Quick Brown Fox 2010

quick brown fox

spring 2011

welcome Quick Brown Fox is a new independent publisher of creative work by the writers and artists in the five college area. We strive to bring the isolated creative communities of the different colleges into dialogue with one another. Our goal is to highlight the work of students by making this publication accessible to the five college community.

This is the first issue of Quick Brown Fox. We received over 60 submissions for our inaugural issue, “Those Meddling Kids,� and the quality of the work was outstanding. We extend special congratulations to the creators of the 16 pieces featured in this issue. These pieces represent what we see as the best work of our peers. We hope you enjoy reading these as much as we have, and urge you to contribute in the future.

the TABLE of CONTENTS The Gardener to Peter SEAN NOLAND Equinox ‘99 HOLLY MITCHELL Aleksander AMANDA ROBINSON Kids AUTHOR Divine Embouchure MADELINE ZEHNDER Noah CARA GIAIMO Four Dead Women RHIAN SASSEEN

Jess NIKOLE ANDERSON

Untitled CLAIRE HARPER

Women in Fur Hats / Women in No Hats CLARE COOKE

The White Sky Hangs ELISE LASKO

Coffee and Lions CHEN CHEN Lying Back We Lied JULIA TEELE Fallow ALLISON BIRD PILATSKY Brother IZABEL NEILSEN The Fallen Mountebank JULIE HOWD Uncle KELSEY SWENSEN We Are Real MATT COSBY

The Gardener to Peter Sean Noland

“Who will take up the shears While the old guard dreams?

Who will prune the hedge at Gethsemane When the hours have gone?”

SEAN NOLAN is an English major and member of the Class of 2011 at the University of Massachusetts. He is the bassist and songwriter for alt-country band ‘The Futurenows.’

Equinox ’99 Holly Mitchell We walked to the Dairy Queen, ordered vanilla cones, sculpted them all back home, where the heavy orange curtains still hung from floor to ceiling. In the summer, those curtains made the den feel like a fort, like a secret drowned in orange juice, peanut butter, graham crackers. Pulp-crumb-syrup-stuck.

I loved you then.

We would draw our fingers across each other’s spines. We would fall asleep with landscapes centerfold on our spines.

We watched Babe in the den. Our feet clapped the cork floor the puppy had yet to teethe through.

Call it an orange rind. The windows big cuts of citrine. Sweet sting drug out to the curb with the curtains.

A fleck of crayon left in the holes you found in my body. The leaf ’s stem gone from the holes I found in yours.

HOLLY MITCHELL is a Mount Holyoke student. Her writing can also be found at The New Gay. Once, Amanda Hess quoted her.

Aleksander

Amanda Robinson

Aleksander is from the Ukraine and is constantly telling the rest of Mrs. Grant’s fourth grade class that one day he will be a famous classical composer, like Mozart. I have never heard Aleksander’s music, but I hear his mother affirm his genius to my mother one afternoon, squared off over their cups of coffee. He makes my hands shake until I can’t hold a pencil. He looks like a martyr in moments of concentration, but when he opens that sorrowing mouth it is to taunt me. He has the habit of repeating everything I say two octaves higher, vowels dragged through the air as though it were mud. The day I scream into his face midway through a lesson on the Louisiana Purchase, he is the least shocked of all of us. In the following embarrassed silence, Mrs. Grant suggests that he would do well to be nicer to girls. His smirk is like iodine, but the rest of the year, at least, passes in silence.

I picture him, a math major at a respectable university in the city, the grave overseer of his grandfather’s pocket-watch. He holds his spine very straight when he walks, eats only a little, is sure to let his friends see that he drinks his coffee black. Women admire the carefree tangles of Ukrainian on the phone with his sister and the still way he watches gulls wheel over Lake Michigan. But Emma Czerniak will remember him for the one thing he said when whatever it was between them finally went sour beyond repair. The slur itself was unimportant, but the way he let it hang in a lull, tenuto, turned her own complaints to salt on her tongue. It circles her for weeks, this thing, and one night she dreams of priests with sorrowing mouths.

AMANDA ROBINSON is a second-year student at UMass Amherst, where she studies English, French and Chinese.

STEPHANIE GIBBS is a freshman English major at UMass Amherst.

Divine Embouchure Madeline Zehnder

“It’s God’s instrument, boy!” he shouted, arms above his head as if to pull down the Big Man himself to lend his argument some weight.

It’s not like he needed the help: a barrel-chested man weighing in at well over four helpings of mashed potatoes, he could fill his lungs until they were ready to pop and his face turned a bright watermelon; only then would he bring his lips to the mouthpiece, and let wail a stream of pure gold, as rich and sonorous and terribly alive as anything you can imagine Gabriel up there playing with his five-piece band.

“So move that air, boy!” he cried, pulling at the collar of his shirt, driving his hands down to the floor as if pushing the invisible column that roared to life through his student’s slide in a tawny cord of muscular sound – jolting the boy from his chair and surprising even the big man, who paused and exhaled up towards the heavens; “Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about.”

MADELINE ZEHNDER is a sophomore at Smith College, where she studies Musicology and English.

Noah

Cara Giaimo

Noah built an ark. It was sturdy wood. Well, one piece was. The rest was airplane balsa. Red writing still on it. “For best loop-the-loops, hold here.” Noah said it was decoration.

He stole the neighbors’ chickens. Two of each color. Four cocks, four hens. And eight babies (he couldn’t leave the babies). And all the eggs. Explaining, “eggs turn into babies.” The neighbors were riled. They used the full moon. Followed a trail of feathers. Found sleepy Noah, marching chickens. Two by two. Ramp made of a busted drainpipe. The chickens kept falling off. “What is that thing, boy? That ain’t a coop. And these ain’t your birds.” They’d brought chicken sacks. The birds seemed relieved. The Johnsons left two eggs. Only ‘cause Noah cried.

Next, two barn cats. One black, one brown. They both seemed like boys. I voiced my concern. “You ain’t Noah,” Noah said. His arms were shredded. “You’re Isaac. Go off and get killed.” He touched the biggest scratch. I didn’t correct him. “Or find me acoupla snakes.”

I did. Garters. We mud-slicked the ramp. They slid right up. Then I netted three songbirds. We let go the ugliest. Noah kept expanding the ark. Adding rotting timber nobody’d miss. I thought of school reopening. Of Ms. Bosman’s mice. The cage was dirty, heavy. It barely cleared the window. We carried it home together. Darkness woke the rats. Familiar nighttime scuttling between us. For once exactly placeable.

The ark was getting full. Noah grew worried. We took shifts. I brought two river fish. He started jarring bugs. I wondered about me. Noah noticed. Looked backwards at me. He wanted to be plain. I was helpful, deserved frankness. There might not be room. He may need a girl. He was considering his options. I yelled I’d be pilot. And I’d take his sister. He bloodied my mouth. It was sudden and stung. Tasted wretched. I ran home, mouth dripping.

I skipped a day. The next, Noah was waiting. The fish had died. The cats ate the birds. The snakes ate the eggs. The ark was all mouths. Fanged or dead and gaping. The entrance was a mouth. “Damn this,” Noah said.

His eyes shone. Not from crying. Eggshell on the snakes’ backs. “Let’s go to the zoo.”

We snuck in. Pocket money long gone. Not many pairs there. One giraffe, tall and lonely. One matted lion. Game farm rescues, both. Two dozen rabbits, all girls.

The monkey cage was empty. Closed for repairs. Noah stood on a bench. “Where do they put them?” He swayed back and forth. Looking. “Where’s a safe place?” I had no answer. I wondered similar things. But different. Based on my own name. What I’d die to save. Or who. Why the ark needed pairs. If both could make it. If each sank the other. My mouth was still tender. I stood on the bench, too. It started to rain.

CARA GIAIMO studies Biology at Amherst College, so she recognizes that a Noah’s Ark-style flood rescue would lead to genetic bottlenecks and thus fail to stave off mass extinction. But she also studies English, so she still likes the idea.

Four Dead Women Rhian Sasseen

In childhood, they had constructed a kingdom, albeit one in which the sky had already begun to crumple.

As always, Emma is the first to return, and as she is enveloped into her father’s hug all the old worries come back: all the same tremors, the same anxieties of the body. The house itself has barely changed, except for the soft, almost imperceptible groan of her mother’s oxygen machine spreading slow throughout the halls.

In her bedroom, her mother’s crooked body lies attached to a dozen spidery tubes, a plastic web that Emma slips gingerly through as she hugs her mother hello. Blood has bloomed bright in her mother’s right eye, unfurling like a sea anemone; her father tries to warn her, but the burst vessel does not scare her. Rather, Emma is reminded of another moment of bloodshed, when clots as briny-dark as ocean water spattered down her thighs and into the green of the toilet bowl. The comparison gives her a moment of satisfaction; when she leans to kiss her, she thinks again of all the things her mother could have told her, but didn’t.

This is why she agreed to come. “Don’t tell your mother she’s dying,” her father begged her over the phone, his voice tinny in her ear, like a shell’s whisper.

“Isn’t it obvious? I mean, how high of a chance does one have of surviving two strokes?” Emma asked idly, not really caring what the answer was, and penciled in the flight information for the coming week.

Rebecca arrives in the evening, after dinner has been picked at and after Emma has begun to attack the dishes their father has neglected. Pointy elbows, she thinks as she hugs her younger sister, and sits at the counter to watch this display of domesticity.

She has heard it said that the smell of chicken fills the air in the moments just before a stroke, but their father said that their mother had been eating a Danish, and Rebecca can see the plate of them shoved off to the side.

Days old, their sugar has congealed, slick as snot, and completely unappetizing. There is almost nothing to eat in the house.

“How long does she have?”

“Oh, the doctors say it’s soon,” Emma says as she dries the forks. “At this point, she’s so filled with painkillers she probably can’t even recognize us. Dad says the nurse told him that she can hear and understand us, though.”

“And Olivia?”

“She’ll be here tomorrow.”

Rebecca watches her sister move throughout the kitchen. When they were little girls, the island and the house itself seemed to hold limitless possibilities, and they were the three sisters, the kind found in every sort of myth and fairy tale. It is cliché to swath one’s childhood in this kind of make-believe, but there is something irresistible in the myth making, some kind of youthful opiate she wants to swallow whole again.

Impossible. Once, yes, she was a girl, as opposed to a concept or idea – but how much time has passed, how many rules has she has forgotten, and how much has she transformed since sixteen, when Olivia left and the neighbor boy took her, his fingers sloughing off all the innocence from her skin.

“Olivia!” Emma shouts when the door swings open, and Rebecca hasn’t seen her this animated for a long time. Their older sister’s voice rings out as she comes towards the kitchen, already trailing loud words, and when she enters the three are together for the first time in years.

Rebecca is reminded again of before – inescapable, in this house – and she is again transformed into the line between Emma and Olivia, the youngest and the oldest, the two extremes. Where is that one picture, the day they took the ferry to the mainland? – but Olivia has already found it, in the study, and the three peer over it, eager to glimpse themselves in that time just before adolescence, when their bodies had only begun to wriggle and grow like tadpoles.

“Oh, God, look at me,” Olivia says, pointing to the center, where she looks as pretty and angry as always

. Emma, too, is as sly and scrawny as Rebecca remembers; she herself stares directly at the camera like she always did, directly at the parent taking the picture. She remembers this day, when she realized how useless the arguing was, the day she realized that their words were only carrion to be picked over by their mother.

“Why did you leave?” Emma asks quietly.

Olivia tries to laugh. “Silly, I had to go to college.” She puts the picture down. They have all remembered what is going on upstairs.

When it happens, there is no surprise. The week itself has been enough preparation, and it begins when their father has ducked out for a moment only, and the three sisters lounge sleepily around their parents’ bedroom.

There is no need for hospitals, and so time has taken on a strange and suspended quality; it now feels incongruous for someone to die in the comforts of their own bed.

They are learning that they are not immortal. They are repeating this to themselves like schoolboy Latin, reminding them that eventually hearts will always stop, skins will always wrinkle, and breaths will always cease. They are remembering that they will die.

Their father returns and holds their mother’s hand. It is happening, it is happening. Olivia stands near their parents, a hand upon their father’s shoulder. Emma is standing, too, but farther from the bed, a look of morbid hope painted plain across her face. Rebecca sits on the ottoman, hands folded, watching the three other women.

When it happens, their father’s shoulders sag. Rebecca does not feel any kind of wind or soul passing, like some of the books on grieving said she would. The sisters look at each other, and in this moment there is the question, and the silent consensus is that they should be happy. Rebecca thinks again to all the stories, all the legends; now the wicked mother is dead and they should be rejoicing.

She sits up with a weird revelation and says, “We’ve got the wrong myth.”

RHIAN SASSEEN is a junior English major at Smith College who has won numerous awards for her writing, ranging from local prizes in her Washington hometown to the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts.

CLAIRE HARPER studies at Smith College.

Jess

Nikki Anderson I. Tip-toeing into father’s dresser – blue suit coat, starched white button down too crisp for an eleven year old to loosen, the little girl reflected in the mirror sensed the presence of a little boy.

She searched through books and beds to find an answer. Preferring football to dolls, she hid herself in baggy blue jeans, frayed at the edges of her identity.

Where could she find those like her? Or him?

Confusion struck her hard as her father’s slap, so she ran fast to a blank slate, where every face is neutral, no turning back as the teenager sought safety in the anonymity of New York City.

She had a choice to make.

II. She hung her khaki chinos on the brass towel rack as sun bled red on the porcelain walls, she longed to end the shame that poured out of her every month, drained the man she desired to be. The needle gleaming hormones tinted yellow, veins peered out like little girls afraid of the dark, a shot of whiskey to her heart, melted her outsides, a deep breath as the liquor washed the sense of calmness she needed to stab her thigh every two weeks the man grew stronger. but mere passing glances provided acceptance. two small mountains, deflated.

III. Black stubble roughed her face, now a chiseled square jaw, slimmed, curvy hips cut off with each shot, juice-stimulated muscle formed with each pump of iron. Voice dove deeper, barely recognizable as calluses grew over her rugged hands like weeds, a rough exterior presented itself, the five o’clock shadow was a bush to hide behind in the men’s room. anxiety brewed but mere passing glances provided acceptance.

IV. The last of her clung to his chest, two small mountains, deflated by testosterone, inescapable female identity: scalpels scraped tissue off a newly flattened body, as lumps of disease gave way to railroad track scars, slowly healed to masculinity.

A dull pain throbbed as he saw himself reflected in the full length mirror, bandages hung like cobwebs on the smooth surface, staring him in the eyes the body he had wanted, he turned the cold knob to step outside into the city, no longer unidentified His breath froze on his beard.

NIKKI ANDERSON is a senior at Smith College studying psychology and education with a concentration in poetry.

The White Sky Hangs Elise Lasko

a frozen yolk in her hair, the silhouette of an earring that glistens only when she tosses her head to smile. Her motion stirs a huffing wind that silences speech and screeches in uncovered ears.

From below, her yellow-red dancers delicately float on her breath, lifelessly jostled like sleeping puppets still strung to tress by invisible thread – snow’s predecessor.

ELISE LASKO is a sophomore English major with a poetry concentration at Smith College.

Women In Fur Hats, Women In No Hats Clare Cooke little drips bounce and dive in and out of couch potato sleepers bread weepers cowbells sing your song as frozen icicles bits of tinsel harsh against the exposed nape of the neck gnawing gently to peel away the skin ripples of skin blinding the homeless who should have found a kinder place to be that way singing songs my old-time some-time radio on the radiator resonating through ripples of rippled time lost thinking of that metal hitting pavement each morning the snow piles up makes me trip slip flip it’s ok no one is here to see me

CLARE COOKE is a senior studying english and art history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Coffee and Lions Chen Chen Why did I flinch? I loved you.

– James Merrill 1.

In the final winter of my teenage youth, I fell in love with a flight attendant, flying from Helsinki to Shanghai. He came down the aisle with his squeaky little cart and in a soft, slightly drowsy voice asked me if I wanted my coffee with sugar—in Finnish…then Mandarin…then Cantonese…Korean, Japanese, English. Knowing three out of the six, I still couldn’t answer him. I couldn’t.

Months later, he finds me on the same online dating site: “You’re that guy who couldn’t make up his mind!

You’re cute.” There’s a picture of him in Hong Kong with his sister’s cat cradled to his bare chest. I try to think of what to say, things I like. I like trees, ghost stories, ginger candy. I like this picture of him, with the cat. I like cats. It’s spring already. I turn twenty, and I can’t answer him. I can’t. He doesn’t message me again.

I remember how his steward uniform clung tight to his shoulders, and how, on that nine hour and five minute flight, I wondered if anyone else could see his nipples through the navy fabric. The coffee, it was black, ultimately, and almost too hot to pick up and actually drink. And those two dark points—they were almost purple, peeking through that happy shirt.

2.

A long time ago, I was in love with two amateur long distance runners, one of them scrawnier than the other, but both scruffy-faced, both with 5K best times under twenty minutes—acceptable. I wasn’t in love with them both at the same time, at least not in the sense you see in the movies, with flowers going to the wrong or maybe right one, and awkwardly hilarious elevator encounters because, it turns out, everyone works in the same office building. No, one love happened and ended years before the other. But after both ended, I saw how the latter had been a kind of continuation of the former, as if one actor had been called in to replace the other one in the same, long soap opera.

Indeed my love life, I discovered, was more of a Spanish TV series than a Hollywood movie: no clear resolution, only more of the same, and with the possibility of a main character’s death by horse stomping in every episode.

And despite the slightly above average athleticism the two of them had in common above all else, instead of craving a change, I felt it was simply my destiny to fall in love with yet another long distance runner, especially if he ran a 5K in around nineteen minutes. I wasn’t looking for an Olympic marathoner, for someone too glorious and too busy for a relationship, just someone who wouldn’t throw up after a 3.1 mile race, someone who knows, after the finish line, to keep walking in order to cool down properly, and then reach out for my hand, stand with me awhile under the trees. This third love hasn’t happened.

Now, though, I realize that all of this has to do with runners’ legs, and my appreciation for that body part in general, which is very different from many gay men’s particular fascination with biceps and abs. See, I’m not looking for a hero, for someone to save me with their legs. I’m an amateur runner myself. This is a philosophical argument.

A pair of shapely, muscular legs is aesthetically and, in the long run, practically more sound than a six-pack for the beach. Practical, I say, because if you find yourself in the unpleasant situation of a mugging or lion attack, you’re probably not going to win, because you are, more likely than not, pretty average in terms of body strength, and in any case, no competition for knives and gazelle-tackling jaws. However, if you possess an above average set of legs, strong legs, you just might be able to scale that fence or rock formation in time to avoid getting an ear cut or an arm chewed off. Or, if you’re lucky, you can seduce them; I mean, scare them, by making that little extra effort, being an amateur.

CHEN CHEN is a fourth year student at Hampshire College, concentrating in creative writing, history, and Asian/American studies. He is currently at work on a manuscript of poems exploring family stories and candy.

Lying Back We Lied Julia Steele

Lying back we lied In beds and laid Such lies in beds Unmade we tried And stayed we lied (For lying lays And laying lies) With eyes and beds And hearts and heads, With touch, looks, and cries

JULIA CHADWICK TEELE is sophomore at UMass majoring in English, and minoring in French and Philosophy.

Fallow

Allison (Bird) Pilatsky This is the closest I have come to forever: hands dyed red, shade of water drained from boiled beets, an earth bitter smell.

The kitchen is full of roots as I submerge my hands in water, prepare what we have been given.

Memory takes on this smell, dark like red cabbage, shredded and pickled, an old German recipe, the plants pulled up with an effort that flushes our cheeks.

I am made of this: Not morning, but star-stuff turned earth-stuff so that I can trap it beneath my fingernails, bury my history in it, some time capsule of proof that I was, am here, to carry with me.

We plant and pick to remember some self we never met, old family with cabbage pink flesh, but you die without telling the stories.

This is why we leave these fields fallow.

You become star-stuff, morning-stuff, earth-stuff at once, and I will be nothing but dull-eyed and dusty.

Mom says I have your eyes.

ALISON PILATSKY is a junior at Smith College, double-majoring in English Language and Literature and the Study of Women and Gender, with a concentration in Archival Work.

Brother

Izabel Nielsen How you untie the looping wool and stretch your taught skin to make yet another hat.

If you let the yarn sleep, You will see that the hat keeps stitching and aching between your fingers.

A bigger hat no less is on your head, a little tight but I like it that way.

I can see your mind reaching for the wool again, Please weave me into the next one.

Your words are no good here for I am pasted with imagery Or is it memory of your strings finely tuned?

Warped with small hands plucking out silence.

The body of a cello makes me look unraveled in this light.

To design such hands would be a sin, Hands that can hold fabric and sound and still have room left in your palms, Space never empty but singing with another kind of energy.

Sometimes I see a ship sailing in those palms, A ship that has no destination but clear direction.

We sleep on the deck in fear of the night and in awe of the stars.

Sharing the spot under the mast we discover that a colander could strain our fears, Letting the light be our only dream that plays on quivering chords of air in the sails When I call your name, “brother� I yell, I cannot turn my head to face you I would rather listen to the beautiful sound of strings, And a voice that whispers behind the wind.

If heaven knew you were here would they let you stay?

Are they aware of your talent to untangle angels hair?

And how you knit god’s dimples into every hat?

How do you keep going when the ship is sinking into the mind of another sea?

If you swim I must not have recognized you, For the water is the same color as your eyes.

Hems will unravel and you keep sewing For your eyes are still thirsty and they drink from the gourd of your brow.

IZABEL NIELSEN is a junior at Smith College, double-majoring in English Language and Literature and the Study of Women and Gender, with a concentration in Archival Work.

The Fallen Moutebank Julie Howd

I’m in the process of falling over: first my body will go near the ground then my head will go near the ground then the ground will come up and whack me, lime-yellow and hairy, back up towards the sky.

It’s a disaster when you’ve atrophied, bathed in cotton sheets and feverish nights, begging for water and then begging for water. My head’s been wrapped up for some time now. I fear the walls that aren’t mine. Do they bite?

Do they let in the seashell air?

I lie in a state of anxious quandary. I muse over the juju of breakfast toast; it falls like manna from Your palms, not brusque, not violent like the way I’ve fallen. Margarine, I’m thread-splitting veins.

I imagine it: the escape, bursting forth like garden hose water, fast and everywhere.

I hug the grass for a minute, then on my way nowhere. I lift Dasanis from the Hess station, window shop for pairs of power-line boots, laugh at all the cars like RC’s on the rotary.

I scatter like sawdust. They know me all over by the great big hat I found on the side of the road. I make my living selling sermons atop a milk crate. They love my words, they swallow them whole like vitamins.

I sleep in different cities each night like a superstar.

Fliers tell folks when I’m coming up. I fish fountains for pennies in the moonlight, pose with statues to scare the drunks. And every morning I wake up and do something else.

It’s thrilling, life as a free agent, trailing nothing. Not this, not my body like a pin cushion, not like an aisle spill someone forgot to mop up. You come to my place now and then, and I beam like halogen. I show you my words and tell you: I wrote these, I wrote these, the rotaries.

JULIE HOWD is an English major at UMass Amherst with a minor in Psychology. This is unfortunately her final year, and she will be graduating in May.

Uncle

Kelsey Swensen sometimes i surprise myself and think of you curled in that blank cell in fort dix making use of your hands to pass the time my cousin says i should hate you but i bought your cologne to spray on my pillow at night just so i can prove i am not unfeeling just so i can prove i can still be turned on i am a victim i have been told this for years but they still havent told me what you did to me if i was broken why

KELSEY SWENSEN is a sophomore at Smith College. She is majoring in psychology and enjoys taking creative writing courses.

We Are Real Matt Cosby

We made stews. We ran between trees. Bone, horse, cucumber. You plucked at my fur. We watched birds. We waded through swamps. I howled at geese. You howled at the ocean. Storms moved the water. We built shelters.

We cooked stew. Logs, skins. I love you, I said. I love you, you said. We cracked bones. We counted planets. We smiled. Venus, Mars, Jupiter. Some had no name. It was a secret. Monsters cannot get along. We bared our teeth.

We caught rain in cups. We tore villages apart. We lit fires. You drank sap. I caught fish. We walked together.

Trees parted for us. We gnawed on bones. We ran. We had a secret. Storms broke the trees. The ocean howled at us. We swam. We tore down statues. We feasted on churches. We made towns into stews. We trembled like children. You killed kings. Snow covered the trees. We built better shelters. I killed children. We were in love. We feasted on horses. We licked up blood. You bowed your head. We bared our fangs. Winds grew. We burned kingdoms. We touched each other’s mouths. I feasted on emperors. The swamps grew red. We counted planets. We stretched our jaws wider. We swallowed planets. Monsters cannot escape their nature. We held each other. The sky grew red. You washed my wings. We caught blood in cups. You dried my face. I dried your face. We opened our jaws wider, wider. Monsters cannot love. All monsters are alone. Wider, wider.

MATT COSBY once built a gingerbread house. Matt Cosby is a senior at Amherst College, where he studies English and Art. It was more like a gingerbread fortress.

CLAIRE HARPER studies at Smith College.

submissions and information for submissions and information: quickbrownfox2010@gmail.com • quickbrownfox2010.wordpress.com if you are interested in helping out next year, please contact Rhian Sasseen: rsasseen@smith.edu