BUFO 2009-10

BUFO 2009 - 2010

The Literary Magazine of Western Reserve Academy

BUFO

The Literary Magazine of Western Reserve Academy

2009 - 2010

BUFO 2009 - 2010

EDITORS Martha Miller Zach Wendeln & Claire Ilersich

FACULTY ADVISOR Jeannie Kidera STAFF Becca Cartellone Lillian Carter Micah Collins-Sibley Sarah Hulver

Melinda Nanovsky Daniel Miller Maggie Craig

SPECIAL THANKS TO The Dads’ Club The Pioneer Women The Green Key Society Sarah Hulver

A

s the first non-senior editors since the revival of the magazine in

2005, we are proud to announce that we didn’t epically fail. While we were the only returning staff members this year, we are excited to note two hallmark achievements. First, Zach made his first (and what he hopes to be last) morning meeting announcement of his Reserve career for the sake of the publication. Second, and most impressive, we surpassed our predecessors in page length. Last year, BUFO consisted of only 67 pages total with 46 pages of writing; this year, we’ve bumped up our quota to 72 pages total with 47 pages of writing.

Although people often say that it’s the quality not the quantity that counts, we’d like to take this moment to bask in the glory of our accomplishment. Bravo to us!

On a more serious note, thank you to all of the writers who submitted this year. It takes a great deal of courage and selfconfidence to allow a group of judgmental, self-proclaimed editors and writers to read and critique your work. To those of you who passed the test, we salute you. This publication would be nothing without your burgeoning talent.

We look forward to working on BUFO again next year and are happy to welcome Claire Ilersich into the editorial fold. She, along with the plethora of other freshman staff, will certainly prove to be invaluable to the continuation and success of the magazine.

Blessed are those fine young souls for theirs is the kingdom of BUFO. Lick and enjoy!

Zachary Wendeln & Martha Miller

Bufo, a journal of young creative writing, is distributed annually by students at Western Reserve Academy, and was published in 2010 by Michele Scourfield of Hudson Publishing. This edition was printed using the Palatino Linotype typeface. Editors can be reached through Bufo Advisor Jeannie Kidera c/o Western Reserve Academy, 115 College St., Hudson, OH, 44236.

CONTENTS 2009 - 2010 POETRY Caroline Croasdaile, Romanov Findings Zach Wendeln, Mother’s Favorite Annie Forhan, 2:13 AM at the Drive-Thru Tori DiBiase, AWOL Melinda Nanovsky, Venir, Aller Nick Hobbs, No Longer Veronica Wazney, The Serpent’s Envy Caroline Croasdaile, What are Little Girls Made Of? Zach Wendeln, In Which a Tree Fells a Man Laurie Coffin, The Mermaid’s Bones Martha Miller, The Fall of Lucifer A RT Sarah Foster, Fighting Birds Micah Collins-Sibley, Brittany Kenneth Dunne, Makeup Lady Sarah Foster, Coming in for a Landing Sarah Hulver, Sarah Kenneth Dunne, Waiter FICTION Zach Wendeln, Desperado and Lola Caroline Croasdaile, The Day Trip Ceara O’Sullivan, The Lifeguard Chronicles Sarah Ramras, The Way She Smiled Thomas Joe, Sweet Dreams, Spartacus Caila Quinn, My Emme Maggie Craig, Staples, Tissues and Flowers Becca Cartellone, Wonderful Caroline Griswold, Accusations and Confessions Martha Miller, Like I Need a Hole in My Head Mary Carter, The TV Laurie Coffin, Puddle Jumpers Cover art by Sarah Hulver

10 11 12 14 16 17 18 19 20 21 24

28 29 30 31 33 34

38 39 42 44 47 50 52 56 59 62 64 67

POETRY

CAROLINE CROASDAILE

Romanov Findings I had a Russian Spring with snow in March. My fields were a candlestick white that withered time when the dry wheat went bent and snapped all prickly under the weight. I remember it like a Romanov finding their photographic self unrecognizable, to bones beneath the birches where they spread themselves unseen and distant, as some supernova in the sky. I’m shyly hungry for that place and having all my cracks and crevices filled with immodest earth.

There is a spot there on the hairline of this wild growth of wood, where the blanched and softly matted ground is warm. For winter animals have bedded down. Where you sit cross-legged just might be your grave.

ZACH WENDELN

Mother’s Favorite Throw your withered spoons and rings with their bloody crusts to the soles of your shoes.

Wrap up their leather coffin with a tough, taught tongue, chewed short by secrets.

He will not acknowledge them.

I cut my tongue, wagging, from lips bloodied

by Pomegranate; juices drip down my throat, burning my breath sore.

Toss it in its cage, a preening canary warbling dry its heart.

Or perhaps a box, cardboard and moldy and tied tight with my heartstrings dripping, fresh from Aztec hands.

Yes, a box with a pretty Scarlet bow and gaily fluffed golden tinsel.

I’ll bury it in the garden of headstones near the white flaking Chapel. I’ll drown it beneath six feet of browning grass and water it with bated songs. Notes worm their way from cold smiles marbled by night-crawlers.

The chapless choir cannot compare to the howling of my severed tongue, ashen and rusted, buried near your spoons and rings and shoes.

Alms for a wretched lover.

ANNIE FORHAN

2:13 AM at the Drive-Thru Mom didn’t know how we had gotten to Kettleburgh Nor did the gasping wheels of our wood sided station wagon.

From the back seat, our stomachs twisted and howled until we halted in the drive thru line.

Its looming sign beckoned us through frigid windows.

From I-84, we whirled around the exit ramp and bowed to a stop in front of the talking metal box.

We curled and stretched in our seatbelts, as mom craned to hear that waitress in Kettleburgh, whose jerky words feared their leap through the dark, from the speaker to our window.

“Three burgers”, shook the station wagon, wheezing in the twinkling five car line.

The car continued onward, moving towards the burgers.

Towards the greasy second window where the pale faced waitress stood.

We could smell their meat drifting through the line, and throughout all that town called Kettleburgh.

She reached the stuffy paper bag into the station wagon dressing its shivering windows in a layer of heat.

We traced wet stars in our foggy windows, smelling the grease on our foil wrapped burgers that huddled side by side in the depths if the bag, riding shotgun in the station wagon.

Finally we ate. Our hot mouths bulged.

We didn’t speak, or fear the empty darkness surrounding us as we crept out of Kettleburgh.

I looked back, out the hazy back window at that brilliant shrinking drive thru line.

Trees swept by. Four houses in a line slept behind their droopy, dark windows.

And I wondered what people did in Kettleburgh, with nothing to do but eat burgers and talk to metal boxes that could hardly speak, from the front seats of their station wagons.

ANNIE FORHAN

2:13 AM at the Drive-Thru (cont’d) In the dark, a string of moms ketchup dripped onto the front seat of our station wagon, and dried in a thick red line.

It dozed there, only hoping to sleep until the morning light came, shattering the windows and erasing our stars.

And on the floor lay the foil balls that had held our burgers.

We had had tossed them to our feet just after passing through Kettleburgh.

“How much longer?” moped the station wagon and its weary windows, no longer distracted by the glimmering drive thru line, or hunger for burgers.

Only sleep could speak as we drifted in the back.

And mom said goodbye to Kettleburgh.

TORI DIBIASE

AWOL Curse the old boat that waits alone on an endless sheet of glass.

The water frozen beneath the bow brightly reflects the vessel’s features, an underexposed photograph blurred by the indolent lensman’s task.

The sails anticipate the wind’s task, like an impatient lover waiting alone watching his mistress through a blurred window, rain streaming down the glass, waiting, for gusts to stimulate their canvas features and move the boat, water crashing against the bow.

The vessel’s wooden frame and the bow I carved myself. A complex series of tasks, that left viewers breathless at its intricate features.

That’s what is left on the open sea, alone.

Where pirates searching through their spyglass would find it useless, floating along the blurred horizon. When the fog blurred my vision, seeing no further than the bow of my boat, and rain, like shattered glass, echoed from the flapping mast, the dark tasked my senses, making me hopeless and alone just waiting for the lightning, the feature of that storm, that was to be the feature in my cinematographed life. Blurred planks swung from the sails, now standing alone without a frame. Poseidon’s minions bow before him, promising to fulfill his task, throw me over into the glasslike water, sharp and cold. Glass shards sting and scratch my features.

The gods have a way with fulfilling tasks.

Salt burns my eyes and blurs my vision. My sacred vessel’s bow was too far to reach; I was now floating alone.

TORI DIBIASE

AWOL (cont’d)

The hour glass leaves me with a skewed blur of the boat’s features with the dark wooden bow.

The waves endless task, push it out of sight. Alone.

MELINDA NANOVSKY

Venir, Aller Venir. Come to me.

Embrasser. Embrace me.

The truth it may hurt Or it may love.

Regret, you may deny it but you know it’s there.

You push through it but it’s still ever present.

You may sit there and trust what you say but do you really believe it?

You wear a mask of shame and guilt, a moving motion of simplicity and vagueness.

You try and change your mind but you know you can’t.

Your mind is set.

Show me the feelings of a true human.

Trust you thoughts without questioning your motives.

Move on without doubting yourself.

Aller.

Go now and live your life.

NICK HOBBS

No Longer Take my hand and shove it closed, touched all within boundaries.

Scrape the filth off my fingertips, sun burning the water off the ground.

Let them feel evil no more.

Blanket my eyes to dark, enhanced haze should surround me.

Lashes pointed to fear no more, let these windows see evil no more.

Waves crash to the drum.

I heard the screams and terror arise, but silence my drum.

Let them hear evil no more; let you hear joy flow from the lives I will touch and pass.

Acid lexis eroded lives away, doomed many to the depth, of spoken chains and illusion.

Cement my teeth and cease, let me speak evil no more.

Mizaru, I evoke you; Kikazaru, I praise you; Iwazaru, I bow to you.

Let evil stay here no longer.

VERONICA WAZNEY

The Serpent’s Envy He was certain, with his entrancing lyre, he could charm anyone or anything Oh, how he charmed me indeed.

How I longed to hear the sounds which accompany the rhythms I feel carried by the roots of trees.

Eurydice. Newly wedded to those notorious notes, she danced in circles of celebration around my nest of green prancing in her euphonious ecstasy.

I bit her heel and so she fell like a withering leaf to that shadowy place. Now she will hear only bittersweet nothings. Like me.

CAROLINE CROASDAILE

What are Little Girls Made Of?

ZACH WENDELN

In Which a Tree Fells a Man: a Paradelle Worm-chewed limbs couldn’t bear your happiness.

Worm-chewed limbs couldn’t bear your happiness.

Gnarled, grey arms dropped you, little egg.

Gnarled, grey arms dropped you, little egg.

Your grey limbs bear worm-chewed happiness.

Couldn’t you, dropped arms? Gnarled little egg?

Gravity greedily cradled your snapping bones.

Gravity greedily cradled your snapping bones.

Mossy bark chipped life from the flesh.

Mossy bark chipped life from the flesh.

Flesh, your mossy life cradled the bones, greedily chipped bark from snapping gravity.

Strips of red flannel clung to the leaves.

Strips of red flannel clung to the leaves.

And wrinkled photos of your children rained from your pocket.

And wrinkled photos of your children rained from your pocket.

Your children clung to strips of your photos, of the pocket, and of flannel rained from red, wrinkled leaves.

Gravity leaves your children grey and snapping.

Little arms couldn’t cling to photos, greedily cradle your mossy red flannel bones, wrinkle your pocket.

And you bear the worms, the chewed flesh.

Life rained from you, dropped egg, you from chipped bark, and strips of happiness from gnarled limbs.

LAURIE COFFIN

The Mermaid’s Bones That fisherman, I used to know, is smoking weeds of time.

Puff it up and blow it Out in rings that spell her name.

Never inhale, she tells me.

Never breathe it in.

To be honestOr cruel at least, She tells me that she never has Never did.

And mostly, Never will.

Well, I hope you have some more.

But it’s odd the way she told me, without lips or coffee cups.

But then again, Our loudest conversations Scream in rooms That don’t exist.

He seems surprisedHe sucks it in, a little harder now he shouldn’t beits obvious.

That chum-cut face, And netted touch What else do live men catch?

Smoke rings hang like gallows Round his neck and pull him in to memory Its memory He swims the way alone.

LAURIE COFFIN

The Mermaid’s Bones (cont’d)

Beneath grey waves He built a house “Come in, let’s drown together.”

Come in.

Come down.

Come on.

Come in let’s drown together.

She was lovely, Icy lipped and bright Metallic-eyed A masochistic mermaid.

Spiraling out in smokers pipe dreams.

Kisses snarled and kisses deep Came in moon-made tides of Salt And sweat And rusted eyelids Screeching shut like hell.

But that was always Years below and now he sits abovewith rotting fish and seizing fish really any fish fishing for the fishes like the little fish he tried to loveHigh tide, Low tide, mermaid’s done bled to death and drowned, she floats.

LAURIE COFFIN

The Mermaid’s Bones (cont’d)

Oh but Fisherman, If she ever needs you I’ll tell her where you are: down, down, smoking time, at the bottom of our sea.

MARTHA MILLER

The Fall of Lucifer Our ragtag team stumbles to a halt, the ant train rippling with exhaustion.

Our energy is focused at the front, our damned general stiff-backed in glory a lowly lieutenant behind him, I wait.

He stares out upon the land, hands clasped behind his back.

Burnt and shriveled wings lie still, one ripped halfway off the bone, a charred and bloody mess.

No one dares to speak, though they shift in their spots uneasily, spooked horses in the heat as the flame and fire white out their retinas, as cries engulf the stars.

Unspoken words lie heavy— my shoulders sag with failure.

But he beckons with blistered fingers.

His cracked lips smile, splitting open like flowers in bloom He leers at the lava, then turns, his eyes shining.

The blaze is still the same.

I cannot tell what drove him mad: the light, or the loss.

A smile filled with glory and dreams; He still pursues our goal.

The knowledge of all of the names, and the plans, the ones He had for us, that spark of hope, that flickering fight.

We thought we could just take it— Oh fools, how wrong were we?

The battle was quick, the justice handed The wrath swallowed up our force— It seared our skin like meat.

MARTHA MILLER

The Fall of Lucifer (cont’d) And now he stares, the land consumes; still throbs the red raw skin.

He smiles, a broken twist, a line, joy for a victory not his own.

“What a lovely place to live,” he says.

Oh captain, my captain, my Lucifer with such sweet smile.

And we your band of curious followers— where will you lead us next?

To fall, to fall, to fall?

ART

Sarah Foster

Micah Collins-Sibley

Kenneth Dunne

Sarah Foster

Sarah Hulver

Louise Craig

Kenneth Dunne

FICTION

ZACH WENDELN

Desperado and Lola

H

e hangs up the phone, whispering words that will die with the

connection. He speaks them for her, but emptiness receives them. Three more broken dreams drift in the dark, caught by dream-catchers hidden in pillow covers. He checks the time- 12:23 –and sighs. But this release is one of content, for he cannot foresee the coming disappointment, the impending heartache. She told him everything- more than he wanted to know –and he loves her all the more for her bluntness. Dark secrets slid from her mouth, toxic vapors hissed on her drunken tongue, transforming into soaring sonnets and intoxicating wine when they reached his ears through the plastic receiver miles away. They linger in his mind, and, while he knows he should resist, the thoughts of wasted twilights and his hands on her soft skin tempt him.

As he begins to drift, his mind looks forward to the coming days. Alluring messages promise lunch, dinner- a chance. Happiness can’t come that easily, it never has. That constant battle between mind and heart- between reality and the fictitious world he writes for himself –wages all the more fervently in him, shredding hope and patching it up again with the memory of their conversations. She trusts him; she needs him. He can shoulder her burden, and is all too willing. He begs to carry her baggage, weighted parcels polished and trimmed like Louis Vuitton luggage. These thoughts in mind, he presses his body back onto a mound of pillows and sheets- his nocturnal cocoon –while blue dreams drown her image.

Tonight, he won’t touch his phone. Tonight, no pixilated promises linger on the glowing screen. The voice had warned him that no pauper could win the heart of a princess, and now Juliet’s found-out deceit sent Romeo virgin to the grave. He longs to wrap a trench coat around his naked body, run to the tarmac and stop her abrupt departure, but in his heart he knows it is futile. Thursday. She had lied, her gilded words baffling him, melting through the wax he had stuffed in his ears to protect his heart from such a siren.

Wednesday. She rewrites her story for the first and last time, knowing his pathetic devotion will linger long after her plane has taken off. She munches on salted peanuts in first class; he devours French vanilla as a jet’s engines roar in the distance.

CAROLINE CROASDAILE

The Day Trip

I

’ve spent nearly my whole life it seems watching coffee drip, and the rain

out the kitchen window. I love café au lait. One time I nearly drank a hundred café au laits stacked a mile high to the chimney mantle. I’ve never really been the same, and I’m surprised my poor heart hasn’t popped yet.

When it does burst it will be like a balloon at a child’s birthday party. What a way to go! One minute you’re smugly savoring the victory of another year and a pile of presents, and the next thing anyone knows you’re face down in the cake. Mom’s on the phone with the EMS squad while the other kindergarteners scream.

Fritz anticipates every holiday with an exhausting zeal. He and the rest of the world insist on believing holidays are going to transfigure the dull grind of day from dawn to dusk into something different, something special.

It’s too Brigadoon, and it’s not for me. I prefer to pretend they’re like any other day. Since tomorrow is Boxing Day, (Does this mean I will be transfigured into a box?!) I’ve decided to take a day trip in hopes that something will happen. Nothing ever happens. I tried to tell Fritz about it over café au lait yesterday morning, but I don’t think he liked the idea.

“Fritz, I’m going to the city tomorrow.”

I decided to go to the city because, that’s where things happen.

“But I’ve promised to meet Marc tomorrow and try to finish that garden wall he’s put up” “Yes, I know, all the more reason for me to go.”

“Alone?”

“Yes, For God’s sake! Fritz, I’m 51 years old. I know how to take the train.”

“Cora, remember when you tried to take it last spring, and ended up in East Grinstead?”

“Where’s that?”

“My point exactly.”

“Well, I’m going Fritz… where did I put my trains timetable?”

“Send me a postcard from East Grinstead.”

Fritz is German so he thinks he knows everything.

Click. I strolled the gravel zigzags of a geometric garden. Click. I had my vintage camera with me. I don’t use digital cameras. I may not like holidays, but I don’t mind surprises. I take pictures of things that surprise me. For example; a man without a hand petting a dog. Click.

“Have you ever heard the old superstition that photographs can steal a person’s soul?”

I jumped out of my skin, and turned around at the same time. The man without a hand was two inches from my face. He didn’t say that to me. I looked behind me, and the path spread wide, and empty toward what seemed the horizon. I turned back around and fear punched me in the sternum harder than any caffeine jolt I’d ever experienced, and the force was akin to the kind of burly man that drinks muscle-milk.

CAROLINE CROASDAILE “Because you’ve stolen my heart too.”

What a truly terrible pick-up line. I laughed nervously I extended my hand to shake his, and both of us stared at it as I slowly lifted it in a stiff salutation, like a small heil Hitler that couldn’t have been any less offensive than this gesture. My mind raced with one-handed jokes. I could hardly contain them; captain hook, “need a hand?” feats accomplished single-handedly all jostled for room in my crowded brain.

As I stood there clutching my old camera which wrapped around my neck like an umbilical cord, our life flashed before my eyes; the onehanded man and me. This chance meeting would lead to another in some smoky hardwood-paneled coffee shop frequented by far-flung marauding art thieves and local coffee epicureans. We would talk for exactly six hours until we were thrown out of the shop onto the street, when in some curious scientific fluke of nature the clear night sky would begin pouring rain and shooting stars. He would lift my chin with his stump and kiss me. I would run away with him and form a one-handed mandolin band and tour Eastern Europe. Then, they would want to produce a wildly popular sitcom called “Cora and One-hand man” that could show right after “The Little Chocolatiers”.

One-hand man gave me a brief and pitying smile as he slowly walked away down the more populated path. And then he was gone. I sat down on a park bench and fiddled with the strap on my camera mourning our mutual death and watching the other people go by. Was it time to go home yet? Suddenly that’s all I wanted to do. I slid my camera back into my leather shoulder bag and headed off, only stopping to buy a cheese danish at a kiosk. I spent the rest of the day wandering around the city, vaguely in search of the train station. However, whenever I remembered what I was looking for I’d forget where I was, and if I chanced to notice at a street sign, by that time I would have forgotten the point of knowing anyway.

I was the only one in the train car coming back, and I let the stuttering yellow lights overhead soak up my energy. I leaned into the black window pane and dozed, eye to eye with my reflection as we clamored. I was taken out past the city, and river, and rows and rows of brown brick houses lined up like broad shouldered men, menacing in the gloom. My eyes flickered open when the wheels began shrieking and a woman with a faultless tongue but suggestive tone announced “Dreyston”. I felt weighted as I picked myself up and shuffled off the train. In my sad state I stood on the platform and watched the train being swallowed up in the darkness of the tunnel.

I couldn’t call Fritz. He had been right about the day trip, and it would be impossible to ever forgive him for that. Far more difficult than if he had been wrong. The town I lived in was small, and modest, and suburbia in a word. Therefore the nightlife consisted only of a few old harmless and wrinkled old regulars who glued themselves to the bar stools every evening in the pub across the lane. Although I knew a few of them (Bert; my sister’s gardener) they were dirty old men who were proficient in drinking and not a lot else. This included rides home. I held my breath and prayed for the impossibility of a taxi on the deserted street, but instead a stray cat darted out from behind a few rubbish bins.

CAROLINE CROASDAILE The house was dark was dark when I got home, and so instead of relief another feeling altogether washed over me. I entered tentatively, expecting what I didn’t know I could expect. Fritz never left the lights out so I looked, but Fritz wasn’t there. I wandered into the empty living room that smelled so much like an empty home, and in that moment the smell of the wide open park found me, and the stickiness of the train, and someone was behind me then, wrapping their two arms safely around me. I looked down, at one hand and one stump. I opened my mouth but the only sound that I made was the shrieking of the train.

CEARA O’SULLIVAN

The Lifeguard Chronicle

I

could’ve been a Navy seal, you know. I could’ve been a Navy seal, or a

doctor, or architect. But it’s all about connections, and the opportunities offered from my circumstance are…limited. I made the choice to forgo higher education in favor of a shiny red rescue tube. Every teenager’s favorite summer gig is now my permanent occupation. I smell like chlorine, look like an albino, and feel like a road killed prune. Yep, I’m a lifeguard at the Mary H. Sotoberg Indoor Aquatic Center. Some guards spout bullshit about how they’re “damn good at their job” but I don’t know. I’d never even had the chance to save somebody, not until today. The aquatic director says that the best lifeguard is a danger preventor. So maybe I’m freaking great at my job. Mostly I just yell “WALK” at scrawny preteens across the deck.

I calculated it all out. By skipping senior year and life guarding full time, I would make $8,594. Then, by forgoing college, I would save an additional $158,000. If I worked through college, I’d end up $192,376 ahead of my peers. But I never accounted for the loss of self-esteem, weight gain, Vitamin D deprivation, or increasingly lacking conversational skills. These supplements were not mentioned as part of the employee benefits package.

Is it weird that I have a perverse love of reprimanding? Every time some punk thinks its cool to take a kickboard into the wade-in pool or hang on the waterworks, I pounce. Most of the guards favor the whistle, but I just yell from where I’m sitting: “DON’T PULL ON THE LANE LINES.” This is the best brand of therapy I know.

While I’m on break, I doodle in the LSI binder, reconfigure the bulletin board, or veg out. Today, for a change, I stabbed pushpins into Dolly the Safety Dolphin’s eyes. This plush stuffed animal has been a facet of Learn-To-Swim lessons since the 80s. “What does Dolly do when someone is drowning?” “Call for help!” But today, Dolly would not be able to see if someone was drowning. I put pins in her eyes.

Dolly must be some kind of voodoo doll because right after brutally torturing of the dolphin, I rotated up to the guard stand on wade-in for the worst shift ever.

Between 9-10 AM the over-50 crowd swarms the pool for water aerobics with Sherry. The dynamics of this totally anaerobic workout class remind me why I hated high school. You’ve got the showoffs—the ones that use the extra big Styrofoam barbells. There’s the pervs that lurk in the back: widow sharks looking for meat that hasn’t passed it expiration date yet.

There are the prudes that won’t do any move that requires getting their hair wet. And every time someone new joins the class, a five-foot diameter of no-mans-land is formed in the water surrounding her.

Today, Sherry was squawking at the elderly to “KICK IT UP A NOTCH”—which actually only means bouncing up and down slowly in the water while keeping the Styrofoam barbells held at arm’s length. The saggy old lady boobs are enough to make me want to hack. But I digress… as the old fogies were pushing through their workout, the Central School District’s kindergarten class came in for playtime. It’s always awkward seeing my old

CEARAO’SULLIVAN old kindergarten teacher, Ms. Thomas, while I’m at the pool. I doubt she ever expected much of me, but Ms. Thomas probably hoped I’d be more than a dead-beat lifeguard with girlishly long hair and acne I should have tackled in grade nine.

I didn’t notice at first. I didn’t see the boy (Benny?) in the limited visibility area behind the waterworks structure. I didn’t see him, and when I did…I just froze. My mind flashed back to Pollywog Swim Lessons and our teacher’s first lesson: “You can drown in a glass of water”. Benny was facedown in water that couldn’t have been more than three feet deep. I remembered one of the cardinal rules of Junior Lifeguards: Sometimes, people are just faking it. Lots of little kids put their face in the water to blow bubbles, or look at their feet, or get something off of the bottom of the pool.

But Benny was only four and his face was submerged for more than a minute…

One of the kindergarten girls started screaming, and once one fouryear old is screaming, all of the four-year olds are screaming. Their cries echoed against the tile walls of the pool deck. Sherry’s water joggers looked on as Ms. Thomas jumped into the water, denim dress and all, to save Benny. He was way unconscious—I could tell that as soon as she hoisted his waterlogged frame out of the water. My mind flickered back to pin-eyed Dolly the Dolphin: “What does Dolly do when someone is drowning?” “Call for help!” but I didn’t do anything. I just sat there, surveying the scene. All of the little kids looked up at me expectantly. Even Sherry called out to me: “get the med kit, kid!”

I don’t know if I meant to let Benny die, but that’s what happened.

While the off-duty guard cleared all of the pools, a lap swimmer made an unintelligible phone call to the EMS. The medics didn’t arrive for half an hour, and in that time, Sherry attempted some lousy, outdated form of CPR that probably just broke all of his ribs and forced more water into his lungs.

But I was drowning, too, you know?

SARAH RAMRAS

The Way She Smiled

O

ne could always find Edie by the way she smiled. When my

mother’s sweet voice washed across my yard to hers, she beamed her smile bright. When I first saw her, I instantly thought she was my best friend, like those typical children do. Looking deeper into the pure grin she possessed, I saw her complete and utter happiness with my own mother’s voice. One could only assume this tone of kindness was not the usual sound filling this tiny tot’s surroundings. I was intrigued, and taken over by a sure feeling that I’d be there for her. Edie.

I always called her over to play. Our ranches were the closest thing we had to neighbors, so we both needed someone to grow up with. Tinier than the rest of her 8 brothers and sisters, she was a breed of her own.

Bones popping through her porcelain skin, the teeth took over her with each widening smile. When she spoke, only meaningful words were produced.

Each word, syllable, letter, meant something she believed in whole heartedly.

She’d wave eagerly as I boarded the school bus, just as her stern home school teacher arrived. I’d rush back to my ranch every day so we could play, and talk. The Santa Ynez Valley’s sun forced our friendship to become one unbreakable bond. Our families were never technically friends, and the only time I saw her parents, Francis and Alice, were when they were screaming for her to come to dinner or just to come inside. The laughs on her sallow face would tighten, and the carelessness that possessed Edie would pour out of her as she ran back to her house.

I could never figure out what was wrong with her, what made her emotions run wild at the pitch of someone else’s voice. My mother, so kind, would make us snacks of cookies and milk, Edie always gave hers to me.

She knew snicker doodle was my favorite, but after the third time she gave them to me I felt my guilt bubble up. She denied most snacks, rubbing her flat belly uneasily at the sight of food. “I’m just not hungry Caroline, I’m fat anyways it’s ok.”

“Edie, you’re not fat, here let’s just go play with my new dolls.” I’d quickly reply. As a child I didn’t really know how to react to such self issues, I just wanted to be her friend.

As time progressed, her family was always a sensitive topic. My doe eyed friend seemed to have a close trust with me, and I’d listen.

“I couldn’t tell him to stop, he’s my father. It felt wrong, and, but I can’t do anything to stop him. I….I don’t know what to do.” Edie would tremble and I’d pat her at a steady beat, and she’d calm down. Then we could play and she’d feel better.

As I lay in bed, I’d pray for Edie and her family. Listening closely, I could usually hear Mr. Sedgwick’s alcohol blurred insults directed at Minty.

The silence of Minty’s reactions was more freighting than the loud obscenities his father would throw at him.

“YOU ARE A SHAME TO THIS FAMILY. JUST GO KILL YOURSELF FAGGOT.” Mr. Sedgwick would scream.

SARAH RAMRAS “Dad, stop. Please. It’s not his fault. DAD” Edie’s voice would float into this attack, sounding like a soft but stubborn lamb in this lion’s path.

After a long system of Edie and I having a “play date” every day after I get home from school, she didn’t show up. I waited on my porch with some cookies that she wouldn’t eat, but she never showed. My mom phoned their house, and Edie’s mom told her the news. Minty was found dead that morning, and my family was invited to his funeral.

I put on my sandpaper soft dress dark as night, and we drove to a cemetery close into town. I looked over at my neighbor, and the strength I had heard in her voice must have faded out, and she sobbed steady with the cello’s strum in the orchestra playing.

A few days later she showed up at my door, still broken, but a bit more mended than when I last had seen her. The whiteness in her face had returned to its normal sheen, and she walked purposefully towards my doll’s chest. We played as we normally did in silence, and she soon spoke.

“He hung himself, just because he was different. My father is an awful man, it’s entirely his fault, and now my brother is dead.”

I patted her back as she played with my doll, and listened.

Edie’s skin began to stretch thinner and thinner, over her soft bones. Adding to Minty’s suicide, Bobby was gone as well. Her other brother, a Harvard student, was taken out of his dorm room. Wrapped and locked tightly in a straight jacket, Edie was told he was mentally collapsing and taken to a psychiatric hospital. He hit a train while riding his motorcycle, another life lost. I was there for her when she came over to play, always.

Soon she was taken. I don’t know how it happened. Our time together had seemed so natural and healthy. There weren’t any ambulances, just her father. Dragging her down the porch steps, Edie was so small. All of those cookies uneaten were shown in with her translucent 90 pound skin. I walked into my room and fell asleep until she called.

“Silver Hill is morbid, Caroline. I need to get out of here. I have no one to talk to, so they gave me one phone call. You know why I called you?

You’re the only one who really does believe in me. The hallway’s narrow as I walk, and my face is no longer living. I’ll see you soon, I love you.” She hung up.

Days would pass, and so would months. My life went on without Edie and it seemed like she had been gone forever. Once she returned, I heard all of the stories and horrors she had endured.

“I’m fat now, but I missed you. I was pregnant, and they killed my baby. Caroline, I missed you so much. But I need to go on to better things for myself; art is the only thing I can escape to.”

Again, she left. I was empty without her long strides and unpolished hair, but I knew she’d call and tell me what happened. So I could pat her back. The smiles had been lost over these events so I said goodbye to her and she left for Cambridge. Occasionally receiving a call, I could feel Edie’s smile becoming wider as she was becoming an artist, and a student.

Although she wasn’t with me, I knew she was happy there, away from the ranch.

Calling from an unknown number, I picked up to hear the chipper sound of Edie’s syllable strewn voice.

“I’m in New York! My friend Chuck and I are going to be artists! It’s

SARAH RAMRAS beautiful! I wish you were here!”

I didn’t have much of a chance to reply before she became distracted and said her goodbyes. Feeling dejected, I thought of her smiling and skipping through central park with Chuck, whoever he was, flying like a bird whose wing had recently healed. I liked that thought, so I’d continue with my life, happily, as long as she was alright.

I didn’t see her until those movies. Poor Little Rich Girl was the biggest movie, created by Andy Warhol. Edie was the new star, and I could barley recognize her. Her usually brunette head was dyed and cut short, a silvery blonde. Her eyes were painted with a black liner out wide, looking like a raccoon with a boy’s haircut. A lacy bra and underwear replaced her childish ensembles. A transformation had occurred between the times I had seen Edie after rehab, to her scandalous debut on the silver screen. I tore my eyes away from this girl I was once best friends with, and shut off the television.

She began erupting all over the underground scene we both had envied as young girls. Black and white photographs of her, laughing, holding cigarettes flashed in front of me. She looked beautiful, different, but I didn’t know her anymore.

After a few weeks, I got her call. It had been awhile so I had no idea how to react, since she was so different.

“Caroline, darling, how are you?” Her voice even sounded foreign.

“Oh hey Edie, I’m just back at home, the usual. How are you? I saw your movie.” This was not how we usually spoke.

“Oh I’ve been doing such exciting things with the movies lately. My friend Andy, you know, Andy Warhol? Well he’s made me the newest It Girl.

It’s just divine, isn’t it?” She paused, and her voice lowered. “I just wanted to call, and thank you.”

I was baffled by this sudden change in character. I had no chance to respond before she said, “You made me so strong, you were there for me, and now I am truly happy. You’re my best friend, Caroline.”

“I love you too Edie, I wish you the best, be safe. Call me whenever you need to talk, ok” “I will darling, I will.” She smiled, and hung up.

I suppose Edie hadn’t completely changed from an innocent, broken little girl into an underground New York film star. I watched her grow and climb over those sharp foothills of her childhood, and escape her pain through art. Once she had left, I was terrified I had lost my best friend. But her smile was still there, she was still, Edie.

THOMAS JOE

Sweet Dreams, Spartacus

T

he Beginning. Lying still to the song of the cicadas chirping in the

dream of a dream, I watch the pale white sphere of the moon above. It sleeps on a black sheet that hides the sparkling stars so that the moon’s light is its light alone.

What a night, eh?

Then, a woman dressed in a grey cloak. She stands peering down at an invisible object at her feet and her black hair hangs down just slightly over her eyes. She’s pale and stiff. The gloom about her figure holds a certain beauty, hers alone.

“Long time, no see, beloved,” I begin.

No response.

“Did you cross the Cocytus alright? And how about Sextus, and Marcus, are they okay?”

No response. Not even a single discernable movement of her body, of her face, or of those empty, dreadful eyes.

(2) Crimson. Before me, the cruel reality of my wife mutilated; behind her, my two young sons wrecked by gashes all across their bodies. I instinctively grab the sword at my side, but where are they, the ones who did this to me, to us?

(3) The Dream. Sweating, I awake to a bright, golden sun—why does it mock me? Quickly, I reach for the sword that was in my hand a second ago, but now it hangs on the wall in front of me.

Footsteps stomp up ahead, and a voice booms, “Sir. Are you ready, Spartacus, sir?”

I ignore him. “Brutus, how many years has it been?”

“I have not counted. A long time, friend.”

“Yes, a very long time, old friend.”

This is enough for me, for now, and I step outside to greet the crowds of men, spread about the white tents littering the lush green field. Immediately, the men assemble. Into legions. Of men fighting against Rome and all its atrocities.

“Oh, the glory of dying in battle…” I begin. And then I see their faces.

“Look to your right,” I command. All the men look to their right in a single beautiful, uniform action. “Now to your left.”

“Today, you fight for yourself, for them, and for those you hold dear, in whatever world they now dwell.” Again, the woman and my two boys appear before me, wan and destitute. Like ghosts, only worse.

(4) The Tent.

Out of curiosity, I ask Brutus, “Back when you fought for Rome, how did you feel?”

In response: “Nothing. I felt nothing.”

“And when they killed your family?” Too late to take it back now, I figure.

“Bad.”

THOMAS JOE “Ah, the beauty of fighting for your country, only to have the whore stab you in the back.”

“Yes. But may I add something?”

“Of course.”

“The past is unchangeable. What’s done is done. And sometimes I ask myself how it would have been … if I had never met Creusa. But no matter how much I would like things to have turned out differently, those times we had together were the best times of my life. And I wouldn’t give them up for anything.”

“What if you could bring her back to life under the condition that you never knew her? Would you would let it all go?” I ask.

“Without question.”

Now if only philosophers were more like you, I think to myself.

When I see those eyes of Brutus, I can’t help but avert my own—who could bear to look at that sadness painted across his face in tears? So I look out the window. Across the green fields through the specks of trees. At sun rising up ever so slowly.

(5) I sigh—not from surrender, or from agony, but from malaise. And I begin, “Some men die for their country and gain glory. And when they cross the black straits below in Hades, they are said to hold no regrets. After all, the fatherland above all, they say. But what if you just want to go home?

“Up above the gods do as they please. The rivers and streams flow free, forever oblivious of time and the cruelty of man. Even when dying men pour blood into the waters’ gaping mouths, the waters simply swallow the red liquid and become one with it.

“And the stars. Oh, those sloths. Motionless, they come and go on whatever nights they please, looking down at us pitiful humans, mocking our pathetic state.

“And the planets go on, circling the sun continuously, fated to do so.

They needn’t worry about making the wrong decision, for they never make one at all.

“But us humans, why must we alone suffer? Even if, out of spite, you bashed a tree a thousand times over, it would not shed tears, it would not bleed, it would not beg for mercy. No, it just falls.

“Why must we be as we are? It is almost as if all the aspects of our lives, when they come together, end up tormenting us to the point that we desire death. Yet we hold on, forever sucking from the bitter fruit of life as if we all were born masochists, humans second.

“My family died several years ago. They did nothing wrong, yet a legion of bandits slaughtered them in the name of the Roman Republic. And when I escaped from that undeserving place, there was no person I wanted to see more than pale Persephone. But I did not meet her. And every day, I have wondered why, how, I was not able to save my beloved family. What if I had decided to stay home that day? What if I had been stronger and had fought those demons? Alas, if only I knew that such was fate. But that I will never know. For we cannot live as gods and stars do, we cannot blindly follow fate as the planets do. No, the very fact that we have control yet do not, torments us day by day.

“And on account of fate, we can do nothing.”

An unknown yet familiar voice, one I have not heard in many years, calls out through the darkness: “Is that so?”

THOMAS JOE (6) Awake. And at the end of that aching dream, when I turn from the window to where Brutus had stood, there stands my wife. Her eyes crying empty tears of grief, her hair falling onto her shoulders in black strands, I wish to touch that sad face, to smell the ambrosial hair. And when I take one step forward, she takes one step back. And smiles.

CAILA QUINN

My Emme

G

azing out the window with eyes of olive and hazel, lashes

heavy weighed by time; Emme waits. Dark is the sky beyond the glass, striped with trails of water. The lull around her of nonsensical chatter leads her to rest as she waits. Her hair is a golden brown with waves that weave around her neck and chest. Her skin, a warm crème hidden by her layers of clothing, is a haven from the world that consumes her. A hand resting on her stomach, Emme feels a kick that makes her stomach churn. Senses alert she scans the fluorescent walkway and ends up grabbing a magazine out of her purse. Flipping through a Cosmopolitan, articles of How to improve your Sex Life made her laugh. “Improving sex is like trying to rent a movie, men never get it right,” she mumbled to herself. “37A?” asked a devilishly handsome, aged man of 48. “Yes, one second.” Maneuvering like a fat man getting out of a child’s car seat, Emme balanced one hand on her back, into the aisle. Beads on her forehead and bladder in a knot; Emme like Moses parted the sea of people, as no one gets in the way of a pregnant lady darting to the bathroom.

Left in row 37 is a weary Emery Collier. His skin is more leathery than it used to be, but he still had the same smile in his eyes. A scar wraps itself around the left side of his neck like a snake and tattoo resided on the right: the date 1983. His suspenders pull up his pants more than he would like and he rearranges himself. Mr. Collier in the process turns to find a stringy haired boy with freckles abundant licking and smelling the flight information pamphlet in seat 37C. Relieved the boy was not adjacent to his seat Mr. Collier gazed out the window to count the number of planes on the runway. He has always counted them. I remember his favorite planes were the ones with a propeller on the front. That was his dream to fly.

“Flight 3891 Service to Napa, California will now be preparing for takeoff,” said the pilot, “flight attendants please prepare for take off.” Stuck facing herself in the mirror Emme pulled the lock open and gripped the accordion door with force. She was a forceful one like her mother and walked the four seats to row 37. Squishing the seven year old while grasping the seats around, she manages to plop back into her throne. Emme did not hesitate to make herself comfortable as she took advantage of both armrests to find her right one was recently cleaned with a certain little boys tongue. She closes her eyes, humming and rubbing her stomach like a treasured magical lamp. The pressure from the plane lifts her body and like bread in an oven the plane rises.

“How far along are you?” asked Mr. Collier. “Six months but it feels longer. It’s a girl in case you were wondering.” “What’s her name going to be?” “Katherine.” “That’s a great name. Hopefully she can grow up a fighter.” Emme enjoyed his tenacity like I did, and they found themselves sharing more than two on a plane would normally share. They were beautiful together, but as soon as Emme was to uncover the truth destiny stepped in. “Do you have any ki…,” said Emme. “Hello Sir,” interrupted the stewardess, “my name is Destiny. Can I get you anything to drink? Why,

CAILA QUINN look at you little miss or should I say not so little!” Destiny a southern bell fresh off the farm had a heart as big as her tied up ponytail braid that extended below her behind. “May I have a cran-apple, please Ms. Destiny?” “Well aren’t you a sweet little old man,” she replied. “Can you make that two please,” said Emme nauseous from Ms. In-Your-Face’s comments. “Here you two go. You know, you two look alike.” Destiny grabbed Emme’s chin intruding on any personal space that had been rightfully established by the airplane manufacturers. “Your eyes are just amazing, darlin’: kind’ov like a greeny browny swirl.” No sooner than when she let go of Emme’s face Destiny tapped Mr. Collier on the nose. “You know you have the same eyes as she does. What are the chances of that?”

Distracted like a little puppy, Destiny looked at the boy next to Emme in the aisle seat. “Look at this little angel. Honey, I bet your baby will be just like him,” Destiny said as she rolled her cart right on. The freckle boy to Emme was asleep for the moment with head back and mouth open wide to catch flies. Emme laughed on the inside and prayed her girl would not be like the inquisitive boy. She smiled at Mr. Collier and for a second she noticed his distinctive eyes: olive and hazel.

Mr. Collier worn gazed out the window and his mind began to wonder. The sky was clearer from above the clouds, brighter. Emery used to be married. For a short while he was a wonderful husband. He lived with his wife in Argentina during the Dirty War. Political corruption and disappearances were becoming more frequent. To protect his wife, he sent her back to the United States. Later that year he would be announced a prisoner of war: captured for three years. His wife thought he was dead. Mr. Collier imagined his wife, from years ago, with him in these clouds. His old wrinkled hands quiver as his breath slowly fills his body.

The loudspeaker fills the plane and says, “Can I have your attention please? The captain has turned on the seatbelt sign and we are now preparing to land.” “If you don’t mind leaning back,” said Emme, “I would like to count the planes as we land. They make me feel safe.” Mr. Collier somehow knew my Emme. Emery knew my Emme. He looked out the window counting the planes and thinking of what to say. He decided he would not say anything. The plane slowly gliding down, Emme grasping the armrest caught a glance of something.

“Can I ask you a question?” said Emme looking at the old man’s neck. With hesitation he replied, “Yes.” “Why do you have the date 1983, if you don’t mind me asking?” The slow motion of the plane lulled Emery as he turned away to the window. “That was the last year I saw my wife. Her name was Katherine.” Heart palpitating he fixates his eyes out the window.

The sun brightly dances on olive trees in the distance. His hands were clenching his knee. Emme slowly places her hand on his. “I can’t believe it’s you,” she whispers to herself.

My name is Katherine Anne Thompson. I died March 2009. Twentysix years ago, I had a girl: Emme Loraine Thompson. I never remarried, but fell in love and stayed young in my daughter. She lives, having now found someone new she can hold closely and she is happy.

MAGGIE CRAIG

Staples, Tissues, and Flowers

I

t’s funny how hairnets and spatulas seem appealing right now. How

I consider air almost visibly laden with lard somewhat desirable. I long to wear a grease stained polo embossed with the double arches, to punch orders into a cashier asking, “Do you want fries with that?”

I am not wearing any such shirt or hairnet. I know I just glorified fast food enough to rival Dane Cook’s description. Gosh, I feel like an idiot. I slump behind the wheel of my gloriously beige Punto and reflect that this 14 year old pile of rust contributes to the reason why I am in this particular situation. Ah, the things we will do for a car... I frown irritably at the dark brick building in front of me as if it is to blame for its job opportunities.

While regular teenagers across the country flip burgers, wipe tables, and tan their beautiful bodies lifeguarding, I am spending my summer days at a funeral home. My father assures me that under no circumstances will I come in direct contact with “those dead people”. No, all I am subjected to is the maintenance and minor jobs - cleaning the hearse for example, or perhaps greeting at a wake or during calling hours. Basically I have become the funeral nanny. I have to be at least twenty-one with two years of mortuary science to graduate from my current level of status. Mortuary science. I there even such a thing? I mean, people do this voluntarily? “Ah, but you do,” the voice in my head reminds. I groan and place my head on the steering wheel in surrender.

The “$9.50 an hour, $9.50 an hour,” chant feebly resumes its internal repetition, but somehow it is not as persuasive as it was when I first agreed. Yes, the higher pay is desirable, but now I would rather take the hairnet.

My eyes dart to the Kreighbaum and Gerhardstein Funeral Home and Services sign and wonder what nationality I am dealing with here. Deciding that I have wasted enough self pity for one morning, I sigh and step out of my car. The gravel crunches noisily underneath my shoes as I walk to the front door. It creaks when it opens. Some sick part of me wants to burst out into panicked hysterical laughter at the ominous sound, but I decide that I am not in the mood.

The first thing I see is a box of tissues. I do not know why it catches my attention; it is a box of such an uneventful gray that the pattern seems a sort of afterthought. I note the brand is Puffs. It sits, unopened, upon a spotless desk.

Beside it is a plastic vase of fake roses. Glancing around the remainder of the room, I locate several other tissue boxes and clumps of plastic flowers. As my eyes sweep the room, I notice I am not the only occupant of the room who is still among the living. A woman enveloped in a lumpy gray sweater stands by the opposite wall, obviously waiting for me to recognize her presence.

She is a small woman, hunched with age. Her skin is so wrinkled she would highly benefit from the extra drop of moisture provided by the Puffs.

Her wispy and sparse hair drifts upward, revealing several age spots lingering upon her wrinkled forehead. She smiles, and the skin about her mouth folds upward.

MAGGIE CRAIG “Hello, dear,” she says in a cracked voice. “You’re Cassandra’s daughter, correct?” I nod but cannot answer. Her eyes flash at me with unvoiced understanding. Thankfully she does not pursue the topic. “Thank you so much for coming. Your help is much appreciated.” Not sure what to do, I mumble a “Thank you.” I haven’t even done anything yet. “When I first met with your father and aunt, you know, to negotiate procedures, they talked quite a bit about you.” I stare at the carpet. “When they mentioned you were looking for summer job I thought of how refreshing it would be to have a young face out and about.” I wonder what sort of response she expected. “Yes,” is always a safe bet, but it didn’t quite seem to fit because she wasn’t exactly asking for my opinion. I decided a noncommittal grunt would suffice.

“Well, I asked them how much young people are getting paid theses days. Your father told me between 7 and 8 dollars and hour. And I said to him right then and there I would give you 9.50 and hour. They say they’d give you my offer and let you decide for yourself and get back to me and will just look at that - here you are. Isn’t that nice.” She pats her hair absentmindedly and looks to me for a reaction. “Yes,” I reply. This seems to be the right thing to do, for she smiles again. “Now I don’t want you to fret, dear. You aren’t old enough yet to get too involved in the whole process. You need your license and years at school. No, I’ve got other people for that. No, what I need you to do is come over here,” she walks me over to another desk, this one too unsurprisingly adorned with tissues and flowers, “and fold and staple these.” She gestures to three enormous piles of papers. “These are the papers for this week and next week’s services. You finish these and get back to me. Okay, honey?

I continue my stapling and folding adventures of yesterday. Sitting behind the desk I observed when I first walked in, I enjoy a full view of the entrance. I watch a steady stream of individuals enter and exit thought that door, all with various levels of emotion. They enter, some clutching the hands of husbands or oblivious children, crying openly. Some are too sad to cry. With white faces and stiff postures, they stride into the funeral home alone, determined to get the job done with as little emotion as possible. Mrs. Kreighbaum stands in her corner and greets them all with the same calm understanding smile she gave to me. Depending on their condition, she might deftly reach behind her for a box of tissues. She’ll open it, and hand a wad over in one smooth maneuver I’ve come to admire. She then leads the person or family to her back office to “negotiate procedures”. And I sit, staple, and fold. “9.50 an hour,” I remind myself, “and not one dead body yet.”

Two weeks pass in a similar fashion, with only an occasionally paper cut here or there to complain about. My work day rotates between driving my hot rod to pick up flowers, artistically arranging cookies and punch for calling hours in back rooms, and most frequently, folding and stapling papers. And somewhere in between, I’ve found myself exchanging more then a “Yes,” and a noncommittal grunt with Mrs. Kreighbaum.

In between customers, for lack a more sensitive name, she sits with one leg crossed over the other and studies my face as I speak to her. She barely says anything to me when I get going, but her reactions etch themselves in the lines around her face. I do not stray near what she already knows about me and she does not ask, for which I am grateful. I babble on about the looming college hunt ahead, about my older sister studying in Europe for her

MAGGIE CRAIG degree, about school and sports and band, anything and everything that I have been holding back for so long. She tells me she took required counseling courses before she was allowed work in the industry, but she is not a shrink and I am not a patient lying on a leather couch. She is a little old lady and I am a teenager who has grown to need her. Now I have somebody to talk to again.

“Jennifer?”

“Hmm?” I respond, without looking up. I have advanced so fully into the stapling zone that I can now do an average 5 per minute. I feel rather proud of myself actually. When Mrs. Kreighbaum does not respond however, I put down the stapler and look up. “Yes?” “Jenny dear, will you look at that funeral paper in your hand for me?”

“Erm, yeah, sure.” I glance down at it. “In loving memory of Carl Reliquiski,” I read aloud. She motions me to continue further. “Calling hours located at Kreighbaum and Gerhardstein Funeral Home and services, Wednesday the 15, 6:15 – 8.” I look up expectantly.

“Jenny, honey,” she says. I begin to feel nervous. Where was she going with this? But I think I might know. “You know I haven’t asked you to be the greeter at any of these services thus far. I usually have Dennis or Rodney or maybe even Barbara when she doesn’t drive, but their shifts have ended…” she trails off, looking desperately at me. My heart plummets.

“So, do you want me to be the greeter?”

“Oh, would you?” she cries, obviously happy that I have grasped her meaning so quickly. I silently nod. “It starts in 15 minutes,” she reminds me gently. Before she turns away, she places her age-spotted hand on the crown of my head. Then she was gone.

I slump in the desk still holding the stapler. I doubt stapling my forehead would make the situation any better, but it is highly tempting. I want to go to the parking lot and curl up in the backseat of my Punto, but I would probably break the rusted metal. I want to hop on a plane and find my sister, but she is studying somewhere and really couldn’t spare the time. I want my friends from school, but they’re all at work. But most of all I want my mom. For the last calling hours of funeral I attended were her’s.

If I want somebody to blame for this situation, I suppose I could be down right cold hearted and blame her. She is the reason I first heard Kreighbaum and Gerhardstein Funeral Home and Services. She is the reason my dad and aunt first negotiated to Mrs. Kreighbaum, mentioned my fruitless summer job search hunts, and suggested the possibility. I could probably blame her for more, but I know none are truly her fault.

I sit back in the chair and rub my face. My eyes dart to the clock on the opposite wall and I dimly register that should go. Standing up, I push in my chair and walk to one of the down stairs room. My footsteps echo unnaturally loud against the white walls of the stairwell. I am frightened. I know I’m stupid to work at a funeral home and think I’ll avoid all direct contact with death. But after a month, my only real involvement with the death industry consisted of staples, which I don’t consider too traumatic. It’s just that, for a good long while, I haven’t had to think of Her. Thoughts of Her cumulate in my head when I have nobody to talk to, nobody to be with. Ever since I’ve started work here with Mrs. Kreighbaum, I haven’t felt lonely. Her presence dulls the pain of Her absence. But now, standing in front of two open double doors, acutely aware of who/what is lying in an opened coffin, I have no choice but to think of Her. I feel

MAGGIE CRAIG lightheaded and sick. I extend the pamphlets to old men with tweed jackets and receding hairlines, to women clutching handkerchiefs, to grand children either bored or confused with the proceedings. And suddenly I find I cannot see too clearly. My vision swims in fast approaching tears and I know I need to get out of there. I shove the rest of the papers into the hands of a highly startled woman in a shoulder padded jacket and run upstairs. I stare wildly about the room, and my eyes land on an unopened box of Puffs and a vase of roses. Without even pausing to think, my hands seize these objects and taking them with me I hurry outside I wish the air was freezing. I want snow to billow around me in clouds of impenetrable white, for rain drops to pelt downwards and punish the pavement. There weather is not broken and grieving like I demand it to be.

Instead it is perfect. The sun daintily peaks out from behind a puff cloud and not a breath of winds stirs the surrounding trees. They are mocking me. I raise my arms to swipe at my eyes, for I am still holding this tissues and flowers.

Before I stop and realize how stupid I look and that I am technically stealing office property, I take brisk steps to the rear of the building. Behind Kreighbaum and Gerhardstein Funeral Home and Services stretch a vast field littered with slabs of gray tombstones. I know where She lies. On the left side of the lot, bordered by a clump of evergreens, she lies, peaceful and still.

I kneel and feel the moisture from the grass seep into my pant legs. I hardly notice. Sweeping my tangled hair back, I slowly place the unopened box of Puffs and the plastic vase of fake roses on her grave. Against my will, the strong desire to laugh creeps up in me and release itself in half a laugh, half a sob. She would have laughed at this pitiful scene. Maybe cried too.

Maybe She would have known that these fake flowers will never wilt and that these tissues will remain unopened. Maybe She would have liked it. I sit back and survey my work, sniffling and laughing a bit more. I stay our there until it feels right and until Mrs. Kreighbaum will expect me back. I stand up and go back inside. The wind blows and I might have felt a raindrop, but oddly enough, all I feel is relief.

BECCA CARTELLONE

Wonderful

S

livers of moonlight shone down through the trees like miniature

spotlights, illuminating glimpses of puddles and leaves on the shadowy ground. The scent of spring rain swirled with the breeze through the heavy night air, and crickets gossiped with each other, hidden out of view. The peaceful night enveloped me, trying to protect me, but it was no use. Inside my head was nothing but chaos.

I was running, chasing her through the woods around a winding path cleared between the trees. I had to catch her. I didn’t consciously know why, I just knew I had to reach her in time.

My legs and bare feet were coated in mud from the knees down. I slipped around a bend in the path, my hands sloshing into puddles, causing my face to be splattered in mud freckles. I got up quickly, never stopping, practically skating across the slippery, sludgy path. I was almost at the end, almost at the river that sliced through the forest behind my house. She couldn’t be far ahead now.

Tammy. Catch her. Keep going. Tammy. The mantra played in my head like a broken record.

Finally I rounded the last bend, reaching the massive tree blocking the path that had fallen over during a storm the previous summer. I couldn’t see past it, but she had to be there. I could feel her presence. I had made it.

But when I looked over the tree trunk, no one was there.

My eyes flashed open. I was breathing heavily, and my hair was damp with sweat around my hairline, almost like I had just sprinted through the woods, but in reality I was safe in my bed. I closed my eyes as I let myself calm down. It was a dream. Just a dream. Yet I couldn’t shake it from my mind.

This same dream had plagued me for over a week now, and I was scared. Because it always ended the same way. And Tammy had been acting strangely lately. I couldn’t help but think that the dream was trying to tell me something. That Tammy was trying to tell me something. They said things like that might happen with twins.

I pushed it to the back of mind, because it was probably nothing.

Untangling my legs from the covers, I rolled out of bed and stretched. I felt like I hadn’t slept at all.

Downstairs, my mom was sitting at the kitchen table eating a bagel and flipping through the latest issue of InStyle.

“Mornin’,” I greeted her, as I poured myself a glass of OJ. “Have you seen Tammy yet today?”

She glanced up from her magazine, and then went back to studying the best dresses for her body shape. “No. She’s just in her room.”

“I haven’t seen her for days. Don’t you think it’s a little weird how she never wants to come out of her room?”

My mom sighed. She knew this conversation. “No, I don’t think it’s

BECCA CARTELLONE ‘weird’ that your sister is tired and wants some privacy. That’s completely normal teenage behavior. Everyone goes through a moody stage in their life, Meg.” She pushed her chair out and took her plate to the sink, meaning we were done discussing this matter. But I didn’t want to be done. I wanted her to realize that this was serious. I wanted her to admit that something really was wrong with Tammy. And then I wanted her to do something about it. But instead, she just smiled, and acted like everything was perfect. And I let her.

I poured another glass of OJ to bring up to Tammy. When we were little, it was the only thing either of us would ever drink.

Tammy’s door was closed, but I could hear faint music playing inside, so I knew she was awake. Besides, her door was always closed these days.

Tammy was lying on her bed. She shot up when she heard me come in, startled that she was being disturbed.

“Hey. I brought you some orange juice.”

It was like she didn’t hear me. “What are you doing?”

I recognized the music floating in the background. “Wonderful” by Everclear. I go to my room and I close my eyes, I make believe that I have a new life, I don’t believe you when you say, everything will be wonderful some day.

“I thought you’d be thirsty,” I said, gesturing again to the orange juice.

“I’m not.”

“But you love OJ.” “No I don’t. I don’t want it.”

“But that doesn’t make any -” “I don’t want it, okay!” She yelled, and shoved me out of her room.

“Just leave me alone.” She slammed her door shut, but I could still hear the song playing inside. Some days I hate everything, I hate everything, everyone and everything. Please don’t tell me everything is wonderful now.

We were having meatloaf for dinner. Shockingly, the scent somehow lured Tammy out of her room. I wanted to forget the episode from earlier, but I couldn’t.

“Since when do you not like orange juice, Tammy?” I asked innocently.

Mom cut her off before she even started talking. “What do you mean?”

I described to her what had happened that morning. “People don’t just change their tastes all of a sudden. You know that.”

“She’s probably just feeling sick. Orange juice always used to upset my stomach.” We were talking about her like she wasn’t even there.

“Quit making up excuses to explain away everything! Quit denying it! Something is WRONG!” I cried, exasperated. She had to understand.

“No, Meg, NOTHING is wrong!”

“How can you say that?! She’s in her room all day -” “SHUT UP!” Tammy exploded, jumping out of her chair. “I hear you arguing about me all the time, and I’m sick of it! Because not once did you even ask me how I was feeling!” She turned to mom, screaming, “You’re blind to not see I’m upset! And ignoring it is pointless! You think that you’re

BECCA CARTELLONE you’re just sitting by, watching it fall apart!”

She ran out the back door, leaving nothing but silence in her wake.

We were stunned, my mom especially. She didn’t realize Tammy was capable of exploding like that. And quite frankly, neither had I. I thought about Tammy, and everything about her that had seemed off lately. I tried to remember the last time I’d seen her smile, but I couldn’t.

I thought about the song she had been listening to, and my dream…

That’s when I panicked. Because Tammy had gone outside. Into the backyard. Where the path to the creek was.

That’s when I shot out of my chair and started sprinting towards the woods.

The sky was clear for the first night in a week. The full moon hung suspended against the ebony backdrop of night. My bare feet sunk into the damp grass, making it harder to run. I slipped in a puddle, my dream all over again. But I had to catch her. I had to know how the dream ended. But I wasn’t quite sure that I wanted to know.

When I was about to come to the felled oak crossing the path, I stopped running. I imagined Tammy as a scared deer; I didn’t want to frighten her away. Like in the dream, I felt her presence on the other side of the tree. And this time she was really there.

She was standing by the edge of the creek, peering over the side into the rushing water below, entranced. The rain of the past few days had turned our creek into a fast flowing river. I couldn’t see her face, but I could tell she was crying.

And then she took a step closer to the edge.

That’s when I realized what she was going to do.

My breath caught in my chest as I fought my way over the tree, scraping my hands on the bark and not caring in the least. I fell to the ground and scrambled up, throwing myself at Tammy. She leaned back closer to the edge, and all I could see were her eyes. Big, round, like the moon. Scared, lost. Lonely.

Then she was in my arms, sobbing into my shoulder. I dragged her away from the edge. Safe. All she needed was someone to care about her.

And that’s when I knew that everything would be wonderful.

Someday.

CAROLINE GRISWOLD

Accusations and Confessions

“D

on’t jump to conclusions. This could all be a big misunderstanding.”

He sounded frightened even as he said this. He was always being afraid of something.

“Don’t lie to me,” she said.

“I’m not lying.”

“Yes you are.”

He looked away. He didn’t want to argue. He was terribly scared of confrontation.

The girl sat at the desk in the middle of the harshly lit police station interrogation room waiting for the man to leave her alone. She closed her eyes tightly for one moment, and opened them with purpose, staring deeply at the desk. But it was still there, the file on the table that she was handcuffed to. The blanched manila folder with her name on the small, highlighted tab. The folder that told how she murdered the post-man. The post-man, of all people.

“Dear God, dear God…” the man was pacing back and forth, the furrow in his brow getting deeper and deeper with each lap. The fear in his voice cut the air, but merely breezed past the girl with such ease that she barely even registered it. An anomaly, to be ignored.

“There is no God.” “Don’t talk like that sweetheart, now you listen to me, we’re gonna get out of this mess.”

“Who, you and God?” “Yes.” “Jesus, you’re such a liar.”

“You were always such a good girl, such a good, good, quiet girl.”

The District Attorney opened the door to the fluorescently lit room that seemed just too small for all of these big people.

The girl was guilty. She didn’t deny it, even to herself. She shot that mailman, emptied a clip into his chest, right into his chest. It was the most

CAROLINE GRISWOLD exhilarating thing she had ever done. It could have been anyone, really, anyone at all. She just needed to murder someone, and she liked his sky blue uniform. She pushed the gun against that pretty blue uniform. For the first time she felt unrestrained, even as she was chained to the desk.

“She didn’t do this, my daughter isn’t capable of doing something like this,” the man was perspiring profusely, that damned liar. He’s always so fucking scared.

“Yes I am.”

“Shut up Kat,” the man said nervously.

“I killed him,” she now addressed the DA. “Could I get that in writing?”

“You want details?”

“Everything you did, from start to finish.” He pulled out a legal pad and a pen, and sat them next to her manila folder. Accusations, meet confessions.

Confessions, meet accusations.

Her clothes were covered in a burnt sienna color. She remembered the name because she used to paint, and that color always reminded her of dried blood. She even remembered the scent of turpentine, just then, as she was signing her name.

The man standing in the corner of the room looked on in horror.

“Kat, what have you done!”

“I already told you, I killed the post-man.”

MARTHA MILLER

Like I Need a Hole in My Head

H

e lay next to her in the dark, his arm wrapped around her, her

head lying on his chest while he inhaled her conditioner scent—had she changed it again? Supposedly you had to change shampoo and conditioner products every six months, to keep your hair... he couldn’t even remember the adjective she had used. It might have been supple, but that didn’t make any sense whatsoever in context, so he wasn’t entirely positive that was it.

Was it even her that changed hair products every six months? It could have been Monica that did that... or, no, what was her name, not Brittany...

Brenda? Had he ever dated a Brenda? Wasn’t Brenda his second cousin twice removed or something like that? Jesus Christ he was getting far too old for this. At twenty-five. He was old at twenty-five. This was his birthday present to himself. ‘Dammit, Mitch,’ he thought to himself. ‘You should have just bought a hooker. Much less problematic.’

As if she could hear his thoughts, she shifted in his arms, moving her head up to rest more on his shoulder. “Mmhm, Mitch,” she mumbled into his ear. She was half-asleep already. Mitch never could figure out how people did that, roll over and sleep right after sex. Didn’t they feel more alert? Or maybe it was less alert, and more just stuck in his own head. He didn’t even know why he kept doing this to himself. It was only going to end badly.

He realized suddenly he hadn’t actually responded to... oh Jesus.

Her name. You knew it got really really bad when you couldn’t remember the name of the woman you had just fucked... the one you were supposed to be dating, despite the fact that she had told him up front that she had a boyfriend and that said boyfriend was in the Marines and could kick his ass with his little pinky. Why had that not seemed to matter at the moment?

What the hell was he doing in bed?

“Mitch?” she asked again. She was getting impatient, and like with all girls when she got impatient they ended up getting into fights and of course it was all Mitch’s fault. He would be the first to admit it. And he would admit it, too, in front of her, usually by yelling it in her face. It was his own damn fault that he hadn’t said no when she had hit on him, that he had just stared puppy-eyed while they got drunk together and that he hadn’t just gone home when she had invited him to come up. That was always the part that got him in trouble. “Do you want to come up?” Got him every time.

Even if the thought of sleeping with the woman in question hadn’t crossed his mind before, he invariably would not be able to say no and then he would go up and they would sleep together, at least three times before he came to his senses, and rarely would the number be that low. He could blame it all on the ridiculous male libido, on how slutty women were nowadays, but it wouldn’t have mattered because when it came down to it, he couldn’t let go of a woman once he had her. Their relationships never meant anything in the long run, but he refused to be the one to call it quits.

He wasn’t a quitter, not with his women.

“What, baby?” he finally mumbled back, hoping to God he sounded

MARTHAMILLER he sounded groggy enough to pass for having been woken up, just so she wouldn’t get mad at him. He hated getting into fights with his girls, the women he was dating, the women he was fucking. It made sex harder, and sex was pretty much the name of the game at this point. He hadn’t truly dated a single woman because he liked her in... Jesus, had he ever dated a girl just because he liked her? It didn’t make any sense to him to do that, beyond the pure ‘he was supposed to do that’ aspect. He liked it better when they had boyfriends, when he was the boyfriend on the side or secret lover or even just the occasional fuck when the primary relationship had temporarily fallen apart. The guys never knew. Most of them would probably kill him if they found out. He liked that. There was danger in the unavailable girl, the worry that the overstimulated boyfriend would walk in on them while they fucked in his bed. He liked doing that too, doing it in their bed. Sometimes the girls would protest, usually the ones he had picked up weepy and drunk because the boyfriend had left, saying that no, that wasn’t right, Reggie would get angry. He just kissed that spot that seemed to work on every girl—right on her collarbone, at the base of her neck—then work his way up until his eyes met hers and he would smile. “Come on, babe. It’ll be okay.”

He realized suddenly that the whole time he had been thinking, the girl he was cuddling with had been speaking. “I’m sorry, babe, I’m really tired, what did you say?” he asked hoarsely, just to get her to repeat it. He was having problems focusing tonight. Maybe because he knew what was coming, or thought he did anyway. They all ended like this anyway.

“What’re you thinking about?” she asked instead, turning so she could stare up at the ceiling, like it would tell her his exact thoughts. He didn’t turn to look at her back. He just stared at the ceiling with her, not letting her watch the lie as it formed on his lips.

“How beautiful you are, baby,” he said.

“Mitch,” she said, in that way that girls do that’s supposed to be warningly, but always comes out more as an innocent, ‘oh you AWFUL thing!’. He never dated a girl that could say no, on principal. He didn’t want to work too hard.

“It’s true,” he insisted. “You’re so beautiful, babe. Man, if I were an artist, I would construct fucking BUILDINGS inspired by your beauty. You’re like a muse, babe.”

“What the hell’s a muse?” she asked, looking back at him.

‘Just stare at the ceiling, Mitch,’ he told himself as the words came and left his mouth. “They were, like, Greek mythology or some shit. They were beautiful and they used to come to the artists and writers and singers that were going to be special and they would inspire them, instill the power to move humans with their artwork of choice, change the world with what they were going to do.”

She giggled. “You’re not gonna change the world, Mitch,” she said, as if she was speaking to a five year old.

He chuckled a little. “Not any time soon, probably not,” he agreed.

Or ever. He wasn’t a world-changer, a mover. He was a lover, a man who enjoyed his women and enjoyed them often. Those people didn’t change the world. That was just how it worked, really. People like him didn’t change the world, ever. Not if they could help it. Too much work. He could feel incredibly self-righteous about certain things, sure, but when it came to action... that

MARTHAMILLER part was not particularly possible.

“The only thing you ever change is your clothes,” she continued. He smiled half-heartedly at the ceiling, the smile fading into a grimace once she looked back up at what he was looking at. He didn’t particularly enjoy being made fun of. He could deal it out all he wanted to, but taking it... it was supposedly one of his faults. He didn’t particularly think so. It never mattered to him. Well, being made fun of mattered—he didn’t like it—but his faults? He could acknowledge that he had faults. It wasn’t hard. He wasn’t about to try to fix himself—lovers didn’t do that until they found their One True Love, and then they reformed their awful ways and lived happily ever after. This wasn’t happily ever after, for sure. Happily ever after generally came with your own woman, not some other guy’s that you were just borrowing for a while.

“Mitch, are you even listening to me?” The other guy’s woman demanded from next to him. “God. You never listen to me any more.”

Mitch shook his head. God. He was normally so good at this, keeping all his girls straight, paying attention to them when they needed him to. He was just tired. That was it. Yeah.

“I’m tired. I’m sorry babe. Long day at work. The boss is a nasty bitch every day, you know?”

“Aw.” She curled up next to him, sliding her skinny leg over his stomach. He had the sudden impulse to push her away, to climb out of bed and yell and get out of her life, but instead he just lay there as she rested her head on his shoulder, tracing the side of his jaw with her finger. “I’m sorry, sweetie.” She kissed his ear, her teeth scraping against his skin and he shivered for a moment, and then turned his head to look at her. She glowed, biting her lower lip while she grinned almost embarrassedly. He smiled back at her and reached around her back to pull her on top of him.

She giggled, shaking her head to get her hair back out of her face, and then knelt down to kiss him.

Across the bedroom, her bedroom, her boyfriend’s bedroom, Mitch heard the door open, and closed his eyes as she pulled away. Finally. There was one less girl he had to worry about now. Just a little rib-smashing and then he could go home.

He almost grinned as the shouting commenced, and he opened his eyes to grin cockily at the boyfriend of the woman he had just slept with.

Nothing had really changed at all with his birthday. He was twenty-five, but he may as well have been twenty. And, he thought as he braced himself for that first punch to the jaw, his life was absolutely perfect.

MARY CARTER

The TV

I

t began when the husband wanted a new TV. It was a typical

fight—the wife thought that they should save their money for a new dishwasher; the husband thought that watching the Eagles in hi-def was much more worthwhile. They went to the home store together to “look around” (those were the husband’s words) and “scope out some prices” (the wife really just wanted to see the dishwashers). As soon as they entered the store they went their separate ways, the wife clutching her purse protectively under one arm and nervously patting her hair as she walked over to the appliance section, her husband heading over to the television section as he winked in the general direction of the girl twirling her hair at the cash register. He walked around for a bit, LCD kaleidoscopes swarming in front of his eyes. He was a financial analyst at a polished and lucrative firm downtown, he was bringing home the money, and he thought they should have a new TV. His wife did nothing; her days were filled with scrubbing already pristine windows and meticulously weeding already perfect gardens. She couldn’t have children, they had found that out. Not that that really bothered him; he supposed he wouldn’t have been a good father anyway. He was too selfish. Besides, they really didn’t need a new dishwasher.

He spent a few minutes staring at the TVs lined up tantalizingly on the wall, their screens glowing in unison. He had always found vaguely unsettling the way the televisions all flickered at the same time, with the same image, in an unbroken line. He was able to recover from the momentary shock however, and saw one that looked about right within moments. It was silver with a sort of pearly sheen. The plastic was smooth and cool to the touch; the screen sharply projected a game of college football, where the green grass on the playing field starkly contrasted against the snowstorm pounding vehemently on the windows of the store.

He stared at it for a minute, his eyes locked on the artificial light that beamed from the game straight into his heart. He realized suddenly that his nose was a mere 3 inches from the screen, though he didn’t remember walking closer. Television had that effect on him—it sucked him away from reality into an alternate universe where everything was brighter and more alive. From his close proximity he could see the individual squares of color that together created his game. He could see their symmetry, the way the pixels expanded in diamond-like shapes outwards. It was perfect and he wanted it. He glanced over to the other side of the store, where his wife was deep in conversation with a pierced-lip employee, who was trying to politely stifle a yawn. His wife was nodding in agreement at something the guy had said as she ran her hands over the side of a stainless steel dishwasher. Her hands moved elegantly to the knobs on the front and turned them gently, surveying them with intent. Her hair was twisted into this complicated knot, held together by one of those huge banana clips he never understood. A piece of blonde hair had fallen out and was casually brushing her cheek each time she moved. She was the picture of perfect. Even the jeans she

MARY CARTER was wearing seemed polished. He knew his jeans never looked like that—they were always grungy and distressed, the way jeans should be. He didn’t deserve her, this he knew. He knew he treated her badly and he knew all she wanted was for him to hold her a little more gently. But he couldn’t change. That would be giving in to perfection, to falseness, away from truth.

He couldn’t stand for that. Out of the question. He knew right then what he would do. He waved over one of the girls chatting behind the counter and asked her to ring up the TV. He told her he was going to bring up the car and load it now. He brought home the money. He deserved this anyway.

On the way home his wife wasn’t even angry. He used to admire her spunk and vivacity when they were dating, the way she would wink at him across the room at parties and smile slyly before turning away. He had loved the way she would slap him and scream at him like it all mattered to her. He remembered the sensation of noise echoing off the walls into his overflowing ears like water. He loved chasing her. But everything about their marriage had made her soft. She had no spunk anymore—childless and lonely years had worn her out, had drained her and made her elegant and quiet. He wanted passion, argument, heat. But she looked sadly out the window, her grey eyes as blank as her face. He wondered when this had happened to her. He wanted her to hit him hard across the face, to feel the burning sting of her hand and the subsequent guilt that made him grateful for what he had. He glanced in the rearview mirror at the TV sitting in the back. The box was white and cheesy with a happy couple snuggled up on an expensive leather couch with a brimming bowl of yellow popcorn between them. He looked at his wife again, who was still staring out the window. Her breath fogged the window in little ovals that faded quickly on the glassy surface. She was watching the flakes of snow fall heavily on the street already blanketed in white. The car was trudging along slowly between the streetlamps whose outlines blurred in the falling snow. The wife was remembering an evening a few years ago, when they were coming home from a cocktail party. They had stopped the car giggling that night because the snow was too deep, stacked evenly in every direction. They hadn’t minded the wait. She remembered her cheeks flushing pink, his hand cupping her chin and pulling her closer. It had been a good night. She wondered why there hadn’t been more.

He stared at the road and remembered Christmas Eve last year, the way the snow swirled in diamond shapes like the pixelized TV screen, when they got a little drunk and she kissed him on the lips. There had been something different about that kiss—carefree, unconcerned, and gentle— that he had never forgotten. They used to have these long conversations about nothing, about anything. He remembered nights on the dewy grass, pointing at stars as wind nipped their cheeks. They had disappeared by degrees, those conversations. He couldn’t remember the last time he had asked her how she felt about something. He couldn’t remember the last time he had complemented her dress. Marriage had a way of destroying feelings; of ripping them apart and stretching them thin, of pushing his other half away.

They got home, and her husband immediately began setting up the TV. He had gently carried it inside and reverently unloaded it from the molded Styrofoam that squeaked in protest as he pulled his prize away. His wife was washing a cucumber for their salad and watching silently. There

MARY CARTER was no reproach in her stare, just softness and sadness. The husband threw the manual on the ground and began connecting cords one by one. The electrical wires were glossy and oiled as he felt the satisfying snap that indicated something was plugged in. He turned it on and static blared from a grey and white screen. His wife dropped the knife and covered her ears. He grabbed the freshly unpackaged remote and quickly turned down the volume, the green bars lowering too slowly across the screen. She turned her head to look at him, but he was already working, intently studying the manual balanced on his knee as he bent down to survey the scene. He switched a few wires and stood back. The screen was still fuzzy. He swore under his breath as he kept working to the rhythmic snap of a knife and cutting board.

He still hadn’t gotten it to work after dinner. They were sitting across from each other at the kitchen table, drinking half full glasses of wine and looking at different papers. Occasionally one would look up to see the other reading intently and then go back to their article. Their eyes hopped from the paper to their spouse, glancing over the latest economic crisis with false interest, and then observing with much more concern the person on the other side of the table. The TV was still flickering in the background, casting a white light in the dark living room. It lent a ghastly glow to an otherwise warm house. The wife had always liked yellow lights, and so at night the rooms were usually flushed with warm bright lights. The TV destroyed this glow, this image of a home. The husband said that there was some problem with the wires; that the communication between the satellite and the converter box wasn’t working the way it should. She nodded as she took the plates from the table, her eyes on the half-finished steak he hadn’t eaten. The wife rinsed the plates and opened the dishwasher to load them.

She added soap and spun the knob, silently comparing this one and the one in the store. She pushed the start button, and the dishwasher made a grinding sound as it started. That wasn’t how it was supposed to sound, she noted with a sick sort of triumph. She watched as water began to leak from the bottom, soapy suds shortly following. The bubbles made a neat pile around the dishwasher as she quickly shut it off so her hardwood floor wasn’t too damaged. She looked at her husband reading the paper, oblivious to anything. She watched the snow outside fall in neat stacks on the windows like the sparkling suds around the dishwasher. Her husband looked up, and they stared at each other without speaking. She gave him a sly smile as the TV flickered black and white in the background.

LAURIE COFFIN

Puddle Jumpers

You stood beside a flowerbed in your mother’s garden. You might have been mistaken for an unusually delicate garden gnome had you not bent over to inspect something hidden in the grass. As you raised your small hand upward, I saw bright metallic veins embroidered in the fabric of a single dragonfly wing. I caught your eye and you looked at me pleadingly before walking towards me and pressing the solitary wing into the flesh of my palm. Confident in the simplicity of your silent request, you turned and drifted easily back to the blossoms.

Three days later rain came to us in muffled heartbeats against our ears. The drops against the cold windowpane streamed in melodies as you drifted into a gentle sleep. Your small form rose and fell as I watched, imagining the prideful lungs behind your ribs, so fine-like shards of porcelain-filling you with the breathe of childhood. Those breaths were good breaths.

When you woke the rain had left us, our melancholy cloud defeated by the warm light from an early evening sun. The light fell like an ethereal honey from above us, dripping into your tangles of fine hair and slipping over your bare feet. It soaked through the tops of my cheekbones as we walked into the cool air that hung like time from the top of our universe. The entire world was encased in a fragile gold foil, and in the passing of every instantaneous moment I collected 100,000 specks of radiance, and watched as they circled inwards towards eternity.

In red rain boots you pranced a cheerful dance down the wide green span of the yard. The quick happy steps pitied the slowness of my own movements as I followed you towards the edge of the sodden asphalt driveway.

Rainy days always meant afternoon naptimes followed by puddle jumping if the skies cleared for us. Together, without searching, you and I had found the perfect place for it. We crossed the street, your hand almost completely encompassed by my own, and headed down the darkened sidewalks towards the nearby playground. The colorful metal jungle stood glistening behind a sizable stretch of parking lot that sprawled across the ground before us. A hundred silent cataclysms had left their histories in the form of deep potholes and crumbling cracks and gouges within the blacktop.

The parking lot and playground were both silent and still, with one exception: the soft murmur of water flying upwards as the soles of your shoes crashed down upon it.

Unlike many of your classmates at school, you had never enjoyed speaking the fast, disconnected language of childhood. Instead, you carried a subtle yet pregnant silence across your face whenever in the company of others. On the rare occasions when you did speak, it was usually regarding something that you considered very important to you. It therefore surprised me when I heard your almost unfamiliar voice drift cautiously across the parking lot. You asked me where the other puddle jumpers were. I had been watching a fat bird stab at a grey worm. I looked away from the worm to see you. Standing motionless in the middle of one of the bigger puddles, you looked shockingly vulnerable and worn for your age. My eyes traveled over the tops of the red boots, almost covered by the murky contents of the

LAURIE COFFIN puddle, then up to the small, kind oval of your face, uncharacteristically slackened and empty looking. “The other puddle jumpers?” I repeated, slightly curious as to what about that question would have warranted the uncharacteristic vocalization. “Yes” you said, simply. “Where is everyone else today?”

I walked over to stand closer to you in your puddle. I said to you, “well, it’s rainy out”. Almost offensive in the speed of your reaction, you replied “No. No it’s not. I was asleep when the rain was falling and when I woke up the rain stopped.” You held your hands outward and turned your face to the sky, confirming your statement equally as much for yourself as for me, and then said, “Look, there is no rain on me.” Both the special occasion and the trivial nature of the conversation were becoming slightly amusing to me. I gingerly responded, “But it was raining, that’s why people aren’t out today. It’s still wet outside. People don’t like it when it’s wet outside”. This had been an attempt to ease whatever confusion you were experiencing but evidently it was of little or no interest to you .You looked at me blankly and walked out of the shallow water. “Do you like being outside when it’s wet out?” “Sometimes” I said sincerely. “But I love spending time with you no matter what the weather’s like.” You rolled a small cracked bit of asphalt around under your boot before looking up and saying quietly, “my feet are cold”. Sensing you had grown tired, I said that we should be heading home anyway-it would be dark out before we knew it.

As we started to walk out the entrance of the parking lot, I saw you turn your head to look back at the distant playground for a moment. “We can come back tomorrow, when it’s not rainy out anymore, okay?” You turned back to face me, and with a kind smile you nodded and said, “okay”.

The worm I had watched seize madly in the beak of the bird was gone when I looked to the spot I had occupied earlier. It had been such an ordinary occurrence; the black eyes above the short beak stabbing precisely with fierce vigor at the fleshy contortionist before it. I had seen this countless times on countless rainy days. The worms always come out and when the rain stops the birds eat them all.

The warm brightness at the beginning of the evening had changed into a dusk whose amber was two or three shades darker than the shade we had first known. We had only walked the first two blocks when it happened.

Approaching a short crosswalk we saw a man on the opposite side of the street lose hold of the leash attached to his large dog. The dog trotted quickly into the street as the man ran after him calling out the animal’s name. I saw the woman in the silver car shout out in panic as she swerved to avoid the shaggy dog in front of her. Barely missing the back legs of it with her wet tires, the man screamed in agony as he was pinned upwards into the trunk of a maple tree growing between the sidewalk and the street.

The man’s razor like cries and the deafening crunch of metal against bone against wood rose up into the air around us and swiftly devoured the bodies of our own terrible screams. Slumped over with her bloody head against the wheel of the car, the woman’s high-pitched car horn joined in with the man’s quickening screams, the instruments of an apocalyptic cacophony. The sounds clawed yet closer to our pumping hearts and I thought surely mine would be pierced and stop its pointless convulsions. But the shrill screams ended abruptly. Without the man’s voice like flames around us the once cacophony fell like ash to the damp

LAURIE COFFIN blackness of the street. The solitary car horn sang on in indifference as I was forced to look towards the tree.

Crimson sap crawled fast and then slow down the tree trunk into the wet grass. The earth, already saturated with moisture from the rain showers spit the blood in protest to the street. Here the warm red swirled in chaos with the cool run water and streamed down the hill like the solitary vein of a charred forearm. At pockmarks in the road, the stream split into many slower moving branches-the fingers attached the forearm’s disfigured hand. One of these creeping fingers ended when it slid over a small pothole in the middle of the street, some sixty feet from where we stood. As I ran with your shaking sobbing form held close to me, I felt my feeble heart strain to keep its manic rhythm for even just minutes more. Your eyes widened as we reached the next crosswalk and a faint red sheen beckoned them towards a shallow puddle in the middle of the street. In that moment something flew from within your depths escaping in a scream through the tiny mouth thrown wide in horror.

The car horn continued to ring in my ears as loudly as if it were inside my very skull. As I pulled the slippery red boots from your feet I thought I would surely vomit, but realizing the futility of this prospect, I stood slowly back up and sat down on the bed. The blanket was surprisingly comforting as I wrapped it around my aching shoulders, terribly sore from the weight of your defeated form. I stretched backwards onto the pillows, letting my head fall into their softness as if the puffy fibers inside might actually muffle the roar of the insistent horn. I saw your face, swollen with misery, come nearer to me as you climbed clumsily onto the bed beside me.

You sank your head deep into my chest as I pulled a smaller blanket around your body.

The day’s last beams of light spun eerily through the window and into the small room where we lay. This was the sun now, falling apologetically from the sky. You were never mine, but I loved being yours.

I lay there, the weight of my body holding me still, and watched your head rise and fall with each of my heavy breaths. I closed my eyes and saw you jump into a final puddle. Your bare feet plunged into the depths of the water, and the corpses of a thousand three-winged dragonflies rose up and fell like rain around you.