2023 USU Creative Writing Contest Issue

From the Director

This special edition of Sink Hollow presents the winning entries of the Utah State University Creative Writing and Art Contest, which is open to all USU undergraduate and graduate students from all departments and disciplines. We want to thank each and every one of our contestants this year for all their hard work, for making the judges’ jobs so difficult(!), and for helping to create such a vibrant and inclusive writing community here at USU and in Cache Valley.

Many thanks for the generosity and discriminating taste of our con¬test judges: Britt Allen, Shaun Anderson, Stacie Denetsosie, Matt DiOrio, Michael DuBon, Terysa Dyer, and Michael Sowder. Thanks also go to my fellow Sink Hollow faculty advisors Russ Beck, Robb Kunz, and Millie Tullis, and to Nicole Cracroft, Ashlynn Durant, and Annie Nielsen from the English Department administra¬tive staff, whose assistance in running the contest was invaluable.

And an extra special thanks goes to the amazing Sink Hollow staff who helped run the contest, organized and promoted the Helicon West reading, and produced this beautiful issue of the magazine. Kyler Tolman and Paul Burdiss led the contest team this year, processed submissions, and along with Deren Bott, Danielle Bucio, Gregory Dille, and Noelani Hadfield, copyedited the winning work. Katie Thomas led the team that designed this incredible issue of the magazine, and KJ Anderson put together the slideshow for the reading at Helicon West. Needless to say, I’m proud of these young people and have been repeatedly amazed at their tremendous work ethic and commitment to make this important opportunity available to all USU students.

— Charles Waugh, Contest Director and Sink Hollow Fiction Advisor

Undergraduate Winners

Undergraduate Poetry

One Word Worth A Thousand Pictures

Sarah Monsen, 3rd Place Undergrad

3rd Place Undergrad

Noelani Hafield

STOMACH

My stomach

Cannot stomach

What it used to—

I make dinner

Once a blue moon, I take one bite, Two, I’m about to take A third, but I picture

The food sliding

Slickly down

My esophagus

And landing in

My barren stomach

And suddenly

I feel full.

Bloated, concrete, Tiny stomach

Can’t take any more

Pitiful, ridiculous

Food. I can’t

Believe I have

To stomach

All this Every day, Forever.

NEUROTIC

Time Marched slower

When I was a child. It would pick me up, Cradle me in its arms. Let me sleep suspended, Endlessly.

It would whisper in my ear, Your birthday is here! I would wake up, Mid-July and just know That my internal Clock had counted Another year.

Time is no longer So definite.

My days stretch together, Monday, TuesdayWednesday, ThursdayFridaySaturdaySunday. Monday again.

It takes me a moment

Of true consideration

When someone asks my age. I’ve been 18 for over a year.

Time has stopped coddling me. It thrust me out of its nest Too soon. My wings

Are still too weak.

They cannot spread, they Cannot fly in the howling, Inevitable winds of time.

Childishly, I try to pretend I still hold some power

Over time’s tempo. I pitifully try to stretch One night, one hour, For as long as I can. Deceive myself Into thinking that I am in Control.

My red-rimmed, Sunken eyes

Stand as testament: Time is invincible, It will take, take, Take until You are skeletal, A husk of the pulse Of a living whisper.

MIRRORBALL

And what am I But borrowed

I shattered you

And gingerly

Picked my favorite fragments With an irreverent air

Made my own little chandelier

To dazzle and lure

Blind And Hook

Pretty Little

Damaged Things Like you

I don’t even mean To manipulate

It’s just my natural state

I’m hiding in these shards

Shriveling away

I killed you But I killed me Just the same

Making My Way Downtown

Charlotte Anderson, Honorable Mention Undergrad

2nd Place Undergrad

Paige Marion Fetzer

Smoky Mountain Fireflies

The wood is soft beneath my fingers, fine rivulets of Tennessee rain lining the grain and gathering to saturate my sun-faded jeans.

Forest air slips through my lips like a post-breath prayer; like the smooth swirls of water-worn paint I peel from the picnic table with absentminded fingers; once powder blue, now nearly purple in the fading twilight.

Cool drops draw river-bed maps down my face and my eyelids follow, just for a moment,

two, three, four, then open to a gradual fantasia of flickering green-gold lights.

Two viridian springs between twin dreams of birth and rebirth and suddenly, silently, the fireflies are dancing deep in the brambles of the basswood trees;

five flashes each then they dip into inky darkness deep enough to pen a love letter, ‘til one reignites and tiny luminescent tangles brighten the tree line in waves.

I wonder if they know (and somehow I think they do) that with every spark they are burning the breath from their bodies: in fourteen days they will diedrop dulled from the air with the sudden heaviness of rain -

but tonight they are a celestial paradox of ground-bound stars, and I’ve never felt so young because as they blink in the low glow of the precipitate haze, it’s all magic to me, light twisting through mist-curled strands of my hair to guide my awestruck gaze.

And as my feet trace a slow, whispered circle in the dampened dirt, my unfocused eyes understand their firefly dance in terms of simplified infinity:

in cool blue breaths borrowed from the last of the Fraser firs, in multifaceted heartbeats hurtling fireworks at my dusk-flushed cheeks, in fleeting bold-gold flashes that manage, for a moment, to eclipse the endless dark.

Love is a strangeness

felt best before dawn; felt best on Monday mornings when the window cold blows fat-bodied breaths against unquilted skin;

when you wake wound around an arm heavy with slumber-heat and your first fragment of thought is “This isn’t mine,” and your second, “Heaven help me, there’s a man in my bed.”

So, with eyes still crusted shut by sleep-sand you slip soft fingertips down the foreign bough -

you’re more curious now than frightened -

Down Down until they touch the stilled, steady cool of the ring and you remember: titanium; just what he wanted.

And you smell sweat and the sweet melt of rain because you met him in a September sweep of gray-cloud weeping, and a light blue blush of dopamine, when you stood closer in the cold than maybe you knew you should;

you were at a football game; you remember that too.

And you hear laughing children and the small staccato of their boot-clad run, because you knew you loved him -

oh yes, that’s right, you love himby Christmas when he gently dragged you into a game of tag with his twenty-nine nieces and nephews and only paused to pile a plate with potato casserolejust that, nothing else -

and drink four cups of holiday punch.

And you taste vanilla frosting, spread like fresco paint on the edge of your lips where he smeared two tiers of sliced wedding cake along the left side of your face and kissed you to press it into your skin -

you choose not to remember that, gasping around laughter, you’d painted him first. And it’s only a moment because the metal hasn’t yet yielded to the heat of your fingers, but by the time he stirs you’ve relived all of it,

and the rising light is saturated with shocked gratitude and old beginnings, when it reaches his open eyes.

Last Chapter; Hers and Mine

Here I go, choking on the last breath of a fictional death; drip-stop tears dropping in a fat torrent from my eyes, blurring lines of bleeding ink.

You turn beside me, laughing gently, touching my arm, “Are you crying again?”

This happens often; there’s a water-warped stack of paperback tragedies beside our bed.

I fall into your shoulder, cough out a smile through the thickness in my throat, and

what I do not say is that a girl I know died today.

What I do not say is that she was nearly a strangerclassmate, one of twenty-twobut her hair was a cacophonic ragtime of heroine’s curls cast in ephemeral yellow, and nerves gnarled her hands when she spoke but her voice never shook.

What I do not say is that while I implored the sun to sleep just a little longer, she pushed a Molotov mix of pills into the pit of her stomach and imploded.

What I do not say is that I am sick of this sadness and I am sick of mourning mothers and brothers and strangers who will never know that we are not lighter for their leaving when all we can do is look behind and wonder, “How did I not see it?”

I don’t say any of that. Instead what comes, is, “The end was sad.”

Neighborhood Snapshot

Sarah Wessman, 2nd Place Undergrad

1st Place Undergrad Sariah Gibby

Huitlacoche

You gave me tomatoes that bit with sun-soaked acid. The seeds scrunched between my teeth. I dipped a finger in your salsa: onions, tomatoes, tomatillos, peppers, lemons, and love shoved in a blender, beat to shreds, and heated in Mason jars till the red sauce bubbled and hissed: all sacrifices for a friend.

You gave me withered dahlias and infant cabbages in a blue woven basket. I palmed the brittle red petals and peeled the pale cabbages to see their curved white spines–scoliosis–branching into bitter dresses. I planted the flowers in a Coca-Cola can but the cabbages curled.

You gave me this duck pin, these blue plastic earrings, the purple pearly corn, crisp red apples, and cooked corn smut: those sweet tumors you’d die for, wrapped in layers of white tortilla cloths and laid to rest in a hot black pan.

I had these pressed dead blooms and memories of truffle mushrooms. What gifts did I give you? A closed door and an empty room. You were gone too soon.

Rollerblading down the Vert Ramp at the Skate Park by Mountain View Elementary

Blue star-patterned button-up shirt, torn white pants, black roller blades, protective pads on his palms and knees, no helmet–helmets are for kids–chain necklace strangling his neck, silver ear cuffs, gel-spiked green hair, brown eyes–orange in the sun–and that white grin when he tips over the precipice of the vert ramp, swims in the bowl, and dances back up to me. Hey, hey, your turn. I swivel shaking knees, tighten my blue helmet, tap my plastic palm pads together, take a breath of pine-spiked air, glance at the graffitied list of park rules–enter at your own risk–and smile at the teenage couple picnicking on the grass with their skateboards, their strawberry vapes, and a baby.

As a murder of crows bursts from a coil of wild blackberries, I fall down the sheer. My wheels scream on cement, gravel glitches my stride, I slam against the gutters, cry for God, plastic tears on pavement, legs fly overhead, the bowl seizes me and holds me.

I hear a baby mumble, a wheel spinning at my toe, and him yelling, are you dead? Well shit, I think, so this is what love feels like.

Grandma Time

Last night I had a dream where I watched guinea fowl run across a pond, their orange feet barely sinking below the surface. Like Peter I followed the birds.

I walked on water behind them, and felt like a child behind plump old ladies dressed in purple polka-dot dresses: too much mascara and lipstick on those fowl.

You were watching, Grandma, and when I returned, we ate pink peach petals, plucking them from a pot of water. They shed droplets like oiled feathers and they tasted like God’s

nectar. Above us people flew through the air with umbrellas like angels or Mary Poppins, real people trapped in a strange dreamlike world.

After we finished eating, we attended your funeral, Grandma. I hadn’t been born yet and you were dead, but we stood together to watch the people who were trapped in our dream world.

But then you had to leave and I had to wake up to make the world real.

Seeing Eye to Eye

The Unseen Wild

Brianna Pickering, Honorable Mention Undergrad

Split Miriam Black, 1st Place Undergrad

Undergraduate Nonfiction

Desperate

Sarah Wessman, Honorable Mention Undergrad

Zachary Brady, 3rd Place Undergrad

In My Blood

From my earliest years, I lived in a world where my toy trains talked to each other and my dance moves were the best that Mom, Aunt Collete, and Uncle Scott had ever seen. You’d find me climbing the tree in our backyard to read my books—tangled in the prickly branches— feeling as adventurous as the heroes in my stories. I’d pretend to fall asleep in the car—hoping to be carried from my car seat to my bed, and during the holidays, I was Santa’s most devout believer. My world was a dream—full of wonder and imagination.

We lived in a small brick house nestled into the Salt Lake City avenues. Our sidewalk and driveway were weathered and cracked while our “popcorn trees” vibrantly blossomed and scattered white puffs about our front yard. It was in the perfect place—just minutes away from the liveliness of downtown, and close enough to my elementary school that we could walk there and back each day. Our house was tiny and likely built decades earlier, though it was the perfect size for our family.

We moved in when I was 3 years old—my sister Brynn was a newborn. I looked up to Mom and Dad so much. Mom was a former elementary school teacher who decided to retire and be my Mom. She continued to teach as her classroom became our kitchen—a class size of two. She taught me the names of world countries and the musical notes on a staff, although her charitable example was perhaps more memorable. Being extremely patient and supportive, she made pursuing Christian values a household priority. Still, like anyone else, she wasn’t perfect. She too got frustrated and upset, though I can count on one hand the times she raised her voice to scold me. Every violin recital of mine she attended, my feelings she validated, and my tears she wiped.

Dad always knew how to have fun, whether we were making forts with sheets in the basement or creating hot air balloons out of cardboard boxes and garbage bags. Because working at the hospital was often his second home, he would call me before bed to tell me funny jokes and ask about my day.

As the sky became dark, Mom cleared dinner from the table while I wrestled with my math homework. Just then, the phone rang, and Mom answered. After moments of anxiously waiting, she handed me the beige wall phone—its curled cord dangling. Through the static, I heard a familiar voice:

“Okay son, why is a seagull called a seagull?”

“Why?” I asked into the brick—already trying to contain laughter before hearing the funny part.

“Because they fly over the sea. If they flew over the bay, they would be bagels!”

When Dad was home, he would teach me various bones of the body. He was the smartest person I knew, with piles of textbooks as tall as me. He seemed to know every detail of the human body and could tell what was wrong with me when I got sick, (except for the time he predicted I had cancer while it was really just appendicitis). Even from my young mind, I knew that what he was learning was vastly more important than my math at school. I consumed every ounce of knowledge I could from him. Pointing with his middle finger to the diagrams, I repeated:

“Radius. Ulna. Patella. Clavicle.”

“Good!” He cheered, with his eyes wrinkling behind his glasses in a smile.

I see my parents in myself—my looks, my predictable humor, my voice. It first occurred to me in my cream-colored bathroom as a child. Brushing my teeth, dad’s sandy hair and mom’s dark brown eyes stared back at me in the mirror. Dad would show me pictures of himself as a kid with Uncle Scott, and I would point to him, thinking it was me. Sharing a home and a phenotype with them made me believe we were the same—a family of commonality and wrinkled smiles. Yet, as I continued to develop, differences between us began to sprout and thicken.

Many physiological changes occur when the human body begins to wake up, the optic nerve—cranial nerve II—receives visual stimulation from behind the eyelids, driving its circadian rhythm. Dreams diminish and settle into reality. The process of waking is not a comfortable one; an organic compound—adenosine—causes feelings of sleepiness even after waking. Therefore, the control center of the brain—the hypothalamus—pumps activating hormones throughout the body to counteract these relaxing feelings. Our bodies naturally want to unwind and remain in a peaceful and comfortable slumber. However, if we can fight those feelings and wake up, we end up feeling glad we did.

Dad’s dream was always to become an orthopedic surgeon. Throughout his undergraduate degree, he worked graveyard shifts to financially support his new wife and build his resume for medical school. He and Mom were married young, and though he had a long road ahead of him, he was relentlessly motivated by the thought of one day holding a scalpel, even if at times it seemed unattainable. I can imagine him hunched over his desk in the middle of the night—his textbooks sprawled—with his feet in cold water baths to keep him from falling asleep.

I was born in the thick of his medical school. He played a main role in my infancy as a role model. Once he graduated and shifted into his residency, his second home at the hospital became a permanent residence. Mom almost single-handedly did all the cooking, cleaning, and nurturing for us. The beige phone would still ring, and I’d still hear his voice, but it wasn’t the same.

Mom tucked me in for bed one night. Minutes later, I heard the front door creak open upstairs—Dad getting home from work. Mom hurried and met him with hushed whispers.

Suddenly. Screaming at each other. It startled me. Mom’s high-pitched cry and Dad’s thunderous voice shook the floorboards. I froze in fear. Why are they being mean to each other? I had never heard Mom yell like that. I cried in my bed, mercifully naïve to the nightmare upstairs. I was beginning to wake up.

Ever since I was labeling bones in my childhood basement, I have been awfully perplexed by the human body. Some see their bodies as means to an end. I see it as a machine. Examining its fine details, I can’t help but wonder why and how it operates. To think that all at once, the heart is pumping blood to the body, the kidneys and liver are filtering that blood into urine, the intestines are digesting food for nutrients, the diaphragm is contracting to allow one to breathe, and the brain is controlling it all, is ironically almost too much for that brain to comprehend. I think of the body the same way I look up at the night sky—a creation so magnificent, so incomprehensible, so sacred.

Such a machine requires the expertise of a Mechanic—knowledgeable and skilled, yet humble. Someone dedicated to putting patients before oneself and one’s life. The world needs Mechanics who can treat complex medical conditions while simultaneously empathizing with the most widespread ailment—the human condition.

It wasn’t long before Mom and Dad stopped Brynn and me from playing one day to tell us they were getting a divorce. From what I had learned from my classmates at school, divorce was when the dad leaves the family and disappears, which is what happened. Shortly after, Dad moved to California without us for his orthopedic fellowship. I felt like I was being ripped in half.

Nearing my teenage years without a dad around was truly lonely. Becoming the only boy in the house, I resorted to joining Mom and Brynn’s girls’ nights and painting my nails with them to feel included. I felt a disconnect from my friends who talked about sports and cars. It was odd to hear Mom comment on how I was beginning to walk like Dad and cross my legs like him, even though I was never around him to observe those behaviors.

I was so happy to hear Dad was coming back to Utah to work at the hospital, which meant Brynn and I would get to visit him at his apartment twice a month. A lot had changed from before—Mom had moved Brynn and me to a new house and a new life. Junior high algebra was much harder for me than math I’d seen before. Dad was different too—he no longer wore his glasses, which he traded for a fiery temper. He was constantly kind and generous to us but seemed irritated and stressed more often—which I noticed but never acknowledged.

On his weekends, I’d enter through the front door of his townhome with my weekend bag—getting hit with a newly built smell. Familiar stacks of textbooks reappeared, and the entirety of his new Target furnishings still repped their price tags. Half of the time, we had a lot of fun together going to Boondocks, eating at nice restaurants, and skiing. The other half of the time, he’d run down the stairs in his turquoise green scrubs.

“I am just gonna run into the hospital really quick. I’ll be back soon!”

While he was gone, we’d watch TV—trying to break in the new couch. Too many episodes later, several hours would pass with no word from him. From daylight to sunset to dark, Brynn and I would be alone. I usually didn’t mind him being away because his pantry was always stocked with snacks. Brynn would get scared, but I always knew he’d come back eventually.

Mom never wanted us to stay with Dad when he was on call. On the drive back to Mom’s house the next day, he’d tell us to lie to Mom.

“If she knows I was gone all day, she won’t let you spend time with me anymore.”

We lied for him a lot to keep going back.

These years shaped my early perception of my Dad and of the cost of being a doctor. Much of my parent’s divorce remained beyond my comprehension—lulling me in my innocence. Still, from my experience, I knew something was off. I was beginning to wake up, but adenosine kept me feeling comfortable in my ignorance.

I had decided at a young age that becoming a doctor was not for me. If I had learned anything, one must be willing to sacrifice all else to treat and diagnose thousands of patients, even at the expense of the relationship with their own family. I feared if I pursued medicine, I would repeat the cycle I had been thrown into.

I had decided at a young age that becoming a doctor was not for me. If I had learned anything, one must be willing to sacrifice all else to treat and diagnose thousands of patients, even at the expense of the relationship with their own family. I feared if I pursued medicine, I would repeat the cycle I had been thrown into.

Yet my curiosity about the body didn’t stop. Entering college, my passion for violin and literature prompted me to align myself with the arts—music, writing, or maybe even architecture. Still, my thoughts wandered to an art more visceral. I’d marvel at the creation of our flesh and its creator—the composer of the universe—and its harmonious piece performed not by strings of wire, but by strings of the heart. As our beautiful yet fragile life ensues, this piece—like the rest—has an ending.

From major harmonies to silence. Life to death. People lose their lives unexpectedly all around us, and in the end, just about anyone would strip themselves of superficial wants and desires for more life to live. The more I realized that understanding the human machine is how one could preserve that life, the more I felt compelled to share with Dad that I was considering it for myself.

I’ve always felt the need to please Dad and make him proud of the person I’m becoming, even though my adult relationship with him is not as it used to be. We live hours apart and rarely see each other outside the series of birthdays and holidays. Practicing as an orthopedic surgeon now, he has what he always wanted. I understand he’s busy—but he hardly reaches out to ask about my day anymore like he used to in the avenues. I wish he would reach out more. Christmas morning. Brynn and I were conversing with Dad and my stepmom—Casey— in the living room when talk of pursuing medicine left my lips.

Dad’s eyes lit up.

He said it would be perfect for me—that I should expect to work hard and that it would be rewarding. He said he would connect me with mentors he knew could help me succeed.

As he praised me, it seemed he had never been prouder. I realized I couldn’t remember the last time he was this excited for me. He wasn’t this enthusiastic when I told him about the exciting new job I had just started. Even though his response was genuine, I felt like he only deeply cared about my life when medicine was involved, since that was his life.

I have awoken from my dream—eyes wide. Wide awake staring at the ceiling. My thoughts carving circles in my head had failed to leave me with a satisfying conclusion. The more I grappled with the notion of medicine, the more I knew I needed answers. I felt compelled to approach the one who always listened.

At my request, Mom and I talked about their divorce.

I was fortunate enough to have slept through many of the nightmares that took place. My dad showed love and compassion for Mom, but he also belittled her, regularly lied, became too friendly with alcohol, and lost his faith in God. “Staying late at work,” meant blowing off steam—partying with med school friends—returning home with alcohol on his breath. To my knowledge, he was gone studying, when it had been his excuse for his lies. Mom tucked me in and kept me sleeping in ignorance as she could, keeping my dad and his bones in the closet.

I was very appreciative to hear the truth but revealing it tempted me to question the authenticity of my entire collection of childhood memories. After all those dad jokes on the phone, how much did he think about me after he hung up? It made my blood and tears boil with rage longing for what I wished was true.

Exhibiting so many other characteristics of him, it terrified me to think I may possess some of those manipulative traits. Were they dormant somewhere in my genome that would eventually activate with the stressors of medical school and raising a family? What if nature ran its course? How much of my desire to become a doctor was already in my blood?

As it turns out, there was enough. Desire filled my veins when the star-sprinkled night sky made existence seem far from coincidental. It pumped through my heart reflecting on the sober regard of life and how quickly death could steal it away. It filled my liver and kidneys knowing I could understand the machine enough to prolong or save the life of another.

As it turns out, there was enough. Desire filled my veins when the star-sprinkled night sky made existence seem far from coincidental. It pumped through my heart reflecting on the sober regard of life and how quickly death could steal it away. It filled my liver and kidneys knowing I could understand the machine enough to prolong or save the life of another.

In the end, my life was my choice, regardless of how much of my Dad I had in me. I knew that I had to choose for myself whom to become and whom to avert.

I’ve spent many evenings in study rooms—anatomy notes and skeletal drawings sprawled out like a psychopath. In these moments, I’m reminded of my sandy blonde-haired Dad and his ice buckets. It’s at those moments I feel his blood pumping from the aorta to the brachiocephalic trunk, to the common carotid arteries.

Mom still points out my walk from time to time. When I hear it, part of me recoils, but the other part of me feels proud.

Giving cadaver lab tours to bright-eyed high school students stirs something in me. In Mom’s sympathetic teaching voice, I prepare them for what they will see, then unzip the body bags—watching each kid’s reaction. Some stare in awe, some retract in disgust, and some pass out cold on the floor. As I point to each body part and explain its significance, I’m brought back to my childhood basement:

Radius. Ulna. Patella. Clavicle.

Every now and then, we drive through the avenues to visit that old brick house. Popcorn is still scattered about the lawn, but it doesn’t seem as perfect as it once was. As a newlywed myself, I am working nonstop to gain experience for medical school—and eventually—I hope to have kids of my own. I can’t help but shudder thinking I am in the same phase of life my dad was in when things began to turn south. In certain aspects, I’ve intentionally tried to avoid being like him, though I’ve ended up like him in so many ways. Inevitably, I will still need to have the same drive to succeed. I will still be busy, and I’ll still be pulled away from my family at times, but it is my hope and my absolute prayer that I can prioritize what is most important—to be the Dad to my kids I know they deserve. Have I figured it out completely? No, and I don’t think I ever will. It’s taken growing up to realize perfection only exists in dreams.

Painted Sunset

Deren Bott, Honorable Mention Undergrad

Kyler Tolman, 2nd Place Undergrad

We’re Both Free Now

Fluffy, white snowflakes tickled my eyelashes as we trudged through snow drifts to the trailer that served as the Eagle Rock Middle School Honors U.S. History classroom. Mr. Owens’ stiff fingers fumbled with his keys in the lock as the frigid December air tightened both of our chests, our crystallized breaths floating into the stillness of the Idaho winter. At last, he found the right key, and we ushered ourselves into the warmth of the trailer, noses rosy and fingertips numb.

Mr. Owens—Coach O. to me—loved his country. United States paraphernalia decorated his classroom: American flags adorned his walls, Civil War newspaper articles boasted from behind picture frames, and although competitive swimming was his sport of passion, a New England Patriots banner hung behind his desk. I don’t even like football, but the Patriots are my team just because of their name, he once told my mom. He plopped the newspaper he was carrying onto his desk with a huff. Coach O.’s mood soured as he skimmed the headlines.

“It’s just so unnatural. All these people want is attention, and it’s disgusting.” For reasons I wasn’t quite prepared to deal with at the time, my heart seized as I muttered some milquetoast response, hoping we could stop talking and head to swim practice. He mistook my quietness for agreement—we were in Idaho, after all, and everyone bled and voted the same crimson red.

Suddenly, a fiery glow emanated from the wall behind Coach O. Large chunks of coal-red limestone appeared and formed an arch whose keystone piece stood six feet above the floor. Damp, dingy oak panels replaced the Civil War decor on the wall, and a thick and rusty iron grate revealed the looming darkness behind the medieval dungeon door that now stood imposing in the classroom where Coach O. was still ranting about rainbows and hellfire, somehow oblivious to the terror in my eyes. Just behind the splintering boundary lurked a person that stood against everything and everyone that I loved—I had seen this door many times before.

The first time my fire-and-brimstone-esque closet door appeared to me, I was only nine years old. I was singing and dancing to Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” in the checkout line at Walmart.

“You can’t sing that when you’re at school,” my parents warned, “People might make fun of you or think you’re a little… girly. Little boys don’t sing Beyoncé or Taylor Swift, so let’s maybe find something else for you to start listening to.”

When I woke the next morning, the dungeony closet door stood tall in the corner of my room. I pinched the soft skin on my right arm and pulled, pain searing through me as I began to split into two. The words I heard adults say about girly boys whirled through my mind, and the separation became easier. Finally, the other me, the scary, unacceptable me, was no longer a part of my mind or body. I opened the door, tossing him inside. I threw my Taylor Swift CD through the door’s grate and vowed to act tougher, more manly. I wouldn’t sing and dance anymore. I would be who everyone thought I should be.

Something as formidable and obtrusive as a dungeon door appearing in the middle of a conversation should have alerted Coach O. that something was off—that something was different. Fortunately for me, nobody in my town knew that doors like this even existed where we lived; only the pedophilic, drug-abusing, God-rejecting, sinners in metropolises had doors like mine.

Only apostate fools had closets like mine.

If the person trapped behind the door ever escaped his prison, everything would change, so I ignored the door. I fervently hoped nobody else could see what I saw; if they ever did, they ignored the door too.

“Anyways, let’s head to practice,” Coach O.’s voice drew my eyes back away from the door, “You ready for a bunch of IM sets today?” ***

I never enjoyed going to church. My parents held antithetical religious beliefs–Dad subscribed to the doctrines of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and Mom had no interest in organized religion. It had been decided for me that I would be raised in the church—I would believe its teachings, and I would be baptized, and I would serve a mission, and I would marry in the temple, and I would raise my own children in the church. Nobody asked or cared what I wanted or what I believed, so I learned to play the role of the LDS church boy, and I played it well.

At sixteen, I served as the First Assistant in the Priest Quorum—the effective leader of the young men in the congregation. I blessed the sacrament, planned outings and activities, and helped the younger boys with their needs. By day, I could ignore the locked closet that smoldered into existence wherever I went. I was the shining example of excellence. Nights were more complicated.

I spent my nights alone and in tears, silently shaking as salty trails carved into my cheeks. I sat with my back to the dungeon door, splinters piercing my skin. I closed my eyes, turning my awareness outward and upward, directing my thoughts to a god I didn’t believe in, and I asked for him to make this cursed closet—and the person inside of it—disappear.

Please—please take this burden away from me. I’ll never ask you for anything else, but please make me normal.

Don’t make me live with this.

Nobody ever responded.

Nasty words and thoughts filled my mind instead. Dirty. Disgusting. Unnatural. Ungodly. Bestial. Unforgivable. Unlovable.

Sometimes, I would remember what people said about people like me. On most nights, I was brought back to one particular Priesthood lesson in which Brother Cox was teaching us about dating, marriage, and sexual sin.

“Gents, sexual sin is one of the most serious sins you can commit—only things like murder and denying God are worse.”

I squirmed in my chair, the hard, cool metal making my body ache as I pressed myself into it. Sweat dampened my underarms and slicked my forehead and palms. Why was I so nervous? I wanted to follow God’s plan, right? What could I be so afraid of?

“In ‘The Family: A Proclamation to the World,’ our prophets and leaders give us several warnings that you guys know all about, but I want to focus on a few key distinctions. Marriage and procreation are sacred and are ordained by God to only be employed between a man and a woman, and anything that deviates from that is an abomination before God. This deviance makes families suffer.”

Brother Cox’s piercing eyes bored into my own as he spoke. Maybe he looked at the other boys too, but it felt like he was staring only at me and into my very being. My legs trembled, heavy with fear.

“I have a brother that suffers from homosexuality, and it’s caused a lot of trials for my family. Despite the challenges he’s brought upon us, I still manage to love him. I’ve seen firsthand that homosexuality destroys families, so I encourage you boys to follow the prophets’ warnings.”

Those last few sentences of Brother Cox’s lesson branded themselves into my soul, etched themselves into my eyelids—they were all I could see when I closed my eyes. I knew I couldn’t tell anyone about the boy I kept hidden in my closet—nobody would understand. So we stayed that way—just me and the boy—for years. ***

I was born when my parents were still young. Dad worked several jobs and studied for his classes, and Mom was only twenty and was still learning how to be an adult. We moved around a lot, especially in my younger years, as my parents struggled to find their footing: change was all I knew. Moving to Utah to start college was about the fourteenth time I had moved, and I was ready for a fresh start and a place to call home, at least for a few years.

Moving around so much made maintaining friendships for longer than a year or so nearly impossible, so I didn’t put forth much effort into forming meaningful connections with people throughout junior high and high school. There was only one exception: Sam.

Sam and I met in Mrs. Chestnut’s seventh-grade history class, and we became instantly inseparable. We both had a competitive drive to perform well academically, we loved listening to The Script’s music, we understood each other’s senses of humor, and we pushed each other to be the best versions of ourselves. High school was perhaps the biggest challenge we faced in the early years of our friendship: she went to the newer Montessori-style, group-centric high school, and I went to the more traditional high school.

We still spent time together, watching movies and planning out dystopian novels, but the short distance between our schools created a rift between us. School, work, and more school took priority over hang-out sessions, and we drifted slowly apart—until Sam and I both left Idaho Falls behind in search of bigger and better things in Utah.

Sam and I went to different universities, but we both quickly discovered that we needed older friends to ground us as we forayed into early adulthood. Weekly video calls throughout the spring semester led to us planning our first in-person time together in a year—I was going to visit her in Salt Lake City before I went home to my parents’ house for the summer.

Throughout all of my childhood relocations, I lived almost exclusively in rural Idaho, so spending the day in Salt Lake City was a treat—this tiny taste of city life lifted my spirits. As we munched on tasty chicken and pesto sandwiches at Even Stevens, I asked Sam a question that would ultimately change my life: “Do you wanna go on a trip with me to New York?”

The city was everything I had hoped it would be and more—Jimmy Fallon high-fived me at his show; skyscrapers towered above me; global food trucks filled the streets, and the city sang, never stopping to take a breath.

The people of Idaho and Utah are—or at least, they often appear to be—functionally homogenous: people are white, Christian, cisgender, heterosexual, and conservative. I never fit in because I didn’t fit into any of those categories perfectly. Despite having lived in several other cities on the other side of the country, only New York made my part-Asian, liberal, questioning self feel at home for the first time.

On our third day in the city, Sam and I emerged from a musty 23rd Street metro station into the pleasant August evening. We read online that one of the best ways to try a bunch of different foods in New York was to go to a food market, so we scurried under scaffolding through the meat packing district until Chelsea Market came into view. The moment we stepped through the doors, a symphony of smells greeted us. We both drew in deep breaths and sighed contently as our bellies rumbled, demanding a gastronomical tour.

We started off with something we knew—pizza. Sam took me to her favorite pizza joint the day before, but I could eat New York pizza every day for a year and not be tired of it. We each ordered a slice of my new favorite kind of pizza— margherita—from Filaga Pizzeria’s booth and sipped on Italian sodas before moving on.

There were so many kinds of food from a huge variety of cultural backgrounds—we could have eaten something new every day for a year and barely make a dent in the course catalog of Chelsea Market. We tried fresh and spicy garden ramen, buttery pastries, rich coffees, delectable stracciatella gelato, and even boozy milkshakes before we made our way to the Chelsea Highline—an elevated subway track that was converted into a city park—to watch as the sun set behind the city skyline. This trip was the first time I traveled without my family; I helped decide for myself what to do and where to go, and it was freeing. I spent a lot of time introspecting during the trip, so we stopped and sat on a bench, watching stars and building lights flicker into existence and silently taking everything in. The air smelled like city, but when I closed my eyes, I felt like I could finally exhale for the first time, letting out the breath I had been holding for as long as I could remember.

“Sam, I need to tell you something,” I whispered not with fear, but with understanding, “I’m gay.”

A familiar scarlet began to glow on the wall next to us. I smiled, opened the door, and led the boy into the rapidly fading sunlight. Sam grinned, reaching out to him. She held him in her lap as we all sat on that Chelsea Highline bench, content and together for the first time.

Every once in a while, especially during the sleepless nights of my senior year of high school, I would unlock the closet door, opening it just barely wide enough for the boy to slip through, and I would let him lie in bed with me for a while. I held him close, brushed his hair out of his face, and whispered gentle reassurances in his ear. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I know you’re hurting. One day, maybe. One day, I hope. That night in New York, while Sam slept in the bed (that she and I were supposed to be sharing) with the Airbnb owners’ dog, Ximena, I let the boy out of his confines to listen to the sweetness of the city’s song with me. I looked into his wide eyes, holding both of his hands in mine. One day, soon, I swear, I pledge, I vow. ***

Coming out is not a one-time event. I could scream it to the world from the highest peaks, and still people would confine me to their heteronormative expectations. I could practice and perfect my speech, but I could never know how someone would respond. Try as I might, it was often hard to give people the benefit of the doubt because I remembered every time someone said something negative about queer people. Justin had a gay uncle, so he was cool with gay people as long as they didn’t flirt with him or force anything down his throat. Uncle Marc posted publicly that he would teach his children tolerance, but never acceptance because teaching them acceptance means teaching them that sexual deviance is an acceptable life choice, when it isn’t. Conservative family members and friends debated whether people like me should even have the right to be married and complained when gay marriage became nationally legalized. The places I lived teemed with people who made me feel unsafe, but I believed, I hoped, that I could find comfort in the people that mattered most.

Telling my parents was fairly easy since my mom was loopy on Ambien when I told her, and she told my dad for me. Mom was the liberal sheep of the family, so I knew she was a safe person for me. Dad’s faith troubled me, but I knew he loved me, and nothing could change that. Max had matured through high school, and although he would certainly deny it, he did actually like spending time with his older brother—we would be fine. My friends who mattered the most received it well, and I was finally ready for a more daunting conversation with Grandma Tolman, Dad’s mom.

My relationship with my grandmother changed frequently throughout my childhood. She and Grandpa Tolman never approved of Dad marrying Mom, and they wanted my parents to put me up for adoption instead of raising me as their own. Their eldest grandchild was born to an apostate mother and a rebellious father—how would the first blood of their first blood live out the Tolman legacy? Luckily for them, my Mormon masquerade fooled them, and they grew to love me for who I was—or at least who I was pretending to be—rather than where I came from.

When it was Dad that told them that I wasn’t going on a mission instead of me, Grandma told me that nothing I could say would change the fact that she loved me. I wanted to show her that I believed her, or at least that I wanted to believe her, so I decided to come out to her in person rather than letting an online post come out to her for me.

I visited my family for Thanksgiving in my sophomore year in college, resolved to talk to Grandma sometime in the afternoon after lunchtime and hoped to not ruin Thanksgiving for her. Lunchtime came and went, and as the tryptophan in the turkey left aunts, uncles, and cousins lounging languidly about, I pulled Grandma aside to go for a walk with me.

Dirty, three-day-old snow crunched beneath us as we walked, Grandma’s arm looped through mine as I gathered myself and my thoughts. Finally, the dam in my mind I spent so long carefully constructing to prepare for this conversation burst open, and my tears flowed freely as I just barely managed to choke out, “Grandma, I’m gay.”

She stopped walking, holding me, but quiet. After three too many moments of silence, finally, she said, “Thank you for telling me, Kyler. I love you.”

Relief flooded through me. “I love you, too, Grandma.”

“Nothing you could say will change that, but I guess I don’t really know what to say.” She paused again before continuing, “What is your plan? Do you have a… partner?”

“No, I’m single at the moment, but there is someone I want you to meet.” My closet door blazed into existence on a nearby shed. I brought Grandma over to it, took a deep breath, and reached for the handle.

I managed to open the door not even two inches before Grandma swiftly slammed it closed, fastening the locks, and placing her hand firmly on the door. “Do you understand why I don’t want this for you? You know your aunt knew someone who was gay, but he decided to marry and have children with a woman so that he could live the gospel teachings. Would you consider that?”

“Oh. Well, I’m not dating anyone right now, but I fully intend on marrying a man one day. I get that the church means everything to you, but I don’t share your beliefs.” In her eyes, I could see the fear that she was losing her eldest grandchild to an aberrant life of sin, but I knew it wasn’t my job to make myself palatable for her. I was enough, and she could love all of me, or she could lose me.

I had opened to her the most private door I had. I kept the door closed more than I kept it open at this point, and I chose to share with her my most true, authentic self, and she told me she wanted me to marry a woman. The boy in the closet would never meet my grandmother. All three of our hearts broke a little that day.

The day after I came out to my grandma, I typed out some thoughts into my notes app. The burden of keeping the closet closed had become more cumbersome than I was willing to bear, and now that I had talked to the most important people, I was ready to let the rest of the world in. I copied my note and sent it to Sam for a final check. Granted the green light, I opened all of my social media accounts and pasted my soul for the Internet to witness: “This is probably going to be a lengthy post with a lot of important information in it, so if you care enough to know what’s going on with me, please stick through it…” I posted on Facebook, then Instagram, then Snapchat, and then I turned my phone off. I had a friend to see and a promise to keep.

I opened the door all the way: I wouldn’t be hiding anything anymore. I had always known who the boy in the closet was, but I had never greeted him by name.

Nine-year-old Kyler inched out of the shadows, shielding his eyes from the unfamiliar fluorescent light. His tiny, chunky hands pulled nervously on his space-themed pajamas as he asked softly, “Is it time?”

I kneeled, taking his hands into my own, and looking into his eyes, I said, “Yes, Kyler. It’s time. I’m sorry it took me so long, but I’m ready now. You’re safe now. And, I love you.”

I took him into my arms and allowed the tears to fall freely, and I closed my eyes. I love you. I love you. How could I have allowed the world to demand I lock away this innocent child whose only sin was love? Why had I denied him the small pleasures of singing and dancing to his favorite artists? How could anyone see this boy and call him an abomination?

At last, I opened my eyes. The boy from the closet wasn’t a boy anymore—his oval-shaped, wiry glasses had become thicker, rectangular, and stylish, and his spaceship pajamas were exchanged for slim-fit jeans and a buttoned-down shirt, and he was taller.

He was me.

I loved him.

He forgave me.

“I think we’re ready,” he said. He pulled a match from his pocket and held it out to me.

“I’ve tried burning it down before. It never worked,” I replied, a tinge of doubt forming in my mind.

“The closet could only be destroyed if you freed me, and we did it together. I was never going to disappear. We don’t need to hide anymore, though. We’re both free now.”

I drew the match quickly and carefully along one of the archway stones, and a bright, rainbow flame flickered into existence. We held the match to the bottom of the old wood, and the entire door burst into technicolored flames.

He threw his arm around my shoulder, and I wrapped mine around his waist. “That wasn’t so hard, now, was it?” he joked.

“Oh, shut up,” I smirked, “Let’s go grab some pizza.”

“We’re listening to ‘Single Ladies’ on the way there, right?”

We both smiled and turned away as our once prison turned to ash.

The Visitor

Brianna Pickering, Honorable Mention Undergrad

Sky-Stained Gown

Sarah Wessman, Honorable Mention Undergrad

Jay Paine, 1st Place Undergrad

We Will Walk Along The River

Sadie departs from the trail, slipping through an aspen grove and wandering down the ravine. Struggling to keep up, I follow, focusing on the gentle swish of Sadie’s boots brushing aside the papery leaves, a sound harmonizing with that ceaseless rush of river water.

“Sadie, wait up! Where’re we going?”

They chuckle. “The river, babe!”

We reach the edge of the banks, and I peer into the Logan River. I am surprised by its blackness. When Sadie and I hiked alongside this river two years ago, the water glowed like sun-kissed emeralds, viridian and translucent, but I shouldn’t be too shocked. We last came here on a summer’s morning, not an autumnal evening. Still, an eeriness hangs above the swift-moving river, as if instead of flowing into Cache Valley, it now flows into Hades.

I look at Sadie, wondering if they sense something is off, but they are kneeling on the banks appreciating their surroundings. They dip one hand into the river, letting the black water rush between their fingers. I ignore the breeze’s stygian chill and smile. I have missed Sadie’s persistent inclination to experience the world and observe all its eccentricities.

Suddenly reminded of why we came here, I reach into my backpack and retrieve the book, the one they let me borrow two years ago just before we spun out of each other’s orbits. Although Sadie understands, I still thought I needed to do something special to prove how much I value our friendship, so I read the book and invited them on this hike. I hold the novel out toward Sadie. “Hey! Before I forget, here’s your book back.”

Sadie looks up, their caduceus earrings reflecting the last of the sunlight. “Oh, right! Thanks for remembering.”

Sadie reaches for their book, but it slips from my grip and splashes into the water. Speechless, we both watch the river sweep it downstream.

After a long pause, Sadie says, “Jay, don’t worry about my book. I’m just happy you’re here now. We can still discuss the story and catch up, you know.”

“But—”

They elbow me. “Hey! You still have to tell me about that Greek course you took.”

I turn toward Sadie. “I’m sorry, I don’t know how—”

Sadie’s lips peel into a thin smile. “Jay, for fuck’s sake! Let’s just appreciate being out here by the river.”

“But your book! I—”

Sadie looks into the water. “You know, I think I heard somewhere that the river carves the canyon.”

Surprised by the abrupt change in topic, I pause. “I think I’ve heard that, too.”

Sadie chuckles. “And you know what this means?”

“What?” I ask nervously.

Sadie dips their hand back into the river, the surface shimmering like obsidian. “This means the canyon is deeper than it was two years ago when we last hiked it.”

I sit next to Sadie and submerge my hand. As I contemplate their observation, I let the water rush past my fingers, dark, cold, and numbing. “That’s interesting. Sadie, I—” But my flow of thought ceases. This image of water slicing through rock like a knife dams up my mind.

Sadie stands up clutching their obol necklace. “Jay, I’m really glad I got to reconnect with you, but I have to go now. Someone’s waiting for me.”

“Sadie, you can’t be leaving already!”

My heart starts pounding. I still have so much to tell them. We still need to discuss the book, and I want to tell them what I learned during my Ancient Greek class.

“Goodbye, Jay.” Sadie faces the sunset and begins walking downstream.

Helpless, I watch, imagining how they, curious and attentive, would have appreciated the nuances of Greek grammar, especially how writers could distinguish reality from unreality using different verbal moods.

“Sadie, wait! I—”

I can’t stop thinking about Greek. I want to tell them how these writers would use the indicative mood for events grounded in reality, like how I was walking along the river with Sadie, but these same authors would then use the subjunctive or optative to express uncertainty or wishes. If only Sadie were to walk along the river with me!

“Sadie! I’m sorry! I should have—”

If only I could regress to moments earlier when we were letting our hands grow numb in the river. I could have used its persistent current to explain how Greek’s present tense typically embodies the progressive aspect. The river does not flow. The river is flowing.

“Sadie!” but they can’t hear. The river drowns out my voice.

I sit shivering on the banks where Sadie was kneeling earlier. I wish I could tell them about Heraclitus, the Pre-Socratic philosopher who wrote all about flow and flux and rivers. I came across one of his fragments during the program: “ποταμοῖσι τοῖσιν αὐτοῖσιν ἐμβαίνουσιν ἕτερα καὶ ἕτερα ὕδατα ἐπιρρεῖ.” Using my infantile translation skills, I reconstructed it as “for those stepping into the same rivers, waters stream on and on differently and differently.”

As Sadie’s figure vanishes like a ghost, I imagine us discussing Heraclitus’ fragment. Sadie would observe how the water droplets contacted our skin only once before rushing downstream, unlikely to touch our flesh ever again. I would then argue that these fleeting molecules are a metaphor for how life is constantly changing, ensuring that we can never expect any worldly feature to remain constant. Sadie would respond with some clever remark, but this conversation never happens.

It can’t.

I am sitting at my kitchen table struggling through a Greek practice sentence, one of the many demanding completion before class resumes tomorrow morning. I begin by diagramming the sentence. Then I decipher the unfamiliar vocabulary. This sentence presents διασφάξ, which my lexicon defines as “an opening made by violence,” but this definition makes little sense because the other words pertain to where the Asopus River flows. I shut my lexicon and stare at the exercise, hoping to glean some context, but the letters and words blur together.

My focus shifts to the next sentence. Perhaps this one will be easier. The TAs told me that I would have little success if I dwelled on any word or clause for too long, so I am only following their advice, but the next sentence proves just as difficult. Although I want to understand the vocabulary and grammar necessary to read Herodotus’ account of the Battle of Thermopylae, exhaustion conquers.

Desperate to make some progress, I switch strategies. Instead of translating the exercises, I identify the verbs. I underline the indicatives. I put a square box around the optatives. If I can outline the contours of the grammar tonight, tomorrow morning I should be able to produce mellifluous translations. As I keep underlining and boxing, the verbal moods of Ancient Greek begin to make more sense than the ones of Modern English. By transforming only the final syllables of a verb, an Ancient Greek speaker could use the subjunctive or optative to communicate apprehension or potentiality, but I am left to select from English’s nebulous array of modal auxiliaries like would and will, whose metamorphosing meanings can trick speakers into believing that the most unlikely of events will become reality.

I box another optative, and memories from my high school English classes surface. My teachers taught me to replace would with will whenever possible, noting that if I implemented their advice, my writing would sound more confident. I followed their counsel for many years, but I can rarely be confident about the future, and sometimes I shouldn’t be. I am upset that my writing instruction has acclimated me to this belief that our unknowable future should be treated as reality. This belief is a grave error, and after discovering Greek’s nuanced verbal systems, I will never subscribe to such a notion again, especially after what happened to Sadie.

I bite my eraser. I hate that I kept telling myself: After I read the book, I will text Sadie, and then we will discuss its story while walking along the river. I should have shifted the verbal mood in this thought from the indicative to the optative, but English doesn’t have an optative. It barely has a subjunctive, but I should have tried to capture the subjunctive’s flavor using English modals. If I should text Sadie after I read the book, then we would be able to discuss its story while walking along the river. If only I had altered the modality of this thought, then perhaps I would feel less regret.

Unable to stare at the Greek any longer, I leave my course materials strewn across the table and climb into bed. I toss and turn, trying to push Sadie’s book and Greek verbs out of my mind, but English becomes inextricable from Greek. Unrealities blur into realities, like how I could read the book Sadie lent to me. I could read it right now. It is sitting on my shelf, dust collecting around the edges of its spine. Then I could text Sadie. Their name and number are etched onto the first page with permanent ink. These actions are so possible for me to perform that I would be justified in thinking about their completion using the indicative mood with the future tense. I will read the book. I will text Sadie. But I don’t want to read the book or text them. I want what can never happen, so I let a memory play through my mind like a movie clip.

I recall Sadie’s beaded dreadlocks flinging to their left as they turned toward a hill overtaken by sunflowers. Each flower angled itself toward the sun, reminding me of a cluster of radio telescopes fixated on deciphering an orbit.

Sadie marveled at the multitude. “Woah! Look at those sunflowers.”

“Yeah! They’re so—” but I never finished my remark.

Sadie’s attention had shifted to a little ladybug ambling across a mint leaf. Crouching beside the plant, they studied the red beetle. Then they asked me a question. I recall their inquiry sounding philosophical or spiritual, but I can’t remember Sadie’s exact curiosity, only that I admired their appreciation for even the smallest of creatures. Since then, I’ve always wanted to be more like Sadie.

Aware of my lack of answer, Sadie turned away from the ladybug and looked up at me, their aqueous blue-green eyes glistening like a river doused in sunshine. “I’m sorry if we’re moving too slow. I’m easily distracted, but I enjoy being out here, you know, on this hike.”

A sharp pain surged through my chest. No one ever needs to apologize for observing nature, especially Sadie. Saddened, I responded, “It’s okay. I normally hike fast, so I don’t see things in the detail we’re seeing now.”

We kept walking, leaving behind the sunflowers and ladybug for a stretch of trail paralleling the Logan River, but we remained on this path for only a moment before Sadie discovered an offshoot leading into a small aspen grove where the leaves shimmered like gold coins. I remember feeling overcome with awe.

“Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold.” I couldn’t help but share Frost’s poem. The moment felt right. I recited all eight lines, and the last one cascaded off my tongue clear as water. “Nothing gold can stay.” As I spoke, the leaves glowed in the warm morning light.

“Robert Frost, right?” Sadie’s gaze remained fixed on the leaves.

“Yeah!” I boasted, “I’ve been reading a lot of Frost lately.” A smile smeared across my face. All felt right that day, especially with the wind tickling the leaves with what sounded like snare brushes, the perfect accompaniment to the river’s swift song.

“You’ll have to show me more of his work. I’ve been wanting to get more into poetry.”

“You can borrow my collection when I’m finished,” I blurted out, but I felt rude offering a book to Sadie and not asking the same in return, so I added, “Also, I love reading what my friends like. Want to do a book swap?”

Sadie’s eyes brightened, making their irises appear bluer than usual. “Sure, babe. I have some you might like.”

“Excellent!”

Sadie placed a hand on their hip. “But we’ll borrow only. I will need my books back.”

I paused, struck by Sadie’s resolve. “Of course! I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

My mind leaps forward to the following week when Sadie lent me Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha, and I forgot to bring my Frost collection. I should have brought it the next time we met, and I should have read Golden’s novel that same summer. I did neither, but it all seemed okay then. Perhaps I was still clinging to the illusion of the everlasting golden moment, but naivete is no excuse. I messed up. I let our friendship dissolve like dewdrops during the late morning. I—

I clutch my pillow tighter, as if doing so will quell my rampant thoughts. I need to stop thinking about the book and Sadie and Greek so I can sleep and wake early. My homework awaits me at the kitchen table, unfinished.

Despite this summer presenting many opportunities, I have yet to read Golden’s novel. Still, I keep telling myself that after I read it, I will text Sadie, and then we will discuss its story while walking along the river. I just need to pick a day and read it before next week when the Greek program begins. There will be no time for novels then. I should have picked today to read the book, but instead I am here at Westside Coffee waiting for a date who may not show up.

“Jay!” the barista calls.

I approach the counter, and I am handed an upside-down latte, the espresso poured on top of the foamy milk like a splash of mud. I thank her anyway and take a seat in the back corner of the cafe. In the seclusion of this corner, I can pretend to be a solo coffee connoisseur if Quinn fails to join me, an outcome seeming more likely with each passing minute.

I sip the latte. The bitter foam dissolves on my tongue as I recall how Quinn and I were supposed to have had our date three days ago, but they asked to reschedule on account of a family emergency. I initially assumed they were having second thoughts and were too cowardly to cancel, but I reminded myself that family emergencies do arise, and Quinn probably couldn’t have foreseen such a crisis. After all, the future is unpredictable.

But the longer I wait, the less I want to be on this date. The caffeine enters my bloodstream, intensifying my anxieties, and the latte, priced at five dollars, begins to lose its appeal. I took off work to be here. I could be making money right now. I need to be making money right now. Greek begins next week, and after the course begins, I won’t have time to work, and I certainly won’t have time to date. Reconnecting with Sadie should be my top priority, and I’m starting to wonder if this date will hinder us from rekindling our friendship. Sadie used to date Quinn, and it might seem odd if I go on a date with their ex just days before reaching out.

I check the time, hoping enough has passed to justify leaving. It’s 2:30. The date was supposed to have started thirty minutes ago. I knock back the rest of my latte and exit the cafe. As I walk to my car, I feel my phone vibrate. I don’t have to look to know Quinn texted me. What did they want now? I was not going to reschedule for a third time.

Once seated in my car, I read Quinn’s message. “I’m sorry. My best friend passed in September and today is their birthday. It hit hard and fast.” I linger on the text before slipping my phone into my pocket. Losing a friend is hard, so I understand why they failed to show, but I wish they had canceled before I drove over and bought coffee.

Once home, I lie across my bed and begin scrolling through Instagram. I pause briefly to consider reading Sadie’s book, but I ultimately decide that I want something mindless to carry me through the afternoon. I scroll through wedding photos of couples I’ve never met and don’t care about. I scroll through mediocre memes and pictures of pit bulls, their smiles dripping with slobber. Then I fixate on a post from Quinn. It features a picture of Sadie, and in the caption, Quinn is wishing them a happy birthday.

My heart palpitates. No, no, no. Sadie could not have been the one who passed away in September. That is impossible. I was going to text them and invite them to walk along the river with me after I read the novel, and these events will happen because Sadie is still alive. I must have misread the post. I must have misread Quinn’s message. But my lies do not shield me from reality’s sharp arrows.

I open my laptop and begin searching for Sadie’s obituary, only I can’t remember their last name. I rummage through my phone contacts. Only their first. Maybe their last is included in their Instagram or Snapchat user. I check both. Both only include their first. Then I remember the book, the one with their full name written on the first page. Shaking, I run my fingers across my bookshelves until I find it. I yank it off so fast that another tumbles out after it. I turn to the first page. Sadie’s full name stares back at me in fancy, permanent cursive. I type each letter into Google and press Enter.

Sadie’s obituary appears.

I feel like my backbone is grating against stone as I struggle to situate myself in the desk. Chuck, the professor, is supposed to be excusing the class for a short break, but he keeps waxing on about the late development of the future tenses in Indo-European languages. “Remember, Proto-Indo-European had no future tense. Speakers relied on the subjunctive and optative moods to express the future, though these all would carry flavors of uncertainty.”

A language without a future tense. My mind stalls on the concept. If the future tense never developed in English, then I never would have thought that after I read the book, I will text Sadie, and then we will discuss its story while walking along the river. Instead, I would have had to voice this thought using the subjunctive or optative, the moods displaying no time. The future would have simply remained a collection of possibilities, never masquerading as that which is ultimately a wish.

Chuck continues elaborating. “All of Proto-Indo-European’s daughter languages developed their future tenses internally, so that’s why Greek’s future system differs from Latin’s, whose future tense was born from the subjunctive.”

I stare into space, wondering when all the ancient Europeans decided they should create a future tense so they could express the future as a perceived reality. I wonder if these ancient Europeans realized that it doesn’t make sense to treat death as an uncertainty. To say death might happen is to voice an obvious lie, but perhaps the ancients had a periphrastic means to navigate its inevitability, like death is going to happen, but such a construction lacks concision. It doesn’t have the same force as death will happen.

How ironic. If the certainty of death influenced the development of future tenses, then these speakers simultaneously created an accurate means to express the unavoidable nature of death while also forging the possibility to treat uncertainties as reality. This is the dilemma that gave rise to the dissonance I experienced surrounding Sadie. I was able to imagine reconnecting with them as a reality when death had already intervened, but I must be overthinking the intentions of the ancients. A more likely explanation is that deep in their subconsciouses, they simply desired convenience, and the future tense subsequently arose.

“Whoops!” says Chuck. “We were supposed to be on break five minutes ago. Take a break—and be back in five!”

Eager to invite circulation back into my legs, I stand up, stretch, and wander outside. From the steps of Old Main, I can see the mouth of the canyon, though the Logan River rests just below eye level, obscured by hills, buildings, and trees. It’s hard to believe that Sadie and I wandered alongside that river two years ago, and perhaps we could have wandered alongside it again if only I had read the book one or two summers earlier. Instead, I am learning about the flaws of language and thought while regret courses through my veins.

Aggrieved, I long to experience Proto-Indo-European, especially its lack of a future tense, but I can only grasp at the fossilized pieces embedded within its daughter languages. The oldest language I am capable of experiencing is Homeric Greek, which is around three thousand years old, and even by this time period, a future tense was afflicting the Greek language. I could have said Sadie will walk along the river with me just as easily as if only Sadie were to walk along the river with me, but with its greater number of verbal moods, reality and potentiality must have appeared more distinct to the ancient Greeks. Wanting to feel the weight of a wish, I imagine using Greek’s optative.

I am walking along the river trail alone, searching for that grove where Sadie and I once marveled at aspen leaves shimmering like gold coins. I find it, and although the golden hour of sunset has arrived, what few leaves cling to the branches appear papery and dull. I fixate on the aspens’ vapid transformations, eventually deciding to slip past their thin, knotted trunks and slide down the ravine, the crisp leaves swishing underfoot. This colorless grove, having entered its temporary and autumnal standstill, offers no solace, yet I hope the river, its waters in swift flux, will.

I kneel on the banks and gaze into the frigid water, now dark and glittering like a sky full of stars. I imagine Sadie dipping their hands into the river, eager to contact whatever force is responsible for the water’s arcane beauty. I plunge my hand into the rush, and cold droplets numb each finger until my whole hand stiffens, unfeeling and frozen. For this brief moment, I wish everything else would freeze, too, as if no verbs existed. Hand in the river. Water molecules on fingers. River inside of the canyon. I wish I could return to an earlier experience. Sadie and I inside an aspen grove near the river. Poetry from memory. Leaves like gold, forever.

I close my eyes and reimagine my present, only Sadie is here with me. Sadie and I next to the river. Sadie’s observation, but I cannot linger on this impossible moment. If I am to respond to Sadie’s observations, they must first be able to make them. Some form of motion forward must occur, and verbs, whether indicating what actually will or what I wish would happen, serve this purpose. Just as Heraclitus uses the rushing river to teach that all is in flux, I use the relationship between reality and language to understand how this present experience is unfolding.

I slip my hand out of the water and shake off the droplets. Warmth does not return as I try to reimagine the moment with Sadie. This time I envision the entirety of the hike. Sadie guides me through the aspen grove, down the ravine, and to this riverbank where we can converse. I might tell Sadie about what I learned in my Ancient Greek class. They would appreciate the nuances of Greek grammar, and they, also curious about the world’s complexities, might tell me some intriguing fact they learned, like how the river carves the canyon. This fact would lead them to observe how the canyon is deeper than it was two years ago when we last hiked inside it. I could respond by telling Sadie that the river carving the canyon is a metaphor for our deepening friendship, but this is where my flow of thought ceases. Some unrealities were never meant to be imagined.

γὰρ ἡ Σάδιη παρὰ τὸν ποταμόν σὺν μοι βαδίζοι.

Instead, I stand up and let my mind meander back to the Greek practice sentence, the one I struggled to translate, the one containing the word διασφάξ. If I had read beyond the first definition in my lexicon, I would have learned sooner that the word not only means “an opening made by violence” but also a “rocky gorge.” My professor even defined it as a canyon. To the ancient Greeks, these geological formations must have looked like gashes, wounds made by the slash of a sword. The Logan Canyon begins to take on this appearance.

I begin walking upstream along the river. Behind me, the Wellsville Mountains swallow the sun like a ripe apricot. Daylight then ceases, and as I continue hiking up the banks, I become secure in the knowledge that I will never read the book and that Sadie will never again join me on this hike. I accept this reality while the black blade of river water opens the wound deeper and deeper.

In Death We Trust

Madalynn Burnham, Honorable Mention Undergrad

Sarah Monsen, Honorable Mention Undergrad

Undergraduate Fiction

Moon

Cody Jones, Honorable Mention Undergrad

Boginka and the Changeling

Camille Bassett, 3rd Place Undergrad

OLENNA Petska laid her babe in the cradle and tied a red ribbon around his wrist. She placed a pair of iron tongs beside his bundled limbs. Covered his face with his scarlet cap. Stoked the coals of her open stove. All this she did so he would be bathed in a warm glow all night long. He would sleep untouched by evil. In forty days, he would be baptized. Until then, Olenna would be diligent. Her husband had called her belief in demons a woman’s superstition. He had chuckled, kissed the baby, and gone to bed. Nevertheless, Olenna watched her child. What choice did she have? She was his mother. One hand upon her breast and one upon the cradle, she whispered to her babe that he would grow, know God, and be grateful. He’d better be, for all her efforts. She tended the fire until dawn and never closed her eyes.

That night was the first test of her virtues. Patience. Forbearance. Perseverance. She practiced those virtues daily. She cared for her baby. Fed him. Clothed him. Gave him a place to lay his head. But he wouldn’t sleep. He refused. He fussed all night, his eyes black and fathomless. He was colicky and cruel, cold to her affection. Soon, all the other children in the village babbled, but her shell of a babe kept his silence. She tried everything. Sang to him. Slapped him. Prayed daily. She poured her tears into her pillow every night for two years. At last, God sent her guidance in the form of a Byzantine missionary, His Grace Father Licinius, passing through for the harvest.

Father Licinius prayed over the resistant child. Spoiled thing kicked him in the glasses. Snapping shut his book of psalms, His Grace said, “Only one manner of creature keeps so profound a silence. A changeling, it’s undeniable.”

Olenna said, “Not possible.” She knew of the Dziwozona, the Woman of the Wild, who stole human children in the night and replaced them with her own misshapen offspring. She had taken precautions. She had done all she could.

“If Dziwozona is at work,” Father Licinius said, peering hard over his spectacles, “some negligence has occurred. Did you tend to the hearth? Keep his face covered from the moonlight?” “Of course, I did.” Olenna folded her arms. “I did everything I could.”

Father Licinius took her hand and patted a succoring rhythm. “Dziwozona is cunning in her machinations. If you did all you could and still the misfortune befell you, perhaps it is a sign of her wickedness—not of your maternal failings.”

“It is.”

“Do you believe this is not your child?”

“I do.”

“Woman, if you believe this is not your child, do this one task,” he said. “Take it out to the woods where it belongs and beat it mercilessly with a switch. Then you will witness a miracle.”

Olenna was a Christian, a good Christian mother. She took the changeling and trod out to the woods, shoulders hunched, murmuring under her breath, “If God had asked you to do some great thing, would you not have…not…not…” Not this? Blasphemy. Despicable. She swallowed the hard lump of sin in her throat and carried on. When they reached the clearing, she snapped at the changeling to stop whimpering. She hissed that it must break its silence, one way or another. Speak or scream—it was his choice. Fathomless eyes wide, the changeling shook its head. “

How much more then, when He tells you…” Olenna recited as she selected a thin willow branch. “How much more?” As she snapped its twigs like fingers. “How much more…?” As she raised the switch to beat the changeling until it screamed.

BOGINKA Nocs—Preserver of the Swamp, Woman of the Wild, Unbeatable Champion of Long-Distance Spitting—was just passing by when she beheld, with her beady yellow eyes, what the mother was doing to her child. A human child. A human babe, whatever those foggy-brained mortals believed. Whatever they did to him, they wouldn’t change the changeling. He was just born that way, just as Boginka was born with a whistle-gap in her teeth and very large toes.

Just as she had been reborn from the mud with dripping black hair, sagging breasts, and brittle claws. A woman, soaking wet and shivering, and, when she stared at herself in the bog, no longer a woman at all. As far as she knew—and she knew a great deal after a lifetime and a death—she no longer had a heart. She was a demon. She should not care about a screaming mortal child.

Natheless, she felt galled by what she heard and so knelt and stirred her long first nail in the earth. She molded the mud and kneaded it like bread. Needed much more than a few gloppy handfuls for this large a storm. As she dirtied her hands in clay the color of blood, bloated clouds clotted above the forest. Above the young mother beating the life out of her child.

The clearing was but a few strides from the ash trunk Boginka lurked behind, the demon but a few waddles from the bog. Its ever-changing stench was her vital source. She drew from it with amphibious greed, her hunger, her emptiness, her rage fueled by proximity. She loomed over the water now, relishing the swampy murk, which held no reflection to disdain. This close, her stomach was carved out with craving. As she closed her eyes and breathed in, absorbed, consumed, her emptiness was replaced by the tempest. Her power was as swollen as a pregnant belly.

And so, when she scooped up a handful of the cess-brown marsh water and carried it back to her sloppy stew, when she tipped out the reservoir onto her earth-swirls and mud-clouds, when she brushed off her hands with a bitter grin, the rain that poured down from the heavens was enough to make God jealous. How’s that for flooding the Goat-forsaken earth, hmmm? She dumped it right on the young mother’s head. She took a piss while the last of the rain splattered, each droplet fat and full until the very last one fell. Took several minutes. Then the final splat rung in the demon’s ears like a lily-lovely death knell.

Drenched, the young mother gasped and spluttered abysmally pious curses. Her willow switch wilted. She whipped it through the air to no avail, then cast it to the earth, useless—useless! Her babe was silent. He shivered, trembling like a stick bug on a leaf, but not from water. He didn’t have a drop on him. Just a hundred or so screaming red welts on his tiny body. Boginka just about howled when the young mother brought him to her chest and kissed his dark curly head. Goat-forsaken Hell and for fuck’s sake…But the babe didn’t seem to notice his mother’s affection. His head dangled out past the woman’s shoulder. His eyes widened at the demon hiding in the mist. “Mavka,” he said, the archaic word for ‘Water Spirit.’

His mother laughed out loud, a sob mixing with the sound. “Yes, that is right,” she said, “Matka.” The mortal word for Mother. “Matka,” she said again, “and now, no more silence, yes?” Then, under her breath, half senseless with the tears, the woman thanked the Lord in His mercy for His sign. “Just like special baby Isaac, sweet little one, precious lamb…It was all just a test…Just a test…” She held him close and smothered as she stumbled back through the trees the way she had come. By now she was damned near choking on relief. “God baptized you anew and gave you back to me…God in His mercy…I always knew He would, oh, my baby boy…”

“You’re a shit mother,” Boginka said to herself. “God has nothing to do with it.” If looks could burn, she would’ve set the forest alight. She was that livid. And, to be down-to-earth about it, that ugly. She wrapped her arms around herself as her power, abused and expended, deflated. The young mother’s prayers thinned away like the mist. Without the bog in her veins, the demon was once again hollow, her womb cavernous. Empty as a cradle. Boginka swayed on her sticky legs. Her ragged bones sighed. She slumped against the ash trunk with her arms over her breasts.

OLENNA had faith her child would be healed. But he wasn’t. Ever since he had broken his silence, his chatter was incessant. He sat on the floor lining up pebbles and speaking to the stones if she couldn’t tolerate his voice any longer. If she brushed her palm along his bent shoulders, he cried. If she disturbed his rocks, he flew into rages. Her every gentle touch, he met with anger. She begged him. Beat him. Prayed. Daily.

Then she bore her second child and she knew, without any doubt, that the creature who had worked her to the bone for the better part of three long years was not her son. Her second child, her human baby, babbled at nine months old. He slept when he was tired. She fed him and he grew, unlike the changeling, who had sucked and never been satisfied, who consumed what little they had and remained stubborn and thin as a reed. She didn’t spare the rod. She wouldn’t spoil the child, if that heartless thing was a child at all. So heartless, it would not kiss her cheek when she tucked it in at night. It would not respect its father. It would not hug its brother.

Wary of the Dziwozona’s wrath, she bathed, fed, and clothed it. It recoiled from her affection and spat upon her kindness. Drawn to the end of her rope, Olenna sought out Father Licinius, who had given up a life of comfort in the Byzantium to tarry in their village. She found him in the chapel, pouring over the word of God. “Your Grace,” she said. “The changeling—”

“Your Eminence,” said Father Licinius, his eyes immersed in study. “I have been ordained a bishop. Tomorrow, I depart for Constantinople.”

“Blessed news, Your Eminence, but the changeling—”

“Did you not do as I asked?” Father Licinius glanced up. “Did you not witness a miracle?”

“I did.” Olenna gripped the back of the pew. “I…I did all that you asked, but—”

His Eminence held up his hand. He smiled, sadly. “God has heard your prayers. He loves you for your faithfulness. But the Dziwozona, whom He despises, cares little for her child. She did not hear his cries. If you hope to see your efforts rewarded, you have only to increase them.”

Olenna pressed a hand to the cold stone lodged in her chest.

“If you do not,” His Eminence said, “the changeling will consume all that God provides for you. Do not forget that negligence reaps its own rewards, and repeats the Original Sin.”

Olenna’s hand fell from her chest. “I won’t, Your Eminence,” she said. “Let it not be said I lacked for effort.”

BOGINKA hadn’t thought about the changeling since that day in the forest. She hadn’t, not once. Not in two more mortal years. She was merely out for a midnight lurk when she spied the mother tossing her child onto the stinking cess heap. Boginka reckoned he would cry or flail, but he didn’t. He sank into the muck, trash, and human waste, and stared up at his mother, eyes like moons. He stared at her until she turned on her heel and left him there for the long night ahead.

Indeed, at night, the trees soaked up the shadows and the bogland transformed from a wet kitchen sponge into a hard-packed block of ice. Chill seeped through the branches and clung to the changeling’s skin, running to the crooks of his elbows in watery beads. His legs thrashed in sudden panic and he shucked at the muck to get it off. A high hum mounted in his throat as he smeared his molten skin. His flapping hands only made it worse. He must’ve known his struggle was worthless. Sinking into the cess heap, he drew in his knees and hid his face between the bones.

Well, Boginka had business to be about, crevices to poke her nose into, a bog to preserve.

Natheless, she remembered the night she had emerged, soaking, from the swamp and clambered toward the heap, choking on the fog and swallowing back a cry, for the sight of him had brought her memories to the verge. So close to the brink, indeed, she just about stumbled over her very large toes, plowing over caution, tripping over roots, limping, loping, running, before she caught herself and loomed above the changeling. Exposed in the moonlight, she waited. She watched his black eyes grow wide. And she remembered why she never left these Gord-forsaken woods. He’ll piss himself. He’ll scream. He would run all the way home to his mother’s blazing hearth.

He frowned. Squinting so his mortal eyes could see in the darkness, the changeling shlucked his arms out of the muck and reached up for her cheeks. She let him hold her hag face in his freezing hands. His mouth folded as he studied her, collecting features like bird-prints and tail feathers stuck in the mud, tracing them to a thing that sings and flies. “Dziwozona,” he said, and then, with a disappointed pout, “you have regular yellow eyes.”

Well, true on both accounts. Dziwozona was what humans called her and her eyes were yellow as piss. She snorted. “Yeah?” she said. “And you stink.”

The changeling took a sniff. He made a face. Cocky little liar, he sat back against the cess heap with his arms over his chest and reigned over his mountain of shit. “Do not,” he said. “I am the Greatest. I am the Mole King.”

“Well, Your Highness, you’re shivering like a water-logged mouse,” she murmured, and she gave him her hands. He took them and she pulled him out of the squelch pit and onto the hard-packed earth, where he shivered harder. That wouldn’t do, so she wrapped him up in her cloak.

“I’m not cold. I’m the Brightest Star,” he said, and he drew it closer.

“I can see that, Your Luminosity, but your toes are small,” she said. “And turning blue.”

“So?”

“So, they will fall right off and then you won’t have any.”

He heaved a sigh at the inconvenience of it all and let her carry him home to her hut in the thickest part of the woods, where she made him take a bath while she pulled the quilt off her bed and brewed them something hot to drink. In the kitchen, lording on his stool with his toes drawn up under his quilt, he asked her, “Why don’t your yellow eyes turn people into ash?”

So, he had heard the stories. She should have known.

“Oh, they do,” she said, not glancing up from the cloves and honey she stirred into his cup of sbiten. “They burn a little boy right up, if he asks too many questions.”

“Do not!” He rocked on his stool, his smile jagged and toothy.

She gave him her sharpest glare. “You don’t want to find out. Every last drop, Your Greatness, or you just might find out tonight.” She bestowed the warm mug upon his hands and he deigned to drink it. As soon as he was all through, she asked him for his name.

“Useless Boy,” he told her. Boginka stoked the fire. White hot ash radiated up from the hearthstones and reflected in her irises. She had heard his mother calling him Useless over the years. She had never imagined the woman never called him anything else. If the demon turned her burning stare on the mother right now, the woman would be a smoking heap of cinders.

When her eyes had cooled like iron rings, she eased the changeling’s mug out of his grasp and swapped it for one of her webbed hands. Her aim was impeccable, her arms, long by necessity, so she had no trouble toss-thunking the mug onto the table and whisking up the kitchen rag.

The changeling just about tipped out of his stool. “You are the Throwing Queen!”

Her grin cracked open. Stringy hair hanging like a black sheet, she nudged her head at the mug. “You should see me spit in it. I could make it from here, easy-peasy.

“You could?”

She demonstrated. His mouth hung open. She wiped the stains off his cheeks, dried his hair, and said, “Everyone I know has at least two names. Not me, of course. I have seven.”

At that, his black eyes went round as berries. “Seven?”

“Seven.” Near enough to the truth. Boginka had been called more names during her human lifetime than mortals had given her after her death. Altogether, she had a heap of them, a horde. Dziwozona. Rusalka. Bitch. Whore. Witch.

And, of course, Boginka. Consumer of the Swamp, Wild Force of Nature. She had earned every name ever given to the boginki, the spirits of women who lost their babes or saw them thrown into a fire, who languished in unkind marriages or had a child out of wedlock, who died when the child was born or who drowned in still water. She as much as any of them had a bone to pick with God. Or with the Patriarch of Constantinople. Whoever she met first.

The changeling caught the flare in her eyes and hunched under its heat. As if, somehow, her burning stare or her liminal state should be his fault. Her stomach sank to the depths. Rather than bog down in such a mucky feeling, she listened for something light. Cocking her ear she said, “I’m so cranky-cross with the rain, it’s drum-drummeling all over the roof of my hut.”

“Cross with the rain?” the changeling whispered, drawing his quilt closer.

“The rain.”

He sighed and loosened his hold on the seam. Then he grabbed out for something else to hold onto and she gave him back her webbed hand. He compared it to his own, matching them up and frowning when his was smaller.

“You will grow,” she said with a snort. “Soon enough.” Perhaps too soon.

The changeling frowned, then did a snottier snort than hers to compensate. “I’m not small,” he said. “I’m the Greatest.”

She laughed, wiped his nose, and gave him his second name. “So you shall be, then, Maksimillion.” In the morning, she took his hand and walked him to the edge of the woods. She watched him until he vanished into his mother’s home. She wavered at the fringes of her domain until the sun simmered hot on the horizon.

OLENNA thought she had seen the last of the changeling that bitter night in the forest. Her soul nearly went early to God to find the little creature on her doorstep in the morning. Crossing its arms, it said, “I’m hungry,” and slunk past her to warm its grasping hands by the open stove. She told it to get away from there. She had just swept. She had swept all night long, and perhaps an open stove was a source of warmth, but it was also a source of filth, with flames coughing up smoke like a child with a chest cold and only a circle of stones to hold in the ash pit.

The changeling ignored her. Implicated her. Infuriated her. Olenna opened her mouth to burn the fear of God into him, but noticed something unbelievable. After a night out on the waste heap, the changeling—the unholy demon-child of Hell itself—was spotless. It was unnatural. It was tarnishing her hard work and sullying its record before God, playing in the ashes. It traced serpents of soot on the floor and teetered on the edge of the flames.

“Mind yourself,” she snapped at it. “You will fall in.”

The changeling stared up at her in defiance. “I will not,” it said. “I am a frog on a leaf.”

So unexpected was its answer, so impossible that it was alive, Olenna covered her mouth before she could burst into laughter. She smoothed her apron and firmed her lips. Father Licinius had warned the village that Hell’s servants were crafty and resilient. He had admonished the good people for their defiance. Defiance of the home, with their offerings of milk and cheese for the Leshy, the Skarbnik, the Dziwozona. Defiance of the church, with their harvest dances and feasts for the dead. Defiance of God Himself with their pagan sins, embodied in the village changeling.

Humming to itself in the soot, the changeling seemed very unlike a servant of Hell and very much like a small child. An entire night out on the waste heap, and he had come back with a tune. He is resilient—that much, Father, I grant you. Busy with her musings, Olenna nearly brushed the ash out of the changeling’s hair on her way to her broomstick. He recoiled, hunching into himself and leaving scorching black soot marks on his knees, and she thought the better of it. “But where is your mother?” she whispered to herself as she swept. “Why did she send you back?”

BOGINKA never intended to stumble upon the changeling again. Even in seeing him to the border of her swamp, she had tread too far from her vital wellspring, too close to the mantle that was not hers to adopt. She was a demon, vicious and scabby, and in every way an inadequate source of comfort for a human child. Natheless, when he returned in the days that followed, when he called her name into the bog, the heart that no longer existed couldn’t turn him away. What harm could it do to greet him in the woods, if he was determined to explore them anyway? His mother’s house was a short walk from the bog. Boginka could let him have his fill of the wild and send him home before supper. She could not very well let him wander. Not, at the very least, alone.

And so, she joined him on his woodland escapades and patched his scrapes with yarrow. She taught him to make jam for toast and sbiten from blackberries, to listen for nesting ducks, to swim. She knitted him mittens to wear in the woodlands and cobbled him a cloak. His own cloak, so he could stop stealing hers, Gold-dammit. She searched with him for a hollow tree to store them in, his woolen articles, and watched how fast he could climb it, that tree, and, some time later, murmured a few parting words above the grave tangled in its roots, their tree, when his first nesting duck died. And when he asked her what her name was, her name that he should call her, she dusted off a name so old it barely fit and told him, “Mamuna.”

She knew mortals never called her by that name anymore and just about drowned in guilt. What a villainous vile hypocrite I must be, to steal away another woman’s child. She is selfish, yes, and quick to anger, but in this, I am no better. She could not keep him. She could not let him go. So, she proved herself a strong swimmer and treaded above the inevitable. Each evening, when she took his hand and walked him to the edge of the woods, she pretended it wasn’t harder.

Maksimillion didn’t help, growing bigger every day. He had his days of silence and his bursts of temper. She could no longer remember the last time he hid his face after his storm was finished. He was the Brightest Star, so voracious with his words she could only wonder where he had collected them all. He collected other things and lined them up to calm himself. Chalky pebbles, shiny beetle shells, smooth moss—he gathered them all and laid them in her palms.

“This one?” he asked. “Is this a good find, Mamuna?”

“Yes,” she said to him. Yes, to every one. And every day she sank a little deeper. Deeper into impossible attachment. Deeper into guilt. Deeper into the realization she could preserve the entire goddamned bog, but not his innocence. She couldn’t spare him from his father’s shouting or his mother’s switch. She couldn’t very well let him see her tears when he ran to her quiet trees with hot strokes on the back of his legs and red fingerprints on his arms, the clenching and dragging burned into babe-tender skin. She’d scare him right out of the bog, right up the chimney, she would, if he saw the coals her beady yellow eyes became when she had to lurk there at the edge of the woods and listen to his breathless cries and the things that woman said to him. His mother. His mother, oh God…oh…oh why was his mother saying that? How could she say that? How can she say that to him and not die of a rupturing heart? Boginka couldn’t fathom.

She had been a mother, once. In her dreams, she heard her baby crying, but could never reach him in time. In her waking hours, she rose to find nothing had changed. Maksimillion ran to her red and burned and she could never reverse it. But after it was done and permanent, she could gather him into the circle of her scabby arms where he could nestle onto her lap with his head on her soggy shoulder, soggier by the second now, and listen to her hum as she rocked him, hum and murmur, “No more tears and no more scars, you’re perfect just the way you are…” This she could do. She could, and she would, and would always. Glory all dammit, try and stop her. She’d spit right in your eye. A miracle, she’d always said, how much could be solved by spitting.

OLENNA knelt, balancing the tray of podplomyki on her knee, then delivered three flattened circles of dough to her cast iron braziers, their surfaces searing hot from the coals. In front of the stove lay the changeling. He’d been tasked with tending the batter but had fallen asleep. Olenna sighed. Useless Boy. He’d been set to the stirring after his human siblings had gone to bed precisely because he’d run away into the woods while they kneaded, rolled, and arranged. Lately, he disappeared more and more often. He vanished into the treeline like the demon’s offspring he was, and brought back stones, and mud, and a smile so breathless he was almost healthy.

Healthy or not, however, he was in danger of earning the ill will of his community. Food was always scarce in the winter, and the village was not kind to children with no use. Olenna nudged him with her toe and still, he did not stir, so spent was he from his two entire minutes of baking. She should have roused him. Cuffed him. Made him sleep outside, or on the stove for that matter, as a bed of coals was the surest way to drive a changeling from a good Christian home. Heaven knew he had earned himself a hard hand after shirking his chores all day.

But she had already punished him once today and the fierce line between his eyebrows faded when he was asleep. As did his hell-sent anger. Dreaming of stones, or of trees, or insects, his hands curled up beneath his head for a pillow, he might not gnash his teeth if she touched him.

She smoothed his black hair off his brow. His breath met her calloused palm, sweet and blameless in the quiet kitchen. After watching his little chest rise and fall several times, she bent her weary back and kissed his forehead. Plenty of time, always, to reprimand him in the morning.

BOGINKA soon found that treading above the inevitable was nothing more than waiting to drown. Cold water kicked her in the gut and her head nearly slipped under the surface the day Maksimillion told her he was six, not four, and he knew his mother had named his four siblings. She had named them. Why hadn’t she named him?

“Because she couldn’t think of a good enough name,” she told him, cupping his face, and he pulled off her hands and told her he was never going back. Never. She walked him to the edge of the woods. When they reached the treeline, he tugged her hand out into the sun—she could come, she could come with him, if he could not stay. Broad daylight dried out her fingertips, moisture sapped, tomatoes shriveled. She seized back her hand. “No, Maksimillion.”

He tugged harder. She could come with him, didn’t she see? She could come, come, come.

“No.” She could not. She was vulgar, inadequate. She had failed as a mother the first time and if put to the test, she would fail a second. He was better off with the woman who had given birth to him. A mother who was human, at least, if not kind to him. So, the demon set in her heels.

Maksimillion wouldn’t relinquish her fingers. He pulled until her long arm stretched to its limit and her tie to her wetlands thinned. He yanked and her swollen fury leaked out like water in a deflating sack, her eyes burned, and her patience snapped.

“No.” She tore away from him. If she stepped one webbed foot beyond the treeline, if she left the bog, she would be cut off from her source, her power irrevocably severed. She would be powerless again, as she had been powerless to stop him. That fiend of a holy patriarch who had thrown her baby into the…who had…She couldn’t. Even if she wanted to, she couldn’t. She was not his mother. She told him so. His mouth folded. Not his frown or his pout. His studying face. Boginka had never lost her patience with him before, and now he would see. Her hag face by the light of day, her eyes in all their temper. He would see her rage and he would run.

Maksimillion reached up for her cheeks. The demon bent, her stringy black hair grazing the earth, brushing against the unchangeable past. He looked into her eyes and did not burn. Then he hid his face in her belly and sang, as soft as a single leaf landing on the ground, “No more tears and no more scars, you’re perfect just the way you are…”

She held him beneath the shadows of the wood’s edge and just about didn’t send him back.

OLENNA held the changeling still while Father Licinius stoked the coals of the open stove. In eight years, the demon child had not grown broad, known God, or been grateful. His All-Holiness, the Patriarch of Constantinople had kept a watchful eye upon her family, even after ascending to the highest station in the church. He had done all he could. She had done all he asked. Now the changeling would return to the woods, once and for all. Eying the fire, it trembled, and Olenna said, “Stop squirming. Your mother will come. And not a moment too soon.”

Father Licinius had come the night before to tell her the village was hungry and would be at her doorstep in the morning. Their crops had failed. They blamed the changeling. Better to take things into her own hands. Her husband had agreed; the task of getting rid of the demon child fell to her. She was the mother. He was not its father, and he had risen with the dawn and taken their four human children to church. Olenna had not risen. She had not slept in the first place. She had not slept. She had not swept. She had not wept since that rainy day in the forest. She was weary.

Father Licinius nodded, his work finished, his solemn face bathed by the orange glow. He proffered the poker at the open stove and said, “Good mother, you have only to cast it in.”

Olenna clutched the changeling to her chest. “What?” She had meant only to threaten it with fire as the stories instructed. She never imagined…

“After all,” his All-Holiness said, “it was your negligence that allowed your baby to be exchanged for that heartless creature. As I am God’s witness, you must make it right. Cast the changeling into the fire and Dziwozona will return your child.”

Her fingers tightened on its arms. Her throat rasped as she spoke her answer.

BOGINKA dreamed she drowned in fire. She woke to the sound of her baby screaming. With a gasp, she threw off the quilt. She hunched over and pulled out clumps of her stringy black hair, gulping down breaths until she stopped drowning. Natheless, the scream lingered, raking her skin over the coals. A scream raw and breathless, and, as she listened, not an echo at all. Not a note of terror, but her name. Not a memory, but Maksimillion.

She remembered the past, and scrambled and ran, her webbed feet pounding against the bog. Swamp trees leapt out of her way as she thundered like rain, like a storm to swallow the earth whole, and when she reached the edge of her domain, throat dry, lungs burning, fingers clawing to tear down the shadows, her hands lost all their moisture but did not shrivel in the sunlight, for the instant she broke away from the trees, the string of her power thinned to its limit and snapped, quick and seamless, too fast to notice, too meaningless to mourn because her baby was screaming.

She had watched him vanish into the house countless times. She knew the number of steps to the door by heart. She barged through the entrance and found the Patriarch of Constantinople tearing the boy from his mother, just as the last patriarch who had crossed Boginka, a lifetime ago, had loomed above her bed and taken her baby. Her eyes filled with rage, but her power was gone. Though the patriarch met her gaze, though he trembled with the fear of the bog in him, he did not burn. Wiping the sweat off his upper lip, he composed himself, then dragged Maksimillion toward the flames. All the while, the patriarch watched her, daring her—a powerless demon—to defy him.

Boginka took aim. She spat in his eye. The Patriarch of Constantinople stumbled back, hands clapped to his face. His foot caught on the open stove, and with a prayer on his lips, he fell into the fire and screamed. Boginka cried out, for Maksimillion had fallen with him. But before the boy met the flames and the same excruciating fate, his mortal mother caught him.

Maks dangled from the woman’s grip, his face a breath from the hearthstones. She yanked him back from death and thrust him away from herself, as if he, not the fire, burned. He staggered. He stared. He stood caught between them, the woman on his right hand and the demon on his left.

“Mamuna!” he cried, running to her arms. Then he changed his word and changed her mind. Changed her entire goddamned world, from that day on. “Mama!”

He grappled to be held, slipping from her grip, falling. She lifted him up, buried her face in his sweet, sweatdamp curls, and rocked him. Rocked him, and hummed through her wet throat, “No more tears and no more scars, I love you just the way you are.”

“So, it’s true, then?” The mother’s chest heaved out a sob. Her nose wrinkled at the smell of bog, distraught and disgust mixing, water and blood. “He is yours? Has been yours, all along?”

Boginka clutched Maksimillion to her chest. Yes, it’s true. He’s mine. Once she would have said that, would have deceived a human and done it cackling. Now she could only rock him. He was a child. Not a memory to replace, not a lie to revel in, not a thing to consume or preserve or possess. “He is your child.” Her beady yellow eyes closed on the tears. “He is yours.”

“But I don’t want him.” The woman gestured at her kitchen, at the smoke stains and ashes, at her gaping open stove. “I never wanted any of this.”

Boginka’s eyes burned, not with rage, but with tears. The pains of the past, she could not forgive, but neither could she despise the young mother. She and her were simply too similar. She settled Maks on her hip and waited for the other woman to speak the words she held on her tongue.

“I’m sor—” The woman looked away from Maksimillion, a failure too bright to behold. She stared into the flames lapping against the stones. “I am sure,” she said to the demon, “you are mistaken. If he was mine, I would know him.” Taking her broom, she swept away the remains of her hesitance. “He’s awake yet he doesn’t recoil. Then can you, Dziwozona, do what I could not?”

“I can.” Boginka drew Maks to her heart where it was once withered and charred, bitter and scarred, and now fresh, and spring-clean, and new. She carried him out the front door of that Grace-forsaken house and murmured into his ear, “I can, and I will, and will always.”

Bloom

Deren Bott, Honorable Mention Undergrad

Raven

Cody Jones

Bismarck Bridge Over the Missouri River

Sarah Wessman, Honorable Mention Undergrad

Ashleigh Sabin, 2nd Place Undergrad

The Lament of the Albatross

In September, a month after Dad leaves, we drive seven hours across the state to move in with Grandma. “It’s only temporary,” Mom says, turning around in the driver’s seat to look at me and swerving dangerously across I-84 as she does so. “Just while we figure some things out.” I recognize these words as an attempt at self-reassurance, and I offer a quick “okay” to appease her, so she’ll redirect her eyes to the road.

I want to believe her; I want to believe that this isn’t a permanent thing, but it’s not the first time she’s said, “It’s only temporary.” This is what she told me a month ago when I arrived home from school to discover that Dad was gone, moving in with Aunt Leah in Warrenton; this is what she told me last week when she dipped into my already-spare college savings to pay for gas; and this is also what she tells me today, as we follow closely behind a Budget Truck Rental moving van because we can’t afford U-Haul.

We finally arrive around dinner time, and I am unsurprised to find Grandma’s house just as I remembered it: filled with Russian stacking dolls and a spicy scent, like peppermint gum, except for the basement, which smells wet and old. Olivia and I will sleep in the basement–of course–in one big open room, with built-in desks lining the far wall, boxes of canned food stacked in the corner, and a mattress in front of a wood stove. Grandma pulls a large quilt from the closet and places it, folded, on the end of the mattress. It looks itchy.

I dig a picture out of my duffle bag and tape it to the wall–our family at the beach. I’m sure that Mom would throw it away if she saw it, or scribble out Dad’s face, but I allow myself, perhaps out of rebellion, to hang this small piece of comfort on the wall, a memory from home. Olivia and I used to spend hours searching for sand dollars, assessing which was bigger or better colored. Silver gray is a rare color for sand dollars. You have to throw back the purple ones; they’re still alive. We would wander around the tide pools, pointing out the families of starfish and deciding which were the parents and which were the daughters. Mom never had the heart to tell us that they had merely been washed onto the same rock by the same wave, that their only familial tie was proximity. The big one is the dad starfish. Those two orange ones are the daughters. We would search until we found the biggest sea anemone, then take turns poking the center, watching in awe as it contracted, seemingly trying to swallow the finger. Some of my happiest memories are at that beach, but now it all feels tainted. My heart aches looking at Dad’s smiling face. I miss him more than anything, but he has become a forbidden topic in our family, so I keep my missing to myself.

According to the New York Times, “When fathers abandon their own children, it’s not a momentary decision; it’s a long, tragic process.”

According to my journal, “How could I not have seen this coming?”

After I finish emptying my duffle bag, I help unload the trunk, grabbing suitcases and dishes and picture frames. As the car empties, Mom scours the backseat, slowly growing more frantic. Finally, she calls us over, “Girls! Have either of you seen a small white box that I packed into the car?” I know immediately which box she is talking about–the one she keeps her wedding ring in–but I haven’t seen it. We both shake our heads no.

“Did you put it in the glove box?” I ask, concerned. She sighs heavily with defeat.

“No, I already checked there.” She looks on the verge of tears, and Olivia is silent to my left. “Liv,” she says, something darker in her eyes, “do you have it?” Each syllable is annunciated separately, like a drum.

“No, I swear I haven’t seen it,” she says, defensive.

“It’s okay Mom,” I interject. “It’ll probably turn up after we put everything away.” My attempt at reassurance is met with a weak smile.

“Yeah, you’re right. It probably will.”

Father: *pointing to a bird floating near the boat* Did you know that albatross mate for life?

Daughter: What does that mean?

Father: It means that they choose lifelong companions. For most of the year, they have to separate and fly over different waters, but once a year, they come back to the same spot to find their partner and take care of their babies. And they do that for the rest of their lives.

Daughter: So, it’s kind of like you and Mom?

Father: Yes, exactly like that.

One Sunday afternoon in October, two months after Dad leaves, Grandma banishes us to the backyard, fearful that we will break one of her nice things. I consider reminding her that Olivia and I are 13 and 15 respectively, and that we are far too mature to break nice things, but the look on Mom’s face makes me decide against it.

Grandma’s yard is big and slanted. The house was built on a hill, which means the backyard consists of three different levels of grass layers divided by big rows of rocks, climbing higher the further you are from the house. We decide to climb the hill, to the very top of the backyard and crawl under the tall hydrangea bush draped over the fence. I take in a deep breath, relishing that autumn smell. Olivia is pushing dirt between her toes, knees pulled up to her chest. When a ladybug crawls onto the top of her foot, she doesn’t seem to notice.

“You wanna know a secret?” she asks, her voice a pale white whisper.

“Yeah, sure,” I answer, lying. I am often overwhelmed by her secrets, by her trust, but she’s been distant lately and I long to feel close to her again.

“You can’t tell anyone.”

“Okay.”

“Promise?”

“Yeah.”

“Mom didn’t lose her ring. I stole it,” she says, still not taking her eyes off of her own feet, her mouth a hardpressed line. I swallow my surprise.

“What’d you do with it?” I ask, trying to sound calmer than I am.

“Buried it,” she says, tapping a spot of soil with her big toe. “I hope it rots.”

“She’ll kill you,” I muse, imagining Mom’s fury at discovering this. Then, after a long pause: “Why’d you take it?”

“She should learn to worry more about us than some worthless piece of jewelry from a worthless man.” I feel the defensive anger rise up in my chest, but I refrain from putting her in her place, from shoving her against the dirt and yelling that she knows nothing of Dad’s worth.

Although she’s younger by two years, I’ve always looked up to Olivia, pining after her attention. She’s the more confident of the two of us, and always seems to know what she wants. When I was younger, I admired that trait, but the older we got, the less she seemed to want anything to do with me.

Back before everything fell apart, Mom always liked to pull Olivia out of school and take her on little day dates. They would get their nails done or go out to brunch. I wouldn’t usually find out about these dates until I returned home from school to find nails painted and leftovers in the fridge. If ever I questioned why she did not pull me out of school too, why I was not invited to brunch, she would act surprised, as if that thought had never occurred to her–and perhaps it hadn’t. Then, after thinking about it, she would offer some excuse. “Liv is having a hard time at school, so she needs a little extra attention. I know how much you care about grades, so I didn’t think you would want to miss school.”

Mom’s idea of attention was material. She loved to buy things–little things usually–but occasionally expensive, exorbitant things. I still remember the day that she gave Olivia a pair of expensive earrings; It was the first time I ever saw her cry. She opened the little pale blue box and looked up at Mom, tears already welling up. “Are these real?” she asked, her eyes big and wanting. Mom nodded her head.

“Diamonds,” she said smugly. What followed was a mixture of crying and laughing and hugging, all while Olivia repeated over and over “You’re my best friend” to Mom, like it was her own personal mantra. Mom always belonged to Olivia.

Dad, on the other hand, was mine. Every Saturday, he would take me out fishing on his boat, and we would spend hours talking about our lives or just sitting in silence. We shared a mutual understanding that comfortable silence is the supreme expression of love. It was Dad who let me borrow the sweatshirts from his closet. It was Dad who knew the name of every one of my friends at school. It was also Dad who had not reached out to me, had not even texted me, in two months.

According to an article online, “fathers don’t simply abandon their families out of laziness or lack of love; they leave because they feel unworthy.”

According to my journal, “I always believed in your worth.”

Father: *Steadying himself against the gunwale* Did you know that the oldest living wild bird is an Albatross? Biologists first tagged her in 1956 and named her Wisdom.

Daughter: Why Wisdom?

Father: Well, I’m sure after more than 70 years, she’s probably pretty wise.

Daughter: But they didn’t know that she would live so long when they named her, did they?

Father: I guess not. *a pause* I guess maybe our names become our destiny, huh?

In November, three months after Dad leaves, Mom gets word that he is filing for divorce. “He can’t even bother to break the news himself,” she rants to me, perhaps forgetting that I am 15 years old, perhaps forgetting that he is my father. “Sends me a damn letter. Like some kind of business proposal.” I pretend to sympathize, but my mind is somewhere else, wondering what this means for Olivia and me.

“Did they say anything about what will happen to us?” I ask, eyes trained out the backyard window. “Like with custody?” Her scoff is like cold ice water washing over my head.

“He won’t fight for it,” She replies. The disappointment must be evident on my face because her eyebrows furrow. “Hey, it’s better this way, you hear me? He’s been lying to us for a long time.”

“He never lies. He’s the most honest person I know.” At that, her face darkens. She scares me when she looks like this.

“Well maybe you don’t know him quite as well as you thought you did,” she challenges, her eyes fiery. “Would the person that you knew abandon his kids? Would he betray his wife? Have you stopped to consider that maybe he’s the bad guy here?”

“Have you stopped to consider that maybe there doesn’t have to be a bad guy?” I fire back. “He loved us.”

“You’re wrong. He doesn’t love us, and he never did.”

“You don’t know that,” I mumble, holding back tears. That same defensive anger is rising in my chest, this time much more forceful than before. “You don’t know that.”

I flee to the backyard, desperate for some privacy and more air to breathe. I crawl under the hydrangea bushes, shivering from the cold. I can’t make my mind stop racing. He’s not a liar. He loves me. He’s not a liar. He loves me. He’s not a liar. He loves me.

I pull out my phone, considering texting him. I draft several messages but each one sounds more ridiculous than the last. “Did you cheat on Mom?” “Do you love me?” “Why did you leave me here alone?” “Please come and get me.” I wince at my own desperation.

I hate that she makes me question these things. I hate the way that she pulls me apart, bit by bit. I hate that I can’t talk to him, can’t figure out the truth.

I need to talk to him.

If I could only talk to him, then maybe I could unwind this whole mess, I could ask him for the truth. If he doesn’t love me, then at least he would have to say it to my face.

Before I know what I am doing, my hands are in the dirt, cold and hard. I claw away at the ground, desperately digging until, suddenly, a small white box surfaces, and I slip it into my pocket, quickly pushing the dirt back where it was and covering my tracks.

According to Oceanconservasy.org, “Albatross will mate with another bird that is not their life partner all while maintaining that life bond with said partner. While to some people this may seem nefarious, it isn’t uncommon in the natural world.”

According to my journal, “I don’t know who to believe anymore.”

Father: Did you know that European sailors believed albatross to be good luck?

Daughter: Why?

Father: Well, they thought they were vessels for the souls of drowned sailors. Coleridge has this poem about a sailor who killed an albatross, and the souls inside of the bird were so angry that they cursed the wind to blow their ship in the wrong direction. The other crewmates were furious with the man, so they strung the dead albatross on a line and hung it around his neck as a reminder of his guilt.

Daughter: So, the albatross was just condemned to hang around his murderer’s neck forever?

Father: What do you mean?

Daughter: Well, it doesn’t seem very fair. It was already killed. I don’t see why it should be strung up on a line like that. If the sailors actually cared about the bird, and not just their own luck, they wouldn’t leave it hanging there around his neck as a sign of condemnation.

Father: I guess you’re right.

In December, four months after Dad leaves, I board a Portland-bound Greyhound bus at 10:30 p.m. Mom thinks I’m in bed. Olivia thinks I’m insane; I asked her to come with me, but she declined, too angry with Dad to consider it. “I won’t stop you,” she said, “but I don’t want to see him.” Fortunately, she did agree to tell Mom that we’re walking to school together tomorrow morning. If everything goes according to plan, she won’t know I’m gone until the following evening.

I pull my hat a little lower over my eyes and hand the driver the $56 fare, the remaining $440 from the pawn shop zipped securely in my backpack. I move to the back of the bus, conscious of my age and hoping to avoid any curious glances. There are few passengers at this hour–just me and two other women who appear to have fallen asleep. I put in my earbuds and queue up music as the idling bus slowly pulls out of the station.

The ride to Portland goes by surprisingly quickly. I try to sleep, but my mind is too restless, so instead, I let it wander. As far as I can figure, there are two possible outcomes to this confrontation. Either (1) Dad will be happy to see me, and he’ll explain that this whole thing was some sort of misunderstanding, that he actually does love me still, or (2) when I arrive, Dad will be indifferent, which is far worse than angry, and Mom will be right about him. I prefer to think about the first scenario.

At 6:30 a.m., the bus arrives at Portland Union Station, where I wait for an hour before transferring to another bus, Warrenton-bound. This ride goes by much slower. I start to wonder if I’ve made a mistake in coming here. I start to wonder what will happen if Mom discovers her wedding ring has been sold to Trader Rays pawn shop for a mere $496. I start to wonder what I will do if Dad is not happy to see me. By the time the bus pulls up to Warrenton Station three hours later, I’m a nervous wreck. You have come this far, I remind myself.

The walk to Aunt Leah’s house is 20 minutes from the station, so I don’t bother with an uber. Each footstep feels heavier than the last.

J ust before noon, I arrive at her house. I knock on her door, bracing myself for anyone to answer. The door swings open to reveal a surprised Aunt Leah. Before she can say anything, the words are falling out of my mouth: “I know that you’re probably really surprised to see me here but I just need to talk to my dad and I didn’t know what to do because I haven’t seen him in a while but I heard that he’s staying here so I just had to come and see if I could talk to him.” Her face softens from surprise to sympathy.

“It’s okay,” she reassures. She is wearing a whimsical dress that billows out of the door in the wind. “I would have done the same thing. He’s not here though”–my heart sinks–“At the house I mean. He went down to the beach to take the boat out. I can walk you down to the docks if you’d like?” The beach is not far from her house, and my heart is beating with anticipation.

“It’s okay, Leah. I know the way. I can walk down there myself. Thanks though.”

“Okay, you’re welcome, honey. You might want to hurry though; He didn’t leave too long ago, but I’m not sure how long he’ll stay on the beach.” I nod my head, already backing away from the porch.

“Okay, thank you!” I call, turning to leave.

“Does your mom know you’re here?” She calls after me, but I am already rounding the corner.

I arrive at the beach in record time and immediately see him there, standing on the dock and working to untether his boat. I consider calling after him, but I choke on my own fear. Instead, I run towards the dock, keeping enough distance so as not to scare him.

“Hey,” I say, trying to sound brave. He turns to face me and I watch in slow motion as his face is washed in surprise, and then some other emotion. Hurt maybe? He looks different. It’s only been a few months, but his face seems more tired. Is his hair grayer than before?

“What are you doing here?” he asks. I’m not sure what greeting I expected, but this was not it. His face is turned slightly to the side, avoiding looking at me fully. I feel a defensive anger rise up again, but this time, in defense of myself.

“What am I doing here? What the hell is that supposed to mean? It’s been months and you haven’t said a word, you haven’t reached out. What do you think I’m doing here?” His expression softens slightly.

“I’m sorry I haven’t reached out to you, kiddo”–My heart twinges hearing him call me kiddo–“I don’t know how much you’re aware of, but things have been really tricky lately and–”

“You think I don’t know that? You think I’m some ignorant little kid who doesn’t notice that her parents hate each other?”

“No, of course not,” he assures, “But I just don’t know how much your mom has told you.”

“She told me that you don’t love me. She told me that you never did.” Now I am just trying to hurt him, but I don’t care. I deserve answers. “Is that true?” Anger and confusion wash over his face.

“She told you that? That’s the furthest thing from the truth.” I breathe an internal sigh of relief but push forward.

“Then why haven’t I heard from you in months? And why don’t you want custody?” I ask, holding back my tears. “Why won’t you fight for me?” The end comes out in barely a whisper.

My mind races with each of his possible replies.

I’ve been lying to you.

I can’t handle this much responsibility.

I’ve thought about this for a long time.

I’m not worthy.

You’re not worthy.

“I can’t,” he chokes out. His face reminds me of a torn piece of paper. “Because you’re not mine,” He is crying now–hard. I try to let his words sink in, but all I can think about is how sad he looks. I’ve never seen him so sad. He continues, “I don’t know how to tell you this kid; I assumed that your mom had already told you, but I–I’m not,” he takes a deep breath, shaking his head, “I’m not your biological father.” His arms are curling in on his torso, and I long to give him a hug, but I resist the urge, in need of more answers.

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” I ask, hot tears now falling on my own cheeks too, “How long have you known?”

“Since this summer,” he replies. “I was in a really dark place once I found out. I didn’t feel like I could reach out to you.” My vision is blurry, probably a combination of lack of sleep and this new information settling in.

“Olivia too?” I ask. He understands my questions and shakes his head.

“Just you.”

Suddenly, so many things about my life seem to fall into place.

I remember Olivia, who was always Mom’s favorite, coming home with leftovers and gifts.

I remember wondering why I was never invited.

I remember Mom, who never told us about the starfish, who simply allowed us to go on believing that each cluster was a happy family. Our only familial tie was proximity.

Dad and I look at each other, both in tears. I take a shaky breath and step towards him. He steps forward, too, and opens his arms slightly. I wrap my arms around his torso and he quickly reciprocates. “I wanted to fight for you–believe me when I say that. I just didn’t think it would be fair for me to fight for one of my girls if I can’t fight for both.” He whispers into my hair, grasping me tightly. I am crying harder now. My girls.

Oddly enough, I’m somehow relieved. I’m filled with both an excruciating confusion and a soft reassurance that everything will be okay as long as this one thing is okay.

“But hey, you listen to me,” he continues. “You will always be my girl. No amount of blood is ever gonna change that. And as long as you want me, I’m always gonna be there for you.” I almost can’t believe it. This is everything that I’ve needed to hear for the past 4 months.

“I love you,” I cry into his shoulder.

“I love you too, kiddo,” he whispers.

After a great deal more hugging, he pulls away slightly and clears his throat. “I was uh–I was just about to go out fishing; I don’t know what your schedule’s like, but I’d love if you would come along,” he offers, more hesitant than I’ve ever seen him. This is new, I remind myself. This wound is fresh

“Yes.” I nod my head. “I would really like that.”

I help him finish untethering the boat and, as we push off the dock, I say as nonchalantly as I can, “just so you know, I might not get much say right now, but the second that I turn 18, you’re my dad by all accounts. I couldn’t care less about some guy with the same elbows or hairline as me.”

He laughs at that. “You don’t mean that. You might care someday.”

I assure him that he is wrong, even though I know that he is probably right. He is usually right.

Daughter: You remember that poem about the albatross?

Father: Yeah, why?

Daughter: Do you think it just stayed hanging around the sailor’s neck forever?

Father: Hmm. No, I think that eventually, it got free. Went back to the ocean, probably.

Daughter: What makes you think so?

Father: Personal experience.

Ocean’s Greetings

Miriam Black, Honorable Mention Undergrad

Midnight Miriam Black, Honorable Mention Undergrad

Amber McCuen, “Dead Leaves”

As Spoons stood at the sink doing the dishes, it was hard to keep his mind from wandering to the last few days. Dunking his hands in the warm, soapy water and scrubbing off their plates, his mind drifted to overhearing his mother call their high school to request his and his older brother’s bereavement leave. Spoons was a junior and only a year behind his brother, but every single day that year felt bigger.

They would be holding his father’s funeral in a couple of days, and the only thing he felt about it was a slight anticipation. On the whole, he felt almost nothing. He had been told that that was just shock–but if he was in shock, wouldn’t he be able to tell? How long can you be in shock?

Looking out the window, he saw his little sister out on the tire swing. Her cheek rested on top of it as her pointer finger drew mindless little swirling designs onto the rubber, her short legs kicking a few inches above the ground they couldn’t reach. His brother sat on a nearby tree stump, a piece of hay sticking out of his mouth as he mindlessly crumbled dead leaves in his fingers. Spoons felt anger flare up in his chest when he saw that Dennis was wearing their father’s cowboy hat.

He dried his hands and walked outside, shoving his hands into his pockets. Dennis lifted his head, looking up at him from under the brim of their father’s Stetson. Some ways away, Spoons could hear the running of the river that cut through their property, its cool flow in contradiction with the rushing of blood beneath his skin.

Spoons folded his arms across himself against the chill in the October air. “Took his hat for yourself real quick.”

Dennis shrugged, looking to the side. “Should be mine, shouldn’t it? Oldest son and all.”

Spoons snatched the piece of hay out of Dennis’s mouth. “You can’t just take it. That’s not fair.”

“But it’d be fair if you took it?”

Spoons ripped the thin stalk in half, throwing the pieces to the ground with an anger that Dennis was uniquely able to provoke. “Be honest with yourself, Dennis. Which one of us is the rancher? You never did have much talent for the rougher things.”

“Oh, come off it, Spoons.”

“I’m just saying!”

“Well, just stop it,” Dennis snapped, getting up and turning away.

Spoons scowled and stepped forward, ripping the hat off of Dennis’s head. Dennis whirled around, ripping it right back out of his hands and shoving him.

“Hey!” Spoons shouted, staggering back.

“Just drop it,” Dennis seethed, returning the hat snugly back onto his head.

“Think about it! I’m the one who would be out, actually using it! He would’ve left it to me!”

“But he didn’t!” Dennis yelled. “He didn’t leave it to anybody. Not every goddamn rope and screw in his possession needed to be left to somebody specific.”

A heavy silence grew between them, and a grimace grew across Spoons’s face. “You really think you’d ever get this farm?”

Dennis’s face was set. “I’m the oldest.”

“You’re not much of a homesteader.”

“Shut up,” Dennis muttered. “I work out here every day, same as you.”

Spoons pressed. “You can’t lasso for shit, you can’t even kill the goddamn slaughter animals–”

“Shut up, Lawson! At least I know money! At least we won’t lose the whole goddamn ranch when I take over!”

“If!” Spoons screamed. “If you take over! You’re so sure of it, and for no good reason! The first time you finally sat in to help birth a calf, which, mind you, I had been doing for years, you were trying to keep your goddamn breakfast down. Don’t you act like that didn’t happen. You’re never going out like he did.” He pointed a vicious finger at Dennis, shoving down his guilt. “And don’t you fuckin’ call me Lawson, you know I hate it.”

A dangerous indignation filled Dennis’s voice. “How could you even–”

“Stop it!”

Both of them turned to see that their little sister had started crying. Spoons had frankly forgotten she was there. She slid out of the tire swing, running off with awkward steps across the uneven ground blanketed in dead leaves.

“Great,” Dennis muttered, turning to trudge past him back into their house.

Spoons was so furious he couldn’t even bring himself to respond. It wasn’t until much later that he headed back inside, his jaw still set and his heart still racing. On his way back, he spotted a pile of leaves that his sister had made sometime after running off.

Spoons awoke to the panicked shouts of his mother.

“Dennis!” she shouted. “Lawson! Get up!”

He bolted out of bed at the use of his given name, hearing his brother’s feet hit the floor in tandem.

She pounded on his door, her fists threatening to beat it off its hinges. “Grab a bucket or a bowl or something and come outside!”

He stumbled to the corner of his room with bleary eyes and muscles that were only just waking up as he heard her shouting to Dennis. Her typically quiet footsteps thudded against the floor as she ran back through the house to whatever lay waiting outside.

He upended the five-gallon bucket of bullet casings and empty shotgun shells that he had been collecting, its contents scattering as he ran to his door, yanking it open and running down the hallway.

He ran through the kitchen, tripping over a footstool that someone had left in front of the junk drawer. He swore as he staggered, his free hand hitting the ground and pushing himself back up as he stumbled forward. He ran to their back door with his ankle smarting, wondering why it was even there.

His stomach dropped when he saw large, far-off flames through their back door’s window. He jerked it open, running outside and sprinting toward them, trying to take stock of the steadily growing circle of fire. To his left, he saw Dennis running up from around the side of their house.

He wanted to clear a perimeter in the leaves that were such eager fuel, and he slowed to a jog to let his brother catch up to him. “Dennis!” he shouted, tossing his bucket to him.

Dennis barely caught it, annoyance twisting his face. “What?”

“You go fill them up!” he shouted.

“What about you?” Dennis demanded.

Spoons viciously waved a hand through the air as they approached the flames. “Just do it!”

Scowling, Dennis ran down towards the river.

Spoons began clearing a perimeter through the dead leaves that were so readily catching fire, stooping and pushing them to either side with great sweeps of his hands. His heart dropped when he saw his little sister.

“Katie?!” He ran and picked her up, swinging her around and quickly walking her away from the fire. “Go stand on the porch,” he told her, setting her down and urging her forward with hands on her back. “Get away from the fire, come on!”

He saw her begin to run towards their house and bent down to continue clearing a path. He looked up when his mother slung the contents of her bucket over the fire and saw her hurry back towards the river.

With the heat of the flames on his face, he doggedly continued.

“Spoons!”

He jerked up to see Dennis and he ran to take one of the buckets from him, briskly walking and dousing along the perimeter of the fire to try and prevent its spread. Dennis emptied his own bucket across the fire itself, throwing the water across the flames with several heavy swings.

They ran back to the water’s edge together, their feet pounding against the packed earth. Spoons saw that Dennis had had the presence of mind to put on shoes and found himself regretting not doing the same. He desperately wished that the water was even a little bit closer to their house, and then forced himself to be grateful the river was there at all. With heavy breathing, they dragged their buckets through the water and started to rush back.

“I saw Katie,” Spoons panted.

“What?” Dennis huffed, looking at him as they awkwardly carried their heavy buckets back.

“Yeah,” Spoons grunted. “By the fire, gave me a heart attack.”

“Is she still there?” he demanded.

“Do you think I would’ve just left her there?”

“I don’t know!”

Spoons frowned as they made their way back. He emptied his bucket over the fire as they reached it, Dennis throwing his across the fire alongside him.

With a few more trips to and from the water, they had finally put the fire to rest.

Spoons threw his bucket to the ground, turning and pressing a hand to his forehead as he tried to recover from the terror of it all, taking a few stilted steps away with a hand on his hip. He could hear Dennis trying to catch his breath too.

He heard his mother’s gentle voice. “It wasn’t gonna reach, baby, it’s okay.”

He looked to see her consoling Katie a ways away. Katie had pulled their hose to its full extent and had been trying to pull it farther. Even at its full stretch, it was yards and yards away from where the fire had been raging. He had to internally commend her–at least she had tried to help, and what she had done was pretty smart for four years old.

Alarm bells went off in his head when he saw Dennis stalking towards her. “Hey!” he said, running forward to take Dennis’s arms in his grip. “Hey. It was an accident, she doesn’t need that right now.”

“It wasn’t an accident,” Dennis spat, trying to get away from him. “What’s wrong with you?” he shouted, hurling the words toward their little sister.

Katie’s face crumpled up and she began to cry, hiding behind their mother’s legs.

Dennis struggled against Spoons’s hold, still trying to get to her. “You fuckin’ stole from my room?”

“Dennis!” their mother scolded.

Spoons adjusted his hold to accommodate the unexpectedly strong resistance. “Dennis, what–”

“Look behind you,” Dennis grunted.

“Dennis, calm down–”

“Just look! God, Spoons, what’s the matter with you?”

Spoons turned his head to look amidst Dennis’s struggling, his heart stopping when he saw the charred remains of their father’s Stetson within the soot.

“Mom,” he said, keeping his grip on Dennis. “Mom, she burned Dad’s hat.”

Her hand flew to cover her mouth.

Spoons wrenched down and to the side, using his body weight to throw Dennis to the ground. Dennis sputtered, getting up and making a start for Katie. Spoons kept himself between them, shoving Dennis back.

“What are you gonna do? Huh?”

“Shut up,” Dennis snarled, trying to get around him and getting shoved back again.

“She’s four!” Spoons said.

“I don’t care.”

“What are you gonna do?” Spoons demanded. “Teach her a lesson?”

Dennis ignored him, still trying to get past.

“What the fuck are you gonna do?”

“Shut up!” Dennis shouted, shoving Spoons and wrestling him to the ground.

Spoons grunted as he landed on the grass. Dead leaves crunched and rustled around them as they rolled and struggled for the upper hand, and Spoons’s eyes welled up when one of Dennis’s forearms hit him in the nose amongst their chaos.

“Enough!”

Spoons was confused as he was pulled off of his brother, and shocked when he saw that it was his mother who had done so.

“Mom?” he asked, blinking away the blur of tears in his eyes.

“That’s enough,” she said.

Dennis got up ashamedly, brushing leaves off of himself with his face still flushed with anger.

“What Katie did was wrong, and I will come up with a punishment,” she said, pointing at Dennis. “Go take a walk, both of you. You can come back when you’ve cooled down.”

Spoons and Dennis were sprawled out in the living room, both of their attention on whatever unpleasant phone call their mother was having at the kitchen table. Spoons had scratches on his cheek and his forehead from their scuffle, and Dennis was sporting a slight bruise on his jaw.

“There’s really nothing you can do?” she asked. “Yes, of course. Yes.”

Katie was sitting on the living room floor, playing with her ponies and making little neighing noises.

Their mother sighed. “Alright, that really is too bad. Thank you for letting me know. Yes, you too.” She shook her head and hung up the phone, setting it on the table and rubbing her forehead.

“What is it?” Dennis asked.

“Nothing huge,” she reassured. “The florist that was going to make the bouquet for your dad’s casket can’t do it anymore.”

“Why?” Spoons asked.

She just shrugged exasperatedly.

“What’s wrong?” Katie asked, out of the loop from her limited vocabulary.

Their mother sighed. “We don’t have flowers for your dad, honey.”

“Should I find some?” she asked.

Their mom smiled. “I think that’s a great idea.” Katie jumped up, running out of the room to go put her shoes on. “The two of you go with her.”

Spoons and Dennis hopped up from their respective couches immediately.

“Come on, Mom, we don’t wanna go out with her,” Dennis whispered.

“I’m not sending her out on her own,” she said. “You two go help her find some nice flowers.”

“Mom, it’s October,” Spoons butted in, Dennis nodding. “There’s not anything out there–”

“I’m serious,” she said, lowering her voice. “Take her outside and help her. I’m sure you’ll find something.”

Spoons and Dennis both reluctantly went to grab a bucket, shoving their feet into their shoes and following Katie out the back door. Spoons could see the giant circle of burned grass a ways off and tried not to think about it. He looked over to see that Dennis was having similar difficulties.

They eventually happened upon their first group of wildflowers as they walked along one of the pathways spanning their property. Katie began excitedly picking them, bringing them back to Spoons’s bucket. She showed no signs of stopping as she continued to add more.

“That’s enough yellow ones,” Dennis said, raising a hand. “How about we keep looking.”

Spoons watched over the next hour as she somehow proceeded to find more and more flowers across their property. They walked with her, Katie staying generally ahead and coming back every once in a while to add more flowers into the buckets that just two days ago had been used to put out the fire that she had started.

They ended with a genuinely impressive collection of wildflowers, boasting yellow, white, purple, and pink flowers all in the mix. They laid them out on the table in front of their mom, and then pulled out chairs for themselves to sit down and help her assemble them into something.

Spoons looked at himself in the mirror, dressed in all black. It didn’t suit him. He bared his teeth in the reflection, then turned off the light and stepped out of the bathroom.

The drive to the church was quiet. He sat in the backseat with Katie, scooted all the way to the side away from her and looking out the window.

They arrived at the church an hour or so before the viewing and subsequent funeral. His mother held Katie’s hand as she led them down the hallway to the viewing room where his father’s open casket lay waiting.

She turned to them, still holding Katie’s hand. “Do you boys want to see him?’

Dennis nodded next to him. She shepherded him towards the viewing room with quiet, gentle words, and with him through the doorway, she turned back to him.

“Spoons?”

He looked down at his shoes, noticing a scuff on the right one. “Not really.”

“Alright, sweetie,” his mother said, rubbing his arm. “Can you keep Katie company then?”

Spoons nodded.

“Alright,” she said, kissing his hair. “I’ll come get you when it’s time to move him.”

She ushered Katie towards him, and he turned to start walking down the hallway, hearing her little steps follow him.

He opened a door to the empty parish hall, flicking the lights on and then holding it open for her. She bumbled past him and he let the door close, taking meandering steps and looking around the room. There were bouquets of flowers on either side of the familiar pulpit, and projected up behind it was a picture of his dad. The words “Dearly Remembered” arched above his smiling face.

Spoons sat down in one of the countless empty pews, looking down at his hands in his lap.

Katie ran up and down the empty pews, her sneakers clip-clopping as she ran through the long, empty benches. He watched her, wondering what all of this was like for her. As she turned to run down yet another pew, he saw that one of her pigtails was loose.

“Katie,” he said, and she spun towards him. “C’mere.”

She started clomping slow little steps over to him.

“You’re not in trouble, come on,” he said, waving her over. When she reached him, he turned her to the side, reaching for her loose ponytail.

“ No, don’t,” she said, turning back with a hand over the scrunchie.

“I’m fixing it,” he said, turning his hands upwards in a show of deference and tilting his head.

She slowly lowered her hand, keeping an eye on him, and he pulled it from her hair, putting it on his wrist and gathering that side of her hair into a low pigtail. He re-tied it for her, patting her on the back and then leaning back against the pew. Her hand came up to feel it, judging his handiwork, and then she hopped up on the pew beside him.

Eventually people began to file in. He was glad that he and Katie were in the back corner of the room because only a few people stopped by to offer him their condolences. Katie sat, swinging her feet, and Spoons looked around. He saw a few relatives that he hadn’t seen in a long time and realized that a lot of people had flown out for this.

“Spoons.”

He turned to see his mother waiting for him.

“It’s time, sweetheart.”

Spoons held the bar handle of the casket for the second time that day, the first time having been when he brought it from the viewing room to the parish hall.

A back part of his mind was nervous that his sweaty hands were going to make it slip. He held it by his side, looking forward. Dennis mirrored him on the opposite side, and together they led the pallbearers out of the church building and to the hearse that waited outside.

The wildflowers that they had picked sat atop it in a sprawling bouquet.

The funeral had been fine. He hadn’t especially liked being reminded repeatedly that his father’s death had been an accident. How tragic it was that they lost him so suddenly. That he could still be here if things had been just slightly different.

He and Dennis lifted the front end into the hearse, and all of them pushed together to slide the casket inside. They closed the trunk, and the men around Spoons patted him and Dennis on the back. As he watched the hearse pull away, he heard his mother telling everyone that they were free to follow them to Morris Hill Cemetery for the graveside service.

Katie was a little ways off, and Spoons felt a small shock when he saw her climb up onto a headstone. He made a start towards her but stopped when he saw Dennis rushing over.

“Katie! Katie, don’t do that,” Dennis said, swooping in to grab her beneath her armpits and lift her off of it, walking her a few feet away and setting her down on the grass.

As more and more people arrived, he felt his mother’s hand on his shoulder. “Sweetheart, it’s time to start.” He turned and she tilted her head towards the casket. “Will you let your brother know?”

Spoons nodded. “Yeah.”

“Thank you, honey.” She left to go speak with their preacher and Spoons made his way over to Dennis.

“Hey. I think we’re gonna start,” he said, gesturing with his elbow.

Dennis blew out some air and looked over at Katie. “Okay.” They got Katie to walk with them and started making their way over. The three of them gathered alongside their father’s casket as the preacher began to request everyone’s attention to begin the graveside services.

Spoons stood there with his hands low and clasped together, the crisp October wind bringing a rosy tint to his cheeks.

Dennis stood to his left, similarly statuesque.

Katie stood between the two of them, sniffling from the cold, a bright pink little coat negating the black of her dress.

The solemn words of their preacher filled his ears, drifting from where he had begun to orate at the head of their father’s grave.

“The Lord doth build up Jerusalem: he gathereth together the outcasts of Israel. He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds.”

His father’s casket was still above ground, suspended above the grave atop a bed of pulleys and nylon belts that would shortly be used to lower him. Spoons squinted as he listened and looked at it, looking once again at the wildflowers that they had picked. They were fitting for his father and looked respectable atop the dark mahogany. They were honestly probably more suitable than whatever they were originally going to use. As he looked and listened, he wasn’t sure why he didn’t feel more. More holy. More sad.

“Great is our Lord, and of great power; his understanding is infinite.”

Just more.

Their preacher pulled a bookmark to turn to another section, flipping a stack of pages and clearing his throat. “And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying: Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them.”

Their congregation surrounded the grave, the fellow and familiar members of their church creating a large gathering. He wondered if the people on the outskirts could hear. Wondered where his friends were in the crowd.

“And they shall be his people; and God himself shall be with them, and be their God.”

Spoons glanced down to his left to see his little sister’s arms folded across herself against the cold.

“And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.”

With a hand on her opposite shoulder, Spoons pulled her to his side. She wrapped an arm around his leg, anchoring herself to him, the top of her head hardly reaching his hip.

“And there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying.”

He moved his hand to her hair, holding her.

“Neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.”

In his periphery, Spoons saw Dennis glance over at them.

“And he that sat upon the throne said: Behold, I make all things new.”

Dennis quietly moved the foot or so over to Katie to hold her shoulder. Spoons looked over at him, and Dennis shrugged with an expression that was hard to read, turning to look back at the casket.

“I am Alpha and Omega; the beginning and the end.”

Spoons stared at the ground, feeling as though everyone’s eyes were on him.

“I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely.”

Spoons glanced up at the multitude surrounding him and was surprised to find everyone looking at the ground as well. Sister Birmingham stood across from him in the circle, her hand holding tightly to the crucifix around her neck while her husband held her close. Sister Dittman wiped a tear away with a frail and age-spotted hand, her other clutching her purse. One of the Richman’s younger kids was looking up at everyone around him, not sure what was going on.

“He that overcometh shall inherit all things; and I will be his God, and he shall be my son.” With that final sentence, their preacher closed his Bible. With a slight smile and incline of his head towards Katie, he accommodated, “Or daughter.”

There was a quiet murmur of laughter through the congregation, intermixed with sniffling. Spoons was sure some were from the cold and some were from crying, but it was impossible to tell which was which. Katie held tighter to his leg.

“My friends,” their preacher said, holding the Bible to his stomach. “Today we have gathered to celebrate the life of Leroy Alan Miller.” He looked at the casket with furrowed brows as he gathered his words. “He was a beloved father, husband, and friend. I’m sure that there are many here today whose lives have been touched and shaped by Brother Miller.”

Spoons felt pride in his chest seeing people nod to themselves. Katie still clung to his leg. A hand found its way into his right hand, and he turned to see his mother looking at him with approval. She nodded, her eyes brimming with emotion, and squeezed his hand.

Beauty in Death 1

Anna Watkins, Honorable Mention Undergrad

Beauty in Death 2

Anna Watkins, Honorable Mention Undergrad

Graduate Winners

Graduate Poetry

Fake Lemon Smell

Ben Nathan, 3rd Place Graduate

3rd Place Graduate Franson

Thiel

Executer

My father chose the Indian restaurant located Inside a gas station in our small farming town

To make me the executor of his estate.

He asked if I had a pen, His small frameless glasses resting on the tip of his nose. Eyebrow hairs that never did what my mother wanted Nearly leaping off his face.

I gave him my black G-2 and he pulled a napkin

Over from the side of the table. Curry stained, the scent of his Last will and testament.

Embossed flowers carried ink strokes of detailed assets.

The red plastic of our booth squeaking as he shifted his weight To show me what he had written.

To him, it was simple math, the logic of a life summed up. He said when we die Not if—

Sell the house.

Sell the stocks back to the company. Sell everything we own. Split it with your brother.

I found myself wanting to beg To reach across the table, shake him and demand But what do we keep?

To tear his testament written in his all capped ink

And let him know I’d never need it because he would never Die. Not the man so competitive he’d never let me win A single game growing up, so competitive I was sure He’d find a way to live forever just to beat death. But I didn’t do that.

I listened, memorized his instructions, Watched him sign it, avoiding the stain. That night, I took the napkin and taped it into my journal. I kept that at least.

Etymology of Hysteria

After the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Gilman

Definition: Exaggerated emotion. Excited and selective amnesia. A disease historically regarded as Specific to women. Put a woman in a room And watch her go mad. Say a woman is mad And lock her in a room. Which came first The anger or the insanity?

Similar words include: Frenzy, Wildness. A woman with the emotions Of a man.

You only gave her Yellow wallpaper to eat, And then you’re surprised when She decided to try and eat you. This isn’t attention seeking This is hunger, A frenzy if you must. This isn’t volatile or selective. This is a long time coming.

“I Praise Vacancy”

-Margaret

But what?

Atwood

But into the mist

An elephant, a smog, a skeleton Dancing on the grave of All the space I accidentally took up

This chasm between Punching first and punching harder

In what might have been

A love story between a tiger and the ocean Which is to say, empty and hungry

Listen to how birds hate silence

The war in their song

Clouds forbidden from rest By the chirp, chirp of the Inability to leave well-enough alone

Throw seed out of a moving vehicle

Fill pockets with collected trash

Shelves with dead and/or sad people

Anything to avoid the empty And open door, a dam, a paper cup

A life in prison to be served by Never leaving a space

Untouched, unfilled, unruined This too is a death sentence

2nd Place Graduate Jacob Taylor

Politicized Bodies

Utah House Representative Quinn Kotter, choking back tears, reads the bible to a committee legislating the medical care of Utah’s transgender youth, arguing that male and female are “absolute moral truths” because his god—with its translations and appropriations and interpretations—made it so. Attendees wear crocheted hearts of pink, blue, and white as Kotter attempts to legislate the bible. The ACLU tracks 73 new bills in January 2023 nationwide that would restrict access to healthcare for transgender people.

Nebraska Senator Dave Murman writes a bill that would make it illegal for people under 19 to attend Drag Queen Story Hour, where drag queens read books to children. In revision, Murman clarifies that the sexually explicit drag performances he’s taken upon himself to protect innocent children from can include reading books for “educational purposes.” Senator Megan Hunt, challenging the bill, submits a revision that replaces drag events with religious camps and retreats, stating that there is a “well-documented history of indoctrination and sexual abuse” from abusers within religious institutions. Hunt’s revisions would make it illegal for people under 19 to attend religious camps and retreats. The ACLU tracks 27 new bills in January 2023 nationwide that would restrict free speech and expression for queer individuals.

Mississippi Senator Angela Hill, in her new bill, writes, separate is not inherently unequal,” using the same language used to justify decades of racial segregation. Now, Hill proposes this language as a means to prevent Title IX from protecting trans and queer individuals. Hill argues to keep trans boys in girls’ spaces and trans girls in boys’ spaces because this is equality. An eleven year old stands in front of a board of adults legislating his future and tells them he just wants to be allowed to play soccer with his friends at school. The ACLU tracks 108 new bills in January 2023 nationwide that would restrict access to educational spaces or materials for trans and queer individuals.

I used to pray to God

I prayed to God, lying In my bed, awake, staring At red numbers as they flickered From 00 to 59 then started over.

Dear God, please help me.

00 looked like eyes, staring As I tried to sleep. Whose, I didn’t know. So I prayed to God. Only later did I realize Those eyes were His. Prayers Became pleas. Tears became Snot.

Red numbers knew why I prayed to God; I forgot. Help me with what? I thought. No, I just needed help—

I remembered tomorrow’s test, (-1.5 for a misplaced period), Next week’s band festival, (My botched solo could cost us State), Scissors and pills just beyond the glowing 57, (I’d be dead before Mr. Hale took attendance), Sunday’s interview with Bishop Brooks, (My half-truths could damn my soul), The future wife God blessed me with, (An eternity of covenanted lies), And I cried as Red Eyes stared me down.

God, please, just let me sleep.

I sometimes forget to talk about life beyond my pain when meeting new people I wonder if my conversation digs too deep my words hit scars (or I’m too much

baggage) I scare men away from second dates with just a taste of my reality I like to pry stories out to relate but maybe that’s a flawed approach bonding over shared trauma produced deeper conversations than most men can muster chatting but then they ghost after connection vulnerability and I go on to try again

1st Place Graduate Lauren McKinnon

Become

When you look in the mirror and your belly hangs soft over denim, stretch marks rise like the yawn of morning sun, dark hairs creep from the caverns of your face, to meet in the middle of brow to embrace and you have not seen the start or end of your waist since November’s stuffed turkey, spiced rum, red potatoes, round like the blue moon bags under your eyes and your thighs rise like trunks, hair frays like bales of broken wheat, before you say a word see the eyes of someone you love.

if that does not retract any unkindness waiting on your teeth spend a day in the bath, tracing valley of stomach and cellulite lines spiraling your skin like a shell skipped on a river, echoes of a life lived in every inch of you.

See your breasts like snow-capped mountains, leg hairs like sapling branches, fat on arms trembling delicate as wild buttercups in breeze.

You are the folds and creases of scripture breathe in oil and mint and become

recipe for generational trauma

on skin and fruit blue bruises taste foul. no worries, I was told. eat around.

1. grab grandmother’s paring knife, recipes for pie, the women in my family pass down. feel the fuzz slide under your fingers, after soaking the peaches in ice. feel the powder skin give, and slice.\

2. focus on the good parts of the fruit. throw any dark spots down the sink.

3. 350 degrees sprinkle sugar on the crust cut holes for the fillings to breathe.

but I reach my fingers down garbage compactors, and fill my fists with pits and rotten things, in there, I find the eyes of three little girls:

1. my grandmother sits upright in bed. her foster father holds his hunting knife at her throat.

2. my mother’s cheek presses in the dirt as two men pit the insides of a six-year-old girl.

3. my own body lurches against a backseat, no, stuffs inside my mouth like foil in my cheeks. in my family women are taught to eat pie with a knife perched between teeth.

the secret ingredient passed down, through our bodies: quiet.

like a lunatic, I smear peaches on the floors, walls, and sink there is three generations of art colored blood sticky on my hands and I laugh, lick and spit at the table full of eyes, who label the mess as mine.

my inheritance is ghost hands, clawing under my skin, my inheritance is showering with clothes on, waking up at three am with shadows of shoulders doubling down on my neck.

I have my mother’s eyes, my mother’s blue bruise, soft water eyes, but I’m not like my mother. can’t bake like peaches in a pie.

I only feed monsters when I rise sweet. I only feed monsters when my body is beaten into a thing easy to eat.

Moab mourns her ocean body: a conversation

Once, my body rolled with combs of water. Blue breath like satin ridges on a shell. Shimmer skin and oyster eyes, I went by daughter. Waves of I am: a hush linger hum of bells. Once, my body was a little daughter. Simple as licking icing from a spoon. Mouth for laughter, legs for pumping farther, gel pen hearts and arrows littered a room.

Seaweed hair, untouched sand before I burned. Sun’s tongue scorched my skin and red peels of drought calcified entrada eyes, stomach churned. Heat hardened my mouth in an unheard shout.

My love once asked why I didn’t scream louder. When I was 16 and raped, no one heard. Icing breath and bouts of belly laughter, decay into the quiet blame I learned.

Trenches of sandstone and hoodoo spires erupt like a claim from ghost pool eyes. Rigid fire, they say I’m something to admire, they snap photos of my naked spines.

Mute, I run from ghost hands, and I cry when they say, you’ll teach your daughters better. Words of hate stick like ballpoints in my eyes I write from a body cut in letters.

My strength is signed in an abuser’s name when they say: “you are strong, because of what you overcame.”

They say my desert body is beautiful because. I weep for soft and strong without a clause.

Graduate Nonfiction

Prairie Chairs

Ben Nathan, 2nd Place Graduate

Ben Nathan, 3rd Place Graduate

Laundry Rooms, Ironing Boards

Recently, I’ve been working on two new drawings. They’re simple line drawings of the laundry rooms I can remember. They’re drawn in turquoise drafting pencil on translucent, plastic sheets and look a lot like blueprints or schematic plans. In my practice as an artist, I visually recreate significant spaces and objects from my childhood—I think I’m pretty good at it too. But, to date, none of the other work has felt quite as much like my Mom, and her personal brand of dedicated affection, as these two drawings.

Sliding my arms out of my coat sleeves and backpack straps, I drop them near the front door with a clomp. As I move into the living room, the house feels abnormally quiet.

“MOM?” My call bounces off of the tall, vaulted ceiling. The house is still, and the air smells slightly of hot cotton shirts and lemon scented starch.

“Luke is sleeping,” she calls softly, her voice echoing up from downstairs. Turning in that direction, I make my way to the basement. I noisily skip down the first flight of stairs, taking the carpeted steps in twos. As I round the turn to the next set of stairs, though, I slow down. With only six or seven steps to it, I usually jump down this flight to the worn pink carpet of the family room below. Today, though, I walk down them slowly. Luke is down for a nap, and Emma and Caleb aren’t home from school yet—they always take way longer to walk up the big hill—so, somehow jumping down the stairs and disturbing the stillness of the house just seems inappropriate.

Almost an hour since Dad sent me down to clean my room, and absolutely no cleaning had taken place. I was eleven; I had done this every Saturday for years, and I still hated cleaning my room. The worst part was, today, I wasn’t allowed to go to the skate park with my best friend, Ethan, unless I cleaned up. So, in protest, I sat on the floor—among the dirty jeans and underwear—and flipped through my binder of trading cards.

“Are you almost done down there Ben? I have to go run some errands in a few minutes, and if your room is clean, I can give you a ride to the skate park to meet Ethan.” Mom’s voice carried down to me through the heating vent. She always used the heating registers in the floor upstairs to talk to my brothers and me through our ceiling vents whenever we were downstairs. She said, that way she didn’t have to yell so loud for us to hear her.

“I’m doing it,” I replied as loudly and grumpily as I could.

“Don’t forget to put away the clean clothes I put on your bed. Ten minutes,” her voice echoed back.

I didn’t answer, but I did look up from my baseball card collection to the stack of carefully folded shirts and matched socks on the bed. don’t remember those spaces now. I wish I did.

I have very limited memories of my family’s living situations before we left Utah, and no recollection, at all, of how our clothes were washed. I do know, however, that my sister and I wore cloth diapers, so clearly our Mom would have spent hours washing and drying—in whatever laundry room she had access to.

I also don’t remember our laundry situation when we lived in Las Vegas. From our time in the apartment, I only remember the enormous bathtub that we were never allowed to actually fill up. From the house, I think I remember the entire layout, except I can’t remember the laundry

room. We definitely had one though, because I never had to go to a laundromat with my Mom. I suppose having a washer and dryer just wasn’t that important to me when I was only three or four. I don’t remember those spaces now. I wish I did.

That fake lemon smell is even stronger in the basement. Mingled with the humid scent of steamy fabric, I know, even without looking, that my Mom is busy ironing. Sure enough, she stands with her back to the stairs, in front of the flower-patterned ironing board. With a basket of freshly cleaned clothes to her right, and a pile of plastic clothes-hangers on the couch behind her, she works in a fury of hissing steam, starchy aerosol spray, and men’s dress shirts.

“How was your day, Buddy Boy?”

“Good.” I reply.

“What did you learn?” she asks, setting herself up for the predictable answer.

“Nothing.”

A brief pause, and then: “Well that’s a fine kettle of fish.” Her’s is an unexpected response from anyone else, perhaps, but not from her, especially while she’s ironing. While ironing, she always has Anne of Green Gables playing in the background—it’s actually the only time she ever watches TV. That’s where she got the whole “kettle of fish” thing from.

I watch the screen for a bit, then I ask: “Why do you even like these movies?”

“These are my ironing movies,” she answers matter-of-factly. “I thought you liked them too?”

“No. They’re super boring, super long, and there’s like a million of them.”

“Well, I used to watch these with my mom when I was younger. Plus, I like all the books.” She answers in the clipped, distracted way she talks when she is in the middle of doing something.

“Oh.”

She always talks about reading those books. We even have the full set on the bookshelf right next to the TV, but I don’t remember her ever actually sitting down to read them—or any other book. It seems like all she ever wants to do is wash laundry and iron clothes.

My ten minutes were all but gone. I had spent the past two minutes in a flurry of stuffing toys, books, rocks (I collected them), and clothes anywhere I could think of, creating an illusion of cleanliness. I didn’t have to be too neat about it. Dad would be checking my work, and he never even looked under the bed— or anywhere else—to see if I had actually cleaned instead of just spreading the mess out. I could hear Mom opening the garage door, and I knew she would be leaving any second. Before leaving the room, I took one last look around. Crap! I’d forgotten to put away the clean clothes. Flinging the door open, I called out to the family room:

“Dad, I’m all done.”

As he got up from his computer chair, I scrambled back to my bed, scooped up all of the crisply folded laundry, and tossed it into the hamper with the dirty clothes. A few seconds later, Dad poked his head through the doorway. “OK. Looks good,” he said. “You can go with your Mom.”

Snatching up my skateboard, I raced up the stairs and met my Mom in the garage where she was waiting in the car for me. I didn’t give any more thought to the clean laundry in the dirty clothes hamper that day.

While I only remember flashes of detail from my early childhood, I can remember most things starting from around the time I began school. The first of these vivid memories go back to fall of 2001. By that

time, we had just moved to Wyoming, and I was five years old. The laundry spaces, where our clothes were washed, included: my Grandma’s house, with the dark laundry chute, the framed but unfinished space in the basement of our house on Sundance Drive, and our Yates Street laundry room, where clean folded clothes never made it off of the white plastic shelves and back to our closets.

Mom washed and folded our clothes every Monday. I think she probably started every week with ten hours of laundry for the seven of us. She also ironed all of my Dad’s dress shirts and slacks about once a month, so he could look presentable at work. She usually had one of us kids help her match socks when we got home from school, but other than that, the laundry room was her domain—and the laundry was a task she handled alone

From my new spot on the couch, I hear the front door open upstairs. Two sets of feet tromp in, accompanied by a swish-slam as the door closes, and twin clunks as Emma and Caleb drop their backpacks on the floor—probably right next to mine.

Mom chimes in between puffs of ironing steam: “Sounds like the other two are home. Run up and tell them Luke is asleep.”

“OK.” I sigh and stand up from the couch. Running up the stairs, two at a time, I nearly collide with Caleb as he heads toward the basement. We pass each other, and I continue up.

Reaching the last steps, I hear the bathroom door closing; Emma must have just gone in there.

“Luke is sleeping, so be quiet,” I say softly through the bathroom door when I get to it. I try to put as much authority into my nine-year-old voice as I can.

“OK,” her voice echoes back from behind the door.

“Mom’s downstairs ironing.”

“Is she watching Anne of Green Gables?” She sounds almost excited; Emma does like that movie though.

“Well duh. That’s what she always does when she irons.” I don’t wait for a reply. Instead, I go back to the stairs. This time I jump down both flights, trying to save time and hoping that Caleb didn’t take my spot on the couch—nestled between the piles of clothes hangers. He hadn’t taken it. Actually, he was asking Mom: “What can we have for an after-school snack?”

“How about pretzels and peanut butter?” Mom replies. Caleb loves pretzels.

“Hmm. OK,” he chirps back. He continues in his sweet voice, “Is it ok if I get them myself?”

“That’s fine.”

With this, he turns and scurries back up the stairs to get his snack. I plop back down on the couch to keep watching the movie.

Mom notices this. “I thought you didn’t like this movie.” Her voice is a little teasing but also a bit distracted sounding.

“I don’t. I hate it.” And the truth is, I don’t like it, mostly. Continuing, I retort: “Mom, if there’s something on the TV, I’m going to watch whatever it is.”

I don’t usually get to watch anything on school nights. Plus, there’s just something that feels good about being here with her, and hearing the hiss and puff of the iron.

Just two days after I “cleaned” my room, Mom talked to me about it after school. When I got home, she wasn’t in the basement—near the laundry room—which was strange for a Monday. Instead, she was sitting on the couch in the upstairs living room. She looked up at me when I walked in.

“Put your backpack away and come with me,” she said in a flat, serious tone. “I need to talk to you about something.”

I took the time to place my backpack and coat in the hall closet, where I was supposed to keep them, rather than on the floor near the door. Something was off. Then, I turned and followed her down

the stairs. She walked into the laundry room. With some hesitation, I followed her. The unfinished room felt cold and small, and there was an awkward tension in the air; something was definitely wrong. The furnace clicked off, ending it’s heating cycle, and suddenly, the room felt tiny and painfully quiet. What had I done?

“Why did you do this?” Her voice was strange. It sounded like she was trying to hold back emotions when she asked.

“What?” and then I noticed the laundry basket. “Oh.” There, on the cold cement floor, was my Green Bay Packers hamper. It was full of dirty clothes, as well as some that were still clean and neatly folded, just where I had hidden them.

“Do you know how much work it is for me to wash and fold all of your stuff?” her voice cracked on “your stuff.”

“Mom, I just forgot. I didn’t mean to leave them. It was just an accident.”

“I don’t have to do this for you every week, plenty of kids have to do their own laundry,” she actually cried a little as she started saying it. Seeing that, I realized she had probably cried about this earlier too. My chest filled up with the strange combination of guilt and nerves that I only ever felt if I’d emotionally hurt her. “Ben, why did you do this? All you had to do was put the clothes away. It would’ve taken you two seconds to do.”

I didn’t answer, I couldn’t answer.

“Well,” she paused, expelling the sadness from her voice by taking a deep breath. “This week, you’ll be washing, sorting, and folding everyone’s laundry. I’ll help you, but I want you to understand just how hard it can be to take care of everybody in this family.”

She really wasn’t kidding. That week, I washed, folded, and put away every single piece of dirty laundry in the house. It took me most of the evening on Monday, and the entire afternoon and evening on Tuesday, just to get everything washed. Wednesday, I folded everything and took trips to everyone’s closets and dressers to put their laundry away. By Thursday, I was happy to be rid of unfolded underwear and back to doing homework. Between the pre-washing of Luke and Caleb’s food-stained shirts and matching up all of my dad’s gold-toe work socks, the process was boringly tedious, and even physically taxing on my skinny frame. The single, yellow bulb of light in the cement laundry room dulled all color and had me squinting for hours to see better in the gloom. It was a dreadful experience for me, but through every minute of it, Mom was there with me, toiling away and rattling off more of her favorite quotes from Anne of Green Gables.

After graduating from high school, I moved out of the house to adventure in Central America for two years as a missionary. Those laundry washing situations were countless in location and nature and never very consistent. The jungle-y laundry “rooms” ranged from washing on river rocks, to buckets of water with cement-slab-washboards, to borrowed washing machines that had to be filled with water, by hand, in order to function. During that time, I grew to hate washing my clothes, and I tried to stretch every bit of my wardrobe to the absolute limit of acceptable grime before setting it aside to be washed later. While a riverbank is certainly a more scenic location for washing clothes, I found that I missed the energy of my mother’s laundry room back home, not to mention the convenience of an automated washing machine. Under the circumstances, it often took me an entire Monday morning just to wash my own clothes. I can’t help but make that connection now to my Mom’s Monday mornings in the laundry room.

Jack Bylund, 2nd Place Graduate

The Fairweather God

You may not know it, but your immortal soul existed before your birth, before the foundation of this world had been shaped by God and his countless children—including you. It’s a pretty thought, to wonder what hand you had in the great creation. Perhaps your touch dyed the wings of butterflies, perfected the glitter of sunlight in cloudless rain, or carved the majestic arches of Southern Utah. With the work done in less than seven days, you settled down in a premortal heaven alongside your uncounted siblings, your fellow unborn, all spirits who lacked physical bodies. Your home, a sort of intangible paradise. That, at least, is the doctrine of Mormonism, the faith of my fathers, which I chose to abandon with my God-given free will.

When I consider this idea of a premortal existence, my imagination conjures something akin to God’s realm as seen in the Mormon, or Latter-Day Saint, camp musical, Saturday’s Warrior. Heaven is a place with a fog machine in every corner; our background, an endless dark blue of galactic space wallpaper with holes poked through here and there, allowing the twinkle of studio light stars to shine through and illuminate our existence ages before the sun first lit the dark of chaos.

If you are a woman, you wear a dress of gossamer material in layers that flow and swirl with ethereal grace to the edges of your ankles. You may not have a body yet, sin may not exist yet, but you wear tight pants underneath. Just in case any of the male spirits get any ideas. Every bit of clothing on your not-body shines and shimmers in monochromatic pastels. All cotton candy pink or daffodil yellow or breathy lavender. But no mixtures. No rainbows. Not of any sort.

Maybe you’re a man, though, so your apparel refuses to cling to your shape, simple pants that almost bell bottom at your feet and V-necked collared shirts that flare about your neck and never expose any not-skin beneath the collarbone. Like your feminine counterparts, your clothing adheres to a strict code of singular color. Blue top, blue pants. Red top, red pants.

But wait, you may say. What about nonbinary people? Where are they, and what clothes do they wear? Don’t ask—there is no answer. Gender is an eternal characteristic, you see. So, although you may look down at your spirit form and see no penis, no vagina, no junk of any sort, you’re either a boy or a girl. You get what you get, and you don’t throw a fit. No trades. No switcheroos. So don’t bother asking about trans people. Or intersex folks. Questions belong to the weak and faithless. Doubters risk wandering forbidden paths. They may end up like our fallen brother, once called “Light Bringer.”

Let me explain. You, me, all of us, we existed in a simple, bland happiness in our studio paradise. No thoughts, minds empty. Everyone jumped back in surprise when our Father, God, and King appeared among us, announcing a Plan of Happiness. I hovered far from him, in the outer ring of the billions of listening spirit children, yet his proud voice reverberated for all to hear. Children of God have one destiny. It seems blasphemous to so many Christians today, but there’s a plain logic to it. Just as kittens become cats and colts become horses, so, too, do the children of God become Gods themselves. A reverent hush fell among the hosts of heaven as the great Elohim unfolded his master plan for us; beneath us lay a world uninhabited by human souls. We all built it together, that our spirits may inhabit physical bodies. Each of us would undergo a great and terrible test, to see if we had it in us to avoid sin, choose righteousness, choose the Church of God, and after death return to his holy presence and be worthy of Godhood itself. Our flawed and sinful souls would require the aid of a messiah, who would suffer and die to pay the price for our return to heaven, so long as we obeyed God’s commandments and joined his Church. Those who faltered stood to lose Godhood, the presence of our Father, and would endure a period of suffering and

sorrow before final judgment. No progress or growth. Lesser love.

Lucifer, the son of the morning, protested. Why craft a plan in which a mere fraction of the spirits present could be saved? This rough draft of salvation merited praise but needed a reviser’s hand. The way God presented it, billions of souls would live and die without hearing a word about this true Church. There’d be whole periods of history where the Church wouldn’t exist! Why not tweak the plan here and there to ensure everybody’s salvation? Lucifer even offered to suffer on the cross more, die more, if it meant eternal salvation for each of his spirit siblings. Cries of agreement rang throughout our galaxy. Debates arose among the listeners.

None of these arguments mattered. God rejected Lucifer’s ideas out of hand. The plan our Father presented needed no changes, for perfection already dwelt in each point of its process. Indeed, God conceded that credit belonged, not to him, but to the endless concourses of Gods who came before. Our Father once lived as a mortal man and passed the very same plan of salvation when his own God presented it to him and his brothers and sisters. This was true for our Heavenly Grandfather and each generation before, beyond the memory of angels and humans. There would be no changes.

Lucifer persisted in arguing. The flaws of the great plan numbered too many to count. Just because others refused to alter it did not mean we could not choose to improve and develop it. But God turned his favor away from one of his eldest children. He banished Lucifer then and there with a snap of his fingers, followed by anyone who dared to agree with the newborn devil. In an instant, a third of my spirit siblings vanished, too. Our Father called them weak-willed and wicked, all the while congratulating us for our faith in his perfection and the sanctity of salvation. Our first gift would be physical bodies, a thing God already possessed in his glory. If we remained loyal to him in our time on Earth, we stood to gain apotheosis as a second gift. Shaken but firm, we agreed to follow him. I agreed to follow him. Here, in the world below, and through eternity.

A long time passed. All of us studied God’s plan in great detail. It required…a lot. Obedience to many commandments. Abstinence from various drinks and substances. Ordinances and ceremonies. Marriage between a man and a woman in specific temples. I watched Adam and Eve enter the world. Moses. Elijah. Jesus. Joseph Smith. An army of spirits turned flesh over thousands of years. History, humanity, lives, all kindling, dancing, burning like a wild, living flame. Which brings us to the present. My turn on Earth approaches. A rush of nervousness somehow winds its way up my not-spine, a tingle of excitement at the chance to participate in a plan that shapes gods. My Father loves me. He prepared a way to make me better. I want to be better, to improve, to grow. Most of all, I want to love. A notice on a bulletin tells me I’m due to be born at the end of the twentieth century. I step through the clambering crowd of my spirit siblings to read more. None of us know our future. No confirmation of what shall be echoes among the hosts of heaven. But we can extrapolate much from observing the events down below in the world. I have. And these bulletins notify us of a few of the trials we can expect to experience. My entire being seems to sink as my eyes run over the words over and over.

I’m gay.

Other spirits read about their forthcoming trials and temptations, the things our Father weaved into their being to test their mettle and their potential for deification. Some cry out in joy at the simplicity of their challenges. Others, like me, begin to drift away, already in despair at the difficulty of the road ahead. In that moment, I understand that I, and so many others, contradict the purity of our Father’s plan and the truth of his Church on Earth.

My desire to live a mortal life died when I read that bulletin, but I shuffle into the line of spirits awaiting birth. It makes no sense, but my blue shirt and pants somehow itch my not-body. I watch my

siblings depart in a process I’ve observed billions of times now. So many souls here, then gone, who have lived, died, all separate from me until the conclusion of the plan. I remember all of their names, a list of beloveds greater than a lifetime. A harried woman in purple gossamer ushers the souls ready to be born up to a platform above the fog churned out by the machines. A lime green light, complete with thunderous sound effects, scans these children of God and teleports them into mortality, a counterintuitively science fiction image in this theocracy. Somewhere down there, countless infants emerge from the womb, amnesiac souls living in their first and last body, their sacred test at its inception before they know words, love, loss, or sin.

I wish then that my turn came at an earlier era of the world. By now, the earth has persisted for some six thousand years or so, though the foolish scientists below are fooled by the bones of so-called dinosaurs and other prehistoric deceptions; they have no idea that God shaped their world from the remnants of those already come to pass, that these fossils persist to test the faithful and blind the faithless. No such lizards and dragons ever dwelt in our world, which I think is a shame; it would be pretty badass to ride a velociraptor to work like the long-forgotten forerunners of older planets. Better, for certain, to live among man-eating monsters than to live instead as gay in this late era. The wickedness of humanity runs deep at this point—queer rights move forward with an unstoppable momentum. Far easier to be gay when gayness is forbidden than to love men when advocacy for your personhood exists.

“Please don’t give up,” a voice says behind me, reading the thoughts made plain on my face.

I turn to see one of my Heavenly Mothers approaching. Blue beads flow to Her shoulders amid Her dark hair. Her own fluid dress shimmers a trio of colors, one of the limited privileges given to a Goddess over Her children. She pantomimes an embrace of my spirit body, a physically empty gesture that still warms my soul all the same. Of God’s many wives, I always felt closest to Her.

“Why did he make me gay?” I ask, spirit tears in my eyes. “I didn’t ask for this.”

“Who’s to say?” Mother replies, a phrase She uses often. “His ways are higher than our ways, his thoughts higher than our thoughts.” As I nod along to Her words, She pulls away and bows Her head. “I know you didn’t ask for this, sweetheart. I wish I could help you.”

“I don’t think there’s anything you can do.”

Mother obtained Her salvation and status as a Priestess and Queen by joining the true Church when She lived as a mortal. She married our Father in a Mormon ritual known as a temple sealing, binding them as husband and wife for time and all eternity. To become a God, one of the commandments we must follow during our time on Earth is to do the same—marry a spouse of the opposite sex, someone we love, in the Latter-Day Saint House of the Lord.

“Hasn’t he set me up to fail?” I say, all of that on my mind. “How am I supposed to be what he wants me to be if I’m a perversion of his plan?”

Mother frowns. She grits her teeth as She points a finger at me. “You. You are not a perversion. I can’t tell you why he did this. But you are our son. I love you. No matter what happens. No matter what you do down there.”

“But Father lists sexual sins as second only to murder in seriousness.” My not-hands cover my not-face in stress. “I can’t marry a woman because I’ll never love one. And I can’t trick a woman into marrying me, or outright ask a woman to be my wife even though I like men. That’s…”

“That would be terrible.” Mother nods. “You don’t deserve that. And neither would she.”

“So, I’m doomed to die alone for salvation? Or doomed to slip up and be damned just for loving the wrong person? What am I supposed to do, Mom?”

She looks around to see if anyone else is listening. It’s for my sake, not Hers. No one prays to Her, not even those who know about Her. But all nearby celebrate their life to come or wallow in hopelessness, too preoccupied to listen in. She was just one of the wives, after all. No one on Earth knew what

She had to say, and few cared. Why should they? She takes a deep breath before answering.

“Have you considered letting go? Just…being gay?”

I scan Her face for any trace of a joke, but She stands before me serious as the temple ceremonies themselves.

“What did you say?” I ask, not quite believing.

“You have freedom to choose,” She says. “Go down there and love someone. It might not be for time and all eternity, but you can treasure what you have.”

“What you’re saying is treason. Blasphemy.”

Mother shrugs. “Call it what you want. But not all your Father’s commandments make sense. Sometimes it’s just ancient tradition and nothing more, kid.” She winks.

I search for words but find none. The anguish at my unjust plight persists, but the tiniest hint of hope colors the despair.

“Your Father is offering you everything he has. But nobody said you absolutely have to accept it. That’s what free agency is all about, right? Freedom to choose? So, think about it. Do you want to follow the plan and suffer your whole life, or do you want happiness and love, however fleeting?”

My heart carried no answer. Yet. But Mother gave me a lot to think about. Before I found out about my test on Earth, all I wanted more than anything was to love. To love someone and be loved. That seemed impossible now. Acting on my gayness barred me the eternal development and progression of godhood. But could a miserable soul earn the privilege of deity?

“Why did you wait until right now to tell me this?” I ask after minutes of mulling her ideas over. She smiles. “I didn’t want you to worry. Far better that you spend your last premortal days content and excited, with just a hint of panic at the end.”

A rumble shakes the heavens, and the spirits around me buzz in anticipation, recognizing the meaning of it.

“Your Father is coming,” Mother says. She tilts Her head a little to the side, as though listening. “He wishes to speak with you. I must leave.”

Although God spoke to me many times before this—with all things before you, you can visit each individual spirit child whenever you want—I worry.

“No, stay.” Were I able, I’d place an imploring hand on her warm shoulder. “I can’t face him without you.” Doubtless he already knew the nature of my conversation with Mother, and doubtless he frowned on the nature of it.

“I already know his mind. He wants this to be a private interview. I’m sorry.”

She’s gone. A pillar of light appears above me. Out of it descends God himself, my Father, whose brightness and glory defy all description. Nothing any of us in this premortal existence have not seen before.

Contrary to the endless barrage of monotonous art in the world below, our Father is not white. Sure, he shines with the light of creation, illuminated by the rays of the great star Kolob and wrapped in oddly low-cut robes of white. But the skin of God the Father possesses melanin. His appearance is akin to a Judean man from the first century CE. Not an attractive one, though, for he has no beauty, that no man may desire him. Prophets, ancient and modern, testify that he and Jesus Christ are identical in appearance, down to a single hair follicle. Maybe that’s why Jesus is his favorite kid.

He rests a hand on the wispiness of my shoulder, eyes (did you know they’re each a different color?) wet with deific sorrow.

“My son,” he says, as he often starts the things he says. “The thoughts of thine heart worry me.

But it is not too late for thee.”

I sigh. “Can we talk normally, please? No thees, thous, and foreasmuches?”

God smiles on me, not for the first time or the last. Benevolent. Patient. “I know you can still use your free agency to make the right choice…and return to me.”

I wanted it. How I wanted it with every fiber of my being. To return to him. To earn his approval. To grow and develop and be better. But Mother’s words burrowed into me, carving a spot next to my urgent need to love and be loved in return.

“I don’t know. I might just let myself be gay.” I flinch as I speak, but there’s no point in hiding my intent. He hears my thoughts: “it might be better that way.”

“I know it’s hard, but you can overcome all things through me,” he says. “I understand what you’re about to go through.”

“Really? Were you gay when you lived as a mortal?”

I see the impulse to lie, to comfort me, in the shift of his stance. But he chooses the truth.

“No,” he admits. “But I am your Father. I formed you. I know you. And I know you can choose to be with me and be like me.”

“Is it so bad that I want to love someone?” I almost demand. “There’s nothing I want more. Can you make me straight?”

“No. Your path is already set. I know every step of it. Each second. Each heartbeat. Each thought of your mind.”

“So, what do I choose?”

For the first time during our conversation, my Father releases a mysterious smile. “That is for you to discover.”

I suppress an urge to roll my eyes, even as his close shut in a display of paternal sorrow. I remembered Lucifer’s words, that God knowingly sent endless numbers of his children to damnation.

“I cannot stop you from your folly,” my Father says, choosing to ignore my devilish thoughts, “but know that I forbid it. I’ll do all in my power to put you in the right circumstances. You will be born into the covenant, raised up in a righteous family. They will teach you to live as I would will thee…you…to live.”

“I know.”

“You have this trial to deal with. Same-sex attraction will be your burden to bear. But my Church will help you. They will not be able to cure you of your malady, but they will keep you on the straight and narrow path that leads back to me and my throne.”

“Maybe I’ll find my way out,” I reply. “Or Maybe I’ll stay. I’ll use my agency as I will. One way or the other.”

“Come,” he says. And, whether I like it or not, I follow.

Quicker than thought, I am transfigured, body, soul, and spirit. I close my eyes at the intensity of the sensation. When I open them, I stand beside the great Elohim on a sheet of silver glass overlooking the expanse of the universe. I feel solar wind dance between my fingers, the fabric of white robes instead of boring blue garb clinging to my skin, the gentle rustle of my hair, the cold of the translucent surface beneath my feet. I experience the sensation of embodiment, suddenly an exalted personage, not mortal and weak, but clothed in the glory of the Gods, able to bear the sight of my fully glorified Father without burning to ash in his presence. I see him even as he is, for I am like him.

My Father motions to the endless galaxies below. I step up beside him, unable to resist taking his hand purely so I can feel true touch for the first time. My gaze follows his. The heightened senses of my celestial body place all things before me, both in heaven and in Earth. I see a mustard seed scattered by the winds and sunken into the earth. In an instant, I watch it sprout beneath the soil and grow, grow, grow, from tiny sapling to the towering heights of a powerful tree. It gives leaf. It sheds its noble dress for

the winter again and again. Before it occurs to me to blink, it withers and dies, but not before spreading countless new seeds that repeat the process.

Planets and moons form all over the endless expanse of galaxies. They, too, grow and die before me, wiped out by meteors and incinerated in the supernova deaths of stars—of which I also witness the beginning and the end, the first and the last. My father smiles at me, and we depart from our sheet of silver glass to soar among the angel nebulas of space and seek out the darkest corners of all that is, where we are the first and sole light. We swim alongside pods of whales that sing to the glory of our omnipotence and look upon us with worshipful eyes. We gather all the human wisdom of the Library of Alexandria with speed surpassing human comprehension.

And before I can say another word, God lifts us up, higher and away, into fractured chaos and outer darkness, where only gods dare to tread, and the sons of perdition are banished. My father seizes matter unorganized and shapes a thousand new worlds without end, amen. The offspring of his thought. Holy tears, golden with the awe of God’s priesthood and power, fall from my transfigured eyelashes and onto my unblemished face.

“All of this is mine,” my father says. “This is my work and my glory. And all these things will I give thee if thou wilt fall down and worship me.”

Mother’s words led me to believe that gayness, queerness, and most of all, love, was the way I yearned to spend my mortal life. But God sways my thoughts, tempts me with everything he has to offer.

My awareness seeks out the human family, which passes generation after generation. God shatters them in a flood that kills millions—women and children, the born and countless unborn. Sodom and Gomorrah burn and crumble. Despite the children who live there, despite the fetuses tucked away in mother’s wombs, the sinless infants in countless households, my father cannot find more than ten righteous souls in those cities, so they are all killed by fire and brimstone, perishing in innocence they are too young to put to words. The armies of Israel, the prophet Joshua at their head, march across their Promised Land, massacring entire civilizations at the command of their prophets, wise men given wisdom and commands from the father who I stand with at this very moment.

Across distant corners of the world, thousands of generations grow and perish without hearing a word of the precious gospel or knowing the name of Jesus. Their spirits enter an afterlife of damnation they do not understand, tortured in unbearable misery and are coerced into accepting a savior who did not deign to save them on Earth. Peace comes on the condition of accepting God’s gospel, the good news they either rejected or never heard.

And, of course, I can’t help but seek out the lives of my people. The Ls, the Gs, the Bs, the Ts, and all the rest. My immortal heart shudders at their pain. The Christian world that offers acceptance and love betrays its own precepts to sneer at them, to express revulsion at their love, their identity, their being. They are abused, harassed, oppressed. Killed. Martyred. I cry out against what I see, at the torment of God’s children by their own brothers, sisters, and siblings. But my father’s own prophets speak down below, confirming the will of heaven turns its back on us.

Moses declares it is an abomination that man lie with man. We must be put to death.

Paul echoes the same basic sentiment, condemning us to hellfire.

Oddly, Jesus never comments on it.

Modern Mormon prophets speak against us further. Apostle Mark E. Petersen forbids our presence out of fear we will contaminate others.

Prophet Spencer W. Kimball calls us a disease.

Apostle Dallin H. Oakes seeks us out in his university with spies and surveillance and tries to

torture us into heterosexuality. He speaks obsessively of our evil for decades, telling our families to reject us, telling governments to criminalize us.

Apostle Boyd K. Packer encourages violence against us and our “choice,” saying that we are among the greatest threats to God’s purpose on this earth.

Apostle Jeffery R. Holland calls for musket fire against us. And the call is answered. All the while, they feign at love and swear they weep for our difficult plight even as they push for legislation to discriminate against us and forbid us rights in the name of a religious freedom that has never been threatened. And they never retract, never apologize. Never repent. God may so love the world, but he has favorites.

“Fall down and worship me,” Elohim says one more time. “The reward is a throne, for thou art a God, a child of the Most High. The punishment for refusal is more severe than eye hath seen or ear heard.”

“Is this love?” I ask out loud.

The glory, the cosmos, the light of life—all of it vanishes. I float once more in the fog machine heaven, returned to a spirit body clothed in monochrome and surrounded by studio light stars. Without a body, my existence feels emptier; I long to return to such a form.

The pillar of light appears once more beside me, and my father is back in my presence, weeping.

“You cannot question me. I do not change, for I am the same yesterday, today, and forever. I do not take notes. God is love. I am love.”

“But…everything I saw,” I say. “It was horrible. It was hate. And it was all done in your name. By your prophets and leaders.”

“Your Mother has been filling your head with dangerous thoughts,” he says. “You don’t understand. The path you are taking is a lonely one, and it will profit you nothing. You will live your life, a fraught and unhappy, wicked season, and then perish, body and soul.”

As he speaks, I see it like a movie in my mind. A life spent in service to god’s church can’t stop me from realizing the difference that sets me apart from the other boys in my congregation. Serving as a missionary radicalizes my politics but does not magically make me heterosexual. I depart the faith of my parents, to my family’s disappointment. They support me, they welcome boyfriends into the home, wear rainbow pride T-shirts and reassure me of their love, but my departure from their eternal family weighs heavy in their hearts through the rest of their lives. All the while, I find what acclaim and accomplishment I can, all fleeting vanities of the telestial world. I write silly little stories, works about gay people, murder, ghosts, love, and death. I write the silly little story you are reading now, elaborating on religious beliefs long forsaken and truths dear to me.

I am prideful. I experience fleeting pleasures I mistake for happiness and joy. Sometimes I feel profound loneliness on my new path. I drink the cup of iniquity. Without the answers of my faith, I’m left with mysteries regarding death, mortality, purpose, and all the rest. And yet I will feel so certain of my choices. Maybe I find a husband. Someone to share my sin with. Someone to rebel with. Someone to love. Someone to one day lose. Maybe he dies or we divorce, and there’s another life partner thrown into the mix. Either way, I perish and find myself in the endless torment of spirit prison, having apostatized from the one true faith and having committed sins whose seriousness are exceeded only by murder. When judgment comes, I am sentenced to the lowest level of heaven. In Mormonism, no one lives in hell forever, all attain a degree of salvation. But the third heaven is where the worst sinners, like me, go. I am doomed to live, dickless (no junk for the wicked) and vibing, with the sinful likes of my LGBTQIA siblings as well as Hitler, Stalin, and Obama. Heaven with the worst of humanity, paradise with drawbacks. I still have Spotify, but it has ads.

“There is nothing for you there,” god says in my ear. “Only death.”

I turn to face my father, not knowing what will happen when I say what I must. I wonder for a moment how many times he has had this conversation with my spirit siblings. I carry no illusions of being the sole receptor of this visit.

“Fine. I accept these conditions.”

My father transforms where he stands. His rugged, ethnically accurate being melts away. Instead, a white god towers by me, all fair skin and fair hair, clad in an ivory robe tied with a sash made of the American flag. His eyes flash wrath.

“Don’t you understand that you are nothing without me?” he thunders, so that the sound stage of heaven quakes. “You would choose, even before your test begins, to embrace the natural man. And the natural man is an enemy to god.” He marches toward me, and I back away until my spirit is pressed against the wall, blocking a painted Saturn and its rings. The lights darken as my father’s anger intensifies. “You are so stiff-necked, so inclined to wickedness and secret combinations, so inclined to do evil, that the only good you do comes by my influence and power. Without the grace I provide, you are worthless. You are sinful. You are lower than the dust of the earth. And yet I do all I can to intercede for you. To save you from damnation. What mercy I give is undeserved but is given all the same because of how much I love you. You are nothing without me.”

The heavens begin to settle as he waits for my response. It is not one he will like. “Are you done?”

His physical body tremors with the power of earthquakes and the destruction of galaxies. He can do with me as he will, yet he cannot destroy my immortal soul. I wonder why he sent me to Earth when he knew I would fail. I wonder about this for almost all of us. The godless. The sinful. The queers. The atheists. The Hindus and Muslims. Those who just happened to choose the wrong brand of Christianity.

God’s anger almost returns, but he relents, shrinking until he is smaller than me and I look down at him as he pleads. “Don’t do this, my son. If you love me, then you will obey my commandments.”

It’s remarkable what happens when you take the rhetoric of god divorced from the holy writ. When you see a man stand before you and say what god says, it isn’t words of love. It isn’t words of truth. It’s manipulation. It’s control. No one who loves you tells you you’re nothing. No one who cares for you demands that you obey them every day, every hour, all the time. No one who loves you demands that they dwell in your thoughts without ceasing. His are the words of an abuser; if a mortal man said these things to his wife and children, we would all tell them to flee. If we won’t accept abuse from mortals, why should we accept it from gods?

I begin to walk away. “Sorry, Dad.”

“You are forsaking godhood,” he calls after me.

“I don’t want to be a god.” I’d never said or thought such a dangerous thing before, but it becomes true as soon as I utter the words.

“Then what do you want?”

I stop. For once, I think before I speak. “Maybe I just want to be better. Grow. Improve as I go.”

I continue walking, and it infuriates my father. “Do not turn away from me. You do not depart from my presence. I depart from your presence. That is how it works. If you forsake me, then I will withhold all you desire from you. There is no progression or growth in the lower tiers of my heaven.”

“Then that’s on you. You chose to make it that way.”

“You can’t hide it from me.” A slyness enters the voice of god. “All you desire is to love someone. You’ll find it, down there. You’ll find him. But it won’t matter. It will profit you nothing. You’ll die. He’ll die. And it will be as a grain of sand compared to a vast beach, the difference between the time you

had together and the time you suffer for your sins.”

“It’s worth it,” I say, now sure of myself. I sense Mother’s approval of my words. “I would rather love someone for a single lifetime and be damned than bow to your hateful plan.”

I desperately know I shouldn’t, but I can’t resist the urge to turn around. Light forms around my once heavenly father as he prepares to leave, determined to have the last word.

“Mine is a plan of happiness. A plan of salvation. I made it for you because I love you and all of my children.”

He leaves, but not before he hears me.

“Then build a better plan.”

Jacob Taylor, 1st Place Graduate

Abatre

Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) pellets are melted into a hot soup that machines inject into test-tube-shaped molds. These stubby test tubes are then moved to a larger mold, heated, and inflated by pressurized air into disposable plastic water bottles. The bottles are sprayed and sanitized; they’re filled with purified water, sealed, labeled, and packaged in 64s with more plastic that shrinks around the bottles with heat in a hug, or maybe a choke. Twenty packs of 64 PET water bottles are stacked on a wooden pallet and bound together with industrial strength cling wrap. Water in plastic, in plastic, in plastic.

A homeless street outreach program purchases this pallet of plastic water bottles because it has run out of donations, and its clients don’t have access to clean water. An outreach worker and a soon-to-be case manager visit a man living under a tree outside a Smith’s in Salt Lake City, Utah. They give him a plastic grocery sack of food, a blanket, and a handful of these PET water bottles.

“Can I have some more water?” the man asks.

“How many more?” the case manager asks.

“Ten more.”

The case manager gets the man ten more water bottles while the outreach worker relays basketball updates for the man’s favorite teams. The man always asks for sport updates. The case manager asks if the man wants help signing up for Medicaid or Food Stamps today, but he declines.

The case manager wants to ask why but doesn’t; they give the man the space he asks for. As the workers drive away, the outreach worker tells the case manager how the man has lost his legs to frostbite. The case manager can’t stop thinking about those ten more water bottles. Is he dehydrated?

Months later, after the case manager transfers from the street outreach program to one of the city’s shelters, that man dies in the heat of summer. The case manager wonders how many water bottles would have kept him alive.

Schools and companies and stockpilers and emergency preppers and soccer moms and churches buy cases and cases of disposable PET water bottles. These bottles sit in cold basements and hot storage sheds, and they sit on shelves where the sunlight hits the PET just right. The water waits to be used; it expands and contracts with the weather, but no one drinks. The “just in case” these people bought the water for never arrives.

Maybe the unofficial two-year shelf life of disposable water bottles causes the owners to trade out their water bottles, or maybe it’s because of the way bottled water starts to taste funny when it lives in Polyethylene Terephthalate for too long—but these people donate their old water to the homeless street outreach program. There is no “just in case” in homeless services—only a prioritization of needs and a funneling of resources until those resources run dry.

This donation of water bottles arrives in a PODS storage container, and outreach workers spend the whole morning unloading it so PODS can pick its metal box back up. Two boxes made of centimeter-thick cardboard—chest height, just as wide and long—overflow with PET water bottles, some packaged, some loose. The outreach workers move some bottles

out into wagons and crates to make the massive cardboard box lighter. They lift and slide the box onto a pallet, and then into the food room, where it sits with cans of beans and corn and other food people have decided they no longer want.

Weeks later, when the water bottles at the top have all been used, the case manager (before they become a case manager) sorts the water bottles into many bins and crates based on condition: the uncrushed, full water bottles; the only slightly crushed water bottles; and the deflated water bottles that seem to have lost half their water after living under the weight of the water bottles above them for so long. The case manager decided to organize the water bottles after a conversation with a client. “Has this water been opened?” she asked. The case manager explained that it had just been crushed, and she took the water bottle. The case manager avoided giving out the crushed water bottles after that. They felt like their clients deserved better than crushed water bottles and cold canned vegetables. Sometimes, the case manager didn’t have anything else to offer.

The next time the case manager gets supplies from the storage room, all the water is gone, even the crushed bottles they avoided giving out before.

Grainy Low-Density Polyethylene (LDPE) pellets are melted and blown into a tall bubble that rises to the top of the factory. Wide rollers flatten the bubble into a sheet of opaque plastic that machines stamp with alcohol-based ink and cut with heated blades, leaving frilled edges on the bags. These LDPE grocery bags are shipped to stores and hung on metal rails, where boxes of Frosted Flakes and Mini Wheats stab through the thin plastic. Many of these bags land straight in the garbage because it takes too much effort to drop the bags back off at the store’s dedicated plastic bag recycling bins. Others are brought to the homeless street outreach program, where the reused LDPE bags will carry cans of green beans, pears, spam—maybe even a can of stew or beef chunks—to someone living outside. These bags get another chance to live before taking the inevitable trip to the landfill—not a chance to become something new, but a chance to save a life.

The case manager and an outreach worker walk through trees and bushes along the Jordan River calling “Outreach! Do you need any supplies?” to the tents they pass. The case manager has loaded two backpacks full of socks, bottled water, and LDPE grocery bags of canned food. The case manager has a stack of ID vouchers and Food Stamps applications stashed in their clipboard.

Four people come out to meet the workers as soon as they reach a camp stretched across the river’s bank. “You guys always find the most perfect places to camp,” the outreach worker says, climbing down the slope to meet the clients in their shaded haven of red and blue tents staked on grassy ledges. The case manager doesn’t mention the staked sign just a few feet away that says, “No camping.” That sign means an abatement is coming. The city will come with police and a dump truck and kick all these people out in a few days.

The case manager hands out grocery bags full of canned food and handfuls of water bottles. They give a P-38 can opener to the woman who doesn’t have one. She wants the backpack too, and the case manager lets her have it.

As the workers are walking back to their car, the case manager notices how the Jordan River trail’s garbage can overflows with trash, how a mound of tied-up grocery bags has built up beside it. The city hasn’t picked up the trash; the city hasn’t placed additional trash cans in the area to accommodate the need; the city hasn’t placed porta potties in the area to prevent the build-up of feces that always shows up in the news in the list of reasons for abating

encampments. Instead, the city has jumped straight to abatement without giving these people the ability to clean up their camp themselves.

A storm ravages the neglected pile of trash next to the overflowing trash can at the Jordan River trail one night. Among other things, the storm blows a grocery bag full of empty PET bottles into the Jordan River. The bottles float down, and each gets stuck in the margins of the river.

Later—on the second Saturday of the month—a clean-up crew from the Jordan River Commission comes along and picks up these PET bottles, the LDPE grocery bag that originally carried them, and most of the other trash the storm blew around. The clean-up crew puts the PET bottles in a recycling bin, but they don’t bother dropping the LDPE bag off at the store’s special recycling bin—that’s too much work—so to the landfill it goes.

The LDPE grocery bag never becomes anything new, never lives again—no one gives it the ability; the clean-up crew doesn’t think the bag is worth the additional effort. It dies over hundreds of years in the landfill.

The PET bottles are separated from cardboard boxes, soda cans, and other kinds of plastic: HDPE, PP, and all the kinds of plastic Waste Management doesn’t accept in Salt Lake City. Any plastic bags are disposed of, as they could get tangled in the machinery (it isn’t meant to handle something so malleable). After the strenuous sorting process, these PET bottles, and all the other PET plastics the plant has gathered, get shredded, washed, and melted into pellets that are sold to manufacturers.

One of these manufacturers mixes the recycled PET pellets with pellets made straight from oil. (Recycled plastic isn’t cheap, and it isn’t worth the effort for the manufacturer to invest in 100% post-consumer recycled plastic bottles—why not make more money?) Machines melt the pellets down and inflate them into more water bottles, but this time the labels read “Made with 50% post-consumer recycled plastic!” The marketing team might be rounding.

Another manufacturer takes these recycled PET pellets, melts them into a hot soup and spins that hot soup into polyester thread. Machines weave this thread into fabric that makes shirts and socks and pants and blankets and backpacks and sleeping bags and tents. Maybe some of these products make it to the people living in the margins of Salt Lake City.

However, when the load of PET bottles from the Jordan River clean-up crew arrives at the recycling plant, one of these PET bottles slips through the recycling plant’s sorting process. Maybe a large detergent bottle made from High-Density Polyethylene (HDPE) folds around the PET bottle in a hug and carries it across the plant’s belts to the end, where the plastics are shredded, washed, and melted into pellets—High-Density Polyethylene and Polyethylene Terephthalate. The plant workers consider this combination a contaminant, but the plant isn’t given the resources or funding to sort the plastic any more thoroughly.

Maybe these pellets are made into HDPE trash bins and porta potties—the ones community advocates suggest the city place at high density encampments to prevent trash and fecal matter buildup. The system has left these people in the margins, and the case

manager sees the city abate marginalized people to the margins of the margins, but nothing changes, as if the city didn’t expect these people to come back. The case manager ventures to the margins in hopes of changing things.

Behind the Day-Riverside Library branch, the case manager and an outreach worker visit an encampment that’s grown very large—not large in people but large in belongings. The case manager goes inside to talk with the librarians and restock resource flyers while the outreach worker talks with the campers. The case manager learns that needles have become a problem for the campers, and the librarian is wondering what she can do to help. The case manager leaves her with a list of harm reduction organizations that can clean up needles and half a dozen Naloxone overdose rescue kits. Then, the case manager contacts one of the harm reduction teams: “I have some clients behind the Day-Riverside Library who need needle clean-up. I think it would also be great to connect them with some resources. Is there a time that your team can stop by and meet with them?”

The case manager goes down to the camp and talks with the people living there. Black garbage bags, blue milk crates, slouching cardboard boxes, and sun-faded suitcases line the pathways between the bushes and trees. Someone has even carried a soggy couch back behind the library (the case manager wonders how far the campers carried that couch to make this place feel more like home). The case manager sees lives packed up in bags and boxes, carried from the last camp to this one, the traumatic loss of home and stability that’s caused these people to hoard anything and everything “just in case.” Then the case manager sees the needles in overflowing boxes strewn throughout the mess. They watch their step more carefully.

The case manager gives out three Naloxone rescue kits. “Remember,” the case manager says to the campers, “Naloxone only stops overdose temporarily, so you need to call 911 if you use it.”

The case manager gives out two sharps containers, both made from Polypropylene (PP), a plastic much more durable than Polyethylene Terephthalate. “A police officer needs a warrant to search this container unless they see you put something inside it,” the case manager says. The case manager gets a bigger sharps container from Utah Naloxone because the camp has too many needles. When the outreach team goes back to check on the camp, there are more needles, and the outreach worker has to point them out to the case manager. “Watch your step!” he says, grabbing the case manager’s shoulder. Outreach workers have stepped on needles before (the agency pays for disease testing in those cases, but some bloodborne illnesses can’t be cured). The hundreds of needles piled in grocery bags and overflowing sharps containers show that at least the campers aren’t using dirty needles, and that provides the case manager with a little relief.

The case manager gives the only camper there that day more sharps containers and more Naloxone. “Did the harm reduction team stop by on Saturday?” the case manager asks. He says he wasn’t here that day. The case manager gives the camper a list of harm reduction programs and asks the harm reduction team to come out again.

It takes weeks, but the campers do clean their camp up. One woman asks to use the library’s dumpster and hauls loads of garbage bags filled with accumulated junk away. This happens without an abatement.

When full non-industrial sharps containers are disposed of, they’re either incinerated or sterilized with an autoclave, shredded, and disposed of at a landfill. Biohazard waste management facilities often ask the containers to be labeled “Do Not Recycle” before dropping them off for disposal. In Utah, incineration is usually reserved for prescription medications, chemotherapy waste, and pathological waste due to the high levels of emissions required to turn something to ash. These sharps containers will likely be locked in a large chamber that will pressurize at 15 PSI and heat to 250 degrees Fahrenheit. This will kill any diseases the needles hold. Then the sharps will be shredded—container and all—and dumped in the landfill with regular trash and all the other plastics that either couldn’t be recycled or took “too much effort” to recycle.

The Polypropylene sharps containers this case manager gives out don’t have a chance to become anything else. Their journey ends here with this one last purpose. In the homeless street outreach program’s weekly meetings, the outreach workers discuss an upcoming abatement on 150 North and 700 West. This encampment is big—as big as “Trump Camp” from February, where the clients hung a campaign flag in hopes the police would be kinder, as big as the camp on Victory Road from April. The case managers try to find any clients who stay at the camp and find out where they’ll move to. Most clients don’t know. If the case managers lose contact, the clients can’t keep working on their housing. They’ll never get off the streets and out of the constant cycle of setting up a camp, gathering supplies, and then losing it all to an abatement.

On July 7, 2022, a fleet of police cars, two backhoes, and seven industrial dump trucks come to the encampment to haul away all the belongings the people can’t carry away: tents, sleeping bags, food, water bottles, lawn chairs, sleeping pads, bikes, IDs, social security cards, birth certificates, prescriptions, and anything else left behind. Some people never learned of the abatement and left their tents thinking they could come back to their belongings just like any other day.

The term abatement stems from violence, yet the police choose this word to represent their actions. Abate (v.) evolved from the Old French word abatre, which means to “beat down, cast down, strike down; fell, destroy; abolish; reduce, lower.” The term is conventionally used to describe the reduction of taxes or rent, the elimination or reduction of pollution, and the extermination of pests.

In Salt Lake City, Utah, the government abates human beings—not taxes or rent prices or plastic or bed bugs.

The case manager hears stories:

“I wait with my stuff all morning, and then I go to St. Vinney’s for lunch—real quick! When I get back, the police threw out all my stuff, like they were sitting in their cars

waiting for me to leave just so they could trash my stuff.”

A man left his cat in his tent one morning and comes back to find the police abating his home. The police don’t let him back to get his pet, and the backhoe scoops the entire tent up—poles twisting and snapping—and plops it in the dump truck. The man never sees his cat again.

The street outreach program gives out blankets and socks and food and water to replace what is lost—but the outreach workers only have so much to give. People rarely donate tents and sleeping bags; the program usually has to buy those but can only buy so many. The landfill eats these abated homes—these abated lives—again and again. And so, before the case manager becomes a case manager, they specialize in information and applications; something the limitations of other people’s generosity can’t hold back, a resource that can’t be restricted. The case manager gets their clients social security cards and IDs and birth certificates and green cards and divorce decrees and fee waivers and negotiates eviction debt and fills out housing voucher applications— The case manager, once they transfer from the street outreach program to the shelter, slates their clients for as many housing vouchers as they can. They reevaluate cases and conduct new client interviews and find new ways to qualify for programs, and they get more housing vouchers than the shelter has seen in a long time.

But these people still die from frostbite and heatstroke and heart attacks and overdose and treatable disease and gunshots and a whole lot of other things. Three die within a week, and the case manager cries into the shoulder of their notquite-boyfriend.

“I don’t know if I can do this anymore,” the case manager says. “They keep dying, and I can’t stop them from dying.”

“You don’t have to,” he says.

“But if I don’t, who will?” the case manager says. “Sometimes, we have to beg EMS to even look at our clients. They don’t care about these people because it’s too much work to care.” The case manager cries, and the not-quite-boyfriend holds them.

In November 2021, Salt Lake City approves the rezoning of the Ramada hotel on 1659 West and North Temple for an emergency winter overflow shelter. The building takes months to recycle into a shelter, and The Road Home, the non-profit tasked with

operating the shelter, struggles to staff the facility. The first stage of the overflow (hotel rooms) doesn’t open until January 16, 2022, and the second stage (mats on the floor) opens on February 14, 2022. The program’s funding ends on April 15, 2022—no extensions. The 168 people who stayed in the hotel rooms and 680 people who slept on a mat, at least one night while the program was open, are out of a bed.

22 of the Ramada’s clients found permanent supportive housing before the overflow closed. 43 transitioned to other shelters in the city, 46 went back to sleeping on the streets, and 13 went to medical facilities. One died. However, most of these 810 people are unaccounted for.

The case manager works with clients when they return to shelters from the Ramada overflow. One of these clients doesn’t like staying in shelter—she gets in arguments with the other women there—and she leaves. She doesn’t come back for months. The case manager asks the street outreach program to look for her because her housing voucher is going to expire, and she hasn’t come back in so long. This client’s voucher doesn’t come with extensions either.

The week before the client’s voucher expires, she shows up in the shelter’s lobby. The case manager finds her asleep in a chair, wrapped in clothes that seem to double her body weight. The case manager wonders how much food she’s getting. The case manager says her name to wake her. “Do you want to come back and talk with me?” they ask, and she follows the case manager to their office. Together, they call two apartment leads the case manager hopes might be able to get her into an apartment within a week, but the client isn’t hopeful. She’s seen the system fail again and again (the case manager has too). The case manager can’t see another person die in the margins without a place to call home.

The case manager’s housing leads fail, so they introduce their client to the shelter’s housing locator and ask him to help her find an apartment that meets her voucher’s requirements. Before leaving, the case manager asks the client to come back tomorrow and leaves her with their direct line.

When she finally does come back, her original voucher has long expired, but the case manager slates her for a new voucher for permanent supportive housing—no housing searches required.

The case manager wonders who would have helped this woman if they hadn’t. She fell through the cracks at Ramada; she fell through the cracks in shelter and case management. The case manager is only supposed to assist clients staying in shelter, and this client left shelter months ago. In the past, buildings like the Ramada hotel have been recycled again from overflow shelters into deeply affordable permanent housing facilities. The case manager houses clients from the margins of Salt Lake City in these buildings. Hotels become shelters become housing. The buildings live many lives, and the people inside these buildings transform: not into what society expected but into what the case manager knew they could become.

Unlike the journeys of the Polypropylene sharps containers, the Low-Density Polyethylene plastic bags, and the abated polyester camping gear—this journey doesn’t end in the landfill.

Suggested Reading

Means, Emily. “An old Salt Lake City Ramada helped as a shelter but it wasn’t a homelessness solution.”

KUER. 30 June 2022, www.kuer.org/race-religion-social-justice/2022-06-30/an-old-saltlake-city-ramada-helped-as-a-shelter-but-it-wasnt-a-homelessness-solution

Rodgers, Bethany and Eric Peterson. “Taxpayers spent over half a million dollars to clean homeless encampments in 2021.” The Salt Lake Tribune. 21 July 2022, www.sltrib.com/ news/2022/07/21/taxpayers-spent-over-half/

Tanner, Courtney. “A Utah homeless man died on the street, and the heat is a suspect.” The Salt Lake Tribune. 8 Sep. 2022, www.sltrib.com/news/2022/09/08/utah-homeless-man-died-street/

Graduate Fiction

Back Down The Corridor

Ben Nathan, 1st Place Graduate

Jack Bylund, 3rd Place Graduate

The Profound Deaths

I lived for a cruel, short time, numberless years in the fabled past. My story is one you doubtless know, perhaps even believe, though my role—and that of millions—receives no thought beyond vague allusions to some unspoken wickedness and a genocide as final as it is forgotten, even celebrated. Although seasons beyond count separate the days of my life from yours, human nature has changed little in the vastness between us. We lived as people do. We had parents and spouses, siblings and children. We existed. Sometimes we even dared to be happy.

But a strange man dwelt at the edge of our sliver of civilization, always keeping his wife and sons apart from us. He professed belief in an unknown and unseen god, calling himself prophet and perfect in his generation. We shrugged and allowed the unusual family their curious and harmless religion.

The prophet, though, refused to leave us alone. He came to the cities from the compound where he and his family lived. He ranted about repentance, change, and righteousness. The earth was filled with violence, he said. The thoughts of our hearts were evil continually, and as much as his god loved us, he repented of our existence. We scoffed. Old, familiar warnings about the end of the world, the doom of humanity. Nothing other messengers hadn’t delivered before. No one likes to be told they are wicked, and almost no one ever believes they are, so few stopped to listen. Most who did only threw his admonitions back in his face. Don’t judge them too harshly. Ask yourself instead: would you have heeded the old prophet’s words? The long annals of history suggest you wouldn’t. Imagine your own neighbor claiming that they found grace with God and walked with him, that the Almighty himself had come to warn them and them alone of the end of all flesh.

You would find it laughable, and you know it. There will always be some odd soul who cries about the end of the world.

In time, our funny prophet let us be. We observed, bewildered, as he and his sons set about building a massive ship, leagues away from any ocean. It was difficult not to be amused at the strange family’s antics, though we mostly continued to ignore them. The prophet sometimes returned to the cities to warn us once more. Some grew weary of his warnings and threw him out. I wish they hadn’t done that, though I understood their frustration. I still do.

After we threw their patriarch out, the family never deigned to speak with us again. No more words for lost causes. We lived and persisted, and all the while the tiny cult built their ship. They gathered animals and livestock, herding them aboard their landlocked vessel.

Even when the rain fell, no one panicked. The proper season had come for such things. Children danced and jumped in puddles. We captured precipitation in buckets. But the rain fell in ceaseless torrents, and people began to wonder at the length and rage of it, as though the windows of heaven had been opened to pour out all they had.

Panic set in when terrible fountains broke up from the earth, geysers and jets that burst upward with the strength to level buildings and raze mountains. It was then that we remembered the words of warning given by our strange prophet. How could we not in the downpour? We rushed to his great ship, which was soon to dwell on dry land no longer. Fists pounded on the great doors as each of us begged for entry and salvation. Apologies for mocking the prophet rang out from both the guilty and the innocent. We believed him now. We had repented, though we knew not of what. Surely, he possessed the goodness of his loving lord.

The prophet greeted us with silence. He and his family ignored our pleas, refused us mercy. Only God’s chosen were privileged to survive his great flood.

So we perished. God undid his creation and destroyed all living substance. Some died before, when the waters first burst forth from the ground in a rush that tore down buildings. Others met their end in the rushing flood that swept them away. A great many clung to the prophet’s Ark; I numbered among them. We found handholds and grasped with all our might, willing ourselves to survive the wrath of a god we never knew. But no one could hold on forever. We let go, one by one, floundering and drowning in a sea of corpses, an ocean of the dead made up of our families, friends, and countrymen. In time, each of us lost the breath of life and joined them. I remember sinking into the new and profound deaths. I reached toward the surface and the sky, to a last splinter of sunlight that slipped through the storm clouds. It was lost to me in a tangle of dead limbs and dead faces in the dark. Every corpse sank from heaven with the same questions on their pale lips: how did it come to this? What did we do wrong?

Love Pencil #9

I’m 23 and I like my job baking bread and making coffee better than I like studying psychology. Magic doesn’t bother me, but it’s not fair that some people have it and others don’t. That pisses me off.

None of my friends are unlocked witches, and I’m really fine with that. Sometimes I drink straight out of the milk carton when nobody else is around. This isn’t doing it. I still feel like my skin is going to crawl off if I don’t write, but whatever I’m supposed to be writing, this isn’t it. I hope nobody finds this stupid thing. Trying again. I stole a pack of gum once. Mom told me I couldn’t get it, and then she turned her back. I pretended to put it back on the shelf, but instead, I put it in my pocket. I waited until Junie, who still lived next door back then, came over to play for an afternoon before I opened the gum. It was watermelon, which was Junie’s favorite. When Mom asked me what I was chewing, I told her Junie gave it to me. Mom didn’t believe me— I heard her complaining to Dad about living in the same apartment complex as people with unlocked powers. I didn’t know what it meant, but Mom blamed Junie for the gum, or maybe she blamed Junie’s parents, and I wondered if maybe it was their fault. I’d never wanted to steal before. It wasn’t the last time I shoplifted, of course, so probably Junie had nothing to do with it, but how would I know if they cast a spell and changed me?

I think it’s working.

The Witch

The bell above the door jingled. The shopkeeper peered through the strung-bead curtains that separated the back room from the rest of the shop. The runes carved into the door frame remained dark, except the origin rune. The tall, blonde twenty-something had no unlocked magic. How she had found the shop’s storefront in the sleepy, alpine town with no claim to fame but an eccentric community college was an exciting mystery. The shopkeeper smiled and swirled out of the alcove through curling incense smoke.

“Welcome to Phaedra’s Hex. Is there something I can help you with, miss?”

“Oh. Um. Kind of looking around. This place was hard to find.”

“The Hex serves many communities. We’re new in St. Mary’s.”

“Right. So, I heard I can buy pencils here.”

“Of course. They’re right over here,” the shopkeeper said, guiding the girl’s eye away from a branch of powerfully enchanted pendula and amulets with a graceful gesture and flutter of gauzy bell sleeve. “Just past the friendship bracelets and temporary tattoos.”

The girl shifted the backpack on her shoulder and walked over to the display. The shopkeeper followed, her colorful skirt flowing around her legs and her bracelet of tiny bells tinkling on her ankle. She didn’t like belling herself, but it unnerved customers when she was too quiet. The Hex carried a wide range of products and it was her job to watch over all of them very carefully. None were too dangerous if used properly but selling the wrong item to an inattentive customer— or losing the wrong one to a shoplifter— was all it would take to damage the public opinion of magic and get the shop shut down. The shopkeeper smiled as the girl looked over the offerings.

“Are these magic? They just look normal.” The girl picked up a temporary tattoo from a hand-woven and hand-dyed basket. “My little brother wore this exact design for his Halloween costume last year.”

“They’ve been lightly enchanted. That one’s a luck dragon. He’ll make you just a bit luckier while you wear it,” the shopkeeper explained. “What kind of pencil were you looking for?”

“I have this big, important test coming up. I don’t want to cheat, but a guy in my study group said he has a pencil that helps him write stuff he’s studied but maybe isn’t remembering at the right moment. I want one,” the young woman said, hooking a lock of straight, nearly-white hair behind her ear.

“Ah. Those pencils. Well, those are behind the counter over here,” she said, leading the girl. “I’d like to know who told you about these— they’re brand new. We’re still seeing variations in the enchantment.” The shopkeeper brought out the box that held paper packets of three pencils. There weren’t too many packets labeled exam, but she thought there were a few for the girl to choose from and choice was important in magic.

“What does that mean? Do… are they safe?”

“Only as safe as writing whatever’s in your heart,” the shopkeeper assured. “I can sell you a set of pencils— you’ll get one exam pencil. The other two will be for writing other things. When you open the packet, the magic will compel you to use all the pencils within a few months. Once you break the wax rune on a pencil, though, you have to use it right away.”

“What if I don’t?”

“The magic will pester at you. It’s different for each user. Some people get itchy, others can’t think of anything except what they should be writing. It’s nothing dangerous, but it can be quite maddening if you try to ignore it, and there’s no point in putting it off anyway, so why would you?”

“Okay, so I get one exam pencil. What are the others for?”

“That’s for you to discover. We’ve seen pencils for doodling, Petrarchan sonnets, and petitions, to name a few. When you break the seal on a pencil and start writing, the magic will guide you. If it’s a longer document you must write, the pester takes longer to settle in.”

“I don’t know what a petrichor sonnet is. How could I write one?”

“The magic will guide the form, and it will draw the words from within you. That’s why the exam pencil isn’t cheating. You have to have known the material at some point in order to write it down.”

“If the drawback to having perfect recall on the test is writing some weird poetry, I can handle it. How much?”

“Oh, there’s one more thing. The magic won’t be complete until an appropriate recipient has read whatever you write. So if your professor takes a month to grade the exam, you might have a problem. And it’s not going to be on a scantron, is it? Because computers don’t count.”

“It’s not a scantron, it’s fill in the blank and essays and stuff. What’s an appropriate audience for a pediment sonnet?”

“The magic will help you find the right recipient, if you need it.”

“I guess I’ll take it,” the girl said. “And that tattoo. My brother really loved that dragon. What other pencils do you have, though? Can I look through them?”

“Be my guest. As for payment, enchantments are expensive, so to offset the cost, we ask for some kind of barter. How much you pay is determined by the value of what you offer.”

The girl pawed through the labeled packets and latched onto one labeled Shakespearian sonnets. How did she feel so strongly about that and not even know Petrarch?

“What’s a good barter item? Like, my firstborn child?” she asked flippantly, but clearly not sure

she was making a joke.

The shopkeeper laughed. “No, nothing like that for pencils.” So typical. So painfully, awkwardly typical. What good were the PR campaigns if this kind of bias was still so rampant? “A lock of hair, maybe, if you haven’t color-treated it.”

The girl knelt and unzipped her bag. “How about this bread?” the girl asked, lifting a bundle wrapped in brown paper and tied neatly with candy-stripe twine.

“I’m afraid the magical value of a loaf of bread—”

“I baked it myself. It came out of the oven this morning. It’s marbled rye— my great-grandmother’s recipe.”

“Who is your friend? That’s an amazing barter item. I’ll take it.” The shopkeeper set the bread on a metal plate on the counter. She retrieved the temporary tattoo and set it along with the pencils beside the bread. The runes around the rim of the plate swirled and told her the value. “The two packets of pencils plus the tattoo, less the bread comes to thirteen, even. The card reader’s right over here,” the shopkeeper said. “I’ll just wrap up your purchase.” She slipped the pencils into a green and violet striped paper bag. “Each of your items has a little information tag that you should read thoroughly to ensure a flawless enchantment. You can come back to the shop anytime if you have questions or if there’s anything I can help you with.”

“Are you Phaedra, then?”

“Oh, no, I just work here. I’m Amantha.”

“I’m Emaline. Thanks.”

In middle school, I rigged the yearbook polls. I didn’t want any of the kids with witch parents to win “most likely to succeed” or “best hair” because, of course, they had a leg up on everyone else. For all we knew, those kids were already unlocked and they were using magic to be amazing. And if not them, then their parents could be enchanting them. What parent wouldn’t? But the next year, the yearbook staff wasn’t allowed to handle the polls, so it seems that someone found out. I never was a very convincing liar, but maybe it was because everyone knew people like Laura Mayhew and Joseph Percy should have had more than their mug shots in the yearbook.

Why am I writing about all of this? I don’t even know. It’s definitely not a poem.

The Romantic

The traveler tried not to see his reflection in the glass as he pulled the door open. After living in secret old-growth forests for years, after unlocking so much more of his potential than he had when he’d left, he expected to see more difference in his face. It was disappointing. Almost everything about coming back to his hometown was. The cafe was practically empty, and he walked right up to the counter. The barista froze. He smiled when he recognized her.

“Emaline, good morning.”

“Good morning,” she returned. Emaline blinked and looked away. “It’s afternoon though. What can I get you?”

“Can you make a macchiato? And a croissant, please. I haven’t had one in ages.” Pastries were hard to come by among the druids, and he missed them.

“Coming up. To go?” Ema asked.

The traveler could feel the hope and insistence in her words. “To stay,” he said, wanting to be near her longer. His magic remembered her, and he wondered if she might be able to unlock what the

druids couldn’t.

“Great,” Emaline said, smiling so falsely that the traveler thought her face might crack. “Have a seat, and I’ll bring it right out.”

“How much?”

“What? Oh, sh—ah, right.” Emaline rang up the order and the traveler paid. As she handed him his change, her fingertips brushed his palm.

The traveler’s skin tingled. He wrote his number on a napkin as he waited. Maybe she still had a boyfriend, but he had to try. He threaded magic into the little pot of grass in the middle of the table— druid magic wasn’t as useful as some other disciplines, but he loved making things grow.

Emaline’s hand shook as she set down the saucer and the pastry. “There you go, Tomas. It’s been such a long time. I’m glad you’re doing well.”

The traveler smiled and a rose grew out of the grass. Ema’s jaw dropped. He didn’t pick the rose for her and he hoped she wouldn’t, either.

“Oh, my god! I didn’t know! I’m—”

“What’s wrong, Ema?”

“Nothing. I don’t know. It’s weird seeing you.”

“What’s weird about it?” he prompted.

“Unexpected, I’m all that’s weird right now.”

“That’s a choice. Make a different one?” He willed her to tell him, to not walk away. He didn’t have that magic, not really, but he knew it could be done, so he tried. Maybe it worked.

Ema sighed. “I’m just so sorry about when we were in school. I was such a stupid, psycho teenager and I’ve felt terrible about you dropping out. I didn’t mean to make you do that. And I swear I had no idea you’re a witch.”

The traveler raised his eyebrows. “You didn’t make me drop out. Well, I guess you did— you sort of unlocked my magic. I transferred, I guess. I mean, I didn’t finish high school, but I went to study magic in England. I’m a druid, now.”

“Oh, wow. What does that mean, I unlocked your magic?”

“I can’t really explain it, but it was a good thing, even though, yeah, you were a bit of a psycho. Teens are all crazy though. Not your fault.”

“Are you going back to England? Does your mom still live here?”

“She moved. I’m going to get my degree here, then probably go back.”

“You’re in college? Here?”

“Starting next semester. I’m going to study philosophy.”

“Why would you come back, though?”

“This forest isn’t like the old-world forests, so that’s a bonus. The scenery’s amazing. But it’s been a long time and the town has changed a lot. Would you be willing to show me around sometime?”

A ghost of a smile appeared. “Are you asking me out?”

“Here’s my number,” he said, handing her the napkin. “It’s up to you, but I’d really like to catch up.”

The owner and manager of the bakery approached the table, catching Emaline off guard.

“Everything all right over here, Ema? How are you doing, sir?”

“This coffee is fantastic,” Tomas said, taking a sip.

“I’m glad to hear it. Ema, you’ve got some side-work to finish up, then you can go home.”

“Sure, Andy. Sorry. Thanks,” she mumbled as she ducked away.

“Sorry about her. She’s a good kid, but she can get a little distracted. Oh, what’s this rose doing here?”

“It’s mine,” Tomas said, pushing Andy’s snub-nailed hand away from plucking it.

“Right. Well, you have a good one. You got a loyalty card?” he asked, pulling a punch-card from his apron pocket.

Tomas took the card and nodded his thanks. He didn’t think he’d be coming back if Ema didn’t call.

At the beginning of my senior year of high school, I kissed a boy with long, black hair and green eyes. His name was Tomas. He gave me roses and wrote poems for me. I promised him that I would break up with my boyfriend. I didn’t. Two weeks later, my boyfriend dumped me (but it took the rest of the year for that train wreck of a relationship to stop smoldering). To make it worse Tomas dropped out of school and I, self-centered and angsty teen that I was, thought it was my fault. I guess it was, in a way. He came into the bakery last week and ordered a macchiato and a croissant. I was mortified. As I set the plate and saucer down at his table, he made the little pot of wheat grass that Andy calls a centerpiece sprout a rose. I stammered something stupid about how sorry I was for making him drop out and that I didn’t know he was a witch, and he laughed at me. It turns out that what I did unlocked him. When he left school, he went overseas to train with a coven of druids and he’s just come back. He’s going to start classes at the university next semester, but he’s planning to finish a degree in philosophy and I’m about to graduate, so there’s no chance we’ll have classes together. Tomas asked me out again, but my boss noticed me chatting and shooed me back behind the counter before I answered. After work, a breeze off the lake snatched the napkin with his number on it right out of my hand and now he’s going to think I did it again.

Yesterday, I went to the magic shop in Old Town. I had to chase it down three alleys before it stopped flittering around, but the map never changed and I wasn’t ever in the wrong place according to GPS, so I don’t understand what really happened. Magic, obviously. I bought a pencil. An enchanted exam pencil. The woman behind the counter (she looked too much like a witch to actually be one) said it isn’t cheating because the magic just pulls the answers from what I know or what I’ve forgotten. I brought her a loaf of marbled rye that I baked that morning before the sun was up. She didn’t want it until she found out that I baked it myself and that I hadn’t paid for it (it was my free loaf for the week— I would never steal from Andy and Andy). So, I only wanted one, but the pencils come in packs of three. Part of the price is that two are wild-cards. I bought the exam pencil, (and a Shakespearian Sonnet pencil, and its tag-alongs, because how could I not?) but I have to use the other two or the enchantment will make me go insane or something. Mom and Dad would disown me if they found out I was using “the dark arts” to get through college, but psychology is no picnic and I don’t think witches get power from the Devil. The way they talk about it makes it sound like a crossword or sudoku or something. It sounds like a puzzle, not a pact.

The Scholar

The professor tried to keep her attention on the students. She’d caught three cheaters just last term, but none so far this semester. But the truth was that she hadn’t had her head in the game for at least a year. Her whole life, she’d desperately wanted to be a witch. She’d tried everything to unlock her potential, but it wasn’t until eleven months ago that she’d tasted the first drop of success. She wrote a poem and she’d felt movement. Unexpected movement in some part of her she hadn’t really known existed until that moment. But she hadn’t unlocked, she’d just rattled the cage. So now she only wanted to write

poems, not teach courses on fundamental psychology. She’d even bought pencils to help her do it—magic ones, of course— but it wasn’t working.

Movement caught the professor’s eye. A student was fiddling with something under her desk. She heard paper tear and watched a familiar seal flutter to the floor. The student’s hair slipped over her shoulder and fanned out to curtain her desk. The professor recognized the girl’s pencil. She sighed. Using magic wasn’t forbidden, and it wasn’t considered cheating unless the enchantment gave the student access to unfair resources. The professor knew that enchantment well. It wasn’t cheating, and she would enjoy grading Emaline Heartford’s exam as harshly as possible, now that she knew it would accurately reflect everything the girl had learned. The professor smiled and might have imagined a small flutter of movement in that unnamable part of her soul where magic waited for her to unlock.

So, I went back to the shop and the second time it didn’t dance around, but I swear it was in a completely different part of Old Town than the first time I went. It was right next to the park this time and before it was near the tunnel under the train tracks. I showed this stupid paper to the witch (def for real and not a fashion witch like I thought) and she says it looks like a confession, or statement of personal truth or something. That’s right, I got a confession pencil. I guess it’s not a question of “if” but “when” Mom and Dad find out, because not only does the enchantment require that I write, but that the writing is received and read. I guess I could send it to Oona, or to Tomas, if he comes to the bakery again. This is bullshit. I’m done confessing. I’m a good person and this magic is just going to ruin my life.

I got an A- on the exam. What kind of crap enchantment is that? Maybe Mom’s right. I just opened the last pencil and now I get what the shop-witch was saying about the worst thing being writing what’s in your heart— it’s a fucking love letter pencil! I wrote it to Tomas! I don’t love Tomas, do I? He’s a witch or a druid or whatever and I can’t be one of those girls who goes out with someone because they have magic. I can’t erase the pencil— I tried. I’m afraid to throw it away because the tip of the pencil broke when I finished, and what if getting rid of the letter doesn’t get rid of the magic and I can’t write a new one? I keep hearing whispery voices in the shadows telling me to give it to him, but I don’t know where to find him. I’ll have to look in the yearbook from freshman year to find out his last name.

The Victim

Emaline hadn’t found him in the yearbook, and, for a panicked moment, she thought it had been her fault. But of course, Tomas hadn’t been magic back then. At least his magic wasn’t unlocked. It made her wonder if anyone could be magic, if they could figure out how to unlock it. What would she do if she got unlocked? Could an unlocked person re-lock their magic? Had anyone ever tried?

Ema couldn’t think straight. She was so glad the term was over because, otherwise, she’d be in deep water. Big Andy sent her home early from barista shifts twice in the past week and Andy Jr. had to change the menu to accommodate her baking mistakes— rye on Wednesday instead of Monday and no asiago bagels on Friday— but they hadn’t fired her yet. She couldn’t think of anything except the shadows and Tomas. The letter was tucked into the most secure compartment of her purse— sealed with a gold sticker embossed with her initials. The shop witch hadn’t been helpful. What was she going to do?

Something fluttered in the bushes behind the bakery. She almost didn’t look up, afraid it might be an advanced symptom of the enchantment on her.

“The napkin!” she said, darting to catch it. How could it be the same one that she’d lost days ago? But it was— somehow, she knew. The scrap of flimsy paper escaped the bush and wafted down the

alley. It looped lazily and flipped like the pages of a book in a breeze, tumbling deeper into the whispering shadows between redbrick buildings, always just a little beyond her grasp. “No, come back!” she called, horrified to see the napkin headed for a delicate landing in a greasy puddle. A breeze gusted it a few feet into the air and she splashed in to catch it. The cold water soaked through the canvas of her shoes and the puddle invaded. She missed the napkin. Tripped. Fell hard on one knee and one palm. The dirty water splashed her face. “No!” she shouted. The shadows roared with her. “No!” she called again, covering her ears.

“Hey, Ema? What’s going on?”

Emaline’s eyes snapped to find his. “Tomas?”

“Are you okay? What are you doing here?” he asked, holding out a hand to help her to her feet. Her hand locked around his and she didn’t let go. “I lost your number. That was it,” she said, glancing at the napkin. “Why are you back here? Was it magic?”

“What? No. I was just going to grab a coffee. You lost my number, huh?”

Something in his tone seemed unlike the sweet boy whose heart she’d unintentionally toyed with and maybe broken. “I swear,” she said, hoping he believed her. “The wind got it. I’ve been looking for you,” she said, sounding a little hysterical even to herself. She took the letter out of her purse and left a grimy smear on the crisp, white paper. For a moment, the image of Tomas dropping it into the puddle and laughing at her made her hesitate and she held the letter like her life depended on it. After a week of whispering shadows, she thought it probably did.

“I had to write this. It’s for you,” she said, offering him the letter. When he took the note from her, the enchantment seemed to relax, and as he read it, she waited to feel like herself again. When read the final line and looked up at her, the magic was gone—the shadows and pestering—but the sickening knot of anxiety and anticipation for his response remained. She still didn’t know if she loved him, but she was desperate for him to love her, just as she’d said in the letter.

Jacob Taylor, 1st Place Graduate

(in)Voluntarily Bound

Ryan pulled the shower curtain open and buried his face in a towel that looked too white for its fraying edges. The matted cotton blend soaked up tears and water indiscriminately as he dried each fold in his flesh. Then, for the seventh time in his life, Ryan clipped on a bra that pushed his breasts up to showcase their size.

After downing a bottle of water, Ryan painted his lips with scarlet. He had to redo it twice before he got it right. Damion insisted that Ryan at least wear lipstick, even though he wiped it off before they kissed. He wore lingerie that Damion took off almost immediately. He showered so that Damion could cover him in saliva and sweat and other bodily fluids. The perfect look Ryan spent so much time preparing only lasted minutes, but Damion demanded Ryan play his part.

And so, Ryan sat on the fresh bed sheets the motel maid had changed that morning, wrapped in a satin shawl, staring at the sun-faded wallpaper and chapped landscape paintings, listening to the winter wind rage against the window, waiting for a knock on the door, hoping it wouldn’t come, knowing he would freeze tomorrow night if it didn’t. ~

Ryan had hated taking showers since his breasts had swelled at the onset of puberty nearly eight years ago, and once they grew larger than an oversized hoodie could contain, he stole a tan compression bandage from his parents’ bathroom and bound those two lumps of flesh to his chest.

Some part of him believed that if he bound them long enough, tightly enough, they would stay that way. Ryan bound his breasts at school, and he bound them at home, and occasionally he even bound them while he slept (though he knew he shouldn’t). The binding came off when he bathed, and each unwrapping of the bandage revealed new colors and new pain. His bruises seemed to cycle through the color wheel, and his ribs creaked like floorboards with each breath he took. Even with eight hundred milligrams of ibuprofen in his blood, each drop of water that hit his skin drove through his thoughts like rusty railroad spikes. Thus, Ryan’s showers became quick and few. He kept binding, longer than he knew he should, with the same roll of bandage. (He did not know where he could buy a real binder except online, and he couldn’t risk his parents intercepting the package, or tracking the charge, or shouting, “What in Jesus’s name do you need this for?”)

However, after leaving home two weeks ago, Ryan had lost his make-shift binder and his hoodie and could no longer hide his breasts.

(Lost was the wrong word. Two drunk men had beaten Ryan and robbed him of his clothes. They raped him after finding a vagina in his pants and left him huddled behind a dumpster in the snow. However, Ryan could not acknowledge this fact quite yet.)

Before Ryan’s frostnip had become frostbite, and before he had found a new way to hide his breasts from himself or anyone else, a man had pulled Ryan into the backseat of his car and driven him to a motel.

Now, Ryan showered daily, and he showered long. The motel room’s shower reeked of mildew, and for the first few seconds the water came out orange. The once-white plastic shell that wrapped around the shallow tub had faded yellow with decades of use. A white crust bubbled around the holes in the shower head, clogging half of them and sharpening the spray of those left. The water stung against the shallow scars that crawled between the layers of his skin as his body tried to heal the crushed veins and tissue left

from the last time he bound.

Ryan still hated taking showers, though for different reasons. It wasn’t the bruises or the dirty shower, or even the way his breasts had grown larger after he’d started taking birth control. He hated showers because of what came after.

With two hard thuds, Damion knocked on the door and entered the room in a flurry of ice crystals that curled into the heat like a claw.

Ryan shivered as the cold air ate through his shawl, and he pulled the thin fabric tighter around his chest.

Damion smirked. He left the door open while he restocked the minifridge with TV dinners and beer, and the closet with a new revealing outfit for tomorrow. When he finally shut the door, what looked like half an inch of snow had built up in the doorway. Damion wanted Ryan to remember how cold it was outside, especially when the only thing Ryan had to wear was lingerie.

“Let’s get you warmed up, [Redacted],” Damion said. He took off his coat, shook off the snow, and wrapped it around Ryan’s shoulders like a mother wrapped a bath towel around her three-year-old. Ryan wanted to resist the gesture, but he wanted the coat more.

“Have you paid for tomorrow?” Ryan asked.

Damion chuckled. It was the chuckle of Ryan’s mother: two parts scoff, one part laugh, blended on low in her windpipe, and served with a cheeky smile. It never came out smooth, but she never meant it to. Neither did Damion. “Kurt will be at the desk all night, [Redacted].” Damion tried to brush Ryan’s hair out of his face like some playboy, but there wasn’t much hair to brush. Ryan had cut it all off with a rusty pair of scissors in 7-Eleven’s men’s room, back when he was sleeping in the library’s parking garage. Damion ended up rubbing Ryan’s cheek with his thumb instead. “I should bring Darla over to teach you how to do mascara and eyeshadow.”

Ryan hadn’t met Darla, but Damion had mentioned her five times in the seven days he’d paid for Ryan’s motel stay. It was her lingerie he wore every night, but Darla wore it better. Stiff competition.

Damion’s hand moved down to Ryan’s chest and cupped his breast. He held it like a chick wet with amniotic fluid. Ryan guessed that most people would have appreciated Damion’s gentle touch, but Ryan hated the way Damion seemed to worship his bulging anatomy.

Ryan couldn’t remember the sex. Even details of his conversation with Damion blurred.

As Ryan lay on the wrinkled sheets, he fingered the film of dried body fluids that stretched from his neck to his thighs. One patch that felt stickier than the rest was the only evidence Ryan found that proved he actually had sex, other than the vague feeling that he had been entered.

At first, Ryan had been glad he couldn’t remember many of the details; he didn’t want to think about Damion playing with his body parts when he wanted those parts off his body. Now, though, he felt all these feelings pooling inside his gut that he couldn’t place with any particular memory; he didn’t know how sad, or angry, or afraid he was supposed to feel.

Three knocks came at the door, and Ryan could feel the hesitance that dragged out the space between each soft rap, the way the hand seemed to tap instead of rap—but Ryan felt his heartbeat spike; he slid off the bed and pulled the soiled topsheet off to wrap around his body and sat with his knees to his chest on the only chair in the room. “Come in,” he said.

The short maid in her puffy coat came in to strip the bed, as she had every morning

before, always silent (and Ryan began to wonder if she spoke any English due to her persistent silence). Ryan felt the maid’s eyes avoid him as she paced between the bed and her cart (she left the door open, of course, just like Damion had the night before, and although the snow had stopped, the wind somehow felt colder than it had last night as it bit through Ryan’s topsheet, which he held tighter to his neck) and stripped the bed of its sheets, placing them into the hamper. She didn’t ask Ryan for his topsheet but instead found the topsheet Ryan had worn yesterday with the fraying towels in the bathroom.

She hung up new towels and remade the bed; she even left a handful of tampons next to the little shampoos, as if she could sense Ryan’s inevitable menstrual cycle approaching. He was afraid to tell Damion about it. Would the bleeding get him kicked out of the room? If Damion stopped paying, he had no place to sleep. He couldn’t go back outside without real clothes.

Ryan looked up at the maid as she tied the garbage sack. Their eyes met for a moment, and she hesitated as the icy wind froze Ryan’s shins through the topsheet. She pulled a second blanket off the cart and opened the closet. She paused, surely taking in all of the lingerie, and then cleared a spot for the blanket. “Miss Hernandez says a blizzard comes tonight,” the maid said. “Daryl on channel five says it comes tomorrow, but Miss Hernandez is always right.” The maid shut the closet and walked towards her cart. “Kurt hates blizzards.” She smirked. “The frost bit him last year while he shoveled the motel’s snow, so he bought a new coat and boots. Now he looks like he is dressed up for war every time he shovels snow. Kurt’s butt will freeze tomorrow!” The maid laughed as she shut the door, leaving Ryan alone as the heater buzzed, trying to recover from the maid’s intrusion.

The next knock at the door came early.

Ryan had showered but hadn’t done his hair or lipstick yet, and he panicked. Damion hadn’t ever come early before, and he was still supposed to have an hour. Ryan pulled the towel hanging over his shoulders tighter and gripped the bag of make-up Damion had given him.

“[Redacted], honey, let me in! It’s Darla. Damion sent me to help you get ready.”

Ryan dropped the bag of make-up and cursed.

Darla knocked again. “It’s real cold out here, [Redacted]!”

Ryan opened the motel door, and Darla walked in with a cloud of snowflakes trailing after her. Ryan felt the water on his skin freeze, but he looked out the door to find the horizon filled with white that stretched down from the sky, clouding buildings and trees. And so, the blizzard came tonight just as Miss Hernandez predicted. Ryan’s flesh swelled with the memory of cold, and he slid the door closed, still looking up at those clouds until the doorway framed them as a sliver and then snapped shut.

“So, [Redacted],” Darla said, “let’s get that hair dry.” She waved Ryan over to the vanity and grabbed the mounted hair dryer from off the wall, turning it on as if she’d done it a thousand times.

“How long have you known Damion?” Ryan asked.

“Oh, we grew up together. Backyards shared a fence.” She combed the bit of uneven hair Ryan had left on his head. “Why’d you cut your hair off?”

“Mom made me keep it long.”

“Do you want me to try straightening it?”

“I want a buzz cut.”

“Damion doesn’t.” Darla hung up the hair dryer and opened a large bag of make-up on the

counter. “Go get your outfit on, honey.” She placed her hand on Ryan’s shoulder and said, “I think a pixie cut would look great on you till your hair grows out.”

Ryan walked over to the closet, but he stopped mid stride as hot liquid trickled down his leg. “Shit.” He looked down at the floor and found spots of deep red dotting the vinyl floor in front of the vanity and a few additional patches of blood on the carpet where he stood now. The trail of blood running down his leg reached his ankle before he took off his towel and wiped it up.

Darla handed Ryan one of the tampons the maid had left that morning. “Does Damion know?” she asked.

Ryan shook his head and put the tampon in. He wiped up the rest of the blood from his skin and then dabbed at the carpet. He didn’t want to think about the way the maid had just known he was getting his period today, or the fact Darla was here to dress him up all sexy for Damion, or the fact that he was meant to have sex in an hour with his bleeding genitals, but something inside him asked—because without Damion, Ryan had nothing. “What happens now?”

Darla sat down on the bed and crossed her legs. “Damion doesn’t like having sex with period blood,” she said, frowning. “If you want to keep this room, don’t let him find out.” She pulled out her phone, checked something, and put it back in her handbag. “But let me tell you, gettin’ a tampon stuck in your vagina sucks ass. I say if the man wants sex, he gets the blood too.”

Ryan stood up and tossed the blood-spotted towel into the bathroom. “It gets stuck?” he asked.

Darla smirked. “Damion’s gonna ram his dick inside. Where do you think it’s gonna go?” Darla walked over to the closet, grabbed today’s outfit and handed it to Ryan. “Time to get ready, honey. Damion’ll be here soon.”

Ryan lay on the bed. The air still felt cold from Damion’s departure.

Ryan quickly reached down to find the tampon’s string within the folds of his genitals. He had stuffed the string inside his body earlier to ensure that Damion didn’t see it. After minutes of searching, Ryan drew his hand back and sat on the toilet, tried to pass the tampon like gas, reaching in perpetually to check for updates. Eventually, Ryan’s hand came back bloody. Wherever his tampon had ended up, it had begun to leak. He cursed.

Ryan would lose the room tomorrow after Damion found him bleeding like this. He didn’t dare stuff another tampon up there if he couldn’t get the first one out. Death by tampons or hypothermia? he thought. He could live outside, just not in a blizzard, just not without decent clothes.

Miss Hernandez was right about the blizzard coming tonight instead of tomorrow. Ryan wondered if it would be over by morning. He opened the closet and found the extra blanket the maid had given him. It was the same thin quilt that she placed on the bed every morning. Ryan wrapped the blanket around his shoulders and thought of Miss Hernandez, the blizzard, and of Kurt freezing his butt off as he shoveled the motel’s walks tomorrow morning.

In the morning, before the sun rose, Ryan tore off a section of the topsheet and wrapped it around his chest to bind his breasts to his chest, tying it tightly at his side. He wore one of the more plain bottoms (with wads of toilet paper stuffed inside to absorb the leaking blood) and a (pathetically) thin satin shawl underneath the spare blanket the maid had given him. He wrapped his feet in the remaining sections of the topsheet and waited for the blizzard to die down into a breeze.

Ryan propped the door open with the make-up bag Damion had given him—just in case he needed to get back inside the room—and walked through the foot-thick snow that stretched across the walkways and climbed up the tan brick walls like powdered sugar. Yellowed can lights flickered above Ryan as

he walked past the other rooms. The snow’s cold ate through the topsheet wrap he’d made for his feet, but he kept going. Kurt had boots and a coat, but Ryan hoped he wouldn’t be wearing them inside.

When Ryan walked inside, the front desk was empty. He walked around behind the front desk and opened a closet: boxes, printing paper, empty shelves. He opened drawers and cabinets: key cards, files, folders, office supplies, water bottles.

Ryan heard footsteps, and he scrambled to the other side of the desk. A tall man walked in wearing a green polo and a name tag that read “Kurt.” No coat. It didn’t sound like he was wearing boots, at least not sturdy ones. Kurt gave Ryan the up-and-down, and Ryan stepped forward to make sure Kurt couldn’t see his lack of shoes (or pants). “I’m out of coffee,” Ryan said. “Like those little cup things you stick in the coffee machine. You got any more?”

“You’re in room 9, aren’t you?” Kurt asked. “Damion’s girl.”

“I need another towel too,” Ryan said. “I . . . spilled something.”

“Sure you did.” Kurt smirked, and Ryan glared at him.

“How about some pads while you’re at it. You do know what those are, right?” Ryan whispered: “Like, for my bleeding.”

“Jesus, I’m not even sure we give those out.” Kurt clenched his jaw. “I’ll get you the coffee and the towel.” Then he turned to leave.

Ryan called after him: “At least get me an extra roll of toilet paper, hun! I need something.” He could hear Kurt mutter something as he walked away on his search for pads. Ryan walked behind the desk and down the hall perpendicular to the one Kurt fled down and opened a closet along the wall. Brooms, mops and vacuums occupied most of the closet, but in the corner, Kurt had hung his coat. Below that, Ryan found a pair of black snow boots. Ryan dropped the blanket, put on the coat and slipped into the boots. The coat reached his knees, and the boots were loose, but they would work for now. Ryan needed to find pants.

Ryan wrapped the blanket over the coat and was about to look some more, but he heard footsteps. He ran back to the front desk and out the door, Kurt’s large boots clunking on the floor. Ryan grabbed a box of tissues on the way out and began stuffing the tissues into the boots as he walked through the snow, trying to make them fit better. Clumps of snow spilled into the boots, leaving the tissues cold and soggy. Ryan tried to keep the blanket wrapped around his shins and knees, but the wind found a way to his bare skin.

As he trudged through the snow back to the library—the only place he could think to go—his skin turned red, swollen with cold, and a blister formed on his thumb where he held the blanket closed. But then he thought: I bet Kurt’s freezing his but off shoveling snow right now. And the maid was right once again.

Sometime after the sun peeked over the mountains, Ryan heard a car pull over beside him. Ryan considered stopping, but then he remembered Damion, who had picked him up in a car. Ryan couldn’t have another Damion. No more death by tampons, he thought, and he kept walking.

A siren blared for a second, and the car pulled forward, window rolling down. Ryan found himself facing a Highway Patrol SUV. “What are you doing out here?” the officer asked. “It’s almost in the negatives! You aren’t dressed for that.”

“I’m going to the library,” Ryan said.

“They aren’t open at six in the morning, kid,” the officer said. Ryan licked his lips but then remembered how chapped they were and regretted doing so.

“Get inside,” the officer said. “You need to get out of the cold.”

Ryan hesitated, but he got into the car and stuck his hands in front of the hot air. The officer eyed his blister and his swollen fingers but didn’t mention them.

“My name’s Officer Tinskey. What’s yours?”

“Ryan.”

“You got a last name?”

“You got a first?”

Officer Tinskey sighed. “Oliver.”

“Gillespie.”

“Does Ryan Gillespie happen to be 16 years old and go to Hollyoak High School? Been missing for about two weeks?”

“Would Officer Oliver have rescued Ryan Gillespie from the cold if he was a 28-year-old high school drop-out who lives in the library parking garage and steals coats from rude men to survive winter?”

Officer Tinskey grabbed a folder from his front seat and handed a paper from it to Ryan: a missing person flier his parents had created. “This is you, right?”

Ryan tried to find his name on the flier, even listed as an alias, but they hadn’t put it on there. His parents insisted that he only be known to the world as [Redacted] Gillespie and no one else, not even if it helped them find him faster. “The picture matches,” Ryan said.

“Where were you?”

“They don’t care where I was,” Ryan said. “They just want [Redacted] back. Too bad that any part of me that could still pretend to be her just got killed by a tampon.”