Quarto Spring Print 2020

QUARTO

QUARTO MAGAZINE

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: “Pool of Hands” by Jazmin Maco

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Columbia University’s Official Undergraduate Literary Magazine VOLUME LXXI

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We wish to express our sincere gratitude toward many people for their contributions to this print edition. To our guest judges, Safia Elhillo and Jeff VanderMeer, thank you for your time and dedication. To our nonfiction judge, Emily Bernard, who did not actually get to participate in judging this time around due to a lack of nonfiction submissions, thank you for your time and dedication as well. 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 the fantastic work of Columbia’s undergraduates. 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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STAFF EDITORS-IN-CHIEF Charlie Blodnieks Nick Gauthier MANAGING EDITORS Lily Ha Kayla LeGrand WEB EDITOR Priya Pai COPY EDITOR Anna Chavez ADMINISTRATIVE EDITOR Veronica Roach SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR Haley Cao

BLOG EDITOR Amanda Ong EVENTS EDITORS Ananya Prakash Alena Zhang HEAD OF DESIGN Mitali Khanna Sharma ART & DESIGN EDITORS Cameron Lee Gisela Levy Sophie Levy STAFF EDITORS Erik Cera Diane Huang Elizabeth Merrigan Alex Tan

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EDITOR’S NOTE To the Quarto readership,

In the midst of all this upheaval, we first and foremost want to thank you for picking up (or, more aptly, clicking on) this issue of Quarto.

Whether you’re an author, a staff member, a Columbia community member, an author’s loved one, a judge, or a complete stranger: We are so grateful for you partaking in this act of literary community building.

We’re glad you’re here.

As the COVID-19 crisis disbands our physical campus community, we at Quarto are doing what we can to keep Columbia and Barnard’s vibrant literary community connected to one another from a distance. But this moment in history is about a lot more than art. Those in especially vulnerable positions—disabled folk, Black and brown communities, low-income people, those who are out of work, and so many others—are bearing the brunt of this crisis, and there is much work to be done. We urge you to use your voice: call your friends, call your family, call your representatives. It is our sincerest hope for everyone reading this magazine that you take the heart of this issue as a moment of inspiration to make the world a better place.

The work that we represent at Quarto has a moral center and asks each of us to sit with the conditions from which artists are made.

Our purpose is to uplift, center, and amplify marginalized voices, and this is no time to stop. This is a time to act. This issue of Quarto illustrates kindness, intimacy, community, and justice in innovative, caring, and creative ways. We are asking you to take those principles beyond the page, now and always. This is the strongest work that art can do.

We would like to extend our utmost thanks to our staff, who have been weathering this turbulent time with grace and care. We think of Quarto’s staff as a family, and we mean it. Our thoughts are with every member of the Columbia and Barnard community who has been impacted—physically, financially, or emotionally—by this crisis. We hope that you are all taking care of yourselves and one another.

With love, Nick Gauthier and Charlie Blodnieks Editors-in-Chief

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GUEST JUDGES

FICTION JEFF VANDERMEER

POETRY SAFIA ELHILLO

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TABLE OF CONTENTS 1 JUNK

Lorenzo Barajas POETRY

2 TRIBUTARIES

Sofia Montrone 2020 FICTION WINNER

7 UNTITLED

Dahee Kwon VISUAL ART

8 DIAGNOSTIC

Sarah Barlow-Ochshorn POETRY

9

TURN ME TO GOLD

12

HOME NOW

13

SEX EDUCATION

Hanna Dobroszycki FICTION

Samantha Losee POETRY

Siri Gannholm POETRY

14 UNTITLED

Lalitha Madduri VISUAL ART

15

THE FERRY PEOPLE

22

EVENINGS AT THE SHEDD AQUARIUM

Franziska Nace FICTION

David Ehmcke 2020 POETRY WINNER

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24 CONTROL

Axel Ivan Ortega VISUAL ART

25

4 THE WEST SIDE

27

LATER, REMAKING THE BED

28

SENIOR PROM

Hanna Dobroszycki POETRY

Siri Gannholm POETRY

Franziska Nace FICTION

30 HER

Raymond Banke VISUAL ART

31 HAGAR

Imani Benberry FICTION

37

I LOSE MY VIRGINITY IN A YOUNG ADULT NOVEL

38

NIGHT FRUIT

39

COMPLEX THINGS

41

BUDAPEST-NYUGATI PU TO PRAHA HL.N.

42

SECOND COMING

Samantha Losee POETRY Anna Desan POETRY

Jazmin Maco VISUAL ART

Sarah Barlow-Ochshorn POETRY Charlie Noxon FICTION

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JUNK LORENZO BARAJAS

i go dumpster diving in the mouth of a volcano and come up with molten shreds dark and glittering shadow-mad i lug everything through the underground catacombs when i arrive submerged into the house it’s dim i lay everything out to cool under the branches of an ancestral pine all the junk a cicada shell with no tenant an heirloom hacksaw rusted shattered clay birds serrated incisors dated news from a foreign country in the corpse-cold moonlight it gleams and i hold all my junk before me in my arms.

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TRIBUTARIES SOFIA MONTRONE 2020 FICTION WINNER, SELECTED BY JEFF VANDERMEER

2

She began by forgetting things. Keys. The mailman’s name. Sentences, halfway through speaking them. There was a tile and iron-framed table by the front door where she had once stopped every morning and evening to exchange her keys, and that she now passed without even seeing, as if her eyes did not remember that it was there.

She was writing a novel about the human body and the things that happened inside of it, although she was not a doctor. At night, she stayed up for hours reading about medicine—not in medical journals, whose sesquipedalian technicalities were, to her, a foreign language, but in The New Yorker where the science was secondary to the human-interest story. Her husband reported that the light from her bedside table was keeping him up at night and so she began to read in the kitchen instead. She read with a cup of tea and, as she drank, paid special attention to the way the liquid felt sloshing around her mouth and down her throat. The way it paused for a moment at the mount of her tongue and then, midway down her chest, vanished—disappeared into a process so deep inside her body that she could not feel it or imagine what it felt like.

At the breakfast table, she told her husband about the sensation of liquid disappearing into flesh and tissue and muscle, all of which were run through and surrounded by other liquids. Her husband buttered a croissant and wondered how it was that she could remember these things in such great detail but not the day of the week.

It was summer and there was a sheen to everything. The backs of their thighs were slick with sweat. They sat on the balcony and listened to the waver and ripple of the trees. The table between them was clustered with little pots of compote and pastries and halved stone fruits beaded with juice. She sat in a slant of shade with her sunhat pulled low over her eyes. Her skin—pale, blue-veined—stretched tight over her collarbone and the knobs of her shoulders.

Her husband proffered a pastry in her direction.

Eat something. He said. His mouth was full of croissant.

The body turns everything to liquid. She said sagely.

She placed a flake of pastry on her tongue and let it dissolve there.

The body dissolves everything. She said. Pulverizes it with the teeth and the tongue, acids and enzymes. Other things too. The body lets everything pass through.

Okay. Her husband said.

He wished she would stop with all of this talk about the body. He wanted her to eat something, but she had been refusing food for weeks now. She said she could feel it moving through her at night, bubbling in her stomach and guts. She couldn’t

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sleep with all that mashing around.

When I lost the baby, she said, it was all liquid.

The body reduced itself, eventually. The morning sickness subsided. She stopped eating. Her belly flattened and then hollowed. Her milk came in and there was nowhere for it to go. It was a different color than she thought it would be, and thicker.

She had purchased bras to accommodate her newly swollen breasts—lacy, celebratory bras with all sorts of bangles and trims—which, after everything had passed, she no longer had use for and needed to return to the store.

You don’t understand. She told the woman at the counter. I never even wore them.

We have a strict fifty-day return policy, Miss.

I have the tags and the receipts right here.

I’m sorry, Miss. But we cannot take them back.

The morning was hot and wet like the inside of a mouth. A bee, drawn to the ripe abundance, landed on the sugar-stick surface of a plum.

She watched the bee march its spindled legs without progress. Across the table, her husband dissected a cheese danish. He had wide, cow-like eyes that made him look much younger than he was. It hurt her to think of him as a child, the life he had lived and the people he had loved before her. She felt, sometimes, that she was playing catch up for the years that she had missed. She would look at him doing something ordinary, like shouting at a football game or cutting a cheese danish into even triangles, and think that she hardly knew him at all. These were behaviors he had internalized from someone else. She wondered what, if anything, she had impressed on him and when these things would begin to mark the surface of his life. The truth was, she had known him for less than half of his life, less than half of that half. Despite all of the past heaped up behind them, they had determined that they would be suitable life-partners and suitable parents to a child who was the product of both of them—their bodies and histories and the histories they carried, encoded, in their bodies. It was not sensible, she thought, studying the bee whose life would end after only 122 days, and yet people did it all the time.

All of this was to say that their baby might have had wide, cow-like eyes. On the ultrasound, it had nascent limbs and fluttering white light for a heartbeat.

Her husband rustled open the paper. When she began to speak, the words rushed out.

The human heart is capable of beating two hundred times a minute at the body’s point of maximum exertion. Three beats every second. She said. Enough to feel your whole body beat. The resting heart rate for an adult woman of twenty-nine years 3

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of age is between sixty and one hundred beats per minute. That’s over one hundred thousand beats per day. Did you know that? One hundred thousand times a day, the heart swells and empties and does not stop.

Even when you feel like you could die, she said, your heart goes on and on.

She closed her eyes and felt the sun on her eyelids, where the skin was thinnest and webbed with blood, and could imagine the pulse there. At the hospital they checked for the pulse at the neck or at the arch of the wrist, but really it was everywhere.

Blood flowed throughout the body in tributaries, a word borrowed from rivers that opened into other rivers. An endless fluid system.

Would you like a danish? Her husband asked.

Okay.

Cherry?

Okay.

He moved the pastry onto her plate and began cutting it into bite-sized pieces.

What’s that?

A cherry danish.

I’m not hungry.

You said you wanted it.

No. She said. I didn’t.

Her husband continued to cut. His hands were trembling. The pieces got smaller and smaller.

She spent most days in the garden now. When she sat down to write, her eyes began to feel dry and alien and she had to fight the urge to scratch them out. Words came slowly and in the wrong order. Outside, she felt herself come back into her body.

She weeded the flowerbeds and threaded tomatoes through their lattices. After hours bent over the hydrangeas, she could feel the ropy pull of the muscles in her shoulders and upper arms, the tingle of her hands as they cramped around the pruning shears.

By night, the ache stretched in every fiber and sinew. She sat with her feet up on the kitchen table and gulped water from an old instant coffee cannister.

When they moved into the house—flush with new wealth from her husband’s work in the city and the advance from a major publishing house for her second novel— they had spent weeks trying to prune the landscape of their backyard into submission.

The house was on a hill and the yard dropped off steeply, so that every journey from the vegetable patch at the bottom to the zinnias that framed the patio at the top was a full-body exercise. When she was particularly exhausted, she took the hill at a crawl.

It felt good to have sweat on her back, dirt on her hands and knees. It felt good to pull 4

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things from the ground so that their fragile white roots were exposed to the sun and just as good to put things back in. She could not keep track of the flower names, but referred to them by color: orange, yellow, sunbeam, tangerine.

Her agent called with an extended deadline for her novel about the body, and then again when she missed that deadline. She did not hear the phone ring at the time.

She was in the garden, wrist-deep in mulch.

Under her fastidious care, the garden wilted. The earth became spongy and black, bubbling underfoot. Stems slumped under their own leafy weight. Everything was too green, oversaturated. Her husband said that she should not water the plants every day, but she could not remember having watered them at all. On Monday, when her husband went to work in the city, she filled the watering can and sloshed it over the garden. On Tuesday she did the same. She did not know how to let things lie.

Seeing the wasted flowerbeds, her husband hid the can behind a stack of plywood in the garage.

She looked for it at first, then, after a day or two, forgot to keep looking.

Without sleep, she could hear the thrum of her body in real time. In her temples and palms, behind her eyes. She could feel her body pulsing. One hundred thousand times a day.

She lay in bed until the afternoon, watching the gauzy light move across the wall. She stood in the shower and scalded her skin, then lathered herself with ointments and thick, fragrant creams. After, she lay in bed some more. One morning brown blood spotted her underwear and the sight of it made her so faint that she spent the rest of the day on the couch with her eyes closed, although she was not asleep.

She had forgotten everything else but she could not forget this. The body remembered. It tired from lugging all that absence around.

The body was, in fact, mostly absence. As tightly packed as it all was, there was still empty space in its cavities and seams. On the most basic level, that of the atom, there was more dead space than there was matter to hold her together. If all this space were to be culled and excised, what was left of the human body could be contained in a particle of dust. All human bodies reduced and pressed together took up no more space than a sugar cube.

Her body, which paraded her person around, which refused sleep and food, which stretched and pulled and exhausted itself after a day’s work, which commanded her to do things like laugh or cry or cry for days on end without repose, which let memory run through it like a sieve, which could not keep anything inside, which bled once a month, which rejected its own offspring, which produced milk without a mouth to feed, which craved the hot press of another’s skin, which recoiled under her husband’s touch, which wiggled and bent and reached and collapsed, which beat sixty 5

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to one hundred times per minute and over one hundred thousand times a day, was mostly empty space.

Easily disappeared, speck-like.

The bras were in the back of her closet, folded in tissue paper. She had miscarried at the end of her first trimester—too early to have bought baby things like bottles or diapers or sneakers in miniature, and too early to have bought elastic-topped pants or tent-like dresses to accommodate a body extended to its limit. The bras, with their bangles and trims and ambitious cup size, were the only objects she had retained of her body’s half-formed past and the half-formed life inside.

In the pre-morning, when the light was still blue and her husband still slept with a pillow over his head, she unboxed the bras, pulling them from their wrappings to examine the fine mesh and the tiny stitches that, when organized, formed the shape of roses.

In front of the bathroom mirror, she slipped the straps of a lavender bra over her shoulders. She turned to the side and leaned forward and twisted around so that she could see herself from the back. She watched her breasts slip around the too-big space.

In front of the mirror, she jumped around and pounded her fist against the wall and sat on the edge of the tub and heaved her shoulders up and down. She turned to the side and projected her stomach as far out as it would go and placed her palms on top of it, gently gently, and held it that way until she had to let go.

Her body was telling her to let go. Everything was heavy, except for her head, which felt like it might levitate away from her neck at any moment. It was exhaustion and it was relief, which, she realized, were the same thing. She unfastened the tiny gold hooks and unslipped the bra, one strap at a time. She nestled the bras back in the box, then enfolded them in the tissue paper until they looked newly arrived from the store, even their tags still in place.

When all of this was over, she crawled into the bed where her husband’s body was beginning to perform the first signs wakefulness, and fell asleep.

She slept all day and into the next. When she awoke, the room was filled with a bright, shifting white so clean and complete that, for a moment, it was as if none of it had ever happened.

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UNTITLED DAHEE KWON

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DIAGNOSTIC SARAH BARLOW-OCHSHORN

Diagnostic Criteria

A. Wherever there is soil, plants grow and produce their kind

a. all plants are interesting

B. When a person makes a choice as to what plants he shall grow in any

given place, he becomes a gardener or a farmer

a. If the conditions are such that he cannot make a choice, he may

adopt the plants that grow there by nature

b. By making the most of them he may still be a gardener or a

farmer in some degree

C. If there is not a foot of land, there are porches or windows.

Note: ​Every family, therefore, may have a garden.

Diagnostic Features The criterion symptoms for major depressive disorder must be present nearly every day. Must be present as you let the soil from your window boxes sit under your nails, present as you let the small shovel fall and your fingers graze the window sill, must be as the cars on Ocean Avenue pass by without seeing into the small apartment.

The diagnosis depends on the 2-year duration, which distinguishes it from episodes of depression that do not last 2 years. 2 years after the first hospital visit, when you graft fragments: back, hips, arm to hold, mind to body. 2 years after pulling together, 2 years after and after and after when you are back in the garden.

Factors predictive of poorer long-term outcome include higher levels of neuroticism (perhaps triggered when your son breaks down his sister’s bike and paints it yellow, then is unable to put it back together again. Perhaps increased when your husband dies.), greater symptom severity, poorer global functioning (​Hayden and Klein 2001​;​ Rhebergen et al. 2009​; ​Wells et al. 1992​), and presence of anxiety disorders or conduct disorder (​Ochshorn, 2002​).1 1 Some language from L.H. Bailey’s ​Manual of gardening: A practical guide to the

making of home grounds and the growing of flowers, fruits, and vegetables for home use​and ​Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition.

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TURN ME TO GOLD HANNA DOBROSZYCKI

When the Mama1 of the Worchesters died, she did not find herself in the Heaven she’d imagined. She had expected to feel the grace—warmth, the epicurean aura of the Lord she’d come to love2—and as her soul now descends the quaint suburban town of Amherst,3 she imagines she will find herself in the palm of the Lord. She doesn’t know what that will be, not exactly, but she envisions something holy, like how Ma and Pa4 spoke about it back in the old day,5 when she was a little girl.6 Though as she flows higher and higher into the sky, she doesn’t feel the golden sunshine7 of God. She floats wistfully,8 like an unattached feather in a wish-washing sky, a breeze entering9 through her chambers. She hears whispers and murmurs,10 though the chorus of voice make her sad11 to never touch Benny or August’s, little Po, or Bennet’s hands again.12

1 A small and tough woman, her neighbors and friends new her as a doting and loving grandmother of 5.

2​ Love is something she had learned to re-understand in the warm and wooden space of her neighborhoods senior community sermons.

3 The playground where little Benny and August would play in the summertime, the little Church with its white sharp cross and crimson window frames, the purple middle school, and the coffee shops of the college, all fading in the distance.

4 Her own parents, may they rest in peace.

5 A time before cable television.

6 Pancakes were her favorite.

7 She doesn’t feel the yellow warmth, on her frail shoulders, the soft kiss of God’s whisper.

8 She doesn’t feel protected the way she thought she would. She feels vulnerable, and exposed.

9 Th ​ e way an air conditioner does on a spring night, like the breeze that flows through Benny’s shirt as he sits on the blue wooden porch of their white house, thinking.

10 And she is trying to stay calm.

11 Makes her feel alone.

12 The small palms, little finger beds. To never tuck them in at night, to never brew them chamomile.

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She realizes it’s the chatter of cable wires.13 But in her moment of greatest sadness,14 the scene changes. She finds herself in a Garden of statues, women15 waning and waxed on marble pedestals.16 Inside, the Garden is situated in a Temple,17 with tall windows and stained glass. And as the sun shines, the room turns to the greens of the stained window.18 She finds herself sitting,19 in a stature she hasn’t been able to compose since youth. Her shoulders are straight20 and her hands are new.21 As she takes in her new environment, something outside the windows catches her eye: the lives of stranger’s, reunited in this heaven. In the meadow beyond the temple, she watches a father and son throw a red ball.22 And as they play, she realizes she has been watching them for hours.23 Sitting there, she begins drifting—changing.24 Her skin begins to morph, vines springing from the bench beneath her. The spread begins slowly.25 They embrace her arms, and creep up her torso.26 Her skin begins to fade, replaced by ancient marble.27

“Honey! Where did you put the cut turkey?” and “Sandy! I’m a minute away if you just let me leave the house.” “Harold, you ​know ​we can’t even afford the rent this month,” reminiscent chatter.

14 As she traverses the open and gray, whispering and arid, big sky.

15 Young, and full, togas slipping at their shoulders 16 Turned to stone.

17 The Temple is white and bronzed and black, with Roman pillars and carved Corinthian columns with such fine and meticulous craft that only The Gods could have constructed such fine marble.

18 Everything green, the leaves of grass, if you look close enough, formulate a billion shades of green at one. Light and ludic, some dark emerald.

19​The bench is pleasantly comfortable, despite being hard.

20 The hunch from old age disappeared.

21 Untouched.

22 The ball bouncing, creating black shadows, the ball dropping, the boy running after it. The way the red ball seems to fall in slow motion.

23 Time has become somewhat of an illusion.

24 She is given to her surrounding.

25 Like this: comfortable, not suffocating. Like the way her mother would dress her as she’d get ready for church Sundays.

26 She does not resist.

27 Her wrinkles, no longer apparent.

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Slowly, her memories28 fade to a transparent gray.29 And at this moment she looks down at her hands,30 the light of the windows, the way it turns everything—the statues, the trees, the bench that she rests on—the way it turns everything to Gold.

28 A flash like a kaleidoscope; bursting shades of green then red and blue.

29 She will no longer remember the taste of mangos, her favorite food, or the way sand feels between her toes. She will forget the way someone else’s hands feel, or the way it feels to read your favorite novel in your favorite outdoor spot, hers, under the cedar. She will forget how her kitchen; the lifetime she has spent in it. She will forget herself. What eyes are, what hair. She will no longer know what alive feels like. She will no longer be alive. She will no longer have the capacity to know, to think, to be.

30 On earth, her grandson Bennett has walked over to the graveyard. It is funny how he’d passed this graveyard a million times. How now, when he passes, he can’t help but start to feel his throat burn. Tears flow, uncontrollably, a sensation he doesn’t want to feel release from but does. He sits there, amongst the stone graves, knees apart, staring. Waiting. He doesn’t know for what. He is trying to recall the voice of his grandmother. Will he ever forget it? He sits, watching the way the sun hits the stones.

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HOME NOW SAMANTHA LOSEE

Instead, I’ll say maybe it’s enough: the watercolor Kermit on the wall, shot glasses filled with gomphrena and statice, orchid and oatmeal box on the top shelf, the soft scratch of thumbing through black dawn pages. Even the blankets and moisturizer mean something different now. I forget to take out the compost most of the time, but nobody minds. I leave the teabag in so long it dries up completely, stare blankly at New Jersey and the dog walkers until the orange dusk joins me on the window seat, tripping over the sill with attempted grace. I can’t remember the last time I tied my red shoelaces. I get by washing my bangs in the sink and playing songs with good basslines so loud I have to skip class. Sometimes, I wonder if the mice are happy, or what’s the best thing they’ve ever discovered. Cue fairytale doom. I’m afraid of the same things they are, except cigarettes. I think about how I’d be a terrible knight. Someone smudges “i love u” onto the other window, and I spend too much money on food. When I’m lucky, the bodega cat sits on my feet. I don’t know how to say his name, his cheek an egg in my palm, so I call him “First Night,” and he doesn’t mind that I have so little vocabulary to choose from. He’ll never know body high, slapping hands on doubled playing cards, river mirror, the urge to sink beneath it.

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SEX EDUCATION SIRI GANNHOLM

You’ll hear: ​ Thank you for drawing me out of my shell occasionally: you bringing your listening lips to the husk: you wandering on dusk feet among tidepools with me in your palm: wondrous you ask ​ What’s a tidepool:​ I tell you L ​ ook up through the circle your hand makes like that yeah:​look can you see stirring on the surface: no look but don’t touch: if she wants to be held she’ll crawl out: yes you can touch that pebble: dip your fingers in only: any deeper than wrist-deep is too deep: you remember what drowning feels like: surely: don’t you know what it means to fall in: aren’t you afraid to be swallowed: what happens when it sets you afloat: no north no west: just minor stars just freckles just tingling to guide you: no what I’m telling you has more to do with the body: and less to do with: no not my body I mean: yes I followed the freckles: what do you mean did I get lost: I’m standing here aren’t I:

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UNTITLED LALITHA MADDURI

Fabric is like human skin in that it molds our outer layer and reveals our contours, all while protecting and encasing us and the essence of what we are. My works focus on the interplay of bedsheets and bodies, with some pieces focusing only on bodies, and others, only on bedsheets, to explore the fragility of the human condition and revelation of identity and emotion.

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THE FERRY PEOPLE FRANZISKA NACE

The whale was oblong and alien, a hulking ridged heap on the shore, and you told me you were going to throw up. Nobody else seemed to have noticed it yet, and it felt perversely important that we were the first people to discover this mistake in the order of nature.

“Maddie, stop,” I said because you had dropped your empty bag of pretzels and were walking towards it then. The whale hadn’t even started smelling or anything yet, and I thought about it drying out in the sand mere hours before we arrived, trapped in its body like a bloated, heavy thing.

It had very human eyes. You walked up to it suddenly, solemn, and put your hand on its flank, a little kid in front of this gray enormousness. Nothing we could ever do would move it. We were so small, and I always remember us small like that, together, shrunk down in the face of the bigness of what we were seeing.

“It’s so beautiful,” you said quietly when we walked away. “I’ve never seen a whale like that up close before.”

Something I never told you then but I’ll tell you now is that you were beautiful too, browning freckles up and down your arms in the middling of the summer, eyelashes long and impossibly dark, the same purple scrunchie as me. We bought them at the drugstore together on the last day of sixth grade.

You did throw up afterwards, in a trash can on the side of the beach. Sticky and too sweet. I threw up with you too, in solidarity. I’m not sure if it was because of the whale, still looming, rotted, in our minds, or the fact that we had licked up all the salt from the bottom of the pretzel bag, hungry with desire to see every granule melt on each other’s tongues. ***

It takes forty minutes by ferry to get from our island to the mainland. I suppose some people must cross every day for work, and we always went once a year for class trips to museums and cultural centers. But other than that, it all feels very far away. It’s easy to tell the difference between us and the ferry people. The ferry people are loud, and excited, and carry large backpacks. They have come to stomp across cerulean shores in their hiking boots, to buy fresh fish from the marketplace. We laugh at their self-assuredness, the paleness of the skin on the undersides of their arms.

I will never become a ferry person, I thought then, and I never have. There is 15

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something painfully sad, and real about them. They go back to routines and lives that make sense. When they get off the boat, their feet plant solidly into grounded earth— secure, certain.

Did you think that too, when we made fun of them? I’m not sure. When we colored together on the floor of your bedroom in elementary school, as I drew fish and squids and deep-sea creatures, you drew ferry people, with violent t-shirts and insect-like sunglasses. Your colored pencils traced the contours of their bodies gently, lovingly.

The last time I ever left the island, on a school trip to the aquarium, I started to forget things. I couldn’t remember the color of my house, or which street we turned on to get to school in the morning, or in which tide pool we found crabs glittering like illicit rubies. Like the island is only truly real when you exist on it.

“Maddie!” I called to you panickedly, and we focused hard on the ferry-ride back, watching the silvery tops of trees emerge from the mist. Making sure it was still there. ***

I’m not sure if you remember this, Maddie, or if you’ve been gone too long, but this is why people came to our island: to build fairy houses. There is a festival every summer where lute music plays tinnily from hooked-up speakers, and piles of wishing stones are erected next to the pond, and kids dart around in fluorescent fairy-wings.

There is a copse of woods in the center of the island where a sign encourages you to gather moss, and bark, and pebbles, and make little homes against trees. To build miniature tables out of sticks, to whittle a mushroom-cap into the front door.

The ferry people come, in the stark starch of their cotton t-shirts, and they build tiny structures with large fumbling hands. They wait for the fairies to come. They take pictures with their shiny cameras. Eventually, they go home.

“I feel bad for them,” you told me once. “It’s like they trek all the way out here for something that’s just fake and manufactured.”

“I guess,” I said. “But there’s something really good about just building that little house, though, don’t you think? And waiting.”

I’m not sure that you felt the same way about it that I did. Once or twice I saw you sneaking through the woods from the corner of my eye—disturbing the winding pebbled paths of each home just slightly, leaving little half eaten fragments of berry in the vestibules for the ferry people to find them. ***

A dream I’ve had as long as I can remember and keep having still: I am at the helm of a ship but it is twisting under me, like dream ships do. I strain at the steering 16

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wheel meaninglessly but it spins under my fingertips as if it isn’t steering anything at all. I am somewhere grey and foggy and in-between. It might be the ferry, but I can’t tell what direction we’re heading in. I look around for you wildly, because I know you must be there, you must, I can hear you breathing somewhere off to the side, your fingers cold on my wrist. I think you might be one of the passengers I am ferrying below deck, glowing like little embers in my belly, but there’s a chance you might be the ship. I can feel the exhalation of the ship underneath me, my feet sink into blubbery softness, and something (Spit? Ocean spray?) flicks out of the blowhole.

The prow cuts through the ocean, and water flares along the sides like wings. ***

We had all said that we would get out eventually, the way people always say these things, that it was only a matter of time. The island had a constraining haze of unreality about it, a place where tourists go, a haven for curiosity shops and kitschy museums and things washed-up to shore.

“I want to live in a real city, Kristen,” you told me once when we were sitting in your kitchen, “With art and culture and like, millions of people existing together all at once.”

I shivered at the thought of so many people, the weight of them crushing me, but I smiled at you. “I can see it,” I said. “I can see you on the fifteenth floor of some deliciously glamorous apartment building—”

“I wonder how it feels to spit from that high up,” you said, “it’s probably so satisfying,” and I laughed and shoved you gently in your rib cage because you were stupid and because I was sure, even then, that you’d escape.

“And you,” you said, “you will be, like, this sexy female pirate roaming the seas and taming these sea monsters and I will visit you every weekend in your adventurous boat-house.”

I smiled, because I wanted to be that for you, but it made me sad to think about how far apart we were in your imagination of our future selves. It struck me, suddenly, that I was your shadow, caught in the window, creased in the drawer. I needed to slather you in soap, sticky and lathered up, to attach myself back on.

It turns out it didn’t matter anyway. It was around that time that I started getting scared of the water. It was only little things at first. The froth of the sea lapping at my feet felt threatening when we walked along the shore. I steered clear of swimming pools. Crossing over the water, anywhere, became out of the question. (Now, thirty years later, I don’t even wash my hands. I keep three bottles of hand sanitizer in my purse. Weekly I rub it all over my body, and strip layers off, stinging like a plucked chicken).

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***

If you know how to look and what to look for, the beach is littered with many things of value. Shells, of course, some filled with the ocean (and some filled with other things). Bottle caps. I found a small silvery fish, once, wriggling in the wet light. When it opened its mouth, I was scared it would start to talk to me. I threw it back in, solid and cold momentarily in my hand,and then in an arc towards the briny deep. I know how these things go, and I’m not looking for any granted wishes.

We used to comb the beach together. One time, you found a half-eaten banana. I waited for you to throw it out, but instead, you pulled out a spool of thread and started stitching up the exoskeleton, neat and almost surgical. ***

I kissed you the first time we were ever drunk, at Nat’s party during a summer I no longer remember. It was suffocating and crowded and impossible to hear anything.

We were older then. We had outgrown our summer bodies.

I followed you to the row of alcohol that sat on a ledge of the basement we were in and you mixed two different dark liquids in my cup. I laughed. A girl we kind of knew was getting more to drink too.

“Hey,” she said, her grin flickering, flashing at us.

“Hey,” you and I said at the same time, or one beat apart, flickering too. (An outsider’s perspective: Hey, said Maddie, and Maddie’s ghost.)

“I like your shirt so much,” she said shyly. You were wearing something pink with ruffles on the shoulders that glistered newly and tightly.

“Thanks,” you said, and grinned widely, and touched my forearm, and we turned away, our cups sloshing.

I stopped suddenly, in the middle of the mass of people, flushed, aware of something creeping up on me. “Shit,” I said. “Shit.” Pulling one of your puffy sleeves.

My pants were tearing along the side seam where my calf strained against them, inching all the way up as I tightened my thigh, frayed threads devouring me.

“It’s okay,” you said, and took my hand, and we weaved through the people.

You pulled me inside a coat closet in the hallway and tugged your sewing kit out of your purse. You licked the thread and pulled it through the eye. (It was a secret then still, but you had told me you wanted to be a designer.) When you are finished, my pant leg is tighter than before, contained.

When the night got hazier and everyone else left to be outside or whatever, we were still sprawled in the closet. I wondered what the other girl was doing out there.

I remembered the whale, summers and summers ago. I thought of something I had 18

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learned since then, that whales beach themselves because they are hurt, or chasing smaller, nimbler creatures, or because the noise of ships and machinery drowns out their echolocation abilities. Your fingers traced inscrutable designs on my wrist, gently moving up my arm.

I turned, because I felt the night has reached this timbre, this quivering sheen, and I leaned over to you half-buried under coats, and kissed you softly on the lips. A pause. I can’t tell if you are surprised. (Your shadow has peeled up from the ground.

She is wearing the same scrunchie as you. Her shadow-tongue has slipped inside your mouth, like she is begging you to sew it down there, where it belongs.)

You laughed in my ear, low and mean. “Be careful Kristen,” you said. “You know this is not what we are.”

No, that’s not what we were. The announcement of your marriage in the newspaper floated to shore a few years ago, just like everything eventually floats over (or at least things that have gone lost or missing, the husks of things with their insides used up.) You looked older, in the waterlogged photograph, happier even. ***

Do you still remember, Maddie, when you opened up your acceptance letter in a chemistry lab during the last year of high school? I was sitting next to you. We were lab partners. The mixture we were supposed to be making frothed with none of the right things inside it. You smiled at me, giddy with the certainty of it.

I pushed the beaker of water we needed across the counter towards you slowly, and then checked and re-checked the rubbery gloves for holes and possible cross-contamination.

“Can you add this in?” I asked you softly.

You nodded. The boat inhaled raucously underneath us.

“Kristen.” You said, and touched my rubbery hand briefly with yours so I looked up. Your eyes were glowing with something, the possibility of foggy futures stretching out infinitely in front of you.

I am making my own mixture, secretly, inside my head. Seaweed, coins from the wishing pool, and the quiet thing that has grown between us like a small, dead animal, furry and with a warm weight to it. All things I am too scared to obtain. I can feel it nestled against my chest, burrowing in, as I look at you. ***

Someone needs to stay behind and keep the ferry running. You all can cross over, live fabulous adventures in far-off lands, drink swirled cappuccinos in bustling 19

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cities, see the works of the masters, deserts and snowfall and cherry blossoms. I will wait here, for you all to slink back eventually when we are old and tired. You will want to see your parents, the mossy woods where you fucked for the first time, bleached rib cages half-buried in the sand.

I refuse to set foot on the ship, but stay on shore and man the ticket booth.

I collect tickets from people who have purchased their spot. I watch the ferry people come in, and I see them go out again, like the tide. ***

Years later, when I start thinking that I see you flickering in the corner of my eye like an imaginary thing, I know. I take off work and I sit on the beach for three days, toes curled in the sand, careful not to touch the wetness. The funeral announcement washes up, ensnared in pieces of coral and the tangle of a shipwrecked pocket watch.

You are an artist, and a fashion designer. You have children.

The next morning, I buy a ticket from myself. The water roils, tumultuously and terrifyingly, below the dock on which I stand. I think there might be something glimmering underneath, but I am too frightened of the salty swirls to look more closely. My stomach is sour and curdling when I step on the ferry itself and it starts moving. To avoid looking at the water, I look into my lap, and then at the ferry person sitting next to me. She is examining the coins in her purse, slowly, methodically. The small, coppery ones clinking against other small, coppery ones, different parcels in the wallet, counting out exactness. When I get to shore, I have to take another bus to the right city. It turns out there are many more cities than I ever thought.

I’m not sure what I expected to see when I walked into the church. Maybe a casket, completely empty save for half-eaten berries and pretzel salt. Instead you are there, very real, and wearing real person clothes. They are one of your designs, I can tell. You have distilled the translucence of tulle wings, of being buried under dozens of coats, of fish scales. The little leaflet that they are handing out talks about your wife, and your dogs, and your freshly-born baby. I see it winking at me across the aisles like a little raisin.

After the ceremony, I walk up to your wife. I can tell which one she is because her hands look solid enough to build things.

“Did you know Maddie?” She asks me, kindly. I have stood there for a beat too long.

“Only kind of,” I tell her truthfully. “We were friends a long time ago.” If I were a real female pirate I could have found you sooner. Followed maps, gnashed my teeth at enemy ships.

Someone gives her the baby and it smiles at me. I must smell like hand 20

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sanitizer and the sea, and I’m definitely not wearing the right clothes.

“Hi,” I say to it. I think that I can see Maddie’s nose in the outline of its pudgy face, or maybe there is something similar about the eyes. ***

I think it is very likely that you have sewn yourself up in a whale skin that you have found, young and long and ripe like the inside of a banana thread-stitched softly around the edges. I imagine you ensconced in the big looseness of this skin far out in the deepness where I will never find you. I can’t reach you but when you wash to shore I will plunge my hand into your whale intestines and pull you out, fresh and mine again.

Maddie, Maddie, let me know when you cross over back to me. I am sitting at the tollbooth, I am Charon and you are my girl with the golden coin in her mouth. We will shrink down as small as ants and go into the woods together. I have a little house for us all picked out.

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EVENINGS AT THE SHEDD AQUARIUM DAVID EHMCKE 2020 POETRY WINNER, SELECTED BY SAFIA ELHILLO The beauty of it, I think, is in its formlessness— how the flesh of the anglerfish wavers, not unwavelike, as it traverses the waters of the deep benthic zone, unharnessed from the greater laws that govern the more worldly forms that light, less effortfully, the brighter waters above— This world is called DEEP OCEAN DWELLERS and is much darker than CARIBBEAN REEF, where, at these less sunny hours, the sea turtles sleep on a small stretch of synthetic sandy beach. As for my angler, all that keeps me from it is one inch of sturdy glass.

In dreams, I’d find a wetsuit or mallet and know that I could touch it, could close my fist around its illicium and pull— But the anglerfish, exile of the ocean, knows no violence like this, not the brilliant shock of a human hand.

All it knows is the light that hangs unfailingly before its eyes, and the glass that keeps me from it. For its many years it will follow its esca, dutiful lamp-light it has carried since birth. No, the beauty of it, I think, is in its piety—

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The anglerfish swims its whole life believing that as long as this light stays lit, no hunger will ever be endless. If the anglerfish had words, would it deny me this? Would it sing?

If it were me, would it not extend an arm and take its esca in its fist, cradling that ordinary light, like a minor God, in its ordinary palm, saying beauty, beauty...

In dark uneven waters, is there no reason to know me?

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CONTROL AXEL IVAN ORTEGA

Through the use of realistic drawing techniques, I’m able to portray human behavior at an exact moment in time. “Control” is a portrait done with graphite on a Crescent Illustration board of my grandfather who suffered from Parkinson’s disease. I used achromatic color schemes to represent reality, and light watercolor shading that gradually fades out from the hand to highlight the loss of control over the cup of coffee.

As a whole, this artwork represents the complex impact that illnesses can have on the performance of daily life activities.

Capturing reality is important! When I draw, my primary goal is to create a composition that brings excitement through its high level of detail. I attempt to create a technically sharp realistic image that is both a representation of a balanced placement of lights and darks, as well as an image that depicts biological behaviors that could not be easily appreciated otherwise.

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4 THE WEST SIDE HANNA DOBROSZYCKI I’m a slut for Architectural Digest the leather plush black couch & rug —featured on Page 1 within the foyer says i have a rug made of lamb choking the mahogany floor is my middle name, you may call me from now on in my glass class bathtub &I music, blushed by the window with the park dark view &

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I filet mignon at night, with my husband, kids & I money down the sin skinned lobby, saying hello to the doorman.

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LATER, REMAKING THE BED SIRI GANNHOLM I did not want not to be quiet but last night you folded me in place of our clothes which clung to the floor in shreds shed petals dewy by the time we awoke I opened my mouth in place of my eyes your body’s length gathered in my arms in pleats cries of quails fluttered down on us rustling and it wasn’t till I placed my mouth on your shoulder that I caught the deer’s eye as it moved through grass

gaze resting

for a moment on our sheets unblinking

how far did it come did it walk to bear witness

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SENIOR PROM FRANZISKA NACE

“I think the prom should be fairy-tale themed, with woodland creatures,” Kelsey says.“Or we could do royalty. Like, princesses and princes.” She is outvoted. It is our senior prom, after all, and we want a theme that reflects our elevated, mature tastes.

The administration won’t allow Vampire Prom, but surely, they will let Old People Prom go through. We can’t remember who suggested it anymore, but we all agree that it is a genius idea, that if they won’t let us wear fangs and pretend to suck each other’s blood, we will rebel against the inherent sexuality of prom itself, bare toothless gums at each other, dance to fifties swing under the pale, nursing-home lights.

“We can have fruit cake,” Ashley, who is in charge of prom committee, says.

“And like, weird, chalky cookies.” Ashley talks a lot at these meetings, but most of the time, we let her. She has great ideas, and a new Marxist Boyfriend who doesn’t believe in equal distribution of time speaking in their conversations.

“I can probably get a live oldies band,” Chloe says. She planned Vampire Prom, but we admire how quickly she has switched tacks.

Poor Kelsey. Don’t worry—she will make a good old person soon enough.

“Do you want some punch?” Kelsey’s Grandma’s friend Cheryl asks her. It takes Kelsey a second to realize it is actually Ashley under all of her old people garb.

The Prom has begun.

“I’m okay,” Kelsey says, and fiddles with her reading glasses. It feels hot with the student body crashing down all around her, moshing their wrinkled bodies, pounding canes and walkers on the gym floor.

“Are we friends?” Ashley says suddenly.

“I think so?” Kelsey says. “We were lab partners?”

“Oh. I was never sure.”

“Well,” Kelsey says. “If we weren’t now, we can be.”

“Okay,” Ashley says, as if unconvinced. She leaves the punch bowl to go talk to Chloe, who barely looks Old at all, and might never look any older, like she could loom in the background of high school proms for decades to come. We aren’t sure if we are friends with Ashley either, but it is too late to ask. High school is over; this is the last, best night of our lives.

Old People Prom will go down in history. A group of girls gets drunk off of bottles of cooking wine and throw up in the bathroom. At least two couples get 28

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married. We think one person has died, but find him much later, splayed out on the back lawn—he has only thrown his hip out. Kelsey finds herself in the musical theater prop closet with a boy who was in her chemistry class. They stack old mattresses one on top of another, floral/ribbed/faded/white/eggshell/dusty. Springs bulging out of the sides like the dents of misshapen bellies. Kelsey thinks she feels something hard and wrinkled and hopeful underneath her and the sighing mattress tummies. It might be a pea, but she is Old and older now, and doesn’t stop to check.

At 10 p.m., Old People Prom comes to an end. The gym clears out, people go home. One or two of us might ask about afterparties, but there aren’t any. It is 10 p.m.

Our joints hurt, and we are tired.

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HER RAYMOND BANKE

“Her� is a combination of two types of printmaking that I thoroughly enjoy: collagraphy and block printing. The texturally dynamic collagraph (a print made by strategically stamping an object over paper, in this case cardboard over newsprint) in sharp contrast with the figure block printed over it creates a balanced yet striking image that retains individuality as a print.

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HAGAR IMANI BENBERRY

“We’ll try it once,” Sarah had told Hagar that morning, as Hagar ironed the tapestry that read “Your offspring will number the stars” on the floor of the den. It was a quote from God. Sarah had had the words embroidered in gold stitching onto a sheet by the tiny Mrs. Anderson, who lived downstairs and had a sky-scraping level of respect for Sarah. Each night, the tapestry blew in the breeze from the open window as it hung over Sarah and Abraham’s four-poster, like a talisman.

God had told Sarah about the descendants, and the requisite pregnancy, almost two years ago now. Hagar had just moved in, and she observed the excited, agitated way Sarah began to conceptualize their existences. She was a founding mother now, after all, and everyone’s perspectives ought to widen a little, encompass a little more of the after beyond their lives.

“Abraham’s very uncomfortable about the whole thing,” Sarah had continued as she pointed out a wrinkle in the top left of the fabric, where Hagar’s arm didn’t quite reach. Hagar had lifted herself onto her knees and clamped the hot machine down on the rumpled corner. “But we haven’t got much else choice.”

Hagar had nodded, offered Sarah a corner of the sheet when she began to cry. While Sarah made a return to the craft store on 77th, Hagar and Abraham would try to conceive.

Sarah had had her eggs destroyed a month before she took over the carseat company. A senior adviser and trusted mentor had recommended the procedure right before Sarah had been published in Forbes’ 30 Under 30, nearly twentyfive years ago. With as fast as HappyRide was growing, no one could imagine the CEO applying for a Release-from-Duty waiver for something as trite as maternity, not even Sarah. The year before Sarah’s promotion, the president had gone into labor in the Oval Office. The post headlines had carried mixed tones of awe and repulsion about it. There was a New York Times piece that asked what it meant to live in a society where leaving work to have children was considered backwards and indolent. “Successful, empowered women simply don’t want to infirm themselves for nine months,” a designer from Los Angeles commented on a Good Morning America segment. “Something about pregnancy is deeply offensive to contemporary feminism,” a conservative from Sarah’s hometown had lamented on CNN. No matter the nay-sayers, it was commonly taken for granted that child-bearing was what the Waiting Women were for, if you were a wife who was desperate.

Sarah had decided she wasn’t.

But the message from God, confirmed by Abraham’s having the same dream as Sarah about a thousand children surrounding the couple in the building lobby, had flipped everything. Hagar listened weekly to Sarah complain about the doctors 31

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she was haggling.

“It’s ridiculous,” Sarah would begin from the sofa, where she watched marathons of the Kardashians and scoffed. “I tell these med grads God himself instructed me to become pregnant, and what do they recite? The shit they print on fertility.gov: Egg incineration is irreversible and permanent.”

“Ridiculous,” Hagar would say, before touching her stomach. The suggestion of her being the one to bear Abraham’s heir disturbed her, but it also anchored her in the precarious inclusion she had in Abraham and Sarah’s scope of concern. Sometimes, they didn’t leave any meat for her at dinner.

When Hagar arrived at nineteen to become one of the Waiting Women, she’d watched the sleekly dressed twenty-somethings, with their swank, affectionate mistresses, stand at the Lennox Avenue bus stop with their host families. The Waiting Women were always beautiful in that very effortful, self-conscious way Hagar suspected had something to do with careful instruction and expense. Still, Hagar had been jealous of that decisive air of belonging that they walked with, the way the older mistresses walked next to them with a protective hand on one shoulder. All the care that followed being one of the young women who sold her womb. When Hagar looked at the picture of her and her sisters, five sets of straight white teeth set in five dark faces, she considered herself fortunate to be picked to come so far, to a place so white and neat.

The first month, she’d paid her rent with the money she made from sweeping up hair in the braiding salon near the boarding house. It was the same salon many Waiting Women were dropped off at to have their hair fixed, usually after their pregnant bellies had deflated and their mistresses were feeling grateful.

One of Hagar’s first evenings there, before God had spoken to Abraham, she cleaned the house alone as snores escaped Sarah’s bedroom. She was picking up the pieces of debris the expensive vacuum never sucked up. As she pulled at bits here and there of the living room carpet, she thought of the things she’d memorized about the house so far.

Abraham was quiet and did not watch the evening news with them at 6pm.

Instead, he went on walks around the neighborhood and planned out the next forty years or so of his retirement. When he came back, he’d tug Sarah into a hug and whisper something like “Morocco” or “scuba lessons.” Sarah would find Hagar’s face, usually bent over the kitchen sink that felt so deep it could swallow her, and roll her eyes, the corner of her mouth twitching.

Hagar’s room, which had once been a walk-in closet with a window, was five feet from Sarah’s dressing table. When she retired to it at ten o’clock each night, she could hear the rustle of Sarah slipping into her pajamas, and the click of the moisturizer pump. Sarah had explained that Hagar should take the closet instead of the narrow bedroom on the opposite end of the hall because it’d be more like they were a family.

“And I like to keep an eye on everyone,” Sarah had mentioned one day with a wink Hagar pretended to understand.

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Hagar tried to recall the sounds she had fallen asleep to before: her parents putting pots away in the kitchen, the swell of locust music, her youngest sister’s breathing on the mattress nearby. It was hard to imagine who they might be with the money she’d been exchanged for. There were so many things it could’ve solved: Duaa’s medicine, the down payment on the newer apartments in town, Lillith’s tuition. Hagar couldn’t bear to respond to the last letter they’d sent and ask them. Her mother had written I hope you’re doing your part to keep the house clean. They thought the Waiting Women program was a kind of adoption. That they were trading Hagar’s womb for her to be protected by faraway people in a land she’d afterwards get the best of: an important job, a house with carpet, her own American children. They didn’t realize that, while Hagar waited for her fertility to be remembered, she had to earn her keep.

Beyond her womb, they’d purchased her hands and muscles.

Though there was a kind of love involved: if Hagar could get pregnant, if she could deliver on God’s promise, Sarah would look at her like she was a miracle. She’d touch Hagar’s body like it was something ethereal. Those were the moments she tried to imagine when Sarah’s allusions to “helping them out” threatened to choke her. ***

Hours after Hagar had finished ironing and rehanging the tapestry, she sat in her bedroom with the door closed. She’d left Sarah and Abraham at the table alone after serving dinner. She’d felt nauseous since Sarah’s visit to her that morning, and the garlicy smell of the stew made her want to vomit. Every time she glanced at the withered but solid bulk of Abraham and imagined herself beneath him, she felt her stomach twist.

A few evenings ago, Hagar had entered the bedroom while Abraham and Sarah finished dinner downstairs. She’d wanted an ibuprofen, and the bottle was missing from the bathroom cabinet. She scanned the room first—the rumpled bed she hadn’t made that morning because Sarah had left it covered in used Kleenex, the cluttered dressing table, the book shelf. She crossed the room and peered over Sarah’s nightstand. Then, ignoring the guilty stiffness of her arm, she grasped the nightstand drawer knob and tugged.

The small white bottle rolled across a calendar covered in hectic red pen marks. Hagar lifted the calendar delicately, and did not stop herself when she read OVULATION printed across the top.

In between the red hieroglyphs and doctors’ names that covered most of the days in February, a tiny black H enclosed in a circle stamped the week starting with the 14th. A trail of oblong eggs filled the space just beneath the symbol. The 14th had been two days ago. “Ideal” Sarah had scrawled. “Talk to Abraham.”

It was one thing to be Sarah’s surrogate, another for the woman to know the intimate details of Hagar’s fertility cycle. It dawned on Hagar that Sarah was counting on her to conceive that very week. She’d been planning it for who knew how long.

Now, as she waited for Sarah to leave her and Abraham alone, Hagar tried to 33

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make her face look triumphant in the little mirror that hung over her chest of drawers.

She lowered her eyelids and set her mouth. Perhaps Abraham would look at her in that same way he looked at Sarah when she salsa’d during the jeopardy theme song. Perhaps he’d be excited and sorry.

Sarah stopped by for a kind of pep talk on her way out of the door for the craft store. She had just finished telling Hagar about Ruth Jensen, who had had a few of her Waiting Woman Joanna’s eggs artificially inseminated and then inserted back inside of her.

“The amount she paid—wow. That’s what happens when it’s all underground.

I have to say I’m glad they outlawed most of those procedures,” Sarah said. “Those instruments are incredibly invasive. And so artificial,” she continued as she spritzed a curtain of her daily perfume at Hagar. Then she made a face, as if she regretted it, and returned to stuffing knitting yarn in the plastic shopping bag. “How much time should I give you all . . . no, don’t answer that. Ha ha.” Then she paused again. “I don’t know why I’m so nervous. This is your job. Women all over the country are doing what they need to do to—”

“Car’s ready, Sarah,” Abraham called from the hall.

“Well, goodbye. Thank you. Loosen up.”

Hagar tried to smile, but Abraham only looked slightly above her as she undressed. The quiet was unsettling. Hagar found herself cold.

He walked over to the bed, reclined, and waited.

And then she was closer than she’d been to anyone in a long time. It did not feel nice, but she bit Abraham’s lip—an impulsive, frantic gesture that she guessed was designed to make him open his eyes.

When it was over, Abraham asked her to take a look at the washing machine.

Was it leaking, or was he just imagining the wet on the soles of his feet when he exited the bathroom? ***

A few months into the pregnancy, Abraham began to assist Hagar with her chores. One night after his walk, he swept the kitchen floor while Hagar put away the sliced vegetables.

Abraham had asked her to call the baby Ishmael, if and whenever she talked to the fetus she never forgot. It was hard for him to hide his excitement around Hagar, around the ever-growing thing in her belly. Constantly, he asked Hagar how she was feeling.

As a result, Sarah had stopped smiling at Hagar and cursed when she was late to bed.

Contrary to what Hagar had hoped, Ishmael did not make Sarah love her better. Instead, Hagar felt essential and despised. In the evenings, the proximity between 34

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the two women was painful, but the second bedroom was slowly being converted into a nursery.

Hagar had listened to Sarah and Abraham whisper about her one night in the dark cove of their bedroom as she exited the hall bathroom after her shower. “She wouldn’t understand how lonely she makes me feel,” Sarah was saying, “And did you see the look on her face when the Pearsons’ asked to touch her belly? So much . . . satisfaction, Abe. Perhaps Ruth knew what she was doing after all. You don’t know the ego on these girls until they’ve lied with your husband . . .”

Hagar entered the room then, went quickly to her closet, and shut the door loudly. ***

Ishmael was born much darker than Sarah had hoped. She allowed Hagar to nurse him, and grimaced when he came inside from the sun, on a July afternoon four years later, holding a monarch butterfly on his deeply brown forefinger.

“He looks less like his father each day,” she commented as she took Ishmael’s hand to eat lunch.

Hagar slept on the floor of Ishmael’s bedroom, and combed his hair in the morning. She’d heard snippets of conversation, that God was going to do something else, that Abraham’s heir could not be half black. Hagar found it nearly impossible to fathom Sarah’s apprehension about Ishmael. He helped Abraham carry wood, made them Fourth of July cards, and did not whine during jeopardy.

The fact that Ishmael was an heir was both thrilling and gut-wrenching. She had a complicated relationship to the reality that her body had made the heir. On the one hand it was a heartening thing to come this far west and start a lineage that would be forever, on the other she felt achingly inconsequential. Ishmael had Abraham’s surname, and the emergency contact on his school forms was always Sarah. Hagar felt more essentially connected to Ishmael than she ever had to anyone else, but still his future was beyond and estranged from her.

Two years later, Sarah gave birth to Isaac. The pregnancy was a miracle; the baby shower was held at the Plaza, with a harpist and waiters. After the legitimate heir’s third birthday, Hagar was officially dismissed. The three of them stood on the sidewalk in front of the apartment building.

“I don’t want Isaac to grow up confused. And Ishmael is quite rough with him—he doesn’t realize that his brother is very important,” Sarah was saying.

Abraham shook the ice in his Coke and took a long gulp.

“Thank you for waiting. But, really, we’d like to move on now,” Sarah continued, “Do things the proper way.”

Hagar left that evening, with Ishmael’s warm hand in her fingers.

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***

On their third night in Central Park, Hagar and Ishmael slept on separate ends of the bank on the Pond and found each other in the morning. They spent the day with their hands entwined when Hagar made the rounds between the community Depositories for leftover barbeque stuffs: half-deflated bags of Lays, wrinkled hot dogs, a sloppy strawberry shortcake. They liked to let go of each other at night, spread out and let the grass absorb their sweat.

That first week, before they looked for shelter in one of the immigrant communities downtown, Hagar liked to watch her son make forts out of dirt, and squeeze his eyes tight when the wind swept it up in swirls around his face.

When Hagar slept, God showed her Ishmael’s children, their princely faces with her nose. She slept easily: Hagar and Ishmael belonged to each other, and it did not hurt.

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I LOSE MY VIRGINITY IN A YOUNG ADULT NOVEL SAMANTHA LOSEE I have nothing to say to him. This is a boy and his hair is quicksand. I shed the prom dress like a last glass cocoon and I sweat pure glitter but he can’t even see it.

No one here still wears corduroy or dreams about their teeth falling out. So far, the only side effects have been extra bike bells, chickadees, and the girl next door taking diligent notes.

She highlights my collarbones, shy moon on our shoulders, And the boy tastes like warm, that’s all. He smells like 11 p.m., Shitty car, the most mundane apocalypse this street has ever seen.

Losing my virginity is bigger than God’s mouth. Not a secret: I don’t actually have genitals. He asks if it’s really my first time.

I’m so good at this. I answer, virginity is something you scoop with a fishing net, something you catch and eat for dinner later, picking flesh apart with claw and metal until you’re full again.

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NIGHT FRUIT ANNA DESAN In Audubon Eastern Landbirds 1946, there is a photograph of a bird I ran over in an empty parking lot.

From God’s mouth drops the commandment grow from nothing.

From His hands drops the apple, which tastes different at night when knowledge is unwanted.

His attention to detail is shown in the nervous system of a bird splayed out something like a garden.

Sorrow, bright as silver dollar, blossoms under the skin.

No one mentions the obvious: that of course bodies will be left, that I will one day marvel at how slow this leaving can be.

The heavy sunlight writhing in idle cars— the light which doesn’t announce itself as light— tastes different over carnage.

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COMPLEX THINGS FRONT JAZMIN MACO

Last summer I was granted the opportunity to conduct a research project based in Kingston, Jamaica—my grandmother’s, my mother’s, and my home. At the end of my research trip, I left Jamaica with 16 rolls of film to be developed, a journal full of unfinished poems, and a new, focused interest on Kingston as both a geographical location and an immersive state of being, on motherhood as a foundational and integrally complex institution, and on the politics and poetics of witness art both as a noun and a verb.

Pool of Hands and Complex Things are two of six visual poems in my poetry collection entitled e-koh-ic. The collection consists of pieces of photos that I pieced apart, cut up, and re-assembled into poems. I began by selecting a core of 12 photos I wanted to work from—out of the 16 rolls of film I developed at the beginning of the semester, essentially creating my word bank. From there, I cut out shapes, objects and people that acted as the words I would use to construct the visual poems. My working definition of a visual poem was and is as follows: a poem which uses visual elements and non-representational language to convey meaning. By heavily engaging the form of the photomontage—a collage made from photographs, or parts of photographs— this medium allowed me to address the concept of inherited affect and community memory. (Continued on next page) 39

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COMPLEX THINGS BACK JAZMIN MACO

(Continued) Pool of Hands and Complex Things were born from absence—the frame of what was left from the excised parts. Both of these poems act as meditations on motherhood—odes to my grandmother, Mom, and my late aunt, Edlette, respectively— in the world of their love and the ruin of their loss. The blurry, the coherent, the reactionary, and the introspective of experience and of memory are synthesized in these poems.

Throughout my time in Kingston and working with these poems, I recognized that I understood myself through my understanding of those around me and vice versa.

For me, bearing witness was and is an absorption of echoes—from history, from the place around you, from the people you take the time to learn. In this sense, the whole of these poems is addressing the necessarily communal nature of e-koh-ic and my larger research project. These words and these images are as much of me as they are of the community that helped me generate them. I stand as a reflection, as an imprint, as an echo of the lives and histories I’ve been privileged enough to witness.

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BUDAPEST-NYUGATI PU TO PRAHA HL.N. SARAH BARLOW-OCHSHORN Fond of laughing and no longer in Budapest I sleep warmly alone, watch tin roofs and muted houses run backwards out the window Sleeping on trains instead of in bed with you, Slovakia muffled against my ears, the drone of the wheels that pull me into a stupor You would like the mint green laced across Czech towns you would whisper it in my ear color tipping as we slip sideways, reaching the border Back in New York you call me from gold-lipped concrete, walk me past the bookshop on Fifth Street, hold me in your pocket beneath blossoms of a spring I am missing You, gold-lipped under cool sheets. You, blossoming like the sweet June air. You, crooning in my head as the train reaches the station.

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SECOND COMING CHARLIE NOXON Quarto received an online submission from Charlie Noxon in early November of 2019, and as an editorial board, with the support of his family, we are choosing to honor his writing in our 2020 Spring Print Edition. We offer our sincerest condolences to his family, friends, and loved ones.

On the 41st day from the second coming of the Son of Man, Theodore Fiske lost his job.

“Excuse me?” Theo’s eyes bulged.

Mr. Tomas gave a somber nod. He leaned forward across his desk with a squeak of his chair.

“You’re a good kid, Ted. There’s plenty out there for you. I’m really letting you off the line here. Go find somewhere else to swim. You’re a beautiful fish, kid.”

“What?” Theo choked.

“A beautiful fish. And I’m letting you off the line to swim for greener pastures.”

“Swim for greener pastures,” Theo repeated softly.

“Yes!” Mr. Tomas gave a toothy smile. “Go find your new home. It’s a vast ocean of companies out there.”

“There’re places hiring right now?” Theo felt unconvinced.

“Oh I’m so glad you understand, Ted my boy,” Mr. Tomas’s grin widened.

“Why, I bet it’s straight to the ice box for you, next company that scoops you up.”

“Ice box?” Theo’s fishing knowledge was just about reaching its limit.

“Yes! The ice box! Once they reel you in, they’ll take one look and say, ‘my, this is a damn fine catch’ and throw you right in the ice box. Right in, I tell you. You’re a damn fine catch, damn fine.”

Theo swallowed. He didn’t love the image of the ice box. He started, “Mr. Tomas, I’m not sure I understand. Are we downsizing? Have I done something wrong?”

Mr. Tomas puffed the air out of his cheeks, smile drooping. “No, no, you’re a good kid. Ted, I hate to tell you, but we’re doing some restructuring. The board,” Mr. Tomas made a swiping gesture with his hands, as if pushing the word away, “the board thinks it’s best to explore some new options for the more day-to-day tasks of operation.”

“What kind of options?” Theo asked.

“Well,” Mr. Tomas seemed to wilt a little. “Ted, kid, we’re bringing in new resources for management.”

“Resources? Mr. Tomas, what’s going on?” Theo’s face flushed.

Mr. Tomas shrunk back into his chair with another loud squeak. “Aw, Ted, this is hard for me too. Have a bit of compassion.”

Mr. Tomas swiveled his chair to look at the corner of the room, where Jesus 42

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Christ was standing patiently.

“Hey, Jesus, can you help me out here?” Mr. Thomas pleaded.

“Of course, Fred. I’m here to make this easier.” Jesus moved towards the desk to rest a large hand on Mr. Tomas’s shoulder, giving it a little squeeze.

“No...” Theo shook his head, the realization coming to him.

Jesus began, fixing his eyes on Theo’s. “Theodore, Fred has asked me to take over managing the middle levels of the company.”

“It was the board, the board,” Mr. Tomas muttered, mostly to himself.

Theo stared. Jesus smiled at him with infinite compassion.

“Is he paying you? Why—Jesus Christ, damnit,” Theo trailed off.

Jesus answered, “Dearest Theodore, I am helping because Fred asked. I have no need for compensation. What parent would not give succor to the child in need?”

Theo was speechless. He stood in a daze and walked to the office’s door. “I’m leaving.”

Mr. Tomas called behind him, “You’ll get a severance, Ted. You’re a beautiful fish, a damn fine catch, kid! Damn fine...”

As Theo shambled to the elevator with his cardboard box, he caught a glimpse of Jesus still inside Mr. Tomas’s office, giving him a back rub and whispering something into his ear. Mr. Tomas nodded along, eyes closed. Theo groaned. He looked down into his box: a few papers, some picture frames, and potted plant that drooped sadly over one of the box’s edges.

“My cup runneth over,” Theo thought bitterly.

With a ding, the elevator doors opened to show Jesus standing inside the car.

Theo took a deep breath. “What do you want?”

Jesus gave a deep hmm, as if he’d heard something profound.

“My child, I sense you’re upset. I would be a balm to your pain,” he offered.

Theo snorted and stepped into the elevator, pressing for the ground floor with his hip.

“Are you still in there with him? Mr. Tomas? Fred?”

Jesus nodded. “Yes, Theodore. I am there for all of my children.”

“How many people are you talking to right now? Is this conversation we’re having number seven-billion-something?” Theo asked.

Jesus moved around Theo to embrace him from behind. Theo flinched. Jesus smelled faintly of honey and fresh milk.

“Dearest Theodore, I am always with every one of my children. Where there is need for me, I shall be. Your soul is as precious to me as anything. Do not think that the aid I give to others makes our bond any less valuable,” Jesus spoke gently into Theo’s ear.

Theo spun out of the hug. The dangling end of his potted plant whipped lightly across Jesus’s face. The Lamb’s hand rose to stroke at his chin.

“Oh, dearest Theodore, I will leave you to your thoughts. But know that my 43

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ear is always open to you. I shall be there for you whenever you have need of me.”

With another ding, the elevator opened into the building lobby. Theo walked out towards the main doors. Jesus remained in the car.

At a coffee shop near his apartment, Theo sat across from his box watching the ice slowly melt in his latte. A TV on the wall was tuned to the news, offering commentary on last week’s ruling in United States v. Nazareth.

Although he did reside in the soul of every man and beast, a peppy reporter summarized, Jesus was likely first born somewhere in the Middle East. That is to say, the reporter continued, outside the sovereign territory of the United States and moreover long before its founding. Jesus had never dealt with any of the appropriate paperwork to naturalize, nor did he show any interest in doing so.

Even so, the majority opinion held, the question of citizenship held little sway over a deity living outside of the normal rhythms of entropy and economy. Jesus Christ, it was decided, was best classified as a new kind of technology, albeit a strange one.

Appearing to any and all who sought him out, there was no monopoly to break up or patents for the court to protect. The messiah could proceed unregulated.

Without any cameras in the courtroom, the illustrator’s impressions of the trial showed Jesus seated behind the defendant’s desk (and the plaintiff ’s, and occupying a few seats among the spectators, and, when Theo looked closely at the TV screen, behind two of the Catholic justices and one of the Jewish ones, scribbling away on a legal pad). All of his faces were sanguine, with a slight smile framed by a dusty brown beard.

Theo looked around the coffee shop. Jesus was sitting at a few of the tables, chatting away with a kid sipping at an orange juice, an older couple with matching wire frame glasses, and a 20-something in a leather jacket who looked suspiciously like a young Elvis Presley.

“Who’s to say he isn’t Elvis?” Theo thought to himself. “Stranger things have happened. Are happening.”

Theo smiled as the ice cubes in his drink clinked into a new arrangement.

“You were what?!”

Theo stared penitently at the floor.

“Mr. Tomas said I was getting a severance,” he mumbled. “I’m sure it’ll tide us over until—I don’t know.”

“Until what, Teddy? Until what? This was supposed to be it, you said! The corporate ladder and fuck all!” Marie sputtered, gesturing wildly with her arms. “I distinctly remember you saying that this was a rung on the corporate ladder, that there was a lot of space for advancement. I distinctly remember you saying that. My memory is very good for these things.”

Theo raised his head up to look at his fiancée. The bangles on her wrist clinked 44

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as she lowered her arms. Theo ran his hand through his hair, determined not to stumble.

“Marie, baby, it’s going to be okay. I’ll find another job. Mr. Tomas said I was a real catch. I’m sure he’ll write me a reference. It’s a vast ocean of companies. Someone’s gonna hire me.”

“What’s with this fucking ocean shit?” Marie’s eyes bored into Theo. “Who’s gonna hire you, Teddy? Who? Ach, we’re going to have to postpone the ceremony unless you get your shit together.” Marie shook her head.

“We don’t even have a date yet. I’m sure it’ll work out—”

“Is all well out there?” A voice called from within the apartment.

“Who’s that?” Theo stretched to look behind Marie with a knot of worry.

“Who’s in our home, Marie?”

“Oh, it’s Jesus,” Marie waved away the question, bangles jingling. “He’s helping me sort through some old clothes. Don’t change the subject!”

“I thought you didn’t believe in talking to Jesus,” Theo pressed. “You said it was a betrayal of your beliefs.”

Marie had attended a weekend meditation retreat just after they’d gotten engaged, and had since professed a deep faith in Zen Buddhism. Though, to Theo’s eyes, that faith had really only manifested in a large golden Buddha that appeared on the end table next to their door. He couldn’t fit his keys on that tabletop anymore.

Theo’s own religion was something of an open question. His parents had been raised Quaker, but had leaned so far into mushier aspects of the tradition that they’d both ended up agnostics. Theo himself had been raised on a steady diet of old National Geographics and sci-fi. Obi-Wan was the closest he’d had to a spiritual guide.

“Oh, who cares what I said,” Marie was undeterred. “He offered to help! He loves it—such an eye for fashion.” Marie cast an appraising eye over Theo’s rumpled khakis. She scrunched up her face.

“I sense some anger,” Jesus stepped out of the living room and stood next to Marie. “Is something the matter?” He held an old bra loosely in his left hand.

“Oh, I’m not keeping that one,” Marie turned to Jesus. “The wire’s all poke-y.”

Jesus lifted the bra closer to his face for inspection. He nodded approvingly, “Very well, my child.”

“Do you know what happened to Teddy today, Jesse?” Marie’s voice rose.

“Jesse?” Theo’s jaw felt like it was coming loose.

Jesus’s face turned solemn. “Yes, Marie, I have spoken to Theodore on these matters, and—”

“He was fired!” Marie burst out.

“I was let go. There’s a difference,” Theo demurred.

“Why were you fired, Teddy?” Marie directed her attention back at Theo.

“You’re avoiding the topic.”

“Ask ‘Jesse.’”

“You’re always passing the responsibility off onto someone else, Teddy! What 45

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happens when there’s no one left, huh? What then?”

“I will always be there, Theodore,” Jesus interjected. “Always.”

Marie turned back to Jesus. “So what happened, Jesse? You might as well tell me, since I’m not going to get it out of this one.” She jerked her head at Theo.

Jesus clasped his hands together, bra pressed between them. “I assumed Theodore’s responsibilities at his former firm,” he said. “Frederick Tomas requested that I shoulder such burdens.”

Theo flinched at cloud of anger that had begun seeping out of Marie. He began edging towards the bedroom, leaving his cardboard box by the door.

“You did what?!” Marie shouted at Jesus. “Jesse, how could you? We needed him to have this job! Jesus Christ, Jesse, what’ll we do now? Who’s Frederick? How could you?”

Theo successfully escaped into the bedroom, still hearing the muffled call and response from the foyer through the closed door. He fell face-down onto the unmade bed and let out along sigh into the sheets. Even as the sound was coming out of him, Theo could feel his eyelids drooping. He slipped into blissful sleep.

“Good morning to all of my dear children. It is seven o’clock on Sunday, June 7th. The high today will be seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit, with a low of sixty-three.

Ready thyself for mild traffic coming into the city. We shall begin this glorious morning with Electric Light Orchestra’s Mr. Blue Sky. I am the Word of the Beginning, and I will be back with a guest after this.”

Theo groaned and slapped the snooze on the clock radio by his bed. “Marie?”

Hearing no answer, Theo looked up from his pillow with bleary eyes. The other side of the bed was empty and the blanket was tangled in a mess on the floor.

Theo gathered up the sheets and settled back into his pillow. She must’ve gotten up to make breakfast. How nice. Theo fell back to sleep.

“—with rising unemployment, I think it’s really time to put the guaranteed income back onto the table. The growing consensus of economists, myself included, agree that this represents the only viable solution in a post-return America.”

“Thank you, Jessica. I am so glad you are able to join me today despite your daughter’s flu. It is trying for any parent to see her child suffer, and your resilience truly makes me proud.”

“Jesus, that’s very kind, but is it really relevant to share—”

“I apologize, Jessica. I strive to be conscious of my children’s burdens. Please, continue.”

“No, of course, and thank you for looking after her while I’m here. As I was saying, the case has never been stronger to implement a program of increased—”

Theo slapped the radio again. The room was just as before. Theo sniffed the air. Nothing. No music from the kitchen either.

“Huh,” Theo thought. “She’s probably on a run. It’s always some new exercise.

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We still have a hundred dollars on credit at that Pilates studio. I wonder if we could get a refund...”

Theo swiveled his feet out from under the covers to rest on the floor. It really was quiet.

He needed a coffee. Should he make a pot? No, no. There was always too much left over, and Marie had been on his ass not to waste. Just a cup. Maybe a chocolate croissant? Oh, that sounded nice. He might as well go to a coffee shop. There hadn’t been much else for Theo to do in the week since Tomas had let him go.

Theo shrugged on a pair of pants and made his way to the door. He grasped for a few moments at the Buddha’s foot looking for his keys before remembering they were in the drawer underneath. With a quick glance at the mirror (he really did need a haircut), Theo stumbled into the hallway.

“Jesus?”

“Yes, dearest Theodore?”

“Where’s the barista?”

“Oh, my son, I can prepare your beverage. Catherine Khan has asked me to attend to this register for the foreseeable future.”

“Catherine? Agh, never mind. Can I get a large coffee and a croissant?

Chocolate?”

“Yes, Theodore. That totals seven dollars.”

Theo winced. His severance had come in a few days after the meeting with Mr. Tomas. It was enough to make it through a month, maybe two at most. It’d be a stretch. Theo thought he might have to cut out coffee shops—hipster ones at least. And restaurants in general. Marie loved it when he cooked. It’s not like he had anything else to do.

Theo fished in his wallet for the cash. Jesus accepted the bills with a deep nod.

“Hey, is that not an issue for you? Handling money and shit?” Theo asked.

Jesus smiled tenderly. “Oh, dearest Theodore, you have such an inquisitive mind. I am very proud of the man you’re becoming.”

Jesus closed the register and gripped Theo’s hands with his own.

“Theodore, this was an issue I considered, but I concluded that the service I might render to my children outweighed any qualms about participating in commerce.

Your coffee will be ready in a moment at the end of the counter.”

Theo yanked himself away from the register. “Please don’t touch me without asking. It’s kinda creepy.”

Jesus gave a caring look. “Theodore, I endeavor only to better your life.”

Theo mumbled something under his breath and walked to get his breakfast.

The TV on the wall showed a panel discussing the appointment of Jesus as the new pope. Three of the five panelists were Jesus Christ himself.

When Theo pushed his way back into his apartment, it was still quiet.

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“Marie?” he called out. “Honey, are you home?”

Nothing. Theo decided he’d sleep a bit longer before going out again. He’d stop and pick up groceries. Maybe fish tonight?

Theo laughed to himself. “I’ll make a beautiful fish.”

He dropped his keys into Buddha’s lap and walked back to the bedroom.

The bed was just as he’d left it. The sheets splayed out in an ever-rumpled swirl across the mattress. Theo didn’t remember the last time he’d made the bed. Marie usually did laundry, and the bed remained made for just about as long as it took to crawl into it that night. Theo actually preferred the unmade bed. It made the space feel lived-in—occupied—whereas a made bed, especially with Marie’s singing bowls and seaside paintings, had made the whole room feel like it could be taken from a catalogue snapshot. Theo remembered when she’d brought home that ghastly sailboat picture.

Marie had said that she loved how “fucking tranquil that boat looks” and hung it up on the wall right above their headboard.

Where were the singing bowls? Their space on top of the dresser was empty, thin circles of dust marking where they’d sat. Marie never surrendered space in their apartment. The gold Buddha had only been one in a long chain of tchotchkes that seemed to sprout up on every exposed surface in the apartment since she’d moved in.

Like mushrooms. Marie-shrooms. Theo chuckled. She’d get a kick out of that.

Theo noticed a note on her side of the bed, tucked half-under her pillow. He reached for it.

Teddy,

I’m sorry that things have come to this. I need to remove myself from our

situation to improve the energies in my life. You’ve been dampening my spirit,

and I must let myself free. I’m taking only the essentials from the apartment.

Anything more would remind me too much of this closing chapter. I’ve been

talking with Jesse about this for the last few days, and he knows why I’ve made

this decision. I told him to answer any questions you have. I just can’t see you

right now.

Goodbye Teddy, Marie

Theo reread the note twice more, scanning for something, something, between the lines. He felt his eyes starting to dampen.

Theo closed his eyes and let out a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding.

He felt shrunk, like all of a sudden the room had begun to loom around him. Every object he could see felt inseparable from the time that had unfolded around it. The dresser, radio, the horrible sailboat—they all seemed to push in at him with reminders of Marie’s presence.

“Jesus Christ,” Theo whispered.

“Yes?” came the helpful response.

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Theo whirled to see Jesus standing behind him.

“No, no, damnit, not you. The cuss, the swear word. I’m taking your damn name in vain,” Theo choked.

Jesus moved to embrace Theo in a hug. “Oh, dearest Theodore, even if you did not intend to call me, I feel your pain as if it were my own. I am here to help you through this moment.”

Theo pushed Jesus away, swallowing a sob. “Why didn’t you tell me? You saw me ten minutes ago at the coffee shop. Why? You just let me sit with that? You acted like everything was normal. And it isn’t normal, damnit! Is that fun for you, the dramatic irony? Are you getting off on this?”

Jesus’s face sank. He looked genuinely hurt. “Theodore, I am deeply sorry for the end of your relationship. It is most difficult when my children quarrel with one another. Marie asked me not to speak with you on this matter until you read her letter.

I sought to respect her wishes, as I endeavor to respect yours.”

“But it says you talked to her! You’ve known about this for—god damnit, how long have you two been planning this? How could you keep me in the dark? How is that respecting my wishes?” Theo gasped.

“My child, I was simply an open ear to dear Marie. This decision was her own. I would not presume to intercede in the affairs between you two. She asked my confidence, and I could not withhold it. I am available to you in all of the same capacities. Theodore, I am here for you. Let me aid you.”

“No!” Theo shrieked. “No, fuck, we loved each other! I love her! Present tense, now. We had problems, maybe, but who doesn’t? I love her! We’d work through it. I- I could get better. How could you help her go? Why would she leave, why wouldn’t she talk to me first?”

Theo’s eyes focused on Jesus. “You know how to get in touch with her. I need a number, an address—something.”

Jesus opened his mouth to respond, but Theo continued, “No, I don’t even need that. Just poof in front of her, tell her that we need to talk. Please. Please...”

Theo crumpled onto the bed, head in his hands. He took several shuddering breaths. Jesus sat beside him. Christ’s shoulders slumped.

“Dearest Theodore, she does not wish to speak with you. Please, I cannot force any of my children to act against their own will,” Jesus begged. “Allow this to pass over you as a storm over a mountain. No matter how ferocious the winds, you shall remain.

You are strong.”

“Could you just,” Theo pleaded. “Could you just ask her?”

“I have done this, my sweet Theodore,” Jesus replied. “She has not agreed to speak. Even as I explained your grief, she remained steadfast. Ah, my child Marie is strong-willed.”

Theo looked up. “Just now, you mean? As we were sitting here?”

Jesus nodded. “Yes, my child. But do not fret, my undivided attention is with you.”

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need—I need to think. Just go away. I can’t talk right now.”

“Even if you cannot see me, I am always there, Theodore. I am your eternal guardian and watcher. I am with you.”

When Theo looked up again, he was alone in the bedroom.

Theo made fish.

A nice slow-baked salmon with some herbs. Some rice on the side. Theo was chopping carrots to simmer with some butter and spices while the fish finished up. He’d put on some Elliott Smith in the kitchen—the real depressing, mortality-pondering stuff. Theo could barely hear the thump of the knife against the cutting board over the music.

The day had passed in a daze. Theo kept himself moving, occupied with groceries, TV, cooking—anything to keep his mind off Marie. He’d spent a few hours sifting through job boards and emailing old bosses. Nothing. The Jesus economy was tight. Even the shitty retail jobs were all taken. Nobody needed a drudge right now. Not even Marie.

No. Stop it. Don’t wallow. Theo scraped a chopped carrot into a bowl and took out another to cut. He closed his eyes for a few moments to sway to the music.

“Dearest Theodore?” Theo heard the voice right behind his ear.

Theo dropped the knife clanging onto the counter. “Jesus, fuck, you scared me.”

Jesus cast a contrite look at Theo. He half-shouted to be heard over the speaker.

“Dearest Theodore, your neighbors above, the darling Mr. and Mr. Bethany and their daughter Rowan, have requested that you lower the volume of your audio system. They are enjoying a movie night, and feel somewhat disturbed by the external sound.”

Theo scowled. “They can turn up their own TV. I’m busy. I like my music.”

Theo resumed chopping. Jesus nodded. He walked to the speaker on top of the refrigerator and slowly turned a dial to lower the music.

Theo felt some burbling and unintelligible knot rise inside of him. He looked over at Jesus: “Why did you do that?”

“Mr. and Mr. Bethany and their daughter Rowan are enjoying a movie night above you, and they asked me to—”

“No, I got that,” Theo turned away from the counter and confronted Jesus in a swift motion. “Why did you turn down the volume? I said I wasn’t going to lower it.”

“My dearest Theodore, I simply am here to help you—”

“No fucking way! I said I wasn’t going to lower it. Turn it back up,” Theo shouted.

“My child, you said you were busy with the cooking, I was merely giving—”

“NO! You’ll listen to them, you’ll listen to Marie, you’ll listen to fucking Mr. Tomas and what’s-her-face at the coffee shop and the radio station and who knows who else when they want to fire somebody, but you won’t listen to me?”

“Theodore, I—” 50

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“Why, Jesus? Why? We were doing fine down here before you showed up?

There was killing and raping and atrocities fucking galore, but we were doing it ourselves. We were figuring it out! What the fuck are you doing here?”

“Dearest, I could not stand to see the suffering of all of those on Earth, and I—”

“How could you help them hurt me? How could you push aside all the people who were making it work in the world? How could you? How...” Theo puttered off.

Jesus stepped closer to Theo and rested his hands on his shoulders. He pressed his forehead against Theo’s. “I am only helping. The wishes of my children are my own.

I will act in service of all of you.”

“I SAID DON’T TOUCH ME,” Theo roared. He shoved Jesus’s face away with his right hand. He still held the knife.

With wide eyes, Jesus stumbled backwards. Blood spurted from his neck, where a ragged gash traced the line from Adam’s apple to collarbone. Theo felt the red splatter across his face. He tasted salt on his tongue.

Jesus fell backwards in a heap. Theo collapsed onto the floor. Theo yelled, a deep primal thing that left his throat ragged and his teeth tingling. He sobbed.

“Oh, my dearest Theodore. I am here. I am with you. I forgive you. I forgive you. I am here...”

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