High Society Loses Altitude - Kim Frederick Heller III

Babel

DESIREE ASCEVICH

The world is a torment of sapphire midnights. Gaping holes that used to be stars rest mutely, greedy mouths that will never again be full. The silence is loud, echoing through empty space. No rustling wind, wildlife, electrical hums. Stillness after the clamor of death. The ashes fall more heavily as the atmosphere dies. Micro asteroids moving through the void. An end to bedlam. Observing the actions of my consequences. Alone at the end of the world, the peace is dizzying.

One being moves through the wreckage. Slowly stepping on newly dead ground. The ash does not stir, there is no air to create such movement. A vacuum now sits where chaos and energy used to dance. His steps falter as a droplet appears on the ground in front of him, momentarily darkening the white dust in a small, neat circle. He hesitates.

They fight so hard. Fleeing blindly, crying, shouting, begging. What a waste. Each meteor causes the ground the tremble savagely. A ghastly figure emerges on the rooftop beside me. Favored son. Does this give him joy at last? No reply. The world rattles. The buildings will crumble. He leaves on a whisper. Pride came before the fall. It is time for this to end. The moon fractures. The tides untether. The volcanos erupt. Fragments of light stream through darkness.

Another circle appears. Shocked, he finds wetness on his face. He has not wept in… millennia. He wonders if things are so unchangeable. His mind has been changed before. Perhaps there is still… hope. He takes a step back hesitantly. This is an old, old trick. This, he has not done since time was in its infancy. He does it now.

Electricity is dead. The darkness makes me question myself. My vacillation ends as clusters of people squabble, envious of belongings. Even now they do not seek out betterment. They glare and scowl, ignoring the bursting blisters blooming on their skin. The wrath causes more mayhem. Planes drop bombs. Countries have been blown

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to dust. The warheads have come out. Mushroom clouds blossom across the surface.

He steps deliberately. The drop pulls itself from the ash, soon followed by the first. Another step. Faster. Too fast. He watches a tower as it is built. The beginning of the end. Fights break out, spilling discontent and hatred. This is where man fell apart. He did not create this chaos; he was merely a construct of it. The men kill one another, He now knows what to do.

Structures burn and crowds gather around people who claim they can make things right. Liars. Gluttons for punishment. Locked away with their food stores while others starve. Beef shortages and crop rot will spread quickly. Food will be as scarce for the wealthy as it was for the children in the streets they ignored. Churches flooded with calls, but this is their answer. Their slovenly pleas grow as the planet dissolves into chaos. Waiting for an absolution that will not come.

He understands now what must be done. What must change. Hope alights within a hopeless soul. He steps forward and finds smoke lingering in the air. Not the smoke

PROSE

of a world consumed by destruction, but of industry. There is excitement, though restlessness slithers, carried by the same wind that broke the first tower. Not far enough yet. He steps forward again.

Pestilence is gleeful. They barely notice. They lust for power, fame, and fortune, carnal pleasures, and violence. I sense only relief as the satellites fall from the sky. The confusion is to be expected. They look for reasons and logic in their science. People hoard money - revolting. The greed that has lodged itself so deep in the soul of humanity. I will pull it out by the root. Less access has created more avarice. They will never realize - they are pitiful, loathsome creatures.

The world is a blur of violence and nightmare. This is the time. He finds Him standing on a rooftop as the ground shakes beneath their feet. Are you happy, now? Before, in this time, in this place, he left. Not now. He grabs Him, clinging tight as he takes a step backward, dragging Him along. Another step, and then another. It is nearly too much, but he continues.

Humanity is a lost cause. The

damage runs too deep. I have tried. I have sent my own child to be slaughtered by the beasts they have become. They have taken it all for granted. War is rampant, egged on by Conquest. Famine is unchecked, and Death is on a rampage. Too few of them care any longer. I will have to start fresh. A new world, a new creation. I have uncaged Pestilence. His brothers are already free, perhaps he can tip the scales and wake them up. This must end.

Until.

They watch as the people build a tower, the men working together in love.

They watch, as the fights start, as the divide spills.

They watch, as it falls.

There, he tells Him.

This is where you started it.

Here is where your pride began their downfall.

This is when you made monsters out of the men you claimed to love.

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Fix it.

There. I’ve done it, just as I said I would. Not a bad job for only seven days, wouldn’t you say?

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Destiny Rodriguez

ONE ON ONE INTERVIEW WITH TOUCHSTONE’S COVER ARTIST

L

ooking at Destiny Rodriguez’s work, you would never guess that she has an affinity for, and is deeply inspired by, horror films.

Rodriguez is a senior digital arts major with a minor in journalism. She has been creating digital art for eight years now, starting her artistic journey in high school. Beginning as a photographer, she took the leap into the world of digital art because her sister is a digital artist as well. Rodriguez has “always been interested in digital art” as a photographer, and this interest inevitably became part of her pieces.

With the pandemic in full swing, Rodriguez has found it hard to get out and take pictures of her own, so she deconstructs and designs her pieces using found images. “Normally I use my friends for models and stuff, but I haven’t been able to see them and everything’s online,” Rodriguez said. Despite this, her art style has grown to be “a little bit more experimental” and Rodriguez thinks “it’s a lot of fun to just see what I can create, without having to worry about taking the images.”

Rodriguez looks up to artists like Frank Moss and Roger Mattos for inspiration, as well as album art covers and films. Rodriguez’s favorite genre of films is horror, and she expresses how she “ kind of likes to focus on something that feels older but has a more contemporary feel,” regarding how horror films are influential to her work.

“Paper Voyage,” Touchstone 2021’s cover, is a picturesque scene of an ocean, with a paper boat floating amongst the gentle waves. Two boys are the boat’s passengers, navigating the sea together. The older boy points off into the distance, showing something unbeknownst to the viewer to the younger out of the two. To Rodriguez, the two boys are “ two brothers, and they’re lost. And they’re growing up together, and they’re kind of finding their own way.” To make this piece, Rodriguez scrolled

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through images, looking for hours for the perfect pictures that match the scene she has developed in her head. “Sometimes between doing writing assignments and stuff, I’ll be like, okay, I can’t do this any longer. I need something else to focus on. So, I’ll just scroll and find something that I like that I think I can make something out of. So, I found the paper boat first. And I was like, create something new that you don’t really see. You think of paper, it’s not really something that’s strong, it’ll crumble and fall apart.” Rodriguez explained that she felt the urge to put the paper boat in an ocean because “I’ve never been a really strong swimmer and growing up in Florida, I feel like that’s a no no. So, I do like the idea of focusing on the ocean because there’s so much that you don’t know that’s out there, 80% of it is on unexplored and that’s terrifying to me.”

With Rodriguez graduating this May, her feelings of uncertainty prompted her to weave this narrative behind “Paper Voyage.” Rodriguez confesses that “I feel like one of the biggest things I felt recently, when creating is the idea of the purpose of creating. Like, what I’m going to do in the future and the idea of growing up and not being ready. And kind of feeling like having a sinking feeling. Every time I think of graduating, I’m like, Oh, God, what am I gonna do next? Yeah, just the idea of you look out to the sea for miles and all you see is blue. That something’s out there. But you can’t see it. So, you’re like, ‘this is terrifying.’”

Rodriguez has two other pieces featured in Touchstone 2021, “In Quiet Rooms” and “Disfigure” both which were created with a similar method to “Paper Voyage.”

“In Quiet Rooms” shows a fully furnished doll house, with the viewer getting a glimpse of the kitchen. Upon further inspection, there is a hand reaching through the open doorway into the kitchen, seemingly in search for something on the island. Looking even deeper, in the back right window of the kitchen peers in a doll, with hair framing her face and glassy, lifeless eyes. For “In Quiet Rooms,” Rodriguez explains how, “what I picture in my head for this is a doll that’s living in a house. And it’s a fake world, and your kind of interacting with it. But at the same time, there’s this sense of stillness and panic. Like, you’re not sure what’s going to happen next.” The inspiration for the dollhouse present in “In Quiet Rooms” was drawn from the movie “Annabelle” from The Conjuring franchise, one of Rodriguez’s favorites. For this piece, Rodriguez stated that she “loves the idea of something that’s really mellow and calm, and that feels inviting and reminds you of your childhood nostalgia And turning that into something that feels unnatural. And kind of looking at it, I feel like I’m holding my breath. Like, you’re waiting for something to happen. And I really like that aspect of it.” With that being said, Rodriguez’s favorite part of creating this piece was “Just getting to create something that’s not inherently mine. To build

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“Disfigure” is a portrait of a young women, bathed in golden light. There is a piece of lace draped over her head, causing the outlines of the pattern to cascade over face. Her face is morphed, almost as if it is being stretched or pulled apart. What appears to be one image, is actually multiple layered, and Rodriguez “became really interested layering and using two different images and combining it into one to just create something new and using the same subject and just being able to take one person and morph them into something that’s unrecognizable.” Despite this disfigurement, Rodriguez still feels as if “there’s still sort of like a delicacy, intricate, perspective about it. Like, there’s a lot of detail with the lace, and just being really soft, but at the same time, disrupting something.” This piece took Rodriguez about thirty minutes and she likes to do quick projects like these from timeto-time because she doesn’t really have to think about it, and just gets to make something that she thinks is interesting to look at. “Disfigure” for Rodriguez is about self-image, and how “You never get to see yourself the way other people see you. And there’s that detail and the beauty” and how this can sometimes be startling, but beautiful. Rodriguez creates her pieces whenever she needs a break from the monotony of day-to-day life, or whenever she feels the impulse to. As an artist, Rodriguez does not always know the purpose behind a piece before she makes it, and sometimes her pieces have no purpose at all. For Rodriguez, purpose is not always important for her, and does not believe that every piece of art that she creates has to be impactful. Rodriguez feels that “A lot of the time, I’ll hear artists talks, they’re like, ‘Oh, this piece is so purposeful.’ And I’m like, that’s, that’s so much stress that you’re putting on yourself. It doesn’t always have to have a meaning. And you can just think something looks cool, and it looks beautiful. And you can appreciate it for what it is.” This being said, Rodriguez still thinks that some pieces can have purpose, just not all of them need to. “The meaning of life, what is the meaning of life, maybe some people don’t have a greater purpose in life, you’re just enjoying it for what it is. That’s how I feel about art a lot of the times is, it can have its purpose, and you can use it to create something beautiful or ugly, or whatever you want.”

Post-graduation, Rodriguez hopes to become an artist in residency somewhere abroad, with her sights set specifically on South Korea or Sweden. Rodriguez feels that her pieces do not have much in common with one another and feels that an artist residency will help her develop works with overarching themes, as well as an “end goal, your end goal is to create something, but you get the freedom to do that on your own time without having to work around your other schedules and your other responsibilities in life.”

For her senior research, Rodriguez is

focusing on the Anthropocene, the idea of human existence and its impact on Earth. Rodriguez is fascinated by how we as humans have only been here for a short amount of time but have had a significant impact on the planet. She travels to state parks and take pictures of them void of humanity, then takes audio recordings of the same parks full of life and human interaction and plans to juxtapose the two to show how our actions impact nature, and how nature and its beauty is taken for granted. Eventually, Rodriguez wants to add an interactive element, where the closer you get to a piece, the louder the sounds become.

For Rodriguez, the best part about interacting with art and being an artist is that “you can interpret it any way that you want, you don’t have to give an explanation. And that’s kind of the best part about releasing it into the world, other people can perceive it the way they want.” With all this being said, at the end of the day, being an artist for Rodriguez means no limitations. “The only limit is your imagination and your ability, but you can always improve. There’s always somebody else you can learn from, you can learn from each other, can teach yourself, because I feel like there’s so many mediums that you can explore and just getting to mix those, I feel like is a lot of fun.” Being an artist is interwoven with every aspect of Rodriguez’s life, and it just comes naturally to her. For Rodriguez, art is not about how it impacts her, it is about “just getting to explore. Like, there’s no limit, I can do whatever I want. There are so many ways that you can use it.”

The art that Rodriguez produces is an extension of herself. Rodriguez’s work is a testament to how art can be meaningful and important, but also how it can just be. Rodriguez will not only continue her work post-graduation, but will continue to experiment with new mediums, always working to allow room for a creative avenue in her life.

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COLOPHON

The 2021 editions of Touchstone Literary Journal was printed by Independent Printing in Daytona Beach, FL, with a press run of 300 copies. Student designers created the journal using Adobe InDesign and Photoshop on iMac computers. The journal consists of 80 pages, and fonts including Adobe Garamond Pro, St. Ryde, and Brandon Grotesque. The 4-color process cover is printed on soft touch coating paper. Touchstone features additional online content on hatternetwork.com, which is student created, managed, and produced. All submissions are reviewed, selected, and edited by the Touchstone staff and selection committee. All literary and artistic work featured in Touchstone is created by Stetson students. Special thanks to those who submit their work and to all our supporters.

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