MEDIa

Peak Austin Saatzer

Mount Chimborazo 3

Ying Zhao

Starlit Visage

Angelika Mehes

Paper Towns and Security

Blankets

Stephanie Shoemaker

Restless Evening

Carter Swenson

Untitled

Zephyr Lynn

Apart

Brandon John Anima

Sigh (Blue)

Stephanie Shoemaker

Early Morning Walk

Harmony Oleson

Mount Chimborazo 4

Ying Zhao

Drop Dead Gorgeous

Chloe Luther

What's On Your Mind

Brandon John

Forsaken Valentine

Kaya Inkster

Laundry Pile

Austin Saatzer

Sushi-Dushi Mariia Asaula

Peacock

I Always Looked Back

Stephany Luithly

Dette er det verste jeg har sett!

(This is the Worst I have Seen!)

Maya Geving

Summertime Movie Set

Stephany Luithly

Snow Planting

Jesse Peterman

Dodgeball

Mikey Formisano

Eating Your Mistakes

Jesse Peterman

Silver Lamp

Lynn Dobmeier

A dream

Victoria Faith Wellman

Soft as a sliver of smooth sleek silk on your cheek

I glide in the waters of your sleep

Wrapping you in a velvety cocoon

Comfortingly caring for you

I paint vivid illustrations in your mind

Of walks through the woods

As the sun casts a fiery glow

Slashing through the trees

It sets the world ablaze

I may guide your heart

And take away the dark

Within my depths lurks turbulent thoughts

They churn and bubble as waves of the ocean

These secrets slither sneakily into deeper waters of your mind

Uncovering your worst fears

I beat your mind till these memories are exposed

Then I shall throw them at you

Till your days are done

Time is Relative Paige Verry

When you have to keep secrets your whole life, you eventually start to keep secrets from yourself. What you are taught and exposed to become core elements of who you are, and sometimes, like the disarray of new and old batteries scattered through the junk drawer, you mix up the things that hold power with the things that don’t.

Mom and Dad are divorced, so when you are old enough to have to decide who you will live with, you move in with Dad, because you think you’ll have more freedom and space there. Mom and Dad live just blocks away from each other in the same neighborhood, so you still see her from time to time.

When you come to find that Dad has political ties to biker gangs, an elaborate timer-operated lighting and sprinkler system powering a weed farm in the spare bedroom, and three unregistered guns with the serial numbers scratched off silently resting under the floorboards of your kitchen, you meet your friends at a centralized location in town instead of being picked up at your house. You say it’s easier than trying to find it by GPS, that you live way out in the sticks where the roads are confusing and there isn't any service. You text this from your wooden daybed in the front-most bedroom of your single wide trailer home that sits right on the outside of town, the double pane windows etched with forty years of seasons and lifetimes on both sides, just a few hundred feet from where you go to school.

You walk to class with headphones in because when they aren't in you can't pretend you're playing a character in a movie where the set will eventually be torn down, everyone will go home to their families and dinner tables, and things will be normal and nice. You try not to think about why you don't have a dinner table or why you never decorate for the holidays.

When you're on a camping trip for a family reunion in the Black Hills and Dad wakes up the campers on both sides with his drunken outburst, you try to look invisible by laying down flat in the shadowed part of the old, wooden picnic table next to the fire pit. You look up at the sky and wonder who is watching, and what the who is thinking.

Dad's girlfriend screams into the night, “I’ve had it! I’m done! I’m taking a police escort to the house when I get back to get my things! We’re done!”

You know what you need to do, call your uncle and tell him to clean out the weed-farm-room before she gets there. Your uncle says, “Don’t worry about a thing, Peanut. I’ll take care of it.” When one of the campers across the way yells out their screen door, “I’m calling the police!” you grab your shoes and run as fast and as far as you can, because you know if they find the drugs and guns in the camper, your dad will go to jail and you will go to foster care. It’s just better if they don't know he has a daughter.

Hours later, you walk back to the campsite where your grandmother tells you the police found Dad in a corner booth at Denny’s, shoeless, having a cup of coffee. You know that he did things this way to mock them, the same way he does when he gets pulled over and the officer asks, “Do you know why I pulled you over?” and he replies, “it depends on how long you’ve been following me.”

In the morning, after you and your grandmother bail Dad out of jail, you and him walk a quarter mile down the dirt road away from the campground to a culvert hidden in the brush, where his paraphernalia is tucked inside between two football-sized rocks. Over the hill you spot the flickering Denny’s sign. You begin to visualize and connect his careful steps through the darkness of the night in your mind like a film. You think he is brilliant. You feel special that he chose you for this recovery mission. You each take half of the baggies and pipes, Dad puts the guns in his backpack, and you stuff the rest in your coat pockets and pants, kick around some gravel and laugh off the night as if it’s already a distant memory.

Women come and go from your life like seasonal decorations in a department store. You create a ranking system for which ones you like least to most. Your favorite is Deb, ten years older than Dad, with her own house on a hill surrounded by flowers and vegetable gardens. Deb is a good influence on your dad — he stops drinking for a time and smokes less weed. Him and Deb come to one of your choir concerts, where dad cries. You use this memory as phantom validation for the next several years of extracurricular performances where you look up into the bleachers and he isn’t there. Dad decides he misses the rum, and Deb is gone.

You survive by getting lost in small things, in the dissociative beauty of the infinite number of paths you can walk from home to town, town to school, school to home. Some alongside the water, some through woodlands and backyards, others past baseball fields and abandoned buildings. You take note of which ones are most hidden, timing them out individually and memorizing the best escape routes in case you ever need them. You notice the way things appear and disappear, trees that hang too low over the road being taken from their roots, and housing complexes erected in what were once flat, empty fields.

Each time you move schools you try on a different personality. You know that no matter where you are, it isn’t permanent, that you can be anyone you want to be even if it doesn’t work, because you will get to try again, you’ll get to be something new. You learn a lot about other people this way, but nothing about yourself. You become the closest thing to a chameleon in human skin.

By the time you’re thirteen, you can shoot the center of a target from fifty yards away, drive a stick shift through a snowstorm, harvest weed plants, tell the time by the sun, know if someone is safe by understanding their eyes, and seven effective human pressure points for self defense; you know how to change a tire, cook chicken cordon bleu, how to ride a motorcycle, how to clean a place in a way that leaves no trace of you, the weight of an ounce with your eyes closed, and that time is relative.

Dad explains that when you’re five, a single summer is about one-twentieth of your life time. Because of this it feels really long and big and full of things. When you’re fifty, one summer's about one two-hundredth of your lifetime, so it feels much shorter and smaller. Dad says appreciate when time feels slow, because it only gets faster and faster as you get older, and at the end of it all, it just feels like footage.

When you near graduating highschool, you feel you’re graduating the end of your life. You’ve spent your childhood surviving, calculating, navigating. You’ve spent no time forming boundaries, figuring out who you are, what you want or where you’re going. You feel naked and fully clothed. You’re afraid of making decisions without approval or oversight. You’re used to following the directions and commands of an “all-knowing person,” and that authoritative all-knowing persons are the only ones you can trust. You sign up to join the Marine Corps. Dad hates this, so he doesn’t talk to you for months. When he finally speaks, he says, “I give the goddamn government half my paycheck, and now I have to give them my daughter too?”

You graduate high school on a Friday in May, and ship out for boot camp on the Monday that follows. By the time you’re eighteen, you can shoot a moving target from five-hundred yards away, fight off the body weight of someone twice your size, carry their dead weight on your shoulders across a football field, run three miles in twenty minutes, properly throw and shelter from a grenade, conceal yourself in any environment, tread water in full uniform for extended periods of time, dig a six foot hole with a tiny shovel and sleep in it, spot all entries and exits of a building in thirty seconds, completely disassemble and reassemble an M-16 service rifle, and survive three days on one meal, four hours of sleep, and sandy canteen water.

When you graduate boot camp, you feel invincible, like there’s nothing left on earth you cannot do. Now you are the closest thing to a chameleon in human skin dressed in camouflage. This is all you have, all you are.

Your first year in contract is hard. Everything you do and know is focused around being trained as a human weapon of mass destruction. You begin to yearn and daydream about a life where you are anything but a tool to be used in times of need. You are called only by your last name. You run through combat training exercises in the darkness of the morning on little sleep through mud-caked pathways, over hills, through the brush around and back and around and back again, sometimes carrying ammo cans, most times carrying people, always wondering if you will ever have to do it for real, in the disembodied fog of war surrounded by projectiles and horror, forever changed by your intimate encounter with mortality.

You’re stationed in Quantico, Virginia, your only means of escaping the mundane military machine are the weekends you can make it thirty miles north to Washington D.C., where you wander down busy sidewalks inhabited by every walk of life, through the night, the rooftop clubs, authentic noodle shops in the basements of skyscrapers, bars tucked away in dimly lit graffiti alley ways, the whole city moving and pulsing like the ocean, everything touching and changing everything else. You find respite in the comforting blanket of a warm buzz, the vibrations of wooden dance floors soaked in the liquid oneness of bodies and stories, being a stranger among strangers all gathered to feel something. You revel in the presence of the unknown, the need to be watchful and careful, the opportunity to use all you’ve learned through the pain you’ve endured.

On a light and warm Friday afternoon before the three-day weekend of the Fourth of July, a guy in your unit just a few years older than you says from across the room, “Where do you even go when you leave here, Verry? Nobody ever sees you in the barracks or the chow hall, it’s like you disappear and reappear. You’re an enigma.”

Your five-year contract feels long and slow, probably because it is about a quarter of your life time. Each time you visit home on the holidays you feel farther and farther removed, like staring at one of those beautifully staged portraits of a family you don't know–the one you’re meant to remove and replace with your own once you’ve bought the frame. When your time in contract finally comes to an end, you pack everything you own into your manual hatchback Ford Focus, and everything you’ve come to learn about the world and yourself into the already muddled file system of your spider-web brain. You take all of the adrenaline in your body and drive twentytwo hours straight across the country back to Minnesota with just four gas stops, three energy drinks, a coffee, and a bag of Sour Patch

Kids. The trees and sky change with each passing state line, and when you arrive home in your mother’s snow-covered driveway, you turn off the ignition, and for just a moment, sit in the silence of the frozen night. Your eyes grace over your dashboard, then up across your windshield. The car begins to feel like a time capsule, all of the things you have experienced in it, all of the things you’ve ever seen outside of the glass flashing across your mind's eye like a flare in the sky. Beaches, riots, funerals, parades, poverty, prestige, marathons, food trucks, monuments, busy streets, empty streets, seasons, desolate planes, mountains and cities made of light. The whole thing feels like a dream, like a movie set that’s been torn down and everyone’s gone home to their families and dinner tables.

You quietly walk inside, careful not to wake your family. For now, you bring only your Dress Blues uniform on a hanger. You hang it up in the back of your otherwise empty closet. You stand there and stare at it for a while until your face feels hot with tears, then you turn off the light and shut the door. Exhausted from a lifetime of sleep deprivation, an eternity of running and changing, a timeless episode of metamorphosis, you crawl into bed and drift off knowing that there is nothing, no one that you must wake up in the early hours of the morning for.