Sisyphus Winter 2010 by SLUH

Sisyphus Winter ’10

Outside Cover artwork by Greg Fister Outside Cover design by Joe Wright Inside Cover artwork by (starting with top film strip, left to right:) Greg Fister, Joe Quinlan, Mike McLaughlin, Greg Fister, Luke Buckheit, Clayton Petras, Joe Wright, Phil Nahlik, Greg Fister, Phil Nahlik, David Stankoven, Nick Seckfort, Greg Fister Inside Cover design by Patrick O’Leary Masthead artwork by Luke Buckheit 3 Together with the Sky, poetry by 32 Offsides, fiction by Griffin Lowry Dan L’Ecuyer 33 photography by Phil Nahlik 4 The Fallen Pledge, fiction by 34 design by Nick Seckfort Adam Cruz 37 Juggler, poetry by Mike Lumetta print by Andrew Beckerle 38 Milton, prose by Dan L’Ecuyer 7 graphite by Kevin Kickham charcoal by Mike McLaughlin 9 print by Dan Kuehl 40 charcoal by Mike McLaughlin 10 drawing by Joe Wright 41 Actress, poetry by Kevin Kickham 11 Small Fish, poetry by Michael Blair photographic collage by Sam McCabe ceramics by Clayton Petras 42 graphite by Jack Mimlitz 12 Demolition, poetry by 42 No, You Boys Never Care, fiction by Ben Minden-Birkenmaier Collin McCabe design by Greg Fister 43 She’s the Girl, poetry by Phil Nahlik 13 Minnesota & Sunrise, fiction by photography by Will Linhares Nick Fandos 44 Up in Smoke, or Any Other Haze, poetry 14 graphite by Kevin Kickham by Joel Geders 15 Marking the Brother, poetry by 45 Point, prose by Michael Blair Jamie Hagan 46 collagraph by Austin Pollock 16 scratchboard by Clayton Petras 47 Trade Winds, poetry by Michael 17 Eden Past, poetry by Mike Lumetta Dienstbach 18 The Joys of Painting, fiction by design by Greg Fister Patrick Creedon 48 Maggie, fiction by Mike Tynan 19 etching by Sonny Hager 49 watercolor by Clayton Petras 21 etching by Dan Kuehl 51 Birkenau, poetry by 23 design collagraph by Phil Nahlik Ben Minden-Birkenmaier 25 Escape, poetry by Matt Bettonville 52 pastel by Mike McLaughlin 26 5:30 a.m. in Forest Park, poetry by 53 The Poorest, poetry by Matt Bettonville Ben Minden-Birkenmaier 54 To an Unknown Sibling, fiction by charcoal by Mike McLaughlin Brian Gilmore 27 Saws, fiction by Mike Tynan photography by Phil Nahlik 29 Poison in Jest, poetry by Conor Gearin 55 Opening Act, poetry by Rob Bertucci ink wash by Mike McLaughlin 56 charcoal by Mike McLaughlin 30-31 charcoal by Sonny Hager 57 Some Victory, fiction by Eric Lewis Popular Mechanics, poetry by 59 collagraph by Joe Quinlan Michael Blair 60 Universe of Reading, poetry by Conor Gearin

Together with the Sky Dan L’Ecuyer

Once there was a building here On another day, in another summer The concrete floor is all that’s left Cracked and broken In parts, grass and gravel Hints of walls, old bricks And here and there, A bit of rusting metal. In the center is a shallow puddle Shifting in the breeze Twirling light and rippling shadow. If you hold your hand to the setting sun That sits above Suburban Cleaners, Its distorted, white-washed walls And dark, dusty windows Are reflected in the shallow pool. In front of that, In the lot beside this empty one Is Goldson Law Firm, LLC— Mirrored in the dirty water Shimmering, mixing with the Sky and clouds Interrupted by the weeds in the crack.

The wind is but a whisper in the trees In the gray-fenced yard behind. But growing now, the wind, It speaks, Louder now, to whom? It tears apart the lines in the pool White of the cleaners, gray Of the lot, Tan of Goldson, blue of Sky And green of the rustling trees. Tears apart the telephone Lines, fleeting birds, passing cars, And voices The sun departing now, At last And joining All Together in the water Ripples, walls Coming apart, And coming together with the sky.

The Fallen Pledge Adam Cruz

“

ongratulations on becoming a member of Kappa Delta Phi.” Thomas Banks extended a hand to the fifth pledge of the eager row standing at attention in front of him. All were dressed identically—black dress coats, white collared shirts, red ties, and dress shoes that twinkled with the polish the pledges had used to clean them the night before. Only later did Thomas try to recall something remarkable as he shook this pledge’s hand, plastered on his best fake smile, and scurried on to the next. His shirt was freshly ironed, and his eyes a piercing blue. He didn’t smile with the congratulations, but his eyes twinkled as the light from the chandelier above them made contact, and his handshake wa s firm. Very firm.

homas zipped his pants and turned the water on in the sink of the fraternity’s bathroom. His friend and board member of the fraternity, Jackson Holloway, positioned himself next to Thomas and patted him on the back. Holloway’s blue shirt was untucked on the sides and already had a food stain over his left pocket, although dinner had not yet

begun. Not exactly as sharp as President Ford looked in his speech last night, Thomas thought with a smirk. “I sure hope that Caito kid makes it in. I heard his twin sister has the nicest ass at this whole damn school.” He chuckled, revealing his yellow teeth, and spit directly in the sink. The spit mixed with the soapy water and swirled into the drain, and Holloway ANDREW BECKERLE looked incredibly satisfied. “How’d you do on your date last night? Get any pussy? I heard she puts out on the first date, but who knows with your luck?” He laughed and flicked water into Thomas’ face. Thomas promptly gave him the finger and flashed a smile as he pushed the door open. “After I stuck her, I drove to your house and gave your mom the business.” Thomas ducked just in time to avoid the wet paper towel hurled at his head. After Thomas had wiped his hands on the ripedged paper towel and pushed back into the main room, he shuffled his papers at the podium where countless fraternity presidents had spoken, had preached. Many had been bigger, stronger. Many were better looking, and better public speakers. Hell,

many probably could guzzle more beer then he could. He tried to push these things out of his mind as his voice boomed into the microphone and echoed throughout the main room of the third house on Fraternity Row. “You have now entered the brotherhood, gentleman,” he began, noting his voice crack on “entered” and scorning his deep Southern drawl that marked every word as his own. “Brotherhood is a word you will learn the meaning of over the next few months. You can always turn to your brother.” He surveyed the room and was pleasantly surprised to see multiple sets of eyes looking straight at him, including a piercing blue pair. “Your brother will have your back in every situation. But I am not a man to say, but a man to do. You will learn soon enough what it is to be a brother by my actions and the actions of the rest of KDP. Welcome to the family, pledge class of 1978.” The rhythmic, thundering applause followed him with each step off the stage, until he reached the table where the executive board sat, the five of them in black, cushioned chairs. He sank into his chair, low, and listened intently to the vice president, Hank Howard (who was also a left tackle on the football team), deliver a speech on requirements. An hour later the pledges exited, with dark circles under their eyes and piles of homework waiting for them at their dorm room or, for the unlucky ones, at their nearby homes. Thomas nodded to each as they walked past, and they gave identical head nods back to him without meeting his eyes and continuing their hurried pace. The third to last kid, the boy with the vibrant, sky-blue eyes, met Thomas’ eyes with a stare of happiness, contentment. His pupils seemed to dance in ecstasy, and Thomas fought back a sheepish bucktoothed grin. It was then that the boy tripped over the top step and fell, tumbling down the stairs, gaining speed, and

thumped onto the sidewalk, knocking over two pledges in the process. The other pledges roared with laughter; some cackled, others let out hearty yelps, and a few chuckled softly. One boy who had been knocked down jumped to his feet, red-faced, and continued walking. The other, a bigger kid with an offcolor jacket and a too-short tie, pushed off on the tumbler. “Nice going, faggot,” he barked, the spittle falling off his lip and landing in the face of the fallen pledge.

ight vodka shots did him in every time. Thomas was a lightweight and knew it, was even proud of it. So when he took his ninth shot at the fraternity’s big blow-out party of the year, served by the now two-week-old pledges, the rest of the party roared in approval and Howard threw him on his shoulders in glee while Holloway dumped a beer over his head. The shower tasted good as it hit his eyes and the bubbles landed on his lips. Howard spun him round and round. The room was a swirl of colors, whirling and whizzing by along with drops of beer falling off of his head. Red, yellow, orange. Green started to dominate the spectrum, and that’s when Thomas threw up. Not that throwing up doesn’t have its perks, Thomas thought as he was helped into his room, the biggest one in the house and nearly the biggest in the whole university, where he was greeted by the smiling, round face of his girlfriend, Maria Castellano. Thomas was laid on his hard mattress, and the three pledges that escorted him in excused themselves nervously and swiftly after a hard look from Hank. Hank gave Thomas a wink, nodded to Maria, then roared to a pledge to get him a sandwich or he’d piss in his mouth. The door closed and Thomas opened his eyes again, meeting Maria’s own dark brown eyes. Her light gray sweater molded around her full breasts; he doubted she was wearing a bra. Drunkenly, he reached for her

hand and squeezed her left ring finger, the one with his blue fraternity ring, and with his other hand he reached to undo her belt. She slapped it away and laughed at him, so Thomas made no more attempts. She’ll want to later, he reassured himself, and put his free hand in his crotch. She started rubbing his back with smooth, continuous motions with her free hand. Up and down, up and down, until Thomas passed out. In the morning, Thomas awoke when a book fell off his crammed desk and slammed with a loud “THUMP” on the wooden floor. He rubbed his eyes, and opened them to see himself not cuddled up next to Maria, but surrounded by the other five board members. Hank sat at the foot of his bed, while the quiet blond Steve Watt sat crosslegged on the floor. The brains of them all, Elliot O’Brien, paced nervously across the room, avoiding the discarded jeans from the night before and the pile of books strewn around the desk. Patrick Finnegan stood at the door reading a novel, clearly fighting to stay awake as he swayed side to side. Jackson stood directly above Thomas’ head, flipping through a Playboy magazine and packing a can of Skoal. Before Thomas could wet his dry throat enough to speak, Elliot interrupted his juggling thoughts. “We have a problem, Thomas,” Elliot said, fidgeting his wide-frame glasses. “With one of the pledges.” “What kind of problem?” Thomas sat up and felt all five pairs of eyes on him. “We’re going to have to take a vote, buddy,” said Jackson.

he entire senior class of the fraternity gathered in Thomas’ room around midday while the pledges cleaned the floors of discarded beer cans, mopped up spilt liquor, and drove hung-over girls back to their respective houses. There were thirty-six left from their original pledge class three years ago, six

having fled before freshman year had ended, and another gone by transfer. Three had been asked to leave because of grades, one after a run-in with the law. When Stan Ritter had gotten arrested, Thomas’ sophomore year, the seniors of KDP had voted on his standing with the fraternity behind closed doors, and Stan was never again seen in the house. Chatter was lively about who had done whom, who had puked where the night before. Thomas didn’t engage in any of it and sat biting his fingernails, grateful when Hank’s baritone grunt quieted the room. All of the members looked at Thomas expectantly, but it was Elliot’s squeaky voice that broke the silence. “Gentlemen of Kappa Delta Phi, most of you know why we have gathered.” Elliot rearranged his glasses and continued. “We may have made a mistake in choosing this year’s pledge class. Two freshmen who will remain nameless have informed us that a pledge we admitted has admitted to them he is a homosexual. While I realize...” Elliot had tried to raise his voice, but it was futile. At the word “homosexual,” the room erupted in whispers, gasps, and arguments. Thomas yelled along with Elliot to try and calm them, but it was a hard glare through the squinted eyes of Hank that once again stilled the action of the room. “You mean to say we slept here with a FAG last night?” snarled Alex Ransom, with heads nodding around him. “Cut that shit out!” yelled Darius Winthrop, and Carlos’ eyes widened and he slouched a bit; Darius almost never raised his voice let alone cursed. Darius was one of just two African Americans in the fraternity. Darius nodded to Elliot and leaned back against the door frame. Elliot cleaned his glasses against his green collared shirt and continued, with more volume than before. “We, the board, were split on the voting. So, as has been tradition for the brothers

before, we will present the two sides of the argument and have a vote as a senior class. If it’s a tie, it goes to Thomas’ decision as President.” Thomas felt his cheeks burn a bit, but he kept his eyes fixed on Elliot. Elliot, an affirmative for the removal of the homosexual freshman, broke into a concise, well-considered explanation. He talked of the fraternity’s pride, criteria, and most importantly reputation, all the while rubbing his hands in front of him nervously. “It will be best for him too,” Elliot finished. “How is he supposed to fit in? He is different, gentlemen, and not the type of difference we need around here.” He sat down at the chair for Thomas’ desk, and the seniors around him patted him on the back, amidst a few claps. Almost everyone nodded in agreement. Thomas stood up, prepared to deliver his formal defense of the freshman he himself had welcomed two weeks ago when Darius stepped into the middle of the semicircle. Thomas shrugged gratefully as Darius faced the looks of confusion and ignorance in front of him. “What is so wrong with being different?” Darius gave a hard glare across the room, but his eyes landed on Elliot and softened a bit. However, his fists remained clinched at his side. “In case you haven’t noticed, my dear brother, I am black. One of two in the house. I’m not the same. Freshman year, they probably worried I wouldn’t fit in. Or are you forgetting, my dear brother, what happened to the last four black men who tried to make it four years through the fraternity?” His voice sharp with sarcasm, Darius looked down and fiddled with his shoelaces, letting his point sit, while Thomas shivered a bit on the bed. “Black and gay aren’t the same thing,

Darius,” Alex said, almost in a whisper, and there was a general murmur of agreement. Jackson tried to pat Darius on the back, but Darius brushed his hand off, straightened, and continued. “This boy is no different than I am, yet you call me your brother. He has taken everything we’ve dished out at him and he has taken it with a grin: he fit in our harsh criteria. And you want to kick him out because he’s gay? Well, I think that... I think that is...” But Darius Winthrop failed to finish, instead shaking his head in disgust and walking out of the room. Before the whispers began again, Thomas stood up. “Let’s get this over with. Raise your hand if you believe this freshman should be removed because of his homosexuality.” KEVIN KICKHAM

Thomas kept his arm firmly at his side. But his body didn’t follow the same rigid composure when he saw one arm go up, then another, then another. His knees buckled and he sat again on his unmade bed, thirty-four of his brothers, thirty with their hands raised, all staring back.

aria lay belly down on her floor, her biology notes surrounding her, organized into separate piles. She was still in her blue KDP sweatshirt and light green pajama pants; to keep on task, that’s all she wore most Sundays. She tried to concentrate on

enzymes, but her mind kept wandering to Thomas; he was usually here with her on Sundays but instead... She shook her head and continued to squint at the tiny scribble taken during the fast paced lecture. Often, the real substrate of the enzyme resembles... Her thoughts abruptly ended with the ringing of her telephone across the room on the nightstand by her bed. Although it could have been anyone, from her roommate to her mother, she knew it was Thomas before she picked it up. “Hey, sweetie!” she squealed into the phone as she dropped into her bed, bouncing down then up. “Maria...” Thomas’ voice sounded unrecognizable, his voice cracked as he seemed to groan into the phone. Maria sat up. “Where are you? What’s wrong?” “Just outside the kid’s neighborhood. Stopped at a gas station to call you.” “Why, is everything all right?” There was a long pause as Thomas breathed heavily into the phone; Maria could hear him crying softly on the other end. “Thomas....” “I can’t do this, Maria,” he sobbed, almost yelling. “How can I do this to him? How will I look at myself in the mirror?” His voice broke after each question, and after the last he heaved a long sigh and released a sob. Maria sat dumbfounded and pushed her hair back against her neck. She had dated Thomas off and on for three years; this was the first time she had heard him cry. “Thomas, I am...” “Forget it, Maria.” Thomas’ voice sounded stronger and more composed over the phone. He too seemed to realize Maria hadn’t encountered him with his guard down like that before. “Momentary freak out. I’m the president, it’s my job. Simple as that. I’ll talk to you later.” The phone line went dead. Maria listened to the dial tone a long time before hanging up, clutching her knees tightly to her chest.

homas straightened his belt, cracked his knuckles, and took one last look around before knocking on the wooden front door. The estate was enormous. Two cars sat idle in the driveway, one being, Thomas noted, more expensive then his own house just down Highway 10. The front lawn was cut clean and spotless except for a discarded yellow teddy bear Thomas had kicked on his way up the gravel walkway. A clean cut and well-tended row of bushes lined the front porch, and a ripe magnolia tree, high enough to graze the tip of the sewer grates that lined the gray roof, jutted near the green porch steps Thomas had just climbed up. He now stood on a brown, prickly rug that read, in red letters, “Welcome to Our Home,” and knocked on the door twice. It made a hollow, empty sound, and it was then Thomas realized how hungry he was—he had eaten neither dinner the night before nor the breakfast of eggs and link sausages an apologetic Elliot had prepared for him that morning. He was thinking of those eggs when the door swung open. “Howdy, Thomas! To what do I owe this surprise?” The pledge tried to hold back a smile but couldn’t; it wasn’t often that the president of a fraternity made house calls to a freshman. Thomas avoided his eyes and instead looked behind him into the house. “Anyone home? Mind if I come in?” he said flatly. He wanted, needed to make this as impersonal as possible. “Oh, not at all. Come in! Mom and Dad are out back barbecuing, but we can just stay in the living room if you’d like.” He ushered Thomas into the house, and Thomas cringed when the door closed with a resounding thump. There was no turning back now. “You’re welcome to stay for lunch of course. Dad knows how to work a grill.” Thomas studied him as they walked—already the sound of his voice had struck him. It was neither high-pitched nor feminine as he had

imagined it was late the night before as he fought against his pillow; instead, it boomed and brewed with confidence. He had the hint of a lisp though, and Thomas keyed on that—Elliot’s right, he doesn’t belong. He looked sharp in his church clothes—

his green checkered sweater fit tightly across his chest, and his light brown hair was combed over to the side. No doubt many a girl had fallen for those bright blue eyes and the deep, indented dimples on his cheeks when he talked. Or many a guy. Thomas stopped following him midway through the hallway. To his right was the half-opened door to a sweet-scented, beach-themed bathroom, to his left a family portrait. Thomas studied the picture—the pledge had his arm wrapped around his mustached father. His father, a chubby man with a toothy smile, had his arm around the waist of an equally pudgy, equally joyous mother who held a blond-headed girl no older than two. Thomas felt a twinge of guilt when he saw that he was the only boy in the family, his father’s only son. He fought an urge to wheel around into the bathroom and throw up.

“Actually, we don’t need to go to the living room, we can just talk here.” Thomas’ voice sounded strange to him, unfamiliar. The freshman noticed the change too, his smile turning more nervous than happy as he came to a stop and turned to face Thomas. He was DAN KUEHL a couple inches taller than Thomas and stood straight up at attention; Thomas slouched even more and avoided his eyes, keying on the yellow Polo logo on the sweater instead. “There’s uh, there’s been a mistake,” Thomas said, trying to steady his voice. He cleared his throat. “Every year something like this happens. We admit two or three guys who actually didn’t make it in. Only when we have to send the University a list do we realize it.” Thomas forced himself to look up. The freshman looked baffled, but right when Thomas met his electric eyes a look of realization dawned across his face and his jaw tightened. They stood in relative silence for hours, days, the only sound the thirty-seven ticks of the grandfather clock that resonated from upstairs in the unknown. “A mistake, huh?” He spoke in a voice just above a whisper. “Sounds... tragic...” His voice, sharp with contempt, trailed off, it was now the pledge who couldn’t meet Thomas in the eyes. “Well, I wouldn’t want to waste anymore of your time, thank you so much for meeting me in person to tell me. Very classy.” His voice never raised nor quavered, and he beckoned toward the door, giving Thomas one final look. His eyes were ablaze, his cheeks crimson, and his mouth sat in a thin line across his face. A strand of his hair had

JOE WRIGHT

Small Fish Michael Blair

Green sea, green rust on the side of the Greenpeace boat. What happens when the water lettuce grows too wild? Gardeners come and trim their tips. Red coral roots tear and float, asking to be like ordered toys, tamed and mild, or men’s hands, adamant, claiming land and cargo ships.

Last night, I dreamed I was swimming— zoysia-green among the reeds, catching small fish in a bell jar. One by one, the fish escaped, descending deep to fading light, dimming. Could they not see the wilderness below, the unknowable weeds? Maybe it was I who could not see, who didn’t look that far. fallen in between his eyes, and his eyebrows met in a V above his nose. Thomas tore himself away and walked quickly toward the door. He had just turned the brass doorknob when a woman’s voice called out melodically from across the house. “Whose car is that in front? Do we need to make an extra burger for your friend?” Thomas didn’t hear the response, practically jumping out of the house and slamming the door on his way out. He started with a swift walk, then a jog. By the time he reached the teddy bear, he was in a dead sprint.

ight vodka shots did him in, that wouldn’t change. Neither would much in the fraternity. They would still have their wild parties and drinking games, and the traditional monthly game of tackle football out in the lawn against the pledges. Pledges would drop out because of the hazing, which would

include forcing the freshmen to streak across the library naked, and starving them for nearly a week; however, most would make it to the end of the year ceremony. The year would have its ups and downs—Thomas and Maria would get engaged, Jackson would once again barely escape academic probation, Elliot would land a great job with an accounting firm, Darius and Hank would have a big blow-out over a racial slur. Time would move on, slowly around the exams and quickly during the parties and beer pong games in the house. Eight vodka shots would do him in, but not on that fall Sunday night. On that night, Thomas lay sobbing in his girlfriend’s arms, clutching her arm with both of his hands, sobbing the name of the freshman with the firm handshake. The freshman with the electric blue eyes. He sobbed the name of a freshman that thirty years later he would be unable to recall.

CLAYTON PETRAS

Demolition

Minnesota & Sunrise

Ben Minden-Birkenmaier

Nick Fandos

When the wrecking ball hit the building, it cracked it like a nut— except the meat was gone. It had trickled away as families moved out over the preceding months, leaving a dreary husk behind.

That husk screamed, though, screamed the tortured screech of steel girders, the tinkling of shattering windows, the dull rumbling of bricks bleeding from its sides, as a final exhalation of dust poured from the door. It had been our protector, sheltering us in its bosom as we patched its cracks, like hermit crabs tending their shells. When the hermit crab exceeds its shell, though, it leaves it for its younger cousins. Not so the human— we destroy our outgrown shells, and in their place, leave parking lots—bleak desolation of blacktop, rows of lifeless cars hungrily ticking as they cool. GREG FISTER

emaris Wells was married to Humphrey Bogart once, or so she says. Their wedding was in Spain, Barcelona to be exact. The exotic guests, draped in thick diamonds and finely tailored dinner jackets, sipped martinis and seamlessly blended into the finest of rich marble lobbies in postwar Europe. The wedding was perfect; and as the couple happily slipped into their honeymoon suite, twentyseven boxes of lavish fabrics and foreign treasures were shipped slow freight back to the States, New York to be exact. I met Demaris on a Tuesday; actually it was Tuesday, January 27, 1983, and I was living in Chicago. It was cold as hell—Chicago winters are torture, especially when you’re out of steady work and live in a cheap-ass apartment. It was a fluke that we met. Demaris wasn’t out of work then. She owned a small used clothing shop north of the city. I say used because I hate the term vintage to describe other people’s trash. The shop was in a crumbling brownstone on the corner of Minnesota and Sunrise. I figured it had been there for a while, and judging by the sun-and-snow-faded sign painted on the wall, it seemed more likely to have been a very long while. I’d been walking for about twenty minutes in a pretty pissy mood after my space heater had died; actually I kicked it. It was a vain attempt to warm up, and all that was running through my head was how right Paul Simon was when he said the sky was a hazy shade of winter. When I saw the cracked red door, my primal instincts took over, and before knew it I was standing pressed against a tall stack of dusty trench coats. As I said before, I am generally opposed

to wearing other people’s trash, but unemployment does strange things with your preferences. And I had a job interview the next day—some low-level management shit at a shipping center—and I needed a coat and tie. I also needed a shave, but they don’t sell used razors, well, at least not the kind I would want to use. I started to dig through a pile of men’s clothing. The store was a kind of museum of old garb: dinner jackets that went out of style in the ’40s, narrow ties that went out in the ’60s, and some dusty flannel-looking sport coats that I’m pretty sure were never in style. Everything was in piles—sorted, but not hung—and Billy Idol was softly screaming in the background. Depressing. The heat in the small room was stifling, oppressive. I was once in the Middle East, and it was temperate in comparison to Humphrey’s Vintage—that’s what the store was called by the way. As I struggled to take off my ripped polyester coat, I knocked over a towering pile of tweed jackets. They fell with a clump, and that’s when I met her. “Darrrlinggg,” she yelled as if we had met before. “What have you done? Oh God, you knocked over my tweeds, baby.” Baby, I thought that was a nice touch, but for some reason I’m a sucker for older women’s flattery. That was my first encounter with Demaris Wells: I’d knocked over her tweeds. She was a frail woman; actually I doubt she weighed a hundred pounds. She wore a rich purple turtleneck and a long black skirt under which a pair of rather suggestive leather boots clung tightly to her legs. But her heavy gold chains and pearls highlighted her age. Out of her frail figure, a seemingly mismatched voice would flow and ebb as she danced through her piles. “What are you looking for, honey?” Her voice seemed to be winking at me. I imagined customers were rare at Humphrey’s.

“Nothing really,” I replied, trying to make my voice sound certain. I guess it didn’t. “Well, that’s the best thing to be looking for. Let me find you something perfect.” By her standards, she did find something perfect. I disagreed, but the surprisingly assertive woman forced the purchase of a charcoal pinstriped jacket and a knit tie for $24.99. Apparently her stories came with the purchase price. Naturally, she began with Humphrey Bogart. Mainly about their wedding and terrible separation; actually there had been several separations. There was no explanation for her living in Chicago, and her photos were just magazine clippings from long before I was born. But the stories sounded real—fights in ritzy hotels, long phone calls while he was working on a film, and jealousy, lots of that. I clearly remember wondering, Why would anyone make this shit up? After a while her voice fell into a kind of cadence: “You know Humphrey and I would always....” The next clause would make sure to drop some sophisticated name. Actually I recognized fourteen celebrities’ names. She floated about three dozen. After about an hour, maybe longer, she mentioned something about having to lock up the shop. I didn’t see the point; it wasn’t

like anyone was coming in anyway. We talked a while longer while she cleaned up and slowly tallied her receipts—actually I should say receipt; mine was her only sale. She talked mostly of her lover, stories of glamour and high times, never explaining why she was there on Chicago’s north side selling used clothes. I suppose it didn’t matter to her—more likely she was hiding it from herself; at least that’s what I thought. KEVIN KICKHAM But in time I had to leave, too. Sshe let me out alone on the dark, damp street corner. and went back inside alone. I suppose she lived upstairs. I say it was a fluke that I met her because I got the job I interviewed for the next day; actually, I got a slightly better job. I moved south of town—into a depressing duplex— to live nearer the warehouse and was, for some time, too busy to revisit the brownstone at Minnesota and Sunrise. When I tried to go back for another story, the shop was closed—not shuttered, simply closed. I remember reading of her death in the Trib a few years later; actually it was eleven to be exact, November 6, 1994—a cold day. She had died alone in her shop. As I scanned the short column the heavy black typeface read: “Ms. Wells never married.” I leaned back in my desk chair. Some small part of me was a little surprised.

Marking the Brother Jamie Hagan

It all started with that infamous apple in the garden. Had it remained uneaten, hate never would have filled him.

Fate is fate, and to blame murder on his parents’ mistakes: What a ridiculous claim for the brother to make.

It’s been fifty years today. That’s how long since I’ve seen my brother. Were we close? I guess. He was definitely the favorite.

That’s typical in any family, though. He was the first born, and I the second.

Did it ever really matter who tended flocks, who worked the fields? Had the birth order been reversed, would anything have changed?

I knew that he didn’t want either title; favorite, or first-born. Things got rocky right before Christmas of my senior year.

“Your older brother is coming home soon.” As if I really cared at all. Once again I would be in his shadow.

And he finally came; there he was in all his false piety and self-righteousness, Leading the family into the church pew. People smiled and waved at his return.

All I really want to know is: did he ever have a chance? Or what if he had seen it coming? While walking in the fields

I prayed to God to grace me as he did my brother. But it was useless and juvenile, like sending a letter to Santa.

We returned home that evening. I had not bought him a gift. My parents expected me to explain my actions.

Maybe, but what good is it to ask, “What if?” As if they ever chose to be brothers.

“ Enough is enough, and with that all hell broke loose. Let the hate of eighteen years consume you.

“And now the blood-stained sickle is raised; And now it pierces the brother’s heart.”

“Yeah, that’s it,” says the living. “I never asked for him.” Besides, I’m not my brother’s keeper…I never was. His eyes pleading for mercy and almost in tears. “I want you out of my life!” I say No Mercy. Go for the kill. “I hate you, and don’t you fucking talk to me again!” My parents say I killed him. I guess I don’t really know. Fifty years is a long time to carry a scar that runs so deep.

Eden Past

God hears differently, as the earth cries out in the lost one’s voice. And the brother is sentenced to a life of failure. “My punishment is too great to bear. Kill me now so that I may also be spared.” But he was cursed to walk this bare earth, the first murderer of the land, marked, all alone. I say, “We were only marked brothers by birth.” Am I telling the truth? Or just excusing my sins? CLAYTON PETRAS

Mike Lumetta

boys and girls. girls and boys. us. they’re all (we’re all) sharpening their knives on cold winter nights when dark falls by five and wind (maybe snow) tucks dark’s blanket in, on sweltering summer afternoons when sky-blue and grass-green mesh into one all-enveloping mirage behind crowded sidewalks and pools, on any rainy morning when the sun reluctantly raises its golden mane (like they don’t have) where dark has reigned for a little while of concrete rivers and window-tears. oh yes, they wait and they watch. from drivers’ seats

and nests of blankets not quite warm enough they’re honing blades down to points, tiny points, perfect for stabbing, bearing the weight of infinity. insert into soft flesh, pull out, and repeat. find the weakness! somewhere between heart and gut. but until then, they’ll sharpen and watch! watch and sharpen. but even as they sharpen, they’re lunging, lunging, lunging—

The Joys of Painting Patrick Creedon

“

f you want to dance and drink all night, there really isn’t much I can do to stop you,” he said. My father was glancing down at me from his own personal catwalk, looking away from the splined canvas that hung in front of him, the same canvas that had hung from the rafters of our two-story garage since the day my father had turned forty-five. Three years, and only half of the taut material had been filled by the oil paints that my father had bought during what is commonly called a midlife crisis. He had never taken painting lessons before. His only exposure to painting, as far as I knew, was an occasional glance over my shoulder whenever friends and I would watch The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross on PBS. He spent a lot of time in this garage. I didn’t pretend to know why. “Why is this an issue now? Have I ever been known to indulge in the sauce?” I said back to him. The palette in his hand hung limply from his thumb as he smiled at this thought. “Yeah, you’re a good kid, Charlie Brown, but I never see you outside the house. Ever since your mother—” He paused, noticing the grimace that was beginning to pass over my face. “—died, you’ve been pretty independent.” “Well, yes, but I don’t see why you’re showing doubt now about this party. I’ve been to parties before.” He didn’t immediately answer. He gazed thoughtfully at the clouds outside the large window in the garage. He loved looking like he was being introspective as all hell, but we both knew that he was all bluster. I took the time to notice which section of his illbegotten dream he had been working on this time. It was a region of stark navy and royal blues. He had used an epoxy knife to cut into

the dried globs of iodine-laden paint, forming what appeared to be rocky crags. As far as I knew, my father had never been to any sort of mountain, spending his youth in rural Indiana and his adulthood in Chicagoland. I had never seen any mountains anywhere near Oak Forest. I preferred to stay in the city whenever possible, and we never had any reason to leave Cook County. I couldn’t think of any reason for him to feel inspired to draw mountains. What was the point of dreaming of something so immense, something so beyond your scope? Did my father need to go that far away to escape? “Here’s the rub. We both know you’re in prep school, going off to college, perfect record, blah, blah, blah, etc. However!” He jabbed his paint brush at me like a knife, the horse hair caked in maroons, fuchsias, and indigos. “Do you really want to go to this party?” “I might as well. You said it yourself. I spend too much time alone.” “Yeah, but I know you hate this Trevor kid who’s hosting it! Why go?” He was right. I did hate Trevor. The guy had the subtlety and the intelligence of a gnat, and I had the pleasure of sharing locker space with him for the past three years. Bear in mind that I could care less if he tried to get physical with me. That was easily dealt with. It was mostly the way he reacted to my dead mother. Trevor had never even mentioned her at school when she had been sick. It was only after she died that he bothered me. It wasn’t the fact that she was dead that bothered me, however. It was the fact that this idiot, this imbecile, pitied me. Trevor pitied me. After my mother died, my school mentioned her once in a prayer over the PA. This kid had never spoken to me, although his locker was above mine. Yet, after that announcement, I could see it on his face. He felt sorry for me. I avoided him any time he tried to talk to me, not wanting to indulge

SONNY HAGER

Trevor in his attempt to console me. Three years later, and he still thought I was moody and depressed. I didn’t give my father an answer. “Hey, you know, I cut this out of some guy’s yacht’s sail. I bet he was pissed. Anyway, look at these white specks at the top of the canvas.” I struggled to do so, squinting up near the rafters. It looked like someone had tried to smear a firefly’s fluorescent chemicals onto the painting, and I told him. “They’re supposed to be specks of light, you know, stars?” he told me in exaggerated disgust. “What is light?” he asked, grinning. “Particles of energy that travel as a wave.” “Don’t be a smart ass, Mr. Prep School. I went to college. I worked for DuPont. I

watch Nova. I’m no stranger to your particle physics. Now tell me what light does!” “It, um, reveals?” I offered up. “Yeah, that’s true. It pushes back the shadows of your lies and madness.” He was staring at me intently now. I knew that he wanted me to see that there was a message for me in this question somewhere. “So no hiding?” He was staring intently at the canvas now. He was dabbing paint above the crests of one of the ranges. Something was evidently catching fire in his scene, as he appeared to be crafting textured smoke. “Exactly. Where there is light, there is no hiding. It’s radiation, and it penetrates you. Remember that. No escape.” He punctuated that last statement by waving around his fingers in an omi-

nous manner. “If you must go to this party, then go. You can use the Trooper. It has a fresh tank of gas.” He looked back from his painting towards me. The bushy mop on his head covered his eyes, but I could still see his smirk. His keys dropped to the floor with a plop, next to the old discarded tubes of paint, dried paint brushes, and other refuse that my father never bothered to pick up. I reached down to grab the keys, wanting to leave my father alone in his obsession.

was driving along one of the turnpikes that outlined the center of Chicago. I could see the skyline of the city, the towers rising high in the distance, far above any point I would ever be. The Sears Tower in particular reminded me of a giant beanstalk like that in the story my mother used to tell me. “You remember the story of Jack, don’t you, sweetie?” my mother would ask, tucking me under the covers as she guided me toward sleep in our own little ritual. My father would be leaning against a wall in my room as my mother began the story, even though he and I had already heard her tell the story a thousand times before. “You see, there was once a young boy named Jack, and he was very poor,” my mother would start. She would stare at me expectantly, her sharp green eyes seeing straight into mine. I could never hide anything from her when she was alive. Every time I ran into a flower pot and knocked it over or sneaked sweets from the pantry, she would know. She never raised her voice at me once, though. All she had to do was speak, and I would listen to her. “His family only had one cow and a pig,” my father would say after her because I would never continue the story. I was always busy staring at the radiance of my mother’s golden blond hair. After waiting a few seconds, she always would continue the story of that foolish boy who sold his parents’ liveli-

hood for three magic beans. My favorite part was always the scene where Jack was running from the giant. “Fee-fie-foe-fum, I smell the blood of an English bum!” I’d cry in delight the only part of the story that I especially wanted to say. “Very good. Do you know why the giant chased after Jack?” she would ask. “Jane, do you really expect him to know this?” my father would ask her. He stopped asking this when I got much older, but that was just because we didn’t read the story as often. It stopped entirely once I had gotten into middle school, a couple years before she became sick. “It’s because Jack stole that goose and harp from him. That’s why the giant chased after Jack. They were very important to him. However, in his rage, the giant forgot that he lived in the clouds. He fell through them, and he died.” By this point in the story, I was still riled up because of the excitement of it all, which kind of defeated its purpose as a bedtime story. “What do you think is the moral of the story?” my father would ask as I got older and more erudite. “It’s OK to steal if you can get away with it!” I would say. My father always howled with laughter, but my mother would always sharply tap me on the head in order to quell my smart-ass remarks. “Do you realize what the giant saw as he was falling?” she would ask. I would always shake my head no, even though I had heard it before. “He saw the lights in the sky. All those lights in the sky are stars, and just as we’re looking at them, there are people looking at us from where they are.” This might have been her attempt to cement some sort of belief in God into me, which, as immature as it would have been then, could always be changed into something more genuine, something less silly. It was something easy to believe in then. I believed her.

pulled into Trevor’s driveway, the gate spread wide open, as if to welcome all who might come to this party. The expansive, ornately decorated lawn screamed old money, the only reasonable thing keeping this kid in our beast of a prep school. I slipped my father’s old SUV between a Bugatti and a Rolls Royce, trying not to bump either. As I walked along a brick walkway to the

front of the immense mansion, two couples barged out the doorway, struggling a bit with the heavy wooden door. They reeked of booze, and I heard mention of hide-andseek, though it was muffled by the giggles of the girls that had been following those young men garbed in designer clothing. The yard that I had just crossed had not been lit very well, so I couldn’t see the kids clearly once they got far away. I tried to ignore the gargantuan chandelier that hung from the high ceiling once I stepped inside. It seemed much too large to be safe inside a home. I did tell my father that I’d been to plenty of parties, but none of them had been like this. There were no people rolling kegs into the parties I’d been to

before, no speakers that could shake the roof off my much smaller house. In an attempt to not look out of place, I kept myself busy by scanning the foyer for someone I didn’t hate. “Hey, buddy, I’m glad you made it.” I turned my head in response to the voice and was rewarded with the sight of Trevor’s gelled hair and bright pink Dolce & GabDAN KUEHL bana sweater. In my Tommy Hilfigers, I felt like Little Orphan Annie to his Daddy Warbucks. He clapped me on the shoulder and said, “You’ll have fun tonight.” I didn’t see how I could. I didn’t see any of the people that I spent time with at school here. Who could I chat with without the almighty dread of awkwardness looming over us? He pushed me into the first mini-skirted girl he found and signaled for us to dance. She glanced at me sheepishly, pushing her sandy hair out of her face. I figured this was something I should do out of courtesy, so I grabbed one of her hands, placed my other hand behind her back and started into a slow foxtrot. It surprised me that she didn’t recoil at my precocious hand placement. Staggering at first, she eventually followed my lead. It was an incredibly inappropriate dance to go with the hip-hop blaring from the speakers, but then again, the hip-hop blaring from the speakers was itself incredibly inappropriate to play. We stepped in place to lyrics about booty-shaking and cop killing until the end of the song. I let go of her and walked off. I was through with the charade that had been forced upon me.

But that girl followed me. I went down some stairs, not knowing where they would lead me. At the bottom of the steps was a lounge. Lush chairs surrounded a big-screen television, though what stood out was a painting of a woman. She had plain features: shoulder length brown hair, pale cheeks, a widow’s peak. She looked like the all-American middle-class mother, out of place in this opulent house. I had no idea who she was. Knowing that I was at a dead end, I walked out the French doors that led to a deck surprisingly free of debauchery. I was leaning on the railing, staring out at the sky, when I heard her walk out onto the deck. I reminded myself of my father at the moment, as he loved to look just as I did at that moment, introspective as hell. “Sorry about that,” I said to her. I continued to stare out at the sky, waiting for the solid cloud cover to leave and unveil the moon. “Oh, don’t worry about it. I know what’ll usually happen when you come to these parties. They’re not too much wilder than those mixers your school puts on.” “I don’t really go to those anymore.” “Well, why don’t you go?” I concerned myself with counting the stars I could see in the nighttime sky. “My name’s Lydia, by the way.” I inclined my head in her direction, exhaling as I did so. “Lydia, you know how we just danced, you know, at arm’s length?” I stretched my arm out to lightly touch her shoulder, for emphasis. She nodded in response. “That doesn’t happen at mixers. They’re school-sanctioned events for people to release their pent-up sexual tension and libido.” One of the clouds had moved, muddying up my previous effort. I had to restart my count. “And you’re not OK with that? I’d blame their apparent necessity on the fact that most of us go to single-sex schools.” She walked

closer to me now. “I’d bet that most of those naive girls certainly know what they’re getting into,” this pale girl said to me. She was standing right next to me now, lightly grasping my arm. It bothered me a little. I turned to look at her. She looked like she was expecting something. “Lydia, what do you think of those clouds?” I asked her, trying to dampen the silence that I had apparently created. “Wh-what do you mean? They’re just clouds. It’s a shame they’re blocking the moon, but that’s just the way this sort of stuff is. I can’t control the clouds. They’re just in the way. Just like you can’t control the expectations of the girls in there.” She reached up toward my face, but I pushed her arm away. I left the porch and went back inside. Trevor stood at the bottom of the staircase, his gelled plumage easily visible as he blocked the stairs that would lead me back up to the faceless crowd. As I asked him to move out of the way, he began to speak. “You really shouldn’t be so grating towards other people. It’s impolite,” he told me, now sitting on the bottom step. He was staring past me at the picture of that woman up on the wall. “If you’re talking about that girl out there, it wasn’t very polite of you to push me into her,” I said. I looked at Trevor now. He was still staring at that portrait on the wall. “In fact, if you were the ideal of human decency you claim to be, you’d be looking at me instead of that painting while you criticize me.” “That painting is a portrait of my mother. My father had some guy paint it about seven years ago after her death,” Trevor said to me. I didn’t like where this conversation was going. “My dad started burying himself in work after her death.” “Why are you telling me this?” I asked. What did he think was between us?

PHIL NAHLIK

“I figured that I could help you.” “Is that why you’ve been trying to get me to come to these parties? Of course, some drunken hook-up will make me feel better about whatever it is that ails me.” I pushed past him, up the stairs. I was through down here. He caught up to me at the top of the stairs, but I continued to ignore him. He grabbed me by the shoulder again. “Why are you being like this?” Trevor asked me. I was shaking as he dared ask that. “Why did you invite me here?” I spun and pointed my finger at him, a young man a head taller than I. He had no right to think that we were even close to being the same person. He had no right to compare us. On the spot he sputtered. “Oh come on, bud—” “We are not buddies. We are not friends. You’re the guy that I just happen to share locker space with. Once again, why did you bother to invite me again after I’ve turned down all of your other invitations?” “Well, I thought you could use someone

you could relate to, you know, since both our—” He had said it. I didn’t let him finish that comparison. My fist swung up, and I punched him in the face. I heard my knuckles crack. I couldn’t tell if I had really hurt him. He staggered back a step or two, but he wasn’t bleeding. I turned to leave but was confronted by the crowd that had gathered around us. I avoided the accusatory stares that penetrated me, and I went outside to the dark yard. I left the party.

returned home in the Trooper. The porch light was still on. It was just after eleven. I walked in through the front door, and it was surprising that my father wasn’t in our living room watching reruns on PBS since it was still relatively early. I went into the kitchen to get some ice. My hand had started to swell a little, and I wondered if it was broken. It only twinged slightly every now and then, but I had heard that broken limbs can go numb because of shock. I went to the garage to see if my father was still painting. Maybe he was drowning a

sleepless night in his perpetual work of oils. The room was lit only by the moon that had been uncovered as the clouds drifted away. The scaffolding he had made himself was empty, even of the pallet and old tubes of paint that he usually forgot to put away. I climbed up the side of it to get a better look at the painting. My father had been working on this for the better part of three years, and I had never gotten a good look at it. The crags, the abandoned forests, the failed attempts at Starry Nights lay scattered about on the fabric. They were all remnants of once active hopes and dreams, I assumed. On the outer edges of the center painted area, there were white splotches fashioned into v’s. They had to be geese. Just below the geese were fields of gilded wheat. At closer inspection, it looked more and more like my father had a cut a harp into the field of wheat. Something was starting to dawn on me. Mountains that my father painted when he had no business painting mountains struck my eyes again. They weren’t mountains. They were teeth. Then I saw it. It was a giant. Swirls of smoke and cloud gathered and formed his hair. My father had been spending these nights and weekends painting a damned mural in honor of my dead mother. This thing, this still half completed giant was staring at me with eyes made from low-hanging stars, but that banner across the top, those were still specks of lights, stars. I stood up high and scanned the top of the canvas and noticed someone had scrawled a message across the top of the bar. All the lights in the sky are stars. —Jane I burst out laughing. Is that what my father was trying to say? He had skirted around the issue without actually saying what he wanted. “He knew he was being watched, and the mean old giant repented,” my mother would say to me as my bushy-haired father smirked

next to her. I just thought that she meant I was supposed to be good. Those damn stars were supposed to be a virtual Santa Claus that knew if I was naughty or nice. Damn, my father had been right about this whole thing. I wasn’t able to hide myself. There were really wasn’t much that he could do to stop me from doing what I did, and I ended up punching a guy twice my size. I dropped down from the scaffolding and picked up my father’s pallet and paint brush. Holding the pallet in my hand and the brush in my mouth, I climbed back up the scaffolding, sat down, and started painting. I brought sienna from my brush onto the canvas, covering the harp of wheat in a wash of gold. The geese were made to fly in clouds, no longer seen by the common man in his lowly place on the floor of the world. The giant came next. Clouds consumed his head, as his body was fleshed out. He stood above a squalid village of no more than a smattering of people. His foot was now crushing their vegetable patch, making sure no boy would ever rise on a beanstalk, preventing his most enlightening of falls. He would continue to grind the bones of men to make his bread, ignorant of what that deadly plunge taught him. I marred the canvas around him, prolonging the work that my father had toiled for but which made him happy. He painted in this garage alone. Alone, just as I pretended to be, just as the giant actually was. The giant would instead pay for his actions with his soul, his talking harp content in ignoring him. I was confident in what I had painted for my father because he still had a reason to paint. He could continue painting now. What did I have, though? I could not paint. My desecration had been proof of that. I had a swollen hand and a foot in my mouth. Maybe I had been too harsh with Lydia.

Escape

Matt Bettonville America, my destination, show me my escape. Working. La semana. Subsistance, nothing more. Babel of cruel confusion. Babel of opportunity. The Master hands His talents to His servants, then leaves. Hundreds pressing inward on the superstore door, cursing the limit one per customer, Avenging the $1.50 flats, sold out. Libations to the blue light: Slaughter in the Aisle. He scattered them about the Earth for their insubordination, Each faction to discover and create a new face of the world. Aprendí el idioma de América. The sales, the specials, The advertisements that told me what I needed. This world has many faces; I meet them each As a different man in a different tongue. Nine to five I check bolts and never see the car until it reaches the sales floor. Then, I am another consumer. History will call me Inspector #40. The Teacher said, You are proud and faithful Who seek more talents, even with many bestowed. I am an assembly line, producer and product. When the years wear me out, I will be replaced. Here, Master, see that I have turned my talents into treasures, Treasures that were on sale. Treasures that die with me. Or before. Treading here to survive. ¿Adónde voy? Where is my escape? My eight hours prescribed for labor are over, Where lies my endowed sleep, St. Benedict? Wicked, lazy, ¡malcriado siervo! His vengeful Old ways return to Him. Babel that exiled me from across the ocean, Vámonos. Return me. No, take me away. I want to start over again.

5:30 a.m. in Forest Park Ben Minden-Birkenmaier

The padding of my soles against the ground enunciates the deafening, blaring hush. The darkness, with its somber, inky brush removes all lively light and joyous sound. Sequestered in my vacuole of time, My life seems like a half-remembered dream. The past recedes, the present is supreme, Floating in darkness, I begin to climb. The path’s white line leads out into the night; my guiding light through world of murky gloom. What shall I fear? No thought could be misgiven, My leading guardian angel shimmers bright. Ethereal thought excises doubts that loom, as I stride boldly upward into heaven. MIKE MCLAUGHLIN

Saws

Mike Tynan

uliann and I were in the meat cooler together, so we shouted over the hum of the temperature control system and shivered slightly when we moved too fast or talked too quickly. “Shut up, you queer. You couldn’t be more wrong.” “Thanks Jules. You’re a true lady and obviously an expert on the subject.” “I’m telling you, Ed Shaughnessy could take Buddy Rich any day of the week.” “Did you even see that battle? Shaughnessy does the stick trick like he just figured it out in Johnny Carson’s green room.” “And Buddy looks like a friggin’ spastic, doing his best drum face, when all he’s doing is a shitty roll.” “You don’t play jazz for twenty years just so you can roll and make drum faces on the Tonight Show.” “Look, just because you follow Rich like you want to have raging hot sex with him doesn’t make him the greatest drummer in the world.” “Ad hominem arguments reveal the weakness of your position, you bitch.” Juliann laughed. “Shut up and help me with this table.” We lifted the cold steel table together. Juliann held the significantly heavier side, the one with the meat grinder bolted to the surface. Months of working behind the meat counter in Tucker’s Grocery gave her surprising strength invisible to those she encountered outside the shop. The cooler housed about a dozen shelves, all filled with shrinkwrapped hams, pork tenderloin, whole pork butts, ribs, corned beef, and countless other chunks of cow anatomy, later to be cut into steaks and chops. Also inside were the meat grinder and a large saw. Dripping brown

stains covered the walls from rogue juices and small hemorrhages, bursting when cut from the uncooked meat. Sticky, knackered linoleum covered the floor. Employees who significantly botched a customer’s order or talked too much while working were subtly encouraged to go clean the cooler. Jules and I were there often. We had been cleaning the wall in the cooler behind the meat grinder and the large band saw. It left curved rows of tiny cuts on my hands when I had to remove the thin blade to clean the inside. I often strained and shimmied to pull the blade from its rusty wheels so that clumsy injury was inevitable. Juliann’s hanging ribbons of hair reminded me of the saw as they curved around her face when she bowed her head to lift the table. The strands shrank into acute points as they weaved between each other down to her shoulders. Jules tried to harness those she could in a tangled bun, but I delighted in seeing the pointed strands that escaped her efforts. She wore the deep red uniform tee shirt that stretched “Tucker’s” in bold letters and a cartoon of a winking cow across her breasts. The shirt was long, but when she bent over for something on a bottom shelf or to pick up a pen she had dropped, she revealed the brightly colored belt holding her black jeans tightly against her hips that day. She must have had an entire arsenal of different colors in her closet, some studded, some with grommets, and a select few simply black leather to blend against the loops of her jeans but still entice me with their tautness against her body. Her hands were small and callused. She had thin, shallow cuts from saws, slicers, and bread knives on her fingers, but she left them unbandaged, like war wounds whose stories she was eager to tell. When she looked at me, her green eyes seemed to burn through her pale face and the inky black daggers of hair.

We shuffled awkwardly under the weight of the table until we pressed it firmly against the wall. “You know Jojo Mayer?” she asked. “Yeah.” “Josh Freese?” “Yep.” “Who’d win?” “Mayer. Anyone that says Freese is high off their ass.” “I meant in a fight”’ “Oh, damn. Then it’s Freese. Paradiddle techniques won’t help Jojo too much when Josh has him in a headlock.” “Radiohead versus Coldplay.” “We still talking about fights? Radiohead.” I paused. “Bach or Beethoven?” “Beethoven, no contest. Abe Lincoln or Theodore Roosevelt?” “Abe. He’s got a better reach and a beard of fury. Karl Marx or Nietzsche?” We continued as we put our steel scrubbers and dirty rags back in the buckets of bleach water, and we began walking out of the cooler. I let her go first, gesturing with a hand speckled with scraps of ancient pork chops, scraped from the inside of the saw. She opened the insulated door and pushed through the hanging strips of plastic as Adam came in the opposite direction, sidestepping Jess and bumping me sideways with his shoulder before I could give him room to pass. He turned around quickly and nodded upward to Jules, surely with a smile or a wink. “Hey there, cutie,” he said. “We still on for tonight?” I folded my arms and leaned up against a cold metal shelf behind me. I knew Adam had begun this conversation only to mark his territory. He stood a few inches taller than me and had a blond crew cut he often rubbed with a few thick fingers. Adam

seemed to spend his time only at the store, in Juliann’s arms, or in his basement, lifting weights. Paranoia drove his earthy brown eyes to twitch around a room or stare at a wall, trying to see through it. Every move he made seemed to be a deliberate attempt to inflate his masculinity, so that no scrawny little bastard would dare look twice at his girl in the cooler, no matter how alone they might think they were. “Yeah, I’ll see you around eight. Cool?” she responded. “Yeah, definitely.” Juliann walked out the door, and Adam stood, arms akimbo, scanning the cooler in pursuit of some plausible reason for being there. He smiled smugly and grabbed a stray bread knife from the shelf. Still smiling, he held the blade between his fingers and tapped me firmly a few times on the shoulder with the plastic handle. I looked in his face and grinned agreeably, as if his wielding the knife was half-hearted and playful. He grinned wider, nodded, and flipped the knife over. Adam grabbed my loose shirtsleeve and stabbed through it with the blade, holding the handle like a dart. I flinched away, causing the knife to twist a larger hole in the fabric. He withdrew the knife, threw it back on the shelf, and looked at my torn sleeve. “There,” he said, “Now, you’re trendy.” I looked into his brown eyes in a rage. “What? If you bought that shirt at the mall, they’d charge you out the ass for it.” I stared coldly through his attempt at a joke. “I’m just here to help, little buddy.” Still grinning, he turned and stepped through the hanging plastic. I stood in the same spot, glaring at the door as it pulled itself shut and the warm rush of air from outside the cooler subsided.

Poison in Jest Conor Gearin

“Have you heard the argument of the play? Is there no offense in it?” Ay, Sire, indeed, what’s the play about? Those who have tasted its complexity must consciously create an answer, relate some fraction of truth, Those who believe they understand it totally—they unwittingly give some wretched summary, Yet neither student nor scholar can ever give a good—nay, adequate—reply, Sire. “No, no, they do but jest.” And there’s your answer, Sire, printed in every “fiction”— In this modern age, the old lie: “entirely coincidental.” So worry not your self-crowned head— But the Maccabees’ oppressor was damned in Israel under the name of Nebuchadnezzar, And the inhabitants of the Italian’s Hell suffered for the sins of the living. “They do but jest, poison in jest.” Sire, fear not, your ignorance harms none, save perhaps yourself. You had best find out for yourself the argument, Wading through half-truths, resisting the urge to swallow the thing at once—impossible— And never, never trust what those calling themselves learned tell you. MIKE MCLAUGHLIN

SONNY HAGER

Popular Mechanics Michael Blair

I struggle with practical things like that— simple mechanics, first-aid or weeding. But everyone needs something to work at. Take last week: driving home, I got a flat. Fords fix as fast as legal proceedings. I struggle with practical things like that. My head won’t fit in a ten-gallon hat. Band-Aids tear hair and don’t stop the bleeding. But everyone needs something to work at.

Do I put out some cheese if there’s a rat? If there’s a rat, will the dog need feeding? I struggle with practical things like that— tying ties or guerilla-style combat. When the plumbing pipes pop, I start pleading. But everyone needs something to work at. Can’t vacuum, I think about doom. Got flat pop to sip. Time turns, I learn by reading. I struggle with practical things like that. But everyone needs something to work at.

Offsides

Griffin Lowry

O 32

n Fridays, the most boring classes became unbearable, the most stuffy classrooms became suffocating, and our uniform ties began to feel like burlap nooses on our adolescent necks. I thought to myself that even halfway listening to a lecture about ancient Chinese dynasties would be impossible if there were girls in the classroom. Friday was the gateway to infinity. The weekend, only thirty minutes away, seemed like a weeklong vacation. The seemingly endless hours between five p.m. on a Friday and five p.m. on the following Sunday were an open field of opportunity. Today, though, something was different. There was an excitement that caused my leg to shake all day, my pencil to tap, and my handwriting to be a little sloppier. I was with Dad this weekend. It was 2:55. I loosened my tie. The anxious excitement I felt about weekends with Dad came to a climax on these Friday afternoons. With the season early spring and my birthday only a few weeks away, Dad had been hinting at something every time we talked. I knew what this one thing was; but saying it out loud, or even too loud in my head, made me think I would jinx myself—that my anticipation of the event would somehow ruin my undeniable participation in it. As always with Dad though, there was the chance of a letdown. There was a chance he wouldn’t show up or would show up hours late with some half-brained excuse, smelling like alcohol, or he would be in a terrible mood from a long day at work. But for some reason today, I felt a real confidence in my dad. Maybe the shining springtime sun and the refreshing wind that had been blowing all week had put me in a great mood. Dad had been in full control for just about a year. Be-

sides, he had been hinting at this for so long that I knew he was focused on making this a great weekend. With my gnawed pencil, I carefully sketched the Dayton Freeze logo on an old history quiz just under “Describe in one sentence…” with the “FREEZE” looking like icicles were dangling from the F and the Z and the two E’s frozen together. I wasn’t a particularly great sketch artist, but I had doodled this logo a million times. It had been on my favorite hat since I was three. It had been on my birthday cakes, my sweatshirts, and the posters on my wall for as long as I could remember. Dad was picking me up, and we were going to a Dayton Freeze hockey game. The Dayton Freeze is a minor league team for the New Jersey Devils, but I wouldn’t advise anyone to try to convince the people in my city that the level of hockey and the skill of the players were anything but spectacular. We all loved the Freeze. Every time one of our star players got called up to the Devils, we felt like proud parents or grandparents. Like somehow we had given them guidance, or armed them with skill that equipped them for the NHL. Once the bell rang, students talked excitedly at their lockers about weekend plans. Hardly able to hear myself think from the bangs of lockers closing and the yells about the party at Mike’s, I told most of my friends I would call them after dinner. There was only one possibility for tonight though: Freeze game with Dad. Dad usually picked me up from school only on certain Fridays. Since I had been in high school, Dad had never missed a Friday when he had promised to pick me up. He had been there, and he had been on time. His mood varied, but most of that I attributed to stress from work. Dad never followed the social rules of the normal after-school pickup line. He would always find a deserted faculty spot or a fire lane to sit and wait for me to come outside. As usual, his dented but reliable tan Durango

was sitting proudly in the parking lot. This time he had chosen spot forty-three, Mrs. Thompson’s designated parking spot, for his waiting place. When I saw his car, I wanted to run to it as fast as I could, but, as a teenager, I knew this would make me look like five-year-old on the first day on kindergarten. I shuffled across the blacktop of the hot parking lot. But I seemed to be moving much faster. I threw my backpack in the backseat and got in the front. Dad’s black hair didn’t seem to have any gel combed into it as it usually did after a Friday at work, and he was wearing a T-shirt, shorts, and his grass cutting KSwiss sneakers, a huge change from his usual Friday attire for his managerial duty at the Wal-Mart. Instead of being tired from work but glad to see me, he seemed dazed yet louder and more obnoxious than a semi-truck horn. “Rob my boy!” he bellowed, slapping me hard on the shoulder with his fleshy hands. “A weekend with my boy! Yes sir! I got the best kid in the world! WOOOOHHH!” The knot in my stomach grew, the skin on my forehead was on fire, and the

slight anxiety and fear I had suppressed now roared through like a freight train. I wanted his hand off my shoulder as quickly as possible, and I wanted him to stop yelling. He stopped yelling for a second, and I leaned to my side and rested my head on the window. Looking at him carefully, I said, “Dad… are you all right?” His answer followed just as the others PHIL NAHLIK had: “Hell yeah, I’m all right! A weekend with my son, who wouldn’t be all right?” He paused and slapped my knee, but I didn’t even feel it. My mind was wandering. “Shoot, I almost forgot, buddy. Guess what I’ve got.” He reached for his back pocket, but it seemed like he didn’t realize he had to lift his butt off the car seat before getting into his pocket. Eventually he figured it out after a short struggle with himself, but even still he dug in his wallet as if he had his eyes closed and two cooking mitts on his hands. Finally, after a few credit cards and a picture of us together at the swimming pool had fallen out of his wallet, he held up silver and powder blue Freeze tickets so close up to my face that I couldn’t even read the date of the game. I faked my excitement,

not because I already completely expected this, but because I had been blindsided. Everything had been going so well. Everything was supposed to be perfect. But the night was ruined. Dad was drunk. When I threw my backpack in, I should have noticed the brown paper bag on the backseat, a Busch hanging out of the side. I should have known right when I saw him in his different clothes. I wanted to get out of the car right then and there, but where would I go? I had waited weeks for this. Now I felt like doing nothing more than going home, and falling asleep on the couch. I did not want to think about it. I did not want to realize that we might waste the tickets. I did not want to think about Dad being drunk. I did not want to think about the disappointment I felt. I did not really want to be with Dad at all. I wanted to be with Mom, where things were stable, where things were safe. I rubbed my sweaty hands against the sides of my warm leather seat. “Let’s head home for a couple hours so you can put on your jersey and have something to eat,” Dad said, thinking practically even with alcohol in his system. “Dad, do you, umm,” I stuttered. “Do I what, Robbie?” he said. “Do you think that maybe…No never mind, sorry, just forget it,” I said, buckling my seatbelt. I wanted to tell him that I thought maybe I should drive. I was fifteen and had my

learner’s permit, but had only driven twice with my mom. I couldn’t push myself to ask. I had thought about this before, and I was sure that Dad had driven places drunk before when he was by himself, but he had never ever done it with me in the car, and I did not know what to expect. Drinking was not a weekend activity for me, and, anyways, children don’t tell adults how to act. I exhaled through my mouth and sat back. He turned the key forward in the ignition, and the Durango kicked on as it had for the past eight years. I usually held my limited times with Dad NICK SECKFORT in a kind of reverence. At 6’2” tall, and a former Division II college linebacker, Dad had bad knees, bad shoulders, and bad hips, but none of these things seemed to bother him when he was with me. When we just played catch in the back parking lot of his condo, or watched the Freeze games together at the arena or on TV, there were no problems in the world. No fights with Mom, no broken promises, no drunken embarrassments. Just dad and son, Dad and his boy Robbie. However, alcohol crept into the best of situations. On one trip to a Freeze game about two years earlier, we had walked into an entrance to the arena with a huge red beer stand. At first, I didn’t think anything of it. Dad told me to find our seats, grab some popcorn—he needed to use the restroom. About twenty minutes after we split

up, the usher helped him to our seats. He reeked of beer and was stuck in a drunken daze. He would scream at the referees obnoxiously, yelling curse words enhanced by his inebriated state. During the entire game I did not look him once in the eye. I asked myself, how could this happen? Why can’t he control himself? I was younger then and knew less about the effects of alcohol on recovering alcoholics. I had to call Mom to pick us up from a street corner downtown after the game while I helped steady Dad, leaning him on a stoplight standard. I don’t remember the score of the game, or how my favorite players performed. The only thing I remember is being so absolutely angry, hurt, and confused about my father’s actions that my mind was elsewhere. After Mom dropped Dad off at his place, Mom and I drove home in silence. The whole ride home I wanted to cry. I looked at Mom, whose face was repeatedly distorted by passing cars and different streetlights. “Mom,” I said, almost choking on my words, “why does he do these things to me? What is wrong with him?” “Oh, Robbie, he doesn’t mean to hurt you, but what hurts is that you put so much faith in him. You trust in him so much that when he messes up, it really stings. Believe me, Robbie, he’s a lot better than he used to be. Do you remember when he started showing up to all your baseball games, and coming around almost every other weekend? Well, about eight years earlier I had told him that if he wants to see you on any days besides your birthdays and maybe holidays and if he wanted to be in your life, he had to get control of his drinking. For eight years I thought that each day might be the day that your Dad pulled himself out. Each day I thought maybe he would be waiting in the driveway, sober and ready to take responsibility. I know how you feel, Robbie, I do, but he is really trying. What, this is only the second time in six months that he has faltered? He’s making

progress, Robbie. And you can choose to trust him or not choose to trust him, but you’re the only thing he came back for. He came back for his son, not his marriage.” With that, I could see her eyes glossing up, filling with tears. I rested my head against the window and wondered if I would ever trust Dad again. I knew other kids who had dads or uncles who were drunks, but my dad wasn’t like them. He wasn’t a dead beat, or an addict. I characterized my dad’s drinking as a vice, or a problem, but not an addiction. Those other kids hadn’t talked to or seen their dads since they were born. My dad had a good job, and loved his child dearly. He had ruined things in his marriage, but was still technically married to my mom. Dad could recite my batting average in summer baseball from third grade to the present. My dad knew my favorite movies, players on the hockey team, and, on occasion, would even ask my opinion about politics. About a month after the time Mom had to pick us up from the game, we went to another game together. With a fresh start and a new opportunity, Dad came through. He showed he had learned his lesson. He learned that we needed to enter the arena at Section 144 where there were no food or drink vendors. If we were walking and we saw a beer sign, although he tried to conceal it, Dad walked with his head and eyes down until he was sure we were past it. A couple times when we were walking, his huge body would brush into people, without an apology or even an acknowledgement from him. In this moment, I really loved my Dad.

ad, you just blew through that stop sign!” I yelled as we passed the first “stop sign after leaving the school parking lot. “There was nobody comin’, Rob. Just relax,” he slurred. “We got seats in the lower bowl tonight son. We’ll be….” I blocked him out. I was focused on the

road. I could feel the Durango swaying back and forth as it glided somewhere between the right and the left lanes on Mallbunk Road. I put my hands on the dashboard to secure myself. We weren’t going fast, but I was terrified. Honks came here and there, followed by people passing us at their safest opportunity, trying to evade the gently swerving Durango. “Dad, please keep your eyes on the road,” I said nervously, when I saw him look down at the stereo console. But even when he was looking at the road, I wanted nothing more than to be out of that car and as far away from Dad as I could possibly be. We came to a red light, still at least twelve blocks from Dad’s condo. I said a quick prayer when I realized how far we had to go to get home. As we began to move again, Dad was holding his lane this time, but closing in on a grey garbage truck parked with its emergency flashers on in the right lane. As we approached, I could see its huge masher in the back opening and closing on the newly loaded waste. We were closing on the truck at a dangerous pace. The truck was now about one hundred feet away. “Dad!” Sixty feet now. “Dad!” He continued to hum carelessly along to the country song on the radio, “Dad! Stop!” I screamed as loud as I could, now with only about 40 feet to go until disaster. Dad hit the brakes as hard as he could, and I could feel the antilock feature firing and re-firing the brakes, so that the car wouldn’t skid. We came to a stop about eight feet away from the massive garbage truck. “Whoa there, cowboy!” Dad chuckled to himself. “Close call there, huh, Robbinator?” Before I even knew what I was doing, I had grabbed my backpack, swung open the door, and thrust Dad’s arm off my shoulder, surprising myself with my own strength. “What the fuck, Dad! Are you serious! You

almost killed both of us, and you are laughing about it like it’s some goddamn cartoon!” I was out of the car now, but I hadn’t yet closed my door. The two garbage men in neon green jackets were rolling the trashcans back to the houses on the sidewalk next to me, pretending that nothing was happening. “I cannot believe you, Dad!” I raged. In my head though, I knew exactly what I really wanted to say: “I cannot believe in you, Dad.” I started to walk fast in the direction we were originally headed. Mom’s house was about three miles down the road from Dad’s, but there were food joints and places to hang out about one more mile down. I grabbed my backpack off the sidewalk, forgetting how it had even gotten there, and marched away from everything. I then realized how much I hated the sun, for my shirt was soaked with sweat, and my head felt like it was going to explode. I pulled out my cell phone and clicked the number seven on the keypad and the button call. Seven was my favorite number. Mom answered her phone cheerfully yet professionally, as she always did when she was at work. “Mom, Dad is drunk. He almost killed us when he was driving. I am out of the car and walking towards the Hardee’s at Mallbunk and Shirley.” “O My God, Robbie, I’ll leave right now, but you know what traffic is like at this time of day. I’ll meet you at the Hardee’s. Text me if you decide that you want to walk all the way home. What is your father doing now?” “I don’t know, probably just sipping on another beer, getting ready for round two.” “Okay, I’ll call him. I love you, bye.” “Bye, love you too.” As I walked, I heard Dad, out of the car now, yelling for me to come back, but it all sounded like a muffled echo. As his voice faded, I began to hear only my own voice, though I could not tell if I was speaking out loud or just in my head: “Never again. I’m done with him.”

Juggler

Mike Lumetta the street performer stands, his glasswares fly orbiting round a holy midnight sky that demands to know why its moon has sunk so low to meet a man, a man, a man. the audience, though, does not complain, only relentlessly cries again! again! chants and cheers of entertained glee assail the sight that wowed eyes see, a spreading iridescent fan. a wheel of bottles, vases, orbs: glass. some you’d find in a house, of high class, whole, peering like a pet behind the shutters. some, broken, seem like trash from street gutters. and they all, united, correspond to a plan. but sometime the night, grown weary of itself, must squeeze itself, bleed out its last beads of elixir, and suffer a dead juxtaposed perfectly between midnight and dawn, and caring for neither one.

by then the crowd has departed, retreated back to dark and silent homes where glass never knows, nor never knew, the air. fragile, not immortal, it weighs on granite and burnished mahogany. and the man, alone (his fame and fortune earned) loses his long-exhausted control glass— smashing! crashing! into worthless shards in which a curious child may see the reflection of his eye or his dream, but likely not. glass shattered, only a man intrudes on the loneliness of the streets. the moon demands to know why it ever stooped for him, but maybe the far-off stars will lace him in their silver cocoon.

Milton

Daniel L’Ecuyer

T 38

he ancient oak in old Barker’s yard was losing its golden, crispy leaves to the gentle, steady wind that whispered through the trees on that quiet cul-de-sac in Warson Woods. Paul walked leisurely down the uneven sidewalk, slightly hunched under the weight of his backpack, a bit like a gorilla trying to stand upright. He was in sixth grade: old enough to have a backpack heavy enough to damage his spine, but young enough that he still kicked

girls to show that he liked them and went trick-or-treating on Halloween. He watched the leaves depart from the tree overhead,

one by one and many at a time. They all were headed the same way, a multitude of paper ships on a river, departing from a weathered pier. The current carried them all downstream, but they followed sligthly different paths, ending in very different places. They were a step more graceful and independent than birds, twirling and twisting and gliding through the air, each in its own way—falling in wide spirals or gliding in erratic directions. Some flew in simple patterns like a corkscrew, and some in intricate motions like a hand writing in the air. Some were so uncertain MIKE MCLAUGHLIN there was no pattern of flight or fall at all. The whisper of the wind was calling them all forward, and one by one they let go, and flew with the wind to their death. In the end, they all ended up in the same place. The dead ones were strewn across the yard and sidewalk, faded from green and orange and red to dusty brown decaying shells of leaves that were. And that, Paul thought, was sad. Another thing that was sad, Paul thought, was old Mr. Barker. The old man was one of those brown leaves still stuck on the tree, a gust of wind away from death. His wife, if he had ever had one, was dead. His friends, if he ever had any, were probably dead, too. And if anything good had ever happened to

him, he probably didn’t remember it, because Mr. Barker was eighty-seven. His grass was a mess of tangled weeds and wild, overgrown shrubbery in the edges and corners. The ferns hanging from rusted hooks on the porch were dead-brown, lank, and stiff. Paul wondered what he did all day besides sit around and wait for death. Clearly, not water his ferns. He walked up the short driveway two doors down, near the end of the street, and went inside through the cluttered garage adjoining their house. Mom wasn’t in the kitchen as she usually was, and he couldn’t hear the laundry running. The basement door off the hallway was wide open, so he set his backpack down and walked over to the steep and creaky wooden stairwell. He saw her coming up the stairs with a large, overstuffed cardboard box full of gaudy Halloween decorations, and stepped out of the way. She brought it up quickly and set it down in the corner with a loud clatter. —Oh hi, Mom, I was just won— —Paul, I’m glad you’re home! Do you think you could get Milton out for me? —Get….get Milton? Okay, do…do I bring him up here? —Just put him in a chair in the foyer. Paul walked down the stairs slowly, one by one, to the dungeon they called a basement. It was dark, lit only by a small, grimy window up near the ceiling across the junkinfested cellar, and by a feeble, naked bulb on the ceiling. There were unused bed frames, old chairs, boxes filled with Christmas ornaments, a dirty, empty tank whose scaly occupant was long since deceased, an old golf bag, an outdated set of medical journals, an ugly old rug that no one wanted, and many forgotten objects with no discernible purpose. He made his way to the far corner, clawing his way through the debris of time. In the darkest corner of the room was a large cardboard box about as tall as his waist. It

read “Evenflo.” Paul approached the faded, yellowish box slowly and looked down at the thing inside. The thing in the box was Milton. The legs were bent at sharp angles and the thing leaned forward with its face against the box, the exposed spine not so different from those of lesser creatures that might crawl inside a box and die. Its arms hung limp and understandably lifeless. Sticking out of its cracked, dirty gray skull was an ugly rusted screw about the size of a pencil stub. Paul grabbed the screw on Milton’s head, slowly lifted it out of his cardboard coffin, and set it down on an old chair that looked like it might date back to the Civil War. It was creaky and broken, but so was the skeleton. It couldn’t very easily sit up straight, so Paul let it slouch against a box of abandoned, yellowing paperbacks. Its legs looked relaxed but unnaturally twisted, the bones all loose in their sockets, held together by springs and screws. The feet were askew, and the toes were stiff and tangled. The arms hung dead and limp as a dead man at the gallows, and the fingers were curled and bent in different directions like the twisted, knobbly branches on an oak tree. A few of the ribs were broken and hung from one of their iron wire joints, and where there ought to be cartilage connecting the ribs at the center there was some kind of disgusting brown matter that Paul convinced himself was indeed synthetic. All that remained of the skeleton’s face was the lower jaw suspended by long springs with a few yellow teeth, and the haunting upper edges of the eye sockets. He saw straight through the skull to the twisted spine, and above that only darkness where the brain would have been. Paul felt a shiver run down his spine, looking at that horrid thing. —Milton. But no, that wasn’t right…Milton was

the name of the lifeless skeleton. At one point, Paul thought, this was a human being. Milton was a lie. The person wasn’t even really a man, which his father could tell by the wide hips. It had once been a woman. She hadn’t been very tall… Paul knew the facts, the terrible truth, the real reason they had the skeletal remains of a human being in an old box in their basement. But he could not help wondering …was it really just time that killed her?

Suppose she had died young? Suppose…. All at once Milton was no longer a skeleton, but a decaying corpse of a human being. Her name was Sarah Milton. She was a beautiful girl of nineteen, with dark, shining hair and warm, bright eyes. No one in the world cared in the slightest when she died—

was it a crash, or a murder, a suicide? She died lonely and unwanted, and someone—was it the killer, or a relative, or simply a passerby?—put her bloodied corpse in an empty box, and left her there to rot and decay, her gaping eyes pecked out by rodents and her clothing sold and jewelry stolen, her flesh wrinkled and shrunken and brown, her once shining hair lank and tangled, a veil to mask her time-scarred visage, anguished and horrifying, leaning face-first MIKE MCLAUGHLIN against the box, spindly legs haphazardly bent at awkward angles to fit in the box, arms that hung weary from lack of use in life, with no one to embrace but death, the joints of the hunched spine more and more pronounced, until all flesh was rotted away or eaten by creatures that feast upon the dead, and the bones lay there in that box forgotten, until they were at last discovered, by people that neither knew nor cared for her any more than they had when she was alive. Standing silent in the dark, filthy basement, looking at Sarah’s remains, his mouth and eyes cold and frozen, unfocused, his heart beating with terror at what becomes of us all, Paul found the thought of dragging her up to be a Halloween decoration unbearable—and so he left her in the dusty, forgotten darkness where skeletons belong.

Actress

Kevin Kickham Her step is right in time to music as the bright stage lights find beauty in planned tears. The right words always come out of her mouth with perfect hesitation or the slightest ease— whichever her director likes the best. Afraid of who she knows she has to be, she constantly becomes someone she’s not. The house lights flood into her startled retinas and faces start appearing in the crowd, but none familiar, from her former life. Companions from on stage abandon her for groups of loving friends and family. Now speechless and unsure what move to make, she slips into hopelessly wistful dreams, auditioning for yet another life.

SAM MCCABE

JACK MIMLITZ

She’s the Girl Phil Nahlik

She’s the girl everyone wants to love. She swims in and out of all their dreams like summer to a hopeless schoolboy. As she smiles, they expect more and more. So she gives, but what does it bring her? Supposed friends and more senseless drama. I wanted to make her life perfect, to keep her away from her problems. But maybe all she really needs is some sushi on a Sunday morning.

WILL LINHARES

No, You Boys Never Care Collin McCabe

he reads his number—the one he gave her the night before— from the crumpled Pizza Hut receipt. She remembers not his name, only his pale blue eyes. His voice rings in her ear as she stares out her bedroom window. Startled, she speaks, but he continues. False alarm. His name is Charlie. He can’t answer his phone, but he’ll call her back if she leaves a message. “Um, hi. This is Jessica. From Kenny’s house last night. You gave me your number on a receipt. You might not remember me.” She pauses. “Call me back. I love—I mean, I’d love to get to know you.” As she sets the phone beside her, Jessica nervously runs her slim fingers through her hair, wondering how she might explain that she doesn’t actually love him.

Point

Michael Blair

Up In Smoke, or Any Other Haze Joel Geders

How much of my life has gone up in smoke? Are there days left in my tar-filled lungs? It seems coughs and raspy wheezes of my innocence are all that remains of my breath. How many years has it been now since I took my first drag? Two? Yes, I think it was two years ago today. Two years ago today since grandma’s mind fell, since she became bound to that chair and I stood watching our family collapse around it, dashing into a cloud of nicotine and cannabis for support, warmth. Two years ago since I got in the car that morning and told Mark, “Give me a hit of that cigar. I need a damn break.” Two years ago since I saw many hands wave goodbye to me, “That smoker. That bad kid.” I can still remember being told how my friends inquired about me, they asked “Hey, what’s Joel been up to? I hear he’s a dumbass pothead now. Figures. He was an idiot for smoking in the first place,” each question, each abandonment pushing me further into that haze which encapsulated me. I would like to think I was a victim of circumstance, that it was not my fault—another normal man under extraordinary pressures But no, nothing to blame other than me, the man who willingly walked into that cloud of smoke inhaling all I could, picked up that pipe and hit away. Is it maybe that I was meant for this fate since birth? Grandpa Joel started smoking when he was fifteen...I share his name...does that mean this was meant to be? No, no, it could not be that. I could not look her in the eye again if that were true—for that would mean I share his fate; that day she tells me she will never forget: At his funeral she cried, could not bear to even glance at his casket—Joel dead black- lunged consumed by his own smog. The day she saw my smoke she cried—and that look she gave me, was that the same look she gave her father’s ravaged face as she stared at his dead body lying still in a hospital bed, December 20, 1978?

And Miss Patty—with her candy eyes and party-perfect lipstick, how her chalky toes tipped on the shiny wood and her fingertips which swung and bowed on her head. She’d glide and bend and blow kisses. She had a voice that sang. But what Ms. Patty really had was passion. It snuck in from someplace unknown, elastic energy hidden so deep you wouldn’t know it was there until she touched you with fiery fingers and the wind breathed and asked you for a dance. Some girls had always had it. They had ruby smiles and perfect posture, grace like golden sun. Linda had to search. She tapped her toes at school. She perfumed her hair and walked straight and upright. She stayed up late and scratched the leather of her pink shoes clean with a flickering bulb as her only light. But she found it.

ointe class, mom. Finally. Pointe class and Pointe class.” Linda tipped her head out of the Volkswagen and into the thick July air. Her matted blonde hair came down in sunny strips. “Can you believe it? The best Sunday there ever was.” undays were for a different kind of worship. For Linda, a different kind of everything. Different smells and different dreams, a different tingling in the toes that started early in the morning and then spread, shaking her blue braces like static shock. It was ballet day. The green Volkswagen would roll and rumble eastbound on Highway 61, past pines and picnic tables, past the gray steeples and into the rising sun. And ointe class. Yeah, Miss Patty came up and slowly, after miles of farm fields and low ware- “ told me I was ready. That it was only for the houses, the buildings would begin to grow. Downtown Milwaukee took shape—colored best of the best, and we have class two times a and tall and full of promises—like a carnival week and we go on trips and everything. It’s a tent rising on the horizon. Linda rode in the big deal, Mom.” “Oh, I know, honey.” Mom’s red hair was backseat, eyes closed with dreams of gowns and grace, of “Swan Lake” and the perfect curled up in a bun and she stirred a pot of soup. Linda sat cross-legged on the mustard pirouette. They had arrived. The Chinese restau- linoleum tiles, looking up to the gas lamp rant, the shoe-shiners and newsstands were on the wall. Mom bent down to give her a as familiar as a curling Woolworth’s coun- steaming cup. Linda didn’t sip. Instead, she ter, a cup of Campbell’s soup, or the latest lifted the cup and let the heat rise and fill Beatles record. And there, on the corner, her cheeks. Dad sat alone in the living room was Miss Patty’s Dance School, the home of where Walter Cronkite beamed in and told heaven, where fame and beauty glowed in the of a man on the moon and foreign lands on lights. Six years of Sunday trips and still the fire. “And we’re going to have to talk to your same magic spread from the mirrored walls dad about it.” Mom’s blue high-waisted trousers slipped and the silver ballet bar the way it had the first day. Linda felt it in the cool air, in the past Linda’s head on their way to shag carpet swift breeze of her pink crinoline tutu, in her and brown leather chairs and Dad. And over smile. She felt it in the knees dropping, the Cronkite, they hushed and whispered and shoulders snapping in place, the whole body suddenly Linda felt dizzy in the yellow light dipping and diving, fancy-free and alive and of the kitchen and her stomach was tight and the unknown hung in the air like a line moving like music.

“

of stars drooping and moaning, spreading the notes of their nightmare songs over the stony rooftops. Mom called. “Linda? Sugarplum? Could you come in here for a moment?” The soup cup struck the floor and Linda’s toes and their pink nails skimmed across the tiles and tugged on the brown shag. She moved to take her floor seat but, before she could, Dad took her hand and led her into his warm lap. He loosened his tie and spoke. “Look, honey. Your mother and I couldn’t be more proud of our little ballerina going somewhere. We’re so happy. But times are tough right now. And Pointe class means more gas and a new outfit and trips. We just can’t afford it. I wish we could. More than anything. But we can’t.” She didn’t move. Somehow she had felt it coming like the cool wind before the rain. That Dad worked all day and sometimes nights, that school was taking more time, that time itself moved quicker and quicker and never stopped to breathe and smell and tilt its head up to see the long, blue sky. But it still hurt. They had put a man on the moon, so why couldn’t she have Pointe class too? Why couldn’t Sunday mornings also be Tuesday nights? Or weekends in a faraway place? It all seemed so temporary and

unfair and she hung her head down and cried in Dad’s lap. And he circled his hard, friendly hands around her bent back and minutes passed and no one spoke. She wanted to be free of it all, to move and scream at the dark, dark night. She wanted to skip and slide through the city and throw away her broken dreams in a bucket of rain and burn, burn, burn like the midnight AUSTIN POLLOCK men who appear out of the black with smoky eyes and the prairie wind on their backs. She wanted to do something wild. Outside, it had started to rain—Linda could hear the humdrum tap on the kitchen windowsill. She sat still and silent for some time. Then she rocked and rocked and she bent her fingers and tipped her cold toes to a point, measured and delicate on the brown shag. Dad’s hands circled and tapped her back. And Linda thought of the summer they spent on the lake, where she and Mom had rolled in the rich earth and she’d danced to the beat of the land, the great moving spirit that lived inside everything. She lifted her head up and her eyes fixed on Mom, who leaned in with crossed legs and big blue eyes. Linda put her hands on her chin and pointed up her runny nose and Mom’s curled, red hair looked as warm and undying and dreamy as the sun.

Trade Winds Michael Dienstbach

Oh, library, I have spent a fortune in Your wooden chairs; invested so much time In hopes that I would find a fine reward. The relics that you hold, encased in glass, Surround us. Golden Buddha sends us peace; The Zulu shield wants to keep us safe and sound; The zig-zag Pueblo pots can hold our dreams; The little moccasins will keep us warm If we want to lay down Hamlet for a while And sail on that pirate ship toward England or the lands from which the relics came. If only we conceive of what’s beyond The Upper Field, Oakland, Forest Park; Outside the upright windows by the chairs. If only we can realize how farOff destinations can be reached if we Just spend our time in this one spot. I have done all this and now I wait To see if I have bartered enough knowledge To fill my sails (they are poised to go).

GREG FISTER

Maggie

’m not in a hurry to go to college,” Maggie said, “My brother told me that you think you have all the time in the world to do your work, but the truth is you have no time for anything, really.” “It can’t be that bad. What do you think you’ll major in?” I asked. “Psychology. My parents are both psychoanalysts.” “Wow. I’m sorry.” “What’s that supposed to mean?” “Well, when my mom isn’t reading about Christianity, she’s reading about developmental psychology, so when I don’t feel like a heathen, I feel like a basket case. I can only image how your parents are.” “No, they were never too bad,” she said. “Although, that reminds me of an old joke,” I said, “There were two behaviorist psychologists who were having sex, and afterward, one turns to the other and says ‘Well it was good for you, how was it for me?’” “Thanks for the image.” “Oh, right. Sorry.” I took a drink to avoid saying something else. “So what do you think you’ll major in?” she asked. “I’m torn between Physics and Creative Writing.” “You sound like you’re avoiding the question.” “I am.” She smiled and paused briefly. “So there was an English professor and a Physics professor who were having sex, and afterward, the English professor lights a cigarette and says ‘Damn, there goes another novel.’” I’d heard that one before. “Someone’s been watching too many Woody Allen movies.”

“

Mike Tynan

“Fine, you caught me. But then the Physics professor turns to the English teacher and says ‘Well, I thought it was wonderful. Too bad we were contributing to the heat death of the universe.’” I laughed and glanced around the basement. “You’ve obviously been hanging around too many of these Jesuit guys.” “Yeah, that’s for sure. I’ve never known so many people to use the word ‘sinusoid’ in casual conversation.”

fter Dylan had introduced me to Maggie about five minutes earlier, I watched him slowly talk his way into other groups of people, leaving the two of us alone in the middle of the party. I hated when people played Cupid, especially guys. He had a history of setting me up, and every past encounter felt artificial and forced so much that Dylan began to look hostile, tossing me haphazardly into bland conversations and nightmarish dates. In the past, I imagined Dylan in a war room á la Dr. Strangelove pushing figurines across a table covered in maps, until small plastic likenesses of girls and I faced each other, one on either side of the Russian front. But this time felt different. Dylan had been going out with the same girl for a year and a half now. He and Laura seemed like the happiest couple in the world. When they would tag along to see a movie with some of my friends, they would hold hands the whole time in line. They would bicker for a few seconds abut who got to pay once they got to the window, but they always decided to split it. I saw them a few times tossing popcorn at each other during the opening credits. Out of the corner of my eye about halfway through the movie, I would catch them making out. Even when we saw the midnight show of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre the night before Halloween, they were tonsil deep in each other.

“

not sure which is my favorite,” I said. “I’m a big fan of Love and Death, but being raised on Monty Python has made me a sucker for philosophy jokes. What about you?” “I’d probably go with Sleeper,” Maggie said. “It’s fun to think about all the things that might go on 200 years from now.” “Like jet packs and orgasm machines?” “It’s the American dream, right?” “I think I came into this conversation at the wrong time,” Henry said. I didn’t notice Henry come up next to me while we were talking, but now his presence, like always, was unignorable. Henry was the kind of guy who would laugh and slap you on the back just a bit too hard if you made a joke. His stomach ballooned in front of him, but he tried to conceal it below his white Missouri Athletic Association hoodie. Almost every week, he had a different girl on his arm. He introduced me to the blonde girl next to him at the moment. Rachel Decker. I had never seen her before, and if Henry’s romantic history was any indication, I’d never see her again. Henry’s basement hosted several parties every semester, and from the few I had attended, I had gathered most of what I would ever need to know about him. His room was one of the side rooms in his basement, branched off from the main room with

the black leather couches and his monstrous flat screen television. Posters of girls in bikinis on beaches covered every wall in his room, but he had taped the one he favored most to the ceiling above his bed. Rachel looked like someone had ripped her off one of those walls, shook the sand off her, and put her in only slightly less revealing clothes. Her dirty blonde hair rested on the shoulders of her tight white sweater. Her jeans seemed a size too small, and when she leaned on Henry’s shoulder, she crossed her Ugg boots, one CLAYTON PETRAS over the other. I tried to avoid Henry most of the time, but he seemed to seek me out in the hallways and at parties just to pretend to be friendly. We would talk and joke casually and very briefly until one of us could find an excuse to leave. Our conversation that night carried on typically. “So what have you been up to, man?” he said. “Just being lazy, really,” I said, “I haven’t done much the past few days, except sleep and watch hockey.” “Oh, no shit! Did you watch the Winter Classic yesterday?” I started to reply when he craned his neck to look over my head. He shouted above me, “‘Sup, Greg! Hey, I’ll catch you later,

man,” he said, patting me on the back once and leading Rachel across the room. I turned back to Maggie but kept my eyes on Henry’s back. “All right, bud. Good talk,” I said. Maggie laughed as I invited her to grab an open seat on the brown suede couch across the room. She led the way through the crowd, planting her grey Converse in open spaces between circles of friends, weaving through the crowd like a soldier in an obstacle course. I watched the spiraling tangles of her fiery red hair bounce as she hopped a little to wave to a distant friend. She glanced back at me before sitting down gently on the couch and crossing her legs. I sat next to her as she adjusted the white scarf accenting her black turtleneck, and looking back at the crowd in front of me, I thought briefly about what to do next.

old on,” Maggie said. “You’ve never been ice-skating?” “Well, I went once when I was three, got five stitches in my chin, then decided I liked standing on things with a bit more friction.” “Oh, c’mon. You were a little kid. Little kids would find a way to fall down even if you glued their feet to the floor.” “True. But the whole idea’s a bit strange when you think about it. I wonder who the first guy was to go out on a frozen lake, strap knives to his boots, and think sliding around for a few hours was a good idea.” As I was talking, Tim walked out from the mob of people in front of us, smiled widely and said, “Well don’t just sit there, give me a hug, you bastard!” I stood up into Tim’s embrace, then introduced him to Maggie. Tim was the type of guy to hop from group to group during a party. We had been friends for years now, and I knew Tim as a series of explosions of decreasing size. When we met sophomore year,

“

Tim was out drinking and roaring around town every weekend. He held on tightly to Sarah during all his escapades. They met at a community theater production of 42nd Street in the orchestra pit. He and Sarah both played trumpet. On weekends, they laughed together one bottle after another, and they held each other by the waist as they shuffled down Delmar Boulevard, singing jazz tunes loudly into the night air. Tim would try (I say “try” because he missed a few times) to jump onto a lamp post like Singing in the Rain for the climax of each song. I watched him hop countless times onto a corner streetlight for the finale of “Feeling Good,” his favorite song to howl drunkenly in public. Ignoring all other pedestrians and onlookers, he would hang over Sarah, holding her hand in his, and belt out, “It’s a new dawn! It’s a new day! It’s a new life, for meeeee!” Junior year, Tim found out that Sarah was cheating on him. He appeared no different when I saw him at school, still joking around, but he stopped hanging out with the rest of us on weekends. I started seeing more of him at the start of this semester, but he hadn’t had a girlfriend since Sarah. And I doubted I’d ever see him singing in the streets again. Tim and I talked briefly before he disappeared back into the mob to find another group of people. As he got up from the couch, I took my phone out of my pocket to check the time. 11:26. I told Maggie I had to leave since I needed to get home by midnight, but it was great talking to her. She gave me her number and hugged me before I turned to cross the room toward the staircase. I opened the front door, and the night air immediately stung my exposed face and hands like a swarm of wasps. I shoved my hands in the pockets of my black wool coat and squinted, walking briskly to my car and thinking to myself what I should expect for us.

Birkenau

Ben Minden-Birkenmaier Seeing the multitudes below, he climbed a mountain, And sitting, spoke the sacred word. The inscription above the gate said: “Work shall make you free” Well, that’s what the sign below it said, we couldn’t read the German. The Man on the Mount said: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall inherit the kingdom of heaven” The buildings where they were kept looked like oversized rabbit hutches, and still smelled like them too. The God in the heights said: “Blessed are the meek, the pure in heart, those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness” Where the gas chambers were, there was only rubble. Bricks like teeth, a grinning maw below hollow eyes. He spoke again: “Blessed are the Peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God” I heard they rounded up the Peacemakers with the Jews and Homosexuals and gassed them. “Blessed are you when men shall revile you and persecute you, and say all manner of evil against you, for My sake” I heard they crucified Him, but I didn’t see any crosses, Only the bashed in, grinning skulls of the gas chambers.

MIKE MCLAUGHLIN

The Poorest Matt Bettonville

Their homes are stitched together: scrap wood, box springs, and broken glass unite to sculpt a shelter. Small chickens in the yard go scavenging, but there is not enough to feed the kin. The children kick a ball around on dirt, that tops the trash-heap road and cakes their faces. Still, fathers brag about their sons’ great plays, and laugh beside them when the game is done. “How can they keep on smiling with this lifestyle, like they can’t even see how sad they are?” But I’ve seen their smiles that prove success, survival; perhaps it’s we who live despondently. We can’t appreciate a meal expected. We can’t take pride in waking up again. We can’t find satisfaction in achievement when failure means less comfort—not starvation. They know fulfillment more than I can find. They know from slaving days just to provide today’s meal—nothing more. They live amid a constant struggle to improve their lives, and do so honestly through sweat and work. When I get stagnant, static in my life, I learn from those I thought I came to help.

To an Unknown Sibling

E 54

Brian Gilmore

ver since she was a little girl, Angela was fascinated with the night sky. At bedtime one night, when she was only four years old, Angela asked her mother a series of questions, questions that the young one would ask her mother again and again, until the day she stopped and her mother became very sad. “Will the sun come back tomorrow?” she asked, gazing out her second-story bedroom window from her twin bed. Over the branches of a barren elm she could see that the night was clear and a string of stars dotted the sky. “Of course, honey. It always does.” Her mother pulled the covers up to Angela’s chin. Angela turned her gaze to her mother. “Why does it go away then?” “The sun needs to sleep.” She brushed Angela’s frizzy brown hair out of her eyes. “Just like little girls.” “Why does the sky turn purple and orange and green when the sun goes to sleep?” “That’s called dusk.” “What’s dusk?” Her mother paused. “It’s when night

and day touch hands and, just for a moment, dance together and light up the sky.” “Do you think one of those stars is Susan?” Angela pointed out the window. “Yes, honey.” Her mother gulped, looking away from Angela and toward the window. “Yes. I do.” Angela squinted her eyes at her mother. “Then where does Susan go during the day?” Georgia turned away from her daughter, tears welling in her eyes. “Flies around the world and makes sure that all little girls stay safe.” Angela thought PHIL NAHLIK for a moment, her mother’s words floating through her head. Then she crawled out of bed and grabbed a lone purple candle from the Advent wreath on her dresser across the room. She brought it over to the bed and laid it on the blanket next to her mother. “Can we put this in the window, Mom?” “For what, Ang?” “Just so Susan knows which house is ours.” “Of course, dear.” Georgia walked over to a drawer and pulled out a pink-tinted glass candleholder and a matchbook. Arranging the candle on the sill, she lit the candle and sat back on Angela’s bed. Angela smiled and crawled back into the bed, pulling the covers up to her head. “Goodnight, Mom.”

Opening Act Rob Bertucci

She stands straight, stage lights hitting the waist of her pink dress. The dark form of the audience shifts, murmuring, unaware of her presence, waiting for the main act. The guitarist strums the first chords of the song, and silence pushes its way through the hall except for a few inconsiderate conversations in the back. Knees locked, eyes closed, she waits for her entry. She is in fifth grade once more, on the gym floor, and the school music teacher smiles at her and strikes up the piano. The first note of the solo washes over the crowd, her arms tight against her body. The room remains unsure, dark, as she sings motionless. “Yeah, Kate,” a face calls, and she laughs as her hand slowly descends to her waist, then lower, touching her thigh and the frills of the dress. Her laughter echoes through the speakers, and her hips begin to dance with the lightened air.

Some Victory

MIKE MCLAUGHLIN

Eric Lewis

J 56

im sat at his desk with his copy of Revolutionary Road open on his desk but his eyes on the clock hanging from the opposite wall. The minute hand was between the two and the three—at thirteen minutes he guessed— giving him a little less than two minutes left until the end of the day. Someone was talking. Ah, it was that chubby kid in the front row with the buzz cut and the sparse beard. The one who said “like” every other word and never had the correct interpretation. Hartenbach, his name was. The girl next to him mirrored Jim’s hidden sense of boredom. Her cheek lolled against her hand, and a little flesh scrunched up near her eye because her head had slowly been slipping for the past several minutes. If the class were even a few minutes longer, her head would probably fall with a loud bang against the desk and wake her. Jim liked this girl—whatever her name was. He knew her only from class, and during class she didn’t appear very bright or attentive. In fact, her most defining characteristic was just how nondescript she was, but something about her caught his attention. It was probably the fact that she sat right next to that idiot Hartenbach. Juxtaposition, Mr. Titchener would have called it. The bell rang, and Jim rose as did the entire class, including the girl next to Hartenbach, if a little groggily. “Okay, class,” Jim said. “I want you to read chapters six and seven by Thursday, and there will be a quiz as always, so please read it everyone.” A few students were already walking out the door as Jim spoke, forcing him to raise his voice and follow them to the door so they would hear him in the hallway and not have an excuse in two days when they hadn’t read

it. He was shocked every time by how quickly those kids could pack up their things. A few others then squeezed past him before he realized he was blocking the door and sheepishly ducked away. They muttered goodbyes as they left, and he answered with a bit more bravado. The room empty, Jim returned to his desk and put his book in his backpack and then hefted it over his shoulders. He found it humorous that he still woke up every morning to pick up his backpack and trudge toward school with a heavy look. He, a grown man, more than grown, already dying, albeit slowly. This book was really starting to get to him. “Sorry, but—Mr. Titchener?” a tentative voice asked. Jim turned back towards the door and saw Ed, a kid from his first period A and C day class, standing there. Ed was a senior of average height, but his vivid orange hair and dinner plate eyes made him seem childlike. Jim liked calling him Eddie Haskell in his mind, never aloud, more out of embarrassment because of his old age than anything else. He had the hair for it, but the name really was unfair besides; the kid was just a genuine, heartfelt suck-up. There had been a time when Jim had walked into class on a Thursday morning, and Eddie had said, “I like that shirt, Mr. Titchener. It’s my favorite of yours” or something of the like. Then again, after they covered “Root Cellar” in class, blindingly earnest Eddie had commented on the five o’clock shadow “lolling obscenely” from Jim’s cheeks on a Monday morning as he had passed Jim in the hallway. Jim had been so shocked by something potentially offensive that he had to ask the kid to repeat himself. Eddie had sputtered and skittered away quickly, afraid that he had crossed some invisible line, the boundary between himself and the teachers and authority figures to whom he assigned so

much—what was the word?—sanctity. Jim himself had been the same way at his age. “Yes, Eddie. What may I do for you?” “Well,” he started, looking at the floor and unrolling his hitched-up right sleeve. He was always nervous. “Since you are my favorite teacher and are teaching my favorite class—” “I don’t really like where this is going,” Jim said, donning a smile. Ed looked to his face quickly, but Jim’s smile calmed him enough to return his eyes to the floor. “I was hoping you’d be willing to write a recommendation letter for me.” Jim waited a moment before replying and contorting his arm through the other of the backpack’s straps. “Where are you applying?” he asked. Ed let out a quick sigh—he was probably hoping for a quick answer, Jim thought—and said, “Grinnell. I want to double-major in English and education so that I can teach while I write on the side.” “So that you have a reliable income while you’re waiting to be published?” Jim asked. It was a question to which he already knew the answer, because Ed was following the pattern Jim himself had once followed. “Yes,” Ed said, looking up to Jim’s face again, his own face flushed with excitement at the thought of a kindred spirit that understood the path he had chosen for himself. Jim didn’t share his excitement. He had gone too far along that path to be excited to find a follower. He knew that although it seemed plausible, teaching others to read literature critically and write effectively while trying to write your own literature, it was damn near impossible. After a day, week, or school year spent retreading the same books you already know so well and pointing out the same key passages and motifs to a new interchangeable set of faces— once you manage to learn their name, they’re

gone, and a new set of strangers takes their place; even when the old ones visit, they’re improved and in some better place and only serve as reminders of opportunities lost— and poring over hundreds of pages of text, red pen in hand, the last thing you want to do is sit in front of the computer, or typewriter, or notebook—it doesn’t matter—and face that terrifying blank page. “I did the same thing when I was your age,” Jim said. “Really?” Ed’s eyes, wide now, as if he had been thrown a jersey in exchange for his answer, rose again to meet Jim’s. “Really,” Jim answered, chuckling. He hadn’t received such love and devotion since his college days. During his second field experience while working on his education degree, Jim had taught a few classes of language arts and tutored students one-on-one at Barbour Magnet Middle School in Detroit. “I know you don’t like it, but you can’t just not do it,” he had explained to one little black sixth grader, Kyla. He remembered the exact words because he had grimaced inwardly at the double negative. At that point, Kyla, her dark blue-ribboned braids bristling with belligerence, asked some defiant question about the need for quotation marks, but Jim adamantly insisted she rewrite her story, a rather enjoyable narrative about a girl named Kapiolani whose “parents’ car was hit by a train and a pole went through them” (a direct quote). By the end of a week of daily half-hour sessions, they had completed the story, and by the end of his month there, she had come full circle, shushing others who talked during small group sessions and inciting her actual teacher’s anger with excessively long daily journal entries. When Jim hugged her goodbye as he left the red brick building for the last time, Kyla told him proudly that she now wanted to become a teacher. Jim now wondered vaguely if

she had ever succeeded. “Just send me an e-mail with deadlines and addresses, and I’ll write it,” Jim told Ed, whose buck-toothed smile had dimmed during the long pause. “Thanks, Mr. Titchener,” Ed beamed, shaking his hand with a good firm grip before leaving. Jim’s eyes followed him to the door and

settled on the bit of wall above the frame. Accusatory white letters shouted the words of Horace Mann, the great educator, from the poster’s indifferent black background: “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity,” Jim sighed, picked up a pen from his desk, and followed Eddie out of the classroom. JOE QUINLAN

Universe of Reading Conor Gearin

Once I was adrift— the book-planet caught me, made me a satellite the closer I got, the greater the gravity.

I thought I was alone in the orbit but suddenly a fellow satellite whirred by, and I knew there were others, and that I was not to be proud. Later I realized how undeveloped the planet was— Even from high up in the orbit I could tell, I looked off to space, saw the other galaxies and sailed off. I was sailing, lofty and proud, among the titanic planets, of imperious scarlet and deep indigoes, their mere continents brought shame upon the other, smaller worlds. It was then I fancied I could form my own planet. After orbiting each classic in turn, and meeting their bold satellites, I scrapped together scantlings, bits of the older planets; it collapsed before it was formed. Humble again, I sighted a hospitable planet not far distant, orbited once, and then, for the first time, landed on the surface. I learned the makeup of the planet, got lost in the alleyways of its sprawling cities, met its people, every subtle shade and size of character. For only then could I understand where they had come from— behind each character of thought and words living flesh elsewhere in the universe— their Author had shaped them in the likeness of those he had met in his journey. Now I have learned I cannot build merely with the scraps of the great, but must journey for myself, seeing all I can, let hurtling asteroids catch my own small gravity, matter diverse enough to be integrated into something larger. And they can only come together but of their own accord, my purpose only to sculpt the face of the continents while processes far more grave and elemental hold the core together. But will these little bits and scraps ever fuse together into something solid? And even if they do, even if they do, will any of the satellites visit, in this vast universe of reading?