become implicated. In this manner, Shakespeare, irrespective of original intent, engenders a deep discomfort in his audiences regarding their own discriminatory tendencies and promotes ideals of racial equality.

Shakespeare endorses extremely damaging perceptions about Blackamoors through Aaron’s shockingly despicable characterization as the singular named black character in Titus Andronicus. If Tamora was the cause for all the death and destruction in the play, Aaron was the one who equipped her with the tools and plans required to wreak havoc on Rome’s nobility. He was the one who furnished Chiron and Demetrius with the exact instructions to rape Lavinia which set off the entire explosive and heavily destructive course of the play: “My lords, a solemn hunting is in hand” (2.3.112). In this quote, he dehumanizes Lavinia by equating her to prey and reveals his intensely sadistic and conspiratorial nature. He even devised the scheme to frame Martius and Quintus ––Titus’s sons –– for the murder of Bassianus and he was also the one to fool Titus into sacrificing his hand for the lives of his sons.

What worsened the audience’s disgust for Aaron even more than all his villainy was how unapologetic he was about his horrendous actions: “I have done a thousand dreadful things… And nothing grieves me heartily indeed/But that I cannot do ten thousand more” (5.2.141-144).

Through the use of hyperbole, Aaron makes his defiance of the Romans starkly evident. Moreover, through his repetition of “thousand,” the sheer magnitude of his sins becomes so expansive in the minds of the audience that he is rendered utterly unforgivable. Even in his dying

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moments, Aaron refuses to beg for mercy. Instead of revealing any hint of fear or regret, he continues to make proclamations about his disregard for the Romans and restates his disappointment in the fact that he could not commit more evils towards them. Thus, Shakespeare’s construction of Aaron’s identity as the ultimate offender in the play worsens the audience’s image of Blackamoors.

However, the intense pain and harm inflicted upon Aaron by the Romans humanizes his character to audiences and exposes the cruelty of the Romans. Aaron’s character is introduced to the audience as the Blackamoor with whom the Queen of Goths is having an illicit affair, placing him in a position of shame and degradation, worsened by his skin color. In the Romans’ view of his relationship with Tamora, his body seems to be his only value, underscoring the commercialization of black bodies through slavery. The perceived inferiority of his racial identity seems to empower the Romans into making discriminatory judgments towards him, such as Bassianus alleging that Tamora is being corrupted as a result of her relationship with Aaron: “Believe me, queen, your swart Cimmerian/Doth make your honor of his body’s hue/ Spotted, detested, and abominable” (2.3.72-75). Bassianus hurls racial abuses at Aaron by comparing him to the Cimmerians who forever live in darkness, just as Aaron is fated to do. He also invokes ideals of female honor and chastity by claiming that Tamora’s relationship with Aaron has turned her honor into the loathed color of his skin. Bassianus concludes by using a hate-filled triad to amplify the audience’s revulsion at Aaron’s race.

Another instance of the Romans’ loathing of Blackamoors is evident in Act Four Scene One when Marcus kills a fly and Titus chides him for hurting an innocent creature. However, as soon as Marcus equates the “black ill-favored fly” (4.1.66) to “the empress’ Moor” (4.1.67), all hints of sympathy in Titus disappear, and he feels the need to strike an already-dead fly. Marcus’s claim that black people are “ill-favored” demonstrates the Roman belief that black people are fated to a life of suffering and pain which they may never escape. Marcus and Titus used Aaron’s race to justify the infliction of harm on a blameless creature, demonstrating their racist ideals of how darker-skinned people deserve the torment that is done to them.

Lucius Andronicus further exposes the tyranny and double-standards of the Romans. His behavior towards Aaron, reveals to the audience just how deeply prejudiced the Romans are against people of color and in turn, how audiences that behave in similar ways are also racist. Lucius orders the death of a completely innocent newborn baby, solely to spite Aaron: “First, hang the child, that he may see it sprawl/A sight to vex the father’s soul withal” (5.1.51-52). The threat

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of state violence against black bodies is so extreme that Lucius tries to kill Aaron’s baby first and turn Aaron’s pain at losing his child into a spectacle. He uses sibilance in “sprawl,” “sight,” and “soul,” as well as rhymes in “sprawl” and “withal.” The utilization of these techniques reveals how much joy Lucius draws from the suffering of black people and how insignificant their deaths seem to him through his almost mirthful declaration. Lucius in this manner trivializes and dehumanizes Aaron’s existence and emotions as a black man. Furthermore, Lucius, despite his precious Roman nobility, shows Aaron no dignity or sympathy even in death. He devises the most torturous execution he can for Aaron: “Set him (Aaron) breast-deep in earth, and famish him/There let him stand and rave and cry for food” (5.3.179-180). Lucius views burying a man alive and letting him starve to death as a fair punishment purely as a result of Aaron’s skin color. He wants to see Aaron suffer and make an example out of his death so that Aaron can be a warning to all other black people in Rome. Thus, Shakespeare, through Aaron’s characterization, pits the audience against him and implicitly encourages viewers to hate Aaron for his race. However, through the Romans’ condemnable treatment of Aaron, the audiences are simultaneously forced to come to terms with instances where they have displayed similar racist tendencies. Through Aaron, audiences are pushed to realize that his evolution into wickedness and villainy was a result of the lifelong mistreatment he had received for being black. Resorting to a life of immorality seemed to be his only escape from the life of systemic discrimination that had been pre-determined for him. Thus, upon being shown the Romans’ double standards and unjustifiable brutality towards Aaron, the audience finds themselves re-assessing their own prejudices and empathizing with the villain.

Therefore, Shakespeare succeeds in furthering the cause of racial equality through the discomfort audiences feel at the villainous characterization of Tamora and Aaron and the Roman misconduct inflicted upon them as a result of their race. By characterizing these two specific characters, both people of color, as the conspirators of conflict against Romans in Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare feeds upon pre-existing notions of race and color in Early Modern society to justify insensible violence. However, by using their race as a crutch for their villainy, and inflicting indefensible ill-treatment on them through the Romans, Shakespeare also sparks a deep sense of unease in his audience. The audience cannot help but note that in the world of the play, Aaron and Tamora’s evolution into villains had to have been a consequence of the constant abuse that was meted out to them due to their races. Whether Shakespeare’s motivation was to promote racial equality or not, he succeeds in advancing it by forcing his audiences to sit in the reality of

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their own biases. In conclusion, Shakespeare’s audiences find themselves unable to avoid coming face to face with their own racist tendencies after consuming Titus Andronicus, and thus the play inadvertently adopts the role of advocate and promoter of racial equality as a result.

Works Cited McDonald, Russ. “Titus Andronicus.” The Complete Pelican Shake

speare, edited by Stephen Orgel and A R Braunmuller, by

William Shakespeare, Penguin Books Ltd, 2002, pp. 1211–1250.

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Systemic Oppression and the Construct of Individuality within Marginalized Groups Shae Gabriel

Modern and contemporary literature tells the stories of the here and now. The how, when, and why of these stories begets certain questions from the reader: Why fiction? Why fiction now? How does the fiction interact with the reader and make them question the modern world around them? Miriam Toews and Kazuo Ishiguro challenge readers with quasi-autobiographical narratives to look through the eyes of marginalized and oppressed communities. These narratives focus on systems of oppression that control individuals by removing their autonomy and linking their worth to their use as products rather than people.

Toews and Ishiguro put the long-term effects of systemic oppression in conversation with individualism and a communities’ sense of belonging.

Why fiction is an important question to ask. The medium in which an author chooses to share their story affects the reader’s perception of the narrative. Fiction allows authors to take certain liberties with their stories that nonfiction does not. Reality is dynamic, complex, and more complicated than concise. It is hard to condense 100% factual events onto a page without feeling like something important is being left out –– purposefully or not. This can breed distrust between the author and the reader which distracts from the novel itself. That is not to say that nonfiction does not have its place and time, but rather that when narrowing down to a particular message or theme, fiction can be more concise. Reality can be bound up in the truth of the details whereas fiction can embrace character arcs and what might seem like

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coincidence in real life becomes thematic in literature. Reality is rarely as thematic as fiction is allowed to be.

Women Talking is a great example of this. Miriam Toews’ novel is based on true events that happened in Manitoba, Bolivia. By using her own fictional Mennonite community, Toews provides commentary on the Mennonite system and the atrocities that occurred. With how closed off the Mennonite communities are, it is unlikely even if Toews had wanted to write the nonfiction version of the story that she would have had access to it. Another power Toews holds by creating a work of fiction is creating a new ending that better serves the message Women Talking is meant to send. In reality, the women do not leave Manitoba, nor do the men return, eight of them having been sentenced to jail; however, this does not mean that the narrative of forgiving their abusers is fictional. In an interview conducted by BBC, Bernard Dyck –– a Mennonite farmer –– said, “We would welcome them back with great pleasure. And if they need anything, we’d like to help them. Our ministers always say we have to forgive, even if someone’s committed a crime” (Pressly). Another reason fiction is a helpful medium for this story is that because of the isolation of Mennonite communities it is hard for women to come forward and speak their truth. Toews, as a former Mennonite, helps give a voice to these women through her understanding of their culture but without the censorship that comes from being an active member of the Mennonite community.

Another benefit of the fiction genre is that it places a barrier of separation between the reader and the text. It is hard to be objective when reading about your own reality. Breaking down oppressive systems and exposing them can be easier through the veil of metaphor that helps readers link the fiction to reality through their own thought process. This is particularly true with Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, Never Let Me Go. The fantastical idea of cloning gives an other-worldly feel to the novel which is belied by the normalcy of its setting in 1990s England.

This mixture of normality and fantasy provides an interesting effect.

The story is connected to our understanding of how the world works, but with the added layer of the cloning system that the book calls us to pay attention to. Fiction also allows Ishiguro to use an extreme example like cloning to provide commentary on the modern medical system and other oppressive cycles that have become normalized in our world.

It is precisely the idea of reflecting on our world that answers the next question: why fiction now? Women Talking and Never Let Me Go detail the stories of those unseen by society. The women of Molotschna are treated as objects, only meant to produce children and pleasure their husbands. Likewise, the clones in Ishiguro’s novel are not given the liberty to have lives, they are simply allowed to exist until their

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organs mature. Both of these groups of people live in the margins of society, overlooked and their existence taken advantage of. These are important narratives to sit up and take notice of in our world, where the marginalized are constantly fighting for their voices to be heard. These books call for the reader to analyze the systems that are upheld in society and look deeper: who benefits? Who is taken advantage of? Who is ignored?

The current political climate puts the idea of bodies and ownership in contention. The current healthcare system perpetuates that idea that only the wealthy deserve to live and, despite strides in women’s rights in that past, the #MeToo movement is startlingly prevalent, and a woman’s right to choose sits on the precipice of being overturned. America is overrun with political unrest and it is our call, as citizens and as people, to listen. The autobiographical-like nature of these novels allows the reader to bear witness to the events of the novel and that is a powerful thing. It is one thing to hear of struggles from a third-person perspective, but the closeness of August and Kathy to the narratives gives a sense of authenticity and honesty. These books do not call the reader to action; they call the reader to witness. The women Molotschna recorded their meeting, not so they can look back on their notes, but so future generations can look at their decision-making process and hear their voices through the paper. Kathy tells her story and the story of Ruth and Tommy not because it will change the past, but because they are people who deserve to have their past known. Before a course of action can be decided on, the voices of the oppressed need to be heard. Women Talking and Never Let Me Go challenge the reader and ask: are you listening?

One element of these novels that brings home the idea of listening is the autobiographical tone of the stories. Both are told in the first-person point of view which draws the reader into conversation with the “I” pronoun. Women Talking, however, is told from the perspective of August. His account is less a narration of his own life –– through elements of that are present — but a recording of meetings by the women of Molotschna. It might not be from their perspective, but the story still centers around the experiences of the women and their voices are amplified in the text. August is adamant throughout the text that it doesn’t “matter what I think (…) I’m not here to think, I answer, I’m here to take the minutes of your meeting” (Toews 117). This centering on the voices of the oppressed is what opens the dialogue about the experiences of these characters with the reader.

By taking on merely the form of autobiography without being tied to the truth, “these texts and others abandon the need for autobiographical authenticity and suggest an alternative where a creative

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shaping of experienced events provinces a conduit by which a fundamental ‘truth’ is made available” (McDonald 74). Using the first-person perspective allows the reader an in-depth look at the emotions and the memories which shape the characters and emphasis their motivation and the “truth” the book is trying to reveal to the audience. In an interview with Christian Century, Miriam Toews speaks on her past as a member of the Mennonite community and why she has lent her voice to the women of Molotschna. “My novel,” Toews said, “is one small part of a conversation that can’t be silenced” (Palmer 34). Silence is the key to continued oppression, but by framing these narratives through a first-person narrative, it removes the distance that the third-person point of view builds between a reader and the text. It is hard to think about Kathy as a fictional character when she readily engages in dialogue with the reader. “I” gives a sense of personal connection which amplifies the voices of these characters and allows them to reach out to the reader. Recounting their stories is, “transformed into witnessing” because the reader becomes a part of the narrative (McDonald 81).

By lending such an intimate perspective both of these books are told from, it is clear to see the lack of autonomy the women of Molotschna and the clones of 1990s England are given. Their first-person narration reveals the uncertain sense of self that is held by these characters who have been confined to these oppressive systems their entire lives. When Kathy introduces herself to the reader as a carer and a Hailsham student who is transitioning into being a donor at the end of the year, “it becomes clear that she has no identity outside of this” system (Quabeck 217). Similarly, the women struggle with their identities outside of their male-dominated community. They have been physically violated and abused by these men who hold so much power over them it is hard to have an identity that does not fall underneath them. Salome argues that under the control of the men, “we fall into the category of animals” and are given no humane nor spiritual rights (Toews 25). If women are only as useful as cattle and pigs then there is no place for them in heaven. Another element that lends itself to this beastial metaphor is the women’s position in the Mennonite community. They are meant to be mothers and to take over household tasks that are deemed too unimportant for the men, namely the task of raising the children. Their worth is measured in the children they produce, not their own merit.

In Mennonite communities, it is believed that “if a woman does not ‘act properly’ (i.e. smoking, drinking, straying from God), her pregnancy may result in the birth of an ill or disabled child” (Kulig and Fan 159). By this logic, women must not sin, not because they want to reach Heaven, but so they will produce healthy children. This applies

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even when the sin is perpetrated on the women by the men of the Molotschna community. The rapists assault unmarried women and children indiscriminately and therefore force the sin of premarital sex and pregnancy out of wedlock upon the women. However, these men are not held accountable for their actions; instead, the women must forgive their abusers or they will be guilty of the sin of rebellion, despite the fact that in being violated –– in Mennonite philosophy –– they have already sinned. A woman’s spiritual and practical worth, according to this tradition, is held in her body, not her soul, whereas men are allowed to exist in tandem as body, mind, and soul while not being held to the same standards of purity. In the same way that the women of Molotschna are held to a standard of bodily perfection, so are the clones in Ishiguro’s novel. While the clones are not required to remain spiritually or morally “pure,” their physical body is meant to remain pristine.

They receive weekly medical examinations and the idea of smoking or taking other drugs was absolutely forbidden. Imagery and mentions of drug use were removed from books, films, and any sort of media the clones had access to. When another student asked if Miss Lucy ever smoked, “she might as well have asked if Miss Lucy had ever attacked anyone with an ax” (Ishiguro 68). Unlike the women of Molotschna, for whom bodily purity is a moral or spiritual qualification, bodily purity is physical for the clones in Ishiguro’s novel. The clones are not allowed to participate in activities that might harm their bodies; to do anything else would be to risk the health of the organs the clones have been created to produce and hinder their ability to treat the illness or disability of the organic members of society. It is their sole reason for existence.

Like how Mennonite women are chiefly valued for their ability to produce children, the clones are only valued for the vital organs they will provide someone else with later in life.

Worth in these novels is also intrinsically tied to suffering. As clones mature and become donors, their health continues to decrease with each donation as their organs are steadily removed. Their purpose in life is to become ill and deteriorate so that others will not until they are truly reduced to useless tissue and bone to finally be discarded. ...even if you’ve technically completed, you’re still conscious in some sort of way; how then you find there are more donations, plenty of them, on the other side of that line; how there are no more recovery centres, no carers, no friends; how there’s nothing to do except watch your remaining donations until they switch you off (Ishiguro 279).

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There is no reassurance of peace for the donors, only fear of infinite suffering hiding in the shadows of the unknown. The belief of suffering has a more hopeful tilt in the Mennonite belief system; however, suffering is still integral to their existence. In a study conducted by Judith C. Kulig and HaiYan Fan of the University of Lethbridge, they learned that “suffering related to physical illness is linked to spirituality (i.e. belief in God) and the idea that illness tests one’s faith” (Kulig and Fan 157). Did God send the men to rape the women of Molotschna as a test? Mennonite philosophy states that “being sick. It’s a test. Because we didn’t listen to God” (Kulig and Fan 158). Both of these communities have been forced into a position where they must, “define themselves almost masochistically through that which cripples them” because of the suffering that is systematically perpetrated on them both physically and mentally (Quabeck 222).

When a group is systematically defined by their suffering, it has long-term effects on both individual and group understanding of self-worth. In “Cultural Rights and the Politics of Recognition in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go”, Franziska Quabeck argues that, “the formation of identity depends on the recognition received from those around us” (Quabeck 211). The women of Molotschna’s identities are primarily informed by the men because they are the ones who are in a position of power. Mennonite communities and values are so closely linked to their biblical text that men are given another aspect of control over the women and their understanding of the bible because the women are not taught to read. Therefore, men are the only ones with the knowledge to define the women and their place in the world.

My point, says Salome, is that by leaving, we are not necessarily disobeying the men according to the Bible, because we, the women, do not know exactly what is in the Bible, being unable to read it. Furthermore, the only reason why we feel we need to submit to our husbands is because our husbands have told us that the Bible decrees it (Toews 157).

It is not until this small group of women decides to create their own group that their identities even have the possibility to begin to shift because they reject the men and their position of power and begin to reclaim their faith. Much in the same way, Kathy and the other students at Hailsham are defined by their guardians, and largely by society as a whole. This does not stop Kathy and the other students from forming their own unique identities, but only in small ways such as the books they read or the art they made. In the grand scheme of society, their,

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“lives are set out for you. You’ll become adults, then before you’re old, before you’re even middle aged, you’ll start to donate your vital organs… You were brought into this world for a purpose, and your futures, all of them, have been decided” (Ishiguro 81).

This is where the paths of the women of Molotschna and the clones in Ishiguro’s novel diverge. The central message of Women Talking is a story of reclamation and a new beginning, while Kathy’s story perpetuates the clones’ systemic construction and deconstruction. The clones in Never Let Me Go have more in common with the “Do Nothing” women in the Molotschna community than the group of women that the book follows. Upon the news that their rapists will be returning to the colony, the women are given three options: do nothing, stay and fight, or leave. Some women do nothing in order to maintain the status quo, too afraid of change and believing the rhetoric of the men that the loft community chooses to question. The clones are also given a false sense of control. Once they attend the Cottages, the clones then choose when to begin their training as carers, furthermore, clones are given the illusion of choice when it comes to transition from carer to donor. In reality, there is no choice, there is only the inevitable that is pushed along by a continuous sense of deindividualization and monotony. “Their passivity,” Quabeck argues, “more than anything else proves them to be human, for it is the oppression and misrecognition that they receive from the society around them, which cripples them and makes it impossible for them to resist” (Quabeck 217).

Both the clones and the women of Molotschna have been raised to believe in their worth as commodities, as objects of suffering, not as human beings. As the women ponder their status as animals of the community, Ishiguro gives a unique insight into the clone’s sense of self through Ruth. Ruth is perhaps the character who embodies the system most thoroughly as she strives to be good and proper and looked upon with approval. It’s this model behavior that makes it even more poignant when Ruth breaks down: We all know it. We’re modelled from trash.

Junkies, prostitutes, winos, tramps. Convicts, maybe, just so long as they aren’t psychos.

That’s what we come from. We all know it, so why don’t we say it? (…) If you want to look for possibles, if you want to do it properly, then you look in the gutter. You look in rubbish bins. Look down the toilet, that’s where you’ll find where we all came from” (Ishiguro 166).

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This systemic oppression has led Ruth to look past the system she has been forced to assimilate into to acknowledge her position as an un-autonomous being. It is the same oppression the “Do Nothing” women are being held back from. This begets the question: what allows the women in the loft to overcome their dehumanization and choose to become their own individuals?

Ultimately, the women are driven to fight against their oppression in the name of safety and security not just for themselves but also for future generations. This is what separates the Molotschna women and the clones: the clones have no hope of reproduction because they have been forcibly sterilized. Without this driving factor of future generations to think about, the clones succumb to the system where the women find the strength to press forward. Both groups of people, “seem to become more of a burden to the wider world, which remains much of a mystery” (McDonald 79). Both are kept in isolation and only given a sense of worth inside of their communities that makes the idea of rebellion uncertain. “The only certainty we’ll know is uncertainty,” Salome said, “regardless of where we are. One asserts: Other than the certainty of the power of love” (Toews 53). Kathy loves Ruth and Tommy, but by the time we are receiving Kathy’s story, Ruth and Tommy are gone, taken by the system which has defined their lives.

Quabeck challenges the idea of communities and “how they develop a sense of belonging that is independent from a local rootedness and in how far they are integrated in the society they live in forcefully or voluntarily” (Quabeck 206). In short, they do not. Many of the women of Molotschna are part of the “Do Nothing” group because they cannot separate their identities from the oppressive environment of Molotschna. The trauma of leaving and being forced to create a new identity is seen as more traumatic than forgiving their abusers and returning to the subjugation that has defined their entire lives. Similarly, the clones find it very hard to establish an identity outside of being a donor or a carer. Hailsham attempts to give the children a sense of individuality but in the grand scheme of things a small box of material cast-offs is not the same as a stable sense of self. Neither the women of Molotschna nor the clones have a solid sense of identity outside of their station in the systems that dominate their lives because they are not permitted to have lives outside of those systems. In creating their manifesto, the women in the loft remove themselves from that system and begin anew, finding their own sense of identity and belonging in their values, not the values of their oppressors.

Miriam Toews and Kazuo Ishiguro give voices to those who have been shunted to the side by the modern world through these quasi-autobiographical texts. The authors have placed topics such as autonomy and self-worth in conversation with systemic oppression and

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the long-term consequences of those beliefs being upheld. Through the first person “I” pronoun, we are invited to interact with the text and question not just the systems of oppression analyzed in novels, but also in our everyday lives.

Works Cited Ishiguro, Kazuo. Never Let Me Go. Vintage Canada, 2006.

Kulig, Judith C., HaiYan (LingLing) Fan. “Suffering: Is the Concept Sig

nificant among Low German-speaking Mennonites?” Journal

of Mennonite Studies, vol. 29, 2011, pp. 153-165. Journal of

Mennonite Studies,

jms.uwinnipeg.ca/index.php/jms/article/view/1410. Accessed

18 Nov 2020.

McDonald, Keith. “Days of Past Futures: Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me

Go” as “Speculative Memoir.”

Biography, vol. 30, no. 1, 2007, pp. 74-83. JSTOR,

www.jstor.org/stable/23540599. Accessed 18 Nov. 2020.

Palmer, Elizabeth. “Novelist Miriam Toews: A MENNONITE STORY.”

Christian Century, vol. 136, no. 10, 8 May 2019, pp. 33–34.

Pressly, Linda. “The rapes haunting a community that shuns the 21st Century.” Stories That Shape Us, BBC News, 16 May 2019,

https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-48265703#:~:text=In%20

Manitoba%2C%20an%20in sular%20Mennonite,within%20

this%20small%20Christian%20community. Accessed 1 Nov. 2020.

Quabeck, Franziska. “Cultural Rights and the Politics of Recognition in

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.” Diaspora, Law

and Literature, edited by Stierstorfer Klaus, Daniela Carpi, De

Gruyter, pp. 205-222. Accessed 18 Nov. 2020.

Toews, Miriam. Women Talking. Faber & Faber, 2018.

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F I C T I O N

Connective Tissue Sarah Lohmann

Something For Starts Before, Elias

Martin finally let me drive on the last leg. We’d been almost there anyway, with hardly an hour and a half remaining, so the gesture sat somewhere between nice and moot, but it did not go unacknowledged. I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel and ignored the others as he played music that he knew I didn’t like.

Things were like this: good and in high spirits, a buzz of frustration humming beneath our surfaces. Martin was happy enough, which was unusual, and I anticipated that Isla and Kathleen would be, too. We’d been planning this weekend since finding out that our spring breaks all miraculously lined up, so about two months ago, and Isla had only gotten the go-ahead from her parents the previous week.

I found out this morning, though, that Jerome was planning to drive up here on his own a day later than the rest of us, and I knew that would be an issue, especially for Isla. Plans were plans, after all, and last-minute changes tended to be a bigger deal to her than they would be to any of us. One might think that after all of these years, we would know not to infringe upon this boundary, but some things never change. Kathleen will always be inexplicably covered in paint stains, I will always fall for it when Martin asks me what’s on my shirt, we will all always change plans in spite of the coming wrath, and Isla will always get over it within the hour. It’s a functional loop that has existed, perhaps, for all of time.

When Martin and I arrived at the house, all of the lights were off and the driveway—or, what we thought might have been the driveway but could easily have been more gravel road—was empty. So, naturally, we believed we had been the first to arrive.

“Should I call Isla?” I asked, leaning over to watch Martin as he got out of the car.

“Nah. She told me where to find the spare key in case this happened. We can go in and get settled while we wait for them.”

Martin moseyed up to the front door, reaching up into the doorframe and feeling around for the key. I got out of the car but stayed at the end of the walk; I felt kind of weird about going into the house without Isla. He unlocked the door and took a few steps inside so that he was visible through the picture window that took up most of the

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exterior wall that faced the street. He waved to me from inside.

I think if I hadn’t been so excited for Martin to scream, I would have given it away when Isla stood from behind the couch. I’d covered my mouth with my hand to hide my smile. She shrieked and Kathleen did the same a second or two later. Martin jumped and let out a little wail. He almost fell down when he turned around to face them, yelling something that I couldn’t hear. They laughed at him, and I did too.

Being the youngest of all of us by what felt like a significant margin now that they’d all graduated, I was going to be sleeping on the couch rather than in one of the bedrooms with the others—which I didn’t mind because it meant that I didn’t have to share a bed, and it meant, too, that I could stare out the window and watch whatever happened in the woods outside. I hoped I would see a deer or something.

For the others, though, me sleeping on the couch was not unlike a baby in a crib. Kathleen especially did not let me forget this. She put a walkie-talkie on one of the end tables and would go on to talk to me with it later while she made herself a bowl of cereal in the kitchen.

“Like a baby monitor,” I remarked, holding it by its antenna.

I was standing on the carpet beside the dividing archway that connected the living room and the kitchen, digging my toes in between the shaggy strands.

“Precisely,” she said and smacked her hands playfully onto the wall beside me. “A baby monitor for our baby Elias.”

“Thanks, mom,” I mocked, letting my nose wrinkle. I felt nothing but fondness for the gesture.

Where We Came From Before

The first of us had come together on the cusp of junior high school. We had met in the lunchroom during one of the school’s dreaded “Mix-It-Up” Wednesdays wherein every student drew a table number and had to eat lunch with a group of people who drew the same number they did. Martin and Jerome both happened to select the number twelve during the first mix-it-up in seventh grade, and, after meeting, hated each other on the principle of hating any and all experiences happening to come out of the almost insulting lack of decision. This hatred, however, did not stop them from spending school nights at Jerome’s house, where Elias would visit when the after school activities didn’t meet.

Elias and Jerome, though, had known each other for much longer by this point, and Martin, doing what any reasonable thirteenyear-old would do, decided that he would now always sit in between Jerome and Elias on the couch. Usually, this wasn’t as big of a deal as

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he thought it was, but it was not uncommon for him to force himself between them or across their laps in a plea for their attention. Jerome and Elias pretended not to notice but exchanged the same knowing look each time.

The dynamic was well-established by the time we met Isla. She was beautiful, and if she were a painting, she would have been made of those thick delicious impasto strokes. She’d come from the other middle school in the district without any patience for anyone who wanted to be less than tolerable within ten feet of her. We met her walking home from the bus stop at the beginning of the school year and decided we wanted to keep her after the first time she shoved Martin into the grass for asking why she wore such ugly shoes. She decided that she would keep us in return about three months later at Jerome’s fifteenth birthday party when a thirteen-year-old Elias had been allowed to punch him in the arm as payback for wiping frosting from his cake with his finger.

After that, we lived in the pavilion at the back of the park by Elias’s house during the summer and when it was warm enough after school. Elias’s mother was shocked often to find three times the amount of kids she had in her living room, not necessarily because she didn’t know we were coming but, rather, because we did our homework in almost complete silence with the exception of someone, usually Jerome, helping Elias with his history homework or Martin leading a one-man discussion about whatever topic was being covered in whatever science class he was taking that year.

Finally, in Isla’s final year of high school, she sparked a new friendship with Kathleen, her near-perfect foil. The two were similar in many behaviors and interests, but Kathleen was fundamentally softer in nature than her friend. We, obviously, commented on this endlessly until graduation. Well, Elias learned a lot about girls and asked a lot of silly questions while Martin commented and Jerome ignored them both.

It was during next year that we—all five—had to decide whether these friends were forever or for home. Elias, being home even after the others had gone, didn’t mind being physically lonesome if all of us could keep the Tuesday evening Skype call, but that didn’t happen every week. Getting older means getting busy, but it wasn’t until Jerome came back to visit for a weekend that the mutual forever became clearer.

“Don’t look so sad,” Jerome had said. “It’ll take a lot more than a few months apart here and there to ruin what we have, bud.”

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Good Intentions Before, Elias

Kathleen and Isla had been in the house for a few hours already, so it didn’t seem so un-lived in as it might have if Martin and I had gotten here first. The two of them had watched from the second-level balcony as we scrambled in the living room, and I remember thinking about rude young people who hover, empty mug in hand, beside service workers while they refill the coffee machine. Same sort of feeling.

I supposed that I couldn’t be too upset, especially since, even though Martin and I unloaded the stuff together, he’d told me to help and proceeded to move everything by himself while I watched. He grumbled sometimes about things being heavy, but I noticed that he tended to grumble more when I happened to exist someplace he didn’t expect, so I mostly just stood by the doorway until he was finished.

“Hey, Martin,” Isla said, grabbing onto the handrail that separated her from the empty upper half of the living room.

I watched as Martin stopped what he was doing, hands still very much clamped on the edge of the rug. He glanced back at me over his shoulder. Earlier in the car, he had been picking at his knees just below the lip of his cargo shorts.

“How much do you wanna bet she’s gonna ask where Jerome is? I mean, for fuck’s sake, he always puts me in the middle of their shit.

He knows that, too. This fight makes literally no sense. I don’t know what kind of shit she’s on, but I am tired of him making me take the brunt of it.”

I’d told him that I wouldn’t take his bet.

“What’s up?” Martin replied, finally pulling his hands back to rest on his hips. He stood up and fixed his glasses.

“Did Jerome ride with you guys?”

“No,” I answered for Martin. “He said he was driving on his own.” Kathleen watched Isla. I looked up, too. There was a moment. “I figured you knew,” I continued.

“No, I didn’t,” she said, looking over at Kathleen. Her eyebrows were raised and the expression was exactly the same as the one she made when she found out Sophie Jin had told the whole school she liked whoever she liked at that time. I don’t remember who it was.

“Anyway, I left my lighter in the car, so,” Martin cut the silence.

He went outside and I followed him.

It was normal for us to snip at each other—especially Martin and Isla, or, actually, Martin and anyone, really—but that time was different, and all of us knew it. Martin, even as he is, usually gave Isla a

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little more space to argue, and Isla usually giggled more and pretended to be joking, but neither of them did either of those things. I remember thinking at the time that it was probably just stress—they were around the time in school when declaring your major was expected—but I never asked. I never wanted to pry.

“She just wants to know where he is. You know how things have been with them these days,” I said.

“It shouldn’t affect me. It shouldn’t affect any of us, actually,” he replied. He was right.

Martin scratched at his palms briefly before flattening them against his pants. He wanted a cigarette, so I did what I always do when I think Martin might break his streak: I held his hand.

“I’m just saying that you don’t have to worry about it so much.

What’s theirs is theirs.”

Martin looked at me over the top of his glasses. He pressed his lips together in a poor excuse for a smile and patted my arm the way guys do when they want to express solidarity in a masculine way. This made me laugh, especially because we were already holding hands.

“I’ll apologize later,” he said finally, looking out at the depth of the forest in front of the house.

I nodded and made a mental note to check in on that the next morning.

“We should get back in there,” I said, yanking on Martin’s hand as I stepped towards the front door.

“Let me have a cigarette first,” he groaned. “I’ll die.”

“Yes, you will definitely die if you smoke a cigarette, you’re so smart!” I cooed, reaching up to ruffle his hair. “Now, come on, let’s get this weekend started properly.”

Our First Cabin Before, Kathleen

When we went on our senior camping trip, Isla and I shared a bunk. There were too many girls, and quite a few pairs of us ended up having to share some of the slightly bigger beds at the end of the hall, but I hadn’t minded. Isla and I had been fast friends after I transferred to our school, and we had frustrated the other girls in our class by staying up under the blankets, giggling and divulging our deepest secrets to one another. It was a home for that burning energy that can only come when you’re seventeen and with everyone from your school in the middle of the forest. We fantasized about how fun it would be if our window matched with whichever one Jerome and Martin were nearest to, or what would have happened if Elias had stowed along somehow on

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the bus, and I think that we had actually been fantasizing about what it would have been like to star in a teen movie on the Disney Channel, which is fine, I suppose.

I remember when, after finally turning off our flashlights and turning to stare up at the ceiling with our shoulders pressed flush against one another, Isla told me our first secret. This was a big deal at the time, for me especially. Being the new kid made me automatically tangential to everyone and every situation, regardless of how often we saw one another.

“I kissed Jerome,” she said, her breath floating up and breaking against the cabin’s wooden roof.

“When?” I asked. I flicked through the day in my mind, trying to remember a moment when we were apart, and then, I knew it must have been—

“During the bonfire. He took me back behind the big house and started talking, but you know how things have been with us lately and...I don’t know. I was just tired of waiting, so I kissed him.”

“Oh...So how was it?”

“He was kind of stiff,” Isla said. When I looked over at her, I could see the wrinkle between her eyebrows as she thought. “I mean, he just seemed nervous. I thought his lips would be softer, to be honest.”

I, not having had my first kiss with anyone yet, didn’t know the significance of most of this, but I assumed that a kiss was meant to be loose and soft based on what Isla said, and I learned that Jerome, probably, was not a good kisser. Maybe she thought too highly of him, built him up in her head; they were the same amount of inexperienced as far as I knew, so I think she was probably as stiff as he had been.

“So, it was bad?” I asked, rolling onto my side, my cheek pressed into my forearm as I stared at Isla.

She shrugged. “No, not really. But I guess I figured it would be crazy good or something. You know, like, I’ve liked him since like, I don’t know—tenth grade? So, kissing him is something I thought about a lot, so...I just thought it would be different after all this time.”

I hummed for a second in understanding before responding.

“But, by that logic, wouldn’t it be your fault that you didn’t like the kiss, then?”

“I didn’t say I didn’t like it,” Isla corrected me, defensive. “It’s just…well, we kissed on accident like three years ago, and I didn’t exactly fantasize that it would be an exact replica of that.”

“But you did insult his kissing skills,” I replied, laughing a little at her. “Especially just now by saying they were the same as when he was fifteen. Which is fine, it’s not like I’m gonna go tell him.”

Even though it was dark, I saw Isla roll her eyes. She shook her

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head and let out a little huff, clearly not liking how I seemed to miss the point. I didn’t know what I was missing, but it seemed so obvious to her, whatever it was. I think that she wanted me to sensationalize Jerome’s supposed badness at kissing, to squeal and be amazed at her knowledge about such mature things and desire for something more, but that didn’t seem fair. So, I didn’t do that. I didn’t do anything else, actually.

“I think maybe I should teach him how to kiss. Maybe he just needs a teacher,” she suggested.

“Yeah,” I said, returning to lying on my back. “Maybe he does.”

It Adds Up After, Isla

I sleep on top of the covers the first night. Kathleen is fast asleep beside me, swelling and deflating and seeming to come close to the surface before plunging deep again. I don’t look at Kathleen more than once, though, as my eyes fix on a spot on the wall opposite the bed. I remember that spot vividly; it’s among the top five things I can recall clearly about that whole weekend.

The droplets just barely sprayed against the windows now, but I am still dripping from the heavier rainfall from only a few minutes before. I’m shivering, one of mom’s embroidered hand towels laying limply on my head. Mud is caked under my nails. I pick at it, flicking it onto the comforter by my feet.

Jerome has been my boyfriend for a long time—in the beginning, we didn’t tell anyone, so even our friends aren’t completely sure of how long “a long time” actually is. He was the first guy I ever liked.

The point is, it isn’t like he and I had never fought before that weekend.

We’d fought plenty, and over stupid stuff, too. Stuff just as stupid as this.

I know he must be hurting right now. Things have been harder than usual, so I had to cut him some slack. Having hurt feelings isn’t a punishable offense. Expressing how hurt you are isn’t one, either.

Our first fight had been in front of my parents, which is very unlucky. I remember my sister telling me that our parents were “worried about the state of my relationship,” and I had asked her what exactly they had said. She wouldn’t tell me, and I think she’s probably forgotten by now, but I wished that I knew, still—it mightn’t have been so difficult for them to let us stay the weekend in their cabin.

“Isla…”

My mother’s voice had been as heavy and condescending as ever, and I had resisted the urge to release my frustration in a series of pointed blows into the wall. I covered my face with my hands and

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groaned.

“Mom, I don’t get why this has to be a big deal. You’ve known all of these guys for actual years. I’ve been taking care of my own... school and my apartment and everything, you know that nothing will go wrong, just objectively.” I had said with a pretty whiny tone, admittedly.

“Honey, it’s not that I don’t trust that you guys will take care of the house, I just don’t know—”

I had felt powerless against her word, letting my shoulders slump. I remember thinking through all the possible ways I could make it up to the others—they’d known it wasn’t certain that my parents would say yes, but I had promised to make this weekend work out nonetheless.

My mother made me promise that I would share a room with Kathleen as I had on the senior trip and ended up giving us the goahead.

I get up off of the bed and creep over to the bathroom. Staring at myself in the mirror, I press the towel down onto my hair. My hair twists around itself in long, curled strands and looks like mud. I turn on the faucet and run hot water over my hands, making my raw palms sting red. I hold the white soap bar and let it slip back and forth between my palms, allowing the suds to collect in creamy swaths over my fingers.

My breathing heaves.

I feel so trapped; like my emotions were stones fastened to my chest and my back and sliding down my throat. I cry and wonder why things had to be like that.

Our first fight had been only words. We snipped at each other and let things become too venomous; I remember the way they had looked at us across the table. I couldn’t tell then who my mother’s disgusted glare was intended for.

I look at myself in the mirror. There is dirt on my hairline from when I’d fallen. I wonder if Jerome had dirt on him. If he was hurting.

I grit my teeth and tell myself to quit wondering and just ask if I’m so concerned. I know I won’t ask. I don’t want to be concerned anyway. I don’t want to have to be.

What is Ruined?

After, Elias

There are many deplorable things we do while waiting. We peel the flaking paint off of the wall or undo the furniture stitches. We scrape the gunk out from under our fingernails and flick it onto the carpet. We pick apart the faces and conversations of whoever happens to be near enough. We pretend to check our email. While I waited for

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the sun to rise that morning, I wish I had done any one of those things. I wish I had done anything, really. Maybe if I were eyes and nothing else.

The waitress sets my plate down on the table. The people in the booth behind me are talking about having driven a long way. I don’t know why anyone would come a long way to end up here. I thank the waitress for the food.

The green olive, pierced by a toothpick, leaks and soaks red into the bread.

“Earth to Elias…Hello?”

I look at Isla. Her face looks like honey.

“What? Sorry,” I say, and I shift in my seat because I don’t know what to do with myself. “I don’t know where I went just now.”

I make myself chuckle, the sound kind of wispy and thin like when your teacher makes a joke about how no one in class wants to be there and you have to pretend that he’s wrong even though he is the only one being honest. I clear my throat.

Back in high school, we used to come to this diner: Isla, Martin, Jerome, and me. That was way back before we’d even met Kathleen.

I don’t think she’s ever been here. We didn’t go much in her senior year; they don’t have any good vegan options, and it wasn’t really worth it for the Real Cherry Coke alone. She doesn’t know our joke about the grandma who runs the cash register, but it’s not that funny, so I don’t think she’s missing out on anything—though Martin seems to like bringing it up anyway.

“Well, you’re the one who wanted to talk about something, so…”

“I know, I know,” I reply and rub my hands over my face.

It occurs to me that what I am going to say will ruin this diner for Isla, if not for everyone else, too. It will ruin it for me. It may already be ruined.

“When we stayed at your parent’s cabin last weekend,” I start.

“That first night, when it was raining a lot, I had a hard time staying asleep. I don’t know why for sure, maybe it was the wind. It was pretty noisy—but, anyway, that night…I have to tell you, I saw what happened outside that night.”

I watch as Isla’s jaw slackens a little, her eyes falling down to her untouched plate. I swallow my spit and feel guilty for making her remember what she must have been trying to forget.

“I really am sorry for bringing this up, Isla. I know it must be hard for you to—”

She cuts me off by waving her hand and asks: “How much did you see?”

I think for a moment about whether or not I should say “every-

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thing”.

“I saw enough to know what happened,” I say, trying to phrase things gently.

I met Isla when I was thirteen. She was a freshman in high school and the coolest person I knew. She told Martin to shut up when he talked too much about my braces and punched Kenneth Willebrand in the face for calling me a name I won’t repeat. She helped me study for calculus exams after she’d already finished high school. She’ll come to my graduation in June and sit with my mom like she did at my baseball games.

“So, what now?” she asks, doing her best not to look at me.

“I, well…whatever you want, I guess,” I reply.

She picks at the edge of the table with her fingernails.

“I’m surprised you wanted to invite me here after seeing me like that,” she says.

She doesn’t sound meek like I expect her to, but Isla has never been meek.

Kitchen Fluorescent Before, Kathleen

My mom never bought us sugary cereal when I was a kid. This is significant for two reasons: 1) I now, as an adult, am obsessed with Cap’n Crunch Berries, ergo, I hate myself, and 2) she started buying it when my little brother was old enough to eat it. I think knowing that informs a lot of my choices involving my mother, specifically allowing me to not feel so bad when I don’t have much time to call her in the evenings.

I like to eat it in lieu of dessert now, and it was very important that I brought a box along with me to the cabin this weekend. I ate some before we made dinner, actually, while testing out my walkie-talkies with Elias after everyone was finally together.

“Hello, this is Cap’n Crunch to Junior. Over,” I said. I released the button, taking a bite of cereal.

“Kathleen, I thought we weren’t using Junior! Over,” Elias replied.

“How about Little, then?” I asked with a snort, my words garbled by the Berries.

“We just—oh, what? I thought you were arriving tomorrow morning,” Elias said. His voice stopped coming through the walkie-talkie about halfway through, and I popped my head up to see what was happening.

Jerome dropped his backpack by the door and chuckled when

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Elias hurried over to hug him. He saw me next as I approached the living room. He smiled weakly before returning his attention completely to Elias. Those two behave like brothers—their relationship spans back to elementary school when Elias’s parents thought that a 12-year-old would be the perfect babysitter to their 10-year-old son. Flawless logic, in my opinion. So, with that in mind, the two of them have a strong relationship with lots of hugging and hair-touselling that Martin pretends not to be jealous of but definitely is. I think Isla might be a little jealous of it, too, actually.

“Oh, you’re here.”

I heard Isla speak from the balcony above us, and Jerome’s facial expression seemed to change in a way that I couldn’t quite pin.

“Hey, angel,” Jerome said, looking up at her. “Yeah, I thought I would have to work tomorrow morning, so I was gonna come afterward, but Erica offered to pick up my shift so that I could come.”

I knew Isla really well. She and I had sleepovers every single weekend for the entire duration of our senior year of high school. She and I take hour-long walks in the mornings before class, and she tells me to stand up for myself when my professors or classmates or guys I meet at parties don’t treat me the way I should be--because of this, I knew exactly what face she must have been making at Jerome just now.

“I wish you’d called first…We don’t have a lot of food left.

You’ll be sharing my parents’ room with Martin,” she said. She sounded flustered.

“It’s okay. I ate on the drive, but—” He paused and looked at the floor. “I can sleep on the couch. I came late, I don’t mind.”

“I’m already sleeping on the couch,” Elias interrupted. “We were gonna watch a movie soon.”

“Oh,” Jerome said, rubbing the back of his neck. “Cool. I want to take a shower, so if you guys want to wait up, I’d like to join you all.”

“Yes, please do join us,” Isla said. I could hear her drumming her fingers on the railing. “It’ll be good for us all to have some time together properly.”

The air felt strange now, but I couldn’t glean any hints from what they were saying. I guess I’m not well-versed at reading them just yet.

Threw Some Branches During, Elias

I am half-awake at around one in the morning. Or, it was one in the morning when I’d last looked, but I don’t remember how long before this moment that had been. It started raining around the time we

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all went to bed. We’d been watching a movie on Jerome’s laptop on the floor because we couldn’t get the TV to work, and the wind had begun to rattle the huge picture windows that occupied the entire exterior wall of the living room.

But now everyone is asleep apart from me and, I learned, Isla and Jerome, who stood in the woods outside the front window. I push myself to sit up, squinting. It’d been drizzling for a while, but now it was coming down in thick soupy drops, and I can see that they were yelling at each other.

Part of me wants to move closer, but I know that I should, in all manner of politeness, turn away and try to sleep. I can’t. Not when I see their stumbled movements, hear their raised voices grow shriller and more urgent. I see them clearly when the lightning flashes, and the rain makes Jerome fall when he tries to throw his body forward. I see him raise his hands.

I see his hands come down.

The darkness returns. I feel sick. I can only hear his voice now, big and frustrated, for a few moments before they fall silent. I keep watching but see nothing more.

I wonder for longer than a few moments if this had been a dream. Isla was strong and unyielding, and my memories were unmatched with what I’d seen. I know that she and Jerome had been having a rocky time, but I never would have guessed that something could push either of them into molds like these. I wonder why Jerome thought this was the only way out.

The lightning flashes again, and I see Isla on her knees in the mud between the trees, facing the road, alone. I roll onto my side and stare at the back cushions of the couch.

I can’t help it at the moment, but I wish I could keep myself from sinking so deeply into the past. Of all the fights of theirs I’d seen, none of them had come close to this one—or, I suppose they did, actually, in retrospect, but I’d never noticed what I should have.

Telling the Truth After, Isla

“I’m surprised you didn’t bring Jerome here instead of me,” I say.

And I am.

“Why would I want him here instead?” Elias asks, and he seems close to scandalized that I would suggest such a thing.

We’ve only been in this diner for a few moments, but all I can think about is how much I wish I could leave. Seeing Elias’s sweet pup-

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py eyes across the table is too much to bear given everything I’ve been feeling, but that’s not his fault, and I want to enjoy his company for the plush kindness that it so often is.

“Because you saw his girlfriend beat him in the woods,” I say, and it feels cold coming out of me—like a ghost seeping through someone’s body in a dark room—but my voice is harder than I mean for it to be. It’s sharp at the edges.

“Oh.”

Elias didn’t know. He didn’t know what he saw—he thought he had but hadn’t. I spoil myself for Elias just then, and I feel a sinking feeling similar to when you see a bunny sitting in the middle of a road. I don’t know what to say.

“I didn’t realize,” he says. “I don’t know what I saw.”

His face flushes pink, the blush swallowing his neck like a burnt snake. I can hear his breathing change, and I know what I’ve destroyed.

I knew before; I knew from the first time I laid a hand on Jerome. I knew I shouldn’t have, but I kept on and kept not telling anyone. And now, I know that I am ruined. I’m ruined in Elias’s memories, in the eyes of who I was meant to care for and keep, and in the lump that’s forming in my throat.

He is not looking at me when I raise my eyes again. His jaw is fixed in a tight clamp; he’s thinking, and I want to ask what about, but I can’t. My voice is too tightly caught in my throat, and, besides, it’s not my place to ask questions.

“I didn’t mean to. I’ve never meant to,” I say, and it sounds like bullshit. It sounds like some horrible soap opera line written by a screenwriter who couldn’t decide if he wanted the audience to hate or love the story’s villain.

“That’s not—”

“I know,” I continue, my vision blurring just a little from the tears I didn’t want to free. I didn’t deserve to cry. “I can’t justify it. I thought I could, and I did, to myself, but I just can’t. It’s wrong, and I keep doing it, and I don’t know how to stop—” I cut myself off by taking a deep breath when my voice breaks.

A List of My Considerations Before, Jerome

Our guidance counselor gave all of the seniors a sheet to fill out about the most important things to think about for our lives after graduation. My mother asked to see it after I complete it; she’s curious, I guess, what I’ll tell them. I wonder if she had speculations about my

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responses.

As you look forward to your graduation in May, it is time to consider what elements you would like to shape your future. What are your academic goals? Who would you like to maintain relationships with?

Where do you see yourself living? Fill in the blanks below with what you believe are the most important factors for your future along with a brief explanation of your reasoning. If you’re having trouble, or even if you’re not, consider coming in to speak with your guidance counselor or having a conversation with your parent/guardian.

The prompt gave some examples to guide our thinking. Miles from home, mental health, and career aspirations were, unsurprisingly, among these examples, and the exclusion of friends and relationships with people who weren’t your parents or teachers in the list was noticeable.

Before dinner one evening, I made a list in my notebook before writing it on the “official” sheet. Something about putting it on that paper first was overly permanent, at least to my mind. Besides, I had a feeling that what I would be telling the counselor and my honest (or complete) list of considerations would not necessarily be equal.

• Miles from home Writing the school’s first stock example as my first real answer made me scoff at myself, but I couldn’t deny that it was the most important. That distance was space from my parents, my childhood home, my cat. My sister. The only friends I’ve ever known. My whole world. Going too far from all of that makes my heart ache.

• A Modern Languages, Language Studies, or French major field

My mother speaks French to my sister and me at home. My father barely speaks it, not as well as us, but he tries. It’s one of the purest shows of love I’ve ever seen. I hope that someone will love me so fully.

Learning a language is always an act of love.

I set my pencil down along the interior edge of my notebook and stare at my crude number three. I pictured Elias and Martin passed out on my couch. I pictured Isla and Kathleen gathering their shoes and cardigans and keychains in silence before ducking out my front door. I picture giving Isla a kiss goodbye.

• Isla

I decided that I was allowed to care. I wouldn’t change a thing, of course—I’ll go where I need to—but it matters how far apart we end up. I waved my eraser in front of my eyes, the corner of my mouth turning up a little. I could hear my mother telling me not to consider her (or Elias or Martin or Kathleen, for that matter) as she wanted my choices

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to be about me, which she is undoubtedly right in wanting, but none of our choices are ever about ourselves in singularity, I think. Besides, if this is something important to me, wouldn’t I neglect myself in not considering it?

I continued the list by adding in the sports I’d like to play and the amount of time I get to spend outside. After I was finished, I transferred my answers—barring such topics as athletic division, greek life, and exclusivity, which I cared nothing about, along with things like roommates and the size of the surrounding city, which I knew my school didn’t want to hear about—to the counselor’s list. I attached it to the fridge for my mother to find when she came home from work.

Kenneth Willebrand After, Elias

In eighth grade, my friend Isla punched Kenneth Willebrand in the face. At this time, I could not be more thankful, but this memory will yellow with age as will so many more pleasant ones than this.

It’s strange how memories begin to taste worse and feel larger in your throat as they swell with new information; like when you hear that your friend from elementary school cheats on her boyfriend or when you learn that your mom used to sneak out onto the porch to smoke in lieu of quitting as she convinced you she had.

After learning what really happened that night—what had been happening for so long—my thoughts sounded like white noise for hours. I didn’t know how I could have seen things so wrongly, through such cracked lenses. And, too, I didn’t know how she could do it. When I’d thought it had been Jerome hurting her, I hadn’t known how he could have done it, either.

I feel strange that I can justify it when Isla hit Kenneth, though. He was a bully, someone who beat me up regularly for hanging out with high schoolers when I was still in middle school, someone who knew my route home from school and followed it just for fun and torture. Someone who made my mom so angry that she threatened to sue the school if they continued to do nothing. Someone who deserved to be punched in the face and spat on when he fell, at least back then. Isla knew that people are only owed the consequences of their own actions.

I mean, I thought she knew. She knew before, at least.

Punching Kenneth taught him what it was like to be me. What did hitting Jerome teach him? Kids hitting each other is altogether less violent than adults hitting each other.

How long has she been this way? How long have I been missing the signs? How long have I been thinking of people based on a falsity

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that I thought I saw? What difference does it make?

Of course, I was angry at Jerome at first, too. That’s what’s worse; I thought I knew what I had to sort through—I thought I was supposed to hate Jerome because he’d somehow become the poster child for baseless cruelty. I thought I was supposed to have an emotional distance from my best friend after he became something I couldn’t withstand.

But it was Isla. It was our shining, golden Isla, and I don’t know if she became tarnished after those good memories or if the signs were always there. I don’t know how to help her. I don’t know how far inside I need to go.

When I told my mom what Isla did in eighth grade, she didn’t know whether to be thankful or pissed.

“Violence isn’t right even when it’s on your side. You know that, don’t you?”

My mom had cupped my face in both hands and spoke quietly as Isla washed from her hands in the bathroom adjacent to the school counselor’s office.

“I know, Momma,” I replied. “I promise to teach my friends to use their words.”

She got a soft look in her eyes then and chuckled, but I didn’t know at the time what was funny about any of it. From what I understood, people only laughed at jokes, and I hadn’t told one.

Sardines After, Jerome

I had my first kiss under my kitchen sink. It was the first and final birthday party wherein I’d convinced my parents to let me invite everyone in my homeroom, but, in my defense, I hadn’t anticipated that the effects would be as permanent as they are. I guess that makes sense, though. Until college, a lot of kids I know thought that they’d never die unless they did it themselves.

It didn’t happen during Spin the Bottle, though, because we actively refused to play that or whatever other kissing games exist.

Actually, it happened during a game of Sardines, and I didn’t even do it on purpose. Well, I guess I tell myself that I didn’t because I did a pretty bad job—as most fifteen-year-olds do, in my defense.

Anyway, Sardines. I was the first hider since it was my birthday, and I picked the best place in the house. My kitchen cabinets are pretty deep—deeper than they look, and roomier, in general, than I think most cabinets are—so, even as I started growing into my teenage body, I found myself able to fit in there. The cabinet looked like many indi-

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vidual floor-level cabinets, but it was a singular cabinet that spanned the entire underside of the counter. None of my friends knew this (why would they?), ergo, perfect spot for shoving as many high school first years as could fit. I pushed my mom’s cleaning supplies to the very end of the cubby in preparation for others to fit inside.

It took about twenty minutes for anyone to join me, which made me feel pretty good, and it didn’t surprise me at the time that Isla was first. She prides herself even now for being particularly clever, and I can’t say that she’s not. I’ve always thought that cleverness was attractive if not a little intimidating. She’d gotten on her knees and shuffled in beside me. In a motion to face herself back towards the cabinet’s doors, she fumbled, and, ducking so as to not hit her head on the plumbing above, she came very close to my face. I did not move out of her line of motion, inviting her mouth against mine, and we kissed, horribly, for a moment.

“If you tell anyone about that,” Isla whispered, the docile tone of her voice rendered ugly by her words. “I swear to God I’ll—”

“Wow, this is a really good hiding spot!”

I had never been more thankful for Martin than at that moment. I am, actually, consistently thankful for him. He is always my buffer when I need him to be even if he doesn’t know it. Maybe someday I’ll be able to repay him for my fifteenth birthday party, but I think I’d rather not. I don’t think it would make sense unless I told him everything about everything.

Of course, I’d told Elias and Martin about my forgery of a first kiss during our boys-only sleep over the next weekend, and, of course, they had a lot to say. Martin laughed for approximately ten minutes straight about cock-blocking me, and Elias consoled me.

“Dude, you’ll kiss her again,” Elias said. “You’re, like, in love with her.”

I can still hear him saying that. I can still hear myself whining defiantly that I wasn’t. I was, but things are complicated, and I wonder what world I would have lived in if he had been wrong.

The Part of You That Dies During, Isla

The first time I’d become like this was the night of our graduation. There were maybe fifty people in Jerome’s house and spilling out into the backyard. All of our friends and their parents and teachers were milling about. Jerome had told me before the ceremony that we could leave together halfway through; we had quite a few things to sort out.

Among these was that I hadn’t told him yet where I’d decid-

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ed on going to college. This was because when my classmate Adelaide Sinclair told her boyfriend Dennis that she was going to UCLA—a sheer opposition to his Penn State decision—they’d broken up that day. She’d explained to me that it was because neither of them thought very seriously of each other and that I shouldn’t worry, but a nagging thought kept telling me that Jerome was closer to their mindset than mine, so I could hardly help it. Another was that I hadn’t told him that I loved him in about a week.

But it was eight-thirty, and he didn’t seem ready to leave. I watched him through the crowd of heads for a moment as he chatted with our French teacher, Madame Roman. My frustration alleviated itself at the way his expression animated while he spoke his mother tongue with her, and I carefully made my way through the living room so that I could stand at his side, hold his hand.

I’d returned home at around one in the morning that night, and I could barely make myself recall what I’d done. I’d thrown up and screamed, sobbing, into the toilet, snot and tears flowing out of me like piss from a dead animal. Slow and rotten.

“Isla,” he’d said when I’d asked him to leave. “Give me a second, will you?”

My brain, irrational and lusting for self-preservation, told me back then that this meant he had already stopped loving me.

“You knew all this time? Why would you keep that from me? That doesn’t make any sense.”

My vision had hazed and fear raised my hand to lower it against him. He didn’t understand; how could he say something like that to me if he knew what was at stake? If we valued each other the same, then wouldn’t he be as afraid as I am?

The last fight I had with Jerome is in the woods outside my parents’ cabin. It’s raining, and the ground was cushiony—puffs of mud swelling around my shoes with each step as the Earth attempted to swallow us both.

He is walking away, and I am yelling.

I had been tempted to yell in the house moments before, but the idea of one of our friends hearing me made my blood curdle. Our argument was stupid—it started that way, anyway. He was trying to go to bed, but I was frustrated that he’d disregarded my arrival plan for this weekend, and he was not understanding. He was tired from driving all the way up here straight after his shift, but he’d been avoiding me for weeks, and I wanted to know why.

“Look at me,” I said, maneuvering my head into his line of sight. He stared blankly through the crack in the door to his shared room with Martin, who I could see lying on the bed.

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“Isla, can’t we just talk about this tomorrow? I know you’re frustrated, but I’m so—”

“I’ve been trying to talk to you for two weeks,” I interrupted him. “Why didn’t you tell me that you’d have to come late today? And, how did you get Erica to take your shift? I thought you guys didn’t get scheduled together, so when did you even talk to her?”

I watched him droop at the mention of his coworker. I knew he wanted for me not to have noticed his mention of her, but I couldn’t help it. I don’t know when I had become so possessive that something like this mattered.

“I asked the group chat if someone could cover me,” he’d replied. “I asked Martin to tell you.”

That had been the moment when I remember wanting to yell for the first time. His short answers made me feel feverish. I could feel him avoiding the conversation in spite of having it. He was avoiding me even as we spoke.

“Yes, but why didn’t you want to tell me?”

I knew why, in my mind, but I wanted him to say it. To respect me enough even just for that.

“You know why.”

I felt it rising in me, and I stormed off down the hall. He had never been so bold before, and, though I should have seen it coming— despite everything, Jerome is no pushover, not even for me—but my frustration began to blind me like it always does. My skin buzzed as I swatted the kitchen’s side door open in my flurry.

Now, in the woods, as the heavens break open and soak us through, I go back to that place inside of me. That burned hole in my skull that lives between my eyes—a version of me that cages whatever promise lovers make to keep each other safe in a box of fuse-bound and lonesome self-doubt.

I hit him. I hit him more than once, on the shoulder, on the chest, on his face. The first two or three are superficial, only barely as heavy as the rain. The next is resounding—harsh and loud enough on his cheek that I know there’s a mark without looking. His arms fly up to protect against me, quivering. I stop. I hear him breathe under the cover of the storm.

I lose us both. He’s crying and telling me he’ll be back before morning, that he has to go somewhere else and think. I’m begging him not to leave me here and sinking my fingers into the mud like I could grow roots there. I’m wishing that I was a tree.

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Saturday After, Martin

On Saturday morning, I woke up before everyone else. I made a pot of coffee that I knew I would drink alone—everyone else likes tea and juice, the amateurs. Elias wasn’t on the couch, but he left a nest of blankets in his wake. I turned around, facing the sliding glass doors that separated the kitchen from the depths of wet leaves and grasses in the mouths of deer, waiting for the drip to finish and beep.

“You have coffee before food?”

I jumped, clutching my chest as I squealed. I was really starting to feel like the sissy everyone pegged me for in middle school.

“Jesus Christ, Kath,” I said, collapsing forward to rest my palms on the counter. “Announcing yourself is encouraged. Even saying good morning might have done the job.”

She chuckled, sinking her spoon back into her cereal. “Good morning,” she said. “Sleep okay? The storm was crazy.”

I shrugged, jumping a little again when the coffee maker beeped near the fridge. I went over and got a mug from the cabinet and poured myself a cup.

“Yeah,” I said. “Jerome didn’t come back until late, I think, though.” I furrowed my eyebrows. “He woke me up when he came back.

I didn’t even hear the rain, to be honest.”

I looked over at her, and she’d paused chewing, a blank look cast over her face.

“What?” I asked, crossing the kitchen again to take a seat across from her at the table.

“Nothing,” she said. “I just have a weird feeling is all. He was acting funky when he got here yesterday, and Isla kind of was, too, but I can’t say for sure that any of it means anything.”

Kathleen looked over to the living room. Her eyes darted across the furniture as if reading lines from a book, trying to see something she’d missed in there the night before.

“I was gonna make some eggs,” I said, changing the subject. “I know you had cereal—”

“I don’t eat eggs,” she said. “But I’ll probably have some toast and jam if you’d like some, too.” She turned back to look at me, that emptiness filled with a kind smile. It, feeling familiar, made me worry less about what she was worried about, too.

The first time I’d talked to Kathleen alone had been on our senior camping trip, so we had been in the woods then, too. We’d both been around the bonfire at the same time, seemingly abandoned by whoever we were supposed to be with, and we had sat on the same

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wooden bench together in silence for some time before speaking.

Something I find curious, though, is that the silence hasn’t even been awkward or uncomfortable. I enjoyed it.

That silence returned on Saturday morning as I made my eggs, and she steeped her tea beside me, spreading preserves over blackened toast.

“I’m surprised you like your eggs scrambled,” Kathleen said, her voice gliding, effortless, into the air.

“Oh, and why is that?”

“I don’t know. You strike me as an almost-over-hard type of guy. You know, because that kind of egg is perfect but impossible to get right without about an eon of practice,” she said.

Something about that flattered me, and I chuckled. “Thanks, I think.”

“You’re welcome.”

Elias’s voice came from somewhere behind me. “Martin,” he said, and it sounded foreign in his mouth, like when you say something so many times that it just sounds like noise. “Can you make me some eggs, too?”

I looked over my shoulder at him, and he looked, frankly, really bad. He rubbed his eye with his fist, chapped lips pouting unintentionally as his very essence yawned.

“Dude, is the couch that bad?”

“Huh?” he asked, blinking and shuffling closer. Kathleen laughed beside me, slipping two more slices of bread into the toaster.

“You just look tired,” I said. “Is scrambled okay?”

Elias waited a moment before replying, appearing to let his body settle back into itself—the wind seemed to blow through him straight from outside. He focused on the tile floor.

“Long night,” he said. “Scrambled would be great.”

“Here,” Kathleen added, moving closer to Elias. She set a plate of toast down on the island for him. “Pre-breakfast toast.”

I huffed an airy laugh out of my nose and picked out two eggs.

I set the finished ones aside for Elias, cracking the ones that would be mine into the pan and watching as their barriers broke: shell then yolk.

I looked up from the stove and saw a deer between the trees outside.

Where We Have Gone After

We are often asked in school or on personality quizzes who we look up to the most, and most of us want to say someone huge. A bigwig in your hobby, a historical inspiration, your mom. And we would say those people, too, but it’s more difficult to know who you would like to

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be like if you can’t pin down how you already are.

We pack up the cars together as the light bows away beneath Sunday’s horizon, and though it is not silent, it feels like it could be.

None of us are saying anything important: passing bags and playing trunk Tetris.

The weekend had been like this, too: ghosts of words humming through the hallways, murmurs that something’s different now. And we know what it is—but some of us don’t, and the partial knowledge is heavier. Those half glances between moments, unaware of what eyes and ears have seen and heard, what secrets pass along in that space, is rifting.

We say our goodbyes and call me when you get homes, and we know full well that we will. The separation will be comforting like the togetherness used to be. We’ll return to not talking with our voices every day or every week, but the messages will be ongoing, still. Some of us will worry, others will wander blindly on and see the difference when we meet again in the summer. Not unlike a puzzle, the missing pieces will reveal themselves when we stop looking. They’ll swim to the surface of the carpet or untuck from between the cushions.

They’ll glow green in the dark like stars pasted to a ceiling, waiting to be found as we rustle, close, between the sheets. And we’ll see them again, less, when we wake up.

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Guest Advocate Lily Lauver

—after Weather by Jenny Ofill

The snow melts so fast today I can hear it making a stream off the curb, finding low ground. I wonder if the lake ice is melting today, too. Weeks ago, when the landlord came by and did a thing that made the radiators drip and sputter to life, he told me that waves cut into the ice on the lake from below. Sometimes those ice mounds are thin as shells, suspended over water.

I hide on the roof and pretend to birdwatch. I pretend to cloudwatch. I look at the house across our alley and pretend to follow its eaves for a reason. For a second, I think about telling Mira I’ve been fired as soon as she gets home, but I can’t think of the first part of the conversation, the part where I bring it up. And then, if I do bring it up, she would take a hot bath and decide whether or not to talk to me.

Mira is a science teacher. She shapes blooming minds.

“One guy has been teaching there over forty years,” she told me. “Can you imagine doing something for most of your life?”

I told her that that’s how jobs work. You do them a long time and make incrementally more money, keeping the incrementally more expensive ground beneath your feet.

In the time since we moved to the city together after graduation, this was my third job. The first job, when I got here, was the only real job I’ve ever had. I worked as the Assistant Director of Social Media at a startup that connected young entrepreneurs to older wealthy investors on a ritzy chat app.

My boss always said, “No product, only people.”

I find two chocolates in my pocket from this morning, melted now by my body heat, and lick them out of the paper one after another. The rush hour traffic clogs our block, clogging every block in the city. Lisa from Beauty gave me the chocolates on my way out of work this morning. A consolation prize. So she must’ve known.

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From up here, there’s the neighbor who’s always coming and going in the afternoons, this time wrestling keys out of his pocket on his way out, laden with bags. There’s the lost cat posters, more of them now that the weather’s warming. There’s the wire flowers taped to the crosswalk post at the corner with that little sign, “Take!”

The second job was Chicken Shack. The third job was Target. I left Chicken Shack for Target, wanting to not smell like chicken or look at chicken anymore. Chicken Shack made me vegetarian until a few weeks after I quit. Target fired me this morning, the day after I slept through my opening shift for the fourth time.

I saw someone with the chat app open at Target one time. The app is called Gener8. When you open up an ongoing conversation, an ad plays.

This is how the startup makes money.

One of the metrics we used to study engagement is called a heatmap. It tracks the heat of a user’s hand across their screen.

At Target, my title was Guest Advocate. I advocated for guests by digging carts out of the slush and putting them back where they go. I also advocated for guests by not kicking the self-checkout stations when I wanted to kick them, instead turning the key on my keychain and approving their transactions.

Lisa told me last week that corporate sent a display sign to promote a new mascara that says “Instant Filter Face.”

Mira’s back from work, and I’m tired of the roof, so I make her tea while she sits at the table. She’s exhausted. When she closes her eyes, her eyeballs recede into her skull like she’s falling asleep right there or thinking deep into her memory. She tells me about a longtime teacher at her work who has cancer, and, since he’s running out of vacation days and sick days, other teachers can “donate” their vacation days and sick days to him by telling HR. This way, he can continue to take time off after his chemo sessions.

The product Target sells the most of is liquid Elmer’s Glue. The kind with the cow on the front. I was surprised when my coworker Dean told me this, and I still don’t fully believe him. Now, even after he explained, I am still surprised.

He said teachers buy up glue over the summer to stock their classrooms, paying out of pocket. Then he said that, this year, people became obsessed with slime. Slime is a mix of glue and borax and

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something else. It’s nice to hold, squishy and melty and not sticky. We started stocking borax this year. But even after they make their own, most people prefer to watch videos of people playing with slime rather than playing with slime.

Mira did a slime-making day with the fifth graders, and she said they all groaned in unison when she announced it at the start of class. Then I wanted to ask her if her kids did the thing kids used to do where you make a second skin of glue over your actual skin and peel it back to scare the teacher. And, if so, did she pretend to be scared? And was there ever a part of her that believed, even for a second, that the second skin was actually peeling away?

Wandering in an antique store, months ago now, I found a thimble branded to promote GUS’S AUTO EMPORIUM mixed in with some halfused matchbooks and pencils. I brought the thimble in to work when, in my second week at the startup, my boss tasked me with designing a new “visual language” for Gener8’s social media platforms to encourage the app’s “everyday use.” We needed an uptick in engagement: downloads, active users, session length, all of it was behind. Investors felt strung along.

Instead of making the moodboard they asked me to, I brought the thimble and an old emergency sewing kit—branded KELLOGG’S—to a conference room I’d never seen before.

“We need to think of it like this,” I tried to say. Such a small thing, but intact since the 1930s. The typography unfickle. We needed to make it durable. “We need to tell users we’ll always be with them.” To which my boss’s boss said, “Users turn on location services the second they make an account. We’re always with them already. You’re here to make them need us. And you’re here to make them think it’s their idea.”

Sitting across from Mira now, I wonder if science is the product or if vacation days are. I tell her that earlier I read about a pigeon sanctuary in the city that people made for the winter in the top floors of a large building, soon to be demolished, so fewer birds freeze to death this year.

I don’t know how to say the other thing.

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By the Seaside Erin Cosgrove

I hold my breath in the backseat as the ocean comes into view.

The ride has been uncomfortably silent thus far, but I’m not willing to change that. Not now. I squeeze my eyes shut and withdraw into myself.

The scenery of this drive was a view I had grown so accustomed to growing up, and memories are rushing in now after it’s been four years.

“Avery?” My heart sinks, and I slowly open my eyes. Mom is frowning ever so slightly, staring at me with a concern that I’ve grown so tired of seeing. “Are you sure you’re going to be okay doing this?”

Mom and dad have been back here a couple of times since that day. My aunt and uncle have driven up with Michael to visit on only a few occasions, which have not provided nearly enough time for me to once again feel remotely comfortable in their presence. I press my lips together, sighing through my nose.

“I can’t put it off forever.”

In all honesty, I don’t think I’ll ever really feel ready to go back to the house by the beach, but at least it’ll only be for a few days. It’s a wonder to me how my relatives can even stand to keep living there, though I know they did toss around the idea of moving about a year after that summer. Mom is still considering me, and I’m about to ask her to knock it off when Dad chimes in.

“We know how hard this has been for you to deal with. You can tell us if you’re too uncomfortable at any point, and we can leave.” Now he’s peering back at me too, through the rearview mirror.

“Yeah, I know.” I am looking out the window now. I don’t understand how they think staring at me is going to relieve my anxiety, but at least I can avoid their gaze. The silence resumes, and I try my hardest to keep a straight face as that memory begins to forcibly replay in my mind. It has done this many times before, but it’s all the more vivid as I find myself in the place that it happened.

They told me they were going to be right back. Michael and I just had to keep everything under control for a few minutes. I was fourteen. I could do it. It was cloudy that day, windy. The isolated corner on the beach was completely empty, as per usual. Michael was twelve then.

Linus had just turned six, and couldn’t stop bragging about how good he had gotten at swimming.

“He won’t shut up about it,” Michael muttered to me as his brother rambled on while frolicking along the shoreline. Linus did love

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being the star of the family. He was explosive and persistent. His swim trunks always stick out in my mind: bright blue, patterned with smiling goldfish. His wide grin looked so funny because he had recently lost a few teeth.

“I can freestyle now, perfectly!”

“I believe you, Little Man,” I said with a smile as I rolled my eyes. I really did. It’s almost as if the forces of nature knew that he was going to be born into a family that lived by the sea; his little body sported pronounced shoulder blades and thin, long legs from birth.

“Can we get in the water now?” The pleading tone in his voice made me smile even more, but Michael just sighed. I looked over and raised my eyebrows at him, tilting my head down to meet his gaze. He had yet to hit the imminent wave of puberty and was still the tiny, high voiced kid I had grown up playing with.

“Should we wait for your parents to get back?”

His green eyes flickered to the sea as he shrugged his shoulders.

“It doesn’t look bad today. We can probably start wading around. Your call, though,” he smirked at me. “I know you are the oldest.”

I shoved at his shoulder, but he was right about the water. All the time spent visiting with my parents made it so I knew the ocean as well as my cousins. That, combined with my dishwater wavy hair, blue eyes and freckled cheeks, almost made it so I could pass off as a native beach girl. I looked at the white foamy residue left by the waves along the shore. It was a little rocky, but nothing we couldn’t handle as long as we stayed shallow, and the adults would be back soon enough anyway.

How maliciously deceptive the ocean was. How stupid and naive I was.

I am jolted out of the memory as the car comes to a stop. I hear the passenger’s side door click open. I can hear the faint sound of my mom greeting her brother, and my dad is reaching back and touching my leg, but my eyes remain shut and my heart pounds faster.

“It’s okay. They’re your family,” I want to respond that that didn’t stop Aunt Marnie from screaming at me through tears about how could I let this happen, but I only nod. I undo my seat belt and inhale deeply before opening my eyes. I don’t look up while getting out of the car, just stare at the ground. The last time I was here, Linus barrelled into me with a hug the moment I arrived.

“Avery,”

My shoulders tense and I lift my head, turning my gaze to un-

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cle Jack, who is still standing next to my mother. His mouth is smiling, but his eyes still hold that perpetual sadness they’ve had every time I’ve seen him in the past four years.

“It means a lot to us that you came down here. Michael’s excited to see you.” I smile politely, but I still can’t speak. He clears his throat after a moment.

“I can’t believe my niece has graduated from high school already.” He chuckles, but I can tell it’s forced. “Sorry we couldn’t make it out to celebrate with you. You’re staying local for a while, right?” I try to smile wider.

“Yeah, I’ll be at community college for a couple of years.” The silence quickly hangs over us once again.

“Honey, we can bring the bags in. Why don’t you go say hi to Michael?” I shift my eyes to my mother. She is looking at me almost pleadingly.

Before I know it, I am walking my way toward the front door of the pale blue house that had been a staple of my childhood. Now, the sight of it makes my stomach churn. Michael is peering through the screen, waving at me. As I draw closer I can see his familiar green eyes, but he has this weird, flippy haircut and the beginnings of stubble. He changes more and more every time I see him, but I’ve still got a few inches on him. The height comes from my dad’s side.

“Hey, Shrimp,” I say as he pushes the door open. We exchange a one-armed hug.

“You look nervous as all hell.”

In spite of myself, I can’t help but chuckle at his bluntness. It has oddly been easiest to interact with him over the past few years, we even texted each other relatively frequently.

Maybe it was because we grew up together—our shared memories extended back long before Linus even existed—or the fact that we shared the exact same memory of that day. We were the ones that were wrapped in a towel on the beach, clinging to each other so hard our nails dug into the other’s skin, while our parents were in a frenzy with emergency services. We were both crying, which somehow made the act itself less awkward.

“How are you holding up?”

I look him in the eyes as I say it, trying to be as emotionally available as I can. He has it worse than me. Linus was my little cousin, but he was Michael’s only sibling. My destroyed aunt and uncle were his parents. He presses his lips together and briefly flickers his gaze to the ground, then back at me.

“It always gets worse for all of us around the anniversary, but we’ve gotten pretty good at keeping it together by now.”

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He falls silent, and I know we’re done talking about the subject, so I just smile sympathetically and nod my head.

It had always been hard to get much out of Michael anyway; he was much more quiet and thoughtful than his brother. Us becoming so close was probably because he had been so complicit in me dragging him around growing up. A simple “Mikey, come on” usually did the trick when he wasn’t feeling up to something. I was a stubborn little brat, but he put up with me.

“Where’s your mom?” He glances out the screen door again.

“She went to buy some stuff for dinner tonight. She should be back any minute.”

I see that my parents are coming to the door with uncle Jack, suitcases in hand. I don’t process much in the next few minutes; I’m too busy reminding myself to breathe and stay calm. Michael can feel it, and he puts a reassuring hand on my shoulder a few times as he’s helping us settle in. He has the comfort, despite everything else he’s had to go through, of knowing his parent’s don’t blame him for what happened. I was the oldest. I was in charge. I should have known better.

Then, aunt Marnie is there, putting down grocery bags and greeting Mom and Dad in the foyer, and I am standing in the kitchen doorway. She finally looks over at me.

“Avery, it’s so good to see you!” The falseness in her smile is so blatant that I can’t help but look away for a moment, but when my gaze returns to her I turn the corner of my lips up as much as I can.

“It’s nice to finally be back here.”

I sneak away from the dinner table after emptying my plate.

Pretending is too difficult to bear without a break every now and then.

Now, I am wandering around the living room. There used to be a bunch of bigger pictures around: a family portrait, a snapshot of the boys by the sea, et cetera. Now there are only two larger-scale photos on the mantel, one from Michael’s middle school graduation and one from my aunt and uncle’s wedding. Most of the smaller ones that I remember remain, except for one of me and Michael playing in the sand during our early childhood. A lot of them have Linus in them. I guess it’s less painful to see him in smaller scales that you have to focus on to see clearly rather than having his little freckled face staring back at you every time you enter the living room. It’s not erasing him, just minimizing.

I stand there, looking blankly at a picture of Linus on a jungle gym. He is posing proudly on a platform with his hands on his hips. I think I am beginning to understand why his parents didn’t go through with the move. They never did find his body; the rip current had almost certainly carried him far out, past the drop-off. With nothing to bury,

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maybe staying by the ocean was the only way to feel like they still had him close by.

My gaze stays frozen on the photo, on his gleaming eyes, messy hair and gap-toothed smile. He’d swam out so far so fast that day, and I had gone after him. We were caught up in the rip-current before we knew it. The force was so strong that it felt as if it would rip off my skin. I reached for my little cousin, whose blurry form I could barely make out. My hand gripped his tiny wrist as I tried my hardest to make my way to the side, but the water tore him away from me as I finally made it back to calm waters. I gasped for air as I surfaced, screaming for Michael to help. I was so far out, and I couldn’t stop crying and I frantically threw my limbs about to keep me afloat. Eventually, I felt Michael grab onto my arm. He was crying too, asking “where’s Linus,” when he already knew the answer.

I rub my forehead, trying to force the memory away.

“Honey,” my mother’s voice makes me snap my head up, and I look back in the doorway at her. She is staring at me up and down carefully with sad eyes. “Are you alright?” I turn my head to the back window that faces the ocean and try to resist the urge to vomit.

“Fine,” I mumble. She clears her throat,

“Jack and Marnie have the guest room set up if you want to go lie down” I shake my head.

“I’ll see if Michael wants to hang out in the basement, like old times, you know?”

I need to talk to someone, and I don’t want it to be any of the adults.

I find myself on the same ugly brown couch where I used to play Super Mario Brothers with the boys. Michael and I were still really little when his parents got him the Wii, and I was so adamant about playing as Mario instead of Luigi that aunt Marnie told Michael to let me because I was their guest. Linus played as one of the Toads when he was old enough to comprehend how to work the controller, and constantly whined that we were moving along too fast and he couldn’t keep up with the screen.

Michael and I keep the conversation surface level for a while, he asks how my senior year was, I ask him how school is going. This is a small town. People know everything about the boy who was washed away, so he goes to a private high school a few towns over. It probably helps that he has a common last name and doesn’t really resemble his brother aside from the dirty-blonde hair. He has his father’s longer, more pronounced features. Linus was round-faced and button-nosed like his mom. After we can find nothing more to small-talk about, an

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uncomfortable silence falls over us. I rub my lips together, look at my hands and ask,

“Have you gone swimming in the ocean since then?” I don’t want to see his face, because I can already feel the sharp tension.

“No,” he finally says. “My parents have hardly set foot on the beach. I’ve been there a few times, you know, played volleyball and stuff with friends, but I’ve never gone into the water. I assume you haven’t either.” He exhales a muffled chuckle through his nose, “No access to the oceanfront in Pennsylvania.”

I almost admit to getting panic attacks whenever I’ve even tried to take baths during the last four years, but instead, I glance up at him with a tight smile. He is looking at me in that close way I looked at him when I first arrived.

“I’m glad you came back. I’ve missed seeing you so often. We had some good times.”

“Yeah,” I say, and it’s true.

For better or worse, Michael was my partner in crime. My memory is forever marked by our splash fights, sandcastle buildings, diggings for buried treasure. So many of our adventures happened before Linus, or when he was too little to participate. I actually feel guilty thinking about it now. I loved my youngest cousin, but I never formed the bond with him I had with Michael. I wonder if we made him feel like an annoying little kid, a third wheel.

“Do you want to walk around the beach tomorrow?”

I jerk my head up and look at him with wide eyes. He bites down on his lip.

“I don’t know, it’s helped me to slowly adjust to being back where it happened. I think my parents should do it too, to be honest.

Just… I recommend trying it. I can go with you.”

My body settles back into the couch as I think. I’ve been haunted for four years by what happened. I’ve drifted from friends, struggled to keep up with and pass multiple classes throughout high school, spent session after session in therapy. My cousin’s death is not always at the forefront of my thoughts by any means, especially after so long, but it still looms over me as if it were his ghost in the middle of the night. It creeps up on me at both expected and unexpected moments. It has the power to make me fall apart, and I’m sick of it. Trying to heal was my reason for coming back here in the first place. I look into his eyes.

“Do you want to go in the morning?”

I jolt awake in a cold sweat. I had the nightmare again. It’s the same way it’s always been, with me walking alone on the shore-

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line at sunset. It’s all so vivid, the breeze on my face, the sand on my bare feet, and then I step on something squishy. I look down and he’s there, half-buried in the sand, my foot on his soft, cool, bloated belly.

The brightly colored trunks with cartoon fish are still around his waist, and slimy blonde strands cling to his skull. He’s a horrible, gray color with blackened lids closed over his eyes, his jaw slacked as if frozen in a scream with dark ooze dripping from his mouth and nostrils. It always ends there. I try to scream, and then I wake up.

My body curls into itself on my little air mattress. Soft snores are coming from the bed across the room. I won’t let myself spiral now.

If I get too upset I’ll wake them up, and they’ll run over and hold me.

They’ll say this was all a mistake, that we shouldn’t have come back here, and we’ll be back on the road in an hour.

And maybe that’s right. Maybe that’s what we should do.

But I don’t want to go. I need to be here right now, to find some way to let go of it all.

Breathe, breathe, breathe.

Slowly, the visions from my dream fade away, but I still can’t sleep. I keep thinking about the faux smiles plastered to my aunt and uncle’s faces as they bid me goodnight, the excruciatingly long hugs my parents gave me before we settled down, the morning walk I told Michael I would go on.

After a while, I can see a faint light coming through the edges of the window shade. There isn’t much of a point in waiting anymore.

My body unravels from its fetal position, and I reach over to grab my phone.

I am hoping the text will wake Michael up. I remember him being a light sleeper. I don’t want to go to his room and walk past the closed door that still says “Linus” in blue stickers.

Hey I can’t get back to sleep Can we go now?

I shouldn’t be hounding him like this, but I can’t think of anything else to do. I double-check that my phone is on silent mode, and when I return to the text app there is one new message.

Ok

After quietly pulling back my hair and throwing on a wrinkled sundress from my suitcase, I leave the room and stand by the stairs.

I can see the vastness of the water through the window above the

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stairwell landing. Michael emerges a few minutes later, in a t-shirt and nylon shorts with his hair sticking out in multiple places. He looks at me for a moment, lips pursed in annoyance, before making his way over.

We slowly walk down the stairs and to the back door. Only when I shut it behind us does he let out a loud huff.

“I hope you know I’m only doing this because I care about you.

Ever get me up at five a.m. again and you’ll be sorry.”

“It’s almost six,” I playfully retort as we make our way to the gate leading to the beach. God, this was such a familiar trip. “Seriously, I’m sorry, I just…”

“I know,” he is unlatching the gate and opening it, and there it is. That familiar, isolated spot I had played at so many times in my childhood.

“This has to be quick. My parents will freak if they wake up and find we’re gone, yours too.” Nodding my head, I take in the feel of the sand softly rubbing against my bare feet as I walk down the beach.

My ankles feel a bit heavy at first, but it begins to seem as if they are chained to weights as I get closer to the ocean. The salty air is awakening long-buried sensations of joy, innocence, panic and grief all at once.

Michael trails after me until we are standing on the shoreline, looking out at the water. The winds have died down, and it’s pretty still right now, but things aren’t always as they appear.

“I don’t blame you, you know, Avery. Not at all,” he pauses before continuing, “My parents have really been trying to come to terms with it all. They love you, they know how hard it’s been for the two of us.”

I stare at the pink and gold glow over the ocean coming from the rising sun, reflecting along the faint ripples of the dark water.

“Thank you.”

I am remembering every beach memory my mind has retained.

The moat digging, the seashell collecting, that last day. I want to smile and cry at the same time. I can remember Linus’ laugh more distinctly than I have in the past; it’s almost like I can hear him.

Little Man, what’s so funny?

The water is lapping at my feet, my toes are tingling from the chill. I begin to step in. The distinct sloshing sound hits my ears, and I take a deep breath.

“Avery?” I look back. Michael’s face is a mixture of confusion, uncertainty and fear. I try to smile.

“It’s okay, you don’t have to try it if you don’t want.”

He takes a moment, but slowly takes a step forward into the water. The surreal feeling is gripping him, too; I can see it in his face. It gets deep fast, just like I remember, and soon we are standing with the

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saltwater up to our waists. My soaked dress is brushing at my thighs, and I am thinking about my carefree childhood before all this, when I would come down here so often it felt like my extended relatives were a second immediate family. Back then, I could never have imagined my parents or my aunt and uncle screaming at me through hysterics. Back then, Michael would quietly utter clever quips and Linus would tug at my hand, begging me to follow him to the beach.

I don’t even think before doing something I never thought that I’d do again. I plunge myself completely under, flinching at the brief, sharp chill on my previously dry upper body. I stay just for a moment, to fully submerge myself for the first time since then. My eyes are shut, and I take in the coolness against every inch of my skin, let my arms float around me. I revel in the heavy and simultaneously weightless feeling. My skirt is lifted up around my waist like I’m the center of a flower. I exhale through my mouth and let the bubbles of air tickle my face as they shoot up to the surface.

When I come up, Michael is staring at me, and I start to worry about how I might have scared him. He looks me up and down for a few seconds, and then his green eyes spark up as he laughs in disbelief. Before I know it, I am laughing, too. Droplets are dripping down my skin, wet hair is clinging to my back, and the fabric of my dress weighs heavy.

The sun is rising higher over the flat ocean, reflecting off it like a glass sheet. It’s peaceful right now, and it’s okay.

For this moment, it’s okay.

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A R T

1 Then, there, that porch Ingrid Wasmer 2 Fern Louise Rossiter 3 I Don’t want to Remember / Don’t be so Dramatic Madelyn Turner 4 Adolescence Madelyn Turner 5 Me and Mine Ingrid Wasmer 6 Sucker Punch Phelix Venters-Sefic 7 I am a Woman / She is a MONSTER Madelyn Turner 8 Would you like some breakfast?

Louise Rossiter 9 Bad Habit Madelyn Turner 10 Databending - to slip Phelix Venters-Sefic

M U S I C

The BDR Project Brandon Roberts

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When did you start making music?

I’ve been playing music since middle school, but I’ve only been writing for 2 years.

Do you have any particular influences?

My big writing influences are The Front Bottoms, Peach Pit, The Mountain Goats, and many many others.

Describe your sound in 3 words.

Acoustic, Alternative, Amateur.

If you could be in a band with any professor who would it be and why?

Nikki Malley! I really love the vibraphone’s texture and unique sound, and I’d love to experiment with that sound outside of a Jazz context.

Do you have any musical projects coming up?

I am (hopefully) writing some new material this term, but that’s not a near-future project, unfortunately.

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J O U R N A L I S M

BIPOC student demands show history repeating itself Sarah Eitel

Demands brought forward by Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) students at Knox College in February and again in September have sparked campus-wide discussions about racism and equity, but a long history of similar BIPOC student demands leave students and faculty wondering what, if anything, is different this time.

As far back as 1969, BIPOC students have been bringing demands to Knox administrators. For the most part, these demands have been brought by Black students, usually affiliated with A.B.L.E., but MEChA has also released a set of demands and the most recent set of demands are not affiliated with any one BIPOC student group on campus.

Still, with each new set of demands released, many of the same points are echoed over the 50-year record of demands that can be accessed through the Special Collections and Archives in the Seymour Library.

Most of the demands can be put into six categories: recruitment of more Black students, hiring of more Black faculty and staff, diversity training, dialogues, reparations, and more scholarships put aside specifically for BIPOC students.

One of the most frequent demands that continue to be asked of Knox today is that more Black faculty and staff be hired. When A.B.L.E. gave their original 10 demands in February of 1969, six of them asked for more Black faculty or staff to help Black students feel more comfortable on campus. A.B.L.E.’s February 2020 demands also asked for more Black faculty and staff to be brought on at Knox.

Students called for more Black faculty and staff in May of 1992 and April of 1988. In 1988, A.B.L.E. even demanded that Knox send them a report with updates on their search every two weeks.

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Anne Ehrlich, Vice President of Student Development, said that Knox is searching for more people with diverse backgrounds to hire whenever there are job openings. She suggested that one reason that it can be hard to find BIPOC candidates for faculty positions is that doctorate programs themselves are based on white privilege.

Ehrlich said it can also be hard to convince BIPOC individuals that they’ll enjoy working in a small Midwestern town at a small school identified as a “Predominantly White Institution” (PWI). Coming to work at Knox could prove to be an isolating experience for BIPOC candidates.

Tianna Cervantez, Executive Director for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, echoed Ehrlich’s point saying that it can be hard to balance the disadvantages of living in a small town and working at a PWI to make Knox look more attractive, but Knox administrators are trying nonetheless.

Cervantez empathizes with the frustration that BIPOC students are feeling. She said she’s disappointed that demands have to continue to be brought up, and she feels the need for action that students are pushing for. Cervantez wants to remind students that some things take time.

Cervantez and Ehrlich both pointed to work being done by Mike Schneider, Provost and Dean of the College, as an example of how Knox administrators are working to ensure that more Black faculty and staff are brought on.

Schneider said he is working on overhauling the hiring process to instill anti-racism within it from start to finish. He does not think there is any way that the hiring process can be fully inclusive and anti-racist with the simple integration of a few changes.

Initial changes to the hiring process include implicit bias training for hiring committees and one member of the committee, called the diversity advocate, being there solely to ensure that diverse candidates are being considered for positions.

Still, Schneider recognizes that a truly anti-racist process will have to start when a department begins to think about hiring someone new.

Right now, the process starts after a committee has already been made.

Another common demand throughout the years has been that staff,

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faculty, and students take part in diversity training. The reasons for and the specifics of what those pieces of training entail have varied, but demands for racial diversity training started cropping up in demands given by A.B.L.E. in April of 1988.

The students who gave the 1988 demand wanted training for advising staff. They said that they had been misadvised at times because Knox advisors didn’t have enough one-on-one interactions with students who belonged to what they described as minority groups. They suggested that advisors take part in workshops and have more one-on-one interactions with students from marginalized groups.

In July of 2017, students in MEChA demanded that Knox provide formal training to Campus Safety officers to ensure that they are informed about immigration policies. They demanded that counselors and Counseling Services receive specific training so they can help students struggling with issues related to immigration. Finally, they demanded that Knox offer annual Know Your Rights workshops led by lawyers that are paid for and hosted by the college.

Four out of A.B.L.E.’s six demands from February of this year asked for some sort of training. Two called for a section of new student orientation that would focus on racial diversity and comprehension and for a week of each First Year Preceptorial (FP) to focus on the same. They also charged Knox with providing staff and faculty with mandatory racial diversity and comprehension training that includes an in-person element.

In response, Knox administrators—including Cervantez—worked throughout spring term and the summer to develop 5 workshops for faculty and staff. COVID and working around the schedules of hourly workers have made the in-person portion of the demands harder to fulfill, but Cervantez and the Executive Committee continue to work on facilitating diversity training for all Knox faculty and staff members.

Cervantez said that administrators have also been working on changes to the orientation diversity program to shift responsibility for those conversations off of students with marginalized identities. Changes were also made to the FP course to ensure that all freshmen have at least one conversation about race.

Of the 12 demands released in September, two of them called for training for students and staff. The authors of the demands asked for

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the students who hung Trump flags in their windows to participate in training about sexuality, gender, sexual assault and race. They also demanded that staff from the Athletics Department undergo sexual assault training centered around BIPOC and LGBTQ+ individuals.

Daniella Irle, Director of Athletics, said that she has been working with Cervantez on diversity training for her department since the summer of 2019. When Knox shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic in March, Irle and her staff were able to attend a variety of diversity and inclusion webinars.

Irle was hesitant to start any conversations with athletes during the summer months but said that many of the teams held informal meetings to talk about issues of racial justice and equity following the killing of George Floyd.

Rain Garant, Assistant Director of Intercultural Life, began working with Cervantez, Irle, and Kim Schrader, Title IX Coordinator, to start having conversations with athletes about topics ranging from positive versus negative masculinity to issues of racism. These conversations are ongoing, and Garant hopes that he will be able to cultivate a sustained relationship with the Athletics Department so these conversations can continue throughout the school year and beyond.

Another common and related thread throughout the demands is a call for some sort of dialogue. The first of this type of demand first cropped up in 1988 when A.B.L.E. demanded that students and faculty who were accused of using derogatory language towards a student with a marginalized identity should talk to a counselor “until racial tensions are eased.”

Since then, students with MEChA demanded that the president of the college hold at least one forum per term regarding issues that international students and immigrant students face. This was in an effort to establish an open dialogue between administrators and students.

In the most recent September demands, the authors of the demands called for peer educators from Intercultural Life to hold a dialogue with the students who hung the Trump flags in their windows. They also charged the Athletic Department with examining their own culture and taking steps to make the department welcoming to BIPOC and LGBTQ+ students.

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A few final common demands include reparations, recruitment of Black students and scholarship opportunities for BIPOC students. The 1969 demands charged Knox with recruiting and enrolling 100 Black students in the next school year and with making more scholarships available to Black students to make Knox more attractive to them. Demands in May of 1992 also called for more enrollment of BIPOC students.

The 2017 MEChA demands called on Knox to provide DACA students with any financial aid they may need should DACA be repealed. This February, A.B.L.E. demanded a $3,000 a year stipend for Black students as reparations.

In September, BIPOC students demanded that any scholarships the students who put Trump flags in their windows had been awarded be revoked and redistributed to BIPOC students and that Knox expand the scholarship opportunities it currently has for undocumented students and DACA recipients.

With so many similar demands coming up time and time again, it is fair to ask, what makes this time different?

Cervantez suggests students think about new demands in the context of the progress that has been made since the last demands were presented.

She cited the fact that diversity training and workshops were not widely implemented at Knox until students fought for it to be in 2013 and 2014.

Garant knows that if change is to be made, administrators, faculty, staff, and students alike must make their own responses to demands being brought forward personal. He said that administrators lean towards organizational change but students want transformational change.

Tension will always exist there.

Speakers at the sit-in outside of Raub-Sellew emphasized the need for students to hold each other, themselves, and Knox accountable for racism on campus.

It is likely that the demands posed to Knox administrators in September will not be the last. It is also likely that the next set of demands will contain some of the same points as the demands from 50 years ago.

Responsibility for holding administrators accountable for meeting demands may very well rest in the hands of students, and BIPOC students should not be fighting that fight alone.

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I would like to send a special thanks to Micaela Terronez, Assistant Librarian for Special Collections, for all her help in locating the files, talking through the content in them and even tracking down some missing information.

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Looking at the contrast in assault and legacy Caroline Clink

Within the public eye, accusations of domestic violence and sexual assault are something that has become increasingly common as those who come forward are no longer facing the same repercussions that they used to. This is no different for professional sports leagues.

However, a glaring difference between accusations against professional athletes and other public figures are the consequences those accused will face. In many cases, people accused of sexual assault or domestic violence are publicly shamed and de-platformed. The same is not true when it comes to professional athletes.

If a male professional athlete is accused of domestic violence or sexual assault they frequently face no repercussions, so much so that some of the athletes that are held in the highest regard have been accused, yet those accusations have frequently fallen by the wayside and are largely ignored by the leagues and fans of those players alike.

In 2003, Kobe Bryant was charged with sexually assaulting a woman –– the charges were dismissed and later settled out of court in a civil case.

In the wake of his passing, this is something that people are heavily reluctant to talk about, saying that it’s too soon to bring it up or that it isn’t important right now.

But when is the right time? At what point is it deemed okay to bring up this important part of his history?

Kobe Bryant is not going to be remembered as a rapist. He is going to be remembered as a basketball legend, a father, a role model.

His legacy was not tarnished in any way by this. He will still be remembered as one of the greatest even though this is something that he did because it is something that people don’t want to discuss. They don’t

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want to be faced with the fact that their icon would do something like this.

However, this problem doesn’t end with Kobe.

In the summer of 2019, Toronto Maple Leafs forward Auston Matthews was charged with disorderly conduct in his home state of Arizona for drunkenly trying to get into a woman’s car while she was inside and pulling down his pants while walking away.

While this happened over the summer, the information didn’t get out until a few months later. Both Matthews and the Maple Leafs were trying to cover up this incident and make sure that nobody found out about it. That only begs the question of what these organizations were able to successfully cover up.

The discussion following this didn’t focus on the experience of the woman or how female fans of the Maple Leafs would feel after this.

Instead, it largely consisted of male sports reporters making jokes about the situation and fans concerned that this would mean that Matthews chances at being named the next captain of the Maple Leafs were gone.

The NHL has a long history of being terrible in dealing with sexual assault and domestic violence matters. The NHL has no defined policy on domestic violence and sexual assault and because of that, their response to it over the years has been lacking.

There has only been one instance in which the NHL has taken real action to deal with domestic violence and that was in the case of former LA Kings’ defenseman Slava Voynov.

Voynov was arrested in 2014 on charges of domestic violence for abusing his wife. He was subsequently suspended indefinitely from the NHL and returned to his native Russia.

However, while the action that the NHL decided to take seems at a glance thorough, there were still many shortcomings within the process and into the current day.

Per routine league ruling, Voynov was suspended during the active police investigation. However, the LA Kings attempted to circumvent that by having him attend practice, something they were later fined for.

Voynov’s suspension also only holds through the end of the 2019-20

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season, following that he is free to return and play for any willing team as if nothing happened.

It is obvious by the actions that the league has avoided taking and in the few situations that they have decided to take action that they will always prioritize the few players, no matter how bad their actions are, over their entire female fanbase.

Within men’s professional sports leagues as a whole, domestic violence and sexual assault are not viewed as seriously as they should be.

Looking at any of the four major leagues, it is not hard to find a string of players all accused of domestic violence or sexual assault that are still being allowed the platform to play and supposedly serve as role models for their communities.

Continuously not taking these accusations seriously and allowing these men to maintain their platforms does nothing but further normalize this type of behavior for younger generations and allow it to continue the same in the future.

Of the four major leagues, the NBA and the MLB are the only ones that have a concrete and comprehensive policy written on domestic violence and sexual assault. However, having those rules exist on paper does nothing if they are not executed well. Those policies also do not ensure that domestic violence and sexual assault do not happen in these leagues and that many players can get away with it.

Gone are the days that players can act without thought to how they will be viewed by the public. In the media age we live in now, each minute action these athletes take can be examined by anybody around the world. But, that still doesn’t mean that domestic violence and sexual assault are being taken seriously.

Accusations are commonly only regarded as a bump in the road for most, an unfortunate incident temporarily halting their career brought up anecdotally for years to come. These accusations and in some cases convictions do not end careers. They do not tarnish legacies.

Big-name players can get away with it because the mentality is still the same. Once domestic violence and sexual assault are taken seriously at every level, real change can finally happen.

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Students revive KADSA to support disabled community Carlos Flores-Gaytan Sophomore S ​ ophia Elswick ​says she has struggled with educational discrimination her whole life because of her ADHD, and this did not change when she came to Knox as a freshman.

It began with finding the process of transferring her accommodations from high school difficult, and thinking it was surprising Knox only had two people working in the Office of Disabilities. But when classes started, Elswick also found herself running into issues with her instructors, particularly with one professor who did not seem to want to deal with disabled students.

“He basically took me into the hallway and told me that I was stupid and that I was a horrible person, and all these horrible things,” Elswick said.

Elswick recognized the insufficient support for disabled students at Knox. But besides some other students with ADHD, Elswick did not know anyone else at Knox who was disabled. When she posted online about the idea of a club for disabled students, Elswick received no responses.

However, last fall term brought ableism issues back to the forefront.

Elswick personally was dealing with a recent diagnosis of the tissue disorder EDS and ongoing illness, which she again found her professors to be unhelpful with.

A public turning point came when The Knox Student published the student column titled “Goodbye, Evolution.” The column was quickly condemned by numerous readers as ableist and implying support for

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eugenics, subsequently being taken down by TKS. Despite the initial column, Elswick found the response from her Knox peers heartening.

“For the first time I was seeing the greater Knox community talk about disability,” Elswick said.

Elswick ended up having a conversation with Director of Disability Services Stephanie Grimes w ​ here she learned there had previously been a club on campus supporting disabled students called the Knox Alliance for Disability Support and Advocacy (KADSA). The club had since dissipated and Grimes had been searching for someone new to head it.

Elswick immediately volunteered.

This time, Elswick’s first post on social media about reforming KADSA attracted interest quickly. This led to Elswick spending winter break collecting student emails, setting up an Instagram and holding executive elections.

Now, KADSA is alive again, with Elswick leading the exec team as President, and awaiting the school’s response to their application for recognition as an official student organization.

Creating a community for disabled students KADSA is now meeting virtually on Thursday nights, starting at 9 PM central, with 12 to 16 people attending the first few meetings. Members described the meetings as informal, with most of the time spent allowing attendees to freely discuss disability-related issues.

Exec members’ hope is that these discussions will make disabled students feel part of a community, as they described spending much of their own lives feeling as if they were alone in their struggles.

“I always felt unseen, but here with KADSA, it was like, ‘oh, we can joke about all these things of our past. There are some other people that understand what pain I was going through,’ “ said Head of Advocacy ​ Dayana Gonzalez​, sophomore.

Gonzalez was diagnosed at age six with Perthes disease, a condition affecting blood flow to the joints, specifically the hips, making them brittle.

“I grew up really isolated from everyone else, having to be homes-

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chooled. And growing up, I felt as if I was the only one disabled. And when I came to Knox College, I didn’t really see anyone else that had a disability,” Gonzalez said.

Head of Support ​Danny Cerna-Núñez,​s​ enior, who is affected daily by PTSD, says her perspective of disability was impacted by growing up in Mexico, where disabilities and mental health were a taboo subject matter.

“I think oftentimes we feel the need to hide our disabilities or hide our differences in general, and having a space that is safe for us to [be ourselves] and express that was definitely necessary on the Knox campus,” Cerna-Núñez said.

Secretary S ​ ummer Shannon​, junior, has a degenerative neuromuscular disease and became permanently disabled before transferring to Knox for the 2019–2020 school year. Shannon suffered from depression after becoming disabled, which prevented her from attending what was her first fall and winter at Knox. Shannon says she experienced feelings of isolation, which continued when she eventually came to campus.

“I didn’t really know anyone at all besides the people who lived in dorms around me, and they were fine. So I had to go through that by myself. I’m still processing it. I feel like I have this long backlog of feelings,” Shannon said. “I don’t want anyone else to go through what I did alone. I just want to be there for supporting other people, especially people who are younger than me, fresh out of high school.”

Vice President A ​ lex Marcouiller​, sophomore, has had a chronic illness her whole life and says she learned to self-advocate from having to constantly do it through her time in public school.

“Now I have the ability to help others with the same things,” Marcouiller said. ”I want KADSA first and foremost to be a space for disabled students on campus to have a community.”

Treasurer S ​ age Isenhart​, sophomore, does not have a diagnosed disability but grew up with disabled family and friends. Isenhart said they were never sure what they could do to support the disabled people in their life, which is what made KADSA seem like a perfect opportunity.

“There’s so many problems with our systems, in schooling, in public, in communities. It’s something I really want to help with, and this seemed

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like the perfect way to do it,” Isenhart said.

The group hopes to directly provide information and advice for people who come to the meetings with questions and believes maintaining the casual nature of the meetings will make them feel welcoming for anyone.

“You can share as much as you want during our meetings. You can share as little as you want. You can have your camera turned off, not say a word, but know there’s a space available for you. That makes a huge difference,” Cerna-Núñez said.

Serving as a campus resource and advocates

KADSA is still in the process of making its plans for the future but has already heard from clubs interested in collaborating and have ambitious goals for how they’ll create a presence on campus.

“Disabled people are the largest minority group on the planet, and yet I feel like disabled people are left out of so many conversations,” Elswick said. “And I figured that the best way to help to advocate for change at Knox is to make a big stink about it.”

The group believes that by bringing together people who are angry about ableism at Knox, they’ll be able to make an effective push for their demands to be met.

Specifically, the group wants improved accessibility on campus through more ramps and elevators, and at least one to two additional employees providing support in the Office of Disabilities. They also want anti-ableism training included in Freshman Preceptorial courses, with professors also being taught how to help disabled students and avoid ableism.

“We’re not really asking for a lot. We’re really just asking to be treated the same way as students who are not disabled. We’re just asking for our accommodations for us to be at the same level as everybody else,” Gonzalez said.

Marcouiller noted that one way in which the group’s advocacy has already started has been by having members work on letters to be sent to whoever is selected as the next President of Knox College, telling them what they expect to see them do in their position.

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When the group is eventually approved for funding, Isenhart hopes it can be used for purchasing items disabled students might need (such as wheelchairs and canes), providing access to diagnoses and medication and for paying speakers to discuss disability. The group also has plans to hold fundraising events to support their efforts.

Cerna-Núñez is working on a resource guide that would help students be informed about the process of getting help from Disability Services and Counseling Services.

She hopes that providing this type of information will help students feel like they are not navigating the process alone and reduce the work of Grimes, who due to the number of DSS cases is not always able to respond to students promptly.

The exec team emphasized that the group is also meant to be an outlet for non-disabled students to learn, hoping groups will reach out to work with them and individuals will feel comfortable approaching them with their questions.

“If you want advice on how to make your organization more accessible, we’re open to that, “ Elswick said. “There are no stupid questions as far as disability goes, as long as you are genuinely trying to be respectful and learn more about it...If you don’t know something and you’re too afraid to ask it, you’re never going to learn.”

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C R E A T I V E

N O N F I C T I O N

Traces Jaime Lam

I have a scar on my face.

It’s minute and has shifted from where it was when earned. Just a little line, curved underneath my bottom lip, but the only photo to its name reveals it sitting in the center of my chin, an angry streak. I was about two.

The only thing my mother has told me is how she cried in the doctor’s office as the needle threaded through my skin. She said I wouldn’t stop begging for it to stop, bawling, turning to her, pleading, “Please, Mommy. I’m sorry. Please, I’m sorry, I’ll stop.”

In the end, I only had two stitches, but they’re the only stitches I’ve ever received in my twenty-two years of life, and I have no idea what happened to obtain them.

Was I running too fast, slipping on my own feet, cutting my chin on the sidewalk? Did Bailey, our enormous black lab, drag his chain under my feet and somehow wound my face? Could it be that I was in the kitchen, playing with a certain sharp utensil that should have never been in a toddler’s palm?

No one can answer my questions. Fallan was twelve and tired of being a part-time mother to three children; she chose to ignore our existence as much as she could. Kendall was a child, permitted to be a child, and Brenan was a year younger than I. Mom, though?

She resorts to her favorite phrase: “I don’t know, Jaime, it was so long ago, I don’t remember.”

We all remember when Kendall received stitches on his knee. He went out to help our mother unload the van, and Bailey slipped out of his collar to run amuck. Kendall had attempted to jet after him; instead, his foot gave out on mud, crashing his knee into a mountain of sticks I’d made on the sidewalk, earning a bloody gash that entitled him to an ER trip. I’d tended to him like a nurse, convinced I was to be a doctor just

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as my father intended, careful of the zig-zag his cut formed. The same care was given when he fractured his leg, a confident child taking the plunge off a new playset in the local park. How he laid there, leg forming a groove in the grass as every movement brought water to his eyes. I had to run home, alone, to tell our mother. Even now, I can return to the park and still find the spot his leg refused to move from. I think I can even make out the shape, like even the grass remembers.

I remember all of Brenan’s injuries. The time he almost bit his tongue in half, leaping off the bookshelf to a reclining chair that clipped underneath his chin to cause his teeth to clamp down. Snapping his leg trying to jump over a hefty stack of blankets in the living room. His many sprained ankles. The time he caught his face on fire with a homemade flamethrower—the ingredients being a can of spray paint and a lighter— marking himself with second-degree burns. His eyebrows disappeared, and his skin looked like raw meat. He’s lucky he wears glasses; otherwise, he’d be blind. I even remember the smaller moments, like when he burst his lip after ramming his mouth onto our Razor scooter’s handlebars, pooling blood onto the crisp sidewalk—Kendall poured bleach over the massacre so no passerby would be concerned. After, Brenan laid on a blanket in the living room, aching as the swelling gradually went down. We’d never seen him lose so much blood.

Even Fallan, I carry a memory that I was not even yet born for, but I know the story after being told maybe once or twice. How she’d wandered about as a little girl, cut her head from a teetering display of cans in a grocery store, and ended up in the ER waiting for hours with a bleeding skull, matted curls drying on her neck. She mentioned how the floors were composed of orange and green tiles—ever since, the colors leave her stomach in twists.

And yet— “I don’t remember, Jaime. I’m old, I can’t remember everything.”

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Little Girl to Something More Shae Gabriel one.

Blonde hair flows down to a little girl’s waist. Flowing and golden, she looks like something out of a fairytale. Rapunzel when her hair was first beginning to grow out. It gets tangled when she swims, but under the water, it floats like a mermaid’s hair. When her mom brushes through her hair, the little girl knows this is what it means to be loved. It will be years still until the weight of all that hair begins to suffocate her. The little girl doesn’t know how helpless she is; the way her arms are too short to even brush all the way through those golden locks. Children are dependent in so many ways, and this is just another way this body is not her own.

But she doesn’t know that yet.

two.

A rushed ponytail. A quick braid. A messy bun. Anything that doesn’t involve more thought than half a moment. That’s how she does her hair.

It’s tangled and knotted, growing worse with every restless night. She should wash it, she knows, but the effort of taking a shower seems even more monumental than moving a mountain. Someone tells her to take better care of herself. Her hair is so pretty, what a waste. Have you ever thought about letting it grow out again? It used to be so long, no matter that it’s still past her shoulders. On the best days, it feels like a weight pulling her into the ground. Her mother maneuvers her in front of a mirror, tugging and pulling and tearing because her hair is more important than the fact that looking in the mirror feels like broken shards of glass against skin.

Maybe she could shave her head.

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three.

You’ll look like a boy. Curly hair doesn’t look good cut short. Your cheeks are too round, it won’t look flattering. Why would you want to cut such beautiful hair? You won’t look good for graduation. Why does it matter? You screech. I want to look like a boy. I don’t care if it doesn’t look good. I already hate this body. Why should I care about my cheeks?

My hair isn’t beautiful, I am. You’re eighteen and they can’t stop you and the hair on your shoulders feels like the weight of all the things they don’t understand. That they refuse to understand.

Ignore them and cut it short anyway.

four.

This college campus is full of people with hair colored like a 48-pack of Crayola crayons; long hair, short hair, no hair, and everything in between. As you run your fingers through your pixie cut, you think about change. You’re already trying a new name, new pronouns, a new set of skin. Another change just seems ​right​. When you catch the bus to Walmart, you spend ten dollars on dye as purple as your school colours, and it’s the best ten dollars you’ve ever spent. That night when one of your roommates pulls out a pair of hair clippers and asks if you want to shave your sides, you think of the endless pictures you’ve always wanted to look like and grin.

After all, it’s your hair.

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Nostalgic Winter Jaime Lam

Wintertime should be a nightmare for me—year round, my fingers brushing at the back of my husband’s neck causes his skin to rise. To combat the ever-present anemic chill, I inhale gallons of steaming Chai in robin-egg-colored mugs and tug on sweaters two sizes too big. Often, I find myself beside windows.

I always loved the way snow coated my childhood home: hiding the remains of trash littering our lawn, the torn-up backyard, the nonexistent grass, our kicked-in front porch. All imperfections laid dormant underneath pure, glittering white that winked as the moon watched over her masterpiece. After a few years of living here, the old house’s heater gave up the ghost, so we dropped the oven door down, bought a handful of space heaters, and wore layers. Outside, we were permitted to forget—for a few months—how we lived.

New Year’s day of this year, ice encased the trees in glass after hours of the weather waving back and forth from rain to snow. I cracked the curtain to admire the way it fell, how trees began to shine. As a child, our Bradford Pear tree split in half with the weight of winter on its branches. Its size swallowed our yard, nearly taking out my mother’s van and the powerline. A weak wood, climbing to the sky too quickly—anything could have pulled it down. My mother had been horrified at the devastation, but I was enthralled and still am.

I romanticize, of course. Growing up, my brothers and I would be strapped into “marshmallow coats” to walk to the elementary school, my teenage sister already gone by the time we left. If it was sub-zero, my mother would sometimes drive us across town before trekking frozen roads to the nursing home, and this day, it happened to be too frigid to send off her three youngest children. I was a round, padded grape of a child with barely a face underneath my winter gear, waddling out the house to my mother’s baby-blue, beat-up box van. The three of us sat in the center seat, buckled as one across our laps, my big brother Kendall at our core. Hold on to them. My mother adjusted a scarf tied to our broken door, knotted to the passenger side’s “oh shit” handle. Kendall’s arms locked around us; we could see our breath. We made it past the train tracks as the scarf unraveled to reveal houses running by. The door slammed back and forth from the speed of the van—I remember white-

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ness, the skipping road. Kendall held tighter, afraid we’d slip through his grip and out. The village wasn’t a mile long; it wasn’t far before we arrived at school. Since we lived, we never spoke of it again; our great aunt took over driving us in glacial mornings, and the van soon retired for another cheap, busted vehicle to take its place.

The downfall of living in the middle of nowhere meant my mother’s job stretched a decent ways away, miles of country highways slicing through frosted cornfields where deer loved to amble. There were many days she should have stayed inside rather than risk the roads, but being a single mother to four children disagreed with her. For years, she would leave before any of the world, or we, awoke. One icy morning, her worn tires protested. She pulled her evergreen minivan over to the side of the road to inspect, believing she clicked the stick shift safely in “park” before climbing out. As she wandered around to investigate, the ice made its presence known and stole her away, her feet sliding. Half her body disappeared underneath the van—a van in neutral that idled back. Later, she picked us up from school, giddy, sneaking glances at my big brother beside her with mischief glinting in her eye. My coworkers and I debated on telling you. Nervous, my brother looked at her strangely.

Tell me what? What happened? When we got home, she pulled down her scrubs, revealing a tire tread decorating her outer thigh, before proudly announcing: I ran myself over today.

Despite the dangers of winter and needing to double up on socks at home, I marveled as snow and wind twirled under streetlights, nose to the glass. My mother preferred snow on Christmas exclusively. You won’t like it when you start driving in it. The bruise had lasted for months, and the feeling in her thigh never returned. An adulty adult now, I’ve scraped morning frost off my windshield with my student I.D., curved back and forth on brown slush at traffic lights, received a friend’s phone call telling she’d slid off the interstate, and—somehow—still can’t find myself hating what everyone told me I would learn to despise the older I became.

Snowfall faded the day after New Years’. My husband and I went on a walk in our winter after the roads were salted and thawed; I stopped at our pine tree, admiring how the frozen edges of needles made icy replicas of pine cones. A lumberjack, he scoped out worries, pointing at trees with dangling, broken limbs spitefully holding on by the green of life. A widowmaker. Danger, Will Robinson, one of his many go-to catchphrases. We strolled past houses that usually looked ordinary but, that day, looked mesmerizing. I stopped myself from photographing

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every glitter. Is it this beautiful every year? Unfortunately, the glamour didn’t last even a week— I was disappointed to see the magic of stilled trees begin to thaw, dripping off branches like snot as they caught the sunlight’s glance.

Despite living in the midwest all of my life, I’ve never taken a winter for granted. It always feels like the first time. Already, I stalk the weather forecast, craving more. Waiting for the numbers to drop, waiting for the cold diamonds to return to my yard so I can gaze outside and feel like a child again.

Every few years or so, I walk out into winter barefoot, leaving footprints in the snow. Of course, my toes protest; I don’t make it far. The prickling, numbing out of my feet makes me giggle, hopping back and forth. I stand outside of whatever home I’m in, feel my body cool, skin stinging with wind, and talk to the moon like she’s listening—because she is— and tell her how beautiful she’s made everything once again. Tell her thank you.

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My Way Home Sally Bessette

Hwy 165

The u-bend exit off of I-440E dumps us right next to East Belt Liquor Store, the dingiest building found in Pulaski County, Arkansas. The roof is rusted, and I think anyone inside must be able to feel the slightest summer breeze blowing through those walls.

When it rains, the parking lot turns into a mud puddle, and when the flood came a couple of years back, this whole intersection was submerged.

There was no exiting the interstate here.There was no taking Highway 165 through here. There was no liquor being sold here.

Let’s turn the AC off, roll the windows down, and turn up the country music on the radio. This is how these roads are meant to be driven. We turn right, pass under the interstate, and drift by the three gas stations the town of Scott has to offer, except this is technically still North Little Rock. That one, there, is where we get chicken on a stick and fried green beans for lunch on Saturdays. Chicken on a stick is a staple around here—oh, you can smell the glorious fried food from here!

And there’s the Dollar General that saves us from taking trips to town every time we have a milk emergency or forget to buy shredded cheese at Walmart. Down here beyond a few churches, we find ourselves at a fork in the road.

Colonel Maynard Rd.

We could go either way, but I decide to merge right, taking us through the scenic route back to the place that feels like home to me.

We pass along Willow

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Beach Lake, enjoying the country waterside scenery. To the left: a mess of fully furnished trees and bushes that are beautifully and perfectly unkempt. To the right: a calm oxbow lake that, up ahead, steadily bends away from the road and back towards its mother—the Arkansas River.

The water casts the sun’s gleaming reflection through a million little sparkles. The bald cypress trees stand tall in the shallow areas. They like to establish residence in the warm lake water and neighboring swamps.

On the left, as we curve up and over the levy, I look down into the field—or meadow, or perhaps a large yard. There are my cow friends (I’ve never met them formally, but I love them all the same).

When they’re laying down, my mom always tells me what Grandpa said: “When the cows lay down, that means rain is coming.” Thinking of him brings a small wave of love over me. I miss his warm smile, enveloping hugs, and he made the best pancakes I’ve ever had. After long, steady summer rains, the cows like to wade in their large puddle—or inland sea—that forms in their corner next to the hill.

Lower Steele Bend Rd

At this fork in the road, we veer left, away from the river dam that has been closed to the public for years now. Dam Site Road (such a perfectly bland name) used to be open so people could drive down, look around, and see what was going on. I was too young to remember, but my mom always tells me about the time a huge crowd of people gathered down there to watch a riverboat pass by. And on that boat was a man playing circus tunes on a calliope.

We twist down this narrowing road, escaping from the open air to enter a realm that is only the color green. I slow way down because the road is so narrow and winding. Turn off the radio and listen. Right here is where the ends of the oxbow Old River Lake come together to make an almost-circle. All kinds of animals live here, and if we see a turtle crossing the road, we can get out and help it reach safety. The birds are singing, the water is pouring through the spillway under the road, the foliage is in full force, but if you look closely, you might be able to spot the coarse bark of the trunks through the verdant southern jungle.

Low hanging branches hold glamorous leaves waiting there for you to notice them, hanging so close that you want to reach out and touch

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them, all along this twisty country road that leads to home.

Soon the trees thin and we dump out into farmland of beans and beans and more beans. Or maybe cotton. It’s hard for me to tell the difference this early in their life, but my dad would know.

Many summers ago, my uncle and my dad would take my sister and me out on the ATVs into the family farmland. So small, I sat in front of my dad on the seat, reaching far ahead to grip the handlebars. The four-wheeler roared, I held tight, and off we went down the narrow roads until we reached our beans. I never realized how bumpy the rows of crops were until then. I was wearing shorts, sitting on a fake leather seat in the hot sun, and with every jolt, my thighs would unstick from the seat and leave red marks on my skin that stung. But the reward was well worth it. When we finally came to a stop, we snacked on our sweet bean pods.

Hwy 161 We’re almost there now. Left turn here at the stop sign, and soon, the farmland on the left side of the road ends at a line of magnificent pines. Here is where Rob Bell Estate begins—our neighbors, my dad’s cousins. My grandparents, aunts, uncles, and those distant relatives used to share this property, but years ago after both of my grandparents passed away, it split up. As a child, I was able to roam those acres, wandering through the meadows, down that gravel road that was once the old Highway 161, still lined with telephone poles, across the bridge over the bayou. My cousins and I would drive the golf carts or just travel by

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foot. Running, playing, climbing trees, tending to the horses. Now I admire the quaint ponds, the small rolling hills, and the dogwoods from our side of the fence.

The Driveway

We reach the intersection of Toltec Mound Road and our driveway, slowing down to make the turn. If we come out here at night, the country is so quiet that we can actually hear the electricity up high in the power lines.

My mom even says it’s so quiet that she can even hear the corn growing. We ease down the narrow blacktop bordered with magnolia and pine trees, bumping along past the unmowed field of fruit trees and wildflowers that my family calls weeds until we reach the small house on Old River Lake that my grandparents once resided in.

To me, home has always been a feeling, not a building I live in. To me, home is where I am loved, in touch with what surrounds me. The feeling that is Home can be found in a house, or a loved one, maybe, but my home is outside in the heavy, damp air that smells like a mix of grass, lake water, and something special about the rural south.

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Citations

Clift, Zoie. “One Tank Travels: Scott and Keo.” One Tank

Travels: Scott and Keo | Arkansas.com, 1 May 2020, www. arkansas.com/articles/one-tank-travels-scott-and-keo-0.

Willoughby, Andy. “Cotham’s Mercantile – Scott, AR.” Burgers,

Barbecue and Everything Else, 23 July. 2015, burgersbarbecue andeverythingelse.com/2015/07/23/cothams-mercantile-scott ar/.

“Bald Cypress.” Dinopedia, dinopedia.fandom.com/wiki/Bald_ Cypress?file=Bald_Cypress.jpg.

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Say Somethin’, Do Somethin’ Matrice Young

Exit Deborah’s Place on Jackson Blvd., prepped in your “After School Matters” shirts with nineteen other Black girls behind you. Look at your posse, your sisterhood, your peers, fellow performers—you are all tired and pumped and ready and not ready at once. Fidget with your backpack, check your phone (it’s August 10th, 2015), make sure you have water—it is the middle of summer, after all. Listen to your instructors talk: this is gonna be a long walk and you’ll be teaming up with other programs, but at the end of the day, your voices will be heard, you will have made a difference. Turn right on Jackson Street to meet up with the other teens; you’re all going to do a peace march together, and it’s your first, and you’re a little scared of how it will go, especially with the hot sun already soaking your skin in honeydew. Gather with the others; there’s enough of you to fill up a block now, and more and more keep coming—you’re anxious, stomach fluttering with little Black boys doing trick shots off the back rim, and little Black girls doing summersaults through double-dutch, but the amount of support this walk, which you had been told was in your mentor’s honor (who had died a year earlier—naturally, but you still missed her; your tears had never felt so numb) was all about the uniting of the hood, and you were happy.

Stick with the girls you know, march beside your friends through the neighborhood you’d ridden the bus through and heard gunshots from or saw people begging for money, crack, or food. March together, holding signs that held affirmations of love for Black people, that say, “LOVE & PEACE,” that say, “DON’T SHOOT,” that say, “WE MATTER, YOU MATTER.” Hear the rhythm of the djembe that a woman you’ve never seen before beats into the Earth, a song like building, a song like family, a song like live and laugh and love thy neighbor. Listen to what you imagine your ancestors’ heartbeat sounds like, listen to what the heartbeat of these streets sounds like, listen to the cries of the ghetto as it weeps for peace for children, from children who jump off of their porches to scream “Hi!” or “Whatch’all doin’?” with the increasing numbers of your march. Watch families crawl out of their houses, from their porches, and join the ranks; watch as children scream at the top of their little lungs in praise and love and solidarity. Witness a love you’d never seen before as your feet move, ununiformed by unanimity, past broken beer

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bottles and trash, past overgrown porch weeds and crowded buildings, past Auntie’s selling candy and snow cones on their front porches, past blue and purple and red and green tongues. Feel your heart swell and swell with a love for your sisters, brothers, aunts, and uncles and those you’ve never met as you scream, throat hoarse, “Honk for peace!” “Honk for peace!” “Honk for peace!” in uniform with the booming of other pubescent voices, and listen. Listen to the car honks on Jackson street as you pass, listen to Black people rolling down their windows and Black women screaming “Go babies!” listen to the honking of change, listen to the honking and chanting of a Chicago love you didn’t know could grow past the four walls of your spoken word sisterhood. Listen. Listen.

Watch the cars slow down, watch the cop cars and white policemen block the street of 99 N Western Ave as you head south, chanting and screaming for justice, for peace, screaming, “Somebody better say somethin’!” as buses pull over and let you pass, as the street fills with Black bodies roaring, breathing a beat of salvation, of truth, of together.

Scream “Somebody better do something’!” with your whole chest, body jumping with pain and love for your friend who hasn’t died yet (RIP Mysean), for your brother grazed by a stray bullet, for the Dark-skinned girl in middle school who was bullied, whose parents committed a uxoricide suicide, for the sista’ who’d bought you your first sweater for your 14th birthday, and whose mother beat the baby that her stepfather planted in her, out of her. Stomp through the streets, tying up traffic as your entire group spreads the length of the two two-lane streets and sob as the rain starts to drizzle from the sky, crying for the beat of the drum, crying from your messages, crying for your “Before it’s too late!” as your mantra repeats, and repeats, and repeats—and the crowd follows on.

Link arms with your sistas as the rain cools the sweat on your bodies, as your posters wet but don’t crumble or smush or break, as the wood poles they’re held on don’t splinter or crack; your point is being made, don’t stop—don’t stop. Reach Van Buren and Western, and by then, the rain has stopped, and you are all cried out, but even with your legs weary, your group walks as tight as a mass burial. Stumble when the entire group, which had split into two, reaches 700 S Homan. Stop, break, breathe. Watch the others talk, like you, chest tight and bursting with the djembe (which, too, has stopped), let yourself bathe your throat in the water you’ve brought along, eardrums pounding. Breaking isn’t an option; you’ve got the walk back, and a performance of all your spoken words and stories to do. Pose as they take pictures, smile and wave from the middle hive of Black bodies laughing and packed with joy and heat and breathing.

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Lost & Found Shae Gabriel

I looked for myself in the world at my fingertips. The world was bright colors, strange shapes, and sounds that I wanted to hold in my hands and touch. The ever-changing blue of the sky and the soft texture that appears to be everything in my crib. I reached for it all, yearning for an explanation of things I did not yet understand. Still do not understand. I was a child, and I saw a world that was so big, so bright that I wanted to inhale it all. Small feet that couldn’t hold up my body, small fingers that couldn’t grasp the air.

There was so much for me to find.

Constellations at my fingertips.

I looked for myself in my mother’s eyes; hazel blue warmth that mirrored my own. The older I grew, the more I looked to this woman who gave me her heart, mind, and soul. Her calloused hands tucking me in at night, her silky soft voice weaving stories before my very eyes as I drifted off to sleep. She was the woman with all of the answers. Why is the sky blue? Can the dog understand me? Can I be a mermaid when I grow up? Why can’t we go to McDonald’s? When is dad coming home?

Are you okay? She always had a patient tone, easy words, and simple answers to put my childhood mind at ease.

I don’t know when my head stopped turning, my hand quit reaching out for that soft reassurance, but I know it has been years and I still don’t know why.

I looked for myself in my father’s spine, straight as a ruler that I wanted to measure myself up against. Taller than I knew I would ever be, my father stood with his back straight and his fingers tensed. His jaw was squared, sharp corners and regal bearing. When I was a child, I thought my father was a king, a superhero, my own personal James Bond. I yearned for his keen eyes, his strong hands, his height. I wanted to reach the same heights, wanted to see what he saw up there that made him leave so often. What made him leave.

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When he came back, I was not taller than him, but I had the same distance in my eyes. However, there

was nowhere for me to go.

I looked for myself in my brother’s shadow, convinced I would find something there that had been kept from me. I became a hanger-on, the quintessential annoying younger sibling. His friends would come over, and I’d follow them, begging at their feet to be included. It’s just that he had so many of them—friends, that is—and I didn’t know how to make any of my own. And what is a brother but a built-in best friend?

He looked at me like he wanted me to go away, and I thought, that’s just siblings.

He doesn’t pick up my calls anymore. When we live in the same house, it’s like I’m not even there.

But he is still my brother, and I’m still looking for answers in his shadow.

I looked for myself in my best friend’s smile. Growing up, I was only a single step behind, following her lead in everything we did. Playing hopscotch and sharing goldfish. Best friends forever and broken promises. She switched schools in seventh grade and didn’t tell me until the day before classes started. I found her phone number years later but she never replied. I’ve shed more tears than I know to count, and, even now, the memory of blonde hair makes me ache for a familiar hand clutched in mine.

I am still removing parts of her from my soul and don’t know when it will just be me again in this heart of mine.

I looked for myself in religion. Swore my soul to the Catholic god and strived for unattainable perfection. They told me from birth to forgive, to forgive, to forgive. I laid myself on the ground and forgave and forgave until there was nothing else to give. I gave Him everything; heart, mind, and soul. And when I begged Him for answers about this world, my suffering heart, about the way I loved and hated and burned, He stayed silent, and I reached down deep only to find

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that I had no forgiveness left to give.

I looked for myself in prescription pill bottles. Clinical depression and Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I looked for anything that would make getting out of bed easier. Fifteen, twenty-five, fifty-five, eighty milligrams of Fluoxetine to keep the crushing fog that had infested my brain at bay.

Three different anxiety medications in a year, none of which worked.

The psychologist told me to be patient. I was trying to be patient. I was trying to be patient, but mostly trying not to die.

I’m still trying not to die.

I looked for myself in identities, labels, and names. Gay. Straight. Pansexual. Asexual. Biromantic. Lesbian. Demiromantic. Confused. Frantic midnight Google searches under bed covers, so scared even if I didn’t know what I was scared of. I threw on labels like they were different pairs of jeans, trying to find the one that fit. There was a yearning in my chest for an understanding I might never find. A sense of belonging, a feeling of rejection, anything as long as I had some answers at the end of the search, but it felt like I was locked in a closet and I couldn’t find the edges, let alone the key to unlocking the door.

I wear my choices like a second skin now, pride on every inch of me, but still, there’s an aching that words cannot fill, but at least I wear my own key around my neck.

I looked for myself in places that felt like home. Anywhere but cookie-cutter suburbia and endless wheat fields. Family dinners where nobody said anything but empty words. The suffocating presence of my mother and the distance between my father and I that I had no desire to breach. Driving between two houses three times a week instead of just driving away. When I was younger, I wanted to run away and join the circus. When I told my mom I wanted to go to school in Illinois, she looked at me like I belonged in a road-side freak show.

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I picked up pieces of myself there, in those cramped dorm rooms and classrooms built of ancient brick. I am still finding new parts of myself every day. But I also found I was so much more than broken up parts I couldn’t fit into a whole.

I looked for myself inside of me sinew, brain, and bone and learned

to call this body mine.

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Anagnorisis Matrice Young

It’s around 1 or 2 in the morning, the TV flickering blue and white light beside me, and suddenly, shockingly, I’m overcome with the feeling to shove my hands into my mouth. Of course, being me, and being sleepy, I do it. And when I stick my hands inside my mouth, inside my jaw, inside my maw, right hand curling up around my top row, left hand around my bottom row, in each case avoiding the roof or floor, I realize that I am nothing more than an animal. I lay there, for a bit, with my hands parting the different halves of my mouth, and I give a long, hard think.

If the brain was unhindered, I have enough strength in me to yank apart my jaw, whole. My maw, open, could be ripped apart until there was nothing left but ribbons of flesh and tongue and bloody teeth—and all that’d be left would be tears rivering down my cheeks, whimpers, howls, and moans of pain like animals do, or what I imagine they do when they gaze upon their reflections in the river, or when like animals meet their likeness, when Bombays meet Panthers, or when Huskies meet Eurasian wolves. A meeting of realization, of one’s status, true self. My mouth, jaw, maw, whatever it can be called is no different than the one of a calf, a baby bear, some tiny fawn. It opens to cry, to make noise to alert when I’m in pain, or hurt, or happy. The canines can pierce through carrots or freshly seared steak just like any other omnivore. When my hands slowly slip from my mouth, fingertips wet and lips dry, I stare up at my ceiling much less aware of my humanity and much more aware of my animality. Oh god.

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One Last Goodbye Sebastiano Masi

She had gone the way she had lived.

John Blacknoll, her husband, went first. He took the shovel by its handle and plunged it into the brown dirt. Then he poured it into the hole, each grain falling six feet to its final resting place. He then stuck the shovel back into the dirt and slowly walked away.

Next was Jack Blacknoll, her eldest son.

Then Margret Blacknoll, her daughter.

Then Phillip Blacknoll, her youngest son, newly enrolled in college.

Next was Susan McNamm, her mother, followed by Michel Blacknoll and Margaret Blacknoll, her parents-in-law.

Then her sister, Myra, and her brother, Collin, and her brother-in-law, George, and her niece, Abigail, and her two nephews, Grant and Nick, all followed the pattern.

Her youngest niece, Jannette, was led up to the pit by the hand. She took a scoop of dirt and threw it in quickly before hiding away in her mother’s skirt.

Then there were the Kennedys and the Milktons, the Smiths and the Schobbins, the Crews and the Jacksons and the Rodriguezes and the Billups, and each member of each family poured another shovelful of dirt into the pit, down upon their friend.

Then came her co-workers and the co-workers of her husband and the teachers of her kids and the students of the teachers (who were also the friends of her children), and they all brought their families. And each person, with tears in their eyes, shoveled dirt clod after dirt clod down into the pit, for even if they hadn’t met her, they had heard so much about her from those who did.

Then came the librarian and the two actors and the deli worker and the

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grocer and the mailman and all the neighbors and the hospital workers that had been with her and the people who had known her as a kid and a young intern and a costume designer, and everyone came.

And each person filled the hole a little more.

Last was the priest, and then the rabbi took one final shovel full, and with a word of prayer, sprinkled it down.

The gathered group then mingled at the far end of the ceremony, each hugging each other and finally greeting each other after a long, crowded funeral, and slowly, the crowd made their way to a nearby restaurant to celebrate her wonderful life and left her stone behind.

She had gone the way she had lived: quietly and surrounded by friends.

And then Jose, the cemetery worker who had stood by till the end, used the backhoe to fill the hole up.

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EDITORS NOTES

Aditi Parikh

2022 Creative Writing, Political Science Mumbai, India Go drink boba and pet a dog, get that serotonin boost this spring!

BP

2021 Africana Studies and Studio Art Chicago, IL

Carlos Claudio

2023 Creative Writing Milwaukee, WI I read your stuff so you don’t have to!

Frankie Williamson

2021 Psychology, Spanish Seattle, WA #GoHawks #12thMan #SuperBowl48Champs

Kaitlyn Cashdollar

2023 Classical Languages, English Literature Colorado Springs, CO Thanks to all of those who submitted your work; you made this book possible.

Lily Gates

2022 English Literature Albuquerque, NM

Lily Lauver

2021 Creative Writing, English Literature Pittsburgh, PA

Sadie Cheney

2022 Gender & Women’s Studies, Dance & Journalism Studies minors Denver, CO be soft to yourself

Samuel Lisec 2021 Creative Writing Chicago, IL

Sebastiano Masi

2021 Creative Writing Major, Theater minor Chicago, IL It has been an honor working with Catch these last two years. Thanks for having me, and thanks for reading! If you ever wish to find me in the future, I will be grafted to the infrastructure of Chicago, watching the ‘El’ trains rattle on by.

Shae Gabriel

2021 Creative Writing major, German & Playwriting minor Overland Park, KS “At the end of the term we will all write limericks, set them to music, and perform them in Alex’s dad’s basement as a senior portfolio band.”

-Monica

Matrice Marie Young

2021 Creative Writing Major, Africana Studies & Educational Studies minors Chicago, IL Keep writing, keep reading, and stay gold, silver, and cyan!

Phelix Venters-Sefic

2021 Education, Art Denver, CO Check out the secret note hidden on the first page in contents (in the bottom left corner) :)

Veronica Sefic

2021 Creative Writing, Gender & Women’s Studies Denver, CO Oh, boy, do I love Catch, thank you for letting me take care of it.

CONTRIBUTORS NOTES

Aditi Parikh

2022 Creative Writing, Political Science Mumbai, India Analyzing dead, white authors from a critical lens reveals so much about society beyond the individual themselves!

Ashley Pearson

2023 Biology, Creative Writing Monmouth, IL “Thank you to my parents, professors, friends, and everyone else who has helped me along the way.”

BP

2021 Africana Studies and Studio Art Chicago, IL

Brandon Roberts 2023

Carlos Flores-Gaytan 2021 History Waukegan, IL

Caroline Clink 2023

Chi Le

2020 Philosophy Major, English minor I worked on this paper in the final term of my senior year, I’m proud of it, and I’m glad I have the opportunity to share it with Catch

Christa Vander Wyst

2021 Creative Writing Major, Classics and Psychology minor Pewaukee, WI Thank you to Monica and Beth for shaping me into the poet I am today.

And thank you to lactose-free milk for allowing my Wisconsinite self to safely consume you.

Erin Cosgrove

2023 Undecided LaGrange, IL Storytelling is a passion of mine, and I’m so honored to have been able to contribute to this edition of Catch. Big thanks to my family and the Knox community! <3

Ingrid Wasmer 2021 Chicago, IL

Jaime Lam

2020 Creative Writing, English Drink tea, sleep, and don’t forget to breathe.

Lily Lauver

2021 Creative Writing, English Literature Pittsburgh, PA

Louise Rossiter 2020

Madelyn Turner

2021 Studio Art Bushnell, IL With portraits and oil paint as my foundation, I work to raise questions about the cultural construction of female identity and the nature of representation with being a woman from my personal experiences. The group consciousness of femininity has changed overtime but still carries the weight of generational expectations that are almost unachievable and has become a pivotal anchor in my work.

Matrice Marie Young

2021 Creative Writing Major, Educational Studies & Africana Studies Minors Chicago, IL Thank you so much for reading, and thank you to my peers and professors in the Creative Writing department who’ve helped me grow as well!

A quote that means a lot to me, and to each of these pieces is a line from Natasha Tretheway’s book Thrall: “what knowledge haunts each body, what history, what phantom ache?” and lastly, I leave you with a quote from Maya Angelou: “I’ve learned that you shouldn’t go through life with a catcher’s mitt on both hands; you need to be able to throw something back.

Phelix Venters-Sefic 2021 Education, Art Denver, CO Stay Stinky <3

Sally Bessette

2022 Creative Writing Antioch, IL “My Way Home” was heavily inspired by Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s World of Wonders.

I would like to thank my Creative NonFiction Workshop class for helping me develop this essay, especially my small workshop group and the wonderful Monica Berlin. Also, thank you to my dear loved ones who always support me in pursuing what I love. This work would not have been possible without all of your encouragement and love.

Samuel Lisec 2021 Creative Writing Chicago, IL

Sarah Eitel

2021 Anthropology, Sociology Pueblo, CO

Sarah Lohmann

2021 Creative Writing, Asian Studies St. Louis, MO crow [krō] noun a large perching bird with glossy black plumage, a heavy bill, and a raucous voice. verb to utter a sound expressive of pleasure

Sebastiano Masi

2021 Creative Writing Chicago, IL “ ‘One Last Goodbye’ is dedicated to Judy Krizmanic and her friends and family, especially Benjamin, Bill, and Leo Weingarten. Thank you so much for everything.”

COLOPHON Catch is printed on 80# Aspire’s Beargrass petallics The art pages are printed on 80# White Smooth Cougar Opaque Text The cover is printed on Curiou’s Cosmic Ice Silver The cover font is Pilowlava The title font is Salvaje Display The body text is PT Sherif Printed and bound by Premier Print Group