Stork Magazine Issue 34 (Spring 2023)

STORK

Stork Magazine is a fiction journal published by undergraduate students at Emerson College. Initial submissions are workshopped and discussed with the authors, and stories are accepted based on the quality of the author’s revisions. The process is designed to guide writers through rewriting and provide authors and staff members editorial support and an understanding of the editorial and publishing process. Stork is founded on the idea of communication between writers and editors— not a simple letter of rejection or acceptance.

We accept submissions from undergraduate and graduate Emerson students in any department. Work may be submitted at stork.submittable.com during specific submission periods. Stories should be in 12-point type,double-spaced, and must not exceed 4 pages for the “flash fiction” issue. Authors retain all rights upon publication. For questions about submissions, email storkstory@gmail.com

Stork accepts staff applications at the beginning of each fall semester. We are looking for undergraduate students who are well-read in contemporary fiction and have a good understanding of the short story form.

Copyright © 2023 Stork Magazine

Cover design done by Katherine Fitzhugh

Illustrations done by Aubrey McConnell and Katherine Fitzhugh

Typesetting done by Eden Ornstein, Aubrey McConnell, and Jessie Jen

MASTHEAD

Editors in Chief

Nina Powers

Hannah Meyers

Managing Editors

Cindy Tran

Kate Rispoli

Head Designer

Eden Ornstein

Design Team

Katherine Fitzhugh

Aubrey McConnell

Jessie Jen

Head Copy Editor

Anna Carson

Copy Editors

Ella Maoz

Maggie Lu

Sage Liebowitz

Nathan Lentocha

Prose Editors

Gabriel Borges

Sara Fergang

Sam Kostakis

Chris Chin

Staff Readers

Dana Guterman Levy

Jessie Jen

Ryan Forgosh

Charlize Triozzi

Sydney Flaherty

Gabel Strickland

Aubrey McConnell

Ruth Fishman

Abby Love

Maria Gil De Leon

Vanessa Jacome Barsallo

Alyssa Sararkin

Social Media Manager

Georgia Howe

Faculty Advisor

Stephen Shane

Letter From The Editors

With the Spring semester coming to a close, we are thrilled to present another collection of some of the best works of writing the Emerson community has to offer. As is our tradition, this issue highlights flash fiction specifically–a literary form extremely short in length, yet packed with complexity. Condensing the plot, character, and thematic elements of a complete story into a two-to-four page work is no easy feat, however Emerson’s student authors have delivered.

This edition of Stork would not be possible without our lovely team who work tirelessly to make every edition better than our last. Our staff members are the heart and soul of this organization. They inspire us every day, and it has been a treat to work with such an amazing group of people this semester. Our social media manager helped us stand out amidst a sea of other publications. Our readers and editors dealt with a heavy workload, their determination and quality of critiques never wavering. Our copyeditors helped perfect each chosen story, weeding out grammatical errors with care. Our designers took our hopes of producing an amazing issue and turned it into a

reality, resulting in the beautiful book we are proud to share with all of you. In short, massive thank yous to our staff!

This semester was an incredibly competitive one. We want to extend our gratitude to all who submitted, we greatly enjoyed reading your work and recognize the vulnerability that goes into sharing it. Of course, this edition relies on the talent of our chosen writers, whose stories we are proud to give a home to. These seven stories explore themes of mortality, longing, connection, and fate with remarkable creativity– we are sure you will find them as wonderful as we have.

The final thank you is issued to you, our reader, for your commitment to quality fiction and student authors. Your support means the world to us; we hope you enjoy the thirty-fourth edition of Stork.

Nina Powers and Hannah Meyers Co-Editors-In-Chief

Spring Fiction 2023

15

CONTENTS

Walking to the End of the World

By Phoebe Chan

Illustration by Aubrey McConnell

The Abadi Force

By Christie XT Cushing

Illustration by Katherine Fitzhugh

Whale Fall

By Ning Chen

Illustration by Aubrey McConnell

Baby Needs an Exorcism

By Lucy Eller

Illustration by Katherine Fitzhugh

The Cheater

By Ryan Forgosh

Illustration by Aubrey McConnell

51

The Boy With the Fishbowl Eyes

By Anna Carson

Illustration by Katherine Fitzhugh

A Funeral in November

By Sydney Flaherty

Illustration by Aubrey McConnell 59

Walking to the End of the World

by Phoebe Chan

Illustration by Aubrey McConnell

On the third Tuesday of her nineteenth March, a girl stood up from her seat at the empty lunch table, threw away her uneaten food, and left the dining hall with a bag full of books and pens and other such things. She took a turn to her left, and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked in a straight line. She had nowhere to go, nothing to do, no one to see. So she continued to walk in that straight line, passing by buildings and parties and people and parks and coffee dates and unhappy businessmen and shops and sale signs and penniless war heroes. And then the girl thought, “Maybe I will walk to the end of the world. Maybe the answer is waiting for me there.” This seemed such a good idea that she managed an empty smile and continued walking.

The soles of her shoes were the first thing to disappear. One day, she looked down and found the bottoms of her feet uncovered; all of her walking had worn away at the rubber separating her feet from the floor. She shrugged, finding the bottomless shoes mildly amusing, and continued. After that, she noticed her feet getting flatter, the arches coming to meet the ball and the heel as both were worn away. She found her flat feet somewhat amusing and spent a day walking around a duck pond, seeing for the first time what the ground must feel like to the ducks. And then she continued.

Several months later, the girl looked down and found herself without any feet at all, her body instead carried on the stumps of her ankles. She found this rather amusing, especially because she was now much shorter than she had been before. “I must have walked very far,” she thought. “Perhaps I am getting close to the end of the world.”

Over time, the streets wore her legs away to her knees, and then to her hips. When her torso began to disappear, she laughed and thought, “I wonder if I look like a zombie coming up from the ground.” This seemed fitting to her, and it filled her with such amusement that she continued walking.

By the time she had lost most of her

shoulders, the buildings and parties and people and parks and coffee dates and unhappy businessmen and shops and sales signs and penniless war heroes began to look familiar again, although she could not place why. It was not until she found herself back at that dining hall—nothing but a bodiless head sitting on the lunch table—that she realized her whole body must be scraped all the way around in a wonderful ring, encircling the world. She imagined those ducks waddling over her back, and the soles of others’ shoes leaving footprints on her invisible skin, coating the streets she had passed through. She imagined the unhappy businessmen and penniless war heroes standing on the same block of pavement, sharing breath from the same stretch of air, unaware that their boots all felt the same to her. “Ah ha!” she thought, triumphant and tired. “I have found it.” And this filled her with such satisfaction that she closed her eyes to rest and never opened them again.

The Abadi Force

by Christie XT Cushing Illustration by Katherine Fitzhugh

My last wish was to die while physicist

Felix Abadi made love to me in his lab, listening to Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony. I wanted our hearts to go supernova, to go out “not with a whimper, but a bang.” But Felix Abadi had been dead for 100 years, so my wish was science fiction.

It was autumn, 2022. I was a History of Science student who would never make history because I’d be dead by winter, or even earlier (courtesy of heart failure). Why my young heart was dying bumfuzzled doctors because this diagnosis wasn’t in their medical books: Unused-Heart Syndrome. Too metaphorical and emotional. My bored heart no longer wanted to keep ticking for just writing research papers on electricity and gravity, obeying MLA guidelines, stomaching ramen noodles, and dreaming of time travel but never going anywhere except tomorrow. Mine was a romantic heart that

yearned to use its beats to electrify Felix Abadi to his depths. I dreamed that together we could pull out the potential passion, like potential energy, stored inside both of our unexplored cores, and let that energy become the motion of our connecting bodies. With an attraction that surged across space and time, we sometimes met in dreams where he brought my girlish heart close to exploding, but I longed to feel his electric thump closer.

Lying alone in my dorm room, going along with the inertia of blah, I listened to midnight rain cry all over the New England forest. My fatigued heart surely didn’t have many beats left. I envied lightning—capable of bringing the dead back to life (at least in sci-fi). Listening to Mahler, I reread my favorite biography on Dr. Abadi, A Force Most Eccentric.

This bio offered a small window into the recluse’s personal life. The eccentric scientist probably died a virgin, and was obsessed with time travel, Hershey’s bars, and Felix the Cat. He told colleagues he was searching for his “strange particle,” and he described electricity in terms of “positive charge,” “negative charge,” and “Abadi charge”: not attracted to anything. His quiet shyness concealed a mad Nikola Tesla! Felix also died alone and young at 32 in 1922: heart attack. Truthfully, I went into History of Science

because of him, my own ‘obsession.’ In many ways, he was so unlike me, so not romantic, so not spiritual, and he believed anything ‘magical’ that happened in his life was brought by way of science and technology. Yet opposites attract. I was howling mad about him but the howls had never escaped the core. I even slept with a Felix the Cat plush toy. I had dedicated my life to understanding Felix, digging through his journals and books to find his soul. While working on a potential theory of everything, a quest to find the “underlying force” on the night of his death, he wrote a note on his lab’s chalkboard: “Girl from the future, please come to me.” The handwriting was a mess, written by a man with a heart under attack. I had always sensed that message was for me; to come hold him, so he wouldn’t be alone while his heart stopped.

It was November 11, and my compulsion to go to the lab where Felix had died exactly 100 years ago was stronger than my fear of insanity. Why not use these last heartbeats to do something fantastical? In the past, I had insulated this crazy feeling in daydreams, but on this night, the heavy impulse drove me through a storm to his lab. It was the kind of crazy impulse we never let steer our lives in daytime, while we follow our body’s inertia of working

to make money to eat, but thundering madness feels natural when you’re alone; no one is around to say you’re nuts, and the stars are out, and the same moon that can transform a person into a werewolf or a lover is waiting to be howled at— these are the heart’s hours.

My student ID granted me access to the guarded Finney-Matheson Hall, mostly deserted at 2 a.m. Strange things took place in Goldell’s physics department: world-changing experiments, turning science fiction into science. The hall that led to Abadi’s lab was taped off with “Caution – Enter at your own risk.” I didn’t care; I was going to die anyway. I was a wet mess and I walked past “Caution.” I no longer felt tired, surging with the energy of madness, but I felt foolish—this was no longer his lab, and wouldn’t it be locked anyway? Maybe the hand of ‘meant to be’ would unlock it?

Yes, indeed, the silver knob gave no resistance. I had no explanation for what happened next: somehow turning the doorknob was like turning a radio knob to a station on another frequency, as if 2022 was a channel, and I had turned it back to 1922. Both channels existed simultaneously on the time spectrum, but my life’s dial had been tuned to 2022. During the briefest second or less, I felt formless, like pure energy or consciousness, while everything

turned as white and fuzzy as the snow on an old TV channel—like I was passing through the ‘static’ between worlds. I heard that familiar gobbledygook of surfing radio stations, those beeps and wheerps that sound like alien spacecraft transmissions. Feeling the topsy-turvy disorientation that happens right before fainting, I worried I was dying. But I didn’t faint. Instead, all the energy of me coalesced into a form again—a nerdish, nineteen-year-old gal. My vision suddenly cleared, and so did my ears, and my orientation came back as the dial of my life ‘tuned into’ this bygone era. I clearly heard Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony. In the doorway I stood astounded, my heart thudding like I had climbed all the way to the moon. By a long lab table, Felix, in a 1920s tweed suit, was turning the radio’s sound knob. Seeing me open the door to his private lab, he paused. Shocked speechless, we became the lightning in each other’s nights—the moment as startling as thunder booming on a calm sunny day. If I had not enjoyed so many dreams about Felix Abadi, perhaps seeing him alive in fleshy color in the lab where he had died a century earlier would have knocked me off my feet, but I chalked the experience up to another dream. Yet I didn’t feel asleep; I felt very awake. With wide eyes, the scientist noted my

21st-century wardrobe, dripping wet. I noted the chalkboard was blank, no message yet to the girl from the future. A tingle surged through my heart—I was that girl. Crazily, I walked through the passageway and blurted out who I was—a time traveler, and here’s proof: my iPod, a tiny music machine. As his starstruck eyes beheld a device incapable of being made in 1922, I told him I was seeking not to make love but to save his life. He was going to die of a heart attack and we had to get him to the hospital. What if this wasn’t a dream? What if an experiment in this laboratory had opened a portal through time? What if these portals opened every century on Earth when whatever was lined up just so in the universe? Or what if the force that had propelled me to come here and had unlocked the door for me had also constructed this bridge across eras for me and him to meet so I could save his life? He must have seen the fantastic experience as a dream too: a strange particle with an affinity to the Abadi charge coming into his lonely life to electrify it. The force didn’t take control of our lips to make us speak but to make us kiss. The kiss spoke everything we were feeling. An attraction stronger than magnets and electricity overcame our shyness and fears, knocked over lab equipment, threw off our clothing, and moved us into each other, two opposites uniting

and sticking together with a bond older than the stars. The same attraction that had forced us hard onto the table to feel it, really feel it, the intense connection, was now giving us the feeling of flight. Oh God, that soaring into warmer and warmer light. Touching his body, I knew why energy took form. Why matter came to life. Supernova after supernova. My heart wanted to keep pulsing forever to keep exploding in his arms. “You’re my soulmate,” the skeptic said, on the brink of pure bliss. I said, “You’re my antiparticle. Annihilate me. I want to be one energy with you.”

In the quivering subsiding of the heartgasms, I pleaded to take him to the hospital. But he put my hand to his sweaty chest, where I felt under the hairy forest his heart pumping fantastically, his and mine, in unison from a shared electric rhapsody. We smiled, playful-like. He was as cuddly now as the plush toy. He wanted a Hershey’s; I did too.

“ And what’s your name, my dearest?” Before I could say “Cynthia Day” and immortalize that name, he dematerialized into white noise, just like that, finger-snap quick. Static replaced the song, and the scene fuzzed up like snow.

I felt the ugly disorientation of being yanked away from the beautiful dreamy moment, as the ‘magical’ portal closed (or maybe it was truly

magical), stranding him in 1922 and me in 2022. Feeling the force release me, I dropped off of the lab table and landed painfully hard onto the cold floor into a pile of my own clothes, with my heart alone again and aching.

“Heart attack,” doctors would rule his death, because “loss of girl” was too science fiction; those doctors could not have saved him anyway. But I knew the force that had accelerated our hearts would also stop our hearts with its departure. Yet despite the certainty of pain, loss, and death, Felix Abadi had written a message for me to materialize in his life, if only for one fantastical moment, a historical event that would be both cause and effect. The same force underlies this story, the same force who wrote it—you know the story; it’s famous.

Whale Fall

by Ning Chen

Illustration by Aubrey McConnell

Content Warnings: Cannibalism

We didn’t see it descend at first. No, we felt it. A cooling of the air as the sun’s rays took a rest from beating upon our necks, if only for a second. I paused my labor and granted myself a moment of relief after years of toil under that awful sun. Glory to God in the highest: I praised Him for rolling those clouds over us, and I prayed He might do it just once more in my lifetime, so that I might one day feel rest before I die.

The spade felt heavy in my hands as I prepared for the clouds to pass and for my work in the fields to continue. O, endless plains of wheat and barley, how I longed to take the whole of my harvests home with me and prepare a feast for myself; but it was during this thought that the walls of the Manor House and the pointed belltower of the church made themselves known to me from beyond the fields. Those dark, square

windows, carved into rich stone, looked down on me in judgment. I closed my eyes and prayed for forgiveness.

Though my stomach cried for something more than toil, I ignored its pleas. I had been taught to resist temptation. I tightened my grip on my spade, and I prayed, and I waited for the clouds to pass and for my work to return. The clouds did not pass. The air grew colder. I heard something hit the ground, and I saw that my fellow tiller, standing nearby, had dropped his spade.

“Amis!” I called to him.

Amis’s voice, low and shaken, was difficult to decipher.

“Holy . . .” he said. “O . . . Holy . . .”

His gaze was fixed on the sky. I looked up.

A shadow had spread across the heavens, so large that I could barely see the blue of the sky. Its form resembled that of a bird, but with many more wings than a bird is endowed. Two wings formed a halo around its head. Two others, a modest coverage of its legs. Two more spread out on either side of its body, casting a shadow upon the entire field where we worked. I fixated on the shadow’s enormity; its breadth blocked out the sun and all of its rays. I thought it to be much grander than the Manor House, and much more holy than the church, and had I not

been so transfixed by the creature floating above us, I would have prayed to be forgiven for such a blasphemous thought. In my transfixion, I came to a revelation, and I fell to my knees and cowered. The creature was falling. The whole manor felt the creature hit the fields. The earth rumbled, and I held my head in my hands as I was thrown backwards into the wheat fields. Around me were the highpitched cries of tillers searching for sanctuary. The wind from the creature’s crash bellowed, its song mixing with the sound of rich stone falling to the ground, those once-infallible walls of the Manor House finally being felled. The bells of the church screamed as they were destroyed, and I prayed my house was still standing but I knew it was not.

It took many long moments for the shaking to stop and for my legs to stand upon solid ground. As I opened my eyes, I saw that the fields had been overtaken by that fallen creature. Its body, towering high above us, was as large as the now-demolished Manor House. Its wings touched every corner of the fields, and all around us, its golden feathers floated, each feather as long as I was tall. I reached my hand out to one floating near me. It was warm to the touch, and it smelled like honey: soft and sweet.

I could not recall the last proper meal I had

eaten.

The tillers crowded around the body. Even as it lay there in its death, the creature shone with a glory matched only by the heavens. We hoisted each other up and reached over its towering body to fold away the wings so that we may see the holy figure that lay at the core. We saw and we began to cry, for it was beautiful.

The creature had the likeness of a human, but it was much too perfect for humanity. Its skin, as smooth as a ceramic bowl, formed a face of perfect proportions, with soft lips slightly agape and shining eyes like glass balls gazing at the sun. Amis reached out to touch the rounded cheek of the being, and his fingers sank into the surface as though he was touching oil. When he removed his hand, the residue that remained looked much like warm honey, and my stomach yearned to collect what was dripping from his fingers.

The creature’s body, much like its wings, was adorned with golden feathers that lay neatly over the muscular curvature of its torso and hips. The feathers wrapped its limbs and chest with a protective tightness that gave way to the down feathers along its stomach—a stomach so round and so, so full. I pressed a hand to my own stomach. It cried.

The creature’s feathers kissed my ankles. Soft, inviting tongues. I was taught to resist temptation but Father, I faltered. I plucked a barb from a feather and placed it in my mouth. I tasted the warmth of freshly baked bread. I indulged in sin thereafter.

My hands ripped at the creature, stuffing handfuls of feathers into my mouth, and my stomach cried tears of joy upon receiving the sweetness of its holy body. Wheat and barley, seasoned with herbs and spices I had only ever imagined the tastes of. Its skin, soft and flowing, dripped juices down my fingers. I lapped them up like a dog. Blood flowed from the chunks of the creature’s body that I had torn away, and I drank it ravenously, for it tasted like wine. I bit at the creature’s neck, sweet as a perfectly ripened grape, and I felt its song sing through my flesh and bones.

“Holy, Holy, Holy,” I cried. The tillers repeated my words as they followed me in devouring the creature.

“Holy, Holy, Holy,” they cried. We ate our holy meal.

By nightfall, we had carved a home for ourselves in the belly of the creature, a shelter from the outside winds. We would stay there for several cycles of the moon. The Manor Lord and his priest dared not approach the fields where

we dwelled; standing at a safe distance near that ruined church, they called us greedy beasts defiling a holy corpse. What right did they have to think that, as though they were not also living on flattened lands as level as the fields we toiled in our entire lives? No; we paid them no mind as we took refuge in the soft shells of the creature’s throat and rib cage. Slowly, we licked the creature clean of its flesh until it was only skin and then bones and then nothing. When the last of it had fallen into our stomachs, we lay in the fields, and we rested.

Baby Needs an Exorcism

by Lucy Eller

Illustration by Katherine Fitzhugh

Your youngest daughter is possessed by a demon.

You call the rabbi and ask him what you should do. Even in a world where demonology is a field of legitimate study, people still go to religious leaders first, and not without valid reason. You don’t trust the demonologists to not treat her like a science experiment, rather than a patient in need of help. But you’ve known the rabbi for years.

Rabbi Levinsky thinks for a moment, then says, “Try having her say the Shema three times a day for a couple weeks or so, and if that doesn’t work, call me and I’ll give you the number of a Catholic priest who can do an exorcism.”

You thank him, and it takes her father’s help to wrestle your youngest daughter off of the wall and into an armchair; she spits on you and curses the entire time, possessing too much strength for a short, skinny eleven-year-old. Her father (your

husband) switches off with you in looking after her. Neither of you want her to lose even one birthday to a demon.

Before long, she tires out, and you get her to recite the Shema. At first, her tongue bursts into flames. Then it’s just nosebleeds and stammering at the name of G-d. Then she chants it successfully three days in a row. When she smiles, it is her own, and you once again call her firefly.

The demon is gone, and your youngest daughter is back. ***

Your youngest daughter is possessed by a demon.

You tried calling the rabbi. His advice wasn’t bad, but it unfortunately didn’t work, which shouldn’t surprise you. Judaism doesn’t exactly prepare you for demonic possessions. Fortunately, Rabbi Levinsky was ready for his advice to fail, because he gives you the number of the Reverend Father Jordan at the Church of St. Anthony. You call Father Jordan, and he is shocked to find that your daughter has been possessed for the past nine months.

“Nine months?” he repeats. “Are you sure she’s—are you sure she’s still . . . alive?”

“Yes, she’s definitely alive,” you say, “and I know she’s still in there.”

Father Jordan agrees to perform an exorcism. He goes to your house that Thursday, and you haven’t had time to clean up the broken lamp your firefly hurled at her two sisters, both teenagers. There was only time for your oldest daughter to clean the vomit off of the walls and floor. But more importantly, you’ve managed to wrangle your youngest into a chair and made sure she’s restrained. Your oldest apologizes to Father Jordan about the broken lamp for you, and he says that it’s not the worst thing he’s seen when called to do an exorcism. To stay out of the priest’s way, your unpossessed daughters go to the movies with their father. You remain at home, waiting in the next room in case there’s an emergency.

No exorcism ever goes pleasantly; there is a lot more screaming than you would like, and afterwards your little girl is exhausted. You wipe away the blood around her nose and mouth, thanking Father Jordan, and you put her to bed. In the morning, she wakes up, just as she always did before.

The demon is gone, and your youngest daughter is back.

Your youngest daughter is possessed by a demon.

Your first instinct was to call Rabbi Levinsky,

but his advice didn’t work, so he gave you the number of the Catholic priest Father Jordan, who performed an exorcism that was supposed to work, but you have a feeling it didn’t. Your little girl isn’t acting like herself. She behaves robotically—she barely speaks, she sits very still, she moves like she is on autopilot. She always behaved larger than she was, but now she is smaller than ever. Where is your firefly? Where is your spirited girl who speaks too loudly and overflows with so much joy that she laughs at everything? The exorcism should have brought her back. Where is she? Where is your baby?

You and your husband have multiple conversations about it, and you both suspect— though you don’t want to say it—that perhaps the demon is merely dormant.

The demon reawakens one day, and you find out when your second-born rushes to your room to tell you that her little sister is crawling around on her ceiling, smearing red paint and muttering in dead tongues again. Her father takes care of her while you search for other options.

You find a place—the Littlerock, an energy commune in Oregon that specializes in an experimental method of exorcizing demons. It’s affordable, it has credible references, and calling the demonologists is a last resort. You reach out to Dagmar, the woman in charge, and she

responds to you that same day, saying that of course they’ll help your youngest.

You and your husband take your little girl and fly to Oregon, leaving your other two daughters with your sister-in-law. You stay in Oregon for all three weeks while your husband flies back home.

You aren’t allowed to visit your third-born at the Littlerock, but you receive updates every other day; halfway through the second week, they include her signature. You try not to dwell on it too much—the Littlerock has given you no reason to distrust them—but you can’t help thinking about their methods. You read about some on their website, such as milk baths, harp music, breathing exercises, and the burning of various herbs and incense, but you know nothing beyond that.

Most of your nights are plagued with nightmares: your little girl is dragged through the woods by a rope around her neck, locusts flying past her lips and the occasional snake slithering out when she opens her mouth; she is tied to a bed while faceless men throw salt in her face and threaten to burn her alive; blood gushes from her nose and the scratch marks on her arms, legs, back, and torso as she begs for help, screams for you, and wails the question of why her family has abandoned her. But these are only

dreams.

Her father returns to Oregon the day before you’re going to pick up your daughter. He knows about your nightmares; he has had plenty of his own. You both go to retrieve her, making anxious conversation about whether or not this method has finally worked, how you will make up for both of her missed birthdays, and your shared relief that the rabbi said she can still have a bat mitzvah.

When your firefly appears, her face lights up. She races towards you, calling in her belllike voice, “Mom! Dad!” and she leaps into your arms, more herself than ever.

The demon is gone, and your youngest daughter is back. ttt

The Cheater

by Ryan Forgosh

Illustration by Aubrey McConnell

Ithink my man is cheating on me. You can call me paranoid or whatever else you’d like, but I know I’m right. I mean, there’s just so much evidence. How could it not be true? My man’s been acting differently for a while now. He used to give me a kiss every single morning without fail. But now? He hasn’t touched me in weeks! He also started leaving the house earlier than usual. My man used to leave the house at 9:00 a.m. sharp for work, but now he leaves at 8:30 a.m.

For what reason? If you ask me, I bet he’s getting his morning fix now from someone else, meeting up with some floozie that everyone’s tasted. What, am I not good enough for him anymore? Sure, I’ve got a bit of a chip on me, but I always thought that added to my charm. Even if it doesn’t, is that enough to drive him to go somewhere else to add some flavoring to his morning?

It’s 8:45 a.m. right now. My man’s already left, and all I can do is sit here, my anger brewing, as I visualize giving him a red-eye. But then my hope is restored. I hear the creak of a door being opened, and I know my man’s returned. Maybe he’s realized his mistake and seen how neglected I’ve been!

“Damn it. I’m gonna be late,” I hear my man mumble. “Where the hell did I leave my files?”

I’m ready for him to greet me. To pick me up and bring me to his lips. But then he walks into view. He moves into the kitchen, and he’s not alone. I can’t believe what I’m looking at. He has the gall to bring her into the house. He’s not even trying to hide her from me. And with this, my suspicions have been confirmed. The woman whom my man’s hand is wrapped around is green as could be. Her head is adorned with a similarly green crown. And her smile is sickening. It’s like she knows what she’s doing to me and is reveling in it. Not to mention what she’s doing to my man. Every morning she steals his money just to give him something he could get for free from me. The siren has lured him into her trap, and he’s transfixed.

I’ve been there for him for as long as he can remember. His parents introduced us when he was just a kid, and we’ve been inseparable ever since. Or at least I thought we were. Whenever

he was cramming for a test, I was there to help reinvigorate him. When he struggled to get out of bed, I was there to wake him up. We were a team. He’d press his lips to me and I’d fill him with warmth, the vanilla scent with which I’m so often adorned wrapping around him. But I guess I wasn’t enough. Now he’s after someone more robust. And he found that in a cardboard cutout with no personality to call her own. He places her on the counter next to me. Looking at her up close, our differences become apparent. She’s much taller than I am, and I’m a bit wider. She’s white with green highlights throughout, while I’m just plain white. Sure, I change color, which captivated my man when he was younger, but I guess the novelty of that has worn off.

She looks over at me with the green glare she wears. If I didn’t know better, I could have sworn she winked at me.

“You’re just temporary,” I say to the cardboard my man’s brought into our home. “You’re just here so he can get his fix. But me? I’ve been with him since he was ten, and I’ll continue to be there for him, even if I’m not being used. Once you’re gone, I’ll still be here. And I always will be.”

“You keep telling yourself that, sweetie,” she responds with a posh accent. One that says, I’m

better than you, and you know it. “In the end, he paid for something better than he could get at home. Honestly, you should be happy for him. Now he can actually enjoy his mornings. Oh, honey, you’re turning green! Are you perhaps trying to imitate me?”

I feel helpless. Here I am, collecting dust on the counter while this cardboard cutout will get to go with my man once he leaves for work. And tomorrow, another will take her place, and I’ll still be here. She’s right. Nothing that’s happened in the past matters if it doesn’t lead to a future where we’re together. The disposable cup’s man comes to the counter, and I feel like I shatter as he reaches past me to grab her. His hand grazes me as he does so. It’s the most contact we’ve had in a long while, and it’s just for him to grab someone else. But this graze is enough to send me reeling. I tilt over, my balance off, and tumble from the counter to the floor. And now, I truly shatter. My chip that I once found charming is now joined by a hundred other little cracks. A moment later, I’m in pieces. I’d have to be glued back together. But hey, maybe him repairing me will also repair our love! At the very least, he can’t ignore me now.

“Ah, crap. Now I’m gonna be late,” the disposable cup’s man says.

I watch helplessly as the man reaches for the dustpan. I’m swept up as grief sweeps over me. Time seems to slow as, instead of returning me to the counter, he walks me over to the trash can. I feel as if I’m shattering all over again when he tilts the dustpan down to discard its contents. To discard me. Now, over the trash, I can see what’s inside: several clones of the cup on the counter sit in the trash, their purposes served. And now, I join them. I guess I’m just as disposable as them. Just like that, I’m replaced. There’s a different one each morning, but they’re all the same. Used once and then discarded, all winding up in the same place as me. I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised. My former owner is no different from everyone else who’s fallen victim to the siren’s song. After all, they can offer so much more than I ever could. The only flavor I’ve ever been is vanilla.

The Boy With the Fishbowl Eyes

by Anna Carson Illustration by Katherine Fitzhugh

There is a boy with fishbowl eyes, and he is visiting me again today. He smiles at me; I meet his eyes. I imagine that there is a fish of frigid blue swimming endlessly around his vacant pupils—I am transfixed by the way the brittle lights of this drab cafe illuminate them. He laughs at my thoughtless murmur, a response to his daily inquiries—how are you, you look wonderful today, I’m happy I get to see you again. Though the sound of his joy is endlessly buoyant, I like to think his gaze is glassy, distant. His long fingers reach out and graze mine as I place his coffee on the counter. He feigns an accident, and as he takes his cup he glances at me furtively and smiles sweetly, hopefully, that I might return his gentle touch with purpose. My responding smile is not quite perfect, a little short of full and real, but he does not

notice—he never does.

The boy comes to this little cafe every day, and it is a feat because our coffee is bitter and our decor is lifeless. We are hidden in the bowels of a mall in a nowhere town—there is nothing here for anyone. This boy still finds me every morning, though, and drinks the terrible coffee in the hopes that I will brush against him, skin on skin, and offer him a honey smile. Before him, I don’t think I did any of these things. I would take the small silver penknife I keep in my pocket and twirl it in my fingers, endlessly, endlessly—I would stare emptily at each man and woman that drifted in by accident, and move with mechanical precision behind my slate counter. I was nothing, smoke-like, but no longer. I imagine it is because this boy and I are one and the same. I see myself in the empty reflection of his eyes, bright and artificial as they are. I believe that he and I are two sides of a coin. Fate has brought us together, and I plan to savor it for as long as I can.

Today, the sallow morning lays waxy sunbeams across the scuffed tile floor in an attempt to bring something warm inside. Today, the boy with the fishbowl eyes lingers before me, coffee clutched in nervous fingers, untouched, and I spin my silver penknife mindlessly,

watching him, waiting. Today, he tucks a mousebrown curl behind his ear and grins at me shyly. His eyes are watching me, watching me, watching me. He mumbles small nothings, nervous—we’ve been talking for a while now, I really like talking to you—and I am fascinated by the way he seems to glow brighter with every word.

“Would you be interested . . . in dinner tonight?” He stops—his fingers, which had been anxiously twitching, fall still at his sides. He blinks at me, and I imagine his eyes gleam, as if a bare white light was shining on polished glass. Fascinating.

“That sounds nice,” I say, finally. I stop spinning the penknife and slip it into my pocket. His skin burns cherry-red.

“I’ll pick you up from work tonight!” he stutters, overly loud, enthusiastically naive, and then he is racing away. His nerve fills the air behind him, a thrumming, vibrant thing. I drink it in—I watch him leave. I think he sees in me what I see in him—surely only someone of my same mind would meet me for dinner in the dark of night, unprotected, alone.

The smile I wear in his absence is cutting, but he is no longer there to see it. If he were, I like to think that he would love it all the same.

The headlights of the boy’s truck pierce through the looming darkness. The parking lot is mostly empty, as it always is, but after-hours it is even more barren than usual. I stand alone by my own car—I guess it didn’t occur to him that I didn’t need a ride.

When he pulls up beside me his smile is wide and just a bit bashful. I leave my car behind—he does not even realize it is mine. As I climb into the passenger seat, we lock eyes; I am once again convinced, as I always am. His eyes seem to stare at me sightless, looking beyond me, past me. I return his smile, and mine is a hungry grin.

“Let’s eat.”

He brings me to a candlelit picnic by the lake. The water is inky black and thick with things unseen. He has tried to be romantic, as though he can’t see the trees hanging threateningly over the blanket, or the darkness winding around the candles and bathing the grove in ominous shadows.

“I wanted to be unique,” he says with an easy laugh. “Although in hindsight you probably thought I was dragging you out here to murder you or something.”

I laugh with him.

He sits me down and pulls out a bottle of

red wine, a couple sandwiches, grapes. It is basic; it is everything a picture-perfect picnic should be, with the exception of a serene meadow and a pink-yellow-purple sunset. I don’t mind, of course; I sip my wine and appreciate the way his blown-glass eyes reflect the dancing candlelight. The night grows around us. He laughs—I respond in kind. He offers me a grape—it is delicious. He tells me he has been wanting to take me out for a long time. I smile and let my hand brush his as I refill my wine glass. He says, with a stutter, that he is glad I agreed to come. I lean forward slightly to look into his eyes, one hand wrapped around my glass and the other resting on my thigh.

“I’m happy too,” I breathe, and his flushed cheeks flame at my words. He shifts forward, closer to me, a little eager, a little hungry. I am hungry too.

The wine begins to sit fuzzy on my tongue, but it does not dull the sharp taste of anticipation. Our eyes are locked—my hand drifts from my thigh to my pocket. His hands twitch with desire—my fingers gently brush my penknife, silver and jagged and deathly sharp. I lick my lips—his eyes follow the movement. He is silent, and the whisper of candle flame is all that sits between us. I am locked in a sudden, inescapable moment in time—I am trapped in

his vacant gaze.

The moment breaks.

I lunge forward, my wine glass discarded and bleeding red on the picnic blanket. He meets me in the middle, and I know he is eagerly leaping for something that I will not be giving. His hand reaches up to brush my hair, but my penknife is now gleaming in the dim fire glow. He cries out and now I am on top of him, blade bloodied, his hand slashed and pressed to the blanket. I lean down, down, down, and our lips are all but pressed together.

“I love your eyes,” I whisper. The tip of my knife drops, drops, drops—it kisses the glass of his fishbowl eyes. I grin. ***

I am sitting behind the counter in silence, as I so often do. I am spinning my penknife, admiring the way it catches the light. I smile when I remember the boy, my boy, last night—I am thinking of his eyes when a girl rings the bell at the counter. I rise to take her order—her pale, blade-sharp fingers catch my eye. I smile an imperfect smile. I think to myself, This girl and I, we are one and the same.

A Funeral in November

by Sydney Flaherty

This time of year the sky is always gray and the air claws at red cheeks. Cecilia stands in a long sleeve shirt and jeans, her white hair blowing in the wind. She feels numb and doesn’t notice her smoky breath or the way her teeth chatter in rhythm.

To combat the icy November, Cecilia is armed with a rake. After occupying a dark corner of Cecilia’s garage all summer, the rake’s teeth are wrapped in strings of dust. Cecilia barely makes out the wisps beginning to fly in the air.

The trees in Ceclia’s backyard are bare and ugly; all of their leaves are on the ground, begging to be put back in place, begging to restore the beauty that’s been lost. Cecilia can’t glue them back on or string them up. So instead she resolves to rake them away, to pile them neatly and stop this ugly cycle.

The trees are screaming at Cecilia, “Give them back to us.” They are sobbing. She can

Illustration by Aubrey McConnell

remember when the trees were young, vibrant with reds and oranges and yellows. She understands better than most how painful it is to watch all the beautiful pieces of yourself as they drop one at a time. This season is stalking Cecilia, following her around like a ghost. She wants to get rid of it. Cecilia wants to wash this body off with a stone, scrubbing and scratching until the only thing left is bright red, oozing flesh and clean blood. She wants to pile up the leaves, saving each and every one. She wants to yell at the ghost—she wants to tell it not to come any closer. The trees are not good and beautiful anymore. Cecilia hates them for it. They faded and became brittle one morning when she wasn’t looking. Cecilia wishes someone would have told her in advance; she would have used more moisturizer and taken more pictures. She would have held onto the compliments and mornings just a little tighter. She’s trying to hold on now, piling each moment higher and higher.

It is easy work, raking the leaves. Cecilia tells herself the trees are happy with her. With a rightful burial for their dead youth, Cecilia honors all they used to be. She tells them, “Don’t worry, I know how it feels to get old, too.”

Her hands are so cold they have frozen to the worn, wooden handle of the rake, but Cecilia

doesn’t notice. She gave up on her body a long time ago. She lets her brittle, worn fingers turn to stone.

It takes Cecilia about an hour to realize the ground is no more clean than when she started raking. Everything looks the same except for the pile of rotting leaves in the middle of her yard. She continues anyway.

Thirty minutes later, she still hasn’t seen grass. As soon as she moves a row of leaves, more fall to take their place. Cecilia looks up at the bare trees and the gray sky and can’t tell where they’re falling from. She keeps going.

Cecilia moves the rake slowly; as soon as a leaf is moved, another is added. Cecilia moves the rake fast, but not fast enough; the leaves match her pace.

Cecilia’s arms are heavy and taut, moving with a purpose they haven’t had since before she retired. Her breathing matches the pace, unsteady and gasping. Calluses are forming on her palms and Cecilia is holding onto the rake like a crutch; it steadies her enough to keep going. The pile of leaves now reaches above her fence.

Cecilia cannot stop. Her body screams for water and food and rest but she is not listening. It feels nice to not listen for once. Her

movements are becoming jerky and relentless; it’s like she’s killing something. Blood runs down the rake’s handle like a river, flowing from the burst blisters on her hands. The sky is laughing at Cecilia, asking her why she needs to delay the inevitable. Why must she rake the leaves into neat piles, knowing they will continue to fall? Why must she order and preserve each thing as it passes by? Doesn’t she know some things can’t be stopped?

Cecilia wants to scream at the trees and the wind and the clouds that block out the sun. She wants to tell them she isn’t crazy, that the trees used to be pretty and she used to be pretty, and that if she holds all of them right here then maybe she can still stop this full death. If she can just hold on to the parts that once made her young, made her alive. She is so focused on the leaves she doesn’t notice the leaf pile creeping up behind her. It happens so gradually that she can’t feel their brittle edges as they caress her face and wipe her tears and sweat. She has been looking down all this time, shoving the endless leaves to the pile behind her. She didn’t know that the pile was beginning to block out the sky and the meager light it provided. Cecilia is tearing at the leaves, ripping them to shreds, when she realizes it is pitch black and the wind is not hitting her like it

Cecilia’s warm breath ricochets off the walls of leaves and hits her face. Her hands have finally let go of the rake. She sits down for the first time in a while. Her body feels as though it is made of wood. She thought she would be scared, clawing her way through with blood on her teeth. Instead, she notices that she is tired and closes her eyes. She is finally warm.

About the Authors

Ning Chen (he/him) is a sophomore Visual Media Arts major. In addition to being a writer he is an illustrator, and his favorite genre of fiction is horror.

Sydney Flaherty (she/her) is a freshman Writing, Literature, and Publishing major. She is from Michigan and likes to read in her free time.

Anna Carson (she/her) is a sophomore Writing, Literature, and Publishing major. She loves to travel, read fantasy novels, and write short stories. Her work has previously been published in Emerson’s Generic Magazine and Page Turner Magazine.

Lucy Eller (any pronouns) is a senior Creative Writing major and Comedy Writing and Performance minor. Her all-time favorite novel is Dracula, and she wrote “Baby Needs an Exorcism” listening to spooky surf rock music.

Ryan Forgosh (he/him) is a sophomore Journalism major. His favorite book is The Princess Bride and he is the captain of Emerson's Splatoon team

Christie Cushing (she/her) is a second-year graduate student in the Writing and Publishing program. Her favorite genre to write is ‘misfits in love.’ She recently wrote the novel Peter & Terpsi, a love story between a martial artist and a ballerina. Outside of writing she enjoys science, math, pugs, and chocolate (but not in that order). Please stop by her blog at writerxt. wordpress.com.

Phoebe Chan (she/her) is a sophomore Creative Writing major. Her favorite genre is fantasy, and she likes to bake when she can.

About the Type

The running text for this issue is set in Adobe Caslon Pro, designed for Adobe by Carol Twombly based on specimen pages by William Caslon between 1734 and 1770.

The display type for this book is Yu Gothic Pr6N designed by Morisawa Inc.