TCU Creative Writing Awards 2015 by TCU English Department

THE

2015

CREATIVE WRITING AWARDS

Contests & Original Work

Christine Salmon Gauthier

English ~ Writing

Christine Salmon Gauthier had a lifelong love of learning, an appreciation of the power of the written word and a passion to make life better for others. And her heart remained at TCU even after she received her English degree in 1994 and moved away from Fort Worth. “The broad exposure she experienced through her liberal arts education at TCU developed a curious, fiercely independent, determined young lady into a charismatic, thoughtful and dynamic visionary,” say her parents, Dr. Martha Hackley Salmon, TCU Class of 1966, and Dr. James Salmon. After Christine passed away in January 2008, they decided to establish the Christine Salmon Gauthier Student Apprenticeship in English and/or Writing to memorialize Christine’s life. The paid apprenticeship offers deserving junior or senior students enhanced learning experiences outside the classroom. “It provides the opportunity for other students to leave TCU and their world with the same profound legacy of strength and excellence,” her parents say. “That would give Christine as much joy as the memory of her gives all who knew and loved her.”

Wonder Eric Fisher Stone A kid grabs handfuls of shells into his beach-bucket. More varied than people or snakes they’re swirled, spindled, spiked, halved, and some can sing the sea in the white coast of the child’s ears. Fighting conchs sail in the shore froth with scallops and shark eyes. Auger snails spire like narwhal tusks with winding sundials, pear and lightning whelks and murexes and Venus combs in the leviathan-birthing sea and the boy watches the sky while barges dissolve at its edge as if they dropped off a waterfall but he knows they entered over deep ocean which mothers sperm whales and leatherbacks and giant squid and barracudas and jellyfish big as Volkswagens and he walks from the pier, back home and plays in his backyard grass looking for nests dappled with ants until he finds their eggs and queen like a dark kernel of rice and he is so happy to live on a planet with toads where Blakean heaven glows in wildflowers and Earths of sandgrains and he smiles gracious for bird-droppings and clouds. He’ll stay friends with worms and lizards storming through spinning days as the Milky Way’s nautilus throbs with stars and worlds. With air. Rainbows. Wonder.

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CREATIVE WRITING AWARDS 2015 Contests & Original Work 1

One that smacked of sure defeat.

This publication is dedicated to

After closer thought he stroked his chin. “I tell you now as I told you before, I never want to see my ex-wife again.”

 Dr. David L. Vanderwerken 

We Were Warned we read the tales expecting the necessary what we’ve always wanted morals and nixies and water-dwelling trolls the voice like Rapunzel’s parrot ready to tell us all it knows calling to the glass mountains where dwarfs sledge ores and evil queens dance on firecoals

“There is no such thing as was—only is. If was existed, there would be no grief or sorrow.” - William Faulkner (The Art of Fiction, No. 12—The Paris Review)

they sing of the destroyed cottage where the bears lived, the big bad wolf with his belly full of stones but when at last we read them again we have become the wronged orphans and are as lost as misaddressed mail we collect mosses for our bed and haul sacks of grain to the mill

The TCU Department of English and the William L. Adams Center for Writing thank all of the sponsors and judges of the awards for their generosity and their support of student writing at TCU. © Copyright 2015 Texas Christian University

I have learned to live under the power of curses a changeling child who once chased pearls not this shaking donkey shambling his way to the knacker 99

2015 CREATIVE WRITING AWARD WINNERS & TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Frog King for James H. Bowden Iron Henry slept under the princess’s pillow in a time when wishes still came true. But acts of passion frequently disenchant, and there aren’t many good strategies for sleeping with a woman so full of narcissistic desire. It was hard to settle on the right word, but as she dreamt Henry whispered endearments sweet enough to make stones cry. Words poured from his mouth as easily as water from a hole in a boot. And each morning he shook the eiderdown until its feathers fell like snow until one day she loosened the laces of her stay. You can call this a miniature domestication myth or merely a tale about an amphibian intruder, but even if she has to kiss a frog every princess hungers for Iron Henry in bed, and any old frog may in time find his head atop the pillow. The Test “Go,” the old hag said And bring back three hairs From the Devil’s head. So the challenge lay at his feet, 98

Contest #1. Fiction (short story or incident) Award SPONSOR: THE WOMAN'S WEDNESDAY CLUB, FORT WORTH Judge: Mr. Jeramey Kraatz, author of The Cloak Society Winner: Taylor Santore for “Peas” ............................................................................................ Page 7 Contest #2. Research Paper or Essay, Making Use of Source Material SPONSOR: THE WOMAN'S WEDNESDAY CLUB, FORT WORTH Judges: Dr. Bonnie Blackwell and Dr. Margaret Lowry Winner: Annelise Severtson for “The Influence of Gender Roles on Child Development” ....... Page 10 Honorable Mention: Hannah Richstein for “Agnes Mary Clerke and her Astronomical Contributions”

Contest #3. The AddRan English 10803 Award SPONSOR: AN ANONYMOUS DONOR Judges: Mr. Christopher Foreé and Dr. Chantel Langlinais Carlson, author of The Exhibit Winner: Lauren Rizzi for “Stepping Into the Life of Chelsee Capezzuti” ................................. Page 13 Honorable Mention: Maya Sinclair Hall for “Nap it Off: The Healing Power of a Nap”

Contest #4. The Tony Burgess Environmental Writing Award SPONSORS: DR. DAN WILLIAMS, MS. CYNTHIA SHEARER, AND DR. STEVE SHERWOOD Judges: Dr. Dan Williams, Director, TCU Press, Ms. Cynthia Shearer, author of Celestial Jukebox, and Dr. Steve Sherwood, author of No Asylum Winner: Alexandra Harvey for “Liberate Tate: The Quest to Free Art from Oil” ..................... Page 17 Contest #5. The David Vanderwerken Short Story Contest SPONSORS: DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH FACULTY Judge: Dr. Neil Easterbrook, 2014 Master Tutor in Criticism, Royal Observatory, Greenwich England Winner, 1st Place: Nick Barnette for “Excavators” .................................................................... Page 22 Winner, 2nd Place: Francia Teruel for “Unattainable” Winner, 3rd Place: Bradford Lowe for “Light Pavement” Contest #6. The Non-Fiction Prose Contest SPONSOR: THE THURSDAY GROUP, TCU WOMEN EXES. Judges: Mr. Matthew Pitt and Dr. Brad Lucas Winner, 1st Place: Alexis Lohse for “When I Was Trash” ......................................................... Page 32 Winner, 2nd Place: Ellery LeSueur for “Devising the Past” Winner, 3rd Place: Alexandria Gomez for “Five-Minute Mournings and Unattended Funerals” Honorable Mention: Annelise Severtson for “Stay Safe”

Contest #7. The C.S. Lewis Prize for Christian Literature SPONSOR: JOYCE ROGERS ESTATE Judge: Dr. Daniel Juan Gil, author of Shakespeare’s Anti-Politics Winner: Nick Barnette for “Milton Stargazes: The Tension Between Astronomy, Astrology, and Free Will in Paradise Lost” ....................................................... Page 37 Honorable Mention: Ellery LeSueur for “Milton and the Morality of Knowledge”

Contest #8. The Mortar Board Prize in Literary Criticism SPONSOR: TCU CHAPTER, MORTAR BOARD Winner: (not awarded this year) Contest #9. The Siddie Joe Johnson Poetry Award SPONSOR: AN ANONYMOUS FRIEND OF THE LATE SIDDIE JOE JOHNSON Judge: Anonymous Winner, 1st Place: Nick Barnette for “Sestina for a Dog” .......................................................... Page 42 Winner, 2nd Place: Ellery LeSueur for “London at Daybreak” Honorable Mention: Bailey Betik for “Electroencephalogram”

Contest #10. The Nancy Evans Memorial Award for Texas Writing SPONSOR: THE EVANS FAMILY Judge: Dr. Charlotte Hogg, author of Reclaiming the Rural Winner, 1st Place: Haley Imlach for “The Hilton Fort Worth: Hotel and Historic Landmark” ............ Page 44 Winner, 2nd Place: Lissie Kevlin for “Coyote Drive-In” Honorable Mention: David Stack for “Fort Worth Masonic Temple”

Contest #11. The Neil Daniel Drama Contest SPONSOR: AN ANONYMOUS DONOR Judge: Dr. Chantel Langlinais Carlson, author of The Exhibit Winner: Steven Veteto for “New Way Home” ........................................................................... Page 47 Honorable Mention: Jessica Fentiman for “The Home”

Contest #12. The Subversive Thought Award SPONSOR: DR. DAVID COLÓN, DR. NATHANAEL O’REILLY, AND MR. ALEX LEMON Judge: Dr. David Colón Winner: Hayley Zablotsky for “Missing Lord” .......................................................................... Page 56 Contest #13. The Woman's Wednesday Club Merit Award SPONSOR: THE WOMAN'S WEDNESDAY CLUB, FORT WORTH Winner: Kacey Williamson Contest #14. The Lorraine Sherley Prize for a Writing Portfolio SPONSOR: AN ANONYMOUS DONOR Judges: Mr. James Chase Sanchez and Ms. Carrie Helms Tippen Winner: Ellery LeSueur Honorable Mention: Alexandria Gomez 4

Second days often go like the first, but on the crucial third she is out of jewels. (Some women say this tale proves that baubles are always a useful gift.). Still he converts the straw on the promise of her first-born. She regrets the bargain, but Rumpelstiltskin wants a kid, especially since he’s too ugly to get one of his own. The girl cries and cries, but he turns away from her like Miles Davis at Carnegie Hall. I’ll give him back, he says, if you can guess my name. Who’s your daddy, who’s your daddy? he intones. Then he volunteers all sorts of misleading clues. Months pass, and she grows rounder than a vintner’s cask. And each day she guesses new names: Reginald? Theodore? Siegfried? Aloysius? Later the mother of ravens overhears him gloating in the forest. He’s prancing about like Mick Jagger in “Sympathy for the Devil” gliding across lichen and ferns, an evil Najinsky before his time. Then he stamps his foot so hard that it goes into the ground and he can’t break free. He struggles and strains until the soles of his shoes bleed. He tears his meniscus before ripping himself in two. His sack of pearls scatters.

The miller happens by and scoops up the gems. With them he returns to the alehouse and buys a round, then another, then a goose with feathers of pure gold.

III. What’s worse than contaminated fruit? Old Cronos devoured his own children, Fearing that a little bird that might Throw a golden chain around its father’s neck. Bluebeard hung his wives By their hair in a dark closet. Heed the premonitions, but like a fool Wage war against heaven. Some of you will not remember Every word I say: How some women will do anything To get out of housework. They sleep with a cross under their pillow, Think all fairy tales end in gold

Contest #15. The Bill Camfield Memorial Award for Humorous Fiction, Screenplays, and Essays SPONSOR: ENDOWMENT ESTABLISHED BY PAUL & STEPHANIE CAMFIELD IN MEMORY OF MR. CAMFIELD'S FATHER Judges: Mr. Will Camfield and Mr. Tyler Camfield Winner, 1st Place: Cody Westphal for “First Love(s)” ............................................................... Page 60 Winner, 2nd Place: Amber Hovanec-Carey for “A Sweet Satire” Honorable Mention: Hayley Zablotsky for “Like a Pringle in the Wind”

Contest #16. The Sigma Tau Delta Essay Award SPONSOR: CHI ALPHA CHAPTER, SIGMA TAU DELTA, DR. ARIANE BALIZET, AND DR. KAREN STEELE Judge: Anonymous Winner: Bailey Betik for “Entomology” .................................................................................... Page 63 Honorable Mention: Rebekah Yarmchuk for “Trapped: Double Standards in Renaissance Literature” Honorable Mention: Samuel Tiller for “Clarifying Metaphorical Racial Transmission”

Contest #17. The Margaret-Rose Marek Memorial Multimedia Writing Award SPONSORS: DR. STEVE SHERWOOD, AND THE NEW MEDIA WRITING STUDIO Judge: Dr. Jason Helms, author of Rhizcomics Winner: Meghan Riegel for “Morning Sickness” Honorable Mention: Ashley Rea for “Virtuous Rhetoric in Online Sharing Economies”

Contest #18. The Bob Frye Satire Award SPONSOR: AN ANONYMOUS DONOR Judge: Dr. Bonnie Blackwell Winner: Kyra Lindholm for “Wanted: One, Contemporary Astral” ........................................... Page 66 Honorable Mention: Kerri Bruce for “Dear Mrs. Burnett”

Tomorrow I Brew, Today I Bake A drunken miller lies to the king, “My daughter can spin straw into gold. See how the sun strikes her hair!” But fathers are always exaggerating the beauty of their daughters, and the next day, as days do, things get worse. In the tower she can’t do it; however, an imp can, so she gives him a necklace and a ring.

Contest #19. The AddRan College Award for a Writing Portfolio SPONSOR: AN ANONYMOUS DONOR Judge: Anonymous Winner (tied): Alexandria Gomez Winner (tied): Kathleen D’Urso Contest #20. The Lilla Thomas Award for an Interpretive or Critical Essay on Feminist Writers or Feminist Issues SPONSOR: MARCELLA DANIEL, IN MEMORY OF AN INDEPENDENT WOMAN Judge: Dr. Rima Abunasser Winner: Ashley Rea for “Dinosaurs and Ballerinas” Honorable Mention: James Chase Sanchez for “Gendering the Argument by Sacrifice: Dolores Huerta and Public Memory”

Contest #21. The Kurt Lee Hornbeck Poetry Award SPONSOR: THE KURT LEE HORNBECK MEMORIAL ENDOWMENT Judge: Dr. Lachlan Brown, author of Limited Cities Winner, 1st Place: Carrie Helms Tippen for “Food Chain” ........................................................ Page 73 Winner, 2nd Place: Bailey Betik for “Alchemy”

Kind of Heart, Fair of Face I. Snow White slept unhappily in a ray of light, Monday’s child, a poisoned comb in her hand, her glass coffin as snug as a chaffinch’s nest. Magnificent pears hung from the branches above.

Honorable Mention: Alexandria Gomez for “Crest and Trough”

Contest #22. The Australia Tarver Essay Prize on Global Literature SPONSORS: DR. KAREN STEELE AND DR. STACIE MCCORMICK Judge: Dr. Karen Steele, co-editor of Ireland and the New Journalism Winner: Kacey Williamson for “Lahiri’s Double-Edged Pen is Mightier than the Sword” ................ Page 75

The huntsman told to kill her spared her, slew instead a boar in the cold northland and carried its lungs and liver in his vest to her wicked step-mother who ate them with cloves.

Honorable Mention: James Chase Sanchez for “Academic Borderlands”

Contest #23. The Woman's Wednesday Club Essay Prize SPONSOR: THE WOMAN'S WEDNESDAY CLUB, FORT WORTH Judge: Dr. Nathanael O’Reilly, author of Exploring Suburbia: The Suburbs in the Contemporary Australian Novel Winner: Carrie Helms Tippen for “On Roots in Exile” ............................................................. Page 81

Without housekeeper and incapable of preparing a single bite, that woman ate whatever was at hand; she seemed to like hearts and gizzards best although I’ve heard she was also fond of turtledove.

Honorable Mention: Allison Pickett for “How to be Female”

Contest #24. The William L. Adams Writing Center Prize for the Best Essay About Rhetoric & Composition SPONSOR: WILLIAM L. ADAMS WRITING CENTER Judge: Dr. Richard Enos, author of Roman Rhetoric: Revolution and the Greek Influence Winner: Jackie Hoermann for “Mind-Body Writes: Moving Body, Mind, and Writing to Learning”... Page 86

Young Snow slept that way much of her life until a traveling prince saw her empty left hand and was stunned. He put his own over her breast and swore what he knew about undying love.

Honorable Mention: James Chase Sanchez for “Unifying Latin”

We like it when stories end right and no one follows the queen’s command. Be careful about what to ingest, and always handle step-children with a kid’s glove.

Contest #25. The Betsy Colquitt Graduate Poetry Award SPONSOR: LINDA CLARK OF GEORGETOWN, TX Judge: Anonymous Winner: Preston Waltrip for “A Memory: Addressed to my Father” ......................................... Page 92 Honorable Mention: Carrie Helms Tippen for “In the Neonatal ICU with My Sister”

II. Contest #26. The Margie Boswell Poetry Award SPONSOR: THE BOSWELL FAMILY, WHOSE ENDOWED GIFT HONORING MARGIE B. BOSWELL FUNDS THIS AWARD Judge: Anonymous Winner, 1st Place: Jerry Bradley for “A Collection of Misremembered Fairy Tales”................ Page 93 Winner, 2nd Place: Eric Fisher Stone for a collection of poems (“Wonder”, an excerpt).......... Page 100 Honorable Mention: Ulf Kirchdorfer for “Edges”

After the old lady danced and danced until she dropped and sank with her iron slippers into the moat, Snow turned to thoughts of the diamond mine. She refused to sweep or clean and plopped onto the dwarfs’ settee where she napped for years peacefully, a piece of poison apple still in her throat.

the goat in the churchyard not much different from the dancer in the graveyard still silence can be redemptive better though not to be too human and have to find emotional equity only in ourselves we’ll live with the smutch of elfinkind until we’re turned into birds, are slaughtered or the donkey one day spits gold

Peas Taylor Santore Amelia was lagging; Lucy could hear the sloppy rhythm of her footfall echoing on the border of the debris-speckled asphalt, each muffled thump falling farther behind. A dusty memory flickered into her racing thoughts and she found herself reflecting on their elementary school years, remembering the sound of running home from school. Back then it had been a competition between her, Amelia, and their friend Roger. For fun, just as a game. But it wasn’t a game anymore. They were two women traveling alone and they knew it was best not to be caught out in the open.

Beauty is forever the youngest daughter, the one who believes in her own footsteps, but she is a tomb that opens from the inside.

Shaking away the nostalgia, Lucy whipped her head from one side to the other to peer through the surrounding trees and unruly bramble. It was time to find a place to rest. After what felt like another two miles, a flash of white caught her eye. She whistled to Amelia. Hoping her sister was paying attention but not having the time or energy to turn and look back, she pointed to a spot ahead of them along the opposite edge of the road. She began counting down on the same hand: five fingers, four, three, two, one, then just her fist. Before there was time to lose her nerve, she darted out into the open, across the width of the road. Fortunately, Amelia had caught the signal and wasn’t far behind. Lucy led the way into the line of trees.

Her love is as far away as the sky is blue and as short as a day of rain. Gold coins fall whenever she speaks,

Both of them were breathing raggedly. They had been running along the edge of the same shaded strip of black crust for nearly three hours. A sign or two told them it was Hilburn Road. Beginning as a thoroughfare and a straight shot through the lush valley surrounding them, it had slowly transformed into a steep back road winding its way up the easternmost foothills.

The Youngest Daughter

and some young dumbling, blinded by brambles and with blood in his shoes, is always there to count them and pick them up. Reliable as a bad meal after a funeral, he would push a ghost down the stairs for her or if necessary bowl with the skulls of priests. But the simpleton who wins this bride lies down on hard straw. Wood shavings become his coffin pillow. This is just how some love starts, with an unwary heart, and ends with every commandment broken.

Lucy stopped all together and finally turned to face her sister. The second Lucy paused, Amelia had hunched over. Lucy could see beads of sweat creeping down her sister’s brow. They should have stopped a while ago. They weren’t safe like this though. To make time for a real break they would have to continue on to what Lucy had hoped was a building. This thought reminded her of the original reason for crossing the road and she glanced away into the trees, looking for any sight of the flash of white she had seen through the foliage. There it was. A sleek column of concrete and white paint. Not a building, but a decorative pillar, could be spotted off in the distance through nature’s mess. Lucy reached back to Amelia who was still bent over like an old lady who had tried picking up a dropped piece of fruit and couldn’t straighten herself up again. Lucy’s touch startled Amelia, sending her ponytail into a backwards flip. Just a little further, Lucy mouthed. With crossed fingers, Lucy continued to lead the way to the pillar. Amelia was too busy trying to breathe and didn’t notice the unconscious gesture. If she had though, Amelia would most definitely have taken the opportunity to tease her older sister. Instead, she slowed to match Lucy’s pace with shuffling steps. Both of the dark figures kept their eyes on the ground avoiding twigs and crunchy, dead leaves. Best not to advertise their location with unnecessary noise. Autumn had arrived swiftly and without much acknowledgment. Everything had started at the

beginning of summer, which had actually been somewhat advantageous when things turned out the way they did. One day there were news blasts that something had happened along the Korean Border and that the US had retaliated with nuclear force. No one thought North Korea or it’s allies posed much of a threat, so it took most by surprise when similar weapons devastated DC, New York City, Chicago, Dallas, and Los Angeles. It was impossible to tell where the attack was actually coming from; everyone had formed their own wild conjectures. Lucy was sure it had been China while Amelia was convinced that terrorists were to blame. Not that anyone’s theories mattered now. They reached the pillar and Amelia sighed in relief. In front of them was a metal plate carved with an address. Its twin stood across what must have been a private driveway before everything went to hell. The debris, fallen leaves, and aggressive vegetation had covered it thoroughly enough to render it invisible from Hilburn. Now that they had discovered its beginning though, the path would be easy enough to follow further into the woods. Eventually they came to a clearing in which sat a little white cottage with navy shutters. A very picturesque vacation home. Weary of company, they silently agreed to circle its perimeter in the safety of the trees. When it was clear that there were no signs of other humans, they approached the front door striding side by side. Amelia tried the door as Lucy peered in through the window. Amelia turned the knob with unnecessary force. The door creaked open. Amelia’s posture straightened and her eyes glowed with hope as they both stepped over the threshold. If they were lucky they might find some food. They glanced around at the picture frames hanging on the walls, one a snap shot of a peaceful lake, another a smiling family of four. Multiple frames had been knocked from the walls and shards of glass gleamed along the edge of the darkly stained rug below their feet. An untidy main foyer to say the least. This empty little house with its navy shutters and brass doorknobs had already been a part of other stories. There weren’t any backpacks or proper sleeping bags in sight and Lucy began moving more loosely. Just odds and ends: the broken picture frames, a battered lamp shade, a few tattered, hopeless blankets and a single dirty sock long forgotten in a dusty corner. Amelia’s fleeting optimism had already been smothered. Another group must have passed through at some point, probably carrying all traces of food away with them. They slunk further forward until the edge of a table could be seen around the corner. The main foyer led into an equally disheveled living room. Turning the corner, they discovered the kitchen. Amelia surveyed the room, taking in its disarray. Drawers were missing or left open, broken tiles littered the countertops, the cabinet doors had been torn from their hinges, and three malodorous black gobs were writhing with maggots by the open pantry door. Amelia couldn’t stop herself from emitting a sob. She collapsed against the island at the kitchen’s center, curled into a ball, and began to weep. Lucy stepped over Amelia and turned away from her sister’s show of weakness, unslinging the heavy hiking pack from her back. Propping it against the kitchen table she turned to the cobwebbed shelves. “Lucy, I can’t do this anymore,” Amelia said. Her hunched shoulders and the thin arms hanging at her sides transformed her into an image of utter exhaustion. Her whimpering mangled the words but they reverberated with decision. Lucy wasn’t up for this again. She could feel the hot oil of rage and determination coursing through her body, tingling in her clenched fists.

A Collection of Misremembered Fairy Tales Jerry Bradley In the Company of Mice Cinderella slept in ashes near the oven worn out as a hound eating crow today, soup the next, at last the red-combed rooster whose wishbone she kept afterward wrapped in cloth in her apron pocket each night beneath the kettle she looked for lentils in the soot and prayed to her dead mother oh when, oh when will he come? she wondered dreaming of rich gowns even when her shoes were worn out from dancing she bided her time waiting for the hansom coach, a magic wand and two loaves of bread, for doves to peck out her step-sisters’ eyes

Donkey, Dog, Cat, and Ram we are all sons of sorrow eating from a wooden bowl

“You don’t get it do you? We don’t just get to give up. That’s not an option. We’re the ones that 8

made it! We have to keep going. Whether you think we should be alive or not doesn’t even matter!”

A Memory: Addressed to My Father Preston Waltrip The phone rings and we sulk out to your car, our duffle bags (hastily packed) lumped over our shoulders, shuffling our feet like old men—or travelers— weary of calling so many places home. We are happy to see you, of course, and Ash greets you with the excitement of a little girl, jumping into your arms so roughly you are almost annoyed. We stow our bags and drive off, waving back to Mom, and Brian (who now stands beside her), through the screen door. You flash your hand out the window, always the same curt goodbye, and ask us

Amelia’s tear-filled eyes were brewing, competing waves of apathetic fatigue and acute distress raging across her delicate features. Her forehead wrinkled with worry lines, her eyebrows stitched together, and her taut cheeks and cracked lips pulled tightly into a frown. Under normal circumstances Amelia would have taken the opportunity to sarcastically commend her sister’s ability to whisper and yell at the same time. Even now that they were fairly certain they were alone, their voices stayed low. “Listen to yourself! You keep going on and on about how it’s not a choice, but everything’s a choice. You were the one that taught me that.” Hearing her sister’s reply, Lucy turned to face Amelia and began shaking where she stood, fists squeezing into even tighter balls. Lucy had snapped. “Amelia, you know what? I don’t care whether you want to make it a choice or not as long as you would make the right decision. But you’re trying to use it as an excuse. You want to give up? I’m tired of dragging you around when all you do is whine. You at least used to have a better excuse than most of us, but things are different now. Everyone has a sad story. If you want to sit there and weep, go for it. I’m leaving in the morning, and you don’t have to come.” The sniveling had stopped. Amelia sat stilled by shock. All she could do was mumble and nod as her sister returned to her quest for food. In the shadow of one of the lower shelves there was a single can of peas, but that was all.

how he is. He is nice, we say, and funny. But he is not you, we think. When we finally reach your apartment, we have entered a new world: burgers for dinner, always dessert, a rented movie both nights, brunch at noon on Sundays; all the things two children could want out of a weekend, except to be in a place of their own, where nothing feels secondhand. So, by Sunday, we are homesick, and eager to go, not to leave you, but to sleep in our own rooms again. And we are sad to think you might be lonely without us in that little home that is yours and not ours, but we do not say so.

The Influence of Gender Roles on Child Development

teaching and research in the spring is to let students tell me, through writing, about their experiences writing with and through yoga and mindfulness, and I expect my students will be the best teachers I could ask for.

Annelise Severtson Societal pressure and stereotypes regarding gender are very influential to the way a child identities him or herself. The identities that people form in their childhood are detrimental to how people view themselves as adults. From a young age, there is pressure from modern day society for little boys to identify one way and for little girls to identify in another way. This concept is an understanding known in the world of psychology as the gender schema theory. The gender schema theory is an approach developed by Sandra Bem in 1981 which proposes that children are encouraged to behave in accordance with the gender-based standards and stereotypes of their own culture (Wood, Wood, and Boyd). Gender roles in gender differentiated children’s toys, allowance gender pay gaps, and different gender leadership expectations are all main contributors to the way in which children develop and grow up to experience defined and unequal gender roles in society. The first way in which gender roles are forced onto children from a young age is the stigma and differentiation between “Girl toys” versus “Boy toys.” In many cases, the way in which these toys encourage children to identify are unequal and sexist. “Girl toys” are typically baby dolls or kitchen sets, which encourages the stereotypical stay-at-home mom behavior. “Boy toys” are typically action figures or science experiments, which encourages action, adventure, and saving the day. From a young age, most children are escorted to a specific toy aisle and are taught by parents, peers, and the media that one kind of toy, rather than the other gender-opposite kind of toy, is appropriate for their gender. With that mindset as a part of their development process, children quickly infer that one type of behavior is appropriate for their gender and the other kind is not. This becomes a problem when children grow up and don’t feel comfortable expressing themselves a certain way because it was not deemed appropriate for them to express themselves that way as a child. For example, many stay-at-home dads feel inadequate and ashamed that they are not the breadwinner of the family, a feeling that stems from their childhood when only girls were encouraged to play with dolls and kitchen sets. Gender differentiated toys are an everyday part of our lives, and as I’ve grown up I’ve noticed it in ways that I didn’t before. For example, workers at fast food restaurants often ask: “Would you like a boy toy or a girl toy with your kids meal?” When I was younger, this didn’t even cross my mind as being unusual or unfair, even though I often found myself fighting with my little brothers to trade for their cooler “Boy toys.”

Works Cited Inoue, Asao. “Mindfulness in Composition Courses.” Message to the author. 3 November 2014. E-mail. Kabat-Zinn, Jon. Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and The World through Mindfulness. New York: Hyperion Books, 2006. Print. Kroll, Barry. "Arguing with Adversaries: Aikido, Rhetoric, and the Art of Peace." College Composition and Communication 59.3 (February 2008). 451-472. Print. Mathieu, Paula. "Excavating Indoor Voices: Inner Rhetoric and the Mindful Writing Teacher." JAC 34.1-2 (2014.) 173-190. Print. Moffett, James. “Writing, Inner Speech, and Meditation.” College English 44.3 (March 1982) 231-246. Perl, Sondra. Felt Sense: Writing with the Body. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2004. Print. Perl, Sondra. “Understanding Composing.” College Composition and Communication 31.4 (Dec. 1980): 363-369. Print. “Sondra Perl’s Composing Guidelines.” The Focusing Institute. 2012. Web. 5 November 2014. Spohrer, Erika. “From Goals to Intentions: Yoga, Zen, and Our Writing Center Work.” Writing Lab Newsletter 33.2. Oct. 2008. Web. 24 Nov. 2014. Yagelski, Robert. Writing as a Way of Being: Writing Instruction, Nonduality, and the Crisis of Sustainability. New York: Hampton, 2011. 192 pp.

However, many people are no longer conforming to this idea of gender differentiated toys. Some fast food managers now remind employees to refer to the two different toy choices by the type of toy, not the gender that typically chooses it. Further, companies like Goldie Blox have been created specifically to give young girls access to toys that encourage confidence and intelligence (www.goldieblox.com). Many people may argue that the reason there are gender differentiated toys is simple: Girls like “Girl toys” and boys like “Boy toys.” There was a study conducted in 2009 in which researchers recorded the length of time in which 3 to 8 month old infant children stared at certain gender differentiated toys, a truck and a doll. The girl infants were typically more interested in the doll and the boy infants were typically more interested in the truck. To some, this research proves that gender differentiated toys are simply what children want and what businesses are responding to (Alexander, Wilcox, and Woods). While this may be true in some cases, it’s certainly not true in all cases. As Melissa Atkins Wardy says in her book Redefin10

revalue this mind-body connection in our classrooms, the writing should become better, as will the intentions of our students after they leave our classrooms. Yagelski’s intention for bringing awareness to the mind-body connection in writing is connected to a much larger intention: the crises of sustainability in contemporary education, particularly in regards to standardized writing tests, student disconnect from writing, and citizen disconnect from environmental responsibility. Without opening an entirely new topic for research, the short synopsis of Yagelski’s argument is this: the lack of mind-bodyness in modern education produces citizens who feel neither connected to nor responsible for other embodied beings, experiences, or the world they read and write about, thus worsening present environmental sustainability crises. Aside from the mind-body connection being made rather explicit, what is striking is that Yagelski has a contemporary motivation for pursuing mindbodyness in writing. Mathieu, too, states in her article that she was motivated to pursue mindfulness meditation in the teaching of writing after she struggled to teach writing to students at Boston College who grew more disconnected from their studies after the stress and uncertainty of the 9/11 terrorist attacks shook her classroom (173). Finally, Asao Inoue has yet to write about his experiences using mindfulness practice, but his motivation comes from a desire to help students “understand how compassion works” (Inoue). That is, Inoue shared with me that he uses mindfulness “[To] cultivate or invite students to enact compassionate stances and labor in my classrooms. Mindfulness practices, with their deep traditions in Buddhism, offer me methods to think about compassion and enact it with students” (EMAIL). In the early 1980s, Perl and Moffett did not identify their motivation for using mindfulness-like meditation practices to connect with our consciousness and bodies in writing. Hence, it becomes all the more striking that the most recent scholars to invite forms of mindfulness meditation practice into the writing classroom—Yagelski, Mathieu, and Inoue—all found strong motivations to use mindfulness to reconnect the writing mind to the writing body. Does this mean that I, too, should identify a crisis as a reason for using mindfulness meditation into my classroom? I do not think so, but I do believe that my interest in yoga, mindfulness, and other Zen Buddhist meditation practices may have re-emerged as a result of my research and activist efforts in helping Dr. Francyne Huckaby write, interview, and direct a documentary on the state of neoliberalism and standardized testing on the American education system. Yet the crisis in education is hardly the only force driving me to teach a course like “Yoga-Zen Writing” this spring. I believe that for myself, and now for many other scholars, the mind-body connection is needed in writing because, when the connection is made and awareness cultivated through reflection, it works. Firsthand experiences confirm that it works for me. Through Inoue, I discovered more writing scholars using mindfulness. In fact, he led me to “The Writing Mindfulness Group,” a Google Group now maintained by Inoue and many other writing scholars. The group utilizes a listserv for writing teachers using mindfulness in their classrooms, so teachers can share ideas and insights or provide pedagogical or professional development support to one another. I recognize the potential power of this resource and support network. It suggests to me that Perl and Moffett initiated our current interest in mindfulness in the early 1980s—albeit by another name—and our continued interest several decades later suggests that mindfulness meditation practice does sustain student writing practice. Next semester in “Yoga-Zen Writing,” I hope to better understand how mindfulness benefits my student writers, but I also want to see how my students respond to the more physical practice of yoga, a more embodied way of reflecting on writing. At this point, I’m wondering which students will respond best to which practices. Who will resist, and why? What insights might my students’ reflective work bring forward that will surprise me? I have more questions than answers, so my intention for my 90

ing Girly, it’s not a bad thing that some girls like “Girl toys” and some boys like “Boy toys.” The problem with gender roles in her opinion is that society often reprimands children who go against the stereotypical gender norms related to the children toys. In an excerpt from her book, she writes “My feeling is that play should be about choice. If a girl loves all toys pink and frilly, that is wonderful. If a boy loves trucks and pirate ships, that is super fantastic. But let’s allow our children to come to those choices on their own and not push colors or a gender-role agenda on them.” Another way in which gender roles influence a child’s development and how they identify themselves is an interesting phenomenon in which some parents are paying their young sons more allowance for less work than their young daughters. An alarming Westpac survey has data to prove that “Boys earned an average of $48 for spending 2.1 hours on chores per week, while girls only got $45 for working for 2.7 hours on household jobs.” Parents may rationalize this gender allowance pay gap by saying that boys need more motivation than girls to complete household chores, but this is neither fair nor helpful to either gender. It holds young boys to a different and sexist standard, hurting them in the long run and sending the message that they don’t have the ability to succeed in completing basic household chores. These allowance gender pay gaps also emphasize the cultural idea that women are meant for housekeeping and men are meant to be the breadwinner of the family. This ideology makes stay-at-home dads feel inadequate and makes professional moms feel as if they aren’t completing their “motherly duties.” One man, Brent Kroeger, publicly shared his embarrassment and frustration at the stigma that is attached to being a stay-at-home dad. In an article published in the Los Angeles Times, Kroeger says “I don’t want other men to look at me like less of a man [for being a stay at home dad].” The final way in which society’s gender roles influence child development is the different leadership expectations for each gender. It’s a well known phenomenon in the realm of child education that little girls who seek leadership positions are disciplined as “bossy” and little boys who seek leadership positions are praised as “leaders.” One program through Lean In and Girl Scouts called “Ban Bossy” encourages young girls to be strong and confident in their leadership choices. The main statement on the Ban Bossy home page reads “When a little boy asserts himself, he's called a ‘leader.’ Yet when a little girl does the same, she risks being branded ‘bossy.’ Words like bossy send a message: don't raise your hand or speak up.“ Another media source, Buzzfeed, takes a satirical approach at addressing different leadership expectations for each gender in a Youtube video in which they introduce childhood gender roles to a workplace scenario. The effect is both humorous and eye-opening. From the choice between coffee cups that read “Diva” or “Rockstar” to telling the female character that the male character can fix the printer as she attempts to fix it (even after he blatantly states that he doesn’t know how), Buzzfeed points out the unequal messages that childhood gender roles send to young children. Another clip produced by ABC for the popular TV show What Would You Do? explores the negative side effects that gender roles have on young boys specifically. In this clip entitled “You Can’t Be A Princess,” two actors create a scene in which a mother tells her son that he can’t dress up as a princess for Halloween even though he begs and pleads with her to do so. Other customers in the costume store, unaware that they are being filmed, side with mom over and over again. They say that it’s unnatural for boys to wear “Girl costumes” and they tell the boy directly that he needs to pick a different costume instead. Some people alluded to possible homophobic views, advising the mom that she should try to “Stop it [gay desires] early on while he’s still young” while others were truly concerned that the young boy would be bullied for wearing the princess costume and wanted to prevent that from happening. When the roles switched and a young girl actress wanted to dress like Spider Man, people were still hesitant but they were far less hesitant than with the boy who wanted to wear the princess costume. One person even stood up to the mother and said that the young girl should be allowed to dress like Spider Man if she wishes to do so. This demonstrates how in 11

some regards such as clothing, people are harder on young boys than young girls when it comes to gender roles. One stigma often attached to researching gender roles in child development is that it is only a feminist issue and that gender roles don’t negatively affect young boys. This is simply not true. Various research studies prove that gender roles in child development, especially concerning leadership and basic expectations, affect both genders in different ways. Defining and analyzing gender roles is a fairly controversial topic, especially when it comes to children and their developmental process. Children can’t control what they’re exposed to and how they’re raised, which brings up questions about what is ethically responsible in regards to raising a child to identify with one gender rather than the other. Gender roles in gender-specific children’s toys, allowance gender pay gaps, and gender distinguished leadership and basic expectations all contribute to the way children grow up to see defined and questionable gender roles in society. Various conclusions have been made about gender roles in child development in past decades, and there is no doubt in my mind that there will be more research conducted in the future to better understand the interesting concept of gender roles in child development and how it affects society. Works Cited "Ban Bossy. Encourage Girls to Lead.." Ban Bossy. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 May 2014. <http://www.banbossy.com>. "Childhood Gender Roles In Adult Life." YouTube. Buzzfeed, n.d. Web. 16 May 2014. <https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=381belOZreA>. Crouch, David. "Toys R Us's Stockholm superstore goes gender neutral." The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 24 Dec. 2013. Web. 15 May 2014. <http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/23/toys-r-us-stockholmgender-neutral>. Dockterman, Eliana. "There's a Gender Pay Gap in Kids' Allowances and Parents Are To Blame." Time. Time, n.d. Web. 16 May 2014. <http://time.com/76023/pay-gap-gender-kids-allowances/>. Gander, Kashmira. "Lego told off by 7-year-old girl for promoting gender stereotypes ." The Independent. Independent Digital News and Media, n.d. Web. 16 May 2014. <http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and -families/lego-told-off-by-7yearold-girl-for-promoting-gender-stereotypes-9104571.html>. Reyes, Emily. "'Men are stuck' in gender roles, data suggest." Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles Times, 26 Dec. 2013. Web. 16 May 2014. <http://articles.latimes.com/2013/dec/26/local/la-me-one-way-gender-revolution20131227>. Wardy, Melissa. Redefining Girly : How Parents Can Fight the Stereotyping and Sexualizing of Girlhood, from Birth to Tween. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, Incorporated, 2014. Print. Watson, Rob. "Hey, Toys 'R' Us, Stop Thrusting Gender Roles on My Kids!." The Huffington Post. The Huffington Post, 7 Oct. 2013. Web. 16 May 2014. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rob-watson/hey-toys-r-us-stopthrusting-gender-roles-on-my-kids_b_4025214.html>. Wood, Samuel, Ellen Green Wood, and Denise Boyd. "Human Sexuality and Gender." The World of Psychology. Seventh Edition ed. Boston: Pearson Education, Inc., 2011. 370-406. Print. "'You Can't Be a Princess'." ABC News. ABC News Network, n.d. Web. 16 May 2014. <http://abcnews.go.com/ WhatWouldYouDo/video/princess--17523242>.

meditation is the second—albeit equal—teaching that can strengthen the teaching of writing. He posits that writing and meditating—along with a host of other meditative activities, including yoga—are “naturally allied activities” because both require inner speech, or “an uncertain level or stage of consciousness where material may not be so much verbalized as verbalizable, that is, at least potentially available to consciousness” (Moffett 231). The definition of speech sounds similar to Perl’s felt sense, although Moffett doesn’t acknowledge the body’s role in identifying the words moving within one’s body and mind. If we recall, however, Kabat-Zinn’s definition of mindful meditation work, we remember how meditation is an embodied act, and like writing or yoga, physical awareness of any of these acts makes one or both acts potentially more powerful and more useful to our development. Definitions of meditation abound, but Moffett believes most define it as “turn[ing] over in the mind, reflect[ing] on” thoughts that enter our conscious state of thinking and feeling, and with techniques for meditation, we might better “witness one’s own mind, direct one’s own mind, and silence one’s own mind” (236, 246). In cases of writer’s block, the ability to direct one’s mind could help writers refocus and return to productive writing activity. Or when writer’s block strikes, which I can certainly attest to, what paralyzes our activity is oftentimes our inner voice shouting doubts only loud enough for us to hear. In those situations, the ability to silence doubt helps writers move forward. Perl also discusses the benefits of silence for writers and gives instructions for writers on how to capture silence to write better, which sounds strikingly similar to the act of meditating: “By breathing slowly, quieting down, waiting for it to form, and then allowing it to lead us to this incipient sense of meaning” (Per Felt Sense 10). I can see many more ways in which Perl’s felt sense aligns with Moffett’s inner speech, but I want to return attention to the question of double teaching in writing classrooms. First, we must acknowledge that while scholars like Moffett may contend that double teaching is necessary and beneficial, teaching another practice in addition to writing practice will challenge even the most skilled writing teachers. For instance, Moffett states that to teach meditation, one must meditate (246). Though anyone familiar with meditation might be capable of leading meditative writing sessions, teachers who regularly practice meditation will probably teach meditative writing most effectively. With experience and practice, familiarity with the pace of meditation and knowledge of intention-setting approaches will help teachers, like myself, smoothly integrate meditation into the regular writing practice of students. Mindfulness meditation might even support the writing and pedagogical practices of writing teachers, as Paula Mathieu most recently reported in fall 2014. In “Excavating Indoor Voices: Inner Rhetoric and the Mindful Writing Teacher,” Mathieu shares the psychological effects of negative teaching evaluations on teachers and candidly shares how mindfulness, as defined by Kabat-Zinn, helped her overcome an inner rhetoric of self-doubt many teachers share (182, 184). She even suggests that it may be of great use to writing program administrators as they try to support the pedagogical development of less experienced teachers more prone to self-doubt. Mathieu does not directly address the physicality of mindfulness or the potential benefit of other physical practices in connection to writing, but she recently advocated for a physical approach to understanding writing in her enthusiastic review of Robert Yagelski’s 2011 book, Writing as a Way of Being. Yagelski exposes what he calls “The Cartesian View of Writing” as one that enacts “the mind-body split by making the body irrelevant to the words the body produces” (45). Like a felt sense, Yagelski acknowledges the embodiment of writing at all stages in the writing process, and it is only when we acknowledge the “moving pen across paper or tapping the keys… [that] this intimate connection between the physical and the intellectual, between mind and body, [come] to the fore; through writing, thought becomes visible” (117). I read his “visible,” to mean centered in the front of our awareness, and if we can revisit and 89

aspects of writing that couldn’t be accounted for by the then popular think-aloud protocols developed by Flowers and Hayes (364). Perl pondered the study’s findings on recursivity, cognitive recall, and whether or not a third finding needed more explanation. This third finding is what she would go on to define as felt sense, a tool for bodily awareness borrowed from philosopher Eugene Gendlin, who believes that felt senses “encompass[] everything you feel and know about a given subject at a given time… It is felt in the body, yet has meanings. It is the mind and body before they split apart” (Perl 364). In my own words, this sense is how a writer perceives a topic, word, or idea through bodily feeling, a visceral connection to the idea that takes on many different forms and sensations. In “Understanding Composing,” Perl gives one of her final, most inspiring conclusions: “[felt senses] leave us with the potential for creating even more powerful ways of understanding composing” (369). Throughout the next two decades, Perl gains followers who enthusiastically approach her about the idea of felt sense, but who also admit they need more help understanding felt sense if they are going to teach students how to harness felt senses in the classroom (Perl Felt Sense xiii). After leading several workshops—and some championing by Peter Elbow and other expressivists—Perl publishes Felt Sense the book with an audio companion of prompts for attending to one’s felt sense before, during, and after the physical act of writing begins. In the first chapter, she describes more explicitly an example of felt sense: Maybe your body tingles. You love what is happening and wish there were some way to hold on to this experience… When the words that are emerging right, we often feel excited or at least pleased; we experience a kind of flow. Physically and mentally, we are aligned. (Perl Felt Sense 3) In the beginning and throughout her book, Perl comes back to the mind-body connection in writing. I noticed, and appreciated, how she comes from a cognitive approach to writing but crosses boundaries to connect with the expressivist camp and show how writing is an embodied act. She unites writing mind with writing body, the cognitive approach with the expressivist approach. I connected most to the idea of writing as a “kind of flow.” Long before Perl said it, writers have been discussing the idea of flow and how conducive it can be to their writing process. What is new is how we might read Perl’s use of this word in her explanation of mind-bodyness in writing on a felt sense. If we are to think about how athletes say they need to “get in the zone” to perform at their best physically, how different then is this from writers saying they need to “get in the flow” of writing? And these phrases aren’t exclusive to writers or athletes; in fact, I’ve heard athletes talk about their flow and writers talk about their writing zone. I, for one, have used both phrases to discuss my writing when it is going well. The phrase used matters little; the idea remains the same. Interestingly, the most common styles of yoga, Hatha and Vinyasa, are defined by the idea of “flow,” from pose to pose, making these flow styles of yoga distinct from styles like Iyengar yoga that focuses on holding poses for longer periods of time. Given this overlap, I wonder, how might we hold onto the importance of the idea of “flow” from Perl’s felt sense approach and connect it to the physical practice of a yoga flow? If we try to introduce students to yoga flow as a means of teaching students how to flow with writing, might we be teaching too much?

Stepping Into the Life of Chelsee Capezzuti Lauren Rizzi Faith. Family. Love. Three values high school dance teacher Chelsee Capezzuti cherishes most. However, on her six-month wedding anniversary, she added a fourth word to her list. Her health. What she thought was a simple headache would completely transform her outlook on life and what she considered to be of the utmost importance. That one day inspired her to “never take life for granted,” and to always “tell people [she] love[s] them, appreciate the beauty and miracles around [her] and never stop caring.” Until 2009, Chelsee enjoyed a happy and healthy life. She had her “dream job” working as the Westlake Hyline Dance team’s director. She had a fierce love for each member of her team. She once told them, “I will be your number one fan, supporter, and cheerleader throughout this dance program, school, and life.” She was also surrounded by a loving family, recently married the love of her life, and had her whole life ahead of her. Her husband, John, “is [her] hero. He is not only [her] husband, but also [her] best friend and soul mate through thick and thin.” Chelsee cherished her faith greatly because she wholeheartedly believed that "If God brings you to it, He will get you through it." He helped carry her through every day and was with her for each step of her journey. Her future was full of promise. She often thought she was the luckiest person in the world and life could simply not get any better. However the luckiest person in the world would not receive the type of news Chelsee did on what was supposed to be a joyous day-her six month wedding anniversary. On this day, she experienced what seemed like a normal headache, which quickly progressed into an unbearable migraine. Noticing the debilitating effects the migraine was having on Chelsee, her husband took her to a local clinic to seek medical attention to ease his wife’s pain. He could not bear the sight of watching his wife hunched over in a chair with her hands wrapped around her head in hopes of soothing her migraine. While at the clinic, she was put through a series of tests and scans to determine what was causing the severe pain. While waiting anxiously for the test results, Chelsee tried to remain positive and convinced herself that there was nothing seriously wrong with her. As Chelsee held the cross around her neck with one hand and the other hand tightly intertwined with John’s, she received heart-wrenching and unexpected news. She had a brain tumor. She was overwhelmed with emotion as she collapsed into her husband’s arms. With her stomach in knots, the doctors proceeded to tell her that if the tumor grew larger, she could be paralyzed or could possibly die. Just as she thought things could not get any worse, she was told her tumor was extremely rare and only a few surgeons in the United States were qualified to treat her. Tears streamed down her face as they would many more times throughout the next couple of months. She remembers thinking to herself how quickly her outlook on life had changed. One minute she had a very bright future, and the next she was faced with having to fight a battle to survive.

James Moffett gives me reason to answer no to that last question. In 1982, Moffett suggested that “double teaching” ought to become the norm in teaching writing. Moffett’s 1982 College English article, titled “Writing, Inner Speech, and Meditation” claims that “The teaching of writing must rise to a new sophistication consonant with a new stage in human evolution,” and the teaching of writing can be helped by “double teaching,” or “teach[ing] two apparently contradictory things at once” (240). For Moffett,

Being defined by her diagnosis was not a way in which Chelsee wanted to live. She was constantly asked the same questions about her health and found it painful to respond. She decided to keep an online journal called Caring Bridge- the one place where she could formulate her emotions in a way that would satisfy people’s questions. Through her entries, she began to realize that her writing had the potential to serve as a source of inspiration for others who were going through difficult times as well. She also came to realize that her writing was just as beneficial and rewarding for herself. “I see this as a journey on a rainbow, up high in the sky close to God. Right now, I am on my way up the rainbow. It's never

easy going uphill,” Chelsee said in an entry. “After surgery, I will be able to enjoy sliding down the rainbow towards my pot of gold which I consider the rest of my long life that I will live.” This passage in her journal reveals Chelsee’s strong faith, positive outlook on her situation, and her choice to place her fate in God’s hands. Chelsee is the type of person who considers herself to be very independent and “likes to do things on her own, on her own time.” She has a Type A personality meaning she is most comfortable when she is in control. While she did not like her situation, Chelsee realized that this was out of her control. But, in the same way she organizes her movies in alphabetical order and color-coordinates her closet, she chose to embrace her personality and finds ways to deal with her predicament. Chelsee was never fond of the word tumor. She believed when people heard she had a tumor, they would take pity on her and treat her differently. To avoid this, she decided to call her tumor Betsy, and the name stuck. One day, while I was taking a dance class with her, she laughed while saying, “Well, if Betsy wasn’t taking control of my life, then I’d be able to remember this combination I was supposed to teach you today!” Everyone around me laughed because we understood that it was her way of making her life seem “normal” again. She was still the same Chelsee Capezzuti-fun and full of life. Chelsee looked at her diagnosis as an experience that she was going to fight through with the best love and support team right by her side. In a blog entry, she stated that, “I don’t believe that I’ve had it “harder” than anyone else in this world. I don’t live my life feeling sorry for my struggles in life. I focus on the blessings and that is what gets me through each day.” She had to “figure out how to live her life in a functional way” even after her life was turned upside down. Throughout this entire process, she thought God was walking her through. She “trust[ed] that God [would] lead the way and that tomorrow [would] be a fresh day.” While her online journal helped inspire and heal her, it was her support team, called Chelsee’s Angels, that truly made the most impact for her. She described her journey as a team effort, mostly between her husband, her parents, and her sister. As she lay in bed, with many thoughts racing through her mind, she could not stop thinking about how much a fund raising event sponsored by Chelsee’s Angels meant to her. The Organization sponsored a t-shirt fund drive to help her pay for her medical bills. The entire community came together and supported the event and Chelsee was very touched by the outpouring of love and support for her. Chelsee, with tears in her eyes, expressed her gratitude to the community in a heart-felt speech during a pep rally. “I will never be able to fully thank everyone for their love and support through this. I have learned that having a community is so important, whether it is a community in a town, a community of friends or a community of family.” Chelsee continued, “If you are lucky, you have all of them. I consider myself very lucky.” In November 2009, six weeks after being diagnosed, Chelsee endured a thirteen hour surgery to remove the tumor. During her recuperation, she entrusted John to keep her friends and family updated on her progress by writing on her blog. Blogging was her vehicle of connecting people by keeping up with her Caring Bridge. John wrote, “What a whirlwind this has been. Although today will easily be the longest day of my life, I cannot imagine a day that I have had more to celebrate. They just took Chelsee back to the O.R., and she went back with a huge smile across her face,” John said. “She mentioned in one of her previous posts that I was her HERO, I wanted to take this chance to let everyone know that she is also without a doubt mine. The strength and courage that she has shown through this entire process has been amazing. She is truly my inspiration.” Just three short months after her surgery, Chelsee underwent Cyber Knife Radiation to stop the growth of the remaining tumor. Because of the surgery, “I have numbness in the right side of my face and double vision, however, these are minimal side effects considering the list of risks they gave me.” Her 14

Because I know this to be true of my own yoga practice—and certainly of my daily writing practice—I began using this metaphor to explain process theory to my writing students the following fall semester. It wasn’t until this semester, when I proposed “Yoga-Zen Writing” as a themed first-year writing (FYW) course, that I had an opportunity to explore what writing scholars have related on the mind-body connection in writing practice. So now, I have the opportunity to ask about questions I’ve long wondered. Namely, who in the field is discussing the connections between mind and body in writing practice? From these discussions, what have we learned that can be of benefit to us as writers or to our students? The answers to these questions took me down a series of winding trails through various networks of academic professionals. Yet inasmuch as I wondered, it soon became clear that few writing scholars study the connection between writing (the task of the mind) and how we write (the task of the body). Some budding interest in the mind-body connection of writing has been explored through Eastern meditative practices, including a peaceful form of martial arts known as Aikido, Zen Buddhism, Hathaand Vinyasa-styles of yoga, but more than any of those, I found that mindfulness practice has become of great interest to writing scholars. To start, one must understand contemporary origins of mindfulness. To medical-student-turnedBuddhist Jon Kabat-Zinn we attribute the most widely accepted and circulated definition of mindfulness. Now a Professor of Medicine Emeritus at The University of Massachusetts, Kabat-Zinn’s mindfulness books helped launch a movement in the field of positive psychology that spread to mainstream self-help literature. In Coming to Our Senses, Kabat-Zinn famously defines this kind of contemplative self-study: “Mindfulness can be thought of as a moment-to-moment nonjudgmental awareness, cultivated by paying attention in a specific way, that is, in the present moment, and as non-reactive, as non-judgmentally, and as open heartedly as possible” (3). To me, the lack of overt physical description made the physical aspects of meditation seem absent, and yet I know firsthand that the physicality of mindfulness is a central part of the mindfulness experience. For many mindfulness practitioners, the connection to the body starts when one takes a comfortable seated position. Similarly, in yoga, practitioners take savasana, or corpse pose, allowing them to release any tensions felt in seated or standing postures so that they might focus on their meditation more intently. The eyes close. The weight of the body is felt, the sources of tension assuaged over until insight into the tension brings relief. The present becomes more apparent, stilling judgment and reaction as the practitioner becomes more keenly aware of her sensory experiences, her thoughts as they fly by, her intentions for the meditation and how those intentions connect to her actions after the meditation ends. For me, the meditations serve my writing when the meditation ends. Although the structure of my coursework has allowed me to reflect through the act of writing, I know from my professional writing outside the academy that this reflection time helps sustain my writing practice. For writing studies, I see an opportunity to connect writing practices to mindfulness practices to the benefit of our writing and us as writers. To date, a handful of writing scholars are exploring mindfulness. Most recently, Paula Mathieu wrote about mindfulness in connection to a challenging class she taught during the semester that 9/11 occurred. Mathieu and a host of other scholars—several of whom will be presenting on mindful writing at the upcoming 2015 College Composition and Communication Conference next spring—ground their work in earlier scholars who used mindfulness in writing, albeit by another name. I turned to these scholars to find that our field has been interested in the presence of the body as we write and the mindfulness meditation activity that accompanies that work, but before Kabat-Zinn coined “mindfulness,” we called it by another name (or two). In 1980, Sondra Perl wrote “Understanding Composing,” in which she explored the cognitive 87

Mind-Body Writes: Moving Body, Mind, and Writing to Learning Jacquelyn E. Hoermann Most mornings, before the rest of the world stirs, I start my day’s work in one of two places: the pavement or the mat. Some mornings I run down my favorite roads and some mornings I stretch myself on my yoga mat. In both places, I think about my writing. Listening to the sounds of a new yogi as her voice flows melodically as I breathe in and through a Vinyasa flow brings my ideas for writing forward. With each flow and salutation, writing ideas move with me and through me, and I feel inspired as I move with those ideas into a higher state of intellectual awareness. I think about an editor’s initial pitch for a profile on a bride battling Stage III Breast Cancer. Flow 1 gives me one idea, flow 2 a different idea. Again and again the ideas flow until I decide on the words I will use to tell this woman’s story. A metaphor, an ironic thought, or even a rhythm of flow help me feel connected to her, to my readers, and to myself through this creative act. Other mornings I take a meditation on the run. Most recently, Deepak Chopra’s Eastern philosophies for aligning oneself with one’s creative potential resonate with my intentions as a scholarly writer. With each crashing footfall, I tune out disruptive thoughts. I pay attention to my pace as it climbs and as it falls, noticing how my breathing quickens and slows as I think through my current projects. When I notice a quickened pace or a drudgingly slow one, I take a moment to check in with my mind and body. Can I pinpoint a source of anxiety that’s affecting my writing today? Why is the anxiety there in the first place, and what words will help me power through it? How can I write a way into that unexplored genre I want to try or that journal audience I don’t quite understand? Every morning, I choose a question becomes the day’s writing intention and I give it my undivided focus. By doing this, I understand my intellectual practice of writing through my physical practice of breathing and movement, and I feel centered for having this time as an outlet for my creative work. I first stumbled on mind-bodyness in writing in 2012. Myself and another graduate student were helping run Iowa State University’s Writing & Media Center at the time, in the absence of a full-time director, and on one particularly slow Tuesday that summer, one of our tutors a Writing Lab Newsletter (WLN) article to my attention. She wanted the tutors to discuss Erika Spohrer’s “From Goals to Intentions: Yoga, Zen, and Our Writing Center Work,” as part of our summer reading series. Intrigued by the title, I let her facilitate the week’s discussion with Spohrer’s WLN piece. But my nascent interest in the commercial yoga industry could have never prepared me for Spohrer’s metaphorical comparison of the intentions we set in yoga practice and in writing practice. I was struck by Spohrer’s analogy between the flexibility of the yogi’s body and the writer’s mind, her acknowledgment of both yoga and then as a process, not a result. Now, what interests me most is Spohrer’s conclusions about intentions. She writes: Without a particular goal in mind, the meditator has instead a less immediate, less ego-driven intention for practices generally. Whereas a goal, focused on the shortterm, would drive an individual session, an intention takes a longer view, envisioning all of our acts as moving us slowly in a certain direction. This longer-term, more patient notion of intention makes zazen an on-going practice, a path of lifelong travel rather than a doorway of immediate entry. (Spohrer 12) 86

surgery and subsequent radiation treatments were a great success. As a result, her prognosis for a long and healthy life is good. She has regular check-ups to ensure her clean bill of health. Chelsee’s positive outlook on her condition and on life in general saw her through this difficult ordeal. She always has a smile on her face and has words of encouragement for her students. She is often seen at school events looking like the happiest person in the world. Chelsee always believed that she would have a chance to “slide down the rainbow toward her pot of gold.” One of her concerns when she was diagnosed with her brain tumor was her ability to become what she had always wanted to be – a mother. Therefore, once Chelsee completed all of her treatments, the couple was anxious to have a child. They were thrilled when they found out they were pregnant in 2010. However, just two short months later, while at a doctor’s appointment, they were told the baby’s heart was no longer beating and that she had miscarried. They were devastated by this news and so was everyone who knew her. People noticed the glimmer in her eyes when she talked about the baby, the baby shower, and the baby’s name. Suddenly, the glimmer in her eyes was gone. The “pregnancy glow” was no longer there for Chelsee. Dark circles under her eyes, marking her sorrow, replaced her previous glow she once had and deserved. Less than a year later, everything began to fall back into place for Chelsee. She and her husband welcomed their first daughter into the world on November 30, 2011. They named her Hope. Given all that they had gone through in the past year, the name had great significance to them. Hope was something that Chelsee never lost during her journey. “Hope has been our slogan throughout this entire process, and I really could not think of a name that would be more appropriate. Hope is what was written across her shirt as she walked in to the hospital this morning. It is hope, prayer, friends and family that have given us the strength to get to this point,” John said on the day Hope was born. Since Hope was born, Chelsee has always had the gentlest smile on her face every time she looks at her “miracle baby.” Every chance she got, she would always whisper the three most important words according to Chelsee; the words “I love you.” Seeing Chelsee with her baby in her arms at school, it was obvious Hope was loved dearly by her mother. She proudly introduced her daughter to everyone and would always tell people how she is the light of her life. Just as everything in her life seemed to be going well again, she received some devastating news about her father. He was admitted to the hospital for meningitis, but after several tests and a biopsy, doctors discovered two malignant tumors on his brain. Her father had brain cancer. Over the course of a year, he underwent three brain surgeries, a hip surgery, numerous biopsies, and several rounds of radiation. Unfortunately, he was unable to beat his cancer and on March 4, 2013, he “passed away peacefully in hospice with my mom, sister, and me by his side.” Chelsee was devastated by the passing of her father. Once again, she relied on her faith, positive outlook on life and the support of her community and family to get her through this difficult time. Today, Chelsee is devoted to balancing a full time job, raising two daughters, and coping with everything she has gone through. However, her outlook on life remains steadfast and is as positive as ever. Her two daughters bring joy to her life, and she draws strength from them every time they tell her they love her. Chelsee learned a great deal about herself during her battle. “I would say that one thing this has already taught me is not to be afraid to love people more,” Chelsee said. “Don’t be afraid to stay in that hug a little longer, to say I love you more than the average person, or to look people in the eyes and give them a look that shows them how you feel about them. Why wait to show someone how much they mean to you?” 15

Chelsee has endured a great deal of hardship in her life. She battled brain cancer, lost a child and her father, and had to deal with her own mortality at a young age. During her battle, she never lost faith that she would get better because of the support of her family and community and her writing as a source of hope. She could have easily dropped into the depths of despair, but on the contrary, she was able to not only survive her ordeal, but grew stronger as a result. She continues to this day to be a source of inspiration for those around her, including myself. She serves as an example that regardless of the challenges we face in life, we can overcome them by having a positive outlook and drawing from the strength of those around us. The world would be a better place if everyone had the same determination as Chelsee Capezzuti to slide down the rainbow to their pot of gold.

make bedrooms in their feet and kitchens in their stomachs. No wonder I refuse to keep my root-hands to myself. No wonder I ache for soil, for seeds, for any excuse to let them go. When I get home to my husband, to that rent house where we have already begun to pack, I change my meditation. I imagine myself as a cottonwood instead of a carrot. On the first morning, I sit, but the second morning, I stand. I forget my chakras and just try to stand still.

Works Cited Capezzuti, Chelsee. "Chelsee's Story." Web log post. Caring Bridge. CaringBridge, n.d. Web. <http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/chelseecapezzuti>.

have multiplied around the gravel. I shake off as much dirt as I can, collect them in black trash bags, and drop them behind the dryer where they’ll stay warm and dry. On the first warm day in March, I empty the trash bags of bulbs onto my front porch and divide the clumps of bulbs with an X-acto knife, the way my friend the horticulturist taught me, separating them into groups of two or three tubers per sprout. I plant them in pots, because I know when they next bloom, I won’t be living here. Each evening, I bring the pots into the hallway to keep warm. Each morning, I put them on the porch to keep sunny. When the dahlias start leafing out, I divide up the pots between my friends and colleagues. Goodbye presents. I save one for myself to plant when I get where we are going next, though we are unsure yet where that will be. My parents and I took a trip to New Mexico, to White Sands. We took the sunset walking tour, following a park ranger who lead us out into the desert, pointing out plants and animals and tracks and bugs. She told us how once this desert was a shallow ocean, how as the water level fell and shifted, it deposited gypsum and minerals to form a low mountain range. She told us how each grain of sand in the dunes was once a particle dissolved in a prehistoric sea that dried up when Pangea broke into continents. Then every grain of sand was an Ice Age mountain. In the Great Thaw, every grain of sand was a piece of gravel under a glacier, chipping off pieces and washing down the mountain sides in the melt and run-off. The gypsum is softer than other rocks, and as the chunks of gravel rubbed against one another in transit, the gypsum particles got smaller and smaller until they turned to soil, to sand, to dust. The winds moved them into dunes that constantly change shape and size, advancing south and east across the desert at a rate of 30 feet per year. Now every grain of sand is an indigent grain of sand. “Everything here has evolved perfectly to live in this place,” she explained. All of the animals are white like the sand. Most of them do not need to drink water, either; they get all of their water from the plants they eat. The water table is shallow, but it is so highly mineralized that few plants and fewer animals can stand to drink it. She pointed to a thick column of white rock with a patch of leaves growing out of top. This was a cottonwood tree, she said. To survive the shifting sands, it had to grow fast. Those fuzzy seeds I knew so well had to embed themselves in a shallow dune and simultaneously grow deep and tall to keep a foot in the water under the dune and a leaf in the sky while the sands piled up in the middle. When she gets a break from the wind, she makes herself wide and hangs on to as much surface soil as she can reach. If she can keep a handful of leaves above the surface, anchor into bedrock, twisting like a rope around the hard places, twining her root-hands around the root-wrists of a neighboring yucca, throwing her seeds to every passing wind, hoping some of them will stick, will root, then when the sands retreat, as they inevitably will, the cottonwood stands, not tall and narrow like a stately pine, or even wide and green like the other cottonwoods I knew, but as a thick and twisted column of sand she turned to rock with the tangling pressure of her limbs. After the dune has moved on, she remains, a womb to the wide desert world, where small animals make their burrows to hide in the heat of the day, feeding at night, drinking from her roots, and returning at dawn to her cool bosom. This is the way she stands, in the footprint of a dune, the way she will stand when the next one comes. I cross my legs and sit on the crest of a dune that will likely be the next to take her over, snapping pictures of the root hairs sticking out the column, of the burrows at her feet, of the nests in her hair.

Liberate Tate: The Quest to Free Art from Oil Alexandra Harvey The group Liberate Tate was formed to protest the BP (British Petroleum Oil Company) funding of the four British art collections that make up the Tate Gallery. According to the society’s website, it is a network dedicated to taking creative disobedience against the museum, started in January of 2010 when curators at a workshop attempted to censor participants who were thought to be criticizing Tate’s sponsors. Since then, Liberate Tate has put on ten political performances, ranging from the staging of a theatrical “mass exorcism over the taint of BP sponsorship” to releasing dead fish tied to black helium balloons in the main hall of one of Tate’s museums (“Liberate Tate”). Like many social movements, Liberate Tate had a relatively slow beginning. At the time of its establishment in January 2010, the group consisted of approximately twenty people who had attended the “Disobedience Makes History” workshop put on by The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination and sponsored by the Tate Modern. The founding members were shocked into action when Tate officials, concerned with “reputational risk” and the possible loss of funding, preemptively tried to stymy activism against BP when no demonstration had even been planned (Jordan). The museum’s attempt to disband an imagined protest group at the workshop backfired, actually prompting the creation of Liberate Tate and the initiation of a campaign against its BP funding. Just months later, the museum hosted an eco symposium called “Rising to the Climate Change Challenge”. That this coincided with Tate’s celebration of 20 years of sponsorship with BP created outrage and added to Liberate Tate’s momentum. Participants in the symposium held a vote and eighty percent of those in attendance agreed that Tate officials had acted hypocritically and should drop BP sponsorship by the year 2012 (“Liberate Tate”). The art gallery’s poor planning damaged the museum’s reputation in the eyes of the general public and spawned a multitude of new members for Liberate Tate. However, the increased public awareness and growth in membership that come about after incidents like Tate’s eco symposium are not always enough to get activists’ demands met. One might think that if “enough people are alerted to an issue, meaningful political action and reform will result”, but the paths of protest movements aren’t so straightforward (Meyer 40). If a large coalition organized around well-grounded ideology were sufficient to ameliorate social grievances, societal change would be swift and the formation of long-term campaigns like Liberate Tate would be unnecessary. Rather, movements actually operate in a more cyclical fashion regardless of their size or purpose, only mobilizing effectively and gaining power under certain conditions. They generally reach the highest point in the cycle after an event or policy puts their particular cause in the spotlight. These high points are the short windows in which the policies or practices being challenged by a movement can potentially be affected, but even then it’s often only by small degrees. Liberate Tate had thus gained leverage from the museum’s questionable decision to host the symposium at the same time as the 20th anniversary celebration, but this did not resolve the issue.

I envy the permanence of trees with their addresses more permanent than names. They mark time in rings and stretch marks and wrinkles in bark and falling of blooms and making of nests. They

Only a month after the “Rising to the Climate Change Challenge” symposium, a massive disaster caused by BP brought the movement to an even higher point. On April 20, 2010 British Petroleum’s underwater oilrig Deepwater Horizon exploded, releasing an estimated 210 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico over 87 days, killing eleven people, injuring seventeen, and causing theretofore unimagi-

nable damage to the surrounding environment (“BP Oil Spill”). The Deepwater Horizon incident was, and still is, the largest marine oil spill on record. Its occurrence fueled the rapidly increasing vitriol for BP felt by many and increased the urgency of Liberate Tate’s mission. Bystanders who had previously been indifferent to Liberate Tate’s cause began taking more of an interest in the group when the catastrophic effects of the spill made BP’s wrongdoing a hot topic around the globe. This was important beyond the mere publicity generated by the spill for, although there are activists who are passionate and dedicated to movements that don’t specifically affect them, it is much more likely that someone will get involved in a movement when the issue at hand directly impacts their life or personal interests. Just as anti-war organizations experienced massive growth in the sixties when President Johnson expanded the draft, Liberate Tate saw a sudden influx of support after the Deepwater Horizon explosion turned what had previously been distant speculation about damage that BP could cause into discussions of the catastrophe BP did cause. While concerns about the dangers of offshore drilling may have been on the back burner or even nonexistent for the average person before April 2010, the massive amount of oil dumped into the Gulf and the implications it had for the wellbeing of the surrounding population, economy, and ecosystem made ignoring the issue any longer practically an impossibility. Now that a widespread conversation about BP’s oil spill had begun, Liberate Tate latched on to it as a “flag” issue. Movements may benefit from such a strategy because of the polarizing effect it has on the general public. Polarization is based on the premise that “you are either part of the problem or part of the solution” and it forces otherwise uninvolved individuals to choose a side (Bowers et al. 40). In polarization tactics, agitators portray those with opposing viewpoints in the most unfavorable light possible, ensuring that taking their side and committing to their cause seems like the most morally sound decision. As a movement gains more members, it also increases its visibility and credibility in the eyes of bystanders and, perhaps more importantly, those who have the ability to make the desired changes (in this case Tate’s director and the Board of Tate Members Council). Polarization can be one of the most important factors in a movement’s construction of a coalition broad enough to wield influence. Just a few weeks after the spill and during the Tate Modern’s 10 Year Birthday Celebration Weekend, Liberate Tate’s first rhetorical and ideological statements were published in the “Liberate Tate Communiqué #1 May 2010”. Like Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, “Communiqué #1” was written in the manner of an open letter. Open letters are “published letter[s] of protest or appeal usually addressed to an individual but intended for the general public” (“Open Letter”). This approach can be seen as a combination of the agitation strategies of petition and promulgation. Petitioning presents a group’s goals to members of the establishment through normal discursive means and promulgation “is a strategy [in which] agitators publicly proclaim their goals… to win public support for [their] positions” (Bowers et al. 23). Like polarization, both of these strategies can be instrumental in garnering the widespread support necessary to bring about societal changes. In the case of Liberate Tate, the publicity that followed the circulation of its first official document transformed what began as a handful of dissatisfied art lovers into a relatively well-known organization with a definite purpose and course of action. The similarities between Martin Luther King, Jr.’s tactics in “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and those of Liberate Tate in “Liberate Tate Communiqué #1 May 2010” are present in more than just their basic open letter formats. Connections can be made between the two at a rhetorical level as well. Both documents focus persuasive efforts on appeals to morality and use vivid metaphors to explain the immorality the authors were combatting. 18

that dropped its little seeds in vellum circles on our trampoline. It was big enough to serve as the corner post of our horse pen, as the arm for our tire swing and bug zapper. Or the cottonwoods around my grandparents’ house on Greenbelt Lake whose fuzzy white seeds piled up like snowdrifts around the house, sneaking under the door jambs, in window sashes, sticking to our shoes and tracking into the cars and the carpets. The first time I read Frost’s Birches, I imagined the boy climbing up the cottonwoods lining the lake shore, tipping them over and swinging from their branches. And what were those trees called with the helicopter seeds? The ones that I used to throw in the air and watch them twirl down, taking their time and using the breeze to get farther from home each time? The ones that would congregate in the flowerbeds on the west wall of our church, then suddenly get picked up by a gust of wind and spin themselves across the parking lot like a hundred ballerinas, like a hundred single engine planes on a solo trip around the world? I thrills me to think that the tree that greets me twice a day on my commute, that chooses to reveal its silver underside to me, a stranger in this place, and a know-nothing, helter-skelter, careless namer of trees. It seems appropriate that the tree that I’ve recklessly fallen in love with is little more than a lookalike embarrassment to birches. I start meditating while we live in West Virginia after I read Eat Pray Love on the airplane ride back from Texas after we bury my grandfather. I start by working on my chakras, but I never make it past the first one. I sit cross legged in my living room floor, eyes closed, breathing deeply and slowly, muttering a mantra in my brain, “I exist.” I follow instructions and visualize a spinning wheel of red light at the base of my spine. But my mind wanders. I exist. I am connected to the earth. I imagine a tap root growing from my sit bones into the carpet, into the foundation, under the house we rent. I am a giant carrot. Hamsa. Every exhale drills it deeper; every inhale spreads root hairs wider. If I have to live here, I’ll have to plant something soon. In the Old Testament, in the wilderness tabernacle, God instructed the Israelite craftsmen to build a lamp stand out of one piece of gold with almond branches for the arms, buds for the joints, and blooms for the cups that would hold burning oil. The almonds were to remind them of when God made Aaron’s staff bud, blossom, and bear fruit to show that he was chosen to be Moses’s right hand, to remind them that God was above seasons and the natural passing of time. He could grow what He liked with or without roots, with or without our watering, with or without our consent or approval. To remind them that once He gave clear and unambiguous signs. I plant dahlias in our front flowerbeds. They’re bulbs, not seeds, but bulbs seem to do well here. Tulips, hyacinths, and daffodils are the first flowers in the spring; dahlias are the last in summer. Our beds are so gravelly that seeds probably couldn’t take root anyhow. I can dig an inch or two, deep enough to be able to add garden soil to cover a handful of dahlia bulbs. They take hold quickly and grow thick stems and dark green leaves, growing thigh high in a few months. They bloom in July, and I have two kinds: dinner plate sized flowers, dark pink with white tips, and a smaller bloom with a lavender tinge, almost mauve. The bigger ones have ragged ends to the petals, lake an old flag. The smaller ones have precise, tube like petals with rounded ends. Every Monday morning, I cut a handful of stems with an old pair of trauma shears and carry them to my office, tied with a little piece of yarn. I have flowers in my office every day until September when the plants slow, and then stop, making new blooms. My friend the horticulturist advises me to pull up the bulbs to replant next year. They won’t survive the winter under ground, under the two feet of snow that will stand in perpetual drift from Halloween until Easter. Before the first frost, I cut down the stems and dig up the bulbs, amazed at how they 83

Near the base of the tree is a lighter, caramel colored silt. “You don’t get to see this part everyday,” my friend says, a snorting laugh, pointing to the grass still clumped on the top most layer of soil, apparently unaware of the move it has made. My hands take turns holding my coffee and lining my coat pocket. “No,” I say, more than a little disappointed at the insignificance of this root system, the utter un-majesty that was just below the surface. On the way home that day, I see my neighbor has solved his problem. He has sawed the tree into five chunks and rolled the pieces down the hill. He puts out a sign: Firewood Make Offer. Where I come from, the trees do not stand tall but spread out wide, luxuriating in open spaces like girls on beach towels, feet splayed, arms unfolded, hair spread. If trees have any luxury on the High Plains at all, it is spaceandtime. Cedars, live oaks, cottonwoods, elms, mesquites, and ancient looking junipers, they take their time to grow, working long on their roots before they bother with branches, digging, anchoring, drinking from aquifers. They stand alone or in loose groups of threes, only blocking a small square of horizon. One does not feel the loss because a quick tilt of the chin puts all right again, brings the invisible world of Behind Trees into the light, the way a step reveals the silhouette of legs through a backlit skirt, a half step closing that world, another calling it back. Eudora Welty said that Southerners write so well because they grow up “listening through unhurried stretches of uninhibited reminisence,” because farm life is slow, but measured consistently in the changing of season, in the tilling of soil and harvesting of crops. Time is measured in the bands of dirt that mark the progress of a stalk of cotton, a crust of brown sticking to the stalk where it last paused, like the watermark of receding flood waters in reverse. Tomorrow, there will be new green and a new ring of dirt and time will have passed and I will have seen it go. Where I come from, I could measure the tilt of the Earth’s axis. I could tell when the sun rose another row further to the North or South than yesterday. My father planted our rows of cotton running straight into the morning sun in mid-April. He knew when to plant by where the sun rose. He taught me to keep the plow straight in the glare of that first day of planting by lining up the hood ornament with one row and following it straight and slow towards sunrise, keeping my eyes on the ground. The field outside my bedroom window was a living calendar. I asked another friend from work to name some of the mountain trees for me. He has lived in West Virginia all his life. And though he’s now a retired dentist and a semi-retired tutor, in real life, he’s a native horticulturist and photographer. We swapped cubicles so he could have more natural light for his potted plants and I could have more room. I poked my head into his cubicle one morning. I wanted him to introduce me to the tree with a round white trunk like a birch, whose leaves look green on one side and silver on the other, flashing bright in the afternoon sun as I drive by on the way home. The shape of the leaves make me think of cottonwoods, but I’ve never seen them in silver. “I need to know what to call them. In case I want to write a poem about them,” I say. “Oh, don’t do that,” he says, laughing, pushing up his glasses. “Those are just throw away trees.” I have no concept of a throw away tree, a tree not worth a poem, not worth a name. The trees I know are indispensable. The mimosa in my grandmother’s yard with its pink starburst flowers and long beans I always pretended were vanilla. That tree grew up with us, getting taller just when we were ready to climb higher, thickening its branches just about the time we were ready to swing from them. Or the elm 82

Persuasive metaphorical phrases in “Letter from Birmingham Jail” like “airtight cage of poverty” and “ominous clouds of inferiority [in a] mental sky” describe the devastating effects of segregation on black people in pre-civil rights America and conjure a clear image of the unfair and oppressive conditions that Martin Luther King, Jr. was speaking out against (King 73). The metaphors in “Communiqué #1” are used in a similar fashion to illustrate the damage being done by British Petroleum’s oil pollution. Several metaphors in the Liberate Tate piece ironically refer to the Deepwater Horizon spill as art, highlighting the stark contrast of the Tate gallery’s self-proclaimed progressive values and commitment to culture with the way it conveniently turned a blind eye to the destruction wrought by its biggest sponsor. Calling the spill “the largest oil painting in the world” not only functions as a bitter denunciation of BP’s scheme to improve public relations through museum funding, but could also be taken as an implication of Tate’s guilt by association (“Liberate Tate”). It insinuates that Tate’s continued affiliation and unscrupulous acceptance of money from BP will not go unnoticed and the new pièce de résistance in each of its collections will be an oil painting whose creation Tate’s director and board stood by and observed without comment. Ultimately, “Communiqué #1” accuses Tate of “scrubbing clean BP’s public image” by letting it provide the gallery with enough funding to allow free admission, which in turn provides the company with an opportunity to direct attention away from its less positive aspects. A discussion of the principles of right and wrong is prevalent throughout both documents and evokes the traditional “righteous movement versus immoral establishment” convention found in many protest songs (Bowers et al. 32). In “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, Martin Luther King Jr. explicitly states that he is protesting against segregation laws because they are “unjust” and “politically, economically, and sociologically unsound” (King 74). To the same effect, although more implicitly, the communiqué too argues that the issue it addresses, BP sponsorship, is morally wrong. The communiqué creates context for its message by opening with several examples of BP’s questionable practices including “feed[ing]… addiction to fossil fuels despite a climate crisis”, allowing greed to take precedence over the lives of its employees, and “[continually investing] in cancer-causing climate crimes” (“Liberate Tate”). Disagreeing with Liberate Tate is equated to being an accomplice in BP’s “crimes against the future”, something that would conflict with almost anyone’s sense of self or “beliefs about who they are and what’s appropriate for them to do” (Meyer 86). This sentiment is subsequently broadened to encompass not just blatant disagreement with the stated ideologies, but also any action that might hint at approval of Tate or its corporate sponsor, such as simply visiting the gallery. The representation of apathy, in this case ignoring Liberate Tate’s arguments and continuing to go to the museum, as on par with direct opposition can create a polarizing effect similar to that of declaring a flag issue. In addition to releasing “Communiqué #1”, Liberate Tate also staged a “creatively disobedient” protest during the Tate Modern Gallery’s tenth birthday celebration. The power that movements stand to gain from widespread public visibility of their protests makes the exploitation of mass media one of the most important and effective tactics available to them. Coverage of a movement’s event by television networks, Internet sites, magazines, and newspapers can facilitate the communication of its ideologies to much larger audiences and potentially win a great deal more support for its cause. However, in the media only “particularly unusual events and especially those involving… conflict” are considered newsworthy enough to be reported on (Bower et al. 23). Although Liberate Tate had been speaking out against the Tate Gallery’s involvement with BP from its inception, at that point their frustration was simply a condition and not an event, meaning the group was largely irrelevant to mass media. The members of Liberate Tate transformed their concerns into a noteworthy media event at their 19

first major protest by taking advantage of the opportunities for discourse afforded by surrounding circumstances. Tate Modern’s birthday celebration on May 15, 2010 was the optimal occasion for Liberate Tate to launch the “series of art interventions” it announced in “Communiqué #1”. Members of the media reporting on the gallery’s birthday event were already guaranteed to be present so Liberate Tate’s demonstration was bound to get some coverage. Additionally, the Deepwater Horizon rig had exploded less than a month prior and the flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico had not yet been stemmed, providing not only an apposite context for the organization’s message but also more built-in media attention due to the international scrutiny already focused on the ongoing crisis. On the day of the celebration, Liberate Tate members kicked off their demonstration by handing out copies of “Communiqué #1” to people throughout the museum. Then, in a dramatic and visually stunning act of civil disobedience, several activists “entered Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall and released dozens of helium-filled black balloons with dead animals attached” (Buoys). Although the “dead animals” were actually store-bought sardines and replicas of birds soaked in oil, they still achieved the desired effect. The harsh juxtaposition of the “oil bubble” balloons and dripping animal “corpses” with the spotless interior of the giant hall was meant to serve as a reminder to the attendees of how the event they were enjoying was being paid for. The balloons also acted as a visual metaphor for the guilt hanging over everyone’s heads caused by Tate’s unethical affiliation with BP and keeping museumgoers from “enjoy[ing] great art with a clear conscience” (Buoys). The balloons took more than a day to be removed from the 115ft ceiling and caused quite a stir despite Tate’s attempt to minimize their impact by shutting down some areas of Turbine Hall. Since it hasn’t yet managed to “free art from oil”, Liberate Tate has continued to commission art interventions like its balloon protest, as promised in “Communiqué #1”. There have been ten more in the three and a half years since the original demonstration, the most recent one being last month. The Liberate Tate movement has been gradually descended from the high point it reached after the initial shock of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill as public interest has died down. In turn, this has made Liberate Tate’s appeal to the mass media insignificant. However, there have been some reports that BP was never actually able to stem the flow of oil from Deepwater Horizon and that it continues to leak. If this is true, we can expect to see Liberate Tate cropping up again on our computers, television screens, and front pages. In the end, Liberate Tate demonstrates that, even when events conspire to give a movement far more publicity and significance than its members had ever dreamed, this is no guarantee of success. They could not have asked for much more than the coincidence of the climate change symposium with the anniversary of the museum’s relationship with British Petroleum and especially the timing of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, tragic though it was. In addition, their widely read “Communiqué #1” was effective in terms of summarizing the group’s concerns and goals and making clear the point that if you were not with them, then you were essentially supporting environmental destruction and shortsighted policies driven by corporate greed. The media covered the movement and membership grew well beyond the initial twenty. But, although the struggle is not over, as the dramatic events cited above are fading from public memory, much of the momentum is being lost. The case of Liberate Tate shows that effecting social change is no easy task, even under the best of circumstances. Works Cited Bowers, John Waite., Donovan J. Ochs, Richard J. Jensen, and David P. Schulz. The Rhetoric of Agitation and Control. 3rd ed. Long Grove, IL: Waveland, 2010. Print.

On Roots in Exile Carrie Helms Tippen A windstorm, uncommon in these mountain parts, uprooted dozens of trees overnight. Jay and I went to bed early to listen to the wind and rain and thunder and think about home. We had been living in West Virginia for a year, but West Texas thunderstorms were still thick in our blood. With my head on his stomach, I told him about thunderstorms at summer camp, how our whole cabin was made of tin and concrete, how loud the rain could be, how it sounded like it was coming from all sides all at once, how the other girls would cry about tornadoes and hide, how I would try to sneak outside to get in the middle of it. I told him about one late afternoon, one summer, when my sisters and I were home alone. I can’t remember why, though probably my mother is helping my father move equipment from one field to another, trying to beat it in before the rain starts. None of us are old enough to drive. We’ve been watching Flower Drum Song on VHS, and it is clear that a storm is on its way. Outside looks like a scene from South Pacific; the colors are all wrong. The sky is sort of green with a dark band of clouds to the West. The setting sun is dark orange, turning the caliche road the color of a creamcicle, the knee high cotton burnished on the borders of the leaves. My sisters and I decide its the perfect time to do a rain dance. Our father must be somewhere hoping that the rain will not come with too much wind, that the moisture will tamp down the top soil so he can take a day to do something besides move irrigation pipe or drag a plow between the planted rows to pull the colder, damper soil up over the hot, sandy top soil that threatens to blow and scorch the cotton plants. We call this “sand fighting.” Even as a child I catch the irony of trying to fight sand in West Texas summers. We dance up and down the rows of cotton singing “I Enjoy Being a Girl,” pretending that we are carrying the dragon in the Chinese New Year and the lightning is fireworks in our honor. When we get bored with that song, we sing selections from our first favorite: Singin’ in the Rain, saving the title track until the first drops prick our arms. When the rain does start, it’s a flash flood, a “gully washer,” a “toad floater.” It doesn’t last long, and we are in no danger. We keep dancing. Jay and I slept like children that night, waking up with joy when we would hear a loud crack of thunder to ask the other if they heard it, too, and to comfort the dog who is terrified and curled in a tight ball between our legs. I don’t expect to see the trees given up so easily. But in the morning, on my commute to work, I see dozens of trees on their sides. Branches, I expect. They fall all the time. But whole trees are uprooted. One has fallen across my neighbor’s driveway. He is already out surveying the damage in his cover-alls. I do not get the call in time. The power is out in my office; classes have been postponed. When my supervisor calls, I am too far away to go back home. My office mate Susan lives a short walk from campus. I call her to see if she has power, if she has heat, if I can wait for school to start with her. I buy us donuts. She offers me coffee and, later, a campus tour. Even though the wind is still brisk, it is better to be outside in the bright gray than inside in the dark. Susan gives me a headband to cover my ears while we walk and matching mittens. She brings her camera to take pictures of the downed trees. We waste time touring the damage, taking pictures of the short roots still clogged with black soil. 81

years old. The landlady’s old age yet continued survival contrasts the “life,” or marriage, of the newlywed couple. The narrator and his bride are so young, so green, that their relationship should naturally thrive. Instead, their relationship is more fledgling than the frail life of Mrs. Croft—that is, until she blesses the union. Upon meeting, Mrs. Croft declares Mala “is a perfect lady” (Lahiri 195), which allows the young couple to, “for the first time . . . [look] at each other and smile” (196). Overall, the rich irony in “The Third and Final Continent” furthers the collection’s theme. Ultimately, the intricate interlay of irony and paradox supports Lahiri’s contention that storytelling both forges and fractures relationships. While the referenced literary critics fail to realize that Lahiri diffuses such ironic and paradoxical examples in order to emphasize storytelling’s ability to unite and divide simultaneously, the reviewers provide sound discourse regarding instances of irony and paradox themselves in Interpreter of Maladies. In the end, the pen is mightier than the sword, and Lahiri’s doubleedged pen postulates a triumphant argument. Works Cited

"BP Oil Spill." NOAA Gulf Spill Restoration RSS. NOAA Restoration Center, n.d. Web. 19 Nov. 2013. <http:// www.gulfspillrestoration.noaa.gov/oil-spill/>. Buoys, Josephine. "Tate Modern 10th Birthday Sees Action Against Slick BP Sponsorship." UK Indymedia. UK Indymedia, 17 May 2010. Web. 23 Nov. 2013. <http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2010/05/451579.html>. Jordan, John. "On Refusing to Pretend to Do Politics in a Museum." Editorial. Art Monthly Mar. 2010: n. pag. Art Monthly. Arts Council England. Web. 23 Nov. 2013. <http://www.artmonthly.co.uk/magazine/site/article/ on-refusing-to-pretend-to-do-politics-in-a-museum-by-john-jordan-2010>. King, Martin L., Jr. "Letter from Birmingham Jail." The Movements of the New Left, 1950-1975: A Brief History with Documents. By Van Gosse. Boston, NY: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2005. 72-75. Print. "Liberate Tate." Liberate Tate. Liberate Tate, Oct. 2010. Web. 19 Nov. 2013. <http://liberatetate.wordpress.com/>. Meyer, David S. The Politics of Protest: Social Movements in America. New York: Oxford UP, 2007. Print. "Open Letter." Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. 25 Nov. 2013. <http://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/open letter>.

Brada-Williams, Noelle. "Reading Jhumpa Lahiri's ‘Interpreter of Maladies’ as a Short Story Cycle." Pedagogy, Canon, Context: Toward a Redefinition of Ethnic American Literary Studies 29.3/4 (2004): 451-64. JSTOR. Web. 19 Nov. 2014. Densingh, L.D. Easter Raj. "Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies: an exploration of the diasporic realities." Language In India (May 2012): 60+. Academic OneFile. Web. 3 Dec. 2014. Lahiri, Jhumpa. Interpreter of Maladies: Stories. New York: Houghton Milton, 1999. Print. Mehta, Diane. "Opportunity Knocks: Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri; Love and Longing in Bombay by Vikram Chandra." JSTOR. Agni, n.d. Web. 28 Nov. 2014. Mongia, Sunanda. “Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri.” Indian Literature 45.3 (2001): 206-211. JSTOR. Web. 19 Nov. 2014. Noor, Ronny. “Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri.” English-Language Writing from Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines 74.2 (2000): 365-366. JSTOR. Web. 19 Nov. 2014. Williams, Laura A. “Foodways and Subjectivity in Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘Interpreter of Maladies.”’ Food in Multi-Ethnic Literatures 32.4 (2007): 69-79. JSTOR. Web. 19 Nov. 2014.

Excavators Nick Barnette I.

Manager

The sun has never been closer to me as I stand on Washington’s powdered wig. Which is the whole problem: that damn sun. But it’s also my employer. “Looking at anything particularly interesting?” asks my other employer, who radiates heat. A silver suit covers his six foot seven frame, shielding his translucent skin from the rays and shading his blue eyes. I’ve never seen his eyes; all our encounters either happen when it’s too bright or too dark out, but I’ve always assumed they’re blue. “Nope,” I reply, “Just the ground.” The four hundred sixty-five feet between my boots and the ground where the mountain stops being a mountain are completely covered in white tarp. “Well take it all in,” says the Boss in his voice that’s cool and wispy like cigarette smoke in winter. “This shithole will be galaxies away once you board tomorrow. You’ll love it. Free booze and porn in first-class and you always fly first-class when you’re with RestoraCorp.” Which is a frigging stupid name for a company that’s a glorified Two Men in a Truck. We’re not restoring anything, just moving it—and, yes, we are moving “sites of historical and cultural significance (since 2037)!,” but it’s still work for a captive orca, moving X from A to B. “We can’t forget where we came from,” the Boss had preached two years ago when he’d convinced me to become a project manager and when the earth had started it’s slow death-waltz towards that celestial oven. Then, it had been dark, but he was too bright. No eye contact, just a dark void of a hotel conference room where I stood in the back and other faceless people agreed and applauded. The lights over the crowd were out; the stage lit too well. The Boss was just a ghost on stage, haunting and resonant throughout the conference room. “We must move forward, create a new life in Clio not in the shadows of the past but on the shoulders of a grand, terrene history.” I had no clue what hell terrene meant or that there was a difference between the past and history, but I’d believed his voice that rung with a prophet’s lust for fiery destruction. Prophets love that shit: destruction, God’s judgment. They’d be unemployed without it. “Eleven more jumped last night,” I say with the apathy of a local news anchor. The Boss creeps to Washington’s tarped forehead like a kindergartener at the edge of a pool’s deep end. Dozens of Lakota decked out like their ancestors litter the ground, sprawled out in their flowing leathers, trailed by their hawk feathers, the grey dirt dappled with turquoise beads and blood. It’s a postmodern interpretation of Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam” from the Sistine Chapel. We moved that on Thursday. I’d call it “Adams,” the painting. If it were one. “What the hell is it with the Indians and Mount Rushmore? They’re so showy. Thank God we aren’t letting them into Clio,” says the Boss. “That’s why they’re jumping,” I respond. The suicides had started when all the one-way flights 22

with Dev. For example, “while Dev fails to notice the cocktail dress [Miranda] buys to crown her role as his mistress, her friend’s son Rohin does” (Mehta 345-46). Indeed, unmistakable role reversals transpire between Dev and Rohin. To elucidate, “[like] Dev the boy takes naps; this nine-year-old who becomes a substitute for [Miranda’s] dispassionate lover not only gives her attention, but also calls attention to the perversity of her role” (246). Ultimately, stories—such as those Laxmi and Rohin proffer— have the agency to both break and build bonds, thus shifting Miranda’s relationships. By the end of the tale, she no longer sees Dev. In “Mrs. Sen’s,” both paradox and irony infuse the particularly poignant narrative. According to Laura Anh Williams in “Foodways and Subjectivity in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies,” the very title “Mrs. Sen’s” is paradoxical. Williams contends “[the] possessive form of Eliot’s caretaker’s name, ‘Mrs. Sen’s’ suggests her own ownership, while the possessed object remains intangible” (74). Further paradox and irony surround the title character’s name: “she is defined through her husband’s name and employment” (73). Mrs. Sen is her actual, legal name, yet it is also not her name—it is a reference to her husband’s name. Mr. Sen himself persists the irony when he “ironically dismisses and strips [Mrs. Sen] of what agency she has attained through her cooking” (74). Mr. Sen is selfish in pushing Mrs. Sen to gain the independence to drive a vehicle because he looks forward to the benefits he will gain from such newfound independence; meanwhile, he is blind to the fact what he intends to help their relationship only harms their relationship. “This Blessed House” also involves precarious relationship dynamics, which Lahiri emphasizes through emotive examples of irony and paradox. For instance, Sanjeev places the utmost importance on being well liked, while his wife, Twinkle, could not care less about others’ opinions. In the end, the large party of guests the couple hosts collectively follows Twinkle in her pursuit of the Christian paraphernalia Sanjeev disdains. The guests “most of all . . . [admire] Twinkle” (Lahiri 152), leaving Sanjeev completely alone. The bitter husband grows caustic, and when Twinkle and the rest of the guests present him with their discovered treasure, “a solid silver bust of Christ” (156), Sanjeev “[hates] it because he [knows] that Twinkle [loves] it” (157). The contradictory emotions of hate and love paradoxically illustrate their polarized marriage and speak to how stories—in the forms of attitudes, emotions, etc.—shift relationships. “The Treatment of Bibi Haldar” also concerns a family that “story” completely disrupts. The relations with whom Bibi lives have a daughter who becomes ill, and the anxious mother blames Bibi. Propagating an unfounded story that Bibi “[infects their] child” 170), the wife influences the family to “[move] away” (171), leaving Bibi behind. Although she is ill and alone, as Diane Mehta recognizes in “Opportunity Knocks: Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri; Love and Longing in Bombay by Vikram Chandra,” “in a brilliant ironic twist, Bibi is cured” (245). Initially, a doctor “[concludes] that a marriage would cure her” (Lahiri 161); what actually cures her, however, is the birth of son conceived ambiguously, possibly by sexual assault. Ultimately, irony marks “The Treatment of Bibi Haldar.” The examples of irony culminate in the final short story of the collection, “The Third and Final Continent.” Overall, the piece’s irony stems from the fact that the narrator is at first more comfortable around Mrs. Croft, his elderly landlady, than his own wife. In fact, the narrator concedes, “I waited to get used to [Mala], to her presence at my side, at my table and in my bed, but a week later we were still strangers” (192). Meanwhile, he is “disappointed” (191) when he leaves Mrs. Croft’s home. Moreover, considering that marriage so intimately involves just two people, it is ironic that the newlyweds require Mrs. Croft, an outside party, to bring them together. As Noelle Brada-Williams observes in “Reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘Interpreter of Maladies’ as a Short Story Cycle,” “[they] are connected to the elderly Mrs. Croft and her near-miraculous ability to survive” (453). Indeed, Croft advances past one hundred 79

fication brings the couple closer together as well as pushes them apart. Another example of irony that Noelle Brada-Williams locates in her article, “Reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies as a Short Story Cycle,” is the plant that is needlessly dying. In Shoba and Shukumar’s home, ‘“[even] though the plant [is] inches from the tap, the soil [is] dry”’ (457). Brada-Williams primarily deems the latter example an indication of neglect, but the infused irony endows the phrase with a greater function: the needlessly dried-up plant fails to meet readers’ expectations, just as readers expect stories to either connect or separate individuals. However, Lahiri proves the latter notion is a false dichotomy; indeed, stories have the ability to simultaneously connect and separate individuals, which the irony and paradox throughout the text emphasizes.

to Clio had booked. But some groups didn’t even have the chance to book the flights.

Irony and paradox abides in the next short story, “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine.” Performing botanical research in America for the year, Mr. Pirzada dines with the narrator’s family each evening. Understanding the cultural implications of Partition proves difficult for the young, female narrator, Lilia, who spends most of the story observing Mr. Pirzada and “[trying] to figure out what [makes] him different” (Lahiri 30). Paradox is prevalent because while Mr. Pirzada is familiar, he is also foreign. Lilia notices that “Mr. Pirzada and [her] parents [speak] the same language, [laugh] at the same jokes, [look] more or less the same” (25), along with multifarious other similarities. However, Lilia’s father explains, ‘“Mr. Pirzada is Bengali, but he is a Muslim . . . Therefore he lives in East Pakistan, not India”’ (26). Geopolitical, religious, and cultural implications demarcate identity for the characters of the story, and the fine line around which such demarcations flirt produce the paradox. While Lilia recognizes Mr. Pirzada as Indian, because he acts so similarly to her parents, she learns he is technically Pakistani, i.e. technically foreign. Undoubtedly, one’s identity is like a story; Lahiri teaches readers that stories both promote connectedness and separation.

“It’s holy, this mountain. For them at least,” I respond. “They raised hell when the government took it from them because they believe it’s a gateway to the afterlife. Or something like that.”

The “Interpreter of Maladies” short story explores bolstered bonds and broken relationships, as well. For example, a piece of paper containing Mr. Kapasi’s address represents the conversations in which Mr. Kapasi and Mrs. Das engage, linking them by the promise of continued communication after the Das’ family vacation ends. The situation stings with irony, however, when “the slip of paper with Mr. Kapasi’s address on it [flutters] away in the wind” (69). The reality sharply contrasts the imagined possibilities of continued communication after the trip and breaks their previously forged bond. Irony persists in the short story, and as Sunanda Mongia writes in the article “Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri,” Lahiri’s explication notes that Mr. Kapasi is “a taxi-driver guide who was once a teacher of English in a grammar school – not that these schools exist in India” (206-07). Although the ambiguity in Mr. Kapasi’s background is difficult to reconcile, Lahiri intentionally includes the comment to infuse a moment of irony—a man performs a job that appears either nonexistent or impractical if he must move outside India. Ultimately, readers readily identify the irony in “Interpreter of Maladies,” which is in keeping with the novel’s collective theme of story-induced coalescence and division.

“Well at least we know they’ll be cremated,” jokes the Boss, turning his cloaked head to the sun as the earth spins towards it like a son into a mother’s open arms. “If they were smarter, they’d have hidden under the TranspoTarp,” he continues when I don’t laugh at his sick joke. I keep gazing. That’s how it works, the technology I developed before I was a RestoraCorp Project Manager (North American Division). Cover it, plug the coordinates into your iPhone 9s, and whoosh—off to the Clio American History Museum—a massive complex now featuring the Statue of Liberty, the Bellagio, and Stonehenge. In Clio, American is a broad term.

“Well it’s holy to the American people now,” the Boss says, turning from the ledge, “Been that way for years now.” The three faces we haven’t tarped grin out over the stony expanse of this barren state. The grins were a revision. Lincoln and Roosevelt didn’t look happy enough—“Too StoneFaced” was the clever title from the Times op-ed—because you shouldn’t trust an unhappy president and then they’d completely carved over Jefferson. Under the knife, Jefferson had blossomed into Kyla Joortz, America’s sweetheart whose second album dropped a few days before we’d learned that earth had gone rogue and was self-apocalypsing. People took comfort in her sugar-rush pop anthems—and who the hell is this Jefferson anyway?—so the government commissioned the portrait. The pigtails are a nice touch. I picture Americans—the white ones—prostrate at the feet of the toothy gods, raising a hymn to the lone goddess. And next to them are wailing Lakotas who’ve quit their casino jobs to be full-time lamenters at the official closing of heaven’s gates—“Out of Business: Have Fun in Hell” reads the sign swinging from Lincoln’s nose. “Make sure your workers cover the other three,” the Boss instructs, waving his metallic arm towards the other three faces. “You’ve got a long flight tomorrow. Rest up.” “I never rest well before flying.” Sweat from my nose drops onto the tarp. I opted for a t-shirt and jeans when RestoraCorp had offered me one of the Boss’s reflective burqas. They told me I was putting myself at risk of developing melanoma. But I think we’ll all get some type of cancer in the end. Or jump before it gets us. The fuel for the Vessel I’m boarding tomorrow is highly carcinogenic. So are iPhone 9s’s, and the TranspoTarp. And maybe turquoise beads.

“A Real Durwan” also explores Interpreter of Maladies’ overarching theme. Ronny Noor posits in his article “Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri” that “[in] ‘A Real Durwan’ the residents of a Calcutta tenement unjustly cast out an old sweeper because of a theft in the building while she was away in town” (366). The tragic irony lies in the fact that Boori Ma is innocent yet scapegoated as the perpetrator. Moreover, the community essentially fires her from a job she never officially holds. In the end, the stories she has always leveraged to determine her place in society ultimately displace her.

“You’ll want rest. You’re one of the lucky ones. What you’re doing will change our new world,” the Boss reiterates. Our work just erases history, or the past, or whichever one makes more sense to erase. And I hate him for calling me lucky.

Similar to Boori Ma, Miranda in the short story “Sexy” must find her place, and irony persists in the process. Diane Mehta expounds in her article “Opportunity Knocks: Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri; Love and Longing in Bombay by Vikram Chandra” that irony surrounds Miranda’s affair

“This company has done so much for you. Don’t be an ungrateful asshole,” he turns to retort. I bet he’s drowning in sweat underneath his armor. Up to his pretty blue eyes.

“I’m not lucky, you know,” I say, staring down Lincoln who looks goofy in love. “Neither are you.”

The eyes I’ll never see.

I take three steps towards him. He’s an arm’s length away. “You’re lucky,” he repeats. The sun is bloated, the sky white, and the marble around us dances with furious light. “Otherwise you’d end up like those idiot Indians.” I like the painting a lot. The Lakotas committed to their art, like a eunuch to his courtly post. It hurt, but now they’re important. I hurt and the Boss tells me I’m important. “Thank God we aren’t letting them into Clio,” he adds in his steel-song voice. I know he’s taller but I grab him. I grab him because he roped me into this. Because he’s a racist bastard. And because I’m starting to doubt whether or not his eyes are blue. He’s not used to physical confrontations, always insulated. I pin his arms up behind his back and shove him closer and closer to Washington’s hairline. “Don’t worry,” are the words that shake out of my adrenaline-pumped body. “You’ll make it to Clio.” “What the hell? You’re fucking crazy.” Maybe I am. Probably. But I’ll die happier than the Boss. The ghost Boss. The spectre of progress. “Don’t worry, Boss,” I say as I inch us toward the four hundred sixty-five foot descent. “You always fly first-class when you’re with RestoraCorp.” I release like a child letting go of a balloon that will wind up somewhere in the ocean although he thinks it will make it to the moon. He falls for a few seconds and thuds to the ground. I admire my revision to the tribal artwork. A glowing figure extends his right arm to one of the Lakotas. Maybe the new piece should just keep the original title, “The Creation of Adam.” I will make my way down the mountain and tuck the bodies under the TranspoTarp. Then I’ll send them, the presidents, and Kyla to Clio. I’d pay to see the curator’s face when he peels back the tarp to find something even uglier than a bowdlerized Mount Rushmore. An American history museum should honor those who came before us. Next, I’ll strip off my t-shirt and jeans and let my body soak in the melanoma. But the grand explosion will get me before the cancer. I’ll be sitting and smiling in holy dirt at the once-gate of heaven as the earth falls into the sun. II. Lakota At least thirty of us are watching through our government issued Ray Bans. Whoever I didn’t vote for at least has good, albeit, affected taste. My boss looks over the ledge where Stevie jumped last night, wearing his great-great-somethingoranother’s buckskins and war bonnet. “You can go to hell,” Stevie’d yelled at me when I told him I was working for the Company now. And I hate working for the Company just as much as Stevie would’ve hated not dying a martyr’s death. 24

The stories that initially provide Boori Ma such agency betray her in the end. Supplanting lighthearted anecdotes, stories morph into pernicious rumors that render the refugee homeless yet again. After robbers steal the building’s basin, the residents condemn Boori Ma as the town scapegoat, disseminating unfounded rumors—stories—about her alleged role in the theft. For example, one resident cries out that “[she informs] the robbers” (81). In addition, the rabble of residents rejoins, “For years we have put up with your lies . . . You expect us, now, to believe you?” (82). The ousted sentry’s stories never proffer credibility, but now the accusatory community refuses to give her the benefit of the doubt. Thus, her stories separate her from the community. Ultimately, in “A Real Durwan,” Boori Ma’s stories first house her then displace her, speaking to the dual nature of storytelling in joining and separating individuals. The twofold function of storytelling appears in “Mrs. Sen’s,” as well. Mrs. Sen moves from India to the United States with her husband, and she often reminiscences about life at home—similar to Boori Ma in “A Real Durwan.” The stories she shares both link and distance her from her listeners. For example, after a long-awaited letter announcing her niece’s birth arrives, the caregiver confers with Eliot the particulars. By relaying the story, Mrs. Sen deepens her bond with Eliot; in fact, the post-letter moment is “the first time she [embraces] him” (121). However, she then phones Mr. Sen and excitedly divulges the contents of the letter in her first language. Eliot observes the exchange, and it appears so foreign to him that he “[has] the sensation that Mrs. Sen [is] no longer present in the room” (122). Thus, storytelling both encourages and disrupts the pair’s relationship. The aforementioned tales boldly illustrate storytelling’s relationship-regulating role. The rest of Lahiri’s short stories contain images and moments that touch on the theme as well. For example, in “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine,” the stories Mr. Pirzada conveys to Lilia draw her closer to him. Contrarily, the stories Lilia’s father tells her about Partition detract from Lilia’s relationship with Mr. Pirzada. In “Sexy,” the parallel stories between Miranda and Laxmi’s cousin establish common experiences between the coworkers. In “This Blessed House,” Twinkle and Sanjeev react to the Christian religious paraphernalia polemically, accepting different stories about what the artifacts denote. News that marriage will cure Bibi’s illness brings together the town in gossip in “The Treatment of Bibi Haldar.” Finally, in “The Third and Final Continent,” the narrator imparts the story of his relationship with Mrs. Croft to his wife, Mala, which is “the moment when the distance between Mala and [the narrator begins] to lessen” (196). Undoubtedly, each short story in Interpreter of Maladies—and the stories within them—actively cultivate and demolish relationships, proving to be the most indelible theme of the collection. In order to further Lahiri’s message, examples of irony and paradox saturate Interpreter of Maladies. Notions of contrasting entities and seemingly disparate sentiments coexisting emphasize the theme of stories’ ability to unite and divide individuals. While most academic articles analyzing Interpreter of Maladies fail to recognize the paradoxical theme, they typically astutely observe the ironies iterated throughout the tales. If readers examine each short story, they realize how crucial irony and paradox are to not only the individual stories but also to the collection as a whole, because irony and paradox support Lahiri’s main message. “A Temporary Matter” contains various examples of irony and paradox. Of course, irony seeps through the story’s very premise. During the time in which their house is dark—a symbol of a lack of knowledge or understanding—Shoba and Shukumar finally communicate and enlighten each other. Laura Anh Williams notes in her gastronomically-rooted article, “Foodways and Subjectivity in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies,” that the edifying power outages beget further irony. Williams contends that “[for] Shukumar, the candle-lit dinners suggest a renewed vitality for the marriage, but the story shows this to be a misinterpretation” (72). Indeed, the stories the couple shares illuminate how the time for clari77

Shoba and Shukumar “to talk to each other again” (19). They also consummate their rekindled connection one night, providing a physical example of their strengthened bond. However, while telling tales allows them to reconnect, the stories also ravage their marriage. Ultimately, Shoba uses storytelling to lead up to the fact that she is moving out and leaving Shukumar. Therefore, while the couple draws closer together, Shoba simultaneously “[spends the] past few evenings preparing for a life without [Shukumar]” (21). Clearly, stories both connect and divide individuals. L. D. Easter Raj Densingh contends in his article “Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies: An Exploration of the Diasporic Realities” that “[the] sorrow of the lost child causes a communication breakdown with the relationship of Shukumar and Shoba” (63). However, he fails to recognize that the couple communicates in the stories they tell themselves about their partner’s attitude, at least before the formal exchange of tales during the power outages takes place. Indeed, such internal discourse supersedes oral communication between the spouses and catalyzes the first degrees of separation. After all, although Shoba already purchases the apartment prior to the nightly story exchange, she does not actually leave until they finish sharing stories. Therefore, storytelling is the culprit of separation all along. In “Interpreter of Maladies,” the title story of the collection, storytelling also simultaneously develops and disrupts relationships. To elucidate, the taxi driver, Mr. Kapasi, is enamored with Mrs. Das, whose family he drives to the various tourist sites. Mrs. Das engages Mr. Kapasi in several instances of small talk as their trip progresses, even recording his address so she can send him the photograph he takes with the family. Once she trusts Mr. Kapasi as someone who can “say the right thing” (Lahiri 65) to “help [her] feel better” (65), the Das matriarch confides in the stranger-turned-confidante about her past infidelity by which Bobby is born. Stories of smaller scope establish a connection Mrs. Das trusts—so much so she readily divulges such a significant secret to her taxi driver. Clearly, Lahiri emphasizes the strength of stories as bonding agents. Lahiri also demands, however, that stories be viewed as common relationship disrupters, as well. For example, Mr. Kapasi accidentally offends Mrs. Das by asking her, in the midst of the story, a brutally honest question: ‘“Is it really pain you feel, Mrs. Das, or is it guilt?”’ (66). The brutal honesty is too much to bear, and Mrs. Das abruptly departs without another utterance, which Mr. Kapasi interprets as her belief that “he [is] not even important enough to be properly insulted” (66). Clearly, communication in “Interpreter of Maladies” both unites then divides the unlikely confidantes, supporting Lahiri’s argument that tales strengthen and sever relationships. The short story following “Interpreter of Maladies” in the sequence, “A Real Durwan,” delineates protagonist Boori Ma’s reduction from a crucial member of the community to an outcast. At first, stories endow her with value and prescribe her role in the community, which is why she “[stands] guard between [the flat-building] and the outside world” (73) like “a real durwan” (73). Not only does she secure the complex, but she also draws the inhabitants together. For example, “Boori Ma [likes] to chronicle . . . easier times. And so, by the time she [reaches] the second-floor landing, she . . . [draws] to the whole building’s attention the menu of her third daughter’s wedding night” (71). In fact, “[all agree] that she [is] a superb entertainer” (73). Despite the discrepancies among her fantastical tales, Boori Ma undoubtedly fosters a connected community through storytelling. After all, the wives of the building collectively surmise Boori Ma’s tale telling tendency allows her to cope with losing her family (72). Clearly, the women connect and collaborate as a direct result of the stories that the “sweeper of the stairwell” (71) relays. However, the duality of stories’ influences persists; as Boori Ma forges connections, she simultaneously separates herself from her audience when she romanticizes her past life and therefore distinguishes herself as “other.” 76

“Sitting Bull, man. Fucking Crazy Horse. That’s how we’re supposed to go, man. Gritting our teeth and sticking it to the white man.” Some days I agreed, but the Heartland Casino had laid me off when the whole sun thing started being news and I could never jump. But Stevie and the rest of my cousins sure as hell did, which is what we’re watching my boss watch like it’s some sort of TV show. He has a tempered sorrow in his eyes of the old hunter’s raising their bows to bring down a buffalo—sad but ecstatic. His neck snaps towards us and he mumbles— “what’re you looking at… keep rolling tarp… nothing to see here”—then goes back to staring at Stevie’s demise. So I go back to rolling. I’m a roller. Our boss drove up to the reservation in a semi and posted up all these signs about employment. Me and half of the other guys I would’ve graduated high school with jumped at. The semi was chock full of white tarp that moved like water but was glassy to the touch. He told us we’d be moving those white folks from the mountain and we were all okay with that since our Nanas and Papas had told us about how the white government took the mountains away and beat the marble into grinning idiots. Getting rid of them would be a new start. They were eyesores anyway, the entrance gates of a presidential theme park in the middle of Godknowswhere, South Dakota. So I’m rolling and rolling and rolling, tarping up old Washington, when THE Boss shows up. Not Springsteen. the THE Boss. My boss’s dad. He walks up to his son in this ridiculous jumpsuit, all shiny and mirror-like with sunbeams bouncing from him to our government-issued Ray Bans back to him. They start talking and it looks like Baby Boss is talking to himself ‘cause Daddy Boss’s mouth is all covered up from the I’mnotgonnadiefromcancer suit. Which is stupid since we’re probably all gonna die from cancer what with the sun lunging toward us. They start looking over the edge where Stevie and the rest of my idiot cousins are spread eagled on the ground. “Where ya going, Louie?” I ask the roller stationed next to me. Louie and I grew up in the same First Mission Baptist Church Sunday school class. He doesn’t talk much, one of those stoic Indian stereotypes, so I screw around with him tryna make him talk and stuff. That was me and Stevie’s favorite game as kids. But this time, the talking was more serious since the sun was about to set us all on fire. Or at least sometime it would sometime soon. Louie just looks at me, the blank stare of a disinterested fish you’ve just caught and knows it’ll be in the freezer soon. “Where ya going before…” “I’m staying,” he says, going back to rolling. “Well, I’m not. I’m going to Vegas or LA, somewhere fun before it all goes to shit” “No point in going to Vegas,” he responds, rolling, “They transported the Strip a week ago. And that just makes me angry because it’s always been the rich people having fun and not me, stuck at the casino watching everyone else gambling away fortunes and me yessiring and stuff to maybe get a good tip at the valet booth. But the game isn’t over. Louie seems to be more talkative than he was before Stevie jumped off Washington because he’d heard too much about Crazy Horse. “Why’re ya staying?” 25

“This spot,” he says. He stops rolling and jabs his gloved finger at the mountain. “It’s the gate to heaven. It will open up and take all the Lakota with it once we’ve removed this desecrated piece of it.” Louie is grasping for straws. If we’d learned anything in the First Mission Baptist Sunday school class it was that heaven’s gates were on some cloud and that Peter was there to let you in if you didn’t drink too much. But we’re all looking for some quick trip to the moon now but we didn’t even get the chance to get the chance to get on one of those RestoraCorps jets. Maybe the hole under the mountain would actually work and I could get sucked up with my brothers and sisters like bubbles through a straw in a Coke can. I look up because I hear some rocks shuffling, all thirty-odd of us gawking slack-jawed at the boss who has THE Boss in a half nelson. And they’re both hollering and fighting the way I used to with my dad and we’re all laughing because Daddy Boss’s suit is ridiculous but we all stop when Baby Boss throws him over the edge. I have a hard time feeling sorrow for the guy even right after we all see it happen. It’s how Stevie died. And half my cousins. Baby Boss then turns around and strips off his clothes and starts heading to the path that leads down the mountain. Me and all the other guys, realizing we’ve been working for a crazy man, get up and tackle him, kill-the-man-with-the-ball-style, and we’re still laughing because he’s stark naked and thinks he can get away with killing his dad in front of all us. I call the cops on my iPhone 6s. We cry and our stomachs ache from laughing so much. The cops get there when the sun is supposed to set but doesn’t. III. Docent I wander Amsterdam’s red-light district in a lab coat. The canals are waterless, now filled with oxygen pumped into the museum through a filtration system. The sky above is white and spotless because it is no real sky but the tent we now live under. The manufactured light catches the starkness of my lab coat and reflects it onto the windows of storefronts. The glass absorbs my whiteness and spread it thin over its surface like a baker’s pin rolling out dough. The brick whorehouses are narrow and tall, almost gawky, like I was back when Amsterdam was anchored to earth. I had grown; the brothels had not. “I keep losing you, Colleen,” Milton says, turning a corner from the path that leads to the Bellagio. “I know. I went off to find my…” My voice trails off. The purged canals rush with silence. “I need you on top of it today,” my assistant adds, “we’ve got some big cargo coming in today.” “I know, Milton. I typed up the docking schedule.” Not breaking eye contact with the facades, I sway, almost imperceptibly, and my reflection glides across the windows like headlights around a hairpin. I am the girl in every window. Milton approaches me. His bitter cologne catches the air and won’t let go. He turns, his lab coat spinning out like a matador’s cape, and looks at the building where my body is smattered across the front. “What did you say you were looking for?” Milton asks, watching the windows. “I didn’t say.” 26

Lahiri’s Double-Edged Pen is Mightier than the Sword Kacey Williamson The romantic “once upon a time” notion of storytelling by no means applies to all tales. Indeed, while images of hope and light appear in Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri’s poignant collection of short stories, images of despair and darkness permeate the pages as well. Intrinsically infused with Indian culture, Lahiri’s powerful prose provides glimpses of the private lives of people living in either India or the United States. Critics often focus on the common threads Lahiri weaves throughout the various pieces of her work, exploring themes of marriage, displacement, food-related habits, etc. However, most fail to recognize the most dominant theme of all: stories’ ability to foster and fracture relationships. Lahiri expounds such a paradoxical and ironic axiom through her double-edged pen, also incorporating numerous examples of irony and paradox to emphasize her argument. Ultimately, in Jhumpa Lahiri’s collection Interpreter of Maladies, Lahiri propagates the paradoxical nature of stories in their capacity to both unite and divide individuals. Despite extensive evidence supporting the theme that stories both develop and destroy relationships, most scholars reviewing Interpreter of Maladies focus on more peripheral themes. Sometimes, the themes they explore hint at the true message, but more often than not, their discourse fails to do justice to storytelling’s active role in relationship dynamics. For example, Noelle Brada-Williams, in her journal article “Reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies as a Short Story Cycle,” examines “the recurring themes of the barriers to and opportunities for human communication; community, including marital, extra-marital, and parent-child relationships; and the dichotomy of care and neglect” (451). However, Brada-Williams fails to recognize that communication is both a barrier and an opportunity, often functioning simultaneously throughout Interpreter of Maladies. Diane Mehta’s article, “Opportunity Knocks: Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri; Love and Longing in Bombay by Vikram Chandra,” claims that “[all] the stories in . . . Interpreter of Maladies . . . are about marriage” (240). L. D. Easter Raj Densingh hones in on the implications of diaspora in his article “Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies: An Exploration of the Diasporic Realities,” propagating that, primarily, “[this] collection is about Indians settled abroad, and Lahiri addresses their struggles with multicultural upbringing and environment” (63). In addition, Laura Anh Williams expounds the theme of food preparation in “Foodways and Subjectivity in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies,” Ronny Noor advocates recognizing the novel’s “maladies” as issues common not only to immigrants but also all humans from all times in “Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri,” and Sunanda Mongia comments on the theme of culture while also condemning what Mongia believes is Lahiri’s failure to convey a fresh point of view in “Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri.” Considering the extent of thematic conversation that surrounds Interpreter of Maladies, it is surprising reviews have neglected the crucial theme of stories’ agency to build and barrage relationships. Numerous examples throughout Interpreter of Maladies evince the binary effects stories wield upon relationships. The first short story, “A Temporary Matter,” serves as the primary paradigm through which readers understand the stories’ duality. When the power falters each night for a designated period of time, the increasingly estranging couple reconnects. Despite the darkness, the couple enlightens each other by sharing stories in an “exchange of confessions” (Lahiri 18). Sharing stories each night allows 75

I know it turns the corner and reaches almost to his spine. When I was a child, he couldn’t eat watermelon or peanut butter or banana pudding. Some thing, some tumor, they said, had shriveled his kidneys until both were useless, until his skin was yellowed and dried, crumbling like a leaf and stem under my fingers, until his eyes were closed all the time, and I could not sit with him in his chair. This thing that did not like to eat watermelon dined ten years on my father.

“Oh.” The phantom water rages behind us. Milton says, “Well we should be making our way to Docking Sector.” He clicks on his phone and swipes through screens of light and numbers. “According to the app, Rushmore should be getting here in about seven minutes.” I follow Milton, ripping my ghosthalf from the shop windows. I am looking for the spot where Henry and I kissed after buying crepes from a street vendor. Our lips were topped with powdered sugar and he had called me sweetie. I mapped the city in my head as best as I could. I knew it had happened three blocks west of the Anne Frank House, but the Statue of Liberty now stands where Anne had hidden. For me, it is three years post-earth, three years post-Henry, and too many days under the tent, but my mind can still map a summer dalliance. “Did you ever go to Amsterdam back when it was…” Milton begins to ask. “Actually Amsterdam?” I interrupt. Before it had been dissected, packaged, shot through the galaxy, and plopped down in the museum? I had studied Renaissance art at the university; he had been there for Journalism. “Well, back when it was on earth?” Milton asks. We cross one of the walking bridges over the dehydrated canal and down a path that leads through Versailles. “No,” I lie.

Ten years dying, ten years healed, my father spits a seed, brandishes his spoon, excises another circle of meat.

“Man, you missed out,” he says, “The place was insane. I backpacked across Europe after graduation and, man, Amsterdam was the best. I’m glad they brought it here. Brings back good memories.” I smile and say something stupid that I don’t mean like, “I’m sure it was, Mil.” We move through seventeenth century oak doors from Versailles’s Hall of Mirrors into the Oval Office. It had been Milton’s idea to cut up the buildings and create the Franken-Palace. From there, we are on to Buckingham. “Sweetie,” Henry had called me. The cafes had buzzed and cyclists had zoomed about us as if we were the only two stationary points in the city, the sugary hearth from which all other life radiated and twirled about. He would follow me to the ends of the earth but not past that. Henry was earthbound. He was up to his knees in clay and he wouldn’t move. He thought it was wrong to move, but I couldn’t stomach the downfall. I fled when I got the job. I didn’t want to look back, but looking back was the job. The bricks and the canals and the bridges haunt me. They are not the type of phantoms that put a knife to your throat but the ones that envelope you like a hailstorm, hold you till it hurts and you are numb with cold. Milton is the type of man Henry would’ve hated. But Milton is here and so am I, which is more than I can say for Henry. Milton, like the spectacles we display, is present but empty. However, hereness is a quality that I find necessary in a man. “Traitor,” he had called me when we sat in his flat and breathed oxygen that was oxygen and stared out at the grey sky that was sky. I told him he loved making a point more than he loved me. His lips were chapped, not meant for another’s. Our footsteps echo unceremoniously throughout the hall where queens have walked. I am no queen; I am a girl in a window. Milton sneezes, breaking the silence that has guided most of our journey although I swear I hear the hushed lap of a river. I excuse him.

Food Chain

“Don’t you mean ‘bless you?’” he asks. “Yes. I’m sorry.” We walk through French doors that lead to the loading dock. Silver tape outlines the spot where the stone faces will land, faces that are not Henry’s. Every day I walk down the streets of Paris, Vegas, and Amsterdam, or at least what is left of them; I know I will run into him. I’m window-shopping for an ex-lover, searching the old streets of new artifacts where people used to kiss and get hit by taxis. The Docking Sector pulses with hard-hats and lab coats, teams of archaeologists who were thrilled at the sudden explosion of jobs in their field and teams of labor that will unwrap the mountain from the TranspoTarp. Although my title is Assistant Art Director for RestoraCorp’s American History Museum, a position that doesn’t require physical labor, I always help with the unwrapping so that I feel like I’m doing something, because what’s the point of directing art that’s already been directed? The creative part is over, completed centuries ago. Milton and I are just here to make sure nothing crumbles. A blinking red clock projects onto the expanse of white overhead and counts down the arrival of long dead presidents. The hard hats and lab coats clear the tape perimeter and ready their box cutters for the process of undressing the old men and Kyla. I clutch the box cutter that swings from my neck on a lanyard where my name also dangles. The clock hits one and the tarped granite hits the ground like a crystal ball on New Year’s. The jagged silhouette looms against the tent, white on white. We attack the mass like an ant colony surrounding discarded candy and slash away at the tarp. I cut carefully so I don’t damage the artifact, peeling away layers of the transportive gift-wrap. I peel until I find a brown splotch huddled against the cool granite, a pristine gem set into the mountain. My voice catches in my throat like jeans on barbed wire but I’m able to whisper, “Come with me.” Eyes that are still pregnant with visions of constellations and prairies stare back at me. Lungs that retain the sweetness of earthen oxygen work quickly and fill with our bought air. He is a fish flung up from sea, panting on a splintered pier. “Don’t let anyone see you,” I say. I throw my lab coat over him and make for the abandoned storefronts of what was once Amsterdam. He is the perfect artifact, but he will never be displayed.

Carrie Helms Tippen My sister took a picture and called it “The Food Chain.” A dry earthworm, thick with road dust, clamped in the bright jaw of a mockingbird trapped in the chrome maw of her SUV. We fasten it to the refrigerator with an apple-shaped magnet. This morning we picked a watermelon, reading the signs of ripeness: the green curl at the stem had yellowed, dried, crumbled from the melon at the slightest pressure. “When they’re ready, they pick themselves,” my father says, sounding the melon with his knuckle. He splits the watermelon in halves, the black rind laying open the still warm middle.

IV. Mother

We sit at the table, scooping

Four uniforms are hauling the bodies away in what we now call night, the brief period when our side of the planet turns its back to its murderer. The dead men are the distraction I’ve been waiting for. The sky is violet with crimson streaks. Jon’s hand is clasped in mine, and the sweat, which is neverending in this heat, binding them together. Among the clumps of dead men in leather rises a silvery mound that reflects the twilight like as if it were a disco ball.

the salted meat with our spoons,

“Don’t look over there, Jon,” I whisper. His eyes are lifted to the glowing sky.

the cold metal making perfect circles in the red skin. We argue over who has eaten more than her share of the heart, spitting the seeds on a striped beach towel

“Where did all the stars go?” he asks. I hush him; the guards are thirty yards from the bush where we are crouched.

drawn across the table to soak up the juice.

I lower my lips to his ear and speak in a voice that is barely a voice, “They’re on vacation, but isn’t the purple pretty?”

My father sits shirtless in the summer heat.

“Yeah,” he smiles back at me, copying my muted tone, “It looks like tie-dye.” 28

I can see the faded scar halfway across his abdomen. 73

tried to squash it, the damned thing kept bubbling to the surface. Very well. I would consider it. No, it was too outrageous. What would the others think of me after it was all said and done? But there probably wouldn’t be another astral visiting for at least a century, if I didn’t count the lingering deities scattered around the globe, but they were too occupied with other duties to even notice. There, it was decided. Now all I had to do was wait for Mrs. Euphemia Archibald to make her first move.

I am waiting for the guards to turn their backs as they carry away another warrior to dump in the back of the company van. The crepuscular light dances on the pallid corpses and turns their skin lilac; they are the scattered wildflowers that I clipped and laid on my mother’s grave. I can’t distinguish any of the bodies now. They are bent past recognition, but I have laughed and fought and sung hymns with them all.

It came a month later, in the form of an unforeseen tsunami that had swept itself into existence almost overnight. As soon as I sensed it brewing, I flew out immediately to quell it; there were no natural disasters scheduled this week. People were beginning to scatter from the beaches and flooded the streets with their cars and children and wailing. I landed in the town square, narrowing my vision until I could see the waves (at least forty-feet high) bearing down upon the shore. Somewhere above the wind I could hear Mrs. Euphemia Archibald’s deep laugh booming. I adjusted the cape self-consciously and cleared my throat as some of the fleeing people stopped to gawk at me standing resolutely, facing the “wrong” direction. I took a deep breath and prepared to blow aside this little maelstrom. Is this really the sort of thing your kind likes? So be it.

“Why isn’t Dad coming to say good-bye?” Jon asks. The guards roll another purple man on his side and hoist him up like a flag at half-mast. Their backs are turned and the body lolls between them. “He’s on vacation with the stars,” I answer. I pull Jon out from the shrubs and speed to the mountain that is blanketed in suffocative plastic. My neck tenses and every vein hums with live-wire electricity. We are exposed upon the plains that offer no shelter. I wonder if Jon is as adrenalized as I am, if my grip on his still-growing hands is too tight. Those hands will keep growing but mine are large and flat as pancakes. Jon gasps and I throw my arms around him in panic. “What’s that?” he asks, pointing to the casualties. “Jon, I told you not to look. There is nothing to see there.” “But it’s shiny. It must be something.” I turn and keep pushing him along to the mountain, but his eyes are affixed on the silver-suited man. “We have to get you under there. Move,” I urge. “Remember what I said? Just like hide-and-go seek.” “Is that a god?” he asks. By now, I am dragging him to the tarp, the final station. “No.” “But isn’t it true what Granny used to say?” “True about what?” We reach the mountain where the TranspoTarp smothers the mountain like a generous layer of vanilla icing. I pull up the tarp and make a tiny entrance for Jon, motioning for him to slip under it. The guards are coming back for another man. “About this mountain being the gate to heaven or something?” Granny’s words are warm and distant but I can hear her explaining it to me as I perched on her knee, as had her parents and theirs and theirs and theirs. Somewhere, that communicative cable had frayed and sputtered, but it still echoed like a wolf cry throughout a ravine. “It is,” I assure him. “Then you should come with me.” “I can’t,” my voice shakes. I kiss him on top of his disheveled brown hair and breathe in the shampoo that his dad had used. Jon is older than I realize and I count back the birthdays to the day we rushed into town to get to the hospital. He had screamed as they removed him from me. Starting from

the end, I count to seven. I push him up under the tarp. “Why not?” The tarp muffles his voice. “Because people won’t show me pity. You have a chance.” I watch his outline sink against the stone as he tries to find a comfortable nook within the rocks. He is last year’s Halloween costume, but now his ghost sheet is eight thousand times too large. “Stay quiet. Try to fall asleep,” I command. “I love you,” I add. “I think that was a god,” he says.

“Instead of all that nonsense, Euphemia, may I call you Euphemia? How about we simply start with tea and work our way from there.” With a nod, Mrs. Euphemia Archibald accepted my request. I patted her arm tenderly and directed her into the teashop around the corner. We sipped chamomile and mint loose-leaf as she recounted the details of her “contributions” to the world. “The Grassy Knoll? My word, Euphemia, how fiendish of you!” After draining her tea and the conversation, she patted her thin upper lip dry. Mrs. Euphemia Archibald pushed her empty mug towards the middle of the table. “This has been a romp, dearie, but I admit it’s not quite enough to put us off our course at hand.”

“You could be right.” I run my hand along my ghost-son and turn. I run back to the reservation blinded by tears and the rising sun.

I sighed. What a pity. “I really hoped that we could come to some understanding, Euphemia.” Her eyes narrowed, and she bared her teeth. “That’s quite enough of your imperialism, astral.”

V. Father The father and son had stalked the buffalo all morning through the hills of granite they called the Six Grandfathers. Creeping from bush to bush, they followed the beast that had been separated from its herd. They kept silent, haunting the buffalo until they had a shot that was sure to strike the creature’s pulsing center.

“If that is indeed the case, we’ll be coming after you and your kind promptly. This vision of a ‘hostile takeover’ is terribly out of style and a downright nuisance.”

The son’s joints ached from the three hours of crouching. His father had shown him a long time ago how to move on all fours and glide above the ground like mist. The father was a veteran hunter and moved about the plains and valleys with ease; the son still had time to learn. Drifting over sere grass, the father turned his head to the son and nodded, giving the signal to let an arrow fly. He reached for the tanned quiver at his back and fumbled for an arrow. The lethal barb retrieved, he loaded his weapon and pulled back the deer tendon string.

I grimaced. What a mess this was turning into. Old Ones can slip into your kind as fluidly as astrals do with planes. She would be almost impossible to track. I reached out a hand. Perhaps underneath that prickly exterior there was a conscience to which I could appeal, but her eyes flashed with an internal light that quickly dashed this theory.

The boy took aim, but couldn’t ascertain the heart’s exact placement within the beast. Swathes of fur blanketed the brown mass that plodded along on legs that seemed too thin to carry an animal of such gravity. The son let the arrow fly wildly and it struck the side of the hill behind the buffalo. The chink echoed throughout the ravine and scared the creature, which bolted. The son hung his head and the father sprung from the earth and walked to him. “Appanoose, it takes many tries. Buffalo are not roots that do not move and are there to be dug up,” the father consoled. “But I have had many chances with buffalo and I am never lucky,” Appanoose replied. “There is time,” the father said. He turned to the south end of the ravine and marched. His son followed. The white peaks loomed over them and Appanoose pretended they were walking among clouds. The two followed the canal out of the mountain pass, crushing the dried grass underneath them. The ravine gave way to verdant plain where they had spent their morning zig-zagging after the lone buffalo. The sky loomed vast and bold, heavy with blue light. They trekked the expanse to the creek they had crossed hours before. The boy waded into the trickling stream and for the first time since they’d embarked on the hunt, his leg muscles relaxed. He surveyed the chain of rocks from where they had just 30

“Ah, ah, ah, don’t get ahead of yourself. You know we can take any form. There will be no way for you to know who or where we are.”

“Euphemia . . . ” “Time to play! You’ll know it’s me when you see it, astral.” Another slow sizzle and soft pop announced her departure a moment before she vanished from her seat. What a pickle. I briefly considered slipping out momentarily to confer with some of my peers, but then decided against such action; I had no way of knowing how much time might pass by here before we had come to an agreement on the proper course of action. I swirled the remnants of my tealeaves as an alien shiver of foreboding tap-danced up and down my spine. There had never before been an open declaration of this nature on Earth. Old Ones lingered on most every planet, but had never given an astral cause to intervene in their existences. The Old Ones’ power was deeply rooted in the origin of this planet. As we were the masters of the cosmos, so too were they the local monarchs of Earth. Suffice to say, they had the hometown advantage. I had seen too much of Mrs. Euphemia Archibald to consider her threat a mere puffing of the chest. If the Old Ones had indeed formed a coalition, then they would have already been gathering their strength down in the Earth’s core. No wonder we had overlooked it. Such negligence. I felt a slight warming in my cheeks that pointed to embarrassment at the thought of it. I realized that it had fallen to me to set the precedence for this instance. How bothersome. And yet. An idea was beginning to brew within myself that I couldn’t help but be tickled by. As much as I 71

“Are you my contemporary astral?” Her voice was neither gravelly nor hoarse, as would be expected from a woman of her age. Instead, it rang deeply like the sounding of an old bell. “Yes, about that, what exactly do you mean?” She clucked her tongue at me in disapproval. Wagging a shriveled finger, Mrs. Euphemia Archibald leaned in closer. “Come now, dearie. None of this pretense; I can smell the stardust on you.” I wrinkled my nose self-consciously, which caused her to laugh with a deep rumble that shook her thin, but padded frame. “Ah, you will do nicely,” she conceded with a grin. Finally accepting my hand, Mrs. Euphemia Archibald clamped down and pumped it a few times. I began to let out trickles of my essence to gauge this outlier of the human race. Flickers of faces echoed like silent films in my mind’s eye: an elderly man with a tulip, a yellow chateau burning by the sea, and the face of a young boy with shorn hair. There was loss, pain, and an unreasonably high dosage of humanity. In addition, Mrs. Euphemia Archibald was a densely compacted mass of immense depth and energy. Not human, not really, but not astral either—I would have known if another were in the vicinity, plus I could sense a base at the bottom of her aching being. She grinned at me with a mouth that seemed oddly stretched beyond normal proportion. As I drew the streams of energy back into myself, Mrs. Euphemia Archibald shook her head of black-and-grey curls like a terrier with a squirrel. “Nothing there for you to pick apart, astral! What fun, what fun we shall have together, my new friend.” I confess that I was almost utterly perplexed. I had heard of creatures like this in my time, but I had never encountered one in the flesh, so to speak.

come. “Chaska says that there is a path in the Six Grandfathers that leads to our ancestors,” he said. “Many say so,” the father responded. He dipped the point of one of his arrows in the stream and so that the water split as it passed by and made a V on the stream’s surface. “Do you believe so?” the son asked. “It is what I’ve been told, but there is no way of knowing until we pass on.” “Then how do we know whether or not the ravine does lead us to our ancestors?” Appanoose asked. He trudged out of the river and lay on the rocky bank, warming himself in the midday sun. “We don’t know for sure,” the father answered, “Some say the ancestors have communicated with them, in dreams or in solitude, and told them of a trail that is invisible to the living. The way is paved with the skulls of ones who have fallen before us.” The boy rolled onto his stomach and propped his head up on clenched fists. His obsidian eyes searched the Six Grandfathers for signs of a trail. He saw himself stumbling upon white round domes cobbling their way up to a clandestine cove that led to the nation where the battle-fallen feasted and danced and hunted. “We should look for the path, father,” the son said. “No, Appanoose. That is a quest with no purpose.” “But if we found it, we could go to the land of the spirits and we would never have to die,” retorted the son. “We could not go.” “Why not?” “Because there are still buffalo to hunt.”

“An Old One?” Mrs. Euphemia Archibald nodded gleefully and rubbed her spotted hands together. A definition: Old Ones are fragmented astrals that were caught in a planet’s pull during their creation—more powerful than human warlocks and sorceresses, but not omnipotent or able to slide between dimensions. They are able to create and manipulate much of the essence on their given planet, but they are unable to leave.

The father gathered his quiver and bow and his son lifted himself from the ground. They began the sojourn back to camp leaving the portal to heaven untouched and over their shoulders. The sun swung above them, a sputtering coyote caught at the end of a spear.

“I’ve been debating this for a while, astral, but I think it’s time I was straight with you. We Old Ones will be placated with this planet, but not your presence.” “I beg your pardon?” “It’s time. I speak for all the Old Ones. As the gods and goddesses, we will begin to mold this planet the way we see fit. Go play with the rest of your universe. Leave us be with this sliver of it.” I mulled this over for a moment. I knew what should be done. As I made my way down the stairs, I gestured for her to walk with me. Pulling a cane out of the air—such props, we both knew she didn’t require any assistance—Mrs. Euphemia Archibald wrapped one gnarled hand around my arm. She walked steadily beside me; the bottom of her cane hit the pavement with each step. I sensed the abyss of her age, though a mere droplet compared to my own, brimming with some unrequited sentiment. 70

When I Was Trash Alexis Lohse

merely to check up on what is needed or desired from week to week. That is how I stumbled across a most peculiar, most singularly unique request that I had never before encountered prior to this date. “Wanted: One, Contemporary Astral.” My word. I must confess that I almost spat out my espresso. Pinpointing the small square that held the shockingly specific ad, I traced my finger along the line until I found the contact information:

“Can I get another roll and a side of ranch, sweetheart?” The trucker looked at me with benign contempt as he made his request. I returned his look in kind though I managed to respond in a casual tone. “Yeah, let me ask the kitchen,” I said, knowing full well the supervisor would hassle me for even asking. “You let that fat bastard know we gonna charge him for the extra bread! He’s in here enough, he knows that plate only comes with two goddamn rolls!” A monkey dish filled to the brim with ranch arrived next to the contested rolls, and as I placed the additional items in front of the trucker I let him know about the extra charge, making a note of it on his ticket. “Goddamn! Ya’ll charge for every-damn-thing around here these days. It wasn’t like that before Ronnie took over ya know? His daddy was a trucker himself and knew how treat a customer when he ran this place! He didn’t hassle people over every goddamn slice of bread! He took care of his customers!” His eyes flashed as he leaned forward to jab the table with a finger as round as a sausage. I heard this same basic testimony at least once during every nine-hour shift. Some tired, pungent, and hungry trucker would let me know how great things used to be at Dorsetts 221 Truck Stop, though the tirade wasn’t always triggered by an additional charge for an additional item. Apparently, any number of amenities were “better before Ronnie” including the ability to smoke anywhere in the building (store, restaurant, bathrooms, even), the amount of hot water in the showers, and the ability to park a rig right next to the entrance, regardless of whether it blocked in other vehicles. These small comforts made life on the road easier for the drivers and they never stopped resenting the changes that turned Dorsett’s 221 from the trucker’s oasis into a business. I, however, could not have cared less. Things had been great for me, too, at one time but now here we both were, enduring a reality that fell woefully short of our desires. I took a job as a waitress only after my month-long job search came up empty. My previous position had been as store manager at a quirky, independent toy store located in one of Austin’s trendiest zip codes. My employment ended abruptly when, after five years there, I simply could not pretend to care anymore. They fired me and, honestly, I deserved it. My brother-in-law, who worked as a sort of accountant for the Dorsetts, assured me I could have a waitressing job whenever I needed it, an offer that only became plausible as rent time drew near. Considering the ignoble exit from my previous job, I didn’t want to add to the humiliation by getting my husband and myself evicted, so, defeated, I accepted the offer to become a truck-stop waitress. Before it closed in 2005, Dorsett’s was a landmark for truckers who drove the busy IH-35 corridor from Mexico through Texas. Situated right next to mile marker 221, about twenty miles south of Austin, the building looked like a squat stone castle surrounded by a sea of asphalt. Inside the building was a large restaurant, a convenience store, and limited locker room amenities like showers and changing rooms that the truckers could use, but for a fee. Under the original ownership of Tim Dorsett, the business had been a nice place for both families and truck drivers, but by the time I started working there in 2003, it was in decline. As evident by my employment at a truck stop, so was I. The restaurant was large and could accommodate a few hundred people on a busy Friday even32

Mrs. Euphemia Archibald Meeting times are between 9:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. The Pointe of Entry Please come promptly. I released the paper and folded it casually in my lap. Oh dear. I could have simply disregarded her statement as nothing more than a coincidental terminology choice, perhaps seeking participants for a séance or such, if only she had not referenced the meeting place that way. An explanation: as I mentioned earlier, we astrals come into this world by sliding in from one dimension through a sort of portal—a pointe of entry. To simply jump into this world would be to risk a repeat of the accidental blazing and tearing that happened once before. Opening a thin flap, much like an incorporeal paper-cut, between planes allows us to consolidate ourselves before entering your atmosphere. But I digress. I took a thoughtful sip of my espresso and hummed an aria as I pondered my options. What to do, what to do. Save for the proclaimed and identified deities, a low profile is typically kept by any astral visiting a world, so as not to cause a fuss. How could this Euphemia Archibald be privy to both our colloquial title and inter-dimensional travel? I checked my watch: 8:47 a.m. Splendid. I would be able to take a brisk walk over to meet her. I left my money on the table underneath the saucer. A gentleman tipped his hat to me as I crossed the street, and I nodded back in greeting. Whistling now, I cut across the park diagonally instead of my usual roundabout path. What a pleasant feeling I had bubbling in my stomach. I think it might have been genuine surprise mixed with anticipation. At 8:58 a.m., I was stationed directly underneath the old outpost that had been converted into a clock tower for relevancy’s sake. It also served as a stop on a historic train route. Quick tip: a pointe of entry is best selected to coincide with a natural crossroads or landmark that is unlikely to be fiddled with or dismantled throughout the ages. I smoothed down the front of my clothes and patted my hair into place, knowing all the while that my appearance was most seemly and tidy. The bell chimed at 9:00 a.m. and announced my mysterious solicitor. Except, I was alone. Humans can be notoriously tardy, so I settled myself on the steps for an indeterminate length of waiting. No sooner had I begun contemplating raising the temperature a few degrees when I heard a low sizzle and a pop next to me. I furrowed my eyebrows in suspicion, a gesture I learned from the Italians, and took a good look at the source. A small woman, hunched over from old age, had suddenly appeared at my side. She wore a long floral dress with tall white socks and black loafers. Tightening the shawl around her neck, she straightened up and cocked a weathered eye at me. Though her face was lined with soft folds and wrinkles, the woman’s gaze was level and unblinking; her eyes unclouded and peeled like hardboiled eggs. “Hmmm.” “Mrs. Euphemia Archibald, I presume?” I extended a hand towards her. 69

The king raised an arm and gestured towards the temple that was being constructed. Hundreds of workers were laboring in the impossibly hot sun to move stones for such a monument. “Strength.” I sighed, narrowed my eyes at the small horde, and nodded curtly. Immediately, the men began lifting weights ten times their normal capacity and moving swiftly with renewed speed and force. The king’s eyes lit with delight. But I quickly retracted the strength before they could get too giddy. Blame the Egyptians for my hesitation. As the three men prostrated themselves before me, I could already see the long years of war plans laid out like the stepping-stones in their near-sighted minds. How terribly dull it would be to rule here. “Well, thank you for your consideration.” When I next checked in, several centuries later, I discovered that they had selected another astral in my stead, calling him ‘Huitzilopochtli’ and sacrificing multitudes to appease him—atop my temple no less. No, that was quite enough of an adventure in god-like status among the humans for my liking. That’s not to say that I never had favorites. Just whom do you think was responsible for Elizabeth I and England’s victory over the superior Spanish Armada? Sir Francis Drake? Preposterous. Things only get sticky when we encounter calamities that originate from influences outside our own. Not necessarily accidents, like the dinosaur incident, but more like unscheduled power outages. The Plague, the Salem Witch Trials—witches, ha!, what a concept—and even World War I were all undesignated disturbances in the line of approved catastrophes we have stored for balance’s sake. These do reflect poorly on our duty, so we look into them as quietly as possible, but once you people get involved, the trail becomes too muddied. There are powers at work within the core of this world, which are maddeningly, unpredictable outliers, that compel my presence among you—to keep a metaphysical eye on things. After the Aztec experiment, I decided that I was best suited to merely observing your kind; thus, I became a type of self-appointed emissary between Earth and the beyond. It would be foolish to think that we don’t know everything that you are doing (I noticed your embarrassing coffee spill in the office last Tuesday) because we are aware and attuned to all forms of life in the universe, including your kind. However, the majority of us do not have the time to remember to check into them all, save for once every millennium, and by then we might have missed everything. Time does inch forward ever so slowly for you. Please don’t fall under the impression that we are spying on you like some sort of invasive force. We care not for influencing your personal doings or what courses your lives take over the years. We simply are. We fluctuate with the tides of the universe and merely strive to keep all things, both cosmic and infinitesimal, in a state of precarious balance. While being in this limited form can be an annoyance at times, I find that there are certain comforts of your world that are pleasant to the form, such as sunbathing and washing your hands, but I am far more curious about your motivations and feelings. Like love. Ah! What a wonderful development this planet has to offer. Personally, I find myself rather intrigued by your kind, more so than most of the others because you have the most eccentric imaginations and constructions of reality. And while your notions of the world are a tad off—I mean you people think the Earth grows warmer and colder due to garbage for Order’s sake—I do enjoy my line of work. Here we are! The beginning I promised at last. I found myself contented by my latest visit, sitting in a café on a crisp autumn morning, reading the paper. Aside from the Entertainment section (it is delightful to observe what your kind finds enthralling) I rather enjoy sneaking a peek in the Classifieds, 68

ing. The walls were thick, varnished logs and the ceiling tiles were a dingy gold color that is only achieved through decades of exposure to cigarette smoke. The two dining areas were separated by a floorto-ceiling fish tank, a watery centerpiece that featured mostly catfish and the occasional bass. The ambiance was completed by large paintings featuring scenes of the plains and cowboys with their horses. The place was so perfectly “trucker” that it had a campy appeal to the occasional visitor. Before I worked there, I had even brought a group of my friends from Austin to experience the alternate reality on display at Dorsett’s 221. In the ultimate karmic payback, the reality I had once ridiculed was now called “my life.” Unless a person has worked as a server, a lot of people don’t realize the minimum wage for a tipped worker is only $2.13 an hour. In some establishments this is not a problem and employees can make really good money every shift. Dorsett’s 221 was not that kind of establishment. Waitressing meant nine long hours on my feet, a steady stream of “honey’s”, “baby’s”, and “sweethearts”, and very little to show for it at the end of the day. In 2004, federal labor law required restaurants to guarantee servers make at least $5.15 an hour in combined tips and wages, but that was not something I knew then, and it was information not made readily available by management. The technical term for this practice is “wage theft” but most people know it by its more common name: “shit job.” I don’t know if wage theft was another of Ronnie’s innovations, but I would guess I probably averaged $3.50 an hour on most shifts and have no idea how I managed to pay my bills at that rate. After a month of working evenings, I moved to the morning shift. While the hours were a little harder, the tips were more reliable. Maybe it was because the drivers were not yet sore from hours inside a truck cab, or not yet jittery from untold amounts of amphetamines, but I rarely got flat-out stiffed on the morning shift. Breakfast must’ve been the high point of their day, as reflected by the tips the truckers left. The morning servers were an easier group, too. The evening crew included many veteran servers, the ones who had acquired the toughest attitudes through their years of serving clientele I had previously described as “colorful” though who I quickly came to know simply as “assholes.” My fellow servers were not bad people and I saw in them the same desperation I was struggling with every day. Many were single mothers who took whatever job kept food in their kids’ tummies. One was diabetic and explained to me how her Medicaid assistance only kicked in for trips to the emergency room but not to help pay for the insulin that prevented the diabetic shocks that sent her to the ER. Another was a quiet, young mother to a three year-old boy. Her father had been a trucker and she had grown up around truck stops. Rumor was, she turned tricks in the lot at night and her boy was a product of her little side job. One morning, I had been at work about an hour when I started to feel nauseated. Considering I worked in an environment that was a daily assault on the nose, I was surprised it took me that long before I felt like vomiting on the job. While the sensation came in waves, I never managed to actually ease my discomfort. Sprinting to the bathroom five separate times, I did my best to hover over the ancient, stained toilet but never managed anything more than some bile and a few choked sobs. I wasn’t exactly disappointed when I had to leave work, but it became a problem when the pattern repeated the next three days. I couldn’t really afford to miss one day, much less four and I set out to find out what was wrong with me. To my horror, my affliction was pregnancy. Clearly my karmic debt had still not been paid in full. In theory, I wanted to become a mother some day but at that point my maternal instincts were completely absent. My emotional capacity was spent on getting through my days at work and trying to repair my marriage after a separation only six months earlier, a break that had afforded me some perspective on the alcoholism my husband was battling. We’d reconciled on the stipulation that a concerted effort at recovery was required but my unexpected change in employment had thrown a wrench into the precise 33

scheduling of meetings and meditations, and the upcoming addition to our family made time an even scarcer commodity. In retrospect, all of this was clearly a problem, but in the moment and under incredible stress I managed to reason that somehow we would figure it out. First, though, I had to find a way to get back to work. When I explained my situation to my brother in law, he pulled some strings to get me moved from server to cashier. My new position would allow me to sit down part of the day and instead of a tipped wage I would make the standard minimum of $5.15. Thanks to my family connections and an unplanned pregnancy, I was really getting ahead at Dorsett’s 221. Now, instead of standing behind a perpetually greasy server’s counter, I would be perched on a stool behind a glass display case of gum, jerky, and hand-painted belt buckles. Now, instead of taking orders from large, ruddy-faced men in dirty t- shirts and painfully strained suspenders, I would be taking money from them. And now, instead of considering my truck-stop job as a low but ultimately temporary phase, I would begin to fear something had gone terribly and irreversibly wrong in my life. My changed status as an expectant mother afforded me mixed benefits. My co-workers, for the most part, treated me nicer and peppered me with questionable mothering advice. “Girl, make sure you stay away from spicy food because it’ll give your baby rashes when they’re born!” advised my associate as she stood next to me smoking her second cigarette. “You must be having a boy because you keep eating all that fried food!” exclaimed another, ignoring the inevitability of eating fried food when most of your time is spent working in a truck-stop restaurant. My birth plan was also a major point of discussion amongst my co-workers. Uninsured and ineligible for medical assistance, I’d decided on a homebirth with the same midwife who had delivered my older brother in 1979. To my co-workers, this was equivalent to saying I was going to squat in a field. “Don’t you love your child? Why would you do that?” asked one particularly blunt server. Exhausted by their opinions, I responded with equal candor: “Having a baby is a natural process that happens every-goddamn-day. I don’t go to the hospital to take a dump, and I don’t need to go to one to have a child either.” The subject was promptly changed. My co-workers may have been a little kinder but the customers were no less offensive. While certain drivers for particular companies could be depended on for manners and a decent tip (ironically, Walmart drivers), most were reliably foul and treated all waitresses with leering disrespect. Around my sixth month of pregnancy, a busy lunch shift was winding down and the remaining drivers were filing towards the register. Approaching the counter, one of the regulars let his eyes move up and down like an elevator over my weighty form. He leaned his scrawny, tobacco-scented body against the counter and without removing the toothpick from his mouth, he drawled, “You sure are a pretty gal. You having a good day, darlin’?” Perhaps because I was pregnant, he reasoned to himself that I had clearly “put out” at least once, so hitting on me was a safe bet. I looked down at my obviously pregnant belly, and then shot him an unimpressed look. “I am pregnant. What in the hell is wrong with you?” “What d’ya mean? I don’t see anything that’s a problem.” It was all I could do to walk away without swearing at him. Despite all of the walks and the pre-natal yoga I’d managed to squeeze into my schedule, the stress of my situation began to creep into my pregnancy. My weight gain had been low, but healthy, and my stats generally came back fine. Around the fifth month, though, my blood pressure began to climb. I told my midwife that it was the stress of family changes, the hardship of not having enough money, any 34

which can be an embarrassing and tricky business of not causing offense or otherwise invoking a battle, the first and last of which called all of this into creation. But that is an entirely separate tale. There have been instances where an astral will forget themselves and siphon away their exterior forms until they have all but confined themselves within the singular entity of worship for their humans. “Behold! I am the God of Thunder and Lighting! Hear my atmospheric cacophony and tremble in wonder!” I think not. The astrals who aligned themselves with the Greeks, for example, got far too carried away for the rest of us to ignore in good conscience. How could you truly believe that a house is made untouchable by statues and paintings? If “Apollo” didn’t smite Achilles at Troy for blundering around a house of special stones and pillars, then it should have been a red flag to all who followed in posterity. We can’t possibly be expected to continually float in your halls and churches like magical lightning bugs. In my own experience, I have little patience for managing a civilization. Well, perhaps that’s not entirely accurate. I suppose it would be more truthful to admit that I have very little confidence in my ability to satisfy your kind. You crave order and stability, and yet you seek intervention from beings whose very nature is chaos in balance. I was curious, once, long ago, as to the alluring nature of serving as a deity for your kind. Hence, I slid sideways into this plane and found myself in ancient Mexico. I offered myself to the Aztecs around the end of the fourteenth century. It did not go over exactly as planned. “Greetings, would you be in need of a deity by chance?” Two of the nobles accompanied the king as we lounged within his palace. They were skeptical at first, but as the position had not yet been filled, I was not immediately turned away. “What is your specialty?” I pondered this for a moment. Of course most astrals, even when not on this earthly plane, possess proficiency in one area of the universe or another. However, I knew that these men required something more concrete and natural to appease their people and maintain their ways of life. Many deities select something small but impressive, like weather or love or health, but I was not particularly practiced in any of those departments. “Is there anything special that you are looking for?” They debated amongst themselves for a few minutes, while I discreetly studied my fingernails. “Strength, with an emphasis in war.” “I see.” “Can you help us?” I tapped a finger on my chin. It was such a vague request, but it really meant the superior ability to kill other humans, which wasn’t something that I was entirely comfortable with at my base. However, I shrugged nonchalantly. “I can help you in many ways.” “Show us, great one.” I frowned, something I had learned from the French, and shook my head. “I think not. There’s no need for manslaughter on such a fine afternoon.” 67

Wanted: One, Contemporary Astral Kyra Lindholm Let me begin by stating that I did not choose to be a deity, nor was I elected to this fickle, infinity -warranted occupation. I suppose it would be suffice to summarize by simply explaining it thus: you were born mortal—all fleshy, wormy, and soft—with no box to check indicating your preference on the matter; likewise, my essence was called into being by powers out of my immediate control. I was divinely crafted from the spray of the solar seas and the chaotic clouds of the cosmos, while you were a combination of bodily fluids brought together by Stevie Nicks and a tequila shot. Please don’t think that I look down upon you for your beginnings, quite the contrary; I envy your innate ability to burst forth from the slimy sac and draw in new life and possibilities with every breath. You were elevated above the beasts and the birds for a greater purpose. Yet for some reason you still look to us. And that is the real mess. I have gotten rather ahead of myself, haven’t I? Such a precocious habit of mine, I’m afraid, but it can’t be helped sometimes. The beginning. Right. Ah, well to do so would be to divulge certain secrets of the galaxy that I would not be at liberty to discuss, so I believe I can safely skip ahead to the part where I shifted into Earth. Another clarification: the boundaries of the great beyond that you humans call “heaven” do not stand so righteously apart from Earth’s atmosphere, any more than your charmingly inaccurate depiction of the “underworld.” (Brimstone, indeed. Do you have any idea what that would do to skin over eons? Demons value their health just as much as the next immortal). You see, we all exist within a blend of planes and dimensions that occupy much of the same space. Regrettably, you are ill equipped to occupy outside your body’s capacity and gravity as I do. Myself and the other astrals—that is perhaps the best way that we can agree to address one another without anyone’s toes feeling stepped upon (a metaphorical expression of course)—have always been just within and just beyond your immediate reach. Since the beginning of your age, you have been calling out to us to save you, deliver you from the calamities of the natural world, and grant you multitudes of virtues and endowments. Those of us who are so inclined will answer, on occasion. It is also important to note that you only receive portions of ourselves when we step through the veil and into your realm; if we were to attempt foisting our infinite capacities into your space, we would most certainly unravel everything and perhaps even set the world ablaze (accidentally, of course). We regrettably discovered this little, uh, caveat sometime around sixty-five million years ago? Not to worry, your kind would never have outlasted the dinosaurs otherwise. Where was I? Astrals. Yes. It is common for humans to calls us gods and goddesses, but in actuality, it would be rather precarious for one, particular astral to maintain a set form or identity for such a lengthy period of time (not to mention horribly uncomfortable). That is why, you see, the assigned deities of one civilization or another inevitably crumble or lose their gumption when they have grown weary of the position. It is also rather dull after a few centuries to continue babysitting one’s allotted group of humans: “Protect us from the Persians! Wreak havoc on them for desecrating your temple!” It all seems relatively mundane work for an almighty god or goddess, but we have our own preoccupations as well. Sometimes we have to briefly step out of this dimension to take care of more pressing issues in the cosmos, and by the time we return, you have gone out and waged a Holy War! And then there’s the matter of hedging into another astral’s territory. Much like the parents of feisty toddlers, we have to corral you away from one another lest you get tangled up in some feud or another that falls to us to sort out— 66

number of things that were likely to give a pregnant lady some worries. The whole truth was that I had managed for years to cope with the stress of an alcoholic husband, but the addition of a pregnancy and a horrible job were becoming too much. My husband’s drinking was increasing in tandem with the size of my belly, but the only blame I could focus on was the job I despised. How could I think about quitting, though, when the bills were only ever narrowly paid and my husband was already working full-time? I may not have had any part in my husband’s addiction, but I could hardly deny playing a role in our impending parenthood, and I could not fathom stepping back from the responsibility of paying for the pregnancy. So I kept going to work despite the dread that threatened to overwhelm me with every shift. Around my seventh month, I had an exceptionally bad day at the truck stop. I clashed with one of the veteran waitresses over some side-work that didn’t get done and I let her know in no uncertain terms what I thought of her effort. She, on the other hand, just told Ronnie. Mr. Dorsett was Tim Dorsett’s oldest son and had wrested sole control of the business from his brothers following their father’s death. Ronnie was tall, broad, and had a perfectly round belly that made him appear about as far along as I was. His sons helped run the truck stop, but Ronnie was not known for his familial warmth. He was better known for regular sexual harassment or simple intimidation of workers. That afternoon I was privy to the latter. Following the news of my disagreement with my co-worker, Ronnie called me to the office and proceeded to yell at me about not getting along with the other waitress. Towering over me, his words were harsh, his voice was loud, and I had never before or since been addressed by a boss in such a manner. In front of his wife and my brother in law, I fought back tears and arguments as Ronnie Dorsett yelled at me. In my head all I heard was, “QUIT NOW, QUIT NOW, QUIT NOW,” but I knew I couldn’t afford it. I managed not to cry until I had left the office. A week or so later, this bad day showed up in my visit to the midwife. Following three repeated high blood pressure readings, my midwife sat next to me on the bed in her office and gave me a serious look. “We have to talk about your health, Alexis. Up until now, you have progressed just fine, but I’m getting concerned about your high blood pressure. We do not want preeclampsia, and if your blood pressure keeps climbing I am going to have to refer you to the hospital for your birth. I know you don’t have insurance, but it is more important that you and your baby stay healthy. What changes can be made to give you less stress?” I immediately broke into sobs, and choked, “I fucking hate my job! I hate it more than anything in the world!” Cocking her head to the side, my midwife stated plainly, “Well, then, it is time to quit.” Turning to my husband, she stated the obvious but difficult truth. “You hear that? She has to quit her job or she will end up in the hospital. You do what needs to be done, but she is not going back to work until after this baby is born.” With her simple statement, my midwife had upset the prevailing emotional hierarchy within my marriage. Surprised by the truncated deliberations, my husband simply blinked and responded, “Yeah, alright. We’ll do that, ma’am.” An immediate wave of satisfaction and relief moved over my large, aching body. The thought of 35

never stepping foot in that restaurant again was better than any gift I had ever received, and within five minutes of leaving the midwifeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s office, I phoned in my resignation. I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t even bother to tell anyone official, I just left a message with whoever answered the phone. I was free and I would not be seeking a reference from the people at Dorsett 221. Two months after quitting the truck stop, on a cold November morning, I gave birth, at home, to a healthy, eight-pound baby girl. Three months after that I landed an entry-level office job and I left my husband for the final time. It would be great to say this experience marked a turning point in my life, but it was more of a curve in the right direction. I can say with certainty, though, that this was the last time I passively accepted what life handed to me. And, in 2005, when I heard Dorsetts 221 went out of business, I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t waste a single second feeling sorry for them.

to mediate my carelessness, to tell what I wish I could have said but didn't have the time to tell. I know that I can't keep them forever pinned down like museum displays, that they have to twist free or else only skeletons will remain, stuck in snow like plastic buffalo. I don't write for love or for country or for the noble reasons other people will tell you. I do not write for anything but the fear that I will lose them. That I will lose you. I write because someone has to keep track of these stories, every one of them vital to the ecosystem of humanity, the only things I know people will remember. They need air. Someone has to feed them, keep them. So I do. I write to reconcile. I write to keep life alive.

Sometimes if you're lucky they glow. If caught correctly they make everyone laugh; if you miss them you're left with the chalky taste of their absence, the missed beat, the lost timing. Others wriggle along the baseboards of houses you're visiting, between cobblestones, the insides of picture frames. These always come as surprises; often you are unprepared, have nothing to catch them with,. I keep napkins in my purse for these specific occasions. Wrap them up, hold them in your fist if you have to, but don't let these go. Bright green, chirping, begging to be seen, these are the ones people come to see, the centerpieces of your displays. Tell them about getting locked in the Alamo! Tell them about philanthropy and acrophobia, about Mackinac Island, the theory of everything. Others have very specific timeframes, only visit when it's hot out. You can only hear them occasionally, their hums cutting in and out of sticky magnolia air. My mother pours a sugar mixture in a bowl on our porch to catch them. It's better for them to gorge themselves on sweet self-gluttony before they find a person to latch onto. They keel over, drunk on themselves, sleepy satisfaction like that kiss at Getzendaner Park, New Year's at the lakehouse, impromptu sunrise hikes. If they find a host they will suck your blood, replace it with the itchy feeling of tell it again tell it again tell it again when you know that you can't. That you have to hold onto them or it won't be the same, that it will never be the same. So you bottle them after they push their seams to bursting, let them live lazily, dripping honey. These are nearly immortal. Then there are those stories that feel like you wait forever to find them. Sometimes it takes decades to track these down. They plod along, armor glinting, slow to come and tough to crack. Their skeletal pieces, their delicate delivery-- why you don't believe in Hell. Coming home to Impressionistic brushstrokes blood-staining the shower. They are fragile, like snowglobes. They require a lot of trust. Patience. But more often than not they come by air, dropping in to tickle your eyelids, brush your cheeks. The homeless girl who lived in your room when you went to college. Peter Pan stopping a Disney World parade for you. The poems you got in the mail last week from the boy you thought you lost. These are harder to tell, but softer. Heavy stories have cousins who fly. I didn't know stories could hurt you until I was sixteen. I found a story in the arch of my foot, haphazardly stuck in moon-pale skin. Pain seeped through my ankle as I howled on the ground. My brother helped me get it out. Tweezers, digging around beneath my skin until he found it, embedded deep like a tooth. You missed your chance. That one stung me hard. I couldn't dance for a week. Tried catching that one, but there was nothing left of it, just the dead stinger threatening to cut me again. I think there may be some still remaining though, shards that cut the surface if I step on it wrong. I try to leave it alone. What people don't understand is that collecting is dangerous. Stories, they linger. I've heard about stories that bite you when you're sleeping. You suddenly wake up one morning with words on your swollen body, itchy whispers like you gave your sister that scar on her forehead, like that boy who had a girlfriend, like your crippling insecurity of never being enough. These are days when they surround you, when you can't bring yourself to catch them even though you know that you should. You lock yourself in the bathroom to sit on cold tile, to make the redness subside, make the bites disappear. Sometimes they leave you marked. And I need to find these. I have to write because there was nothing else left to collect. I was too careless for snowglobes, for shotglasses, for brittle china. My mouth was too brash to collect songs, no matter how soft they were. Being a story collector gives me a way to become careful, human. I keep these in glass bottles in my mind, reordering them and taking them out and shaking them, dissecting them until I can see every heartbeat, every word chosen meticulously then soaked overnight. Words give me a way 64

Milton Stargazes: The Tension Between Astronomy, Astrology, and Free Will in Paradise Lost Nick Barnette John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost serves as a record of his unorthodox religious views as well as a compendium of his vast scientific knowledge. The existence of free will is a concept that Milton defends throughout the text, most notably in God’s soliloquies. However, Milton’s Arminian leanings contrast what Milton learns from his exploration of astronomy. Heavenly bodies in Paradise Lost are more than gaseous orbs; they are influential entities that repress human freedom. The tension between free will and astronomy signifies a failure to “justify the ways of God to men” by presenting a character of God who affirms free will’s existence yet exerts control over his creation (1.26). Ultimately, Paradise Lost’s astrological allusions undermine God’s Arminian rhetoric and convey Milton’s own doubts concerning the limits of freedom on human will and knowledge. The character of God acknowledges free will’s existence, which contrasts Milton’s description of stars’ powers. In his first speech to the Son, Milton’s character of God establishes the idea that all his creation is free. He claims that Satan and his rebels were “free to fall,” and he goes on to assert, “freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell” (3.98, 101). From his introduction into the epic narrative, God decrees free will’s existence and reiterates the fact throughout his principal soliloquy. However, God’s insistence stems from political maneuvering rather than authentic conviction. He absolves himself from engendering the rebellion by claiming that the insurgents “ordained their fall,” not their maker, although some accuse God for the fall “as if predestination overruled their will” (3.128, 114-15). In returning to the same point of who is to blame and using free will in his defense, God devalues the concept of free will as a political tool. However, God is not merely a savvy politician, he is omniscient and therefore must know whether or not free will exists, yet, whether or not God is lying to the Son is unclear until one looks to the stars. Milton’s stars are more than distant celestial bodies but entities that exercise control over humanity. Milton often personifies the stars in ways that imbue the cosmos with authority. The star Hesperus has the “office” of ushering in twilight and twice Milton describes the stars as “officious” and as entities that “officiate” events, which are words that connote literally holding office as the footnotes suggest (9.49,104, 8.99,22). Milton casts stars as more than ambient lights but workers with predestined objectives. In Adam and Eve’s celebratory prayer, they call upon “the fixed stars, fixed in their orb that flies” to praise the almighty Creator (5.176). Using “fixed” to describe the stars and their courses sounds more Predestinarian than Arminian by acknowledging that heavenly bodies have a set path. Furthermore, these revolutionary objects with predestined paths hold godlike powers. When Adam recounts to Raphael his first encounter with Eve, he says that when he first led her to the “nuptial bower, […] all heaven, / And happy constellations on that hour / Shed their selectest influence” (8.510-13). The same diction reappears when Adam praises God for creating “precious beams / Of sacred influence” (9.106-107). Adam believes that the cosmos have the ability to influence earthly occurrences, a belief that God confirms as a reality when he manipulates constellations in order to coerce Satan into leaving Eden. God tampers with free will when he uses an astrological sign to keep Satan from attacking Gabri37

el. A fully armed Satan is about to confront Gabriel, who has threatened to fling Satan back to hell, when “the eternal” sets “his golden scales,” the constellation Libra, in the evening sky to send a portentous sign causing Satan to flee (4.996-97). Milton justifies God’s puppetry as a gracious act that prevents a “horrid fray” that could potentially destroy all of God’s new creation (4.996). However, God is also nullifying Satan’s free will, which God claims exists for Satan and the rebels in his first speech, by manipulating star patterns and in turn Satan’s actions. In this episode, God changes stars’ set courses, highlighting God’s ability to tamper with his creations. Therefore, stars, and in turn humans, are not safe from God’s machinations although they may appear to be free. Furthermore, the players within the episode validate the power of astrology, the interpretive and pseudoscientific branch of astronomy, in their reactions to the sign. Gabriel sees the sign as “proof” that Satan will lose the battle and Satan fulfills the prophetic omen by fleeing from Paradise (4.1010). Not only does Satan’s reaction affirm the power of astrology, it also bolsters the idea that stars are influential. When Gabriel taunts Satan by telling him to look heavenward to see his doom written in the stars, Milton writes, “the fiend looked up and knew [his fate]” (4.1013). Both Satan and Gabriel regard God’s celestial message as objective evidence that Satan should retreat, which verifies the power of astrology, and in extension God, not only over humans but also divine beings. Although God’s celestial maneuvering is a blatant attack on free will, scholar Russell M. Hillier interprets the scene as an instance where the libertarianism Milton supports is most evident. Hillier cites De Doctrina Christiana, a treatise Milton most likely authored, to show Milton’s belief in angelic freedom. The author of De Doctrina Christiana writes, “[The] divine plan was that the angel or human should be endowed with free will” (qtd. in Hillier 310). Hillier believes that a truly authoritarian God would have banished Satan from Eden by force. He claims that giving Satan the option to either fight or flee “[preserves] the consistency of the Arminian-libertarian position for Milton’s poem” (311). However, Hillier disregards the position that God puts Satan in. Without God’s machinations, Satan undoubtedly would have stayed to fight Gabriel. When the host of angels first threatens him, Satan is armed with weapons forged by hell-fire and holds his ground “like Tenerife or Atlas unremoved” (4.987). The idea that he should leave Eden does not enter Satan’s mind until he sees the Scales that God places in the sky. Hillier is right in saying that God gives Satan options, however, the tyrant forces Satan’s hand and therefore alters earthly events. The Golden Scales allusion also links God to classical gods who were highly active in shaping humanity, not always in a positive way. The footnotes inform the reader that the same image of the Scales appears in The Iliad with Zeus weighing the fates of Hector and Achilles and in The Aeneid when Jove weighs Aeneas’ and Turnus’ souls in an episode of psychostasis, or the weighing of souls (883). The classical imagery Milton employs in the passage relates God to the tyrannical and vengeful Roman and Greek deities who actively suppress human freedom. In turn, Milton also relates Satan to Hector, a classical hero praised for his bravery and patriotism, in a parallelism that should have shocked Milton’s contemporary Christians. Moreover, the image portrays God as an authoritative interventionist. Zeus, through the Scales, ordains Hector’s untimely death much like God forces Satan to retreat, which are both instances of divinity superseding events outside heavenly realms.

Entomology Bailey Betik Some people are collectors. My grandfather collected coins from the Civil War, lined them up in chronological order: faded tin, copper, nickels half-eaten by time. My dad, he collects baseball caps, but only wears the same three over and over. I've never understood that, why someone would have a collection of things they don't use. I have never met a person who collects trains, but I've heard about them as we all have: those dentists who search for the perfect engine, the penthouse CEOs who lord over dioramas of Pacific railways, playing God between voicemails. I was never very good at collecting things. Like antique spoons or almost-boyfriends, I could never quite commit to the satisfaction of repetition, of permanence. Stamps were boring. Autographs were just pieces of paper. My mother tried to get me to collect snowglobes when I was younger. Mount Rushmore, Empire State Building, a buffalo on the plains, Cinderella's Castle. The same scene beneath a blanket of glitter-snow. Stir it around, repeat. Never changing, just stuck in a plastic moment forever. But I was too careless, tumbled into my dresser when I was eleven and walking on my hands. Shards of glass buried themselves in the carpet, cut my hands when I tried to vacuum them out. The buffalo still stood, unperturbed. My mother took my snowglobes after that and put them out of my reach. They were sold in some garage sale past, pushed onto the next young girl who could only dream of life inside a bottle. I found my first story when I was four years old. My ballet class was for some reason doing a dance to "Take Me Out To The Ball Game," miming homeruns in tutus and leather mitts. Somehow through criteria beyond my comprehension I was selected to sing said song while my classmates danced, but the microphone screeched and I ran off-stage crying. The audience roared with laughter. No one ever warned me about feedback. Later I'd realize that my first story was nesting in the velvet curtains. I'd go back and coax it into my hands, carefully save it in a jar to use at my nana's tea parties, and everyone would laugh. After that I saw them everywhere-- the supermarket, the backyard trampoline, our church. I found some digging in the sand on the playground once and kids gathered around to see them for a quarter. Stories were nice, I learned. They helped you make friends. Some stories are easy to find. Your common household stories. They buzz around your dinner table, landing on unattended spaghetti, batted off by Aunt Gayle when she notices one perching on her fork. These are the easiest to capture. Pin them against a wall with a newspaper. Clap them in between your hands. It's okay if you think you've killed one; usually you've only stunned it, momentarily stopped its heart. I had to learn this the hard way, left a couple to die only to hear them whirring around again minutes later. You can resuscitate them, tip them into a jar--but they don't live very long so you have to be quick about bottling them. Charles watching Lonesome Dove instead of going to Christmas Mass, the search for your brother's stuffed hippo. Keeping these alive is a complicated process. Give them some air or they will suffocate; not too much, though, or they will escape.

While scholars complicate the symbol of the Scales, the symbol represents a powerful yet simple image of God’s judgment. In a piece for The Milton Quarterly, Clay Daniel, a critic and professor at Texas A & M, asserts that the Scales represent Gabriel. Daniel reasons that Gabriel must be identified with the Scales because Gabriel is God’s ambassador to earth and God is the one casting the Scales in the sky. The critic tries to elucidate his ambiguous claim by writing, “it would seem necessary for Gabriel to be

Some skid the surfaces of water, dart past you so quickly you have to snatch them immediately. Timing is everything. They land for a brief moment, lighting on coffee mugs and wineglasses just long enough for you to swing your net, and then you only have so long to tell them. Did I tell you the one about the rabbi? A photographer walks into a bar and tells them he'd like a shot. So my boyfriend didn't know the difference between nickels and dimes until sophomore year of college. These are clever, tricky.

deep opinion on all matters literary, I raised my hand and told her that it “sounded cheesy” and “didn’t leave an emotional impact”. She then told us she was “anonymous”. So that was awkward. It was the worst thing I had ever done, and I felt so bad that I wrote her an apology note- in cursive of course, to prove it was sincere. She seemed to accept my apology and went on to write my letter of recommendation for college. Mrs. Kontrye, 12th grade Government: She was tall and beautiful in a frightening sort of way. I found every part of the solid 6 feet and 1 inch of her frame mysterious and oddly magnetic even if she did scare me. I fell in like with the force of her, but I fell in love with how she used her force to fight for things she cared about. Mrs. Kontrye had a booming voice, which she used to both coach JV women’s basketball and exterminate ignorance in the minds of American Government students. She wasn’t young, but she wasn’t old- she had lived however many years it takes to learn how to be powerful. I would describe her as maternal, but not as a kindergarten teacher is maternal. More like a mother elephant; ready to literally stomp your ass if you cross her or anything she loves. My love for her was not as consistent as the others, but it was intense- when you love a hurricane, you have to love it enough to not get blown back onto your ass. It was the first time I ever loved anyone who scared me. Then I graduated, went to college, and started falling in love with girls my age in the hopes that they could actually love me back. I can’t argue that I am now the same kid I was in kindergarten, third grade, fifth grade, seventh grade, ninth grade, eleventh grade, or twelfth grade. I can zip all my own zippers, I don’t like Oregon Trail all that much, I’m not afraid of people taller than me, I don’t think I’ll ever write the next Great American Novel, I don’t think physical attraction is reason enough to like somebody, intellectual challenge is no longer novel, and scary girls aren’t all that scary any more. But love is a constant, and even if I’m not the person I was when I was 5 or 15, even if that love is illogical by whatever definition I’ve adopted for the time being, every love means something to meevery person is a part of me. Maybe I was just a lonely, nerdy kid falling in love with his teachers because it was safe and I was bored. Or maybe I was learning in more ways than I thought.

explicitly associated with his heavenly counterpart since Gabriel plays a comparatively brief role in the poem” (Daniel 95). Daniel’s flawed logic is that since Gabriel plays a minor role he must have some deeper quality and therefore must be symbolized by God’s almighty scales. The Scales do not deepen the audience’s understanding of a minor character but rather emphasize God’s wrathful judgment. Readers should grasp God’s judgment from the beginning of the epic when Satan observes his harsh and fallen state. Milton further expounds God’s anathema to Satan and penchant for draconian philosophy of justice when he says, in one of his first soliloquies, “Die he [Satan] or justice must” (3.210). Considering God’s vengeful nature, the Scales carry a much weightier meaning than Gabriel’s character development; they are symbols of God’s justice that he enacts through manipulation. Despite the image’s classical roots, some scholars have tried to interpret the scales as a JudeoChristian image that upholds Milton’s tentative Arminian beliefs. Critic Eugene R. Cunnar claims that the scales are less foreboding than the ones Zeus wields but draw from a motif in Renaissance art known as Christus in statera. In a number of Renaissance paintings and texts, Christ’s outstretched arms on the cross are associated with scales that do not symbolize justice but something much more benign. According to Cunnar, the scales in the psychostasis episode are “associated more with God’s mercy than with his justice” (17). The episode no longer involves a psychostasis, or weighing of souls, but rather Libra is a “warning” from God to the fallen angel that he should leave (Cunnar 20). What Cunnar fails to address is that Satan is not covered by the mercy won on the cross that Christus in statera represents. God has cast the rebel and his army into the “penal fire” where they are beyond redemption (1.48). The God behind the sign is not the merciful God of the New Testament but has more in common with the classical gods who use their powers more viciously. Sending Satan a warning would be out of character for a tyranical God who, in the realm of the poem, flippantly jokes about the fall of man, sarcastically observing, “Like one of us man is become” (11.84). Milton’s God contrasts the benevolent God Cunnar portrays through his interpretation of the end of Book IV. A classical interpretation of the scales also fits into the poem’s vast catalogue of Greek mythological imagery and allusions. One such allusion comes with a seemingly sacrilegious allusion. Milton calls upon Urania, muse of astronomy, to aid him in the opening passage of Book VII, which subverts orthodox Christianity by placing emphasis on a classical figure and scientific knowledge that God seeks to limit. Milton’s invocation of Urania contrasts his culturally acceptable invocation of the Holy Spirit that begins the epic (1.19-23). However, the poet makes it clear that “the meaning, not the name” is what he petitions in the opening of Book VII. Being the muse of astronomy, Milton is therefore invoking the scientific field itself, not its classical patron (7.5). Milton beseeches astronomy through Urania in order to gain “eternal wisdom” to help him compose (7.8). This invocation exemplifies Milton’s questionable relationship with astronomy, an area of study that the poet both praises and censures in Paradise Lost. Adam’s discussion with Raphael about the heavens introduces the idea that God’s will, which predominates humanity’s free will, is that humans do not explore certain intellectual fields. When Adam asks Raphael astronomical questions, God’s messenger deflects the questions and urges Adam to stay in a state of ignorance. Raphael tells Adam that the heavens are a “book […] / Wherein to read his wonderful works,” however, he goes on to say that humans should “admire” the cosmos rather than scan them for answers (8.67-68,75). Ironically, Raphael goes on to concede that “those bright luminaries” are helpful “to thee earth’s inhabitants” (8.98-99). The ambiguous messages that Raphael relates to Adam reflect Milton’s own unease over scientific knowledge. One clear point that Raphael makes and reiterates is the vastness of the heavens and God’s influence within them. After Raphael tells Adam of the importance to

be both aware of the stars but not too aware of the stars, the angel encourages Adam to let the skies “speak / The maker’s high magnificence” (8.99-100). Also, according to Raphael, the heavens are “ordained for uses to his Lord best known” and he goes on to conclude, “Heaven is for thee too high […] / be lowly wise” (8.171-72). Raphael’s command that Adam “be lowly wise” contradicts the compendiumlike nature of Paradise Lost and highlights Milton’s doubts concerning complete human freedom of knowledge. A central irony of Paradise Lost, Milton simultaneously educates his audience about and investigates astronomy while undermining its scientific value through Adam’s dialogue with Raphael thus bringing into question the limits on human knowledge as dictated by God. Milton, much like Adam, shows interest in astronomy throughout his canon and personal life; however, he is reticent to fully embrace the area of study because he sees it as a contradiction to his religious beliefs. Milton peppers his pamphlets with stellar metaphors and mention of the heavens, showing “his deep familiarity and erudition concerning astrology (Hillier 306). In The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Milton compares the Book of Ephesians to a “loadstar,” thus demonstrating his knowledge of astronomy, particularly navigational astronomy (Goldberg 220). The poet also dabbled in the less accredited field of astrology and gained a depth of knowledge that he showcases in the psychostasis scene. John Gadbury, a renowned Renaissance astrologer, wrote a personal “natal horoscope” that sat in Milton’s extensive library along with an “annotated volume” of Aratus’s astrological poem Phaenomena (Hillier 306, 316). Milton’s personal interest and investigation of astronomy and astrology inform not only Paradise Lost but also many of his works. Despite his knowledge concerning the heavens, Milton evades pressing cosmological debates of his time by taking both sides. In a passage describing the movement of the earth, Milton writes, “Some say he bid his angels turn askance / The poles of earth twice ten degrees and more / From the sun’s axle” (10.668-670). These lines describe a heliocentric model of the universe where the angel of the earth’s axis determines season. Milton goes on to counter himself, writing, “[…] some say the sun / Was bid turn reins from the equinoctial road” (10.670-671). The second passage offers a geocentric perspective of the universe where the sun’s movement brings about a change in season. Not taking a definitive stance on a controversial issue in Renaissance religion and astronomy clears Milton of becoming too entangled in the argument. Furthermore, Milton’s diction and syntax remove focus from the poet’s own studies in the field. Instead of aligning himself with helio- or geocentrism, Milton states that “some say,” not the poet himself, different things about the earth’s movement. He also emphasizes the divine control over planets. In both situations, the celestial movement is God’s bidding (10.668, 670). Although Milton is a well-read student of astronomy, he will not relinquish his religious convictions in order to approach the topic scientifically. Milton’s relationship with astronomy and astrology mirrors both that of Raphael and Adam’s relationship to knowledge. Paradoxically, Milton is both an educator, as the poet of a compendium of scientific knowledge, and student, as evidenced by his personal library. The topic of fixed orbits and repetitious seasons contradicts Milton’s Arminian beliefs; therefore he explores the heavens but turns a blind to the deeper questions of the cosmos.

ups, but it only made our time together more special. Mrs. Kitchell had enormous breasts, made even bigger by their relative size on her small frame. I was enamored with them, but not in a sexual way- I didn’t even know why I felt the need to stare at them when I zoned out of the lecture I already understood. They just had their own gravity about them, and that was fine by me. Sometimes in her class, I would unexplainably get what I now know as “erections”. When that happened, I always asked to go to the bathroom to sit on the toilet until the phenomenon subsided. I hated being away from her, but “erections” were kind of uncomfortable. Mrs. Wilkes, 7th grade English: “Talk doesn’t cook rice” read an ancient Chinese proverb featured prominently above the whiteboard in Mrs. Wilkes’ room. I saw that on the first day of school, and it really caught my eye because a) Friendswood, Texas isn’t known for its appreciation of cultures other than Conservative Christian ‘Mericans, and b) Mrs. Wilkes was pretty plump and I thought it was kind of charming that she embraced food in such a deep way. She had a short, neat haircut, thick framed glasses, and slid her feet as she walked. Not much in the way of conventional attraction, but she was in love with writingeven mine- and that made me fall in love with her. By the 7 th grade I had already flown threw Steinbeck’s more popular works, so she introduced me to the lesser known “Cannery Row” and “Wayward Bus”, giving me her own copies which smelled like soup but felt like love notes. She always gave me As on my papers, which helped me build the rare confidence needed to explore forms considered ambitious, for a 7 th grader at least. She once told me I could write the next Great American Novel one day, which ironically proved that (her) words really could cook (my) rice. Mrs. Huff, 9th grade Geometry: I’m not going to lie, Mrs. Huff was hot. She was in her late thirties, but she looked not a day over her early thirties. Her skin didn’t show any aging because she was allergic to the sun, which is a thing apparently. When her subject matter became a bore, as it often did, I would zone out from my chair at the back of the class and fantasize about the two of us together. I was a late bloomer without armpit hair or any real knowledge of anything sexual, so the fantasies were pretty classy. Yes I pictured her naked, but my understanding of the nude female form at the time was limited to paintings and two scenes in the film “Old School”, so my imagination focused more on her glowingly pale face and the romantic emotions we would share if I stayed after class for extra help. Holding hands, hugs, kissing- you know, really edgy stuff. In real life, nothing special happened. I asked her questions as often as I could even though geometry was easy, just hoping she’d write on my paper in her favorite purple felt pen and give me enough time to see her beauty up close. Mrs. Huff was absolutely terrified of frogs, so I always hoped one would hop into her classroom and I could save the day and make her love me too. A frog eventually broke in, but the tall basketball star with a ridiculous beard and a real girlfriend grabbed it before I could even get out of my chair.

A monumental undertaking, Milton’s Paradise Lost dually serves as a religious and scientific text that is ultimately flawed in its discourse concerning free will and the freedom of knowledge. In his attempt to elucidate God’s actions for a human audience, Milton loses credibility in his discussions of astronomy that ultimately portray God as a puppeteer who has predestined plans for his creation. Furthermore, Raphael’s discussion with Adam about the heavens demonstrates God’s plan to limit human knowledge, specifically astronomical knowledge. While Milton’s poetry often “[soars] / Above the Aonian mount,” his arguments fall short of the stars (1.14-15).

Mrs. Nye, 11th grade English: Mrs. Nye reminded me of a watered-down Conservative version of Dolly Parton if Dolly Parton loved Jane Austen and wore long denim skirts. She had a thick country accent and big boobs like Dolly, and unlike those of Mrs. Kitchell, I was fully ready to appreciate them. I wouldn’t say my love for her was sexual, but for a 16 year old boy, they were inexorably a factor. Mrs. Nye liked my writing, but she tore it down more than she praised it. I loved that about her. I could bullshit just about anyone up to that point in my life, but not Mrs. Nye, no way. Often I stayed after class to discuss books with her, and though we rarely agreed, I was on fire like never before. During those conversations, she looked me in the eyes, which I thought was incredibly kind because I had acne and was really selfconscious about it. I stole glances at her chest when she looked away- I felt bad about that, but love makes you do crazy things. She once used an “anonymous” first-person essay about the death of a girl’s dad as an example for the class. When it was over, she asked for critique. Because she knew me as the one with a

Works Cited

First Love(s) Cody Westphal I don’t mean to sound fickle or slutty or desperate, but I’ve loved a lot of teachers. Love at any age other than the one you fell in love at may sound silly, but I know it was real, every time. I know I was in love because my heart dropped when a substitute walked in instead of Her- capital H her, the capital S she to lowercase m me- and because I just asked my mom to confirm I’m not making this up. Sure, it wasn’t “Hollywood hot pink love”, nor was it Nicholas Sparks “omg I bet Scarlett Johansson will play her in the movie” love. It was just love, as defined and felt by the heart of a kid trudging his way through the 12 grades in Friendswood Independent School District.

Cunnar, Eugene R. “God’s ‘Golden Scales’: Mercy and Justice in Paradise Lost.” English Language Notes 21.4 (1984): 13-21. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 29 Nov 2014. Daniel, Clay. “Astraea, the Golden Scales, and the Scorpion: Milton’s Heavenly Reflection of the Scene in Eden.” Milton Quarterly 20.1 (1986): 92-98. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 29 Nov 2014. Goldberg, Jonathon and Stephen Orgel, eds. John Milton: The Major Works including Paradise Lost. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Print. Hillier, Russell M. “‘Betwixt Astrea and the Scorpion Signe’: The Conjunction of Astrology and the Apocalyptic in Milton’s Psychostasis.” The Cambridge Quarterly 15.1 (2008): 305-323. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 29 Nov 2014.

To give you a better understanding of the kid we are talking about here, that kid was me, and that me really loved school. It was everything to me; the other boys told me they’d get football or basketball or baseball scholarships for college, and I told them I was going to get one for academics- enjoy your debt and Division 3 memories, Will. The heroic arc of my public school career was set almost entirely in the classroom, so it isn’t surprising that my heroines dressed in business casual and graded my papers. I shall here chronicle the uniquely perfect women upon whom my heart dwelled and evolved in love. Mrs. Huckabee, kindergarten: I had a nasty habit of getting my zipper stuck, but Mrs. Huckabee, in her infinite magic and wisdom, always got it free and where it needed to be. She was the age of my mom which I thought was cool, even though she wasn’t as pretty. It must have been her mom powers because I always felt so safe. We had a girl in our class, Anna, with downs syndrome, and Mrs. Huckabee always treated her with endless patience and love- even when Anna threw tantrums. Mrs. Huckabee had a very shiny silver charm-bracelet, and as she’d lean over me from behind to write on my paper or guide me through a question, the charms would dance together and make the most beautiful jingle I’ll ever hear. Honestly I rarely needed help; I’d just make up questions so she’d lean over me and jingle in my ear. Mrs. Campbell, third grade: Every morning I’d walk through the door decorated to look like it was on a barn, and into “Campbell’s Corral”, where my love waited for me in her cowboy boots. She was my mom’s age, but my mom never wore cowboy boots. Like me, she was small and had dirty blonde hair. Unlike me, she was fearless. Robert Roy, legendary for his temper, once got so mad about his lunch that he threw one of our tiny chairs at tiny Mrs. Campbell. She didn’t even blink. And when she read us the ending of “Where the Red Fern Grows”, she didn’t even cry. That ending hit me hard – spoiler alert: dead dogs – and when she saw me sobbing even after we all returned to our desks, she gave me a tissue and shut up the giggling kids around me by telling them she cried the first time she read it too. Sometimes she ran out of work to give me because I was something of an academic all-star, and she’d let me play Oregon Trail on the computer. I couldn’t help but wish we were on that trail together. Mrs. Kitchell, fifth grade, English: I might have had a thing for small women my mom’s age. Not that I knew Mrs. Kitchell was small; everything in the world was bigger than me. But she was closer than all my other teachers to my well-below-average size, and I think our love grew out of that. Her smile was magnificent, and when she’d laugh she’d throw her head back and slap her knee. Her voice was squeaky, probably because she only wore turtle necks that constricted her vocal chords. She was the first love with whom I could not spend the whole day because we apparently had to start switching classes like grown60

Sestina for a Dog

She held on for a few years, although she never forgave my parents for their actions. But we all have a breaking point.

Nick Barnette

Don’t we. And so, one day, Sophie packed up her things and just walked out. And we never saw her again.

I killed the copperhead that blew up my dog’s face into a venom-balloon. The shotgun shell split the snake in two; the head took off like a prayer to heaven. Somewhere between the roses and the snap dragons, a tail is writhing, calling out to the teeth that used to feed it, I am lost, don’t fly

I was very young then, and still generally heartless, so I was not moved deeply by our family’s loss. I’m not sure if the rest of the family was really moved either, though. I don’t remember seeing any MISSING CAT posters. Maybe our printer was broken. Maybe it was raining. Maybe mom didn’t want a fickle furry friend whose claws were as sharp as her purr was sweet. Or maybe it just wasn’t worth the bother. In any case, there was no reward for finding Sophie. She’s probably dead now. But. I am rising above my family’s neglect and am offering a reward. And I just remembered a Starbucks gift card I got for Christmas, so we’re back up to $200.

too far. I have a recurring dream in which I fly to the tip of Africa in a balloon that is my dog’s fevered cheeks. The continent below has marble teeth and beaches where families don’t pick up shells to phone the ocean that is at their feet. A gunshot snaps me out of sleep. I see the bloodied roses. I pray, Forgive me, but the snake struck first, a murderer’s prayer, I promise to bury what is left of it before the flies descend. The half-snake jumps among the roses, snapping twigs that are ideal for playing fetch with a dog. Forgive me, but it was only an animal. The eggshell road to heaven is as narrow as a comb’s tooth. A killer’s plea should be equal parts heart and teeth, a vicious act of brokenness, unlike a car’s prey that curls up in false-death before full-death. I stop at the Shell Station on the way home from the vet. Gasoline flies from the pump and blankets the iron-stench of dog’s blood that splatters my t-shirt and the metal cog snaps 42

boy with a great capacity for believing in miracles and who liked his toast with a layer of Marmite thin enough that we could see the toast grains through it. Josh was sensitive and perceptive, creative and technical. I think he would do well in a career of interior design. Josh and I looked at the stars sometimes. New Zealand’s night sky is perhaps the world’s original soul, unadulterated and pure and exquisite. It is the only thing that has ever made me feel small and important at the same time. “You know what?” I whispered one time, caught up in the beautiful moment of humbling tranquility. “What?” he answered, as he always did, with as little pretense as the smattering of freckles across his pale face. “They say there are more stars in the sky than grains of sand on the beach.” I felt proud about this moment, this cliché. I had managed to be Educational and Fun at the same time, and these are the two main things you have to be as a successful nanny. I was expecting shock and awe. But instead, Josh said: “Yes, and did you know that God loves you more times than there are stars in the sky?” Oh. I suddenly felt very inadequate as a human being. There are really only four stars in the Southern Hemisphere that matter. They’re situated in the shape of a diamond, but we’re supposed to call them the Southern Cross because connecting them with lines would form the cross. But they look like a diamond. The Southern Cross is a constellation sailors used to seek out as a guide when steering their ships into harbor in New Zealand. But there are false Southern Crosses. There are stars that look like the Southern Cross but are not. These false Southern Crosses used to cause shipwrecks and untimely death for many sailors. It’s funny, I mean not funny, but, you know, funny how much death is associated with Christianity all because of the cross.

once the tank is full. The driver’s seat is a snapped hammock, ropes lolling, body falling, clenched teeth anticipating the concrete. When I left him at the vet, the dog crumpled onto the table, still beautiful the way a praying mantis is beautiful, cinched arms with glass eyes. Flies collided white bulbs above and the dog on the table was a shell with a poisoned yolk. I pray. I shout. I blow my conch shell. I hope He notices me on these knees that creak and snap. I hope He won’t notice that I’ve left the tail for the flies. I promise to wash my death-brushed hands, scrub my lying teeth. When hate envenoms my body, I will resort to prayer. I smile because, among the roses, a tail still dances doggedly. I have a recurring dream in which I fly my dog’s swollen head to Africa. We gather shells and pray to the snapping tide that we will never have blunt teeth.

Personally, I’d rather magnify diamonds with a telescope than death. ### Josh was not the only child who educated me. Four-year-old Chloe once told me that, when you cry, God “collects your tears in a jar.” God collects your sorrow in a jar and keeps it safe. So it’s okay to cry. I used to fill God’s jars sometimes. On the nights I could hear doors slamming as I sat there in my room asking the pink wall if they would get a divorce this time. We always seemed to have spaghetti on those nights, and sometimes daddy just left it sitting there at the kitchen table after hurtling away in his black Lexus. Sometimes the spaghetti stayed there until the next day or longer, and sometimes I wanted to cry seeing it waiting there for something that just wasn’t going to happen. But then sometimes I didn’t cry. Didn’t want to and just didn’t. ### When I was very small, we had a black and white cat. Her name was Sophie, which means wise, which she wasn’t. At one time, she was a nice cat -- so the story goes. But then my parents had children - which was incredibly callous and irresponsible of them -- and Sophie was soon overwhelmed by feelings of inadequacy and envy. 58

The Hilton Fort Worth: Hotel and Historic Landmark

give cats this modest breakthrough. I don’t think God wants us to hold grudges.

Haley Imlach As I walked through the revolving doors of the Hilton Fort Worth hotel I stopped to ask myself “is this it?” At my first glance around the hotel I saw polished floors, elegant chandeliers, and a big modern-looking waterfall. To my left there was a lounge area next to the Starbucks cafe and to my right was the concierge, elevators, and the check-in desk. For a Sunday afternoon the hotel was certainly filled with a fair amount of guests and employees with smiling faces. I had been told that the Hilton Fort Worth was the hotel where the 35th president of the United States had spent his last night before his assassination in 1963 and I was interested in seeing what it looked like today. While waiting to be helped by the concierge I took a small tour of the first two floors. After a short look around I noticed framed pictures and newspaper articles of John F. Kennedy on the second floor and it was in that moment that I wanted to learn more about this historic hotel. On November 21, 1963 JFK and his wife Jacqueline spent the night in room 850 in the hotel that was then called the Hotel Texas (Moiser). The following morning he ate breakfast in the hotel’s Crystal Ballroom and made his final address to 2,000 visitors outside before he was assassinated in Dallas shortly after noon (“Hotel Details”). Since then, the Hotel Texas has been bought out by a few new management companies and undergone several renovations. Unfortunately, President Kennedy’s room was not preserved throughout the renovations but the Crystal Ballroom still exists today and continues to function as an event space. Although the hotel has changed numerous times since 1963, it continues to be recognized as the place where America’s 35th president spent the last night of his life. The Hotel Texas was even named by The National Register of Historic Places as a historical landmark in 1979 (“Spreadsheet of NRHP List”). The fact that the hotel has become a historic landmark reminds us all just how important and special it has become over time. Once I actually saw the exterior of the building, it was pretty clear to me that the Hilton Fort Worth looks extremely similar to the way it did over 50 years ago. The outside of the building has the same brown brick as the Hotel Texas did in 1963. In fact, besides the name on the outside of the hotel, the exterior has not changed whatsoever throughout the years. I expected a modern and completely different hotel, but the truth of the matter is that it has been extremely well maintained throughout the years. Since 1963 only a few minor changes were made inside the hotel. The lobby and rooms look quite different from how they did when JFK stayed there because they needed to keep the hotel looking modern and up to date. Although his room no longer exists, there is a JFK suite that guests can stay in for $2,500 a night, which is supposedly set up almost identical to room 850 (Newman). The hotel knew that many people would want to stay in his room, so they created a replica suite to satisfy the guests’ wants. Personally, I think the creation of the JFK suite was a great addition to the hotel because it gives tourists and businesspeople the opportunity to experience something different from their average hotel visit. I also found out that many people come to the hotel looking for a museum, but all that they have to remember him is the suite, the Crystal Ballroom, and photo collages scattered around the building. Although you cannot stay in John F. Kennedy’s exact room, the Hilton Fort Worth certainly doesn’t let you forget what a special place you’re in. Talking to one of the concierge employees, Jacki Loyal, made me realize how important the hotel is to our country’s history. With her smooth southern accent she told us that as a freshman in high school she had spent the night at the hotel. It wasn’t until she started working there eleven years ago that she truly understood why The Hilton Fort Worth is such a special place. With a warm smile on her face 44

### I know two kinds of churches. My Kind and Not My Kind. My kind is the Lutheran kind, the kind of Lutheran kind with drippy candle traditionalism, the kind with kind ladies in camel-colored cashmere sweaters, the kind with an excruciatingly heavy wooden offering plate. Many of my friends go to Not My Kind. The kind where the church is filled with short-blade ceiling fans, crackling Spearmint gum packages, and a congregation full of robust middle-aged trailer trash in FEAR GOD t-shirts as well as teen parents with infants. Unlike the members of my home church, these members do not subsist solely on the will and whim of breathing machines, walkers, and canasta. The ratio is probably about 3.4 babies to every adult. (The reason for this is clear when you consider the simple fact that, when God told Adam and Eve that they shalt not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, He also mentioned that they shalt not use of the condoms. In both cases, you see, they shalt surely die.) In both types of churches, devout followers abound. When I go to church, I rather feel like I’m at a zoo, watching strange creatures behave in strange ways. I’m not proud of it, but my fascination with churchgoers is akin to that of a scientist studying a lesser-developed species, a species that hasn’t yet figured out something vital. And yet, if the members of this species really believe with absolute certainty that there is someone out there loving us all the time no matter what, then I envy them. I also envy designer dogs because they get to spend their days eating organic sausage rolls and riding in mesh-encased strollers. And I envy lattes with foam because everyone loves them emphatically, unconditionally. And I envy calculators because nothing eludes them. And I envy the Dalai Lama. I haven’t always been disillusioned like this. Back when all I did in church was color and eat snacks from mom’s purse, it was fine. All I had to know was that there was an Almighty Father out there who loved me and didn’t yell half so much as the one at home. It was good. But it isn’t good anymore. And there aren’t any snacks either. My world is obscene now and contradictory and sensual and strange. I’m part of the multi-dimensional grown-up world now where no one knows anything, and the people who pretend they do know things actually know the least of all. ### When you’re little, very little, you know everything. You don’t know what you know because it is necessarily true, but rather you know it because you believe it. Believing in something makes it more true and more real than reality itself would deem it. I recently spent two months working as a nanny in New Zealand. The family I worked for was religious and diligent. The children already knew things - everything. The second-to-youngest was Josh, a 57

Missing Lord Hayley Zablotsky If Santa doesn’t exist, and there is no such thing as the Tooth Fairy, and toys really don’t talk when you leave the room, and your parents don’t love each other anymore, and there’s no real cherry at all in Cherry ChapStick, how are you supposed to believe in God? That’s what I want to know. But I don’t ask. I don’t ask because it does me no credit among believers. So I say what they want to hear. If someone asks me where I see God, I immediately, automatically state, “In random acts of kindness, of course.” It works every time. But I’m actually doing a lot more not seeing than seeing. Maybe I need to put up signs on lampposts like people do for lost cats. MISSING LORD, my sign would read. ANY INFORMATION WOULD BE GREATLY APPRECIATED. REWARD $200. I’d print off a picture of Morgan Freeman and paste it on the sign, add my cell number, and go around the neighborhood with a roll of tape, mentally calculating how many months I would have to go without Starbucks in order to pay the reward. Maybe I should make it $150. How much is the Lord worth? Somebody told me recently that the value of a human body comes in at $9, so $150 really seems quite generous. I can only tell certain crowds that I’ve done the unthinkable, I’ve done something incredibly irresponsible, and lost the Lord. It’s usually okay to talk about it around artists, hipsters, college students, atheists, and, in general, the people you’re allowed to say the word “fuck” around without getting Looks. But everyone else? I keep quiet. ### As with all things, there is a beginning. My rocky relationship with religion sprouted way back when I was baptized at age three. I have two great-uncles -- both reverends -- and it was deemed fitting that one of them baptize me. The job fell to Uncle Kerry, the reverend who inserts the word “goddamn” in between almost everything. Spaghetti and goddamn meatballs. Shut your goddamn mouth. Jesus, Mary, and goddamn Joseph. Uncle Kerry got some holy water on my goddamn white dress. Ever since, I’ve held a grudge. It isn’t Christian to hold grudges. But that’s what I do. I hold grudges. Grudges are the backdoors of relationships. They’re wonderful because they get you out of the long and delicate process of forming a meaningful relationship. Take the cat, for instance. Poor bastard hasn’t had a meaningful relationship in his life. In addition to the fact that cats are intrinsically emotionally unavailable, cats are also the species that invented the grudge. Humans aren’t smart enough to have come up with that. Besides, we invented democracy, calculators, and spaghetti and goddamn meatballs. We can at least 56

Jacki said, “It’s so amazing to me how many people come into this hotel and want to see this because this was the last hotel that JFK was in. I want to share my experience working here with them because they’re so excited about being at this hotel.” Jacki also shared one of her favorite memories with us. She said one of the most exciting things that she’s experienced at the Hilton Fort Worth was last year when they held a breakfast for guests in the Crystal Ballroom on the 50th anniversary of JFK’s death. Based on the way that Jacki’s wrinkled face turned into a smile when telling us about her experiences working at the hotel showed us just how proud she is to be working in such a legendary and important place. However, I realized that Jacki wasn’t the only worker who gave off a refreshing positivity. I noticed that every employee, including the maids, had a genuine smile on their face and gave off an energy that made me feel like they really appreciated their job not only at the Hilton Fort Worth, but also at the historic landmark of where JFK once stayed. The hotel has upheld a great reputation over the years, however it wasn’t always that way. Directly following JFK’s assassination, the Dallas/Fort Worth area was looked down upon for the tragic loss of such a great American president and leader. “Dallas city leaders spent years hoping desperately to shed the ‘City of Hate’ title after the assassination of John F. Kennedy” (Mosier). I asked Jacki if the removal his room 850 was beneficial to the image of the hotel and she responded, “At that time everyone thought bad of Dallas and Fort Worth because they thought it was their fault that they brought him to this city. They didn’t want to publicize his stay at the hotel so they didn’t really talk about it until they became a Hilton.” The Hotel Texas later turned into a Sheraton, then a Hyatt, a Radisson, and finally became The Hilton Fort Worth in 2006. The Hilton Fort Worth was the first hotel to embrace the fact that such an influential president made his last memories there. The fact that the hotel didn’t want to bring attention to JFK’s stay until they became the Hilton shows that hotel’s previous owners wanted to not only protect their reputations, but they also wanted to respect the loss of JFK silently because it was something they took personally, especially during the few years directly after his death. After further conversation with Jacki, I found out that a lot of different people stay at the Hilton Fort Worth, but most of the guests specifically stay there because they know of it’s historical significance. When I heard that answer come out of her mouth I was shocked. She even told me that one man had “visit the Hilton Fort Worth” written on his bucket list. As for the guests that really don’t know the importance of the hotel, Jacki told me that they are always in for a pleasant surprise. “We want to tell the guests where they’re staying and when they find out they’re surprised and curious and want to hear a little bit of history about him.” I expected that most guests would have no idea of the Hilton’s historical value, but I was proven wrong with Jacki’s reply. Because the hotel has changed names and undergone a lot of renovation since 1963, I figured that nowadays no one would know that the Hilton Fort Worth was once known as the Hotel Texas. I wondered if there was a trend in the types of guests who stay at the Hilton Fort Worth but Jacki said that it is a convention hotel and all sorts of guests stay there. Everyone from men in business suits to children doing book reports on JFK take interest in the historical value that the hotel holds. Right outside the front entrance is a tribute to John F. Kennedy, which was recently constructed in 2012, that brings awareness to hotel guests regardless of whether or not they knew about where he spent his last night before he died in 1963. Not only can guests enjoy a little history lesson during their stay, but the surrounding downtown area also offers plenty of things to see and do. The hotel is located in Sundance Square, which has recently gone through renovations. Sundance Square has many restaurants, shops, and entertainment opportunities and there is a permanent stage in the square for live entertainment. There are also 216 jetted fountains in the middle of the square where you can watch children run around and have the time of their lives (Sundance Square). Not only is the hotel 45

historically significant, but the location also makes it easy for guests to get out and explore all that the city of Fort Worth has to offer. After I left the hotel I reflected on my discoveries and how my expectation didn’t match up with reality. I went in thinking that the Hilton Fort Worth would be a totally different hotel than what it was 50 years ago and that nobody would know that President John F. Kennedy stayed there before his death. I felt proud to be in a place that will always be remembered as something very special to our country’s history. The Hilton Fort Worth brings a lot to the city’s community. It provides a very unique piece of history that no other town or city in the country has. People want to learn smaller unknown parts of history that aren’t taught in classes because they want to be able to say that they discovered something unique. The interest that the Hilton Fort Worth has to people, not only in the community of Fort Worth, proves that our country’s history means a lot to them and that they are fascinated with a part of history that isn’t extremely well-known. It was so great to speak with someone like Jacki who is so passionate about her work and sharing the history of the Hilton Fort Worth. Talking with her really put the hotel’s significance into perspective because even after working there eleven years, she is still so fascinated by the fact that President John F. Kennedy stayed there 50 years ago. It’s a place that will always be remembered because of its connection to one of the most influential presidents in America. Although it has been restored, the memories made inside of those four walls will forever be imprinted in the hotel’s history and in the Fort Worth community. Works Cited “Hotel Details.” Hilton Hotels & Resorts. Hilton Worldwide, n.d. Web. 21 Oct. 2014.

JAMIE Let’s not do that right now. It won’t help. Let’s just sit tight, I’m sure we’ll find out something soon. The DOCTOR appears in the doorway of the waiting room. DOCTOR Who’s here for Sam Thompson? Lauren, DJ, and Jamie stand and follow him into the hall. INT. HOSPITAL HALLWAY - NIGHT The doctor flips through the pages of his chart, and rarely looks up. DOCTOR I have some good news. Your friend is completely fine. DJ, Lauren, and Jamie all exhale with relief. JAMIE Then what happened to him?

Loyal, Jacki. Personal interview. 19. Oct. 2014. Moiser, Jeff. “Fort Worth Nurtures It’s Place in JFK History.” The Dallas Morning News. The Dallas Morning News, 21 Nov. 2013. Web. 21 Oct 2014. Newman, Michelle. "JFK Slept Here." Enlightened Travel. Hearst Newspapers, 23 Feb. 2011. Web. 22 Oct. 2014. President Kennedy at the Hotel Texas Parking Lot Rally in Fort Worth on Nov. 22, 1963. 1963. Fort-Worth Star Telegram, Fort Worth. “Spreadsheet of NRHP List.” NPS/NRHP. n.p, n.d. Web. 21. Oct. 2014. "Sundance+Square+Plaza." Sundance Square. N.p., n.d. Web. 22 Oct. 2014.

DOCTOR Well, it appears that the substance that he was vomiting, which you and the paramedics thought was blood, is actually only bile that was stained due to an excessive amount of a particular type of junk food, ‘Flamin Hot Cheetos’. LAUREN So he just ate too many Cheetos. That was it? DOCTOR Yes. That, and an excessive amount of alcohol. There are some pamphlets behind the desk that I recommend you all take a look at. But we’ve been treating him with fluids and vitamins, and he should be ready to go in about thirty minutes. DJ Thank you so much. We’ll wait for him here. The doctor walks away and Lauren and DJ let out a deep breath, then hug. Jamie turns away from them, covering her face with her hands, the burden only half relieved.

DJ Looks like you’re just gonna have to drink for all of us, Sammy. SAM Don’t think I won’t. You will all be jealous of how much fun I’m having!

New Way Home Steven Veteto (excerpt, pages 15-25)

INT. TRAILER HOUSE - NIGHT

JAMIE, a college student, has returned to her small home town to visit her friends (SAM, DJ, LAUREN) and conservative family (JOHNNIE, MELODY) for Easter. Jamie is a functional addict, spending most of her days and nights drinking and smoking marijuana, who has managed to keep this a secret from her parents. She is slowly learning to recognize the damage she is doing to herself and her relationships.

Sam is passed out on the couch. The empty bag of ‘Flamin Hot Cheetos’ lays on his chest, and an empty whiskey bottle is on the ground. Lauren, DJ, and Jamie sit in a corner talking. Jamie stands to leave. Lauren and DJ take turns hugging her.

INT. BEDROOM - NIGHT Jamie sits in her closet. Around her there are a variety of books, old backpacks and spirals, and countless old memories from the 7th grade strewn across the floor.

CUT TO:

JAMIE Alright guys, it’s been a good visit, but I probably better leave. DJ Have a good trip. LAUREN Text me soon, okay? JAMIE I will. Love ya both. Jamie walks over to where Sam lays passed out. JAMIE (CONT’D) Alright, Sammy. Have a good Easter. I’ll see you later. Sam doesn’t even mumble a response. Jamie bends down to pat him on the shoulder when Sam starts to cough up a dark red fluid. There is only a little at first, but then Sam begins to vomit a large quantity of the red, blood-like substance. JAMIE (CONT’D) Sam? Oh my God, Sam?! (turning to DJ and Lauren) Call an ambulance! INT. HOSPITAL WAITING ROOM - NIGHT DJ, Lauren, and Jamie anxiously wait. DJ We all deserved this just as much as he did. LAUREN What is wrong with us? How could we ever let it get this bad? 54

There is a knock at the door. JAMIE Come in. Johnnie, Jamie’s father, opens the door. JOHNNIE Hey, what’s going on? JAMIE Not much. How about you? JOHNNIE Oh, nothin’. Just wanted to let you know what we’ll probably have a nice Easter lunch right before you head out, so plan for that. Mom wanted me to let you know. JAMIE Okay, great. Thanks! JOHNNIE But, uh, also I think Mama wants to watch a movie if you want to join us? JAMIE Sure. I’ll be right there. What movie does she want to watch? JOHNNIE I think it’s gonna be “The Passion of the Christ”. Cause of Easter. It’s Good Friday and everything. 47

SAM And in order to further solidify my good will, I will even offer you a gift! Of one Cheeto.

JAMIE Oh... Great. Johnnie walks out of the door. Jamie rolls her eyes and walks out, too.

JAMIE Nice. That’s quite the commodity.

INT. TRAILER HOUSE - LATER THAT NIGHT

SAM It is! This is my dinner tonight.

Sam, Jamie’s oldest friend, sits on the couch, laughing at someone from across the room who spit up a mouthful of beer after trying to shotgun it. He peeks through the blinds of the window next to him to see headlights outside his house.

Jamie begins to walk up the front steps to the house, and Sam follows along behind her. Jamie soon enters and sits next to him. He hands her a beer from the coffee table in front of them. JAMIE Why are Flamin Hot Cheetos your dinner? That’s disgusting.

SAM Hey! What’s up, J?

SAM Well I thought I had another frozen pizza but I was really drunk last night and I forgot I ate it.

JAMIE Thanks. Nothing much. INT. TRAILER HOUSE - NIGHT

SAM How’s the fam? JAMIE Everything you’d expect. We watched ‘Passion of the Christ’ for the past 3 hours to celebrate Good Friday.

Jamie walks in the living room and sits between Lauren and DJ on the couch, and they pass her a pipe to smoke. Sam stands behind them and squats down so that they are at eye level. SAM Who wants to drink? I know somebody does.

Sam, DJ, and Lauren burst in to laughter. LAUREN I’m good.

DJ So are you enlightened?

JAMIE No way. I couldn’t.

JAMIE I’m something.

SAM No. Somebody wants to!

SAM Well we can fix that.

Jamie and Lauren avoid eye contact. They clink their beer bottles together. CUT TO: INT. TRAILER HOUSE BATHROOM - NIGHT

SAM (CONT’D) Are you really gonna make me drink alone? Jamie, we have half a bottle of whiskey! It’s your last night in town! JAMIE Which is exactly why I shouldn’t be getting drunk!

Lauren pukes in the toilet as DJ holds back her hair. INT. TRAILER HOUSE - NIGHT 48

MELODY You can change the channel if you want. I’m about to go to bed. JAMIE That’s okay. I think I’m gonna go hang out with Lauren and Sam. Since it’s my last night in town and everything. MELODY Don’t forget we’re doing Easter lunch tomorrow at noon. Have a good time. Jamie doesn’t answer at first. She stands and walks to the door frame leading to the hallway. JAMIE I will.

Sam and Jamie drunkenly play Rock Band. Sam bangs the drums much harder than necessary, and the game culminates with Sam knocking one of the drums completely off its plastic frame and Sam and Jamie laugh loudly. After a beat, Sam stands up straight and points his arm to the door. SAM (announcing) Cigarette! Sam walks out of the door and Jamie follows after him. EXT. TRAILER HOUSE - NIGHT Sam and Jamie light up their cigarettes on the front steps. Sam stands closely to Jamie.

EXT. TRAILER HOUSE - NIGHT

SAM So do you have a boyfriend down at college?

Jamie walks up to the trailer house, where Sam stands outside finishing off a cigarette and eating an economy size bag of ‘Flamin Hot Cheetos’.

JAMIE No, not now. I haven’t really clicked with anyone in a while.

SAM Hey, J.

SAM Yeah, I know what you mean.

JAMIE Hey.

Sam leans close to Jamie.

SAM So, let’s just get it out of the way. I’m sorry about last night. JAMIE It’s okay. We had too much to drink. I know. It happens. SAM Okay, good. But, everything’s cool between us? JAMIE Yeah. It’s fine. We’re friends. SAM Exactly. We’re good friends. JAMIE Good, that’s best. 52

SAM (CONT’D) But if you ever decide you feel lonely, you know you can just call me, right? JAMIE I know, Sam. But thanks for reminding me again. Jamie inches away from Sam. There is an extended silence. SAM It wouldn’t even have to be that. We could just see what happens. JAMIE Sam. SAM If you just wanted or needed to have sex, 49

then we could and it wouldn’t be weird orJAMIE Sam. Stop. Okay? You’re my friend. Sam pulls her in to a close hug. SAM But we should be more than-

She exits the car, and with her heart beating fast in her ears, she slowly pushes the car back on the road, then climbs back in and continues along toward her house. INT. ENTRYWAY - NIGHT Jamie walks slowly through the house and toward her bedroom. INT. BEDROOM - NIGHT Jamie walks in and shuts the door behind her, then exhales a strained breath. She climbs on the bed, jams her face into a pillow and cries.

JAMIE Sam. Let go of me. You aren’t listening to me.

CUT TO: INT. JAMIE’S KITCHEN - DAY

Jamie pushes him off. JAMIE (CONT’D) I need to go home. Jamie walks inside and quickly comes back out with her purse. Sam is quickly becoming cognisant of the situation and visibly guilty. Jamie deliberately walks past him toward her car. She stumbles a few times, then reaches her car door when she turns around to hear Sam. SAM You don’t have to. I’m sorry. She pauses for a brief moment, then gets inside the car. INT. CAR - NIGHT

Jamie sits in her pajamas eating a bowl of cereal at the kitchen counter. Her face is fatigued, and she has dark bags under her eyes. INT. BEDROOM - AFTERNOON Jamie looks through an old photo album. She looks through a few pictures of her with her family on various holidays and vacations. Finally, she comes to a picture of herself, Lauren and Sam at the fair. INT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT Jamie walks in the living room and sees Melody sitting on the couch, rigorously clicking the laptop on her lap. The Late Show flashes on the television. On the end table next to her sit a variety of colored pens, and a planner each with their specific meaning in the context of the planner. Jamie comes and sits down next to her.

Jamie turns on her car and quickly backs out. She drives along the road, with her head bobbing and a queasy look on her face. She starts to lean too far toward the left of the road, then she over-corrects and is leaning far to the right. Her eyelids start to droop.

MELODY Honey, do you know how to bring back an old file that I accidently erased?

After the road begins to curve to the left, Jamie’s car drifts into the grassy, shallow ditch next to the road, spinning in a sharp circle before coming to a shrieking stop.

JAMIE No, sorry Mom. I’m a Mac girl. I don’t remember how to work those at all anymore.

The car’s emergency lights come on. There doesn’t appear to have been any real damage. Jamie steps out of the car, and feeling the roof and hood with her hands to further convince herself that she actually was okay. She takes a step back from the car. Her eyes are wide and watery. She blinks to allow the tear drops to fall and takes a deep breath. She pulls her cell phone from her pocket and sees that it reads 2:48 A.M. She slides it unlocked and goes to her contacts, and reaches the one reading ‘ICE Dad’. She stares at the phone for a beat, then puts the phone in her pocket. Finally, she climbs back in the driver’s seat and shifts to neutral. 50

MELODY That’s okay. You would think they would make that type of thing simpler. Surely I’m not the first person this has happened to. JAMIE I’m sure you’re not the first. Maybe one day they’ll figure it out. Jamie shifts in her seat. Melody hands her the remote control from the end table. 51

then we could and it wouldn’t be weird orJAMIE Sam. Stop. Okay? You’re my friend. Sam pulls her in to a close hug. SAM But we should be more than-

JAMIE Sam. Let go of me. You aren’t listening to me.

CUT TO: INT. JAMIE’S KITCHEN - DAY

MELODY Honey, do you know how to bring back an old file that I accidently erased?

After the road begins to curve to the left, Jamie’s car drifts into the grassy, shallow ditch next to the road, spinning in a sharp circle before coming to a shrieking stop.

JAMIE No, sorry Mom. I’m a Mac girl. I don’t remember how to work those at all anymore.

EXT. TRAILER HOUSE - NIGHT

SAM So do you have a boyfriend down at college?

Jamie walks up to the trailer house, where Sam stands outside finishing off a cigarette and eating an economy size bag of ‘Flamin Hot Cheetos’.

JAMIE No, not now. I haven’t really clicked with anyone in a while.

SAM Hey, J.

SAM Yeah, I know what you mean.

JAMIE Hey.

Sam leans close to Jamie.

SAM And in order to further solidify my good will, I will even offer you a gift! Of one Cheeto.

JAMIE Oh... Great. Johnnie walks out of the door. Jamie rolls her eyes and walks out, too.

JAMIE Nice. That’s quite the commodity.

INT. TRAILER HOUSE - LATER THAT NIGHT

SAM It is! This is my dinner tonight.

SAM Hey! What’s up, J?

SAM Well I thought I had another frozen pizza but I was really drunk last night and I forgot I ate it.

JAMIE Thanks. Nothing much. INT. TRAILER HOUSE - NIGHT

SAM How’s the fam? JAMIE Everything you’d expect. We watched ‘Passion of the Christ’ for the past 3 hours to celebrate Good Friday.

Sam, DJ, and Lauren burst in to laughter. LAUREN I’m good.

DJ So are you enlightened?

JAMIE No way. I couldn’t.

JAMIE I’m something.

SAM No. Somebody wants to!

SAM Well we can fix that.

Jamie and Lauren avoid eye contact. They clink their beer bottles together. CUT TO: INT. TRAILER HOUSE BATHROOM - NIGHT

SAM (CONT’D) Are you really gonna make me drink alone? Jamie, we have half a bottle of whiskey! It’s your last night in town! JAMIE Which is exactly why I shouldn’t be getting drunk!

Lauren pukes in the toilet as DJ holds back her hair. INT. TRAILER HOUSE - NIGHT 48

DJ Looks like you’re just gonna have to drink for all of us, Sammy. SAM Don’t think I won’t. You will all be jealous of how much fun I’m having!

New Way Home Steven Veteto (excerpt, pages 15-25)

INT. TRAILER HOUSE - NIGHT

INT. BEDROOM - NIGHT Jamie sits in her closet. Around her there are a variety of books, old backpacks and spirals, and countless old memories from the 7th grade strewn across the floor.

CUT TO:

The Hilton Fort Worth: Hotel and Historic Landmark

give cats this modest breakthrough. I don’t think God wants us to hold grudges.

Sestina for a Dog

She held on for a few years, although she never forgave my parents for their actions. But we all have a breaking point.

Nick Barnette

Don’t we. And so, one day, Sophie packed up her things and just walked out. And we never saw her again.

Works Cited

When I Was Trash Alexis Lohse

“You could be right.” I run my hand along my ghost-son and turn. I run back to the reservation blinded by tears and the rising sun.

I sighed. What a pity. “I really hoped that we could come to some understanding, Euphemia.” Her eyes narrowed, and she bared her teeth. “That’s quite enough of your imperialism, astral.”

“If that is indeed the case, we’ll be coming after you and your kind promptly. This vision of a ‘hostile takeover’ is terribly out of style and a downright nuisance.”

“Ah, ah, ah, don’t get ahead of yourself. You know we can take any form. There will be no way for you to know who or where we are.”

Food Chain

IV. Mother

We sit at the table, scooping

the salted meat with our spoons,

“Don’t look over there, Jon,” I whisper. His eyes are lifted to the glowing sky.

the cold metal making perfect circles in the red skin. We argue over who has eaten more than her share of the heart, spitting the seeds on a striped beach towel

“Where did all the stars go?” he asks. I hush him; the guards are thirty yards from the bush where we are crouched.

drawn across the table to soak up the juice.

I lower my lips to his ear and speak in a voice that is barely a voice, “They’re on vacation, but isn’t the purple pretty?”

My father sits shirtless in the summer heat.

“Yeah,” he smiles back at me, copying my muted tone, “It looks like tie-dye.” 28

I can see the faded scar halfway across his abdomen. 73

Ten years dying, ten years healed, my father spits a seed, brandishes his spoon, excises another circle of meat.

to Clio had booked. But some groups didn’t even have the chance to book the flights.

“This company has done so much for you. Don’t be an ungrateful asshole,” he turns to retort. I bet he’s drowning in sweat underneath his armor. Up to his pretty blue eyes.

“I’m not lucky, you know,” I say, staring down Lincoln who looks goofy in love. “Neither are you.”

The eyes I’ll never see.

Excavators Nick Barnette I.

Manager

I envy the permanence of trees with their addresses more permanent than names. They mark time in rings and stretch marks and wrinkles in bark and falling of blooms and making of nests. They

Works Cited Capezzuti, Chelsee. "Chelsee's Story." Web log post. Caring Bridge. CaringBridge, n.d. Web. <http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/chelseecapezzuti>.

The Influence of Gender Roles on Child Development

made it! We have to keep going. Whether you think we should be alive or not doesn’t even matter!”

Donkey, Dog, Cat, and Ram we are all sons of sorrow eating from a wooden bowl

“You don’t get it do you? We don’t just get to give up. That’s not an option. We’re the ones that 8

Beauty is forever the youngest daughter, the one who believes in her own footsteps, but she is a tomb that opens from the inside.

Her love is as far away as the sky is blue and as short as a day of rain. Gold coins fall whenever she speaks,

The Youngest Daughter

Honorable Mention: Alexandria Gomez for “Crest and Trough”

The huntsman told to kill her spared her, slew instead a boar in the cold northland and carried its lungs and liver in his vest to her wicked step-mother who ate them with cloves.

Honorable Mention: James Chase Sanchez for “Academic Borderlands”

Without housekeeper and incapable of preparing a single bite, that woman ate whatever was at hand; she seemed to like hearts and gizzards best although I’ve heard she was also fond of turtledove.

Honorable Mention: Allison Pickett for “How to be Female”

Young Snow slept that way much of her life until a traveling prince saw her empty left hand and was stunned. He put his own over her breast and swore what he knew about undying love.

Honorable Mention: James Chase Sanchez for “Unifying Latin”

We like it when stories end right and no one follows the queen’s command. Be careful about what to ingest, and always handle step-children with a kid’s glove.

The miller happens by and scoops up the gems. With them he returns to the alehouse and buys a round, then another, then a goose with feathers of pure gold.

2015 CREATIVE WRITING AWARD WINNERS & TABLE OF CONTENTS

One that smacked of sure defeat.

This publication is dedicated to

After closer thought he stroked his chin. “I tell you now as I told you before, I never want to see my ex-wife again.”

 Dr. David L. Vanderwerken 

“There is no such thing as was—only is. If was existed, there would be no grief or sorrow.” - William Faulkner (The Art of Fiction, No. 12—The Paris Review)

I have learned to live under the power of curses a changeling child who once chased pearls not this shaking donkey shambling his way to the knacker 99

100

CREATIVE WRITING AWARDS 2015 Contests & Original Work 1

Sandra Brown

Scholarship The Sandra Brown Excellence in Literary Fiction Scholarship was established by Sandra and Michael Brown in 2008 to provide a full tuition scholarship to a TCU student who demonstrates both academic excellence and significant potential as a fiction writer. The scholarship is given to a rising junior (54 or more credit hrs) and provides full tuition for the junior & senior years. Sandra Brown is the author of more than sixty New York Times bestsellers, including MEAN STREAK (2014), DEADLINE (2013), LOW PRESSURE (2012), LETHAL(2011), TOUGH CUSTOMER (2010), SMASH CUT (2009), SMOKE SCREEN (2008), PLAY DIRTY (2007), RICOCHET (2006), CHILL FACTOR (2005), and WHITE HOT (2004). Brown began her writing career in 1981 and since then has published over seventy novels, bringing the number of copies of her books in print worldwide to upwards of eighty million. Her work has been translated into thirty-four languages. Her episode on truTV’s Murder by the Book premiered the series in 2008. She appeared in 2010 on Investigation Discovery’s new series, Hardcover Mysteries. A lifelong Texan, Sandra Brown was born in Waco, grew up in Fort Worth and attended Texas Christian University, majoring in English. In 2009 Brown detoured from her thrillers to write Rainwater, a much acclaimed, powerfully moving story about honor and sacrifice during the Great Depression. Brown holds an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from TCU. In 2008, she was named Thriller Master, the top award given by the International Thriller Writer’s Association. Other awards and commendations include the 2007 Texas Medal of Arts Award for Literature and the Romance Writers of America’s Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2011 she and four colleagues went on a week-long USO tour to Afghanistan, meeting with service members on numerous bases.

THE

2015

CREATIVE WRITING AWARDS

Contests & Original Work