Volume 30, Issue I

Silhouette

Literary and Art Magazine Volume 30, Issue 1 Fall 2007

Silhouette Volume 30, Issue 1 was produced by the Silhouette staff and printed by Inove Graphics, located in Kingsport, TN. The paper is 80# Text Patina with a 100# Lustro Dull cover. The font used throughout the magazine is Gill Sans (Regular), ITC Benguiat Std (Book), and Arnold Boecklin Std (Regular). Silhouette Literary and Art Magazine is a division of EMCVT, Inc., a non-profit organization that fosters student media at Virginia Tech. Please send all correspondence to 344 Squires Student Center, Blacksburg,VA 24061. All Virginia Tech students who are not part of Silhouette staff are invited to submit to the magazine. All rights revert to the artists upon publication. To become a subscriber of Silhouette, send a check for $10 for each year subscription (two magazines) to Silhouette’s address above, c/o Business Manager or visit EMCVT’s e-commerce website at www.collegemedia.com/shop. For more information please visit our website at www.silhouette.collegemedia.com or call our office at 540-231-4124. Enjoy!

4.16.07 Ross Abdallah Alameddine

Partahi Mamora Halomoan Lumbantoruan

Christopher James Bishop Brian Roy Bluhm

Lauren Ashley McCain

Ryan Christopher Clark

Daniel Patrick O’Neil Juan Ramon Ortiz-Ortiz

Austin Michelle Cloyd Jocelyne Couture-Nowak

Minal Hiralal Panchal

Kevin P. Granata

Daniel Alejandro Perez

Matthew Gregory Gwaltney

Erin Nicole Peterson

Caitlin Millar Hammaren

Michael Steven Pohle, Jr.

Jeremy Michael Herbstritt

Julia Kathleen Pryde

Rachael Elizabeth Hill

Mary Karen Read

Emily Jane Hilscher

Reema Joseph Samaha

Jarrett Lee Lane

Waleed Mohamed Shaalan

Matthew Joseph La Porte

Leslie Geraldine Sherman

Henry J. Lee

Maxine Shelly Turner

Liviu Librescu G.V. Loganathan

Nicole White Annabelle Ombac, SPPS Photographer

6 8 10 12 12 12 14 16 18 20 21 24 25 27 28 30 32 34 36

Impact The Beauty of It All The Patient Naked Dark Night whenever lonely Because I couldn’t think of any thing to write except a love poem Sibusiswe my Native American sculpture Remember Grandma Boy Soldiers The Fruitless Task Hard Times for a Hispanic Empires Mixing concrete on my carport on a warm January evening Above the Roots MARCHing forward head 1st Everlasting Coming Home

Kate Michel Tara Marciniak-McGuire Evan Luzi Mike Bury Matthew Vera Paolo Busante Kate Michel Kristen N. Brugh Tara Marciniak-McGuire Xavier L. Herrera B. Casey McGrath Emily Mook Xavier L. Herrera Emily Mook Tara Marciniak-McGuire B. Casey McGrath Mary Morser Kristin Semeyh Will Holman

Literature

Art Lost Paradise Biological Clock Oedipus Untitled Untitled Accordion The Three Stooges Grumpy Old Men Voice of the Individual Union Is That Alien in the Background Freaking Anyone Else Out? 33 Snowman 35 Appalachian 7 9 13 15 17 19 22 23 26 29 31

Jessica Turrin Ryan Arnaudin Zachary Gunner Madrigal Stacey Swann Kristen N. Brugh Will Taylor Garrett Bradley Garrett Bradley Jessica Turrin Will Taylor Ryan Arnaudin Annabelle Ombac Amanda Kubista

Six

Impact It was the early morning and it was cold.

It was the bumpy West Virginian roads that woke me in a silver pick-up truck passing mountains that I imagined then as breasts. Sour with age with eyes like great gray magnets, my father drove us north.

Most days the anger was metal melting in red hot vats; the forest fires— flames that thrash irrationally.

Tonight it was the cursing at city lights and driving determinedly in darkness.

Tonight the sky would blink with a thousand burning meteors like grains of sand in a dark, milky sea—I liked the image of foreign rocks igniting on an unforgiving atmosphere.

They say that some escape the disintegration, (the hard jolt out of their quiet womb) And impact in soft grass with the chance Of becoming whole—I liked that image, too.

The engine cuts off. On a drab gravel road we watch the sky. We both close our eyes when cars pass with bright headlights. Like children we both point hungrily at the flashing horizon, the cream-colored screams of light.

And there are stars falling because I am born my father’s daughter tonight.

Kate Michel

Seven

Lost Paradise

Jessica Turrin

Eight

Imagine cherry blossom petals spilling from the pockets of a white silk robe hung on a clothesline billowing in a slight curling breeze.

Moss and flowers recede from the gum lines of trees, roots and bark. A new vulnerability is exposed as winter approaches.

Can I show it? Can these dots of black on white man the thing that is happening outside; inside me. The morning glories collapse inside themselves, sucking their color back under the surface of the earth, to explode and wind through my air conditioner again next summer. The air is thin and runny like cider. The ground is hard but brittle; yellow. Vibrant colors have drained into a messy puddle of oil in my driveway.

What a way to see the earth, so condensed, so scared, so patiently waiting while the summer months rest, exhausted from shedding too much color.

The Beauty of it All Tara Marciniak-McGuire

Nine

Biological Clock

Ryan Arnaudin

The Patient Evan Luzi

Beep. Beep. Beep.

The room was silent to go along with its white walls, white floors, white sheets, white instruments, and even the white face on the bed; all speaking no words, emitting no sound.

Except for the black heart monitor with its red line that darted up then shot back down creating a mountain chain of activity, of life, the mountain chain of a person.

Beep. Beep.

It was all that separated a world of silence from the noisy, busy world that exists today. That world was on pause right now. For one moment, in the white world of hospital room number 247, the world stopped and listened. Listened for what?

It stopped its jobs, its cars, its planes, its money and its nature for what sound? The only thing making noise was a black heart monitor next to the bed with white sheets on which a man lay with a pale white face.

Beep. Beep.

That heart monitor seemed as if it were the only life in the room and, ironically, was the one thing that would soon take life away. The life support stood tall, powerful, as it gave what was called life to the patient. The patient was the only one listening.

He listened for the family, the pastor, anything; he listened to the sound of the black heart monitor in the corner of the room.

Beep. Beep.

It’s hard for a six-year-old to take death seriously. By the time a child is six, he’s undoubtedly played numerous violent video games (if not his own then at his friend’s house. Everyone has that friend whose parents let anything happen: the parents that will buy anything, who act more as a broken bank ATM than they do parents). By the time he’s six he has also more than likely seen death and violence on TV and in movies more times than he could measure. A child spends more time watching TV by the time he graduates high school than talking to his parents.

In this time he’ll experience the entire spectrum of human emotion more than once, but he won’t understand it.

A six-year old doesn’t understand or grasp his emotions and he can’t understand others’ emotions until he can understand his own. The six-year-old mind is set up much like Play-Doh. The early experiences of childhood absorb, mold, twist, roll, and shape the mind into something to play with. The mind is merely a segway for a six-year-old to laugh with and enjoy the ignorance of his childhood. Not until adulthood, after he has left the Play-Doh out of its yellow cylinder container with the red top, will the mind harden into something definite. Some minds become round and able to understand all around it. Some

harden flat and can see only one point of view.

When I was six-years-old, the mold of my mind was made fast. It had to be. My mother first received news of the cancer four years earlier. Of course, her tears were hidden from the youngest of us kids. My sister Traci was only half a year old while I was almost two. At two years old, you’ve already doubled your lifetime. My two older brothers, Kyle and Tony, would have been five and eight years old respectively. Our family was always very close. We fought, we played, we laughed, we cried, we especially cried in the coming years, and we lived a happy, middle-class, white picket fence lifestyle.

My father was diagnosed with cancer when I was only two years old. He was told he had a rare type of cancer that the medical community lacked very much experience in dealing with. He was raising a family and he was diagnosed with cancer.

Doctors were optimistic in the early stages of the war. He fought little battles everyday against the disease. My father was not even forty and he was diagnosed with cancer. I was not even two and my father was diagnosed with cancer.

I knew my dad more as a person than I did as a cancer patient. In fact, the two words “cancer” and “patient” meant about as much to me as Operation Desert Storm did. My father would later claim his scar from the first surgery occurred during Desert Storm. I always saw my dad bald, skinny and tall.

At five-foot eight-inches, he was a giant to me. At one-hundred and twenty pounds, he was a sumo wrestler. I didn’t know he was bald from chemotherapy or that he had lost weight to an extreme degree. My dad wasn’t a cancer patient; my dad was my baseball coach. My dad used to chase me around, catch me, pick me up and tickle me to death. I called him a monster. My dad was a tickle monster. My dad was there for me. My dad was diagnosed with cancer when I was not even two.

If you look at the entire time line of the last few years of my father’s life, everything he did was a countdown. One week until surgery, two weeks for recovery, a month until a procedure. At one point, my father entered into the hospital late at night after having spent a whole week on vacation at the beach. My mother didn’t know but he was told before the vacation he only had nine months to live. Another countdown.

The doctors found his tumor to be the size of a football. He loved his family so much, when asked why he went on vacation he could answer only in short, panted breaths,

Eleven

“be..cause..I..wan..ted..to…be…there,” he said.

“Ma’am, we need to make a decision on what to do,” the doctor said.

“Well, how long do we have to decide?” my mother asked.

The doctor glanced down at his Rolex.

“Two minutes. He’ll die in twenty,” the doctor spoke with some urgency.

“You have to fight,” my mother said.

“I..kn..ow..,” panted my father.

“I’ll be here waiting for you. I’ll be right here,” she said.

The last time my mother ever spoke to my father was that night. Her last words to my father were exchanged by notes they wrote before the morphine took over, before his cancer took over.

What does a six-year-old know about death? The hospital was never a bad place for me. Everyone who was there was always really nice. I enjoyed the cafeteria food. I got to see my dad when I went. I knew my father was sick, but I didn’t know the seriousness of it or how it would affect me later in life. I knew my mother was sad, but I didn’t know exactly why. I was sad because everyone else was sad, but I didn’t know why.

My last words to my father I don’t remember, but my mother did for me. I told him I loved him and that it would be okay for him to leave. He was so stubborn we all let him know it was okay for him to give up his fight. Relief is what we wanted for him. He probably didn’t feel the pain because of the morphine, but we knew his body was working hard against an uphill battle.

Beep. Beep.

The people the patient, my father, had touched throughout the years were now in a circle around him with their hands on his body, touching him. The doctors, friends, a priest, and family all stood in room 247. The process of “pulling the plug” began in the morning and lasted all day. The last organ to fail was the heart. The last machine to do anything was the black heart monitor.

Beep. Beep…...........

At 11:59 P.M. it stopped beeping in a rhythm and let out one long note that hushed the room even more so than before. My father lay on the white sheets of the white room now freed, relieved, and dead.

What does an eighteen-year-old know about death? I have never been back to that hospital since. As legal adult by all measures of society I’m able to vote, I’m able to smoke tobacco, I can go fight a war, buy a gun, go to jail, change my name, and

live on my own, but at eighteen-years-old I still know not more than an inkling about death than I did at the impressionable age of six. I made feeble attempts to write letters to my father soon after he died, but eventually I gave up understanding. At eighteen-years-old, triple the lifetime I lived when my father passed away, I’m still lost for an answer. Steven Francis Luzi died that night and he was my father. I will never forget him.

Twelve

Naked

Dark Night

Who likes naked?

I like naked We should all hold hands naked Run around without any clothes Because the body is beautiful No longer should we hide it Let’s all be naked Who likes naked?

I do You do Let’s all run around without any clothes!

On a pitch dark night Two kids got in a fight So on the only tracks This railroad town had They duked it out Fighting hand to hand And when all was said and done Neither one could stand So they both laid down Known they were beat But not by each other But the girl for whom they compete So on the tracks both boys lay Waiting for the train to come And make it a better day

Naked is good.

Mike Bury

Matthew Vera

whenever lonely i drive around town and stick my hand out the window just so i can feel another cold hand pushing back against mine

Paolo Busante

Oedipus

Zachary Gunner Madrigal

Thirteen

Fourteen

Stacey Swann

Untitled

Because I couldn’t think of anything to write except a love poem I. Mornings, an alarm clock squeals and ricochets the painful sounds of 7am.

Your roommate and I fumble on our respective sunken mattresses Racing to reach it first, to grope the snooze buttons awkwardly So we don’t wake you.

But I do, anyway, climbing back to wrap around you For a quick, hot minute before responsibility washes over like guilt.

I thought, as I dressed, you told me once that we’re all pushing that great boulder of middle-class labor up the mountain for eternity, just to spite God. But your pessimism doesn’t keep you from blinking aside 7:45 to trace a heart in the air as I close the door quietly.

II. Mornings, in our lazy bed sheets lined with early sunlight on the floor, Are laughter and yelps as we wrestle for that easily concealed and long sought after Ticklish spot. Do you think your roommate hates that we’re so loud in bed?

With wicked eyes you kiss me lightly above your borrowed boxers And pretend to demand that I get dressed. It’s 2pm and you have wasted the weekend In me, the books and food wrappers, and the empty cups of tea that have lately Perforated your desk of quiet towers of paper. I love time and deadlines When they’re flying by idly on Saturdays. I pull you back.

I wish I had the words, just then, that moment, not now, alone, But I suppose a poet has emotions with cold pen and paper, or a girl with little to say.

Just know, when we have time dripping off our hands, or When we are giving up slowly to old age, or when I have a great boulder to accept—I would spend every morning with you.

Kate Michel

Sixteen

Sibusiswe ewsisubiS

I still dream of you In staggering detail Seldom unguarded thoughts Vivid allegory frequently disquiets Are you such a dreamer?

Nostalgia is seductive, overwhelming, cherished Focus on the few details which remain I will remember what I choose Pacified in the midst of reverie I am never closer to an understanding of you Disconnect What you put in. What I take out.

Your eager giving smile Ebony coat What you have witnessed, endured, sacrificed Warm me.Your freedom fills my oppression Pure and clean I can breathe again At times I catch sight of my skin, pallid I want to hide it, I hope you haven’t noticed The stark contrast The privilege contrast The ethnic contrast The human contrast You catch me, open and ashamed

In your absence I have seen the best of you I have seen the worst of me I tried to breathe it out. All of it.

Let it sink out through my mouth. My skin.

Into your rich soil.

Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.

So that when I left your place the worst of me would remain with the best of you.

Africa I have never struggled to write you before Constantly faltering, fumbling, failing for words What if I try, all of my life, and I still can’t get it right?

I pray The following days always remind me That you never leave me And that I never find the words to cheapen the best of you.

I held your hands I washed you, fed you, taught you, breathed you Day in and day out What you put in. What I take out.

I saw your sister Alone crying in the corner I saw your sister and understood Newly starched sheets

Kristen N. Brugh

Seventeen

UntitleddeltitnU

Kristen N. Brugh

Eighteen

my Native American sculpture

you speak yellow corn and stir prayers and smoke on a tongue that has carried the two of us through silver rivers and icy misconceptions; full and starving. you knead red clay with gentile smearing fingers that once fought red, deep and crimson, a shadow of purple, a thick crease of oil because respect was beaten into you–to others. your delicate tea cups; your handsome statues hold imprints of scars from your fingers carrying the past into the present. and so I sit on the floor, Indian style, facing your sculpted buffalo telling him stories of the tiny indents on his cheeks, his forehead, his eyes from a man I never really knew; you, my Cherokee child.

Tara Marciniak-McGuire

Nineteen

Accordion

Will Taylor

Remember Grandma She was a rare Beauty, someone not to be forgotten.

Today you can find her sitting alone smiling, yet struggling to remember.

Midway through a story, she stops, and tells me to shave.

A man in white walks by and reminds her she is my Grandma.

Yes, that confused vieja is my Grandma and as I look upon her thinning white hair, I see beauty.

Then laughing, she tells me to shave, even though soon, she will have forgotten.

Her glazed eyes triumph, thinking she remembers, but she won’t remember why she feels so alone.

I turn my eyes away, leaving her alone.

Glowing, my Grandma believes that she remembers.

Through my salty waterfalls, I announce her beauty.

I pray for her to know what has been forgotten as she commands me with a stern face to shave.

Touching my beard, she reasons why I should shave.

Then asking for Luis, my Grandfather, she wonders if he is alone.

She hopes he found the note, hopes he has not forgotten to come pick her up, because my Grandma has her appointment at the beauty salon. It’s at 3 o’clock. She remembers.

Wait, maybe she does remember saying she thought I was going to shave.

She then recalls a time when she saw beauty when a single rose had a perfect blossom all alone.

Regardless, it is time to leave. I stand and hug my Grandma, making a silent promise that she will not be forgotten.

It’s frustrating knowing that she has forgotten but pains like a plague knowing what she can’t remember.

“It is late,” they tell me. I have to walk away from my Grandma but then she calls out to me, reminding me to shave.

My dried waterfalls flow anew as I, like her, sit alone.

I fear I have lost sight of God, I fear I have lost sight of beauty.

It’s punishment knowing my Grandma is forced to live in a community of the forgotten.

I wonder if she is still able to see beauty as I pray for her to be remembered.

In the dark of loneliness, in these times I am alone all I can think about is my Grandma telling me to shave.

Xavier L. Herrera

Boy Soldiers

His eyes pierce through mine A hungry little boy Who has every excuse not to smile And yet he does Hope still chokes his skinny face A victim of the famine flood He shouldn’t have to love in that place Where boys become soldiers And are trained to lust for blood But it’s not their fault They grew up knowing love Kidnapped past midnight Taken to a place darker than the darkest night And if they refuse to fight They will pay the price with their life Kill or be killed little one I love you still For you know not what you have done Tears now swallow his tortured eyes But who can blame a child who wants to cry When the best thing in his life would be to die

B. Casey McGrath

Twenty-Two

Garrett Bradley

The Three Stooges

Twenty-Three

Garrett Bradley

Grumpy Old Men

Twenty-Four

The Fruitless Task Where are you, in medias res?

I look for you in the summer soil, in ditches beside highway signs and the jade glow of the firefly.

Tell me, are you as frozen as forever feels?

I reach for you in glassy ponds, in waxen lumps of cinder and ash and a hand raised in its last goodbye.

Sometimes the door is open, and I hope the wind will carry you in to comsume these questions in my mind and leave me empty before your eyes.

But I will never find you, in medias res.

I will always be a world too late.

In my heart I know this: some are born to live; and some to wonder why.

Emily Mook

Twenty-Five

Hard Times for a Hispanic Hard times will follow your every move when you’re the only Hispanic in a family of Mexicans.

Constantly singled out as the Black sheep (I suppose I’m destined to fail them...) you know every foreign word shared was some critique of how menacing you are (or seemed to be...)

Every cooked meal shared at that table had a special–odd ball–dish just for you. (what was my problem...)

I’m different...

I’m difficult... and I’ll choose Pizza or Burgers over menudo any day.

Every family night shared in that living room was spent sitting–silent–focused staring blankly at the television, absorbing which ever novella was on. (bad acting never caught my attention...)

I always wondered why the only thing I ever understood were the commercials for Budweiser Beer.

Every time I look back on those days, I tell myself...

No one is to blame...

It’s not that my family didn’t love me...

They just didn’t understand...

They’ve just never known who I am...

Xavier L. Herrera

Twenty-Six

Voice of the Individual

by Jessica Turin

Twenty-Seven

Empires

by Emily Mook

History begins with the cell, the smallest unit with the biggest task: building a nation without knowing itself. But identity is easy when there’s a need. There is a reason for the eyelash, for the occasional skinned knee- things that must be blinked away, lessons that we bleed.

Perhaps we aren’t fit to be nations, amassed in this dependent state, composed of small soldiers who legislate our fate. But laws don’t live from limb to limb. They grow and harden in variant branches of bone that dispatch orders to sinews that they control alone.

What can we do when an order is delayed?

Disregarded or disobeyed? Existence is a call to arms, legs, and heart, but why do we survive when these things break apart?

Let us forget how solid we are, how our veins are road map rivers that have carried us this far- I want to remember where I began, an unnamed essence in an untraced plan.

Twenty-Eight

Mixing Concrete on my carport on a warm January evening.

The neighbor’s yard is contaminated.

Toy vehicles lay upside down, wheels exposed, and some still turning.

Laughter explodes from behind a pine tree as the two children come bounding through the yard. I can’t tell which is chasing the other.

They wear the same colors as their spattered, mud covered toys, completely neglected because the two of them have found a stick to play with instead.

I make small movements on my carport. Perhaps I can turn and head inside before. . .

“Hey! Hey! Whatcha doin’?” The little boy screams as his sister stands and stares.

I do not want to turn. I do not want to answer the boy. I continue to pour concrete into the molds of rocks I have made for the back yard. I am covered in concrete and red pigment.

“Hey. . . HEY! You! What’re yoooouu doing?” That little bastard. I realize I cannot win this.

“I’m pouring concrete. . . see?” I lift up one of the finished rocks for him to marvel in his four year old mind. Miraculously he is amazed by it and begins climbing his fence to get a closer look. If I cared about him, I would stop him; tell him that what he is doing is dangerous. Instead I just stare. He mutters a line up of words garbled by a tongue he has yet to learn to control. I understand none of it. I turn back around. His mother screams to him from inside the house to get off that fence! He does. He is embarrassed for awhile and quietly plays with his sister. I swirl gray with red and add tan when I am feeling adventurous. The aggregate grinds and I find the sound pleasing. The sound of work. I use an old wooden spoon, because god knows I won’t cook with it; and cake molds lined with aluminum foil, because god knows I won’t bake with them; and tupper wear containers for mixing, because god knows I have nothing else to put in them. I peek back over to their yard. They are again playing with sticks, which to me, seems even more dangerous than trying to climb the fence. Their little Jack Russell is going crazy along with them. Jo Jo. I hate Jo Jo, and I think their mother does as well. She screams more than she speaks and I think I realize I hate her as well. Gray and red and tan. Red and gray and tan. “Look!” I turn. A stick, wow. “I see.” I answer. I turn back to my concrete. Then the little girl comes over and wants me to look at her stick too. “Yes,” I say, “a stick, I see.” They stand next to each other like little soldiers, just staring back at me as if I was supposed to say something more about the little branches they found. . . “It’s poop!” The boy screams to me.

Sure enough, each of them found some shit in their yard from Jo Jo and expertly globed it onto their sticks. I wonder where their mother is now.

Tara Marciniak-McGuire

Twenty-Nine

Union

Will Taylor

Thirty Above the Roots

This man, he stands, in the middle of the streetway.

“Say sir, I’m not sure, but you look as if you’ve had a bad day.

I’d love to listen if you’d like to share. If you come with me, we’ll dry your hair.”

Soaked in clothes from head to tow, skin wet with regret, not sure just what he has to show. Rain has no shame in being the pain that helps his misery grow. It seems insane, but he’s not the same so he doesn’t expect the sane to know.

“No thanks kind mind. Leave me be, I’ll be fine. I left that body, it was never mine. I searched the seas attempting to find, but fell in love with the way this concrete shins. After the drops, they stole my eyes, it never felt better to be left behind. We’ll have to wait and see where the rain takes me this time.”

Southern Mother, nature uncovers like a blanket, deafening him with thunder. Buick embraces with arms wide open. Suitcase shuts, hiding everyday faces. A business man fed up, the nine to five routine escapist.

He’s been so many different places, like a friendly fox, unsure of what he chases. With palms turned up, he looks for love. Searching the cracks in his weathered hands, he finds no such.

“Things don’t have to be this way, living each day like there’s nothing to say. Bending your limbs, doing your best to obey. Well Mr. Mime, I’ve got something to say. I realize this town is colored shades of gray. But after the storm, the sun will shine another day.”

A suit of abuse, he sulks in sorrow. Staring at the puddles, reflecting the same face he will see tomorrow. If you have a heart, lend him some kind words, or perhaps one he could borrow. He drinks up the rain till he no longer feels hollow, but the bitter taste of his life makes it hard to swallow.

“Say sunshine, why do you hide your eyes? If you don’t mind, I’d like to see your smile. Now, more than ever, I could use the light.”

B. Casey McGrath

Thirty-One

Is that alien in the background freaking anyone else out?

Ryan Arnaudin

Thirty-Two

MARCHing forward head 1st Sometimes I feel like I live life trying to dodge the raindrops Avoiding the inconveniences dampening spirits, spit in the eye and a soaked pant cuff But I inevitably get hit.

Its naĂŻve to believe That I can be the one who gets aways with it.

Selfish in fact.

But the rainy days continue to come And raindrops continue to find a way to land on my Head Hand and Heart.

So I’ll wait out the weather and look for the bow tied by the rain And be grateful for the moments I am in the dampness and darkness that make me continue to seek the sun.

Mary Morser

Thirty-Three

Annabelle Ombac

Snowman

Everlasting Punching out at five o’clock, He grabs his lunch pail, his hat and gloves.

Dark and windy, icy and black, The road seems endless.

He drives through streets Painted with couples– Laughing, Dancing.

He smiles and remembers years past, Still driving on.

Finally. Throw it in park.

Deep breaths, a short prayer, A swig from a flask.

Car door slams, ice shattering from the window.

He walks, a single red rose in hand.

There she is. Same as years past.

Grey as stone.

She waits for him as she does every year.

He stares at her, she stares right back.

A single tear falls.

His hands grace the emboss of her date– 1922-1984

Kristin Semeyn

Thirty-Five

Amanda Kubista

Appalachian

Coming Home Will Holman

The moment of just arriving, after work, back to home, was the only unshakable minute in his day. In the summer, still light, smog-tinted pink might halo the house for just a minute, dazed, five fifty-five and the birds angling around. His car would pause on the ramp of driveway, then idle up the concrete, wheels spurring twigs into the air.

The garage had no door and leaned to the left, shadowing the neighbor’s picket fence. It was that kind of neighborhood, real picket fences erected with a real lack of sarcasm, owners projected onto drapes that never moved. Jim parked, got out, humidity pressing his face into a fine sieve. His collar stuck to his neck. A short push into the blast of kitchen and cool wood floors.

Katie, his wife, was sitting in the living room. She was pretty, in a distracted way, as if her hair and eyelashes couldn’t be bothered most days. Her high cheeks and forehead were dusted with sweat. Even on a day spent in the house, like today, she would put on nice jeans and a buttoned shirt, clinging to her hips and ass in a way that they just didn’t before the baby. His son, Jacob, kicked and pawed the floor in aimless baby circles, wrinkling the blanket that had been laid out. Small red rashes grew from the creases in his skin. Katie looked exhausted, as usual, leaning back and breathing slowly.

Hey. Jim was reluctant to puncture the silence, feel the reserve hiss out of the room. He took a tentative few steps into the room and put down his briefcase, his blazer, unknotted his tie.

Hi, honey. Katie’s voice slid out of her chest, barely there. She made a half-move toward him, managing to push partway out of the enfolding wings of the chair, then stalling, eyes still fixed on Jacob. Her eyes followed his silent scuffling.

Jim closed the gap with the chair, leaned in, deposited a lukewarm kiss on her forehead with a casual toss of his chin, the same toss echoed minutes later by his hand dropping change into the glass in his closet, kicking off loafers. He was thin, and looked strange in the funhouse closet mirror, undershirt exposing a rib here and there, long neck studded with stubble.

There were the jeans from yesterday, his tennis shoes bought on sale in last year’s colors.

Downstairs, Katie fed the baby. The air conditioning kicked on, and the street began to light up with others; the same trips, deposits, same doors opening and shutting, the same crawl of cicada buzz over the windows, August dead-ending into September.

Jim came down just as she was finishing with Jacob. He always came down when she was just finishing up with the baby, and she knew his next sentence before it happened, the same way he made a selfsame web of creaks on those stairs, the same rhythm of shifting weight, the dependable squeak of his shoes: Hey, what d’you wanna do for dinner? He stood at the top of the kitchen, looking down on her seated, Jacob pulling on his bottle.

I dunno, hadn’t really thought about it. She usually didn’t.

But then, some anonymous Thursday, she would reproach herself for not even cooking something canned, or setting the table, or just having anything ready when he walked in the door, just once. She knew her mother’s faint click-clucks of disapproval, tongue snapping at Katie in a way words couldn’t; and just as soon, she knew she didn’t owe Jim anything as simple as dinner.

Being there was enough. Feeding and swaddling and clothing and bathing and all the crying and tugging at her exhausted breast – that was god damn plenty.

Then, in the same thought, she figured working for her father was punishment enough for Jim already. Seniors in college, no stress, just having some fun, and one night they forgot. And the clinic was closed in the morning, and they figured they were worrying about it too much anyhow. The job with newly-minted Grandpa Jack at the bank was just to tide them over, until he could get some night classes and advance.

But she couldn’t let all that avalanche her to the ground. She made her promises and tried to only break the ones that didn’t matter.

How about I make some sandwiches, then, simple. Katie nodded a bare assent, then went wordlessly to the nursery to put Jacob down. He had just gotten some shots, and had been colicky, uncooperative, two welts on his powdered bottom refusing to fade.

Jim regarded himself as a master of sandwich architecture. It began earlier, in college, the first couple times smoking weed – at home, a kitchen full of free food, the giddy chasm of hunger that was pried open by the joint. Since then, in the same kitchen, the same fridge, even, inherited when his parents retired, he had refined his skills.

So he unloaded the fridge and set to work. Outside, the screens seemed to boil with bugs trying to get into the cool, or maybe he just imagined their scratching, wishing someone wished to be where he was.

Once the plates had been cleared, Katie went to lay down for a minute. She had taken a nap that afternoon, but the early-morning feedings and shrieking seemed to have left her permanently disabled. There never seemed to be a way to catch up, weekends evaporating in a flurry of tasks that had to be done together. If it was sunny, they would walk Jacob in the stroller, Jim with hands jammed into his pockets, Katie pushing the stroller.

The Johnson’s just got a new car. She didn’t point it out to be prideful, or jealous, though those things colored her words unconsciously; she just had to have something to say, to fill in the gaps between passing minivans.

Oh. Yeah. Nice. Jim didn’t talk so much as murmur, waiting for the wind to pick up his hair, waiting for mail truck to bring him his magazines. He liked to walk, where he could think, just think awhile without checking over his shoulder for Katie’s flat mouth, grimly into the sun on a Sunday afternoon.

He ducked into the back room. Katie lay on the couch, legs curled, hair laid out on the pillow. That room had been the repository of TV and board games growing up, but now they had no need for that much space. Leftover baby shower gifts, his old bike, unopened boxes left from the move, all over the floor and against the walls. They shut off the heat and AC in there usually, keeping the door closed, but when Katie went in to take her naps she cranked down the thermostat until a violent shudder

came out of the ducts.

Katie? He was half-whispering, and she didn’t respond.

Katie? Louder this time, and she turned her head away from the couch and opened one eye.

Yeah? Her lips were dry, catching the soft syllables.

You know I don’t like it when you take naps in here – turning on the AC just for an hour so you can sack out, honey, it’s a waste. He hated these confrontations, stupid bickering that came with living with someone too soon. At any rate . . . he didn’t pause for her to answer, knowing already what she was going to say . . . I’m going for my walk. The walk was his nightly ritual, after the sandwiches, before the book and bed.

Katie rolled back into the couch, repeating her defenses in the hazy space between sleep and awake: he knows I can’t sleep in the nursery because I’m so sensitive to his breathing, and I have the baby monitor, and if I fall asleep in bed, you come in after your walk and bang around in the bathroom . . .

The sun had finally receded from the sky, leaving a dim afterglow on the horizon that barely penetrated the trees. Jim stopped at his car and ducked into the console, opening a small, air-tight jar he kept there by the owner’s manual. Sitting in the passenger seat, using the back of his Risk Management seminar binder as a surface, he rolled a thin joint. It was short work for him now.

The first time Jim smoked wasn’t until college, and he fell into the lifestyle at first, all the corny shit that revolves, in some circles, around weed: reggae, long hair, tie-dye, weekend festivals on remote farms, a couple mediocre bluegrass bands jamming indeterminately. His room acquired some tapestries, his lower-right desk drawer a complement of accessories. But that, as all phases do, passed. He abandoned the theme clothing, most of the instruments of inebriation, and turned to the joint exclusively. By the time he started seeing Katie, he just smoked on the weekends. Katie didn’t mind; but after Jacob, and the job, her view dimmed, and she declared he must give it up by the wedding.

And he did, at first. He escaped the mandatory drugtesting of all bank employees because of his father-in-law, but if he crashed a company car or some money went missing, he was first in line. But after the baby was born and Katie sunk into her current slump, she became less vigilant, and he, more bored. It was hard to find now, freighted as he was with baby and wife – where to go?

One night, at the bar, he ran across a kid he had known in high school, all shaggy hair and droopy mustache, drinking Pabst on the copper bar. It was a slow Thursday, random football on the dim TV. There was slow conversation: Mike had sloped shoulders, thickened from slinging mulch, shoveling snow, opting out of college. He worked under the table for his uncle, a perennial basement refugee, renting out above people’s garages and the cheap ground floors of garden apartments. A few beers went down, the words came more easily, and weed was mentioned. Jim had his source.

The address changed every few months, sometimes the cell phone, too, but Mike was always waiting on the couch, whatever roommate or girlfriend he happened to be attached to at the time next to him, absorbed in TV. It wasn’t like college anymore –it had hardened down into something different: the

money, the bag, the deep whiff of contents, eyeball for weight, a muttered thanks, out without having to sit down. The longer he lingered the longer his clothes had to absorb the strange, matted funk that accompanied the memories of all the cave’s he’d known in college.

Jim tucked the joint into his shirt pocket and headed out. The heat still clung close to the asphalt and sidewalks, though, sending weak missives of steam up where errant sprinklers overran the grass. His jeans began to stick to his legs. At the end of the street, right, another few hundred yards, and there was his alma mater: Clellon High School, named for a small bronze man in the lobby. The campus faded from brick into athletic fields, the remains of office softball just melting from them to the parking lots; and from the athletic fields they turned back into woods, sheltering a small creek. Jim made his way to the tree line and ducked into the green, air shedding a few degrees in the presence of the tepid stream. The water had been forced into channels by concrete embankments, now slicked with green.

He found a seat and watched the water. At length, he lit the joint and took a deep pull, the smoke spiraling lazily through the thick air. He ashed, puffed again. The smoke filtered through his limbs, back into his chest, pushing that familiar congestion behind his face. Shadows, leaves, lights, sounds; everything sharpened and dimmed at the same time, muscles he didn’t know he had un-kinking in his lower back, the trace memories of daily tragedies evaporating from the back of his mind.

When he was done, he walked down the channel for a while, flicking the roach into the water. He cut back through the neighborhood, not thinking of Katie or Jacob or the Johnson’s new car, just scuffing his feet the same as he always had walking home from school.

Katie knew as soon as he opened the door: eyes glazed, limbs slack, lips slicked with too little spit. Jacob was in a contraption that let him bounce without rolling around, his stubby baby legs unsure when they flexed against he floor. Jim looked at her, at him, impressed with the newness of it all, how unfamiliar Jacob was with being upright. He seemed to enjoy it, giving the occasional squeal, fat fingers grasping incoherently at the railing.

You been smoking a cigarette or something? You smell. She was squatting by the baby, interrupting her speech to coo.

Jim looked at her, the pleasant arch of her back, the buttons of her spine shining through her shirt. Nah. Went to Bogen’s for lunch, you know how it is in there. He unbuttoned his oxford, headed for the stairs. Gonna hop in the shower.

Ok hon. Katie straightened her back. She caught the end of Jim as he disappeared up the stairs, the flash of back; the way she had been looking at him ever since they got married, watching him walk away; and she knew that he too was trying to only break only the promises that didn’t matter.

Staff Hali Plourde-Rogers Editor-in-Chief

Jenna Wolfe Business Manager

Corinne Jeltes Photography Editor

Lana Tang Advertising Manager

Laura V. Cook Fine Art Editor

Jennifer Johnson Special Events Coordinator

Marisa Plescia Prose Editor

Danielle Downing Alumni Relations

Erin O’Keefe Poetry Editor

Megan McCarthy Public Relations

Misono Yokoyama Graphic Designer

Erin Snyder Promotions Director

Matt Brubaker Assistant Graphic Designer

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Joel Riley Webmaster

Katherine Leonberger Production and Distribution

Katherine Brumbaugh General Staff

Kalyn Saylor General Staff

Suzanne Watkins General Staff

Michelle Rivera General Staff

Vanessa Ramos General Staff

Katie Fallon Editorial Advisor

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Forty-Three

Letter from the Editor

This has been quite a year. I published my first issue of Silhouette, which was released in February. And I am proud to publish my second issue. Between these two magazines I have learned a lot about publication, management, and business. I also learned a lot about myself.

And like everyone that is part of this campus I have gone from feeling happy, to confused, to angry, to unbelievably sad. And I want to thank everyone who has stuck with me through all of these emotions and everyone who has helped me laugh again.

Thank you to my staff.You are wonderful. I will miss all of you graduating, but I can’t wait to work with those of you returning in the fall. Without your hard work this magazine would not be half as wonderful.

Thank you, Jenna.You are the best BM a girl could ask for.

Thank you, Max. Thank you, Hill and Veil.

Thank you, Reema for inspiring such beautiful dancing in every girl in Hill and Veil, for being so dedicated to dance, and for sharing a little piece of your life with us.

-Hali

Thanks to the EMCVT professional staff and other MAT members for being amazing leaders and teachers.You have all given me so many skills and so much more confidence than I ever thought possible.

Thanks to Hali.You are a great leader, and I admire all that you do.You keep me laughing and you don’t get mad at me when I spill chocolate milk all over the draft magazine and office desk.You’re the best!

Thanks to the staff for being the best staff in the whole world.Your dedication and persistence is so great, and I have so much fun working with you.

Thanks to my family, roommates, friends, and Nick for being so patient with me through such a challenging year. I am a lucky girl to have you.

Working with Silhouette is fabulous. Enjoy!

-Jenna

Letter from the Business Manager

This has been such a great opportunity and I thank EMCVT for giving me the chance to be the Silhouette BM. I can’t believe it has already been a year. This year has been full of everything good and bad, but working with Silhouette has been one of the great constants keeping me happy.

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