Stillwater 2015 by Stillwater EIC

STILLWATER Literary Magazine 2014-2015

Cover Photo The Greenhouse by Kimberly Nicolas

THE

STAFF Alexandra Vasteno

Meredith Clarke Alexis Powell

Rachel Drachman Kelson Goldfine Jared Povanda Irene Yeh

Emma Sheinbaum

Justin Le

Gabriella DeGennaro Grace Rychwalski

Emilia Scheemaker Tommy Maher Kellsey Evers

Marisa Wherry

Robert Hummel

Derek Marinaro

Gabe Sylvester Charles Hess Irene Yeh

Nicole Maturo

Kimberly Nicolas Brenna Williams

Jill Weisman

Katie Marks

Editor in Chief

Assistant Editor in Chief

Director of Promotions & Events Nonfiction Editor Nonfiction Editor Nonfiction Editor

Nonfiction Reader Nonfiction Reader

Nonfiction Copyeditor Fiction Editor Fiction Editor Fiction Editor

MC / Fiction Reader Fiction Copyeditor Fiction Reader Poetry Editor Poetry Editor Poetry Editor Poetry Editor

Poetry Reader

Art & Photography Editor

Assistant Art & Photography/Web Editor Layout Editor Layout Editor

Faculty Advisor

A NOTE FROM THE

E D ITO R S I remember receiving Stillwater in a thick yellow envelope as part of my acceptance into the writing department. I peeled open the cover in excitement knowing this was what my peers were creating. I thought maybe this could be me someday and realized someday wasn’t so far in the future. The editor page listed less than ten names and each year it’s been an amazement to watch that list grow. This year the number of submissions we received surpassed the year before, and the year before that, and our staff has doubled with it. To me it is a sign our voice is also growing. Our staff has valiantly taken on this load with enthusiasm, and I couldn’t be more proud of this final product. The most important goal of the magazine to get voices heard, creative ones like you and me who deserve to publicize. I’ve seen firsthand how people come out of their shells at our events, reading aloud to a group of peers, putting themselves out there when they may not have otherwise. Those moments are what makes this experience so special. In addition to the magazine, we are working to expand our online presence. Visit us at icstillwater.com for more information about what we do and to view even more content. We are excited about the future of the website and incorporating different media into it. Whether or not your work was accepted into the magazine, know your effort was seen and we encourage you to submit in the future. Even if your voice shakes or you get rejected, we appreciate everything and are always impressed with the talent we get to witness. Every decision we made in the selection process was a tough one. I believe we found a unique group of voices that we are all truly delighted to share. I hope in these pages you are able to find a source of inspiration and motivation.

Keep creating, Alexandra Vasteno Editor in Chief

TABLE OF

C O NTE NTS Imperatives from Sistas in the 70s by Charles Finn Poetry..................................................................................................................................................... 6 Sergeant Flowers by Sam Kamenetz Poetry..................................................................................................................................................... 8 Falling into Place by Anna Fay Nonfiction...............................................................................................................................................9 Memory Lesson by Chris Rose Poetry..................................................................................................................................................... 12 Clarity by Marisa Wherry Fiction.................................................................................................................................................... 14 Old Recipes by Natalya Cowilich Poetry..................................................................................................................................................... 19 Princess of the Root Vegetables by Samantha Salloway Poetry..................................................................................................................................................... 20 Ink by MacKenzie R. Snead Fiction.................................................................................................................................................... 23 Love: Lions and Dinosaurs and Bears by Samantha Brodsky Nonfiction...............................................................................................................................................30 Education by Meghan Cafarelli Poetry..................................................................................................................................................... 34 Moonwalker by Alexis Farabaugh Poetry.................................................................................................................................. 35 Going Home by Rose Munsey-Kano Fiction.................................................................................................................................................... 37 Seven Different Lovers by Madeleine Van Dam Poetry..................................................................................................................................................... 41 Shedding by Aimee McManus Nonfiction.............................................................................................................................................. 43 Why She Prays by Taryn Pire Poetry..................................................................................................................................................... 46 Confirmation by Tuck Dowrey Fiction.................................................................................................................................................... 48

Imperatives from sistas in the 70s by Charles Finn

back in that ole st. mary’s schoolyard just behind the chapel we was always taught one thing, and one thing only, “every sentence gotta have a subject” so one day... when sista scratched “study hard for the test” on the chalkboard i raised my hand i raises my hand and i says, sista, that sentence don’t have no subject! and every sentence gotta have a subject! and she just looked real cool and mean, crossin’ her arms and she says david, that sentence do have a subject but sista i says, no it don’t! david, that sentence’s subject is “you” but sista i says, there’s only predicate and she says, every sentence gotta have a subject david so i wallow back down in my desk chair thinkin’ bout it before i give it one more go ahead sista i says, if there’s a subject on that sentence it ain’t visible to the human eye! and she says david, that sentence do have a subject... and it ain’t visible to the human eye but sista i says... and she says david, here at st. mary’s we learn a lot that ain’t visible to the human eye and that sentence do have a subject

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Dinner for Elephants by Ryan Somelofske

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Sergeant Flowers by Sam Kamenetz

made in the offices of the afterlife, and a drift his roots prevented him from dodging.

Private Boltansky isn’t what we’d call “soldier material” but a draft is a draft is a wind that whisks able-bodied men into foreign lands. It blows over villages with mortars and bullets in hurricane force, leaving bodies in its wake.

The medic thought Boltansky was better suited for photosynthesis than combat, but he’d rather have him stay human than become a flower once more or god forbid, a vegetable. So the soldiers and the medic dragged off the man who would forever be remembered as Sergeant Flowers.

In a whirlwind of shrapnel and shouting Boltansky dove from cover as his own grenade rolled back towards him (for sometimes, the most dangerous thing is a half-hearted throw). He found himself in the eye of the battle, bringing his rifle to bear with the safety still switched on. His commander hollered his name when he wilted underneath the rattling thunder of enemy fire. God must have a great love for innocent fools. When the battle blew elsewhere the medic found Boltansky humming in that ditch, clutching the ragged red blossom on his hip. As morphine drip met bloodstream Boltansky told the medic he secretly believed he had the soul of a daffodil and his current state of being was the result of a clerical error

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Falling into Place by Anna Fay

“Now this part is important. Make sure…” I’m not nervous, I’m not nervous, I’m not nerv… “As soon as we exit the plane I want you to…” Does this mean I have to keep my eyes open? “Pull the chute when the pressure reads…” I HAVE TO PULL THE PARACHUTE? Well, that’s terrifying! Why am I doing this again?” “Ok, are you ready Anna?” Are you ready, Anna? * I can feel a long chain of unconnected thoughts tangling around my mind as I write in a foreign dialect during anatomy and physiology class. Everyone else seems unscathed by the assault of indecipherable words while I feel defeated. “The action potential is propagated along the sarcolemma…” I’m not ready for this test, or that lab quiz, I think to myself. “You should all know this by now.” I’m not ready for any of this. My professor, who doesn’t look much older than fourteen in his oversized flannel shirt and khaki shorts, makes a small mistake as he writes out the steps of ECC (don’t ask me what that stands for). The class corrects him almost immediately in unison.

The atmosphere hands me an espresso shot, frothing with blustering winds and lake-affect snow, as I tread on the ice-glazed pavement. Lana Del Rey is whispering in my ear about summertime and how it makes her sad and heartsick while my tear ducts feel frozen shut. I imagine if the frigid air didn’t burrow beneath my skin and leave my muscles sore from all the shivering, I would stream and spurt like a rusted water can because like Lana, I’m feeling sadness of cinematic proportions. It’s almost ten at night and I’ve walked the campus perimeter twice now. I can’t feel a majority of my body but I also can’t stop walking. Not until I know I’m not stumbling and blindly tumbling into a future I can’t navigate. Not until the universe understands that I don’t want to feel lost anymore. * After my instructor gives me a five minute lesson on how to properly fall from the sky, I sign a paper that basically states my family will not sue if I die while crashing through the air. He mentions something about arching my back and pointing my toes upward and what I should do if by some evil act of the universe he goes into cardiac arrest mid-air. I think he draws a shape on the white board but I can’t be sure because at this moment, my thoughts are on a free-fall of their own. They keep interrupting what I’m sure are very important instructions.

What I would do for a crowd of people who knew how to correct my latest mistake. *

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A seasoned hippie with luscious locks and loose cotton trousers stuffs a mess of string and parachute into my pack. He seems too relaxed and blurry-eyed to be assembling my life line. Yet despite the fact that his lackadaisical approach has flicked the turbo switch on my already fluttering heartbeat, I can’t help but admire him for his calmness. I walk down the makeshift red carpet that leads to the small plane I’ll be free-falling from, flashing my mum and dad a nervous smile as they stand at the sidelines. My instructor and I sit in the back corner of the plane, leaving space for a troop of wacked-out adrenaline junkies who walk with the strut of celebrities on Hollywood Boulevard. They all shake the life out of my hand, asking me if I’ve ever done this before, smiling even wider when I laugh nervously and tell them this is my first time. My instructor begins to fasten himself to me as the plane jolts upwards. My stomach feels like it’s been shaken and stirred one too many times. * I drum softly on the edge of a large round table in Clark Lounge, anxiously slouched as the hour hand of the clock above the door frame creeps towards eleven. I’m completely alone in here because as of late, my muddled head feels like a foreign-exchange student amongst the company of the sharp-witted minds of my friends: friends who haven’t changed their major multiple times or questioned their future. No one worries about them. But everyone is worried about the girl who can’t seem to make up her mind, overwhelmingly lost and unsure within the confines of her ‘safe’ Public Health major. Just like every other night, I try to map out the nonsensical workings of my

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brain through artful doodling as I stare hopelessly at a blank screen, unable to draw the inspiration needed to write about melanomas and programedcell death. I think I’d rather write a poem about shoes. * One of the crazies in a tight black biking suit munches on an apple as his leg casually dangles out of the open door of the plane, the strong spurts of high-altitude wind electrifying his bones. His alarmingly wide smile intensifies the shockingly white undertone of my skin as I nibble on my freshly- balmed lips. I’m festooned tightly to my energetic instructor as we shuttle towards the gaping, wind-soaked hole I’m about to disappear into. The solo jumpers exit the plane first, forming a conga line of vibrant shades as they plummet towards the ground. The late spring air pulsates with a frenzied Bollywood beat as we inch closer to the edge of the door frame. My instructor tells me to fold my arms in the shape of an “X” across my chest, gives me one last pat on the back, and begins the countdown. Five…four… * I write about soles filled with wanderlust, and clumsy clacks and caffeinated clonks. I write about burning puddles and eating the sun. I write until I realize I’ve started falling from the monochromatic comfort of science and guaranteed employment, teetering on the edge of a thick and bubbling frontier where writing is the only thing that keeps my mind alive, and flushed, and interesting.

Graphite smudges, alliterations, a bursting mind, an exploding truth.

Three…two… I call my mum and tell her all I’ve ever wanted to do is write.

With a yank of the yellow lever, I jolt aggressively upwards. The parachute deploys and the wind stops rushing. I’m floating now above sparkling bodies of water, and splotchy trees, and bumbling hills, and high-reaching mountains. I feel as big as the universe.

ShitshitshitshitshitSHIT My friends tell me they’ll help me find a cardboard box. My classmates tilt their heads in confusion. My mum’s voice falters. The individuals policing my life are ready to pull me over for drunk driving because my life path is spiraling faster and faster off the beaten trail.

Up here, gravity seems to defy its own laws, carving out a clearing in the sky so I can set camp amongst the clouds. It lets me fall so beautifully slow that my mind has time to shake itself dry before I’m expelled into a marbled frontier where falling is entrance into something spectacular. And thankfully, up in this inverted ocean of electric blue, spectacular is a destination where maps are clouded, roads are skewed, and directions are meaningless.

My instructor yells “One!” and we fall like shuttling acorns. I dive into the spangled unknown and change my major to writing.

With the scribble of a pen, I can feel myself plummeting without restraint into the clouded arms of something extraordinary.

The first three seconds of the free-fall are wonder fully terrifying. My lips grow instantly chapped as the cold torrent of wind slaps my face numb. I walk around campus for close to an hour, shivering from the cold and the wonderfully terrifying aftermath of my epiphany. Rushing, tumbling, swirling, plunging, tripping at sixty miles per hour.

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Memory Lesson by Chris Rose

Air—light transfixed mid-flood—fills the lungs with ice. Dunes of hunched snow cut by wind (once; now silent) swell and choke like waves on the ocean floor— taut-skinned and crooked, the branches shutter the sky’s (voiceless apparitions break from furled clouds) blue expanse. My skin blurs. My scarves come loose in the cold and green magenta scrolling blue in the leaves (shells float patternless on gray branches) while across the heath snow shapes like frozen geese flock and clump-white islands shingle the rooftops. Your hand calls up from grass clutched in the hill’s basin. Your nose-pink face nuzzled by earmuffs and wool, the black camera strap on your neck. The woods rise around us. Quiet, shallow breaths. Photographs flicker—as if to freeze a frozen world, to trap the mute forms before they forget. To suspend footprints in ink (coiling oilslick) and watch the pages change to water—lucid, impossible fragments of time swallow the wind and leave only light.

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Sierras by Keith MacDonald 13

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Clarity by Marisa Wherry

I sit motionless against the edge of the drop. The eagles swoop down into the crevices between the pines, their wings dominating gravity; eyes squinted into determined slits, talons hungry for prey. Fearlessly they sail over a sea of dancing leaves, flapping from the trees, which anchor them down, anchor them to the branches, and the branches anchor themselves to the trunk and the trunk remains sewn into the floor of the valley. But the eagles remain unhinged, impeded only by strong gusts of wind, briefly pushing them down and back until they catch on and conquer the air again. If I leaned over just a little in between the rails, set my torso off balance with the rest of my body, my heavy legs, I could grace the current like the giant birds, arms perpendicular to my torso, diving into the ocean of forest life beneath, floating among the leaves like balls in the old county fair’s fun house pen. When I was a boy, Mom would take us to the county fair and I would swim through the ball pens like a plastic fish, trying to kick my legs in an attempt to catch up to my older brothers. They would taunt me, throw plastic balls at my head, the only part of my body above the surface of rainbow ornaments. “Too slow, you’re too slow, Henry!” My mom would come over, fish me out, and give me a piece of candy, usually a lollipop, and tell me not to worry about it. I would take the lollipop and smile at her, and she would know I was okay, and we would go watch the dancing bears and elephants in the other corner of the car-

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nival’s tent, where other little kids and their moms stood holding hands, right behind the tilt-a-whirl that I was a couple inches too short to ride. The sun grazes across the top of the tree line, red and orange paintbrush streaks across the sky reflecting onto the pines, replicating a purple hue over the majestic dip in land, a pallet of colors meshing together, running into each other, stronger reds dominating shy blues. I could feel a trickling of people gathering to watch the sunset. Most of them stay away from the edge where I sit. Directly sideways a couple leans against the railing, taking a picture of themselves with the valley behind them. Maybe they will frame the picture. I always thought framed pictures were nice. I had some at home of my parents and I, I think we were at the Jersey shore. I was probably five or six, on my dad’s back, giving him bunny ears, and my mom was standing next to him laughing at the both of us because my dad probably knew exactly what I was doing and letting me get away with it. That was one of the best days. No single moment stuck out, but a golden simplicity shined over our time there, the sun leaving nothing untouched. We went back every year, until one time my dad got lost on the beach. Hordes of sunbathers decked out in neon bathing suits and visors crowded the shore, but my red-haired father was not among them. We thought he had gotten pulled out to sea, waves dragging him to the deep waters by his toes. The lifeguards went searching for him in a boat. I ran miles each way on the beach to find him. Finally, we discovered him arguing with the 14

ice-cream man. He was yelling at him to “turn the goddamn twinkle tune music off.” He almost got exiled from Long Beach Island. He was 53. The other framed picture I have is of my dog Lola. A small blue and orange bird hops up and down on a nearby branch. It chirps rapidly, perking its head up in different directions, small black eyes narrowing in search of someone. An eagle flies overhead of the tiny bird, and he gazes up at the huge wings, fierce beak, breaking off his searching song. I watch a bunch of ants in a tiny crack in the rocky surface carrying a piece of bread some little kid had torn off of his sandwich. The boy is just sitting there, tearing apart his peanut butter jelly. His mom finally notices and confiscates it, yelling at him for being wasteful. The ants don’t think it’s wasteful. The ants are loving this. They’re going to throw a party when they get back, crumbs for everyone, free of charge, and they’ll sing and dance and maybe find some spilled drops of whatever that lady over there is drinking and they’ll really have fun. I used to be the bartender at my fraternity, not every night and not for the whole night, because we all took turns. But the bar has the best view of the whole party. Everyone twirls to the music, alternating from Janis Joplin to Jimi Hendrix to The Who, the girls’ skirts whispering through the air, the girls who wore those low bellbottoms flashed their tattoos. The guys nodded along to the music, dancing with girls whose skirts brushed their ankles and hair hit the ceiling, but they really wanted the girls decorated with tattoos, the rebellious ones, the ones their parents wouldn’t approve of. But my favorite part was watching the party change throughout the course of the

night. People show up, acting cool and collected, greeting everyone they know even if they barely remember each other’s first names. After another hour or so everyone becomes a little more friendly, the first guy leans in to that girl in the corner over there. A little more time passes by and suddenly the whole place is packed—you can’t move without touching someone else’s sticky body, and the only breathing room is the little spot behind the bar, a lookout tower for the planes in the air, making sure everyone avoids disaster, no fighting in our house please, and helping everyone to have a very relaxing flight from reality to a more surreal world. One night a girl with short curly blonde hair and deep brown eyes came up to the bar a couple times to get drinks with her friends, the wave of new girls, fun girls, girls who got stoned and drank beer and protested the war. She bit her lip like she was trying not to smile at some inside joke she kept from the rest of the world. A tattoo of a sparrow adorned her upper back with its wings spread, which is how I remembered her when she came up again without her friends. “What can I get for you?” “How about a dance,” she grinned mischievously, as if she was breaking a bunch of unspoken rules just by asking me. Her smile stretched widely across her face, her dimples dancing on either side, and her light blue-almost-gray eyes shined like intense pools of mercury, confident but with a hint of caution, as if she secretly feared I might say no to her request. The wind bullies the trees again, rattling them from their peaceful slumber in the bed below the mountain. It blows dirt up from the dry ground of the peak where I’m sitting. People behind me start to leave, head back to the parking lot, pack

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But most of the time, I’m stuck playing chess and reading books over again and swimming in the community pool. Sometimes Luke tries convincing me to move out to Chicago with him. He says I need to experience more, “reactivate my social life.” I joke about how I would hate to deal with that much wind, but he knows why I won’t move away. Even when I can’t remember a lot of stuff, I remember that for some important reason I can’t move away. The thick tremoring sky rolls towards me and below the leaves shake as if trying to uproot themselves. Lightning shines threateningly behind the mountains in the near distance and the sky groans as if it’s cracking itself in half. Soon the fuming clouds will lose their temper and spill over their boundaries, becoming vengeful sky sprinklers that try to drown the valley of its beauty. She hugged me really tightly one night before we climbed in bed. I asked her what she was doing. “Remember that I love you.” “I love you too, darling.” I thought maybe she had just been reminiscing about the past, looking through the photo albums of the years after we had met. She held me the whole night, and I held her back until she fell asleep, and then I turned over and shut my eyes. I never could sleep while cuddling. The next morning I tried to kiss her awake. She wouldn’t open her eyes. I refused to let them trap her underneath the ground. So instead they burnt her body up into a million different pieces and handed her to me in a thick plastic bag inside a heavy cardboard box. I couldn’t bear to spread her out somewhere, dissipate her remains throughout the earth, lose her for good, so I transferred her to a prettier encasing, a purple vase, something she would have admired in one of those home living stores but wouldn’t have

up the cars and the coolers, buckle the kids in. I sit on the edge of the cliff. I think some people are concerned about my presence near the edge, they think that I’ll roll right off, but I just like sitting here. The drop doesn’t scare me. This view, this height...there are scarier things. She woke me in the middle of the night, she cried out so loudly. On the way to the hospital I tried to keep my hands steady on the wheel and hoped she didn’t notice they were shaking. I didn’t think she was paying much attention to me because she remained head turned, looking out the window, breath fogging up the glass. I started shaking a little more. I had forgotten a jacket. When we got there she told me to get a wheel chair and stop shaking, I wasn’t the one having contractions. I got a wheel chair. We named him Luke, which she would have avoided if she knew how many ‘Luke, I am your father’ jokes I was going to make. He thought the harsh, raspy voice I used to imitate Darth Vader was funny, until he became a teenager and spent the majority of his time playing video games and trying to grow facial hair. He tried telling me I wasn’t cool anymore, but he was obviously confused. Star Wars jokes never get old. The clouds in the distance darken as the last signs of sunlight hide behind the mountains. Branches lay bare of chirping birds now, as the impending storm sends them to better hiding places. Sometimes Luke visits me, brings his kids with him, and his wife Lorie, who I have always really liked except for her shrill laugh, which somewhat resembles the neighing of a horse. Also shape of her face is quite oblong, which doesn’t help the horse-like laughing situation. When they do come to visit me we usually talk about the same things, the Phillies, the weather, that time Luke got caught eating the cake Aunt Sue made for after Christmas dinner, the kids’ school, Lorie’s work.

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were waiting for something in the first place, much less who they were waiting for. “Henry! Hi Henry!” the friendlier voices shout. I put a lot of effort into forcing a convincing smile on to my face. In my seat by the window, next to Lawrence, I take out the photograph and rub my finger over the dents from the handwriting on the back, pressed and pressed over again. In the picture she is about thirty. At this age she was convinced that she had lost her best features and gained only stretch marks from pregnancy, but I thought she looked more beautiful than ever. The bus pulls away from the park and the scenic overlook falls away to dense forest and further highways and big green direction signs. The road we always take contains a lot of bumps, and balding heads bob along to the bouncy flow of the bus. “Watcha got in your hand there, Henry?” Lawrence asks. I look down at my hand. A picture of an attractive woman, maybe late twenties, with curly blonde hair and a piercing stare meets my eyes. I flip the picture over. On the back “Claire” is written in jagged print. Where have I heard that name before? “Maybe a girl I used to know,” I shrugged. “She’s pretty. Think you got lucky?” “If I have her picture, she must have liked me,” I smiled. “Yeah, man,” Lawrence jabs me playfully in the side. I look around the bus. “Do you know where we’re going?” “Home. We’re going home.” I sit back in my seat. I don’t think Lawrence is lying to me, but if we are going home, I should feel happier than I do right now. For some reason I’m sad. Maybe the Phillies lost earlier. But I just can’t remember.

bought because I didn’t buy her flowers all that much. I used to have framed pictures of her. Dozens, I would keep them everywhere in the house, so she was still with me wherever I went. Now I just have a tiny 2 by 4 print that I can look at when I remember. On the back her name is written in my scraggly handwriting. The rain soaks through my brown plaid shirt and worn blue jeans. I sit on the edge, imagining the valley transforming into a river, the water rising high so I can jump into my own personal pool, my own sea, where I can float along by myself. Or I could sit here forever, until my bones grow into the soil and my torso sprouts branches and I become another tree, like all of the trees down in the valley, but I’ll be watching over them and they’ll feel safe. Not that they have anything to worry about, they just like flowing around, but they’ll still appreciate the gesture. I don’t think I would look like the other trees anyway. Maybe my branches would be a little more crooked, or my leaves a slightly different shade, or my bark a little too soft. “Henry!” I hear a voice shout. I shut my eyes and hope it disappears. “Henry! We’ve been looking everywhere for you!” Two strong arms pull me up from the edge, push me back into my chair that I had discarded hours ago, and wheel me over the hill to the waiting bus. “What have we told you about wandering away on our group walks? We don’t want to have to suspend you again.” I nod understandingly and feign regret, and they forgive me almost immediately, probably out of pity. Everyone has already boarded the bus, and some of them scowl at me for making them wait, but most of them have already forgotten that they

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photo by Robert S. Hummel

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Old Recipes by Natalya Cowilich

Despite everything, there is still a thin layer of snow that will pile up slow like a quilt in progress, threads on threads stretching into white hills making it easier to see where the nuthatch met the fat grey squirrel under the spinning suet holder which revolves like atomic particles banging like a solar system on someoneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ceiling with other half-empty bird feeders; or maybe they are half full, sparrows and leftover barn swallows would like to see it that way. By the end of the night the land will be made up with quilts on quilts on quilts. The rifle is gone from the vestibule, my grandfatherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s orange hat is somewhere in the basement, there is still pumpkin pie, somehow. There are still Johnny Gold apples peeled naked with paring knives thrown into a pie, given to my grandmotherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s oven. There are still nutcrackers in the window and love in our measuring cups, still the wisps of Ukrainian accent in the way she pours the can of milk into the little bowl, and despite the terrifying paradoxes of postmodernism, our crises are replaced by old recipes, familiar faces, and everything that has ever come before us from which our bones and our words combined have grown.

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Princess of the Root Vegetables by Samantha Salloway

Ants or crumbs long enough And far enough There she’ll be Waiting Waiting For that single drop of Rain that will bring her Tiny, shriveled form Back to life. Little root girl Little seed Little potato Little turnip, With blackened eyes that Don’t see Cannot see Forgot how to see Clogged with dirt Simply unable, Wash her clean please, She needs to be clean Little princess of the dirt And of the root vegetables, Daughter of the seedlings that Have fallen on Unfertile earth Like in that Bible story She can’t remember.

Little crumbs Little ants Leading back and back to Someplace I used to Know where the someone I once was or Maybe thought I’d Be still lies, breathing Deep under the soil still Waiting to take root, Lost without any notion Of which way is Up And which way is Right Or Left Or here Or whole Or happy. . Maybe she is there, A tiny seedling, And if I follow the Little trail of

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Untitled by Christina Davis

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photo by Andrew Ronald

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Ink

by MacKenzie R. Snead “You’re letting him watch this?” He looked down at his phone, checking for text messages. “Alec?” “What?” he finally answered, his voice bellowing. “The episode’s almost over.” He could see her rolling her eyes without even looking at her. Those eyes that scanned his entire life for judgment like a hawk for a rodent. “That’s not the point. What is this?” “SyFy Channel. You telling me he can’t watch SyFy?” “No, Alec, he can’t. I told you he could watch The Incredibles, or Nemo –” “He always watches that cartoon crap! You stick it on replay for the entire day. It’s about time he watched something real.” Danni rubbed her face. “Alec, I trusted you with him tonight,” she said, her voice harsh. “I told you I couldn’t be here. Work ran over and –” “Here we go again.” He hated it when she did this. The same old sob story about how much work she had had to do and how stressed she was—it was a daily routine. “Listen, we were having a good time,” he said, standing up. “And then you come in here and break up our bonding time –” “Oh, is that what it was?” Danni raised her voice, reaching toward Alec. “‘Cause it looks like the only thing you’ve been bonding with tonight is a bottle.” Her fingers grazed his as she grabbed for the beer in his hand.

Owen was shaking. Alec could feel his trembles from the other side of the couch. “Hang tight, little man. It’s just getting good.” “Are those aliens, Daddy?” Owen asked, staring wide-eyed at the blue fanged characters on TV. He sat next to him, but out of arm’s reach. Even though Alec was more than a little drunk, he noticed the large middle cushion his son let sit between them. Alec had already patted that cushion multiple times inviting Owen to come closer, but the boy would merely scoot an inch or so, only to move back to his original place shortly after. “Probably. They’re usually that or robots,” he slurred. Just then a light shone into the room, traveling across the wall then vanishing. “Hey, watch this next part!” Alec said, trying to divert Owen’s attention away from the car lights and back to the TV, but the boy was already on his feet and running to the back of the house shouting, “Mommy’s home!” Alec took another swig of beer while the creak of the backdoor echoed through the house as Owen and Danni’s voices simultaneously greeted each other. “Hello, baby!” said Danni. “Why are you still up?” “We’re watching TV!” “You are?” Heavy footsteps started to approach the living room. “What are you guys watching?” Alec turned up the volume on the TV as Danni walked into the room.

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Alec watched Danni as she slept, wondering if he’d ever be allowed to touch her again. His eyes scanned her tattoo sleeved arms and the rest of her body. It was then that he noticed something new peeking out from beneath her tank top. He carefully reached down and pulled up the shirt. It was a black sun, shining its rays from her navel. He was sure he had never seen it before. What was this now, tattoo number twelve? She had had it done in the exact spot where he had hit her the other night. Right to the stomach. He’d punched her like she was a man. He had never done that before. He needed to make sure he didn’t again. He hoped he wouldn’t do it again. He ran his thumb softly over the sun. It stared up at him accusingly, illuminating his guilt. Danni opened her eyes at his touch. He stopped his thumb somewhere above her bellybutton, staring down at her. There was a held moment of breath, then she rolled over and went back to sleep. The next morning he walked Owen to school. He texted his friend Rudy first to tell him that he wouldn’t be going to his party that night. He wanted to stay home. “Keep up, Owen,” he said as they sloshed down the snowy street. The boy was lagging behind, and Alec wasn’t sure if it was because of the snow, or something else. He slowed down for him. “Everything okay?” he asked as Owen dragged his way up next to him. The boy shrugged. “What are you learning in school?” “About the ocean.” “Oh, that’s fun. You love the ocean. Want to be a shark, right?”

Alec seized her tattooed wrist, strangling that snake around her arm, feeling an all too familiar rush of rage spread through his entire body. He wanted to throw something, to hit her as hard as he could, but first he said, “Owen, go to your room.” Owen had been clutching at Danni’s leg this whole time. She looked down at him, seeming to remember he was there. She looked back up at Alec, then said, “Go to bed, baby. I’ll be up in a minute to say goodnight.” Owen went upstairs. Danni Butler’s journal – Dec. 3. Couldn’t bring myself to start Xmas shopping today. I’m so behind on it but there’s just too much going on. Went and got a new tattoo instead. The bruise had faded enough for no one to notice it. Can’t see it at all now. Alec was shoveling the driveway when I got back. I know it’s his way of saying sorry, but he’ll have to do more than that after what he did the other night. Besides, he doesn’t do anything around here. Shoveling snow isn’t that much of a chore. I don’t know why I’m still here. I told myself to pick up Owen and leave if Alec ever got violent, and here I am, too afraid to run away from this old house. I can’t shake the belief that Owen should be with his father. Alec may not love me, but he does love our son. I always thought that no matter how much Alec and I might wound each other, Owen would always be a sort of tourniquet to stop the bleeding. I’m beginning to doubt whether that system works. Is it right to use your son that way? Alec has never hurt Owen, but if he ever did, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself.

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He took out his phone after dropping Owen by the school door, reopening the chain of messages he and Rudy had been sending back and forth. “I’ll be there,” he typed.

Again, Owen just shrugged. That wasn’t like him. “What’s up, little man?” Owen looked up at him with a face that was remarkably intelligent for a boy his age. Alec stared back. The two of them were clearly trying to wear the other down until he caved, and in the end it was the boy who crumbled. “Mommy said something this morning about you . . .” “Oh yeah? What did she say?” He tried to seem unsuspicious, keep his voice light. It was hard to do. Owen stumbled over his words. “She said . . . she said I’m not like you . . . that I should be proud of it and never try to be you.” Alec’s fists clenched inside his pockets. “She said that this morning?” “Yeah, when she woke me up before going to work.” Alec felt that familiar heat rushed through him again. It had been five days since he had hit her. Five days in which he had tried his best to apologize. He had shoveled the driveway. He had bought the groceries. He had even stopped eating meals in front of the TV. And this morning she tells his own son to never look up to him. Was it because he had never actually said the words, “I’m sorry?” He knew those words would not soften Danni. What more did she want? He had married her after she had gotten pregnant. That had been nine years ago, when the two of them were only seventeen. He had tried to love her then– had even thought he did love her–but it had been a hopeless wish. It was no more possible for him to love Danni than it was for Owen to become a shark.

Danni Butler’s journal – Dec. 5. Alec still hasn’t come back. He was gone all day, missed dinner tonight, and he won’t even answer my messages. Owen’s teacher had to call me to pick him up from school this afternoon. I had to leave work early. I asked Owen what he and Alec talked about this morning but he won’t say anything in particular. I fear either Alec’s found another reason to get mad or he’s gotten into some kind of trouble. I need to stop worrying about it and get some sleep. It’s been a long day. Going to finally start the Xmas shopping tomorrow. No clue what to get Alec. The creak and slam of the backdoor woke Danni up with a start. It was early morning and the sun was just beginning to peek through the window. She listened as the heavy footsteps dragged their way from the back of the house to the living room. Only when the sound of the TV reached her ears did she know for sure that it was her husband. She scrambled out of bed and went downstairs. Alec was seated in his favorite spot on the couch, clearly very tired, and very drunk. By the look of his wet clothes, the same clothes she had seen him put on yesterday morning, he had fallen in the snow. His left hand was bleeding. The smell of alcohol wafting off of him was overpowering. “Where have you been?” she asked hesitantly.

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remote control across the room and getting to his feet faster than any drunken man should be able to. “Should never try to be me? What kind of thing is that to say to your kid, that he should never be like his father? Who’s he supposed to look up to? You?” Danni tried to shush him but Alec kept on going, ushering her into the wall. “Ever since he was born you’ve been slowly taking him away from me, and I won’t let you do it! You took my life! I won’t let you take his!” “I took your life? If I remember correctly–” but what she remembered she never got to say, because just then Alec seized her by both shoulders and slammed her as hard as he could into the wall. Danni felt the surface crack behind her as chips from the old ceiling littered her head of hair. Her eyes were closed and her whole body was tensed as blow after blow cut into her, spreading across her body like needle injections. She knew needle injections and the pain that came with them, but these almost tickled more than they hurt. She could never stand being tickled. Her leg shot up. Was it an involuntary movement? Possibly. Her knee made contact with Alec’s stomach. She heard a grunt and felt a hot breath of alcoholic air hit her face as the tickling pain stopped. There was a crash and a thud. Then everything was quiet. Danni opened her eyes and saw Alec spread across the living room carpet at the base of the TV. He had clearly fallen into it. The characters on the screen were still moving but their two dimensional forms were cracked and misshapen. Her back felt as if it were about to break. She slid down the surface of the damaged wall and stared at the motionless figure on the floor. Was

“Ah, yes, the judging wife comes to scold the drunken husband for being out so late past curfew,” slurred Alec. “Not to scold–I was just worried,” she said. “Were you now?” He looked at her through half closed eyes. The smell coming from him was like nothing she had ever smelled before. It was like stale food that leaves a bad aftertaste in your mouth before you even swallow it. “Yes, I was. Where were you?” “At Rudy’s place, drinking a bit of this, doing a little of that, making all kinds of friends.” His face curled into an almost boyish smile. “I don’t know, off making a bad example of myself, maybe?” This comment made Danni want to scream, to kick and slap him in his chair, to pull her hair out, but she shouldn’t act on a single one of those impulses. That would only give Alec the excuse he needed. “Well, why weren’t you here? I had to leave work and pick Owen up at school. I made dinner for all three of us but you never showed up. You could have been here, setting a good example for your son.” She inwardly cursed the bitterness in her voice. She had not meant for it to come out. Alec raised a finger. “Ah, now the question is why can’t I be a good example for my son, hmm? Maybe you know the answer? Or, maybe Owen does.” Owen had told him something, she was sure of it, but decided to take the road of precaution. Fighting fire with fire never won over Alec. “I would never take away a chance for you to be there for our son,” she said, holding up her hand at chest level as a sign of peace. Alec looked drunkenly up at her, and she saw the monster swimming in his drowning eyes. “Not like me?” he shouted, throwing the

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he dead? Was the man she had married gone? She listened… No, he wasn’t gone. She could still hear him breathing. Part of her was relieved, but the other part knew she had to get out. “Mommy?” said a voice above her. She looked up and saw Owen standing at the top of the steps, silent tears cascading down his face. Of course…he had heard it all. He had never missed a single thing. She climbed the stairs as fast as she could and held on tightly to her son. “We’re going,” she said as she carried him into her room and picked up her car keys. They could pack up the rest of their things when she came back for them. She would bring her father and her brothers. As she was about to leave the room her eyes fell on her journal, looking up at her from her beside table. She grabbed it and fled. “Is Daddy coming with us?” said Owen. “No, baby, he’s not.” She made sure Owen was facing the wall as she carried him past the scene in the living room and out the backdoor to the car. It was a gusty morning. She started the engine as soon as Owen was safely buckled in the backseat and she was settled in the front. Pulling out of the driveway and down the street, Danni didn’t look back at the house she had lived in. She didn’t look at the nosy neighbors who had clearly heard the shouting and were now coming out of their houses. She didn’t really even watch the road. What she couldn’t keep her eyes from returning to was the bottom of her hand resting on the steering wheel. Protruding from the top of her sleeve was the head of a snake, its fanged mouth opened wide to devour. Inside her sleeve, the rest of its body circled around her wrist. It had

been the first tattoo she had gotten, after a night Alec had twisted her wrist too hard. She brought the car to a standstill, wearing out the stop sign at the empty intersection at the end of the street. “What is it, Mommy?” said Owen from the back. Her eyes left her wrist and fell onto the journal lying in the passenger seat next to her. She had thrown it there and it had fallen open. Its inked pages stared up at her. “Mommy,” came Owen’s little voice again. “Why aren’t we moving? Are we going back?” Danni opened her car door, aggressively seizing the journal as she did so and tossing it out onto the black tar of the street. She put her foot on the gas. “No, baby,” she said. “We’re moving.”

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AprilStillwater by Alexis Lanza Magazine

Love: Lions and Dinosaurs and Bears by Samantha Brodsky

L Listening to the lull of waves as the sun radiates off of the ribbons and rolls and spirals of water that curl into themselves like cursive penmanship reaching off the page.

I am four years old. I have a helmet of curls that makes my tiny head look like a mushroom. My favorite food is Cornflakes with chocolate milk. I am infatuated with the shiny Oreocolored shoes that sleep in my closet, black with creamy white straps. I call them my “party shoes” and stomp around in them like I’m squishing bugs with every step. My favorite part of preschool is the naptime I’m given, and I spend these minutes exploring the Crayola-smeared collage of my eccentric cranium and digging for gold in my nostrils. The love of my life is a big magenta and green dinosaur who goes by the name of Barney. He sings to little boys and girls (like me) about sharing with each other and caring for one another, and I will do whatever he tells me to do. Because I love him. And he loves me, he tells me so. And we’re a happy family (he tells me this too). I love him because he loves me, and that’s that.

Letting yourself slip slowly, slowly away from the night’s burdening hold and gliding ever so swiftly like the drip drip dropping of water into the first slender wisps of whispering serenity.

Lies, little kids, long talks, longing, lust.

* * * Love according to Dictonary.com:

1. a profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person. 2. a feeling of warm personal attachment or deep affection, as for a parent, child, or friend. 3. sexual passion or desire. * * *

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I am thirteen years old. I’ve just started wearing a training bra, and I think I’m the shit because I can call myself a woman (yeah, right). I’ve also just started wearing my hair down to school and applying thick lines of black around my eyes for the first time (I think it’s super sexy). I can do more push-ups than almost all of the boys in my grade, and I’m damn proud of it. Maybe more than I should be. I’ve started drinking coffee because it makes me feel sophisticated like taking-longdrags-of-a-cigarette-walking-down

Love (noun)

As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once. -John Green

the-streets-of-New-York-City-in-high-heels-withthe-wind-brushing-the-waves-of brown-away-from-my-faintly-crimson-cheeks kind of sophisticated. I spend the midnight hours chatting with many other middle schoolers online, faceless conversations masked by computer screens and fake confidence. His name is Leo, the boy I love (like the lion). Before we sign off and shrink back into our quirky adolescence, we daringly send each other little hearts. These hearts, these tiny red icons of pulsing, overwhelming passion, beat for each other. We talk for hours on end about everything, and I walk the halls of school chanting his name over and over again in my mind as blue cartoon birds swirl around my head like a halo. But of course, whenever we lay eyes on each other through the swarms of our puberty-bound peers (and through those rare few who are products, or rather prisoners, of premature puberty), we do not utter a single word. We simply gulp like dumbfounded, flapping fish. But we are in love. I swear.

i s

s n

in all their freeness, in all their flexibility. Offering yourself up, unclenching your distressed, white-as-snow knuckled fists and surrendering to the moment, to the here and now that squeezes your hands reassuringly with the danger and risk and joy that courses through your veins and dresses your entire being in an undeniable glow. Obligation, ongoing traffic, on days, off days, odd days. * * * We accept the love we think we deserve. -Perks of Being a Wallflower

* * * I am eighteen years old when I first meet you. I still wear thick strokes of black around my lash lines, but I think of them as works of art, and I think of myself as glamorous (but not the snobby kind of glamorous, the good kind). I am a fanatic when it comes to working out, and coffee is still my number 1 drink (and 2 and 3). I now wear a B-cup bra (moving up in the world, I know). I’m a writer. I’m a virgin. I’m also a freshman in college and live over four hours away from home. It’s a strange, new world, like trying to feel your way through a room that is pitch black. It’s terrifying. I’ve kissed three men here (Men? Ok, boys…I’ve kissed three boys). But when I lay eyes on you with your brown, mystery-laced irises, your joltingly handsome face, I forget about the others.

* * * Love according to Urbandictionary.com: Love 1. nature’s way of tricking people into reproducing. * * * O Opening up your mind like unwrapping presents, crisp paper peeled away to reveal thoughts of wonder that slip and slide like snakes and coil into themselves,

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really in love isn’t falling at all. It’s more like plummeting at full speed, crashing out of control. Better yet, that one person has all of it: all of your sanity, all of your fears, every one of your emotions in his pleading palms. And I have none of it. It’s like letting another use your heart as his own personal stress ball, squeezing the meaty pulp of your beating organ in unforgiving fists. But I feel more alive than I ever have before, as though I’m viewing my life in color for the first time, and you’ve brought the blurred reality of my surroundings into focus. But I realize quite harshly that all of this whimsical wonder can be snatched from my grasp in a mere moment. And there’s this relentlessly stubborn thing called doubt poking at my rib cage every time my heart is wounded the slightest bit (which is every goddamn day). It reminds me that just as easily as I’ve fallen in love, I can just as easily fall in hate. I can fall in jealousy, slip in doubt, and drown in ignorance. But it’s my first time, and so mistakes are bound to happen, right? (Wrong.)

They are as meaningless as pesky bugs that I have crushed flat from my memory. For I can’t help my curiosity, that sweaty-palmed, fluttering-heart, wide-eyed feeling otherwise known as desire. You know, that spark that makes you feel alive, like you’ve swallowed firecrackers? *

* * V Viewing the world, the little things, the big things, and everything in between with selfless appreciation, with eyes that have never before been so clear, so wide with wonder as though everyBIGlittlein betweenthing is transparent, translucent in its most innocent form.

Veiling your mind with the sweet salvation of security. You can b-r-e-a-t-h-e, inhale hale ex for you are at ease, safe from suffering.

* * * Love according to Wikipedia.com:

Violence, violets, vibrant, values, vacant.

Love

1. love may be understood as a function keep human beings together against menaces and to facilitate the continuation of the species. * * * E Embarking on a jolting journey that expands and crushes your life back into place like an accordion, mangling your every emotion, every tampering thought.

* * * Love is a serious mental disease. — Plato * * * So you, Teddy (like the bear), are a sure thing in my unsure, uncontrollable world of uncertainty. You are my first boyfriend. And my first lover. I learn that love is hard. There’s no hiding behind computer screens; there’s no easy way out of anything, and sharing and caring isn’t good enough anymore. Falling in love, and I mean

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Eventually finding your way.

Right now I’m raw still; I’ve never broken up with someone before. I feel the breakup in my fingertips, my knees, my chest, every bone and every joint. And when I think about what once was, I still feel that love. Feel it through me like a comb brushing through knotted hair. But it’s different now. Now it’s like I’m staring at this heart on a wooden tabletop or dented pillow or ashy sidewalk in front of me, glowing, pulsing red as it beats, and I’m watching that heart, my heart, from a distance. Now I feel as though my love for my ex is stretched out like taffy and is at the point where the candy is too thin, breaking in half. So it’s still there, but broken. And eventually it will decompose in the dirt speckled grass or evaporate into the breeze and will only be a whisper within a storm of blizzarding sounds. So, in simple terms, love confuses the hell out of me (as for most). It’s this thing that I cannot quite grasp. Like running your fingers through wafting smoke. It’s like I’m just trailing my feet while I walk hoping to leave a path for someone to find me in case my heart has stopped beating. Because love is scary when it’s fragmented with jagged edges, and it’s not warm and fuzzy all the time like Barney tries to trick the young, malleable mind into thinking. And so, for now, I’m working on it. * * *

Eternity, earrings, endure, everything, endings. *

The course of true love never did run smooth. -William Shakespeare

* * * I am nineteen years old now, almost twenty. My mind doesn’t work like a dictionary. I don’t have permanent-as-glue definitions for everything; my brain isn’t printed onto pinecone-smelling pages, words organized alphabetically in Times New Roman with explanations galore. Frankly, I don’t know what anything means. And so my mind is a chameleon when it comes to pinpointing the right words for “love,” what love is according to me. When I’m enraged, I think love is a wrathful leach that bleeds a person dry of any and all confidence. Happiness is shoved aside. But when I’m joyous, when I’m inspired, I think of love as floating in the cotton-puffed clouds, as dizzyingly wonderful. It’s all the disgustingly corny clichés that Hallmark lives off of rolled into one neatly (or, rather notso-neatly) wrapped package. It’s caring for another so much so that sharing your life with them seems as simple as walking, as effortless as breathing (maybe Barney’s “sharing is caring” spiel really does still apply). When it’s good, it’s really good, but when it’s bad, boy is it really bad. I’ve learned this through my very first breakup, a breakup I never thought I’d have, with my very first love. It’s weird calling someone my “ex,” a strange concept that still makes my tongue feel numb yet impossibly heavy behind my teeth. It’s like I’m crossing out memories and feelings and features on my face with thick, black sharpie. I’m trying to X-out and X-out and X-out until there is nothing but vacant spaces and dark holes.

If a writer falls in love with you, you can never die. –Mik Everett

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Education by Meghan Cafarelli

In first grade I got in trouble every day when my teacher thought I talked too much and focused too little and got nothing done at all. How much was I supposed to pay attention to cutting out little strips of paper printed with monosyllables? The cat sat in the hat, jumbled all out of order, had to cut and glue just to know what the cat sat in. I couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t cut straight lines, and the glue made my fingers stick. There were little cards, labeled with our names and colored per the season. Pumpkin orange during the fall months, each marked with dots. More colors. Symbolic colors. Green for good, yellow warning, and then the dread, the red that meant no recess. I remember too well that walk from my chair, hands sticky with the glue stick I could not master, sentence hanging above the table, unfinished, across the rug to reach my pumpkin card which I would flip from green to yellow as twenty-four pairs of eyes drilled into my back, smug that they were still seated with their paper words and prospects of recess still secure. Repeat, repeat, nearly every day until the urge to talk disappeared.

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Moonwalker by Alexis Farabaugh

Sometimes I sit on the moon, who also sits, but in the anesthetic space of time, and I take off my rose-colored glasses when I land because it’s already rosy here. I can watch roses bloom from the seeds of passing stars without needing another’s rosy cheeks or limbs to share radiation in the fleeting moments because I am joined by the sun. Gravel and grain on this terrain do not irritate my skin after I have stepped on its anatomy, the very torso people look to at night, because this place knows me better than the blue and green on earth. This land has shaken hands with my rose-colored heart and watched it pump each beat and watched me breathe each breath while I watched my home planet spin and spin with the inexplicable. When I want to return back to Earth the craters speak on the moon’s behalf and tell me, “You must go back, you cannot stay forever,” and I am presented with my rose-colored glasses and I read the inscribed temples: For you, a numbed reality. 35

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photo by Keith MacDonald Stillwater Magazine

Going Home by Rose Munsey-Kano

The sun beams down onto the empty foyer, bounces off the mahogany staircase, and drains out of the open front door. Blocking its path is a woman, tall and slender, standing in the doorway. She hesitates at the threshold. She knows that to enter the house is to solidify something she has been denying for a month, ever since the unexpected call from her parents’ lawyer, with his solemn words, and professionally apologetic tone. After a minute or so passes, she swallows a lungful of air, tenses her body, and takes a step. The first strike of her high heeled boots on the hardwood floor breaks the strained silence and makes her wince, but still she continues on towards the kitchen. The brown paper grocery bag doesn’t crinkle as Petra lowers it onto the kitchen’s granite countertop, removing a package of pre-made cookie dough. For a second she glances around the room, at how luminous everything seems. Even the beige walls had been washed and repainted an indigo blue, and there are no traces of smoke stains or peeling edges. She knows this house, and she immediately resents the false perfection. The coat of fresh varnish the kitchen table is hiding under disturbs her. She can remember every evening spent eating dinner in this space, always early, before her father would get home. The pungent scent of burnt potatoes and her mother’s cloying perfume have been masked by paint and Lysol. Every repaired aspect of the room secures an invisible bruise, in the shape of a palm

or a fist, more tightly to her skin. She feels a panic rise within her chest, even though she is the only one in the cavernous house. Her breath quickens, her fingers tense into fists and then straighten into steel rods. Petra moves towards the doorway, the cookies forgotten. She stumbles past the brass pots hanging from the ceiling, through the archway to the dustless living room filled with poufs and lounge chairs, to the wide, carpeted stairway. Her boots make no sound here as she scrambles, taking the first left and opening the second door she comes to out of habit. Inside, the room is bare. “Do what you want with it,” she had said. Now the true implications of her careless statement crash into her as she slides down the exposed wall, pushed by their weight. Why should she care? Maybe she had expected for her room to be the same as she remembered it the last time she was here, when she was sixteen. But the old twin bed is gone, its piecework quilt no longer slung over one side. The poster of teen pop star, Cole Burns, that she had hung by the window had been taken down, not even a patch of scotch tape left to remind the room it had once existed. Petra used to burrow under that quilt, shove a pillow over one side of her head to block out the noise of her father stumbling drunkenly around downstairs, and stare into Cole’s baby blues. She would imagine a world where only the two of them existed, happy. Not even Cole

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himself, Petra didn’t even listen to his music. She made up a personality for him that suited her. He simply lent her the flowing brown hair and dark denim jeans. When she looked at his coy smile, the realities of what awaited her downstairs would recede. Her father’s leer as he stood over her, sprawled on the floor. Her mother, silent and stricken, watching from a dark corner. Those belonged to a world where the other Petra lived. The real Petra was grown-up and free, and lived in a beach house with her lovely, ex-teen pop star husband. She hadn’t had time to take down the poster that night, much less room in her small duffel bag to take it with her. She wasn’t able to lovingly peel back its edges, roll it up neatly, and tuck it under her arm. A strong current of adrenaline had rushed through her, and sent her spiraling out of the house. Her father was confused at her confrontation, weaving back and forth under the kitchen’s pale light. Her mother’s face was still blank, even as Petra screamed. Her palm wanted to slap that face, wanted to make her show some emotion, any emotion. She can remember how the violent urge scared her, made her think maybe there was some of her father’s tendencies flowing through her veins. But Petra didn’t allow him the pleasure. Instead she careened up the staircase, ran to her room, and shoved her wooden desk chair under the doorknob. Her angry, resentful tears felt hot running down her cheeks as she packed, whirling about the room, ignoring her father hammering at the door, her arms beginning to blister from the chafe of his broad palms. She forgot the poster, even though it was her companion, something that had reminded her of an outside world and given her the strength to run. The worst part is that she

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will never know who finally removed it, her parents to more easily forget her, or the team who had made this house a project. She immediately thinks it was him, that he removed it to ensure her unhappiness one final time, but he probably didn’t care enough to destroy it, or even know it was important to her. “Ms. Donovan? Ms. Donovan!” The voice echoes from downstairs, wrenching Petra back into the moment. She runs her palm down the side of her right calf, sure she can still feel the way the rough roof tiles scraped her skin as she escaped out the window that night. Despite her heavy breath, she scrambles up from her position, wipes her face for tears that never arrived, and hastens to the foyer. A woman in a black pantsuit stands near the door, her scrunched face only emphasized by her scrunched hair, which she had attempted to pin back. “I take it you did not start the cookies. Did you remember to pick them up?” Petra nods her consent and begins to form a reply, but is cut off. “You know, I do think the house looks quite lovely. You wouldn’t think that only a month had been devoted to the transformation, would you?” Petra opens her mouth to respond, but– “Yes, it looks lovely. It was too bad you couldn’t be here to oversee the production, as I know you are a very important,” here Petra thought she sneered slightly, “very busy lawyer in the big city. I picked up the slack, however, and once you take a thorough look around, I think you will be very pleased with the results—very pleased.” Petra finds it extraordinarily difficult to listen to the woman drone on. There is something in her condescension that reminds her forcefully of another stern woman that once stood in that same

foyer. Petra waves the woman away, heading into the kitchen to take out a baking sheet. As she lays the pre-sliced dough on the cold metal, her mind lingers to a hazy winter afternoon thirty years ago, her mother pressed against the same counter, her deep red apron wrapped about her slim waist. Her face was still young but her dark hair had already started to gray, and there was a pinch around her eyes that intensified whenever she heard the rusty old Chevy blundering up the driveway. “Mom, you never bake. Why are you baking?” Petra asked. She sat on a stool pulled up to the kitchen island, adrift in the teal comforter that swallowed her tiny frame. “For your father’s work party.” There was a cool, clearness in her eyes that ordered Petra not to question, a look she had learned to obey early. As her mother continued placing the premade dough in neat rows, her sleeve caught briefly on the side of the countertop, pushing the fabric upwards, exposing her pale forearm and the deep purple bruises speckled heavily in a leafy pattern across her skin. Petra leaned quickly across the corner of the counter, catching the sleeve from falling back down, staring at the incriminating marks, marks she had never seen on her mother before. Her mother shoved her hand off and stepped away, her face a refined mask. She reached for the timer, turning her back to Petra, who sat completely upright, as though a rod had been slipped into her spine. The green and gray edged bruises on her thighs and shoulders that had been lying dormant under her clothes began to tingle with a new comradery. She imagined herself leaping from the stool, grabbing her mother up in her small arms, the pair crying together. Yet she sat, motionless, sure she smelled

a mixture of alcohol, cigarettes, and heavy cologne, much stronger than they had been a minute before. Their stench billowed out between woman and child, creating a solid barrier neither of them could break. Then her mother began to speak, her words like heavy stones fortifying the blockade. “Shouldn’t you be doing your homework? Your father and I were not pleased with your last report card, missy, not at all. You need to work harder, or you’ll amount to nothing. Your father works hard to make sure you go to a good school. Don’t you want to go to a private high school? You’ll never get in with the grades you are receiving now, and then what will you be worth?” Petra leaned forward over the countertop to lay her flushed cheek on the smooth, cool granite. A full day of school combined with her mother’s words exhausted her. She let her mother attempt to fill the substantial space between them with her rambling. She barely heard her lectures anymore, anyway, they were always variations of the same speech. When her mother ran out of words to hurl at her, she settled down at the kitchen table, waiting for the timer to end. A few minutes passed in silence. Content knowing her father would not be home until at least nine that night, Petra let herself drift off in the cocoon of the comforter, her face plastered to the counter. Partway through her doze, she could swear she felt a tentative hand on her head, but when she woke to the ding of the cookie timer, her mother no longer in the room. Petra can still feel the warm comforter about her shoulders and her mother’s small hand smoothing her hair, as she turns off the timer and slides the cookies out of the oven.

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Jacob by Lily Alexandra Harir

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Seven Different Lovers by Madeleine Van Dam

doorstep with a light kiss that tasted like innocence and fireworks and you thought about him all night long. Wednesday was the young boy you brought home to your parents and he showed up to the house with an apple pie and race car dreams. Wednesday doesn’t touch you without your permission and Wednesday leaves roses inside your wounds. Wednesday is full of little gift-wrapped promises of forever, all ribbons neatly tied. Wednesday was impossible. Wednesday was a dream that would never come true, and you felt guilty afterwards for letting him bloody up his fists just to be with you. Wednesday taught you that you cannot teach people how to love the bruises. When Wednesday leaves, you don’t think you’ll ever recover.

Monday wore flannels that were too tight on his chest but hugged your shoulders perfectly. He’s got dark hair and light eyes and said big words that made him sound smarter than you and looked down at you over his black glasses, “Oh, you mean you haven’t heard of this?” Monday treated you like another book that had been read too many times and when he was done rubbing his finger along your spine he stuck you back in his shelf to admire you from afar. Monday only ever wanted to look, but he threatened to kill himself when you tried to leave. You think you heard somewhere that he’s doing okay now. Tuesday was a class clown award. Tuesday called you “dude” while he slipped his hand up your skirt during a high school lunch. Tuesday was make-outs under bleachers during pep-rallies with students that had bags under their eyes. Tuesday pretended that he didn’t want you in public but couldn’t keep his hands off you when you were alone with him in the front seat of his car. You kept wondering if you would find what he was hiding about his smile in the glove compartment. Tuesday smelled like tobacco and your local gas station; you haven’t spoken to him in months but you still remember his laugh and wonder how he is.

Thursday stepped out of a James Dean movie: light-washed jeans and split lip accidents and you knew he was a bad idea from the start. You and Thursday met in a bar and smoke curled around his head as he stared at you with such intensity that you knew there was no going back. Thursday could never keep his promises and had bruises along his jaw and some other woman’s name tattooed on his shoulder. Thursday only lasted a night. Thursday is the first person you slept with after Wednesday. You can’t even remember Thursday’s name, but damn did you love that old-worn out Harley.

Wednesday was a virgin when you started seeing him. Wednesday showed up at just the right time, and he didn’t have bruised knuckles when he knocked on your door. He left you at your

You met Friday in a bathroom at a house party. She was wearing a Jack Daniel’s t-shirt and

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farmer’s markets—strawberry stains on your fingers. Sunday was quiet. Sunday rubbed your back while you shook as you spilled your secrets into pillows and she waited for you to be ready. She helped you fill the hole that Wednesday left. You never forget Sunday when you decide she is too good for you.

smelled like vanilla and you remember, vaguely, climbing up to the roof to watch the stars. She was the only one that ever sang you to sleep—singing of quiet roads and pine trees. Friday made you feel reckless and alive. Friday picked you up at 3am and you went skinny dipping in a lake in the middle of the stars. Feeling the cold water in between your toes and the moon on your skin was the closest you’ve ever come to heaven. Friday is a high speed chase and wind through your hair. Friday leaves your life so fast it makes you dizzy—spinning away to more adventures and you return back to the ordinary. You couldn’t bear the thought of another Friday so you found the opposite of her inside Saturday. Saturday thought he was the greatest thing to ever enter your world. Saturday wore his hats backwards and always smelled like beer. Saturday was a packed arena with screaming fans and even though he couldn’t take his eyes off the tv, his hand would always make it to your inner-thigh. Saturday stood you up for dinner three times but you kept forgiving him because being with him was better than being alone. Saturday knew that you couldn’t do any better than him at the time. Saturday was heavy cologne and loud music. Saturday left without saying goodbye and you thanked him for it. Sunday was dirty dishes. Sunday was underwear strewn across hardwood floors and cold rings of coffee around a ceramic mug. Sunday was juvenile. Sunday hid with you underneath white sheets while you watched the afternoon come and go. Sunday told you stories about her childhood while she walked barefoot down the sidewalk. She held your hand in public and kissed your cheek as you both sat on a park bench and fed the ducks. Sunday was dancing. Sunday was sunflowers and

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Shedding by Aimee McManus

September 4 2014 My therapist watches me. “We all have multiple selves. In you, I see one self holding on, but more selves letting go.” He says this with the care of an action hero dismantling a bomb, cautious of my red and blue wires. There is a Mr. Potato Head dressed as Darth Vader sitting on his desk. I want to ask him to turn it away but that seems a little dramatic. It studies me as my throat spasms into simultaneous laughter and tears. Hot salt gushes in tides under the half-moons of my scrunched up eyes. It’s selfish but I can only think of your mom. I think about how I don’t want to stop being her Facebook friend. I think about how much I will miss the bright turquoise colored nail polish she picked out, chuckling at its absurdity, when we got pedicures together. I think about the morning we sat across from each other at the over-varnished kitchen table, which inverted and reflected us both in its shiny wetness. Outside, cars whispered past. The whole house was dense with the exhalation of your and your brother’s and your father’s sleep. You deserve somebody who treats you well. Whether it’s him or someone else,” she said, her words thick and velvety. I think of her and then I think of how I flinch at words like ‘love’ and ‘beautiful,’ as if they’re choreographed punches that I wasn’t anticipating well enough. I miss everything though nothing’s ended yet. I can taste our goodbye in my mouth: it is faint and metallic, just barely there, the intangible flavor of blood after flossing. I look at my therapist’s desk again. Other toys sit on his desk; silent, gazing. One should not allow colorful plastic casts of Monsters Inc characters to witness one’s emotional breakdown. “The things that feel the best to us are often the worst for us.” I want to argue with him because I know he’s right. I stop laughing. I keep crying.

December 16 2013 I love you so much that it’s painful. Your room is multi-colored, the walls warm and kaleidoscopic from the non-regulation strings of Christmas lights. I tell you that Res-Life will make you take them down. “Fuck ’em,” you say, duct-taping them to the side of your bunked bed as I hold them in place. Your eyes crackle like slow-burning candlewicks. I make you listen to “All I Want For Christmas Is You” four times in a row and you humor me, because you almost always do, except for when I want to listen to Beyoncé. I wrapped your Christmas presents in cut-outs of the college’s newspaper. Your Douglas Adams book is enfolded carefully with a cartoon photo of a cat dressed up to look like Jesus. Another one of your gifts, a pair of your favorite brand of socks (the ones without the seams around the toes, because you hate the socks with seams around the toes, because you always have to sleep with socks on, because you are you, peculiar and lovely) is hugged by a snippet of an article that warns of the dangers of trans fats. The Brahms Symphony CD that I bought you is enveloped in the text of newspaper, and I split words from their textual contexts like a ransomnote maker. I paste the phrase “CHRISTIAN NAKEDNESS O.M.G.” to the outside of the wrapping. The fervor of your laughter when you saw it could have roasted chestnuts. I peel the shell of your wrapping, which is made of recycled yellowing sheet music, off with reverence. I uncover: a ruby red cat-print sweater, a pair of slate-gray woolen socks that are printed with Abraham Lincoln’s face, and a book of Pablo Neruda’s poems. We both smile wide. Mariah Carey has now made room for Frank Sinatra. He croons like fallen snow thawing: I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams. Six months later you will write me a note on a

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on your forehead as if you are a glass of ice water melting beneath spilled afternoon sun. My discomfort softens as we speak. You ask me if I’ve ever listened to Bon Iver. I have, and I think it’s kind of pretentious bullshit. But I like how your thick-rimmed glasses don’t really fit your face right and instead perch precariously on your nose, a constant split-second away from teetering off, and the way your body is tucked into your deep red cardigan so I say, no, I haven’t, but yes, I would like to. You tell me to listen to For Emma, Forever Ago. “He recorded it all by himself in a cabin in the middle of the woods,” you say. “It’s all out of tune, which is what makes it amazing.” It is now confirmed pretentious bullshit. Still, when you leave, I split the spine of my laptop, go directly to YouTube, and begin listening to the off-key vocals: With all your lies, you’re still very lovable.

napkin in warped wobbly Sharpie strokes that you will tuck into a lunch you’ve packed for me. It will say: I never want you to move out of me. You are the only one with my house key. September 8 2014 “I just don’t love you anymore.” Your room is dark and lonely. Shadows saturate the walls. I look at you. Your eyes have changed: what used to be warm pools of amber now look like congealed puddles of browning sludge. It hurts more to feel these words passing over the speed bumps of my lips; your face, deflated and sagging like a deployed airbag, in the rearview mirror. September 3 2012 The warmth of August places its head on the edge of September’s shoulder like an awkward teenage lover. The oppressive temperature melts the waxy lines between the months. We meet in haziness. We’ve gathered in my dorm room to watch Easy A. I cross and uncross my arms: I am far too aware of what my eyebrows look like and of the unsightly pimple just below the freckle on my left cheek, and I just want to go home, but I am home. The three of us girls have started to scope you and your friend out, peering with slick wide eyes. Lina sits on her flashily colored bedspread, corkscrew-hair frizzy from the hands of humidity and face coiled up in an anxious fraying knot. Her legs are curled tensely beneath her. Gabby, loose and relaxed like a human slinky, cackles a little too loudly at one of Will’s jokes. Will wears bleached white socks with his dirt-crusted Adidas flip flops and pants that show just a little too much of his ankle. He talks a lot about baseball. At dinner earlier that night I said, “I love baseball, especially when the home team scores a touchdown.” You were the only one who laughed. The two of us, you and I, are wrinkled on the floor, limbs creased, and bodies like the oily shells of cars crunched up from a crash. I can’t stop looking at you. I’m drawn to your Long Island (Laowng Island) accent, the way you drag words out thickly behind you like poured concrete. Cawfee. Tawlking. Chawclate. I gaze at you, heart gasping in my chest. The bubbled condensation of sweat forms

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December 13 2013 In eighth grade, your therapist recommended that you keep journals, so you do. I find an old one on the shelf above your bed. I curl myself into your covers and open it because I want to know you; every part of you. You keep letters you’ve written to close friends and exgirlfriends tucked into the pages like hushed secrets. You write about killing yourself on one page and, on the next, you scribble your plans to open a Brooklyn coffee shop called It’s 5 AM Somewhere. July 3 2014 You leave Long Island behind you to visit me in my tiny Ithaca apartment. I’ve spent my whole summer writing about you but not seeing you; it almost feels as though you’re not real. Like I’ve made you up. You deal with my roommate, the one who is obsessed with her dogs in a kind of serial killer-y way, with precise patience. When she leaves the room, you remark, “What a fucking asshole.” We walk to and from the grocery store. As we are nearing home, the sky bursts, sobs, and lights up like a drowning firecracker. We slosh down the sidewalk, bodies heavy and tattered like

wet rags. In the kitchen, we unpeel the fabric layer of our skin and look at each other, naked and sopping. I look at your collarbone, your forearms, the scattering of your breadcrumb freckles, your arm hair, which is so fine I could use it to sew up the hole in my dress’s sleeve. We press against each other, figures flooded by the hollow glow of the refrigerator. Your lamp-light skin, my moth-wing hands.

I try on my favorite dress, the black sheer one with polka dots strewn across the fabric. It looks wrong. I feel wrong. The fabric hangs sullenly: a bed sheet’s best impression of a ghost. The note with the flowers says: “For the best girl around.” My mother sees the vase and rolls her eyes. “What did he do?” Nothing, mom. Don’t you know I’m the second-best girl around? The flowers, roses, quickly grow moldy and tired in their vase. They bow their heads as if their necks have been broken. My room reeks of decaying cliché. I throw them away faster than I would have liked to.

March 1 2013 I pick it up and feel its leatherbound weight in my palms. You left your journal open like a fractured ribcage on the desk. I think: I will find something sweet, words drenched with nectar. I find: Why do I want to fuck every girl I see? And on the next page: It’d be real nice to fuck Amelia. Later you will say it was because you were insecure. But you never wrote that part down.

September 12 2014 “You can’t have me back,” you say, your voice splintering and buckling like rotten floorboard. “All you ever do is get drunk with your friends,” you spit in the voice of a nail-gun. Ten minutes before this conversation I was with my friends, and I’m a little drunk, so I can’t really argue that. I touch your hand but I don’t hold it. It is too hot, like shimmering Christmas light bulbs. I can’t hold you anymore. “This is it,” you stutter, as if it is a threat. Your fingers are crooked: knotted at the knuckles. Out-of-tune. I look at my face, which is distorted and blurred, in the reflection of your glasses. I realize I am frighteningly older. My eyes are hardened into shiny beads. I am not sure if I know myself (my selves?) anymore. I’ve held on to you for so long. But this is the letting go; this is the realization that I am not fit to carry you. You are scorching; you are unmanageably heavy, like a sledge hammer forged from molten rock. You sear holes through the lining of my stomach. You are achingly gorgeous. You are the sound of wind chimes during a hurricane. You are the hurricane. You speak like broken glass but I cannot bend my body into a dustpan for you. You are too much for me to love. “I know.”

March 26 2014 You are sad and angry for reasons I don’t understand. Sometimes it feels as if you hate me. I have a panic attack and (selfishly, childishly) ask you to stay home from a party to be with me. You shake your head and say, “I just don’t have time for you. I’m too busy.” January 8 2014 It’s winter break, and I’m visiting you and your family on Long Island. You’re tucking me into your bed, folding the red quilt around me. “I’m gunna fart all over your bed,” I say, and we both laugh like idiots. It grows quiet. Your hands are smoothing my hair down. You kiss me on the forehead and I fall in and out of sleep while you talk. I’m barely listening. It doesn’t really matter what you’re saying. What matters is: I’m two hundred and thirty nine miles away from where I grew up, but you sound like home. August 7 2013 The only time you will ever send me flowers is today, and it is because I found out about the month-old kisses and gropes you left with her in your bed. I feel naked, or better off naked, as if clothes will never do my body justice again.

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Why She Prays by Taryn Pire

Grandma says “llamame cuando llegues.” Call me when you get there. She can’t see me— her hand is squeezing my wrist. It’s cold, every vein bulging with slow blue life. She is a desert of aged pink flesh, bruised blood, misty green eyes. Foggy. She can’t see me. “Okay,” I say. “Okay, Mimi.” I kiss her on the forehead. She’s still holding onto my wrist and she needs to cut her nails so she stabs me with them by accident as I lean in. Her other hand reaches up, feeling around for my neck. and I feel sorry. She pats my ponytail, strokes its curls. She hasn’t seen my face in years but my hair is the same. The same hair that blocked her vision of the novella in front of us when I was three and on her lap, frizzy. My feet didn’t touch the floor. I have the same hair she bragged about to all of her friends over the phone, the same hair she can almost see when she touches my skin,

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when she feels the thickness of my thighs as I sit with her, the width of my back in a hug. I’ve grown since I was seven. “Voy a rezar hasta que me llames. Okay?” I’m standing up, eyes on the door, but she won’t let go until I agree. She still knows how to stare at me, how to glare at my face that’s already turned another direction. “Okay? Me oyes? Taryn?” I feel sorry. “I’m going to pray until you call me.” That’s what she says. “I can’t see you now, you’re not real until I hear your voice again.” That’s what she means. She still talks about my grandfather. She cries thinking about dancing in Camagüey, their first miscarriage, the time she asked him for a new fridge so he painted their old one. I know my car won’t hear her, my lead-foot won’t hear her prayers as I start my drive, so I cross my fingers he hears her instead. “Okay, okay Mimi.” I’m pulling my wrist, running late,

leaning away gently enough that I don’t feel guilty, but she knows I’m going. She takes her rosary out, ready to whisper to a sky she can’t remember. “No puedo dormir sin saber de ti.” I can’t sleep until I know.

She hears the door click. I’m at the bottom of the stairs and I hear her, asking if I’ve left yet. As I turn my key I tell myself I won’t forget to call. The door is locked. “No puedo dormir sin saber de ti.” “No puedo dormir sin saber de ti.”

“Okay, Okay Mimi.” I close the door, turn up her radio.

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Confirmation by Tuck Dowrey

through the branches shone down on the cross. How many times had he passed that hill in the car with his parents and never noticed it? Had it even been there before? He wondered if his father saw the cross. He glanced at him in the driver’s seat; he didn’t seem to. If he had, Adam was sure, he would have visibly taken notice, been just as transfixed as he was. Adam opened his mouth to ask his father if he had seen it, and then, just before he was about to speak, thought better of it. If his father hadn’t seen it, which now he was sure he hadn’t, then it must have been because he wasn’t supposed to. It must have been meant for only Adam. “Yeah, bud? You think of a question?” His father looked back and forth from the road to his son, eyebrows arched in anticipation. The dark bags under his eyes drooped, and Adam suddenly wondered how old he was. “Dad, why don’t we ever go to church?” Adam remembered sitting in the library working on a science project with his friend Graham a week prior. They were to research the evolution of sharks and present their findings to the class, but Graham claimed the pictures of fossils they found on Google were fake. “My parents said that God made everything,” Graham had said as he pointed up towards the latticed skylight above. “He made fossils to see who would find them and stop believing.” Adam followed his pointer finger up towards the window and strained to see into the clouds floating by, but he kept focusing on the remnants of a bird’s nest

Adam leaned his head on his seatbelt as he and his father drove down Route 2 headed into Boston. Out the window, kids played soccer in a park by the highway. Adam didn’t play soccer, but as they passed in his dad’s old Ford Ranger, he watched the goaltender make a diving save on a ball headed towards the lower left corner of the net and wished he were there between the wickets of the goal, robbing the opposition of the joy that comes with scoring. “Do you have any questions about what you’ll see when we get there?” Adam’s father stole a sideways glance at his son. It was unusually warm for mid-September; Adam reached under the radio and turned the air conditioner on. He would be twelve years-old in just over a month, and he wondered why it was that his father seemed to slide into the kind of language one might use with a first grader whenever he spoke to Adam about his mother’s illness. “No.” The soccer fields grew smaller in the rear view mirror and all that remained to look at was a vast field of corn rushing by. “Well if you think of any or have any when we get there, feel free to ask, okay?” “Okay.” The truck began to slow as they fell into line with the other cars at the rotary by the prison. The trees beyond the cornfield thinned until Adam could make out a hill in the distance. Atop the mound stood a large stone cross; the trees surrounding the mound cast the lush grass in shadow, and the only rays of sun that made it

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one; a lightning bolt pulsed through the line that cut the screen in half. It was rhythmic, almost soothing. Numbers on a grid were on a smaller monitor below. The TV was on. Had he been home right now, he would have been watching Fairly OddParents. His favorite. His mother was watching PBS. Past the monitors on the windowsill were a few flower arrangements and fruit baskets, not that his mother could eat them. He walked over to them, pushed a vase of flowers aside and looked out the bay window. On the eleventh floor, they had a glorious view of Fenway Park. The Sox had a game later that night, but he didn’t really like baseball. He looked back at the vase he had displaced and plucked a card from among the petals. It was from Graham’s parents. They signed it ‘God Bless.’ “Adam.” Her voice sounded like she was on a radio station with a bad connection: crackly, distant. He turned and looked at her. She motioned for him to come over, and he obeyed, stopping a foot or so away from her. His mother smiled warmly. Her hand was outstretched, waiting for him to take it. He looked at the bruise radiating from the IV in the crook of her elbow; it traveled down her vein halfway to her wrist, and he thought he ought to show her his knee. He had been playing tag at recess a few days earlier and, distracted, ran into a fire hydrant. His kneecap was still swollen and purple and the color seemed to leak down his leg as if it were paint, staining his shin greenish-yellow. He almost pulled up the leg of his jeans to show her that they matched, that he knew how much it must hurt, but he didn’t. He suddenly remembered a time a few years ago on Easter when his mother took him to an egg-hunt at his Aunt Millie’s church. While his

in the corner of one of the panes of glass. Graham leaned across the table towards him. “And my brother says that if you don’t believe in God, you’re going to Hell.”

Adam held his father’s hand as the nurse led them down the hallway. The corridor smelled like a mix of bleach and sheets fresh out of an industrial dryer. He tried his best to keep his eyes straight ahead, but he couldn’t help but steal glances at patients in the other rooms as they passed by. One room had a woman in it who looked to be about the age of his grandmother. She had tubes that snaked from under her nostrils to around her ears and into a machine under her bed, and he wondered whether the tubes were pumping something in or out of her. In another room, a little further down the hall, a nurse helped a man out of bed. He set his feet down on the ground cautiously, as if they might break upon contact with the grass green linoleum. The veins in his stickthin arms bulged as he propped himself up out of the bed, and as Adam passed the doorway, the man looked up and made eye contact. Adam’s eyes darted back to the floor. The nurse led them to a room at the end of the hallway. The door was closed and she turned to address Adam’s father. “She should be awake right now, but she’s very tired. She’s had a good day today, no issues with the crackers, so we’re going to bring her dinner soon.” She pushed the door open and Adam’s father set his hand on his son’s shoulder, guiding him through the doorway. His mother wasn’t the first thing he looked at when he walked into the room. He looked first at the monitors. His mother’s heartbeat was on

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mother socialized, he wandered into the church and found the supply room where they kept the leftover candy. Quickly, he ate as much as he could, and spent the rest of Easter bent over a trashcan with a stomachache while his mother rubbed his back. She asked him why he made himself sick, and he said he didn’t know. He thought now to rub his mother’s back, but he doubted it would help. “You won’t get sick. It’s not like that.” His father smiled reassuringly. He looked to the other side of the bed where his father was holding her other hand. That arm didn’t have an IV in it and Adam felt a rush of anger that he had to touch the one that did. He wasn’t scared, or whatever his father thought; he would just rather not. Not anything: not touch his mother’s emaciated, discolored arm, not sit on a hospital bed and listen to the heart monitor beep, beep, beep incessantly. He looked at his mother, took a deep breath and closed his eyes, reaching for her hand. When he closed his eyes he saw the cross on top of the hill behind the row of trees, bathing in sunlight. He thought of Graham and his parents uttering his mother’s name in a slew of prayers as they said grace before a meal, and as he blindly grasped her clammy hand, he wondered if it would help. He opened his eyes and looked back at the windowsill. Their card stood visible among the flowers. The words were written so absolutely: God bless. The first time Adam flew on a plane, the pilot gave him a shiny brass pin to commemorate the flight, as if it were some kind of rite of passage. Only five years old, Adam was crying, but the pilot consoled him. “No need to be scared, young man,” the pilot smiled warmly as he fastened the pin to the

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brim of Adam’s baseball cap. The pilot pointed up towards the roof of the plane. “I got the big guy upstairs watching over us.” When they reached their seats, Adam asked his father if there was an upstairs in the plane. His father explained that the pilot was referring to God. As the plane hurtled through the air, Adam looked out the window and scrutinized the tops of the clouds, looking for a staircase or footprints. He thought he saw some as they flew over them, and when the plane landed safely and the pilot waved goodbye as they exited, he was sure he had. A nurse brought his mother’s dinner in: white rice, plain boiled chicken and tea. Adam’s stomach lurched just thinking about the rubbery chicken, but his mother ate it. She told him it was the first solid food she’d been able to have since she’d been there. He watched as his father cut the meat, lifted bits of chicken and rice into her mouth. For dessert she had a small cup of applesauce. Adam watched her eat and struggled to recognize her. He knew she was his mother, but the mother he had known before the sickness could have been able to eat by herself, would have protested boiled chicken. She looked incredibly small, shrunken into the mess of sheets on the cot, as if only half of her were there. “I told the nurses about you,” she said when she was finished eating. She smiled and pointed to a gift-wrapped box on a metal table in the far corner of the room. “They put that together for you. Go get it.” Adam got up and walked over to the present. It wasn’t wrapped; it was the kind of thoughtless pre-wrapped gift box you’d get at the paper store on Christmas Eve at the last minute, as an afterthought. The box and bow on top were blue. He picked it up – it felt full, not quite heavy, but certainly full – and walked back over to his

Jesus in Graham’s church, even though he was told this church was Catholic and Graham’s family was Protestant. Adam tugged on his mother’s sleeve, whispering to her that he was bored. Hymns were sung and eulogies were given, and then came time for the Catholics among the funeral-goers to take communion. Adam’s seat ached from the hard wood of the pew, and upon seeing that the priest was giving out what appeared to be juice and crackers, he got up when his mother stood to walk into the aisle. Adam followed her. His father stayed put and waved them on. Adam repeated his mother’s actions and words and received the wafer, which was less flavorful than he had hoped, and drank what turned out to be horribly bitter non-alcoholic wine. With the taste of sour grapes lingering on his tongue, they returned to their pew. Adam settled in next to his dad. “Daddy, why didn’t you go up with us?” Adam asked. “Because I’m not Catholic,” his father said. “But neither am I. Was I not supposed to?” Adam’s father looked to his mother and thought for a moment. He looked back at Adam. “Well, technically no.”

mother’s bedside and sat down. He looked at his mother, who gave him a nod of approval, and he gingerly lifted the lid off the top of the box. “It’s some stuff from the gift shop they thought you might like,” she said. Inside were Mad Libs, a green slinky, a bag of salt-water taffy and a tiger beanie baby. He wondered why a hospital would have a gift shop. He recalled visiting a gift shop on a family vacation to Disney World when he was six, and wondered if it was anything like that. “I told them I thought you might be a little old for that,” she said from behind him, motioning to the stuffed animal. He unwrapped a piece of taffy and popped it into his mouth. As he chewed, he looked out the window to see the Red Sox warming up in the setting fall sun. “Do you want to play?” He turned to look at his mother as she picked up a pad of Mad Libs. “I have a pen.” Adam picked a book out of the pile, flipped it to the first page and handed it to her. “Ok,” she said, taking the cap off her pen. “A noun?” He thought for a moment, looking around the room. “Tiger.” “A verb?” “Run.” “A name?” “God.” His mother looked at him, raising an eyebrow. He shrugged. She wrote it down. “Another verb?” “Believe.”

It was well past dinnertime when they left the hospital. Adam’s stomach growled as they drove down the highway back towards their suburban home, him and his father. They sat in silence as Adam picked at his taffy. “You’ll spoil your dinner with that stuff,” his father said. Adam went to put a piece back in the bag when his father said, “no, I mean, you can

Adam’s grandfather died when he was seven. The funeral was the first real time Adam had ever spent in a church. He looked around at the stained glass windows and wondered if the Jesus in the glass and above the altar was the same

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eat it, it’s just…” He sighed. Adam offered him a piece and he took it. They both unwrapped their candy. “Is Mom going to be okay?” Adam placed the piece of Taffy on his tongue and closed his mouth. Cherry. His favorite. He let it sit on his tongue instead of chewing right away. “Yeah, bud. Of course she is,” his father said a little too quickly. He reached out and put his hand on Adam’s shoulder. “Hey, listen, she’s just gotta stay in the hospital for a while so she can get better and come home. She won’t be there forever.” Adam noticed the prison out the window past his father and remembered the cross on the other side of the rotary. He sat on his hands and craned his neck, searching for it at they turned onto the roundabout. “What are you looking for?” his father asked, looking at him. Adam quickly weighed the pros and cons of telling him about the cross. He decided that, whether his father could see it or not, his answer might help him make sense of it all. He remembered back to when his mother first fell ill, and Graham and his parents came to visit her at the hospital. Graham’s mother had knelt down at his mother’s bedside and took her hands. “We’ll pray,” she had said to Adam’s mother, and they both closed their eyes. Adam wondered from his chair in the corner of the hospital room whether it had done anything, and he remained unsure even after a few weeks later when his father sat him down and told him that his mother would need to stay in the hospital a bit longer than expected. He wouldn’t explain anything further. The vagueness of the whole situation was unsettling; his parents hadn’t even given the sickness a name. His mother seemed smaller with

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each visit, and he started to doubt everyone who told him she was going to get better. They turned off of the rotary and Adam saw the cross. In the dark, it was illuminated with a yellow light that seemed to come from far above, as if in a spotlight. He pointed at it. “Dad, have you ever noticed that cross before?” He hoped his father couldn’t see it. Maybe planting the cross on that hill so that Adam would see it was God’s way of giving him proof of His existence. In the midst of his mother’s illness, one that still hadn’t been explained to him, he had felt helpless. He felt as if there was something that he should or could do to help, he just didn’t know what it was or how to find it. Maybe it was praying. Maybe it was simply believing. Adam could figure it out later. If his father couldn’t see it, that is. His dad looked out in the direction that Adam was pointing. “Where?” Adam’s heart fluttered. “There,” Adam pointed again, though he was now positive it would be no use. He watched as his father narrowed his eyes, scanning the trees across the field. After a moment, his father turned his attention back to the road. “Oh, that cross,” he said. He kept driving. “So… so you can see it?” “Oh, yeah. You know the prison off the rotary? It’s maximum security. That means that it’s filled with dangerous prisoners, many of them with life sentences. When they die, they’re taken and buried there on that hill. If you walk on it, you can see grave markers in the grass, but the whole hill is marked with that cross.” “… so it’s just a gravestone?” “Exactly. Just a big gravestone.” Adam leaned back in his seat and looked out through the sunroof. He tried to see into the night clouds, tried to see something in the dark

that his father wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t, something to save the feeling the cross had given him when he thought he was the only one who could see it. The sound of his motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s heart monitors beeped, beeped, beeped in his ears incessantly like an alarm clock. His lip quivered and he wondered, thinking of how small she had looked, if soon his mother would waste away until he could no longer see her. Goosebumps tickled his forearms and he shuddered in the cold, wrapping his arms around himself. He stared and stared, but all he could see in the sky were the flashing lights of airplanes cutting through the haze of the clouds before the darkness swallowed them in in the distance.

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