Quarto Spring Print 2019

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Copyright ©Quarto by Quarto Literary Magazine Quarto accepts submissions of literary nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and visual art created

by Columbia University undergraduates.

Submissions accepted at quartomagazine.com For other queries, contact: columbiaquarto@gmail.com All rights are reserved and revert to authors and artists upon publication.

Cover art: Peacocks in Urban Landscape by Seowon (Angela) Lee “Peacocks in Urban Landscape” was a really serendipitous photo taken in the backyard of the cathedral near Columbia. Most of my photography focuses on capturing the beauty of day to day life and the minutiae. As a writer and a photographer, I think my aims are the same.

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Columbia University’s Official Undergraduate Literary Magazine

VOLUME LXX

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We wish to express sincere gratitude towards many people for their contributions to this print edition. To our guest judges: Anelise Chen, Emily Gould, and Spencer Reece, thank you for your time and dedication. To our faculty advisor Joseph Fasano, thank you for your invaluable guidance and mentorship. To Dorla McIntosh, thank you for your unwavering encouragement and support. To Columbia’s Creative Writing Department: Thank you for providing Quarto with the space, resources, and opportunity to showcase fantastic undergraduate work. To our incomparable writers, thank you for building this magazine. Finally, thank you, dear readers. We do this for you, and we could not have done it without you.

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EDITOR’S NOTE Dear Readers, Over the last three years, Quarto has become our home. In this small, loving community, we have formed meaningful relationships and grown immensely as writers, artists, and people. We are honored to have had the privilege to lead Quarto this past year, and we leave our positions with great optimism for Quarto’s future.

Our mission this year was to uplift marginalized voices and represent the diverse group of creatives on campus. We collaborated with other publications to foster a sense of community that extends outside the world of literature and visual art, and we thank the staffs of these groups for working with us to create dialogue and organize impactful events. We are thrilled to have been able to engage with members of the New York literary and art scenes to help students on campus explore potential paths in the humanities, and we are excited to further develop these efforts going forward.

Our beautiful, passionate staff facilitated aesthetic and artistic experimentation, spearheaded the launch of our new blog, lent their miraculous design skills to the creation of our fall chapbook, and contributed their voices and knowledge to the selection and curation of our online publications and this print edition. We are immensely proud of the persistent hard work our staff has done to help Quarto thrive, and none of this would have been possible without their insight and talent. We want to thank them for all of the late night meetings, memorable conversations, and moments of joy.

This print edition represents a year of growth and exploration, and we are eager to continue to push the boundaries of what a literary magazine can be. We hope you enjoy this edition, and that these works remind you of the power of art and literature to mobilize, unify, heal, and inspire wonder.

Sincerely, Cameron Lee and Priya Pai Editors-in-Chief

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STAFF

Editors-in-Chief Cameron Lee Priya Pai Managing Editors Melissa Cook Amanda Ong Web Editor Erik Cera Copy Editor Anna Chavez Administrative Editor Lily Ha Social Media Editor Sophie Lee Blog Editor Alison Peebles Events Editor Petru Rosu

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Head of Design Charlie Blodnieks Art & Design Editors Mallory Evans Gisela Levy Sophie Levy Katie Mimini Dora O’Neill Mitali Sharma Iona Tan Community Outreach Editors Samantha Caveny Nick Gauthier Staff Editors Willa Cuthrell-Tuttleman TJ Gill Jane Paknia Neeraj Ramachandran Catherine Valdez Tamarah Wallace

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GUEST JUDGES

Anelise Chen Fiction

Emily Gould Nonfiction

Spencer Reece Poetry

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TABLE OF CONTENTS 1

National Park

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La Reina de Azucar

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Listen, You’re Far Too Good For Him

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Nightswimming

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Canned Pineapples

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Coda

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Burnt Focaccia Bread

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my favorite pants are not my favorite pants anymore

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Black Cat

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Jade Levine Poetry

Carolina Dalia Gonzalez Fiction

Olivia Loomis Visual Art

Amanda Liu Poetry

Seowon (Angela) Lee Fiction

Morgan Levine 2019 Poetry Winner

Parth Chhabra Fiction

Zain Murdock Poetry

Emily Mack Poetry

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Our Dad the Robot

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archive of an unmarked grave

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Royalty: A King Sits in His Castle in the Sky

Corinne Rabbin-Birnbaum 2019 Fiction Winner

Bryn evans Poetry

Mallory Shingle Nonfiction

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Sea Bright, Saigon

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Self Portrait in White

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Heinrich Hofmann’s Christ

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Elizabeth Kyung Merrigan Poetry

Lilly Jean Cao Visual Art

Ben Appel 2019 Nonfiction Winner

SAINT NICASIUS OF RHEIMS HOLDS HIS OWN HEAD AND CONTINUES HIS CHANTING OF PSALM 119 Anderson Peguero II Poetry

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Stained Red

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Gentle

Maya Sibul Visual Art

Josh Tate Poetry

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National Park Jade Levine

Every baby born in the United States is dreaming of a national park is dreaming of 60 officially designated national parks administered by the National Park Service is dreaming of their baby blankets dipped in cold glacial spill, onesies washed with soap from a plastic box pearl christening buttons rolled in sequoia, and sand, and mulch chips A ranger is lining up cars at the bottom of the mountain A ranger is collecting pacifiers and teething giraffes for the lost and found Every time I’m born I’m dreaming of national parks 50 cent soft serve, metal cups of pump water, a poorly photocopied map to lose beneath a car seat Every American baby is dreaming about the water cycle land management policy brown hats drought congressional budget lines wildfires and every American baby knows the same lullaby: Arches, Badlands, Crater Lake, land, land land la la and

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La Reina de Azucar Carolina Dalia Gonzalez Abuela lived in the back room of the Garcia house on 105 Andalusia Avenue.

It was a small room, with egg shell white painted walls and a twin sized cot that took up half the space. Only one window allowed for views of rotting palm leaves and small slivers of light to enter. There was one closet in the corner, filled with luxurious batas de casas1 of all prints and colors. On a seven-day drawer was an organized tray of multiple pill bottles, with long names for prescriptions my nine-year-old tongue could not begin to pronounce. Next to those pills were half empty jars of rich anti-aging creams from La Prairie—a reminder of the beauty queen she once was in Cuba. It was an indulgence mami never understood, but abuela always cherished.

Abuela’s routine was simple while she lived at 105 Andalusia Avenue. In the mornings, she walked out to the kitchen and joined me and my sisters for breakfast.

She took her café con leche with more milk than coffee, and made sure to add as much Splenda as mami would allow. Sometimes, I would catch her in the corner of my eye sneakily trying to add just one more packet of the fake sugar. But her hands would fumble and drop the packet on the floor for the family dog, Pinky, to quickly lick up. In pure Cuban tradition, Abuela would then dunk her Publix toast into the cup, letting the salty buttered bread soak up the artificially sweetened liquid. If it was not café con leche, abuela would drink a tall glass of the fake orange juice, Sunny-D, to wake her up. Mami kept the refrigerator in the garage visibly stocked with bottles and bottles of Sunny-D— unnaturally orange and toxic looking in their packaging. On every third Saturday of the month, Papi would buy in bulk the sickeningly sweet drink at Costco—just so abuela always had the option.

At breakfast, and on every other occasion, Abuela felt a self-appointed responsibility to keep us Garcia girls in check. She hissed while Gloria cried about the lack of French toast sticks on her plate and yelled at me when she heard I did not finish my scrambled eggs. “Piensa de esos niños en Cuba!” her voice would bleat out to us at the dining table. I rolled my eyes, and let my scrambled eggs go untouched.

When us Garcia girls were finally out the door—on our way to school or day care or running errands with mami—abuela returned to her room and spent most of her day with her head on those frumpy cot pillows. She let her favorite talk show, Cristina, fill up the small room with pre-recorded laughs and ridiculous interviews with trendy actors she did not care enough to know about.

Every other afternoon, mami drove abuela to the local clinic down Flagler street for her dialysis treatment—past abuela’s beloved La Rosa Bakery. Before diabetes took away her eyesight, abuela would ask mami to go see the delicately baked pastries, so perfectly cut and assembled in their large trays shelved on top of each other. If she could not take a bite, at least her other four senses enjoyed the delight that were freshly baked Cuban pastelitos. Occasionally on these visits, Mami would order a guava y queso pastelito and describe to her mother in such exact detail how flaky the pastry was or how sweet the guava tasted. When the sensory description was not up to par, abuela would walk straight to the counter and yell at the camerera2 on how the pastries were a disgrace to the Cuban tradition and community in Miami. And yet—without fail—abuela and mami would be at La Rosa Bakery the next week to give them one more chance at baking a guava y queso pastelito the right way.

1 nightgowns 2 waitress

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Indeed, it was abuela who taught mami to never accept anything less than perfection in her consumer goods. When mami was in middle school, abuela would drive them both to McDonald’s for fresh fried French fries as their American treat. If McDonald’s served them lukewarm or unsalted fries, abuela would park the car and march mami and herself into the golden arch establishment. Once inside the fast food chain, she stomped to the counter and shook the bag of French fries at the young server.

“I paid two dollars for these French fries, and they are not hot or crispy!” her thick voice getting louder with each syllable. Abuela knew she was a spectacle, but if fleeing her beloved Cuba and becoming a proud American citizen taught her anything, it was to stand up for what you believed in. In no time, abuela and mami would be back in the car with fresh hot French fries in their lap.

On these afternoons in the clinic, abuela sat herself down in a worn out brown La-Z-Boy and greeted Polly, her favorite nurse on shift. Abuela had slowly grown to trust Polly, and definitely appreciated the nurse’s willingness to listen to stories about her youth in Cuba. While Polly pricked abuela’s arm with two needles, abuela closed her eyes and squeezed mami’s arm hard. Her veins pulsated through her paper-thin skin, visibly showing her blood’s circulation throughout the treatment. Mami could not stand to watch her own mother in pain. Abuela would twist her legs together, or bite her bottom lip. But Mami would still make eye contact with abuela, to let her know she was there, by her side.

Pain, and the pain of others, was something mami could never handle well.

When Isabella would run down the hallway and bang her head on the corner of the wall, mami would cry out and leave a trail of kisses all over Isabella’s forehead. When Gloria skidded her knee learning to ride a bike, mami squeezed Gloria’s hand until her fingers turned white from loss of circulation. To watch her mother’s blood be filtered through loud, whirring machines only echoed the strenuous discomfort mami felt inside. Yet, mami saw it to be her daughterly duty to drive her mother and stay for her three-hour dialysis treatments.

Abuela would get home around the same time as my sisters and I got home from our tennis practices, soccer games, or ballet rehearsals. She would walk back to her room and lie her body down on the small cot once more. There she closed her eyes and allowed her body to rest in the singular seconds of quiet that filled the Garcia home.

Almost immediately, us Garcia girls disrupted the quiet with our dance marathons located in the family room. I was always DJ, and chose a mix of Celia Cruz, NSYNC and Britney Spears as our track list. Abuela would simply stay put in her room, too disturbed and tired to watch the show us Garcia girls put on in the room next to hers.

The dance marathons that resumed in the family room lasted whole afternoons, an unlimited energy radiating from our tiny bodies. Gloria and Isabella took it upon themselves to make every inch of space their own, and began to jump on the couch to keep things interesting. This truly pissed off abuela, as she could hear our jumps from couch to couch through the vibrating walls. Our shrieks and giggles and singing could not distract abuela from our activities, and thus led to her bleating yells of my name from her small back room. “Carolina! Carolina! Carrrrrrolina!” Her rolling of the r in my name acted as an authoritative pronunciation I hated to hear. After the fourth or fifth time she shrieked my name, I left Gloria and Isabella in their own antics and answered abuela’s call.

I was never really interested in visiting abuela’s room. It smelled like old people, a smell that usually acquainted me at relative’s homes where I was given too many kisses on the cheek. The light that filtered through the window only emphasized the stale dust that floated in the air. I entered abuela’s room to see her, laid down on her bed, eyes closed. “Yes abuita? You called me?” I asked her as I slowly stepped closer to her bed. She 3

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would turn on her side, eyes still closed, and arms stretched out to reach for my face. I knew abuela was blind, but I could never wrap my head around her condition. I was too fresh with youth, still seeing everything as if it was for the first time.

I would come just close enough for her to place her hands on my cheek.

“Carolina,” she then cooed, sweetly. Her frail, spider veined hands traced themselves around the baby soft skin on my forehead. I noticed her own skin began to turn darker, as if she enjoyed afternoon sun bathing sessions when us Garcia girls were out. But I only ever saw abuela in her room or at the dinner table.

“Please, can you and your sisters stop jumping.” She croaked out in thick, accented English. I nodded to her request, frozen in place as her hands still caressed my face. “Y esquela?” she then asked. I mustered up some lame response, a mixture of updates on my good grades or upcoming birthday parties I would be attending that weekend. Her hands would then retract themselves from my face, and slowly she would place them beside her. I noticed the pain in her twitching muscles, how every movement of her body was a chore in of itself.

“Que linda eres.” She cooed once more to me. I never believed this, since I knew Abuela could not see the snotty, sweaty pre-pubescent girl I was. But I would smile to myself anyways. I was the last grandchild abuela got to see—mami told me this. I was the last grandchild she had a visual memory of. And because of this, she always told me how beautiful I was. I ate it up, always.

“Gracias, abuita.” I thanked abuela. I would run back to the family room, and lower the music a bit. I then yelled at Gloria and Isabella to stop jumping on the couches, and began to shake my hips to Celia Cruz’s cries of “azucar!” through the speakers again.

Mami told me that abuela loved to hear about how I was doing in general, that she spoke about me during her dialysis treatments. I beamed inside, proud to know that I was the favorite. Even if I did not enjoy the back room visits to abuela, I would never reject any affirmation.

Abuela only ever left her bedroom in the late afternoon once, where she joined my sisters and I for dinner. While we scarfed down our arroz con pollo, abuela slowly brought a spoonful of the dish to her mouth. Her hand shook, spilling some of the arroz on the floor. Mami would then take action and spoon feed her mother, the tenderness and patience between them palpable.

There were certainly bad days. The kind of bad days where abuela was not able to come to neither breakfast nor dinner. She was not able to yell my name when my sisters and I got too rambunctious. She was not able to feel my face, to see how much I had grown in mere weeks. She was not able to tell me how pretty I was and in turn I was not able to see her toothless smile. I began to miss it all. These days of abuela’s absence became more and more frequent. Her hospital stays got longer and longer. Mami stopped coming to dinner too.

It was not unusual for us Garcia girls to come home to an ambulance outside the house on 105 Andalusia Avenue. It was a stomach-turning image to see abuela carried out on a stretcher, her eyes still closed. I did not yell to her, but Gloria and Isabella cried hard and loud. I stood there, my spine frozen. I saw mami, fresh tears still on her face.

We all collectively felt helpless.

After one hospital visit, mami came home and told us abuela had her right big toe amputated. Her body began to shut down on her, and the first thing to go was her big toe. I could not help but laugh, and mami scolded me, hard. “Your abuela is not well, and you laugh?” She hissed at me. I began to cry big fat tears.

Mami did not like when us Garcia girls visited the hospital. She was scared we would get sick, or maybe she did not want us to understand what was really happening to abuela. I only heard in passing the terms “diabetes” and “heart failure” when mami and papi would talk alone in the kitchen.

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I knew though when abuela’s sickness became really serious. Abuela’s stays at the hospital spanned into weeks and mami eventually started to let us visit. Papi would pick us up from school and we would drive to Doctor’s Hospital, sweaty and sticky in our plaid jumper uniforms. Mami only had us see abuela in small pockets of time, usually when abuela was asleep. I was upset by this, and yelled that I wanted to talk to abuita right now. Mami began to cry at my temper tantrums, unable to emotionally deal with three growing little girls and the decay of her mother.

My temper tantrums only got worse, and I would begin to bite Gloria or scratch at Isabella if I was not able to see abuela that day. I began to crave abuela’s hands on my face, her soft fingertips gently on my cheeks. I wanted to tell abuela about my day at school, about how Robert pushed me at recess or about how my new friend Cristina drew me a picture in glitter markers. I wanted to hear her say my name, with the rolling of the r included. I wanted to hear abuela yell my name, Carolina, Carolina, Carolina.

Over and over and over again.

Abuela tried to say my name when she saw me during my few visits. Sometimes I could hear her, other times the big medical machines would beep too loud and drown out her attempts. Nurses ran in and asked me to leave, and I would start to cry in the hallway. I did not understand what was happening to abuela. Mami and papi would still not give me an answer. They would continuously tell me abuela was not doing well.

Mami would then start to cry and I knew not to ask any more questions.

Abuela was not going to get better, mami told me and my sisters at breakfast.

After months of abuela in and out of the hospital, of her routine at 105 Andalusia Avenue officially and steadily broken, mami accepted abuela’s decline.

Mami did not let us say goodbye to abuela, and I screamed so loud the neighbors called. I pushed mami hard and hit papi everywhere. I was mad. I could not process why my parents did not let me say goodbye, why my parents thought it was not a good idea. I was the last granddaughter she ever got to see, I held importance to her. Yet, mami shook her head and cried more to me. She whispered sorry into my ear and began to comb her hands through my hair. “Don’t cry. You sound just like her when you do.” I cried harder.

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Listen, You're Far Too Good For Him Olivia Loomis This linoleum print discusses the prominent role that pain holds in womanhood. I’m frustrated by the repetition of post-breakup conversations that I have with my friends.

I’m always saying the same things. Could we instead rethink who we invest ourselves in and who is worth our time?

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Nightswimming Amanda Liu there’s an ocean lodged in the sheets and the springs and the pillow-matter and the people between them that quiver like kite strings—while they sleep and while they don’t. the bassline makes a wingman. the words punctuated by the crackle-pop of the microwave strike the porchlight and scatter— like perfume through an atomizer. her lips are azalea pink and so wet with gloss that if you look close enough you can see the moon’s reflection— begging for a bite and just a few hours underwater where the body arcs like sheet metal in a microwave. in one orchestral maneuver, like love in a Faraday cage, you are quite certain this is the end of the world. with parachute bones, you are falling faster than sound. overwhelmed by the taste of impact. you briefly believe in God. the air is synesthetic with ozone, vanilla and hibiscus in no particular order. you find you are a child learning truth tables: categorizing your fictions and believing them anyway. you are beyond the knee-on-knee chewing of confessions like strawberry bubblegum and have become the city’s neon bright adverts that reflect off a chrome hood— backwards, incoherent, ecstatic. she’s drying off to the hum of midnight radio tuning. you say this room isn’t dark, it’s just ultraviolet.

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Canned Pineapples Seowon (Angela) Lee Next to Ursa Major and Minor, a princess and a prince, next to Cassiopeia the arrogant, next to the archer aiming his bow in valor, next to those honored by gods and those punished by gods as fables, is the constellation Canned Pineapples. A distinctly cylindrical formation that appears as spring reaches its peak and brightens as the burning heat of summer arrives.

Why this canned shape was not soup as Andy Warhol would plainly see, or green beans or sardines (actually that is a more terrible alternative to the pineapple so scratch that) or lima beans or pinto beans or anything but canned pineapples (Dole if you have it) is commonly linked to the discoverer of the constellation who simply said, "I like canned pineapples."

What she meant was that it was what she ate in a fever. Cold sweet pineapples, poked through with a single chopstick fed to her by her mother, who couldn’t afford orange juice so made do with canned pineapples from the pantry below their apartment as a source of vitamin c. The sweetest damn thing she’d ever eaten. Her mother had fed her to the last drop. She had gotten sick in the stomach from drinking the syrup meant to be preservative but her head had felt a little lighter. She wondered later if the syrup would melt her bones like what mama said about coca cola melting teeth or if it would preserve her insides like what diet coke did to the lady in the newspaper article. Or would this sweet nectar turn her sweeter still.

Many an outraged anti-big money journalist accused the discoverer of receiving an enormous pay out to lease the celestial hall of fame as an advertisement board for one of the most atrocious fruit-juice coated conglomerates that profited from imperialism.

Reading this the discoverer simply said, "well then, guess it’s going to be called the goddamned Canned Tomato Soup in a couple years."

Her husband left the day canned pineapples flooded their driveway. Dole had tried to pay her. In a lifetime supply of canned pineapples no less. Her husband hated canned pineapples, but what he hated even more was being Mr. Canned-Pineapplediscoverer’s-husband. He had always been the amateur astronomer looking for new stars through a telescope that could’ve paid for hospital bills, or a new car, or a child. But he was more preoccupied in the heavens, and she in teaching Classics and so in their home was a state of the art telescope, and a beat up station wagon, and no baby crib. It had happened half on accident and half on whim, by word of mouth and propulsion of absurdity. Perhaps it was because of the romantic notions that he always dismissed her of, or perhaps it had been written in the stars all along.

As she opened up another can of pineapples bought from the Walgreens down the block, she remembered how her mother had taught her that girls weren’t supposed to 8

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have short hair, girls weren’t supposed to swear and girls weren’t supposed to go against their husbands. But apparently, girls weren’t supposed to discover constellations either.

She wondered how she could effectively destroy the cans that seemed to multiply on her driveway and now infected the lawn. She simply said, "fuck it" and let it fester. They shone like stars in their tin and yellow wrap with each passing headlight that wasn’t a beat up station wagon.

"The Greek poet Aratus is credited with the creation of constellations and their fascinating stories. He weaved beautiful and heart wrenching tales. The sky was a canvas that promised meaning in its mysterious patterns." But who deserves to be immortalized?

The chalk stopped. Who created the narrative in the sky?

She remembered how her sky had been divided in four—an azure dragon chased a black turtle who chased a white tiger who chased a red phoenix. The guardians of the four corners of the earth smiled on her. She remembered the day when she realized the sky was written in english, while her stories sang Korean. In the eyes that stared back at her, the tiger’s tail was the belt of some guy named Orion who also apparently had a bow (probably to kill tigers with).

She donated the cans to the food bank, sold the telescope on eBay and bought a new car. She cut the long straight hair he loved to run his finger through and left him a voicemail to take the rest of his shit with his fragile masculinity.

The new generation was getting tattoos of Canned Pineapples. Canned Pineapples graced many a shirt in Forever 21 and Target. The occasional angry reporter still showed up. But soon Canned Pineapples was a part of the sky as much as her highness Andromeda or Zeus’s Aguila. She smiled, Orion be damned.

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Coda Morgan Levine after Tracy K. Smith

2019 Poetry Winner, Selected by Spencer Reece Asleep, we breathe little cuts into the morning and it bleeds lemony blue light. This opening— this movement of your shoulder, the angles of the shelves and tables sharpening themselves into reality. The world is opening too.

How miraculous the sun. How sweet it must think us, to celebrate it’s coming this way, softly, every day.

Every day. To ourselves and one another. And what* if the morning is neither opening nor closing? Just another entrance of light, another way for the sun to needle into our cells? An injury?

That, too, we would welcome.

* Line from Tracy K. Smith's “Life on Mars”

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Burnt Focaccia Bread Parth Chhabra When Raunak’s bakery starts to burn—when it catches fire bread by bread, pastry by pastry, muffin by muffin—no one is around to smell the smoke. It is 6:00 am on a cold Sunday morning and everyone, Raunak included, is asleep, fast asleep, knees pressed against their chests, dreaming of heat and warmth, and so no one is around when the bakery comes alight.

No one except Aunty Bilimoria. Famous Aunty Bilimoria. Famous Aunty Bilimoria and her famous nose. (It can smell anything off you: trouble, pre-marital sex, yesterday’s undercooked roast). Even though Aunty Bilimoria and her nose are four streets away, bundled up in a mass of scarves and cardigans at the bus stop, they know, almost instantly, that something is wrong.

When the burnt toast smell first reaches Aunty Bilimoria, she thinks she is having a stroke: she read about it in a WhatsApp. Heart racing, she smiles (the WhatsApp said to smile) and lifts both her hands above her head (also the WhatsApp) and finds, to her relief, that she can—not a stroke. A heart attack then? Too much butter on the pav last night? Maybe the WhatsApp said heart attack?

But before Aunty Bilimoria can test her heart, or figure out how she would even go about doing that, the smell changes; it develops a texture and becomes familiar and warm, like a focaccia sandwich at that new bakery. (The bakery is five years old and no longer “new,” unless you’re operating on Aunty Bilimoria time, which, like geographical time, is slow and tectonic.)

Aunty Bilimoria is, at first, hesitant to go check. The bus will be here at any moment and if she misses it she will have to wait at least 30 minutes for the next one, if not more: buses are unreliable at the hill station as it is, even more so on Sundays.

At least 30 more minutes in the cold, away from the empty school, the warm teacher’s lounge, from her aching calves and swollen ankles stretching themselves over its small but hardworking heater. But there is something distinctly wrong with the smell now: it is charred, black, smoky. With an audible sigh, she abandons her outpost and turns, following her nose.

By the time Aunty Bilimoria is just over a street away from the bakery, she no longer needs her nose. Her eyes start to burn as heavy black smoke rises in the air in front of her. She turns the corner and sees it: Morning Sun bakery, burning like a star, a hot mix of flame and gas with a continuous series of reactions at its core—bread and fire, table and fire, thick brown envelope and fire, chair and fire.

In spite of herself, in spite of her eyes, Aunty Bilimoria cannot help but think how good the heat feels from this distance: with the bakery still about 100 meters away, the fire is rejuvenating as it thaws her icy skin, spreading it open and letting it breathe.

A loud crash and flare of light snaps her out of her reverie and Aunty Bilimoria pulls out her (new, son-bought, expensive) phone. Fumbling, her pudgy, purple fingers slowly call for some help.

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*** When Raunak gets the call, he is dreaming about a beach. At the beach, it is hot—not pleasant, but hot, hot and humid, with the sun clawing its way down his exposed torso. He steps into the water, which is unpleasant also: dirty and lukewarm, like an old bath. Sweat collects at the base of his neck.

Suddenly, a blast of cold air rushes from the sea in front of him—icy wind, that starts off as a relief and quickly becomes uncomfortable, the wet hair on his skin freezing into crystals. Below him, the water turns icy too, and his toes go numb— 6:15 am. Call received. Raunak scrambles on some shoes and runs—runs, runs, runs. He runs and runs, till his windpipe feels like the beach, full of burning sand.

Raunak has an affinity for the dramatic and so when he gets to the now doused fire, he immediately falls to his knees. It is not that his shaky legs can no longer hold him and have given way—it is just that a lifetime of melodrama (movies and otherwise) has taught him no other way to express shock.

What is authentic, though, is the silence: Raunak cannot think of a single thing to say. Somewhere behind, or around, or in front of him, an aunty is talking to him; she oscillates between comforting him and chastising him—for what? For not being more careful. He can hear her; he understands what she is saying and realizes, somewhere in the back of his brain, how ridiculous she is being, how he should probably be angry at her for insinuating that this is somehow his fault. But the anger stays there, at the back. It does not make its way to his tongue, it gives him no words to utter. Raunak cannot think of a single thing to say.

The aunty’s hands are on his shoulder—rough, uncaring, evil. He resists, wills with all his power to stay on the ground, but soon she has help. Other hands, also big, their owners in giant war suits, with hoses wrapped around their shoulders grab at him with her, and even though Raunak wants nothing more than to be on his knees on the ground, to commit his grief to the town’s historical record, he is dragged away.

*** Every day, for the past 23 years, the Captain Lt Colonel has left his home for a morning walk at 6:30 am sharp. Every single day—with only three exceptions.

The first time was the morning after his son’s wedding. It was a loud, yellow, happy night, and the Captain Lt Colonel had allowed himself four glasses of whiskey (and one shandy, but we don’t talk about that). Drunk, full on buttery parathas and oily chicken, knees hurting from bobbing up and down to the music, he had let himself sleep in the next morning. He left for his walk at seven.

The second exception was the morning after he accidentally took double his post-dinner medicine dosage. That night, he had knocked himself out cold, woken up at 12

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11:00 am, and spent the day unable to do anything but sit quietly on the couch, his world unrecognizably tilted off its axis. The third was the morning after he got the email, the one everyone his age is always expecting, from his best friend’s wife. He didn’t sleep that night, and didn’t realize as 6:30 am came and went.

But that was two years ago now, and so by 6:29 am, the Captain Lt Colonel is at his gate, in his Reeboks, muffler, and favorite mustard sweater. He lifts the metal latch, cold against his dry palms, his digital watch beeps 6:30, and he is off.

The Captain Lt Colonel loves his little hill station. His hour-long walks take him up and down its small roads, past its regal old houses, past the ugly tourist ones, through its bald trees. He loves the hill station’s cold mornings: puffing at the top of a steep incline, he is still fascinated by the way his breath clots together in a cloud. He turns the corner, down past Izzy’s new café, to the right now, where he crosses the Church, and then the little stall where truck drivers going from big cities to other big cities have stopped for some chai and some mountain.

On Sundays, the Captain Lt Colonel likes to end his walks with a little treat: black coffee and a pastry, at the Morning Sun Bakery. The bakery is only a few streets away from his house—he finishes his walk, pops into his kitchen for a glass of water and is back out, already tasting the banofee on his tongue. *** As Ali walks towards the billowing black smoke, it does not occur to him that it might be coming from the bakery. Earphones in, jamming to some sick tunes, he continues down his route to work in the direction of the black cloud, wondering about what might have happened, his mind skipping over the concern that should have begun to take shape the closer his walk to the bakery brought him to the smoke.

It is only when the charred storefront comes into sight that it hits Ali—fuck.

Raunak bhaiya is going to kill him.

Ali had shut the shop last night, which means it had been his job to make sure the gas and oven were off. Fuck, fuck, fuck. The cold morning is suddenly a lot hotter and Ali’s back, which hasn’t hurt in years, begins to prickle under his heavy jacket.

Still a few meters from the store, most of Ali’s view is blocked by small crowd that has gathered outside: firefighters, police, some loitering aunties and uncles out to shop, or on their morning walks. But Raunak bhaiya is nowhere to be found—does he even know? He must know. Has someone called him? Ali calls—nothing. Where is he?

Where is he? Where is he?

It occurs to Ali that he could walk up to the bakery and ask any of the firefighters or members of the police. But he does not approach them, happy to stay behind their busy backs, unseen. He is filled with the irrational fear that they will arrest him, accuse him of intentionally leaving on the gas, or oven, or whatever it was—what was it? He tries to remember, grasping desperately for a mental image of his hand on the stove knob, or on the oven button. It does not come. Instead, he sees a knob handle turned left, he sees the oven glowing orange, he sees gas hissing out of both, still images 13

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that he cannot comfortably categorize as either memory or imagination.

Where is Raunak bhaiya? Ali decides that he will only talk to Raunak bhaiya— tell him it was all a mistake, mother swear just a mistake, of course it was, and then Raunak bhaiya (after he is done killing him) could talk to the police for him, vouch for him. But where was he?

From the other side of the street, Ali sees a tall, commanding man approach the bakery—he stops at a distance too. As soon as Ali spots the Captain Lt Colonel’s face, he forgets all about Raunak bhiaya, about the firemen in front of him, about the fiery remains of his place of work. All he can think of is his heart—he can feel it working, pumping blood to organs that don’t exist anymore. With nowhere to go, the blood collects in his stomach, mixes with acid, and his gut swells. But his heart has not been informed of this recent incident of organ disappearance, so the blood keeps coming, like gas from a cylinder, like electricity from a generator, frayed copper wires, spark, spark, screech. Ali’s body is on fire. *** Chai, a suspiciously old box of fruit cake, and a new packet of digestives: Raunak is now in Aunty Bilimoria’s kitchen and she is talking and talking, trying whatever she can to help his singed insides, to clear the smoke that is accumulating in the cold air. She tells him about a WhatsApp forward she got this morning.

“These cold-drink companies are all thieves, man. Bloody fools think we will buy any shit they give us. I always knew they were bad for you I never let Royston drink all this. See, now, who was right. This World Health Office is also saying now, see”—she pushes her phone across the table to him—“not to buy all this Diet-Coke and all. Gives you cancer you know.”

He’s seen that one before and so he only smiles and nods.

Aunty Bilimoria, for her part, cannot figure out what to do with the boy—he will not speak, he will not eat. He is still in his pajamas: a thin grey t-shirt from the fancy foreign university that girl— what was her name?—used to attend and soft comfortable pants. Sitting in her heatless apartment he is shivering, his body shaking gently, his head nodding, saying nothing.

“Are you cold, beta?” auntyasks.

“No, no, I’m fine.” His first words.

“You’re shivering—come to the sofa, it's next to the window.” He is almost limp in her arms as she lifts him from the table to her worn green sofa, which, as promised, is under the east facing window. There are some flowers on the windowsill, and as a snapshot, it is bright and happy, oblivious to the circumstances.

It is no warmer, though. The sun pours itself in through the thick glass but does nothing to sooth the goosebumps in the air—the sunlight is soft and meaningless, spreading itself thin over brick and bone.

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*** The Captain Lt Colonel has been the bakery’s first customer every Sunday morning since it opened: at 7:30 am, right as Ali turns the sign from closed to open, the Captain Lt Colonel is there, dabbing at a thin line of sweat on his upper lips with a handkerchief, ready to come in.

Sometimes, no one comes in for another half an hour, and so the two of them are forced to talk awkwardly: The Captain Lt Colonel asks about Ali—all well, nothing new, the same the same— and Ali asks about the Captain Lt Colonel—all well, nothing new, Aakash is visting these days. Still, there is some love: The Captain Lt Colonel likes Ali because he has a firm handshake and makes eye contact when he talks; Ali likes the Captain Lt Colonel because he tips well.

Other times, they are comfortably quiet—Ali busies himself around the bakery and the Captain Lt Colonel pulls out a small notebook and fountain pen from his shirt front pocket. Sipping coffee, he writes: grocery lists, to-do lists, mini accounts sheets, the occasional reminder to self.

For as long as Ali has worked at the bakery—which is basically since the beginning—the two of them have done this dance every Sunday morning. Except one.

The Monday morning after the missed Sunday, also a cold, grey day like this one, the Captain Lt Colonel came into the bakery with the weight of the world tugging under his red eyes. His face— which Ali had never seen anything but immaculately smooth, so much so that he assumed that maybe the Captain Lt Colonel couldn’t grow a beard—was sprouting the beginnings of a little white garden, blades of grass sticking out of old, unfertile land.

“Uncle, are you ok? I didn’t see you yesterday.” The Captain Lt Colonel didn’t reply. “Uncle, should I bring you the usual? Sit down na, the seat by the window is free.”

This time the Captain Lt Colonel nodded—but didn’t move. For a while, he just stood there by the counter, his head bent—from behind, it might have looked like he was just taking a long time to choose a pastry. Finally, monumentally, the six foot four man stirred, carrying himself to his table, his table that didn’t feel like his. His table was a Sunday table and today was Monday: so even though the actual material reality—like the wood, and the slightly off balance legs, and the napkin holder—was the same, this wasn’t his table. There was too much happening outside the window and there were more people in the bakery than he was used to.

When Ali made his way over with coffee and a small slice of the banofee cake, he found the Captain Lt Colonel on his phone, reading his email—no eye contact, no handshake. As soon as Ali put the tray down, though, the army man’s manners kicked in.

He shut his phone suddenly, as if the clink of the tray had woken him from a trance, and looked up at Ali. “Sit, beta,” he said, his booming army voice replaced by that of another man.

“Uncle I…” Ali made the best, “I’m busy” face he could.

“Sit, please,” he said again in his new voice and Ali did.

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Then, the Captain Lt Colonel reached under his sweater and pulled out a thick, bulging brown envelope and placed it on the tray in front of him. “Today, I…” A beat, that Ali lets sit in the air.

“Yesterday, I…I lost a friend. His wife emailed me, that who’s...” he gestures to his phone. “It doesn’t matter. I need you to keep this envelope. Keep it somewhere here.

Give to me when I ask for it.”

“What’s in it, uncle?”

“That’s private.”

“Uncle, come on, you know I can’t just keep this. What if it’s black money, or some illegal documents, or—” “It has…it has our letters. And some photos. Do not read them, do not look at them, do not open the envelope at all. I cannot have it home. One day, when I am ready, I will ask it back from you.”

At 9:00 am on the cold morning in which the Morning Sun Bakery realized the full potential of its name, Ali finds himself on the Captain Lt Colonel’s doorstep. He does not say anything; neither does the Captain Lt Colonel. There is nothing but silence and prolonged eye contact, silence and eye contact in which apologies are asked for and given. A hand on the shoulder. *** Aunty Bilimoria looks up at the clock—10:00 am. The boy has been crying for hours now, refusing to stop, leaking snot and tears onto her upholstery. He is shaking uncontrollably, even through the thick, rough blankets she has put over him, and she wonders if she should call someone. Who? She stands up and goes to the kitchen one more time, bringing him more paper towels, more biscuits for him to ignore. For a minute, she allows herself to feel resentful: she thinks of the empty teacher’s lounge, of the soft, hot, white heater, of her magazines, of her Sunday.

Suddenly, guilt. Skipping church on the occasional Sunday is something Aunty Bilimoria has done for years now, but she still feels guilty about it. No one said anything, of course, and she attended enough times through the week for everyone to know she wasn’t lacking in her faith—it’s just…Sundays are Sundays, brief respites from the bratty, entitled, snotty (her mind lingers by her upholstery) third graders who dominate her week, and she feels like the higher ups wouldn’t mind her claiming a few for herself.

Back to the boy: what is to be done? *** On a hot night last summer, sweat under their knees and puddling in their armpits, Ali and Raunak bhaiya sat with cold beers on Raunak bhaiya’s terrace, talking, as Raunak bhaiya liked to do, about sad things: death, corruption, the state of Test cricket.

The night had started off fun: they had watched the cricket match, laughing, 16

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betting (why Ali continued to bet on Delhi he did not know and could not explain), shouting at the TV. With four beers still left in the fridge and some weed in Ali’s pocket, they had decided to move to the terrace.

But as they gazed down at lit up slope of their hill station, Rauanak bhaiya had done his thing and Ali found himself listening to yet another sad monologue about how we’re all going to die alone; about how nothing will ever change as long as the rich have the ministers in their pocket; about how India needs to sort its middle order before the World Cup. Ali didn’t like talking about these things: not because he disagreed, but because he knew there was nothing that could be done about any of them. Ali liked his weed with silence.

But the night, Raunak bhaiya moved onto something new: he was talking about moving back to Bombay, restarting everything he had left. “I’ll give you the bakery, Ali, it’ll be yours, you take it. You’ll be comfortable, it’s a nice bakery, the people here will buy there for years.”

At the time, Ali only felt sad. He did not like the idea of Raunak bhaiya leaving; he could not bear to think of the prospect of his nights returning to how they had been five years ago: bored and high, in front shitty weekday reruns. But the next morning, Ali had been—still sad, though, still sad—also a little excited. He liked the idea of the bakery being his. His. His to design, his to run, his money to make. He could finally take out that shitty painting. Finally change their milk supplier, because Raunak bhaiya did not believe him that the current one was diluting their milk by like 10%. Finally experiment with the cakes.

At 11:00 am on the morning the bakery said its fiery goodbye, Ali finds himself remembering this night as he sits in Captain Lt Colonel’s living room—he had been kindly invited in for a place to eat and call Raunak bhaiya. Ali’s phone rings: Rajesh chacha, his neighbor.

“Beta, where are you? Some mad lady, some Aunty Bilimoria, is calling everyone looking for you.” *** Ali picks up Raunak at Aunty Bilimoria’s gate. She lives in one of a line of small two floor apartments, bunched together a street away from the tourist market. Aunty Bilimoria does not come down—her watermelon knees cannot handle more stairs today. Raunak emerges from the stairwell, his grey t-shirt streaked with miscellaneous substances, his eyes redder than that night the two of them accidentally put double the amount of weed they should have in the brownies. Upstairs, Aunty Bilimoria’s face appears in the window and Ali shouts, “Thank you Aunty!” She nods, half smiles, and turns away towards the TV, to see if she something can be made of this Sunday yet.

“Bhaiya, I—” Ali begins.

“Let’s go see it.”

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“We don’t have to.”

“No, I want to.”

The two of them walk in silence—through the market, up past the residential lane where the Captain Lt Colonel lives, past the football field, to the bakery. The firefighters and police have cleared and the crowd has vanished. People stream past the bakery like it has always been like this—a black structure, jutting out of the ground with no purpose.

To Raunak, though, the bakery looks like it is still on fire. It is still in the act of burning, the ash still eating away whatever is under it.

“The firefighters said it was some trip wire in the generator,” Raunak tells Ali, though it is not the truth. The firefighters had said it was a gas fire: though they could not be sure if was because the gas has been left on or the cylinder had leaked. Raunak chooses to spare his friend.

The two of them stand staring at the charred remains of their workplace, the faint smell of warm butter, and brewed coffee, and their famous focaccia still in the air, almost definitely imagined. The ashy bakery is suddenly still—it is as if, in a moment, the hot ash has cooled, settled into its new, darker look. It is noon and the burning bakery becomes the burnt one.

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Trigger Warning: Sexual Assault

my favorite pants are not my favorite pants anymore Zain Murdock

for daphne, galatea, etc., etc., etc.

black soft velour size small $24 at Costco even though they’re brand name but i never cared about that kind of thing anyways so soft you could leave a hand print i washed them a few times since and i still see the handprint there i still feel his hands on me on me asf on meaaasfasf on measfasfasfasf on me, i have these pants black soft velour i wear them now as if it never happened they just happened to match my outfit today handprints can be rubbed off anyways and now i let myself spill tears on my black velour sweatpants they can be washed out anyways for we are all trees, 19

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rooted in time and space and heteronormativity and flight makes us all the more lovely anyways tears are clear anyways he’s not here anyways i disappear anyways i bury my tight shirts in the back of my drawer, anyways pygmalion would have thought i’d dressed like a harlot that night maybe it was he, him and all the other handprints who turned me to stone because what’s hidden must be even better, right, apollo?

1 at 40.8075° N, 73.9626° W: 6:40 AM, 7:11 AM, 4:27 PM

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some times1 i see the sun peeking out from the heavy slits i call my eyes; from sleep, i drag that semblance of a body bones made of ivory again aaa and again

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people only leave handprints on things not worth touching i told myself and made myself a fortress out of my own skin to hide in from the shadows of his handprints and the rain of my own judgement anyways i drank a beer last time i tried to try to feel like he did that night but i wasn’t fucked up enough to leave a handprint on anything that never asked for it i guess i guess my black velour sweatpants size small $24 at Costco even though they’re brand name but i never cared about that kind of thing anyways neverasfhqrehqow asked for it

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Black Cat Emily Mack 1. Bull Run 20’s in a Blue Box in the trunk beside Frat Party 15’s, one Peacock-Grand-Slam Finale (green!) swerving lanes on the I-90 East in the fields they will crack like city boys splitting trees for the fire and the axe tossed carelessly between their torsos.

A ziplock bag of gummy butterflies had melted on the dash clear peach streaks dripping so there goes breakfast, I thought, there he goes again pouring Skol into the orange juice and grinning like a bad cowboy.

The cabin was damp next to somebody’s grandma’s trailer home.

Here in a small county.

The tennis court and the little soft-bottomed lagoon.

Drove down the I-90 East with expired plates all that hot afternoon and still: two of us didn’t feel so lucky striking the match for an upturned Marlboro Red or was it a Light.

That night was controlled demolition.

We had paid good, wet cash to watch the show. There would be no liplocking at dawn over ziplocked candy.

No wooden porch and certainly no Oscar-Mayer stuck on a stick that blazes like, what else, a torch illuminating woods behind grandma’s trailer, there would be none of that.

I said unpack the trunk already.

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2. A confession: At senior prom my date forgot the corsage. What would have been a hot pink rose, and I cried alone in the bathroom of a rich kid’s house while girls posed on the lawn with a leg exposed.

A hot pink rose tied in baby’s breath and champagne ribbon for my champagne dress.

A satiny corsage that tilts against my gold wristwatch still cold from the fridge.

A rose with glitter painted on the rubbery tips of curling petals by a woman at the grocery store and stored carefully in plastic.

Falling apart by midnight like all the other girls’.

My shy date gifted me instead a single roman candle from his back pocket and in the bathroom I clutched it behind my back like a glinting dagger that would not fit in my silver pocketbook.

I clutched it in front of my stomach taut in the creamy dress like it were a prim bouquet, if only it were a bouquet of Buck Shots.

Behind the dance alone, I lit my corsage and watched it take flight, fizzle high and fast and disintegrate with a pop that shook my hand trembling with the gold wristwatch and the firework was green. (Typhoon!)

The roman candle contained three shots. Pop. Pop, Pop. I had asked for pink.

Inside the slow songs played.

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3. We Knew Not Much Outside the depths of the neighborhood from whence we came in our long city on a great lake.

We were not yet ancient then.

Our tan legs quivered with swagger from summer roofing jobs and bicycling about town singing Back in the Saddle and slinging King Cobra in glass bottles that clinked in our backpacks.

This was before the beginnings of beer bellies, see.

When we drank to get sidetracked in waning suns and took the long way home at night if just to linger.

Always in our jeans pocket: iridescent switchblade, a casual forefinger.

And at night nothing but love between the boys and girls!

We were a soft bunch of burgeoning addicts, fake scholars, and reformed thieves. Saints, really.

And we loved our country so much that we crossed state lines multiple times every Fourth of July to get the day-glo goods.

We had lost some eyebrows to the cause, maybe a quarter-pinky. But not yet.

This was before the beginnings of beer bellies, see.

All of our parents were alive.

At night there was nothing but love between the boys and girls.

Seven or eight of us would fit in the car on the way to explode a surplus in a trailer park called Woodhaven past hours of corn.

We meant to find lucidity in the airborne there, starting little sparks up near trees like cardinal wings spreading and tensing in the dark.

4. The Village of Blue Gill, Illinois With reverence for the past, and hope for the future, all Blue Gill citizens are proud to call this community their home.

A place for small town values, monthly newsletters, man-made lagoons like Black Oaks Pond and Reservoir Yellow Feather.

Blue Gill population 5,004 with a 15-member, dutiful police force 24

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that patrols the Woodhaven Trailer Park in pairs fat cop in the driver’s seat sometimes he floors it down Potawatomi Street after wet, filmy teenagers hop the fence of the lap-swim pool near dawn air slicing cool on the local kids’ skin while they escape Woodhaven gates on dirt bikes doubled up and riding pegs out to fields of farm near the expressway, rows of soybean for miles.

The Blue Gill teens traipse over these bushes, stepping toward the protection of corn where they stomp through stalks blindly and touch each other.

And the fat cop never catches country kids.

And on Sundays, he goes fishing.

And he’s never been to Chicago before.

He likes the skirt steak special at Blue Gill Tavern and he likes the Fourth of July parade when Ms. Ottawa County floats by and she plays the flute along to old Gene Autry songs.

But the fat cop dreads the fireworks all day.

They keep up his bloodhound, Bud, scratching at the trailer door dreaming of mud in Black Oaks Pond, wet lawns, dreams of howling at the gates of Woodhaven.

5. So We Left For Blue Gill in X’s van and Sam called shotgun quite seriously. He twisted the radio dial.

I was a mechanic’s daughter that couldn’t drive, I sat hunched in back for miles chasing whiskey with water.

X at the steering wheel: the most handsome of us, and best, he was supposedly blessed for surviving a fire of his own making.

That was years ago. (Pyro!)

Now he’s a mechanical engineer who taps the wheel at stop signs

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along to homespun hip-hop.

Sam in the shotgun seat grinned like a bad cowboy, John Deere cap turned backwards.

That was the year Sam and I split night shifts at the Italian Ice stand, scooping ruby sorbet into styrofoam cups.

I made good tips.

In the back, Sam squeezed limes and measured sugar, we worked sweating through the total solar eclipse.

That was when I said Sam, let’s go on a trip soon, my hands sticky and thick with strawberry juice.

The same day that Juan brought cold cans of Old Style to the walk-up window around noon and shoved a bill in my jar.

When nights were slow, I picked my scabs while Sam played acoustic guitar.

On the I-90 East Juan sat in the backseat of the van with me while X sped past wide-eyed cows and Burger Kings and we kept look-out for highway patrol since Juan was still on parole but don’t worry, X gets away with everything.

Juan wasn’t going to come to Blue Gill.

He never left town. He was addicted to cocaine and hung out mostly still in the park by the high school taking swills or smoking spliffs on the bench.

Juan sold lots of coke back then.

And he wasn’t going to come to Blue Gill until the day before we left, some older guys had shot a single, clean hole through his living room window, it was penny-sized.

And his head fell now to rest shaking on my shoulder in the backseat of the van like we were sixteen.

How the boys fascinated me so.

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There were girls too in the backseat and packed behind in yet another row.

They were interesting and beautiful girls.

They had broke homes too, by all means, and they were thoughtful and looked good in cut-off jeans. They forgave. They sang folksy.

They wore sparkles and raved on weekends: loud-laughing and proud to exist among wayward young men.

Maxine, Maddie, Bella, the other Bella, Safiya, Lily, all curled up in yellow bikinis.

But I can’t forget grumbling Sam’s ruddy profile and the window behind his face moving moments of farm animals and exit warnings.

How I loved him back then and how embarrassing. The boys were not fearless.

X would slow the van with a smirk.

From my shoulder, Juan would whisper that the gunshot sounded just like a firework.

6. Uncle Mad Dan’z off the Indiana Skyway was a shack in a gravel lot.

We preferred the smaller joints to whopping spots advertised on main routes between billboards for Roxy Gentlemen’s Club and Rogaine just a few feet south of the border by a turn-off lane.

At Uncle Mad Dan’z, a brace-faced checkout boy always hustled X into a larger set of mortars. We all liked to flex back then, waving wads of singles and pointing up the short aisles while the checkout boy crunched on Fritos, climbed the stepladder.

A man, maybe the Mad Dan, smoked in the lot on a beach chair and stroked his pit bull.

He helped the boys load the trunk by the bagful while I lingered around inside and imagined Mad Dan’z burning to the dusty ground.

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A vision which made my knees buckle— so perilous to stand in aisles stacked ceiling-high with Cosmic Honeysuckle, Combat Zones (yellow!)

Chameleon Centrifuge, Ghost Riders, Bellowing Asteroid Blaster in huge columns and Big Pimpin’ 25’s, Aerial Dogfights (blue!) plus cherry bombs.

I always pocketed a few.

On the label a gold-eyed panther bares his searing fangs: a hiss you could nearly hear through plastic-packaged boxes of the name-brand.

His face torn open again and again by eager hands.

I imagined the cherry bombs covered in chocolate.

I always left one or two on the counter in the back of the ice stand.

7. What the Fat Cop Knew round noon when he saw a dented van speed through town center with city plates and a trailer park guest pass pasted in the windshield: a trunk full of thirty-cases and love-makers, no doubt. But what else?

He watched the backseat waving cigarettes out the windows passionately. The fat cop tailed behind till he was radioed for backup: Drunk guy won’t leave the library. Over.

He reversed the squad car back up over West Street, red and blue light fragmentary drifting across his forehead.

It was midday in central Illinois.

The local cardinals sang a song of roses and violets. Momentarily the fat cop closed his eyes behind the wheel basking. It was a sweet summer.

The bum at the library kept asking 28

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for shoelaces and using the C-word.

He would eventually be peacefully transferred somewhere leeward.

Somewhere else in town— in the timbered curves of Woodhaven— boys and girls had torn open the first box of High Life.

The Irish ones were applying sunscreen.

Nicole, whose grandma owned the lot, was in the shed poking old tires on bicycles she rode with brothers when they were young and visiting. She recalled those hot, nothing weekends but oh, the excitement of the diving board then.

The tires were all half-flat but would do just the mile or so to the pool although the road was hilly.

One bike was a tandem. And how I tried to understand him when Sam and I mounted its corroded skeleton, pedalling silly.

I remember he spit on the ground.

I remember the sky was cloudless.

We rode past small lakes with painted signs.

All in a line, grinding drained wheels through the gravel-paved meadow and up green mounds.

Made our way as if whistling.

Whenever we slowed, Sam lit a firecracker which disturbed like a camera click: all the white-tailed deer bristling.

I said stop that. Or we’ll run out and what if we get hungry later. His right hand extended and pinching a shrinking wick against the wildflower clatter, we cackled.

Crackers. The does scattered. My god, my chest.

He looked back as if to say don’t flatter yourself.

8. We Caused Trouble in the Locker Room shotgunning gold cans and waiting our turn with Juan in the handicapped stall.

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We had no self-control.

Mothers hunched and changed and covered their children along the concrete wall: No Run Zone.

Fenced-in blue the lap-swim pool shone.

Freckled X had stayed behind at the cabin to have sex. Couples had to do it in shifts: First Bella and X then Maddie and Travis and then Nicole and Alex.

The rest of us slept on quilts on the floor. Confession: I’ve never had a real boyfriend before but I fall in love all of the time, it’s easy when you’re drunk.

I used to wake up and make a screwdriver.

I used a screwdriver to break up chunks of ice before I fed them into the churner at the stand while Sam squeezed limes.

Sam and I staggered home sometimes getting loaded while he went on about his drowned brother and I thought I was so special.

After swimming us girls finished another thirty amongst ourselves. Tossing gummy butterflies between our mouths. We lay browning.

I didn’t know it then that my blood was boiling.

Shaded by a visor crown, I was so drunk and kind in the grass when X crouched down and asked where we hid the fireworks.

Nicole said something about noise complaints and a clearing outside of the gates. She said later.

I rose.

Glancing under the oak tree, Juan dozed.

Keyring looped around his thumb.

And with his eyes closed I swear that boy looked about ten years old and beatified.

I had to pee but one of the couples was still inside.

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9. That Night It All Started when Sam sat cross-legged on the porch deeply engaged with Maxine who was loud-mouthed and big-hearted.

I had brought her along, we met at college that year and became dear girlfriends. Sam’s guitar in his lap while Maxine held our Stella crystal chalice brimming before her like a gloved queen.

Yes, I felt the sloshing and smelled the splash onto the swinging bench.

And Maxine was going on about dropping out of school so her big, brown eyes filled with tears so perfectly and Sam moved the guitar to the ground so carefully so he could move in toward her.

And one of the couples was still inside.

And one of the couples was in the back of the van.

So I asked Juan to take a walk and we had made it to the gravel road by the trash cans where X was taking a leak and looking dumbfounded, he asked again where Nicole hid the fireworks.

Juan was astounded when I pointed toward the bush behind the shed.

See, here’s the thing: years ago X survived a fire of his own making. Not so dead but half-balded and he still he loved to play.

Scalded boy, I called him.

When he drinks he aches for a little gasoline.

When we were fourteen X left trash cans burning down the alley like valentines for his Bella.

Baby smokestacks in the city, we used to roast marshmallows in the park.

X always with the tangelo display.

Mania out of a match and hairspray.

That was why Nicole had hid the bundle under the bush.

The Bull Run 20’s in a blue box beside Frat Party 15’s and one Peacock-Grand-Slam. (Green!)

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X could not be trusted to wait until we made it to the clearing.

The secret valley she knew far from the rows of shuttered homes where no one would have heard us cheering for what the air held.

Nicole said the cops around here were real jerks.

Juan offered X a bump off his own wrist while I looked back to the porch. Its figures.

That’s when white-toothed X took off resisting our hands with a twist, downright giddy when he fled. Arms loaded with explosives.

He howled catch me if you can. And I ran back to the house screaming fire like a madman as X wasted our finale on drunken antics.

How romantic, I thought when we split into pairs to effectively search the Woodhaven grounds: the forest, ponds, jungle gym, the pool.

We trailed where cardinals fled from faint popping sounds.

10. A Brief History: Research into pyrotechnics first began during the Han Dynasty, when the emperor approached Taoist alchemists with one request: to live forever. To conjure immortality, the alchemists combined potassium nitrate with sulfur.

Potassium nitrate provided enough energy to blast out from the bamboo casing. The sulfur sprayed and stunk. But it was not until centuries later during the Song Dynasty that charcoal was added for a slow burn. The bamboo tubes were stuffed thick and tossed into fire pits to ward off evil spirits. Along with the ingredients for gunpowder, fireworks spread to the West through the Silk Road. To increase morale during the American revolution, fireworks were displayed along with booming cannons and the discharging of muskets. John Adams referred to this triparate “illumination” as a tradition which he hoped would continue every coming summer in celebration. Although dangerous and violent aspects of the festival were subdued, his wish was mostly granted.

Americans still delight in the noise, light, smoke, and floating materials. Most cities and townships provide citizens with a public display every Fourth of July.

(New Year’s Eve too.) Oftentimes neighbors will curate their own hazy show on street corners while other neighbors grill meat and gaze up. In some states, red billboards punctuate the freeway with a deranged cartoon cousin of Uncle Sam offering a swell deal on bottle rockets, mortars, and more. In many movies, 32

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when the couple finally kisses and the man says, “I love you,” fireworks ignite in the background.

11.A Wooden Guardrail Rings Reservoir Yellow Feather shallow and muddy at the trailer park’s edge.

Illinois herons rested in the wings where we could not see them their knees bent backwards.

The tennis court was across the pond.

Droves of mosquitos hovered above the still water.

We swatted.

Sam and I against rotted posts, we called out X, X like kids following smoke.

Sam kept asking who told X where the bundle was hidden since we all knew what was forbidden but I was quick and mean asking him about Maxine and why he didn’t call me back last week when I was leaving a house party and I wasn’t tired yet and it was so warm outside.

I was still in a pink bikini top as we squinted into clusters of trees.

I sucked in to muster up what I needed to say please look at me, Sam. Our drugged, wet pupils.

Jean shorts pulled up over the fold of my belly button.

Legs shaved and then bitten clean.

My god, my chest.

And he said I don’t know if it’s best for us to walk so long or sleep together anymore because you love me.

You love me. When he said it, hot wind whirled.

So then what could I do besides fall into the marshy grass and cry like, what else, a girl?

Sam chainsmoked Reds while I cried, or were they Lights?

I cried until I choked while Sam drank a 40 from his backpack.

Every few minutes, he handed me the warm bottle.

He did not look at my soaked face.

When the sobs stopped and I moved to get up, the gentleman offered me a palm.

I told him he was an asshole for forgetting the corsage at prom.

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That’s when we saw it in the tennis court from across the pond: a vertical eruption almost like a cylinder of sparkles fizzing and it was mostly orange, I think. Until the green mortar exploded, a peacock unfurled so high, twinkling peony into a flash powder titanium salute.

Golden spider legs inching out from chrysanthemum (silver!) the twitching legs dissipated into platinum flare. Bang.

Showering, momentary red glare.

And the crackling traipsed down as a velvet curtain upon a bare-torsoed boy who danced around his flames like Merlin. Bang.

He did not notice us spying.

A reflection of the color wavered in the reservoir.

Of course, I started crying.

12. So the Fat Cop Demanded to Know What Was Wrong when he pulled up to the wooden gazebo.

Sirens flipped off.

He grabbed Sam’s bony shoulders and cornered him to the rail.

The cop’s back to the vanishing trail of X’s final tennis court torpedo.

I crossed my arms to cover streaks of dirt and explained that I was not battered so the cop let go of Sam. He said that was all that mattered but where the hell was my shirt?

Sam said, I’m sorry, we’re just in the middle of breaking up, sir.

And the cop blushed. Then he said, I’ll need to search your bag.

See, I’m responding to a call about a reck-loose running and lighting shit up, disturbing the peace, see, you fit the description you dirty blonde.

Go ahead, take another drag. Stupid kid.

And while I’m here, would you happen to know anything about the big group in the cabin off Section C? You know, the cabin with the shed and all the bicycles strewn about on the lawn by the willow tree?

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And we said No sir, not me.

I was crashing hard and shaking, sobbing still, and the cop ordered Sam to hold me.

That was the last time he held me.

He held me stiffly from the side while the fat cop wrote us tickets for underage drinking.

We were twenty then. What a joke.

Obviously the coke was in our pockets.

The cop drove away.

Then Sam left to find the others but I said I wanted to walk back alone through the woods just to see. And he said okay.

We were twenty then.

It was the last time we spoke.

13. Back at The Cabin, The Girls Were All Shook Up because when they went to look for X, Maddie slipped into a mud pit and lost her shoe.

In the aftermath, a flash of sirens came from down the gravel path which sent Juan running.

When the fat cop ransacked the place, he discovered a stunning 210 empty cans of Miller High Life.

He was looking for something explosive.

X was still missing.

And other boys had been skinny dipping in the forest while the girls all lined up on the porch.

Side by side.

It was Nicole who first dared to slide out of line and shatter our Stella crystal chalice so the callous cop would pop out and investigate the crash.

That’s how Maxine scurried in through the door in the back to shove all of Juan’s stash in her crotch.

When I finally staggered in, I was regaled the tale of heroism: how Maxine crawled through the grass and how the girls were all lined up quaking on the porch.

They swear they saw smoke rising from the tennis court.

But they could not see his orchestrated flames.

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And I would never tell them what I did see.

How the pond illuminated.

Nicole kept saying if we had only waited, she knew about fields of farm near the expressway, rows of soybean for miles.

She rode there with her brothers when she was a child.

She said the police can’t find you there.

X came back near dawn with brambles in his blonde hair.

He apologized for stealing the show.

But everyone knew it was me who had pointed to the bundle below the bush and around the shed.

While Bella kissed his mouth, I said Good Thing that fat cop didn’t find you or we woulda been dead.

We left Woodhaven that morning in a dented van.

We left the tennis court scorched black in the shape of a chrysanthemum.

We drove around Blue Gill till we found Juan in a tavern.

All of us sat at a long table and ate quietly.

We stunk like sulfur and cigarette ash.

My eyes hurt.

We all paid in cash.

Went home to the city.

That shift I made tips enough to pay my drinking ticket.

It was still July.

We were still twenty and all of our parents were alive.

As I passed sweet ice through a window crickets moaned the new night.

It was not unlike the hissing of a cat (black!) or the fizzing of a bottle rocket.

I found an old cherry bomb in my apron pocket.

A lighter was hidden in my cowboy boot.

I thanked myself, sadly disposed of the fruit.

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Our Dad the Robot Corrine Rabbin-Birnbaum 2019 Fiction Winner, Selected by Anelise Chen Dad came home from the hospital and now he is a robot. His brain is a MedCorp PlatinumCerebro™ Model 6.3.

Robot dad is a little strange but we love him anyway. He was watching football just the other day when he began to scream, like he always does, but the things that came out were a little odd: “ducking pieces of shit!” he yelled forcefully. Someone fumbled a pass: “jesus’s fucking crisps alright tea!” An interception: “I can’t take this to store!”

Later, we were informed by the doctors that autocorrect was the default setting on dad’s robot brain. Dad was not happy about this, and our mother reluctantly took him for an appointment so they could reconfigure his settings.

Dad does not like it when we call him Robo-Dad. We also tried The Bot-Father but he began to sweat and get red so we stopped. Little brother had to fan him with a sheet of paper just so he could get back to standard operating temperature.

One day Little and Middle brother were in their room playing VR soccer when Middle knocked over a pottery figurine someone had painted at a birthday party. “My puppy!” Little shrieked, trying to piece together the figurine’s shattered remains. “You broke him!”

Middle shoved his hand over Little’s mouth to stifle his screeching.

“Shut up!” Middle said. “If you don’t tell anyone, I’ll give you ten bucks.”

Little grinned behind Middle’s hand. “Okay!”

“I’ll give it to you tomorrow,” Middle said with a wave, and darted away to find the Roomba 12.0 to clear away the mess. After some time, he found the Roomba sitting on the side table in our father’s study. Dad was sitting in his leather armchair, one of his hands holding a book while the other stroked the cleaning device.

He did not seem to notice when Middle entered the room.

“Um, dad?” Middle said.

“Hmmmmm?”

“Can I maybe use the Roomba? Little broke something.”

“Of course,” dad said, turning to Middle and smiling. He looked over at the Roomba he was still lovingly petting and jerked away from it, as if he had not known it was there or what he had been doing. “Here, just take it!” he said quickly, shoving the Roomba into Middle’s arms.

From then on dad and the Roomba kept a wide berth of each other.

Dad did not go outside as often as he did before he became a robot. Gone were the Sunday morning donut shop runs, and we oddly missed the embarrassing jogs he used to take around the neighborhood clad in obscenely tight red spandex running pants. Instead, dad sat constantly in his study, attached to his charging port while staring at the oscillations of his desk fan. We were convinced this self-isolation had something 37

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to do with embarrassment over having become a robot.

“It’s so normal,” Older sister assured him. “Pretty much everyone will be a robot in the future. My friend at school burned out his retinas in the VR machine and they replaced his eyeballs. He says he can see through everyone’s clothes now but I don’t believe him.”

Little began to cry. “But I don’t wanna be a robot!”

Middle whacked him on the arm. “Stop that, you’re making daddy feel bad!

There’s nothing wrong with being a robot!” But Little was still crying. “Would you rather daddy have died? Is that what you want?”

“If the choice was between Robo-Dad or Dead Dad, I’d pick Robo-Dad any day,” Older sister said.

But Little cried on, and dad began to get hot again.

“That is enough!” mother declared. “Your father is still your father, robot or not.

We will have no more of this talk!” Then she sent us to our rooms while she poured our father iced tea and helped him attach to his charging port.

The fact that our father was a robot did not come up again until Middle asked if he could bring him in for show-and-tell at school. This came on the heels of a comment from Older, who said proving to everyone that he had a robot dad would greatly increase Middle’s street cred.

Mother was very upset at this request. “Your father may be a robot, but he is not a spectacle!”

“I want to do it,” dad said, surprising us all. “I do not want to hide in this house anymore. I want the children to see me with my robot brain so that they will not be afraid.”

Middle was ecstatic. He asked if he could paint dad’s face silver, so the message would really hit home. This request was declined.

The day Middle brought our father to school was a hot one. The A/C in the classroom was very weak. Dad was sweating profusely and everyone could hear the whirring of his robot brain inside his metal skull.

“So, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?” the teacher asked him. He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. He blinked very slowly. “Is everything okay?”

In response to the teacher’s question our father’s robot brain exploded.

Bloody wires and molten, steaming skin flew about the room. The children began to scream. With pieces of our father’s metal skull stuck in his hair, Middle cradled our dying robot father in his arms. “I’m sorry, daddy!” he sobbed. “Please don’t die.”

“Someone call 911!” a person yelled from the back. Another asked: “Does anyone have rice?”

Soon an ambulance came and took our father to the hospital.

When he was returned to us he was much the same as before, except that now he had a MedCorp PlatinumCerebro™ Model 7.1. It turned out that we had overlooked a notification that our father’s old robot brain had been recalled due to being too prone to overheating.

We all hugged Robo-Dad close. “I love you, robot daddy,” Little said. “I was so scared when you exploded.”

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“I was scared too, little man,” dad said. “When I was sitting in that classroom, half-dead, most of my brains spewed out, all I could think about were dogs. All sorts of dogs. Big, massive, giant dogs. Small, yappy, fluffy dogs. Even stuffed dogs. They were all standing in a circle, staring at me, watching me. Like they wanted something.

Something from me….” We exchanged concerned looks, but decided not to read too much into it. Robo-Dad had said strange things before.

Later that night we went to the study to bring dad some ice cream. He was sitting there like always, reading a book in his big chair. The Roomba was in his lap.

From the doorway we could hear it whirring.

Quietly the three of us crept away. The ice cream, we decided, could wait.

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Trigger Warning: Racial Violence

archive of an unmarked grave Bryn evans The suggestion of a body* a

cord

necklace†,

teeth‡ the smell of muscadines§ a limb¶ the repose of a soul°

* †

‡ § ¶

It’s displacement It’s memory loose, now tight, tight her or him a choke her or him, a call her or him dull white bullets or stones or seeds like gas burning a brown branch bleached blanche a shriek of purity, catching that limb

° 40

charred back charred black a crowd screaming mercy

a ghost with a busted lip a laugh that bleeds onto

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Royalty: A King Sits in His Castle in the Sky Mallory Shingle

There are some things people can never know about you. Like the way you kiss me right in the center of the top of my head to say I love you, as though it were a target, and that you can name every battle and general who fought in the American Civil War. Have you noticed how our left legs shake when we are concentrated. When I was born, your heart began to tremble so fast that you too were given your own bed to sleep on by me and Mom. A blessing in disguise without a priest and a blessing in disguise without a costume does not rob a chaotic moment of its sanctity. All three of us laying side by side, an imperfect trinity, being carefully monitored by angels in white coats. Who knew your heart was more fragile than mine.

Meerkats live in underground burrows in groups of two or three families, called mobs. Each mob is led by a dominant female who charges the group in foraging trips, finding new tunnels, and settling disputes with neighboring mobs. Maria Corazon Cojuangco Aquino led the People Power Revolution and served as the Philippines 11th president. Before his assassination, her husband, Senator Benigno Aquino, Jr. championed for the fall of President Marcos that eventually led to Corazon’s victory. Meerkats, much better than honeybees, do not spread their matriarch’s power too thin.

Her power depends on the mob’s faith in her, her investment in the collective, rather than the male’s simple ability to perform tasks. In teaching us how we can be a throne for Mom, I realized the way in which you are a king.

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OCD is gambling for a chance at fulfillment on a series of nonconcentric circles. You spin your mind on one wheel before spinning for another. 3,000 miles apart we sometimes land on the same wheel. When you call now I pretend that I am busy because it is hard to talk to myself, but I want you to see the way that you think reflected in me so you do not feel so alone. Yet, I hope that if you wave at your reflection, I can openly deny it by staying still, and people will believe me over you. Stock trackers on Wall Street display numbers in looping patterns that still manage to seem sporadic for the obsession with the value they denote. Careful observations of minute changes exaggerate the catastrophe and delight of the large ones. Birds squawk with or at each other in large choruses using similar indistinguishable noises, hinting at the unintelligible and bathing in its mess. “You look so much like your dad” a friend will say when they meet my parents.

A professor calls on me in class, telling me my comment about the reading is genius, dressing my mind to look as it always should.

I will go to his office and ask him what steps I can take towards intelligence, trick him into revealing his secrets, and undue your sense of dissatisfaction with the satisfaction of so many right turns in my life. Still a housewife, Aquino declined to join her husband onstage at his campaign rallies, instead opting to stand in the back and listen to his speeches. Sinking into the pillows of our worn brown leather couch or gliding over meandering streets in the passenger seat of your Volvo, I have spent my life listening to you.

Our conversations sat suspended in mid-air doing somersaults and toppling over each other in a mess of sometimes eloquent disasters, while Mom or Amir look on without awe for the tower of thought we created. A castle in the sky we both sometimes flee to when the earth is too much to bear. If you never let me back in to your fading mind, I’ll reconstruct these beautiful dance routines of conversation we called the drive to school with every sound of static on NPR.

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Unfocused eyes. Feet shuffling. You mumble and throw your hands, arguing yourself onto a path that failed to meet your feet through years of snow and wrong turns.

St. Francis is our common image of the monastic lifestyle.

Renouncing his wealth, the room in his castle and drunken days, he shed himself of every last material belonging, even the clothes off his back, as he walked through the streets of Assisi. Proclaiming his loyalty to God, he fled to the mountains. I remember the stories you told me about growing up in a political household, what it was to have thirty influential people gather round a table. How this lifestyle was all lost in an instant when your own father had a stroke. How you chose to stay in Sacramento mostly because you have never been one for decisions. You pursued work as a social worker with some of the most dangerous youth in Sacramento because you were good at it. As he wandered the coastal region of Umbria, there was said to be a wolf terrorizing the town of Gubbio. When the wolf ran towards him, Francis knelt. Sometimes you can tame the wildest of things with passivity.

Swim back to me. A kingdom of one needs no ruler. Jump in and do not be afraid to sink. The ditch is deep but not so broad. When it is light, I fear you will again be unreachable. Retreating to your fortress. Insular.

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All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again. In the original riddle, there is no indication that Humpty Dumpty should be depicted as an egg. Yet, the image stuck after Denslow’s original graphic depiction of the rhyme.

Every Friday morning when I was little, you would pick me up from Nana’s house and ask me where I want to go. We always knew the answer would be Fairtytale Town. And I would always ask what’s your favorite color. Then you would take a long hard stare at the shirt I was wearing, and if it were purple, you would say purple. I remember going to sample all the ice cream flavors even though I always left with a double scoop of vanilla.

Atop your shoulders, I felt like we were one device, a captain commanding a ship that would steer in any way I directed it.

When we reached the gate of Fairytale Town, I would come eye to eye with the large egg statue that sat on its gate. Heavy concrete in its fragile shell. After pulling me off your shoulders, you would duck into the entrance. We would both turn to the left and enter our favorite attraction. Cross the moat via fake wooden bridge.

You will soon be suited in your starched shirts just for a visit to the store.

You never leave the house without showering.

You always carry too many books.

You search for floss after every meal.

You reach for death only to show that this is the best way to live.

Your eyes are hazel like mine.

You have watched Zulu more than thirty times, your favorite scene is three minutes long.

You smooth out every wrinkle when you wash your sheets and tuck the corners like they do in hotels.

You remove cancerous patches of skin that hide in the wrinkles of your face.

You sigh creamer into hot coffee.

You cry a steady stream with the wail of any bagpipe.

You shoot lightning bolts into whoever wakes you.

You have curly hairs on the first knuckles of each of your fingers.

You worry about the next part of your life, forgetting this is what you used to look forward to.

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You taught me that crying does not mean sadness.

You leave restaurants with their coffee mugs.

You have accumulated quite the collection.

You buy lemonade in bulk and spend hours organizing it into the fridge.

You don’t like messes.

You cut your ear each time you shave.

You rub your gut with every slurp of wonton soup.

You collect pens and hide them so Mom won’t see.

You never snap your suspenders all the way closed, so they swing at your face when you stand up.

You are really good at accents.

You will go all day without eating so you can share a meal with me when I get home.

You listen with a deep baritone.

You dip your sourdough in my hot chocolate the moment I turn around.

You pray the surgery puts a stop to the pain this time.

You polish your shoes with the same set of fifty strokes.

Your dad used to have milk and cookies with you in the middle of the night.

Your favorite midnight snack is still pink and white frosted circus animals.

You make Amir turn down the TV when I am venting about class.

Your eyebrows sit perched on your lids like furry caterpillars.

You buy expensive hair products, though you could probably count the strands you have left.

You never stopped learning.

You are what I look for in my best friends.

You and I, reflections of each other.

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I would give anything to remember which play it was you read to me when I was sixteen and you woke me in the middle of the night. Tears filled your eyes but your voice became steady with the iambic pentameter and I fell back to sleep. In Hamlet V, he states “When a father gives to his son, both laugh; when a son gives to his father, both cry.” Funny. The less we give, the more we both cry. Standing over the stove, I peer into the pot of Cream of Wheat. Cold and Clumpy. Waiting for its insight into the human brain, memory. William Randolph Hearst built the nation’s largest newspaper chain on yellow journalism. You still read to me from the New York Times over the phone despite my insistence that you not. A battle neither of us wants to win. Sometimes it’s the same article. Ten years ago, you drove me to the palace Hearst built in San Simeon. Parading through each of the rooms, I pretended to be a tour guide, that Willy was my great granddaddy.

When people giggled, you smiled and said “that’s my daughter.”

Porous wood. Firm hugs. Memories morph into something permeable, so I wonder if it is worth the energy to keep their walls insulated.

Book 2, Verse 4 of Daniel reads “And in the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, nor shall the kingdom be left to another people. It shall break in pieces all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand forever.” You were born up there in your castle in the sky.

How unfortunate when the rest of us sit so rooted in Earth. I’m sorry it takes so long waiting for the rest of us to join, but I hope you enjoy the passing of each cloud, each sunset. The way your leather satchel carrying all your books stretches and becomes softer with the ongoingness of it all. This is how you are. Your heart always expanding, to fit more and carry it, carry me with you. Sometimes it wrinkles. But ultimately it is soft and it is home.

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Sea Bright, Saigon Elizabeth Kyung Merrigan When the storm was just a swirling argument my father swept the shore each day for sea glass to exchange for quarters The teacher came to collect him in the hallway by the vending machines where geckos did not fall from slick cinder walls Years ago wind and water funneled missed Saigon into silt romance to settle on a strip of land off south Jersey so when it landed on soft dunes and stilts it carried our young out to sea When waking one morning in a strange town do not think to become the boat people of some midtown transatlantic strip mall I do not claim to know disaster that delivered my father as his own cargo In the embroidery of my diner napkin memory I see just our simple golden bodies and evening summer haze 47

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which in Sea Bright would have blurred the lighthouse the burmese python wound tight around the backyard palm spilling like white froth to the ground following a boy’s finger to beyond the property’s edge

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Self Portrait in White Lilly Jean Cao An investigation of my own hybrid culture as an American-born Chinese with parents who rarely spoke Mandarin at home and celebrated few Chinese traditions. In this oil on canvas panel work, I grapple with personal identity and themes of division and superimposition through symbolic use of color and composition.

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Heinrich Hofmann's Christ Ben Appel 2019 Nonfiction Winner, Selected by Emily Gould Every morning when I wake up, I recite a simple set of prayers: “God, please keep me clean and sober today no matter what, and please grant me knowledge of Your will for me and the power to carry that out.” When I pray I see Jesus: his beige skin and his crimped, shoulder-length hair the color of chestnuts; his long, slender nose and his raspberry lips, shrouded in a ginger mustache and beard; and his amber eyes, which are downcast and subtly averted to his left (my right).

My prayers require complete focus and I have to say them quickly, otherwise I begin to have what mental health specialists refer to as “intrusive thoughts.” Suddenly Jesus and I will sprout ivory horns from our heads; a serpent will uncoil from his mouth, and a serpent or an erect penis will pierce my back and explode through my heart; and Christ’s eyes will darken and fill with disdain. (“It’s all very ‘William Blake,’” says my psychotherapist.) These images used to upset me when I was a kid, but today I know they’re merely symptoms of scrupulosity, which is the type of obsessive- compulsive disorder that I have.

I developed scrupulosity when my family left The Lamb of God, a charismatic renewal community located in the Baltimore suburbs, when I was twelve. Effectively excommunicated, I no longer saw my friends with whom I had been raised since infancy, nor my teachers who taught me creationism and about Sodom and Gomorrah and who prayed over me daily. At my new public school, my classmates tormented me for my gender nonconformity (which turned out to be homosexuality), and then my parents split up. I didn’t know if God had abandoned me, or if I had abandoned God. Atop a tall bookshelf in the family room of our new home, my mother displayed a large clothbound Bible with a small painting of Christ on its cover. Late into the night, while the rest of my family slept soundly in their beds, I would kneel behind the pink La-Z-Boy, lift my head to the Bible, and repeat prayers of praise and repentance while images of openmouthed serpents, blood- soaked horns and penises swirled through my mind. Please forgive me God, I love you Jesus, please keep us safe, I would plead, because if I didn’t then my mother would be raped and murdered, or my sisters would be killed in a car accident. After each set of prayers I made the sign of the cross as many times as it took to get it right—perhaps I hadn’t tapped the proper location on my chest or my shoulder touches were asymmetrical, or maybe I needed to gaze more reverently at Christ’s face.

The Christ who returned my gaze from the cover of my mother’s Bible was, I discovered recently after a somewhat exhaustive Internet search, a replica of the Christ in Heinrich Hofmann’s 1889 painting, “Christ and the Rich Young Man,” held inside Manhattan’s Riverside Church.

I recognized the image the moment it appeared on my computer screen; the 50

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likeness of Hofmann’s Christ is as familiar to me as my own reflection.

*

The first and only time I’ve been to Riverside was about a month ago, for the fortieth anniversary gala of the church’s LGBTQ ministry, Maranatha. The gala was held in an expansive room in the basement of the church, and it is to this room that Robert Rodriguez, Riverside’s tour leader and gift shop manager, leads me after I inquire in the visitor’s center about viewing “Christ and the Rich Young Man.” Altogether, Riverside possesses four of the German painter’s works, Rodriguez explains as we descend the marble steps into the basement: “Christ and the Rich Young Man,” “Christ in the Temple,” “Christ’s Image,” and “Christ in Gethsemane.” The latter is the only one that was built into the foundation of the church in 1930, and it hangs in a small prayer room next to the nave. The rest were donated by Riverside’s financier, John D. Rockefeller Jr., in 1941, and they hang behind locked wooden shutters in the basement hall, which explains why I don’t remember seeing them at the gala.

The hall is empty when we enter, and it looks altogether different without the elaborate floral centerpieces and mingling guests. My eyes are immediately drawn to the ceiling, where intricate vermillion and white tapestries paper the spaces between the dark wooden beams that run the ceiling’s length. Rodriguez, following my gaze, says that the Australian tapestries were once featured in a commercial for Gloria Vanderbilt’s blue jeans. Anderson Cooper can remember dashing through the long marble hallways of the church while his mother transformed the basement into a catwalk, or so he told Rodriguez when he toured Riverside a few years ago.

I place my backpack on an empty table as Rodriguez removes a set of keys from his pocket. He moves to the wall behind me, where the bar had been erected for the gala, and inserts the key into the center of four dark brown shutters. He swings the shutters open, revealing the Christ of my childhood.

*

“You can take a picture if you want,” Rodriguez says.

“Oh, OK, yes,” I answer, and pull my iPhone from my pocket.

“Christ and the Rich Young Man” is very large—about four feet by five—and is hung quite high, making the lower half of the painting eye level for a six-foot-two man.

I have to step back to capture the entire painting, and then further for a second photo that includes the wooden shutters and—for some reason I insist on this—the round clock hanging above the painting (it reads 1:20 p.m.). Built into the wooden frame are four consecutive rows of tiny round light bulbs, which, rather than improve the view of the painting compromise its dimension by creating unseemly glares over its darkest portions: the poor man and woman who linger in the shadows outside the Rich Young Man’s dwelling, and the dim hallway through which the young man will disappear once Christ concludes his lesson on charity.

Christ’s face, particularly his right cheek and forehead, attracts the most light.

His hair is parted in the middle; his beard and mustache are unkempt; and his eyes, though not entirely vacant, are looking right through the young man, as if he knows he’s wasting his time. The cream trim around the young man’s crimson turban also of 51

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catches the light, either from what looks like candlelight or from the light bouncing off of Christ’s face.

“Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” the young man asks, according to the Gospel of Luke. The color of his robes recalls the mint green Escada gown worn by Best Supporting Actress Kim Basinger at the 1998 Academy Awards.

His ecru sash has a two-inch navy blue and gold border. His porcelain-doll-like face resembles Zac Posen’s.

“You know the commandments,” replies Jesus, whose robes are pale burgundy and hunter green.

“All these I have kept since I was a boy,” the young man says.

Jesus gestures toward the loitering impoverished villagers. The desperate woman wearing a cloak the color of storm clouds tries desperately to catch the young man’s eye, as the feeble old man—who looks like Michelangelo—collapses to the ground.

“You still lack one thing,” Jesus says. “Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.”

The diamonds on the young man’s turban shimmer.

He places his hand on his jutted hip and looks away.

*

The summer after I turned thirteen, a young man and woman approached me on the boardwalk in Ocean City, Maryland. “If you get into heaven, the streets will be paved with gold,” the man said as the woman handed me a tiny red book filled with scripture. For weeks, maybe months, I walked around holding the book tightly in my right hand, its red cover staining my sweaty palm. In my left I cupped an inch-long metal crucifix I had found in the bottom of my mother’s jewelry box, its edges leaving tiny indents in my skin.

*

“Christ’s Image,” which was sketched by Hofmann but completed by his understudies in 1894, hangs on a neighboring wall. It is a portrait of Jesus at thirty-three, shortly before he was crucified (or perhaps shortly after he was resurrected). Christ’s shoulder-length hair is again parted in the middle, but his mustache and beard are more neatly groomed than they are in “Christ and the Rich Young Man.” He holds his left arm across his body, extending his left index and middle fingers in front of his chest, as if he’s flashing a peace sign. His face is expressionless and entirely unreadable.

In this painting Christ’s robes are pale pink and white, but the primary hue of the painting is blue. Either due to the bad lighting—again, a distracting glare from a poorly conceived light fixture—or the cloud-covered steel blue sky that stretches for an eternity behind the Christ, the image has an underwater quality, as if the painting lies submerged within the ruins of an ocean liner.

“Christ’s Image” is the painting before which Hofmann frequently prayed as his mother died from leukemia. For a year after her death, his paintings consisted of dark greens, grays and blacks.

*

During my last year of middle school, I began leaving class a few times a 52

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week to pray in the bathroom. I couldn’t go into a stall because that would mean I was ashamed of my Christian faith, so I knelt on the cold tile floor next to the long row of sinks. I would repent and plead for my mother’s protection as quickly as I could, lest a schoolmate walk in and discover me, and then make the sign of the cross a few dozen times before sprinting back to class.

When I got to high school, my rituals no longer allowed for a trip to the bathroom; I believed I had to pray, make the sign of the cross, and lift my hands in praise right there at my desk. I could recite my prayers silently, but it had become necessary for me to say ‘Amen’ out loud because the word had started to sound jumbled and incoherent in my head, as if it wasn’t a word at all. This was difficult because I couldn’t interrupt my teacher, and also because I wanted to disguise what I was doing. Thus, when I lifted my hands in praise, I pretended I was stretching; to make the sign of the cross I was merely brushing the hair off my forehead, scratching an itch in the center of my chest, and sweeping dust from my shoulders; and the word ‘Amen’ was just a yawn or a cough with a little bit of song added to it.

In high school I also began to cover all of my exams with faintly drawn question marks. This was because if I got one of the answers wrong but had answered affirmatively then I would be lying. By adding the punctuation, I was making it known to God and to my teachers that my answers were merely conjecture.

In my journals, which I had been keeping since I was 10, I stopped capitalizing all proper nouns besides “God,” “Lord,” “Jesus,” and “Christ,” along with their pronouns (He/Him/His), because if I was capitalizing regular folks’ names then I was giving them the same dignity as I was God, which would be blasphemous. Similar to the question marks I wrote on my exams, I wrote “I think” and other qualifying words in the sentences that included any type of data, lest I had gotten the information wrong. (“We got home around 12:30, I think.” “We only have approximately seven days of school left, I think.”)

I also went through all of my old entries to cross out curse words, negative statements I may have written about others, and any passages that suggested I was lacking in faith. I scribbled next to these entries, “Forgive me Lord!” and “I love you!” and I circled all of the places I had written “God” and “Lord Jesus” to emphasize my passion for His name.

*

“Christ in the Temple,” tells the story of Jesus as a young boy, on the day he stole away from his mother and ran to the local synagogue, where he testified to the rabbis about religion and his Father, God. “Most of the rabbis thought Jesus was crazy,” says Rodriguez. “But there were a few who believed him.”

In this painting, which Hofmann completed in 1882, four bearded rabbis and one beardless rabbi are gathered around Jesus, who wears a simple white tunic with a gold sash tied around his waste. The rabbis wear mint green, burgundy, pink, and brown.

Some are silver-haired and some have dark brown hair, and one looks like Santa Claus.

One of the rabbis sits in a chair with an open book across his lap. As Jesus speaks, he points to the book. Perhaps this is a book of scripture that the Christ Child brought with him to Temple, or perhaps the rabbi was already in possession of it and 53

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Jesus is telling him of the chapters which are yet to be written.

*

During the first few years after we left The Lamb of God, alcohol was the most adequate solution for my mental anguish, but when I was sixteen I started smoking pot.

Then it was opioids, benzodiazepines, and speed; and finally, heroin.

At nineteen came a psychotic break. My mother took me to the hospital, and I escaped through the back door of the emergency room wearing nothing but a hospital gown and socks. I hid in the snow behind the dumpsters until I couldn’t bear to watch her search for me anymore.

*

As Rodriguez closes the shutters over “Christ’s Image” and “Christ in the Temple,” I look up at “Christ and the Rich Young Man” one last time. Nothing sinister protrudes from Christ’s temples or uncoils from his mouth, and his eyes appear kind if not imploring.

Feeling experimental, I close my eyes and recite my morning prayers, even though it’s well past noon. Still nothing. My skull and chest remain intact; the air is void of matter. I don’t know what this means. Maybe it doesn’t have to mean anything.

Rodriquez returns. He closes and locks the shutters over “Christ and the Rich Young Man,” and we ascend the marble steps to visit the last of Heinrich’s paintings.

*

“Christ in Gethsemane,” completed in 1890, hangs in a small prayer room to the right of the nave, where, Rodriguez tells me, a family often prays over the body of its deceased loved one prior to a funeral service.

The doors to the room are inches thick and as heavy as cast iron.

“Do these ever close?” I ask him.

“All the time,” he says.

Inside the room are three kneelers covered in red velvet. One of the kneelers is stationed directly beneath the painting, so the worshipper can look up at the Christ who kneels and looks up at God. The painting tells the story of the Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. It is during the hour after the Last Supper, when Christ prays to his Father and tearfully accepts what is to come to pass: he will be betrayed by one of his disciples, arrested, and crucified.

“My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death,” Jesus confides in his friends, just before they fall fast asleep.

In the painting, Christ wears a blush pink robe and a forest green tunic, and he kneels before a giant slab of stone. His outstretched arms appear disproportionately long; if he were standing, the tips of his fingers would fall level with his knees, like an orangutan. His spindly fingers, woven tightly together, rest solidly upon the rock. The long folds of his tunic billow elegantly across the stone floor behind him.

The majority of the painting is of the shadow of night, which lends to Christ’s isolation and anguish. Three of his beloved disciples lie but “a stone’s throw” away, and yet he toils alone in the dark with the Father who readies him for the slaughter.

“If it is possible, may this cup be taken from me,” he pleads, before quickly 54

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acquiescing: “Yet not as I will, but as you will.”

The moon peeking out from behind the black clouds is yellow. Its rays extend only but so far before they dissipate, miles and miles and miles above Christ’s head.

And yet there is a light that reaches him from somewhere, because he is bathed in it. He glows. Behind his head shines a halo.

The Father sends an angel to strengthen His son’s resolve.

*

Late one night during my second visit to the psych ward, I knelt before my bedside and begged God to help me. The horns and serpents were spectacularly vivid during this time.

Please forgive me, Jesus, please God help me, please keep us safe, I prayed.

There was no relief. None.

Finally I said, “Fuck you, God!” In my mind I screamed the words, and suddenly everything was silent.

Nothing was broken—not my mind or my spirit or my heart.

For the first time in months, maybe years, I felt hopeful. I believe God had just wanted me to be honest.

*

I was a guest of honor at Maranatha’s anniversary gala at Riverside; the organization had chosen me as the recipient of its annual scholar award for my “service to the LGBT community.” When the presenter asked me to come up and share with the crowd how I had learned to reconcile my sexuality with my Christian fundamentalist upbringing, I joked that I would have to get back to them about that and instead read a speech I had prepared earlier in the day.

“Six years ago, on the night that we won the marriage equality campaign in Maryland, something in me changed,” I read to the crowd. Crystal glasses clinked and silver steak knives scraped across the surfaces of porcelain china. My husband, sitting at a table to my right, held up his iPhone to record my speech for my mom. “Suddenly the future was full of possibility, not just of the right to marry the man I love, but a future in which young gay and lesbian Americans didn’t have to grow up thinking they were undeserving of the love and respect of their peers, or that there was something wrong with who they are.”

Directly opposite the podium, some twenty yards away and just beyond the wine bar, Christ’s downcast amber eyes and chestnut-colored hair were steeped in shadow behind a pair of locked wooden shutters.

I had no idea he was there.

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Trigger Warning: Suicidal Ideation

SAINT NICASIUS OF RHEIMS HOLDS HIS OWN HEAD AND CONTINUES HIS CHANTING OF PSALM 119 Anderson Peguero II and as if he simply needed something to do with his hands on the day of rest / the good Lord made me like this / my soul attached to dust / brittle translucent chest overflowing / i am the ancestor of longing / i am not evil / i am worth grace / it has been said if you recite a psalm long enough it will coat your heart so even in sleep your blood beats to the rhythm of the lord / i chant to myself: i am not evil slash i am worth grace / my worth the subtext of a psalm unwritten / i have not yet forgiven myself for all that i will never be / these hands break so easily / i try not to crumble / i cling to dust / i remember all the funerals i could not go to / years after and i still fall apart at the stray thought / limbs spilling from the flesh / all the life in it gone by the time it kisses the earth / when i pieced myself together again at the bottom of my sorrows / it was because God willed it / i am not evil / i am not grace / because God willed it / my soul clings to dust / if it was His will i would be happy / it is His will that some whom i loved are no longer here / when a father wills it a house is warmed / i know whom to blame for this chill / in the house of the lord / there is more time lost than i have left / but i will endure / some days i wish i had died before anyone i loved / so i would never have to mourn / or learn to live without them / this is to say i would give anything to see some people again / even my life / what am i to do come days i want to hold my own head / in my hands / what to do but pray / read scripture as psalm / tomorrow i will not be evil i will be worth grace / who to blame for delaying my own funeral / but myself / if i have learned anything from my lifetime of silence from my father / it is that the duty of a man is to endure and to suffer in silence / that it is best if no one else knows you suffer / the evil eye never blinks / and atlas will never shrug / i have endured this earth for so long / martyrdom would be the same as salvation / in all the oceans of hearts i have dived into / i have been searching for a good place to drown / you may sever my head, father and i have no doubt that you will but the one to hurl this body into the sea or the earth will be me / and i will keep on singing / i cling to my soul / i search for the meaning of death / in the maws of the dead / from within them God whispered to me the evil are not worth grace / salvation is far from the wicked because they do not seek it / all the spirit i have is in the seeking / dust clings to me / all i have in me are words / and memories of the dead / how much do i lose until there is nothing left / to take / how many of us did God mold from dust / just to watch be dashed on the rocks / of salvation / if i am to die a sinner / may those i love be remembered as saints / may their ruptured eyes still see paradise somewhere / i have tried just to glance a corner of it / but i have gone blind in the trying / and don’t know how to confess it / if i have learned anything from my brother that was born asleep / and his spirit that has followed me to the depths of my soul / it is that even a dead man must not let suffering stop him / from collapse / i dont know how to ask for help / without shattering / so i will endure / and pray for mercy / until i am erased by it / my soul becoming one with dust 56

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Stained Red Maya Sibul Stained Red is chalk pastel, graphite, and marker on paper. It considers the dissonance between internal and external experience. Homage to Egon Schiele.

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Gentle John Tate The dogs are out and the world could fit in my fingers if i would let it.

For i have become a hairy phantom that lingers. i have broad shoulders and a belly and i can’t remember this face that stares back and a cold wind blows in the holes of this hallowed house.

My toes curl and flicker.

And i don’t recognize the hands that cradle the world.

There’s a song one whispers through these frigid breezes that coaxes me out to pray.

So i swallow my faucets and showerheads, listen to the pipes wilt in the walls and fill my fists with hair to paint myself prettier than this body allows. i think i am standing by the kitchen window watching them play as my eyes wander like a frigid wind looking over the foreign face that stares back at me from the window’s mirror.

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i’ve become a glaring pantoum which eats itself like the godecho of my father’s voice remember where you came from.

Call me Helen and let the world speak for me while i’m gone.

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This publication was produced using Adobe ‘InDesign’ page layout software and ‘Photoshop’ image-editing software.

The typefaces used are: Minion Pro, a modern serif font: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz 1234567890 ?!@#$% and Avenir LT Std, a modern sans serif font: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz 1234567890 ?!@#$% Avenir LT Std 35 Light Avenir LT Std 45 Book Avenir LT Std 55 Roman

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