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ntents o C No t e s 4 Rising to the Challenge
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Ever wondered what it’s like to hold someone’s life in your hands? Step into the shoes of two nursing students.
R equ i r e d R e a di ng 6 Paranormal Activity: U of A Edition Send shivers up your spine with some good old-fashioned ghost stories.
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Fear, Young and Old
Into the Abyss Learn how horror media can help you understand yourself.
T h e S t u dio
Explore how fears change — and don’t change — as you grow up.
F e at u r e s
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Hollow Eyes
A Brief History of Witches
Auribus Teneo Lupin
See through the eyes of the dead.
Let these fascinating figures cast a spell on you.
What hides behind tentacles and teeth?
Di v e r sions 32 Horoscopes What do you have to fear this October? Find out here.
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Crossword
Comic
Put your knowledge of death to the test.
Discover the true meaning of fear.
THE FEAR ISSUE
Published since November 21, 1910 Circulation 3,500 ISSN 0845-356X Suite 3-04 8900 114 St. NW University of Alberta Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2J7
OCTOBER 2019
Editor-in-Chief Andrew McWhinney Managing Editor Christine McManus Art Director Peter Elima Photo Editor Helen Zhang
Online Editor Advertising ads@gateway.ualberta.ca Tina Tai Website www.gtwy.ca
Director of Finance & Administration Piero Fiorini
News Editor Adam Lachacz
Contributors Copyright Jonathan Hocnalon All materials appearing in Jillian Hollett The Gateway bear copyright Arts & Culture Editor Faramarz Jabbari-zadeh of their creator(s) and may Ashlynn Chand Shelby Marler not be used without Opinion Editor Bree Meiklejohn written consent. Payton Ferguson Juliet Morse GSJS Colette Nadon Staff Reporter The Gateway is published Jack Stewardson Khadra Ahmed by the Gateway Student Harmon Tamura Journalism Society (GSJS), Webmaster Grace Wainaina a student-run, autonomous, Hugh Bagan apolitical not-for-profit Director of Marketing Cover organization, operated Helen Zhang & Outreach in accordance with the Peter Elima Pia Co Societies Act of Alberta.
Volunteer Want to write, draw, or shoot photos for us? To get involved visit gtwy.ca/volunteer for more information. Printing Printed in Canada at Capital Colour, on FSC certified uncoated paper.
FIVE CONTENDERS. FIVE ROUNDS. YOUR VOTE. ONLY ONE WILL SURVIVE. Fight Night gives you the power to control the show via a voting pad from your seat. Who will you trust? What will it take to earn your vote? And what will you do if your loyalty is betrayed? Ages 14+ Written by ALEXANDER DEVRIENDT, ANGELO TIJSSENS, and the cast Produced by Ontroerend Goed, The Border Project, Theatre Royal Plymouth, Richard Jordan Productions and Vooruit
FIGHT NIGHT OCT 17 – 27, 2019
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PAINTING JULIET MORSE, “FOUR”
DEAR READER, The nights are longer and colder. Midterms, once a faraway dream, loom large on the horizon. It’s the season of unease, and that’s what we wanted to explore this month. We are thrilled to introduce you to our first themed edition of the year: the Fear issue. Our writers delved into the darkest parts of the human psyche, and our photographers and illustrators gave fear a new face. While fear is one of the most negative emotions a person can feel, it’s also one of the most complex and fascinating. It has many different faces and takes countless forms. It’s the monster lurking in your childhood bedroom and the self-doubt lurking in the back of your mind. Fear fuels witch hunts and mass hysteria, but also growth and change—if we’re willing to learn from it. We’re excited to showcase so many different perspectives on this universal human experience. g Eat, drink, and be scary,
Christine McManus Managing Editor
Peter Elima Art Director
OCTOBER 2019 3
RISING
TO THE CHALLENGE TEXT FARAMARZ JABBARI-ZADEH PHOTO HELEN ZHANG
NOTES
e all have fears. When I was younger, I was afraid of staying home by myself after watching Home Alone several times. No one tried to break into my house and I never resorted to setting anyone’s head on fire to protect myself. However, that fear stayed with me until the beginning of junior high school. No matter how unrealistic some of our fears may be, there will always be more tangible ones that come with our life decisions. Going into a high-stakes, stressful career where a patient’s well-being rests in your hands and one mistake could have drastic consequences is a heavy burden to carry. In an effort to learn more about the anxiety and worry associated with a medical career path, I reached out to my two friends, Ryan Key and Johnny Nguyen, who are both fourthyear nursing students. Considering the stressful tasks that nurses have, such as caring for patients and following the exact instructions of doctors, one of Nguyen’s greatest worries is falling short of expectations. He is afraid of disappointing his family and friends after they put their faith and trust in him. “Making errors or letting people down who invested a whole lot into you is [my biggest fear],” Nguyen said. “Even just the job that I’m working at as an undergrad nurse right now, you see how much everyone is willing to let you learn. Am I doing a good enough job for them to justify how much [trust] they put into me?” When you’re a doe-eyed high school graduate about to enter your first year of university, getting caught up in the hustle and bustle of Week of Welcome can make it hard to contemplate how a future job might cause self-doubt or anxiety. In his first year, Nguyen did not fully understand the implications of being a nurse as it seemed so far off in the future. Now that he is going into the final year of his degree, he often feels overwhelmed working with patients. A nurse’s job is no small task. They are the front line for any patient who walks in and are necessary to translate the medical jargon of doctors into English. If a patient is sobbing hysterically, nurses have to remain calm despite the stress they face. Although it sounds dramatic, nurses hold patients’ lives in their hands.
“Even though [saving people’s lives] is not really part of my day to day, it is still something that happens and it is something you have to come to terms with,” Key said. On a preceptorship program, Nguyen himself is currently experiencing a microcosm of how a nurse’s decisions can affect a patient’s life. “I’m working at a rural hospital right now and not everybody wears a patient identifying wristband,” Nguyen said. “It’s kind of always scary, especially the first few weeks I was here. If I’m giving meds, am I giving it to the right person?” Thankfully, despite how daunting these fears can seem, Nguyen and Key find ways to cope. Key believes that taking a step back and looking at the situation with an outside perspective can help. “If I’m doing my best to help somebody and it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t really mean that I’m any less of a nurse for it,” Key said. “It is important to recognize that the well-being of others isn’t intrinsically tied to my self-worth.” For future nursing students and those who wish to go into healthcare, Nguyen believes that it is important to accept the inevitability of making mistakes and to not think too highly of oneself. Key doesn’t like the idea of telling someone what to do. Rather, he thinks that guiding someone while they act for themselves can be more empowering.
“the well-being of others isn’t intrinsically tied to my self-worth.” “Advice, in and of itself, often fails to consider the position of who’s on the receiving end and acts as a bandage for a wound that requires more attention,” Key said. “When the time comes, [nurses] are supposed to walk behind people rather than beside them when they make their own decisions.” g
OCTOBER 2019 5
REQUIRED READING
TEXT KHADRA AHMED TYPOGRAPHY PETER ELIMA
It’s a classic fear—it inspires campfire stories and horror movie franchises, it’s our first thought when we hear a suspicious noise in the night: the paranormal. Sometimes it may just be the wind, but there are also times where the wind can’t explain why you wake up at 3 a.m. to see a figure at the foot of your bed. Whether you’re a believer or not, take a moment to read about four students’ brushes with the paranormal. In the end, you’re free to draw your own conclusions.
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REQUIRED READING
EMMA WILLIAMS Fourth year Education I went on a trip with my family to Sedona, Arizona. We entered our condo and it seemed no different than the ones we’ve been in previously. My mom used to do this thing where she would open my door in the morning and check on me and would accidentally leave it open. I assumed this is what happened because my door opened in the night and it didn’t close. I asked my mom in the morning why she came to check-in on me and she said she didn’t, so I thought I didn’t latch the door properly. The next night I [made] sure to latch the door so it wouldn’t open. I [stayed] up till around 1 a.m. and I [could] hear my what I thought was mom’s footsteps in the hallway, no big deal. But then I [started] to hear scratching on the wall above my head. I talked to my dad the next day and he told me it was probably a mouse. The next night, the door floats open again and I hear steps in the hall. Assuming it’s my mother, I get up to talk to her. When I look into the hallway, there’s nobody there. I close the door [and] latch it. Once again, the door opens all the way. After that night, I left the door open every night because I was too spooked. I get my dad to check my door the next day after I latch it and he can’t open it from simply pushing, he needs to twist the doorknob and push. At this point I’m arguing with my parents in the living room because they don’t believe me. Out of nowhere the fireplace doors slam shut SO HARD, making the loudest bang. A cross breeze couldn’t do that, somebody actively slammed the doors shut. Then the WiFi and the phone lines cut out for the rest of the day. So, for the rest of the trip I made sure to keep my door open and to go to bed before the scratching started consistently at 2 or 3 a.m. It could’ve been an animal, but the fireplace doors slamming have me convinced it was a ghost.
PETER ELIMA Fourth year Design It was 2009 and I was in high school. A big typhoon hit Manila. Typhoons are normal in the Philippines and sometimes they are not extreme, but this storm was different. It flooded our school and a lot of the employees and students got stranded inside the campus. My parents worked at my school, so we were all stuck together. We were staying the night at my dad’s office because it is impossible to drive home. Then in the middle of the night we heard someone screaming. My parents,
me, and the other stranded people were curious and went to see what was happening. We saw a female student screaming with people holding her against a chair. The people holding her said that the girl might be possessed by a “spirit.” The school was run by priests so we had them present. A priest came and did a ritual [or] prayer and used what looked like holy water on her, but it just kept on going. The exorcism ended when a guy turned on a bright flashlight. I don’t know if it scared the spirit or something but the girl stopped screaming. The guy who turned the light on fainted. My mom and I panicked and we were scared that the spirit might move to our bodies since he was beside me. However, he gained consciousness after a couple minutes but couldn’t recall what happened to him. The storm ended the next day and we went home.
KRISTY DIRKS Fourth year Psychology Specialization When I was 14 I was lying in my bed about to fall asleep. I’m lying there and all of a sudden I have this weird feeling come over me. Then I hear knocking on my walls. I sleep in the basement so it’s impossible [that] something outside [would be] knocking on my walls. I ignored it, but then it happened again. I laid in bed hoping for the feeling to go away before I heard a voice saying “we’re coming for you.” I didn’t know if it was my own thoughts or actually something else. Then the voice repeated “we’re coming for you" and the final words were “we’re at the end of the hallway.” I ran upstairs so fast and I didn’t sleep in my room for a few nights after that.
AMANDA PIPELLA Fourth year Education It was the first day of spring break in our last year of high school. I decided to have some people over that night since my parents were away that weekend. There were about 30 people hanging out in my backyard having a good time. All of a sudden there was an ear-piercing scream coming from the front of my house. Then, a car alarm started going off. My first thought was that someone got hit by a car. We come to the front of the house to see that it was my friend's SUV alarm going off. One of the doors of the SUV was open and that was where the scream was coming from. We come closer to see that he and his girlfriend were in the backseat and she was lying across his lap, back arched and
screaming an ear-piercing scream with her eyes rolled back in her head. We asked what happened and he said he had no idea, that she just started doing this out of nowhere. I asked if she is having a seizure, but my friend beside me (who has epilepsy) immediately said that it wasn’t a seizure. So, my next thought was to bring her inside. The girl could not walk and was still screaming, so we got [her] boyfriend to carry her inside. We [brought] her down to my basement and [laid] her on my couch. She [continued] to arch her back, thrash around and scream with her eyes rolled back in her head the whole time. We tried to talk to her and calm her down but nothing was working. Then, she suddenly went dead silent. The silence of the room was incredibly eery and we all looked at each other with unease. Suddenly, she throws herself on the ground and crawls into a ball. Rocking back and forth, the girl suddenly started to sing “Amazing Grace” in a very low voice. At this point, we all begin to freak out. Some people in the group who were religious began to pray over her and one person even took out a rosary and held it against her, but she threw it across the room and sneered at it. People were yelling that she was possessed while others were saying that we should take her to a hospital. The girl suddenly flipped over onto her back and started arching her back again and thrashing around. When she did this time, she made eye contact with a few of us, myself included, and we all felt chills to our bones. The look in her eyes gave me a feeling that it wasn’t her looking at me. At this point, I was obviously freaking out. Some people were crying and others just completely left the room and even went home. Finally, after what felt like forever, she suddenly went quiet and very still. We all held our breath, expecting something even crazier to happen, but nothing did. After waiting a couple of minutes the boyfriend carried her out of my house and took her home. Most of the other people had left already but the few people who were still at my house all looked at each other in disbelief. There were talks about what we had just witnessed: some said she was possessed, some thought she took some bad drugs. When we came back to school after spring break, everyone acted like nothing had happened and no one talked about it. I did hear from some people that the girlfriend didn’t remember anything that happened. g
OCTOBER 2019 7
ILLUSTRATION COLETTE NADON, “NOISE”
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OCTOBER 2019 9
REQUIRED READING
How Horror Helps You Understand Yourself DISCLAIMER: this has spoilers for Melvina’s Therapy by A. Rasen. TEXT JONATHAN HOCNALON PHOTO HELEN ZHANG
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REQUIRED READING
The root of horror is the sickening urge to flee when recognizing a danger to oneself or something you care about. Unlike terror, which is a short adrenaline boost to an immediate threat, horror unsettles you. Even as the moment passes, horror lingers in the background until a slight, unassuming reminder dredges it up again. Despite being an unpleasant feeling, people use books, films, games and other media to willingly subject themselves to it (along with some unwilling friends). One of those people was me. Over the years, I exposed myself to various media out of morbid curiosity and to increase my tolerance towards it. It was as fascinating as it was fun to get scared, especially with friends. Books generated a deeply personal experience as they rely mainly on your imagination, with illustrations helping shape (perhaps too accurately) the horror.
As you decide the pace, you decide if you really want to see the next page or if you want to sleep for the next three days. Audiobooks, radio, and other non-visual media offer better direction through sound effects, music, and voice acting. This creates a clearer sense of mood and tone, but sacrifices self-pacing for automatic progression, so you’re essentially strapped in for the ride. Films and haunted houses sacrifice even more ambiguity and use more visual tools in order to increase immersion. Costume design, lighting, set design, and in the case of films, editing, create a more visceral experience. Video games allow for interaction between the player and elements within the game, increasing tension by reintroducing self-paced progression, introducing penalties to the player, and placing pressure
on the player to fight or flee. However, mechanics necessary for fun or playability can clash with the story or atmosphere. Additionally, the volume and diversity of horror videogames is comparatively low, with some titles restricted to older, barely accessible platforms. Despite my initial enthusiasm, I slowly withdrew myself from the genre as mainstream horror gravitated towards tropes and cheap jumpscares. It was like the difference between getting dragged into a haunted house as a child versus routinely maintaining it as an adult. I knew exactly how each mechanic was queued to enhance the fear, but the core reason of why I should have been afraid faded quickly. It lacked realism and inspiration. It was in this state that I read Melvina’s Therapy by A. Rasen on Webtoon.
OCTOBER 2019 11
REQUIRED READING The premise is about the psychological treatment of typical people by the titular character. They have problems like not having the will to follow one’s dreams, coping with unresolved childhood memories, and the struggle to reconnect with a family member even as they succumb to dementia. These mundane motivations coupled with insight into their fears helps ground them, making them more empathetic. The first story is about a woman, Gina, whose irrational fear of rabbits stems from a traumatic childhood memory. Her boyfriend, Owen, pushes her to investigate the memory so she can finally resolve it for the sake of their relationship, and so she braves the house where the trauma occurred despite her anxieties. Tension builds as Gina uncovers bits of her past, timidly moving past room after room. Surprisingly, I feared for Gina as I identified with her mission to address the root of her stress rather than treat the symptoms of it. I found my fingers hesitant to go down panel after panel until Gina finally found her answer. Owen, ignoring all the cues that some-
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thing is wrong, finds Gina in the house. He immediately admonishes her for isolating herself, making it difficult to find her. Owen doesn’t understand that a mirror has taught Gina what she truly is. And so Gina reveals her monsterous form before his very eyes. It’s at this point the author introduces you to his signature: body horror. Webtoon forces you to view each panel in fullscreen, allowing you to see every elaborate detail. When viewing this part for the first time, I almost closed the Webtoon, deleted the app, and then ran to St. Joseph’s for holy water. The author begins with a canted angle of the woman in an awkward pose, her face and clothes indistinct, invoking the eeriness of the uncanny valley. It continues with two close-up panels of her face, now wrinkled and hollow, peeling off like a beauty mask and revealing two large glowing eyes, a bony nose, and gaping maw. The image stuck with me despite many attempts to banish it. Body horror reminds you that the monsters are not just conjured purely out of one’s imagination. They’re
based on humans. The remnants of an arm, leg, or eye forces you to acknowledge that these people were twisted into becoming monsters, and that this could have affected anyone. This effect synergized with the narrative, as with Gina rejecting her weak-willed, human outer appearance and accepting her grotesque, but liberated form. The scene was horrifying not only in its execution, but in its relation to the premise that wantonly exposing another’s true self can have drastic consequences. The internal struggle becoming an external nightmare became a motif over the course of the story, as mundane things like chairs, rabbits, and branches took on macabre forms linked to the patient’s underlying, disturbed condition. One patient pursuing art must overcome the dual terrors of his mother’s disapproving ghost, as well as a murderer whose pursuit of similar dreams were crushed. Another patient unwilling to accept his mistakes gets trapped in a time loop. A pair of patients try to escape from a nursing home occupied by deformed, forgotten seniors and their sinister staff.
REQUIRED READING It became harder to ignore how scenarios like these could be seen in the society and people around me. With all the smaller arcs having a moral lesson, I examined Melvina’s overarching character arc for this Webtoon’s purpose. In some ways, Melvina is a stand-in for the reader. She knowingly, apathetically sends her patients to their own personal hell while she sits back to gather results. It’s almost identical to how the melodrama, dumb decisions, and shallowness in some horror pieces dehumanizes its characters, making it hard for the audience to express empathy as they wait for the major scares to occur. The use of her patients’ blood to immunize herself from fear is similar to the way readers vicariously live through the protagonists’ horrors to try to become braver. Her goal of destroying the world because of her basic incompatibility with it is akin to a horror fan lapsing out of the genre, as their expansive knowledge of horror has left them feeling that there is nothing of value anymore. By making the patient more relatable, Melvina’s actions are seen as reprehensible in contrast while
insinuating that the reader should not become like her. Another therapist named Beatriz acts as Melvina’s foil. The lessons gained through her horrors allow her to survive. She accepts her negative emotions over faking happiness, forms bonds with others, and reconciles her decision to leave her abusive mother to reclaim her life. Beatriz represents what the reader should take away from this Webtoon: that being afraid, vulnerable, and struggling at times allows you to learn from yourself and others, allowing for meaningful change. Through this Webtoon, I realized my immunity to fear limited my emotional connections to a certain degree. I was unwilling to make investments in other people or causes beyond the surface level. Rather, I would use that time for myself, for any quick, cheap thrills that barely met my excitement threshold. I was like Melvina; free from any worries, but also free from any pleasures. Inspired by Beatriz, I decided to revisit some of the horrors I had dismissed before with a fresh perspective. Emily Carroll’s comic “The Groom” showed how subtle
details in imagery and dialogue can dramatically change the outcome of the story. Becky Sloan and Joseph Pelling’s Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared video series showed how fulfilling your goals by any means necessary is less important than doing it according to your own standards. Fromsoft’s Bloodborne reminded me that, even if something unexpected ruins your carefully laid plans (like an eldritch entity), it doesn’t make your actions completely futile. Not all of it was interesting, some of it was cringeworthy, none of it was regretful, and all of it worth sharing. Slowly, I empathized with others again because I implemented my old lessons. I listened closely to different aspects of a conversation like tone, pitch and pacing to determine subtle changes in my friends’ emotional states. I offered better advice by identifying the best means for someone’s success. I could patiently comfort others until they were ready to move forward. Finally, I found valuable people and causes to devote my time and show I cared. And slowly, I began to feel scared. g
OCTOBER 2019 13
REQUIRED READING
Fear, Young and Old TEXT HARMON TAMURA ILLUSTRATION JILLIAN HOLLETT
I was a timid kid. One day when my mother was out of the room I saw a sketch on TV about a man who fell into an open manhole and encountered a wide variety of childishly terrifying fiends. Thinking back on the skit now it was just actors in rubber suits under the lens of an old monochrome camera. But in my young eyes, the monstrous beings who assailed the poor man in the sewers were a bad dream made real. What I watched was the precautionary tale of precarious circumstances that I could find myself in one day. I was left sleepless, tossing and turning on the darkest nights of my younger years. If these monsters could live in the sewers, then what was to stop them from living between the walls, in the vents, under the bed? I quickly developed a fear of the dark. Once an invincibly fearless infant, I had long since grown past that into an age of imaginary boogeymen. As I grew into the uncomfortable teens, these rubber suited monsters soon ceased being anything more than a bad memory. The fear of not knowing what was waiting to strike at me from my closet was trounced by the knowledge that same closet contained nothing in the dark that it didn’t in the light. Dread caused by the thoughts of ghost hauntings and invasive aliens found replacements in the very real threats of anxiety. Oral presentations and social gatherings gave me feelings of intense uneasiness. The invisible thoughts and feelings of my peers became like a surrounding darkness to me, hiding what I feared could be hurtful remarks and false friendships beneath the surface. Tomorrows contained all manner of unknowns and yesterdays had me analyzing and re-analyzing my actions not knowing if I had come off as someone I didn’t want others to see. I dreaded becoming close with someone I couldn’t be positive I could trust or forgetting to complete an assignment and being berated by a teacher. Overwhelmed and enveloped by fear of embarrassment I could not see
coming, I played life close to the chest and paid no mind to paths that lead anywhere I didn’t know. In retrospect, I never really moved on from what I feared as a child. The sets and actors had changed but the script had not. I feared what lay in wait behind the curtains, not believing it could be a real monster but fearing that it might be the beast of my own shortcomings. The stakes had been raised: no longer were the monsters that I was afraid of fully a figment of my imagination. The threat of embarrassment that haunted my confidence could pierce my tender heart in a way no closet monster could. Still, I entertained anxiety's presence in my life. Believing I might not live up to the expectations held by people I held dear was frightening, but still better than knowing that I didn’t live up to them. In some ways, knowing might have been easier, though. While I was comforted by not knowing for sure if my anxiety was based in reality, leaving myself in the dark forced me to stew in my fear. As I grow, my horizons grow with me, and that is truly scary. The things that lie in wait beyond my field of view are as ever changing as my own identity. I fear social blunders and my merit compared to others now, but as my life approaches its final act I will come to fear the death of my loved ones and even myself much more. In order not to stagnate, I must allow my horizons to continue to grow and for this I will never know what lies in every shadow. Looking back, I spent so many years wondering what each new horizon would reveal and each time I pulled the curtain back I found it to be near negligible. I could not be harmed by boogeymen as a child because there were no boogeymen; the real harm came in fearing there may be. As a teenager, my anxiety about the things my peers thought about me was the real antagonist plaguing my life, not the thoughts
themselves which I would ultimately find were trivial. I know now that my fear is rooted not in the monster but in not knowing the monster and from this I find a kind of strength. If the unknowns that I feared for so long always came up empty, are they really unknowns anymore? Is there anything to fear anymore? Well, yes, there is. Natural disasters or deaths in the family are just as unknowable as they are capable of reshaping my entire life for the worse. I can find confidence in knowing that the small unknowns in life hide the harmless satellites of my anxiety, but these greater unknowns are in no way harmless. Ultimately, I am powerless to affect those dangers concealed behind blackout curtains. So as scary as they are, there is no reason to actively worry about them. They will reveal themselves when they are ready and I will deal with them when they are, confident that I am as powerless as I am irreproachable for their occurrence. When I saw my first monsters on TV, I remember feeling true fear. It was such a strong emotion at the time and I will never forget how it petrified me. Whenever I feel that way now, I remember the times when my greatest fear was what lay in wait inside the closet and can find strength in the knowledge of how far I’ve come. Part of maturing is shedding these childlike fears. It is a commonplace transition but still very meaningful in the context of one’s life. Like a monster in the dark, what lies in wait beyond your horizon is significant only as long as you keep it beyond your view. To lift the curtain is not to resign yourself to the monster but to instead dismiss it and step beyond your previous limitations. There will always be horizons and closets. But by knowing that beyond the edges in the dark lurks nothing more than what steps in the light, these unknowns become the setpieces of your future. g
OCTOBER 2019 15
THE STUDIO
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THE STUDIO
TEXT SHELBY MARLER ILLUSTRATION PETER ELIMA
The sightless thick is bound. The downed folk mound around. Here we are, as we are, With all our hollow eyes. The undulations blow, With every waking hour. Sorrow? Thought? Then? ‘Tis fraught. Now? Is nil With all our hollow eyes. Did I feel the shrift? Did I see a bliss gift, For the waking soul? Hardly, I say. Hardly, at all? Yes, I scarcely did, With both my hollow eyes. Clinking, clacking, Lacking, yacking, Cracks? That’s all I hear, For nothing passes through These hollow eyes Anymore.
And so we gasp As wind does rush To brush and shush the underbrush. For we know nothing but the rush That seeks to crush the blush. It’s this I know - for I am not lush As the winds rolls ‘round to hush And calm my hollow eyes. And there’s nothing I can do, When sight is what I need to see The tracks of rushing wind. I cry with no tears, And sing with no voice. I see with no sight And touch with no feel, For this is my fate This is all our of our fates. Our hollow eyes will suffocate From this old putrid spate! With others just like you, Who trip over air like I, ‘Tis only you, And only I With sight of hollow eyes. For the sightless thick is bound. The downed folk mound around. Here we are, as we are, With all our hollow eyes. g
OCTOBER 2019 17
FEATURE
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FEATURE
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Histo
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Witches Tex t Br ee Meik l ejohn Photo Hel en Zh a ng A rt Dir ect ion Pet er El im a
Do you feel a chill in the air around this time of year? Maybe you’ll be walking home sometime this month and turn around, only for the shadows to disappear behind you. Maybe you’ll hear the sound of howling beasts in the night, just a little too close for comfort. Fear and unease run rampant in October, and other than the changing of the seasons to mark the occasion, images of ghosts, ghouls, and other spooky scary skeletons arise. The most prominent that come to mind are vampires, werewolves, and zombies. These monsters act as manifestations of societal fears. Vampires are undead, blood sucking creatures of the night, and are also used as a commentary on class struggles. Dracula, a nobleman, literally sucks the life out of the peasant class to survive. Zombies are mindless drones that will tear you apart, representing mindless uniformity and violence. Werewolves are the monsters hidden within ourselves and our loved ones, a reminder that your friendly neighbour might be a savage predator in disguise.
Witches are no different, and our deep dark fears of them change and adapt over time to fit our changing perceptions. They have existed for a long time—captivating all areas of pop culture—while being similar to other monsters that reflect societal fears. Witches represent societal expectations of women, and misogynist fears about women’s autonomy and power. Antiquity had no shortage of witches in literature. Homer wrote about golden-eyed Circe, a witch Odysseus encounters on his voyage back home, who turns any man that steps foot on her island into a pig. Euripedes wrote the tragedy of Medea, a murderous witch who is abandoned by her husband and kills her own children. For Circe, her fear comes from her corruption of battle-hardened men after she’s led them into a false sense of security with her beauty and hospitality. For Medea, her magic is foreign, and therefore strange and bizzare. It’s only after her husband leaves her for another Greek princess that Medea goes mad and commits infanticide, after her
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FEATURE that geness is exchanged for normalacy. The underlying fear of these two is the defilement of masculinity, foreign magic, and a descent into madness. Both characters are perversions of “good women,” as Circe uses her feminine beauty and charms to curse men, rather than serve them, and Medea commits the worst crime a mother can: killing her children. Instead of fitting the ancient literary archetype of a good, passive woman, they are evil, active women. Judeo-Christian belief condemns any kind of occult witchcraft, including soothsaying, omen reading, or spell conjuring in the book of Deuteronomy. While the common idea is the association of the occult to Satanic rituals, this particular verse mentions not allowing one’s sons or daughters to walk through fire, seemingly a reference to a ritual practiced in many ancient cultures, including Greece, India, and China. These kinds of rituals come from cultures that practice different, and often, polytheistic religions. Since Christianity is quite strict about worshipping no other gods, these cultures (and by extension their rituals) are looked down upon and falsely conflated with evil magic. The most prominent occult biblical figure is the Witch of Endor. In the book of Samuel in the Old Testament, Saul comes to her and asks her to conjure the prophet Samuel to tell him his fortune in the battle to come. She protests that the practice is illegal, but Saul promises her protection. Her story connects witchcraft to necromancy, and communication with the dead.
“Instead of fitting the ancient literary archetype of a good, passive woman, they are evil, active women.”
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FEATURE But it was the assumed connection between the occult and the satanic that lead into one of the most sinister periods in human history that once again preyed on vulnerable women. The witch trials of medieval Europe reached their peak from the late 1500s to early 1600s, when the trials which were arguably the deadliest took place in Germany. Many believed at the time that the Holy Roman Empire was experiencing abnormally cold temperatures, leading to crop failure. The people wanted an explanation, and came to the conclusion that it must be witches in consort with the devil. So, under Johann Gottfried von Aschhausen, the Prince-Bishop of Bamburg, and theologian Friedrich Förner, the witch trials began. Nearly 200 documented trials were conducted, and many men, women, and children were accused, arrested, tortured, and executed. The victims were so numerous that an extra firewood preserve was built at the town of Zeil am Main for the burnings. Witch trials in Europe declined in the late 1600s, but reappeared in America with the infamous Salem Witch Trials. Religious superstition was a part of everyday life for the small Puritan community of Salem, Massachusetts, who believed the devil was constantly working to infiltrate their defenses. So when several young girls began having seizure-like convulsions, the town doctor begged them to name who had bewitched them to behave in such a way. The girls named Tituba, a slave woman in the village. Tituba confessed to witchcraft, but claimed she did not work alone, sending the Massachusetts town into a frenzy. While the victims included some men, it was mainly women who were accused and executed. These women were social outcasts from society, poor beggars, widows, and those who had previous run ins with the law. Intense religious paranoia, mixed with scapegoating of social outcasts, had disastrous consequences. Witches as social outcasts is still a common theme today. Around Halloween, images of a green-skinned, wrinkly crone with a distractingly large warty nose can usually be found on decorations or trick-or-treat bags. For a creature one is meant to fear, this is a pretty standard design. This image of a wicked witch is human, but just inhuman enough to be uncanny. The green skin is a red flag for any gullible children to stay away, and the ugliness means that no one in their right mind would want to go near anyway. Think the Wicked Witch of The West from The Wizard of Oz. The “old crone” archetype also points to a witch being the opposite of a socially acceptable woman, that is, young, married, and fertile. These witches tend to be portrayed naked and mumbling in a cave with their cauldrons, like the three Weird Sisters from Macbeth. It was easy to portray witches as unmarried, old hags because it drew inspiration from the most vulnerable people in society and set a precedent for young women to follow. Don’t want to be a wrinkled old crone who lives in a cave and consorts with the devil? Stay in your lane, get married and have kids.
However, not all religions or belief systems adhered to this nasty, misogynistic image. Many polythestic religions had deities who could technically be considered witches. For example, there’s Isis, the Egyptian goddess of motherhood, who resurrects her husband Osiris and protects Ra by casting spells as he travels through the underworld each night. The Norse worshipped Freyja, another fertility goddess who had connections to witchcraft and divination (as well as an awesome feather cloak that let the wearer fly). From Celtic mythology there’s Brighid, patron of healers and magicians, as well as the goddess of the hearth and home. An interesting dichotomy arises here: these goddesses have traits typically associated with femininity like childbirth, fertility, and marriage, but are also skilled in witchcraft and the occult arts. However, they were worshipped as important parts of their respective pantheons and mythologies, whereas other religions tied witchcraft with femininity in the context of conspiring (sexually or otherwise) with the devil. In Christian Europe, traditionally feminine traits were an indication that one was not a witch, and it was the image of an unmarried, childless crone that was associated with witchcraft. But in Pagan pantheons femininity was directly tied to magic and was something to be celebrated and worshipped instead of feared. Of course, it was the source of this magic that became a debate once Christianity spread across more of the globe. In the middle ages, between the 7th and 15th centuries, Christian missionaries arrived in Scandinavia, and Anglo-Saxons had already partially Christianized Ireland. The main goal of these missionary campaigns were to convert the locals to their religion, but the missionaries couldn’t just dismantle their entire belief systems without significant (and possibly violent) backlash. Therefore, the missionaries came up with a sort of compromise by remixing various Celtic and Norse gods were as saints: for example, Brighid became Saint Brigid. This way, Pagan magic spells became miraculous deeds from the grace of the big G. Despite its association with darker parts of history, witchcraft still thrives in the modern day. Modern witches can be found all over the world practicing in different ways. As well, witchcraft itself can mean the practice of pagan and polytheistic religions, and the return to old pre-Christian traditions. Much of modern witchcraft follows Celtic traditions set before Christianization of the UK and Ireland, such as the observance and reverence of nature. As well, the Pagan religion surrounding witchcraft is known as Wicca, while witchcraft itself is more of a spiritual practice. Deb Vourne, owner of Edmonton’s pagan supply store Where Faeries Live, says that if you asked ten people why they practice Wicca, you’d get ten different answers. “I personally have been practicing for 26 years,” she says. “[Wicca] is the basis of my spirituality, and since I run a pagan store it’s there on a day by day basis.” As Vourne explains, not all Wiccans practice the same
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“Witches are considered feminist icons for the same reasons they were feared in the past; because they resist the norms of ‘good’ womanhood.”
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way. “There [are] a lot of flavours and traditions in Wicca. You’re gonna see ones who practice the traditional British wicca, there's other ones like myself who are Gardenarian, which is actually another British tradition. [There are] lots of sub groups of Wicca.” Vourne describes Wicca as an earth based-spirituality that honours the Duality, a male god and female goddess. Wicca is in tune with the cycles of the earth, and recognizes eight sabbaths including Yule, Ostara, and Samhain, that celebrate the cycle of seasons. Some practitioners of Wicca also recognize the Horned God and/or Mother Earth, archetypal deities that can be found in different pagan pantheons. Wicca is a subset of witchcraft, and because it doesn’t have a hierarchy like Catholic Church, it’s interpretation and practices vary from person to person. As Vourne said, “You're going to find people [who] are solitary, who will practice Wicca the way they feel is right, you’ll get people that get together in small groups... and then you’re going to get people who come together as a coven.” Accusations of witchcraft in the Middle Ages in Christian Europe were a tool of systematic misogyny, but in the modern day it seems the opposite is true. The women-only branch of Dianic Wicca is sometimes known as “Feminist Dianic Witchcraft,” and is politically centered and supportive of feminist movements. Additionally, while this branch of Wicca welcomes all women, there is a strong lesbian prescence in the group. It would seem that as Wicca connects back to that idea of spirituality pre-Christianization, it also harkens back to the connection of magic and femininity as a way of empowering women, especially women who belong to marginalized groups. “Wicca came over to North America in the 1960s. Back in the 1960s the life of women was very different to what we enjoy today.” Vourne explains. “I grew up in the 60’s… women [stayed] at home with their children. You might work until you got married, but then you stayed at home,” Vourne says that the feminist movement was centered around female empowerment at a time when all major religions were patriarchal. “God was a He [in] the church that I grew up in and went to as a teen. Young adult women were not allowed to be ministers, women weren't
FEATURE allowed to do a lot of things. Wicca, because it honours the female deities, it is considered a matriarchal religion… and the goddess traditions honour the female and the empowerment of the female.” Pop culture also reflects this shift. Hermione Granger from the Harry Potter series is an example that immediately comes to mind. She was a witch who was at the top of her class,who uses her magic to save the other two heroes on multiple occasions. As a kid, Hermione was my first feminist icon. More recently, the Netflix Original The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina imagines the teenage witch in a grittier retelling. Even if the portrayal of witchcraft is tied to Satanism, Sabrina deals with feminist and queer issues, as the system of magic in the male dominated Church of Night, and Sabrina’s relucance to join such an organization can be interpretted as a metaphor for resistance to patriarchal ideals. Additionally, Sabrina creates a club in her mortal high school to act as a safe space against sexist and homophobic bullying, appropriately titled Wicca: Women’s Intersectional Cultural and Creative Association.
“It would seem that as Wicca connects back to that idea of spirituality pre-Christianization, it also harkens back to the connection of magic and femininity as a way of empowering women, especially women who belong to marginalized groups.” So where are we now? We may never be able to trace the exact starting point of the concept of witchcraft, but we can see how it has changed over the centuries. In antiquity, people feared the woman as an active agent who trapped, cursed, and murdered men, and in some cases through the use of foreign magic. In the middle ages, witches were those who would practice pagan beliefs, and those who did not live in accordance to the church’s definition of appropriate femininity, in fear that they would lead other Christians astray, which blended into the pop culture green skinned crone who preyed on innocent children. But in the modern day, witches are considered feminist icons for the same reasons they were feared in the past; because they resist the norms of “good” womanhood. We fear witches because it is dangerous for a woman to have power. In the wake of third wave feminist movements like #metoo and #timesup, misogynistic fears have started to take root once more. In response, witches have become mascots for resistance, women’s empowerment, and anti-patriarchal sentiment. Where they were once symbols of violence and evil, witches are now symbols of empowerment to many. So when you feel the chill in the air this fall, listen for a cackling on the wind, a silhouette of a woman on a broomstick on the night’s sky, or the smell of cauldron brew. Remember that witches might not be as scary as you think. g
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Nothingness. Inescapable, eternal nothingness. To be enveloped in it was to lose herself, to lose all hope of ever being one again. Water lapped against skin the same temperature, and every touch was agony. Pitch black combined with white noise to conduct a horrible symphony, hitting its crescendo of terror again and again. The last ounce of awareness left, fading out of reach. Not that she could have reached for it if she’d had the will. Floating weights kept her limbs in intolerable stasis just under the surface, swallowed by the water but unable to thrash and connect. Everything was lost. Was she even a woman, a person, alive? Her name, if she had ever even known it, was lost to the water and the dark. Somehow she had become separated from her body, a floating consciousness in the blackness. Even that fragile part of her was disappearing, each lap of too-tepid water against the skin of a body she did not own biting chunks of her away. Soon, she thought. Soon I will be nothing. And she was glad for it.
“Stacy?” the professor drawled, pulling her from her thoughts. “Are you listening?” She nodded, and the professor said something she didn’t hear before turning back to the projector to continue with his lecture. It had been a month since she first entered this building, since she began her first class ever at university. Things were not working out the way she’d hoped they would. She refrained from looking left, where she knew it sat in the corner. Little more than an oscillating mass of blackness, she was the only one who seemed to see it. Sometimes she saw tentacles and wings in its shadows, claws reaching out to try and caress her as she strode past. Other times it looked almost like people she knew, had they been crafted from shadows and ruin. Those were the times she hated. She couldn’t stop coming to class. This one was important, and despite the fact that she’d barely absorbed any information for the past week, she had to show up. Any interruption of her studies would disappoint her parents, who were nearly breaking themselves to pay for her schooling. No, she had to be here. The thing, it seemed, had to be here too. He, it… seemed to watch her. She knew no one would believe her if she told them about what lurked in that corner, so she kept her mouth shut.
Something like an impish grin appeared in the mass, and a cold shudder ran down her spine as she lowered her face. So it was going to be one of those days. “Class dismissed,” said the professor. She slowly packed her things into the backpack she wore, keeping watch of it from the corner of her eye. Though its gaze lingered on her, it disappeared after a while, just as it had every day. She wanted to sag with relief, but instead rose calmly, striding out of the classroom with false contentedness. Only once had she run into it outside this class. She made sure to never take that path again. The path she now took home was longer, more crowded. Since she was sure it would be waiting at her usual shortcut, where she’d run into it before, she dealt with the crowds. Keeping her eyes on her feet, she counted her steps. One, two, three, four. It was exactly 543 steps to the inside foyer of her apartment, where she could finally be sure she wasn’t pursued by it. Just 543 steps to safety. Just two more days until she would find herself counting those steps again.
The memory hit her like a slap, propelling her back into her pruny body. For a few moments she felt the lukewarm kiss of water on her skin, the unnervingly steady breathing apparatus forcing air in and out of her uncooperative lungs. She didn’t want this, didn’t want to experience feeling this body. Each soft touch of the water stung like a burn, and her whole body ached from the strain of trying to move. At least the pain was something. She would rather break every bone in her body than be stuck in that purgatory between feeling and nothingness. She searched for her voice, for anything to call for help. She felt like she was screaming already, but she couldn’t hear. She wanted any reliable sense back, she would take taste for god’s sake. God…
FEATURE
Just like that, one thought of the intangible launched her back into the black. No body, no mind, no sense of self. Her name, which she had known mere seconds ago, was again a prisoner of the void. She had been thinking about… about something. A deity, maybe. Somehow, here in the blankness which was both her and not her, she shrank away from the all-powerful. Maybe she was a god, or maybe the gods had forsaken her. A thread of memory pulsed in her, and she gritted her teeth to hold on to it. Not her own memory, but a story. The story was about a man condemned to push a boulder up a mountainside forever. When he reached the top, his overlord shoved it back down, forcing him to repeat the process every day for all of eternity. What was his name again?
A few days before it showed up in her classroom, she had gone to a party. It was her first college party, so naturally she’d spent hours getting ready. She and her roommates had decided to go together, piling into the Uber like the petals of a flower, joined together by a sepal of loosely concealed caution. The fraternity wasn’t far, but all of them still held that secret, shared fear instilled by years of lectures from their mothers: young girls weren’t safe at night on campus, not even in groups. Dark alleys and streets hid men in stained wife-beaters with whisky on their breath. They loomed in the group’s imagination, starving beasts with teeth so long they scraped the pavement, lying in wait of girls who aren’t careful enough. Terrified of demonstrating any weakness, the girls expressed their fear in a language only they could speak. Lipstick-shaped mace, keys held between fingers, an unspoken pact to never go to the bathroom alone; they wore their tokens and rituals of self-defense like wards against evil.
Despite this fear, gleeful giggles filled the car as the pre-drinking buzz set in. All of them were freshmen, and this was the first real taste of adulthood they would be allowed to savour. Stacy was the only girl who was still 17, but it hadn’t stopped her from indulging in the same capacity as her new friends. After all, this was college, and her birthday was in a few months anyway. That was how they’d walked into the party, all hair and lipstick and half-drunk exclamations. Music echoed from somewhere deep within the house, and strings of lights lit up the walls in a yellow that looked as warm as they felt. Everyone had always said this would be the best time of their lives, and through the drunken haze Stacy could finally see why. This night, these people. It was going to be like this forever. It was like all of her favourite movies from the 80’s had come together in one colourful, pulsing fantasy, and she finally got to be Molly Ringwald. She locked eyes with a boy across the room as she filled her cup with beer from a cheap keg, and he walked towards her in slow motion. Her pulse quickened in her ears while she waited for him to reach her, eyeing him up and down as he did the same to her. Cute, she thought. Several other boys clapped him on the back as he passed them, and the symbols on his shirt alerted her that he was a member of the fraternity. She bit her lip. At 17, all she wanted in the world was to do well in school — and get a boyfriend in a fraternity. He flashed her a smile as he reached her. “Hey,” he said. “I’m—”
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She fought and thrashed. She didn’t want it, didn’t want to be in the skin that held that memory. The harsh rise and fall of her chest strained against the gentle pulse of the water like a caged animal. The pitch black around her seemed to undulate, threatening to take her once again. She was glad, almost giddy at the idea of being lost to the terrible void, but it receded again. A sob escaped her, not that she could hear it. Everything here was white noise. To know your body had done something was to completely trust your muscle memory, and she didn’t. She tried to forget. Tried and failed. The boy, the party. She was adrift in this nothingness specifically to forget that, and yet it was the one thing that kept her anchored. She couldn’t remember her own name, but somehow she remembered how uncomfortable her shoes were, how vile that warm keg of beer had tasted. She begged her bleak surroundings for relief, begged them to take her to that detached state of existence she craved. She wanted to be cleansed of her memories, of this memory. She prayed for it, though she knew she hadn’t believed in God that night. She pleaded with the darkness for any reprieve, any tiny modicum of relief from her own memories. It never came.
Drunk. That was what she was. Everything was blurry and spinning. She’d never felt this way in her drinking experiments during high school, though. It was all she could do to cling to that boy’s arm — what was his name again? She didn’t just feel different, she felt wrong. She had the sick feeling of being on autopilot, not in control of her own legs as she watched them step, one in front of the other. Up a set of stairs they marched, into a room with soft shag carpet. Little more than a marionette, she felt her body sit on the edge of a bed of its own volition. She tried to scream that her limbs had stopped working, but found her mouth utterly useless, producing a garbled
string of not-quite-words instead of what she willed it to say. Panic struck her as that same boy knelt before her, unbuckling her shoes. His sandy hair fell in front of his eyes while he took them off, looking for neither confirmation nor protest from her. He was saying something, but she couldn’t hear him through the blood pounding in her ears. She couldn’t scream, she couldn’t even speak. Even blinking was an effort, and she found herself unable to open her heavy eyelids again after she did. She felt her body being jostled, maybe laid down. She was encased in unbearable darkness, unable to see what was happening, but feeling everything. Her leaden limbs and lips could not muster a gesture of protest, but every brush of fabric or fingers against her skin was too much. She mustered up all of her strength to crack open her eyelids, even if only a sliver. Her gut turned to ice, cold bile rising up in her throat as terror took hold. The boy had become something so different, so horrifying. His sandy blonde hair morphed into tentacles and teeth, his skin no more than a void. He was a monster, and she was frozen in her own body. If only she could speak—
She wanted to scream. This was the memory she wanted to forget, needed to forget, but she never could. It was so similar to now, the cloying darkness and inability to move. Every lap of the lukewarm water became fingers, hooks, claws. She fruitlessly tried to find her own hands in the void to try and pry herself open to get away. Unbearable. The word pulsed through her head, over and over until it lost all meaning. Unbearable, unbearable, unbearable, unbearable. She could not get ahold of herself, could not remember anything other than this void and that party. The phantom claws, which were his fingers and the water all at once, pawed every inch of her. No one could go through this and make it out, no one.
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She curled up and faced directly into the searing-hot shower water. Not hot enough, she decided, reaching a red arm through the stream to turn it higher. Getting home had been a triumph of will. She couldn’t even stand in the shower, but somehow she had walked the entire 20-minute distance at four in the morning. When she had finally regained control of her limbs, the amalgamation of swirling darkness and claws sleeping soundly beside her, she’d quietly dressed and left the house. Some people were still awake downstairs, more seasoned drinkers than she, but she barely noticed them. She’d left her shoes on the shag carpet beside the bed, the image of greedy fingers undoing the clasps more than she could bear. Her movements were no longer physically restricted the way they had been, but the swirling tem-
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pest of real, raw fear still festered inside her, immobilizing her all the same. Her maneuvering was purely mechanical, each step an act of survival rather than a firm choice. She was outwardly calm, almost eerily so, but it was all she could do to keep from falling to her knees and never standing up again. What had happened… what had happened was too much. Too much for one person to handle. She felt like a cloth doll, each step ripping her seams open to reveal she’d been stuffed too full. She was on her way home instead of somewhere built for dealing with these matters, not because she didn’t trust them, but because of that fullness. She had a feeling that if she walked up the steps of a public office right now she would unravel, spilling her stuffing onto the pavement. So she kept walking, one foot in front of the other, until she found herself in the bathroom, staring into her reflection
at a girl she didn’t recognize. Her hand still held her apartment key between trembling fingers, white-knuckled in fear of losing this final talisman of protection. She couldn’t force her hand to let it go, so she took it with her into the shower.
She remembered. This memory was less difficult than the other one, and even though each break of the tepid water against her skin had her clawing to get out of her body, she let herself see the end of this story.
After weeks of gentle urging from her roommates, who had peeled her from the shower floor and gotten her into bed that night, she had indeed gone to a place where they knew what to do about her situation—but not a clinic. When the slightest kiss of an autumn breeze was enough to send her reeling,
she couldn’t bear the thought of even the most clinical touch. The atmosphere in the psychologist’s office was calm, cool. The fabric of her couch was so velvety-smooth that it didn’t feel like claws, didn’t feel like fingers. In jolting breaths and over many sessions, the victim told her story, and in that release she became a survivor. Or so the woman with the notebook said. She watched the monster in her class slowly morph back into a boy, and worked to overcome her inexplicable guilt. In her sessions she often asked why it was so hard to accept your own innocence. “Sometimes,” the psychologist mused, “you will feel like the victim again. It’s okay to have days where you are more victim than survivor, but you will need to be ready for them. You can’t always outrun your memories.” She tapped her pen against her lips. “Have you ever heard of sensory deprivation tank therapy?”
FEATURE
She stepped out of the tank. Not she, Stacy. Stacy stepped out of the tank, reaching for the towel in the waiting hand of Dr. Taylor. She took her time drying off, pushing down the revolting feeling of the rough cloth against her skin. “How do you feel?” asked the psychologist. Her eyes seemed to be scanning Stacy’s face for anything, any sign that she was about to bolt. “I think I—” Stacy started. “I think I feel okay.” The woman gave her an approving glance above her glasses as she wrote in that notebook of hers. “It never gets any easier,” she added. A sympathetic smile tugged at the corners of Dr. Taylor’s mouth. “You’re right. It never gets any easier,” she said sadly. She lifted her chin to look Stacy directly in the eyes. “But we do get stronger.” Stacy met her unwavering gaze with trembling determination. We do get stronger. She said it in her head over and over again like a prayer: we do get stronger, we do get stronger, we do get stronger, we do get stronger. She let the memory of the sensory deprivation tank wash over her, and for once she didn’t think of the water as greedy hands, his hands. For once, it was just water. We do get stronger. g
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DIVERSIONS
HOROSCOPE TEXT GRACE WAINAINA VISUALS PETER ELIMA
ARIES
TAURUS
Stop being afraid that all your friends secretly find you annoying. It’s probably only the majority of them. Isn’t that comforting?
Being afraid of new things is boring. You can’t knock it ‘till you’ve tried it!
GEMINI Fearing deadlines but still procrastinating does not make sense. Get your shit together.
CANCER The only thing you fear is not meeting your daily tear quota. Please stop crying, it is exhausting.
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DIVERSIONS
LEO
VIRGO
LIBRA
SCORPIO
Your relentlessly gripping fear of not being the constant center of attention? That’s what we call being a Leo.
The fear of oversharing is a healthy fear!
You are a bad bitch! Literally nothing could have you in distress.
You, like everybody else, fear the day Blue Ivy’s talent surpasses Beyoncé’s.
SAGITTARIUS
CAPRICORN
AQUARIUS
PISCES
Fear can sometimes be a good indication that something isn’t the best choice for you. Honour your gut feeling, but don’t let it rule you.
Yes, the phobia of Week of Welcome volunteers is real. Yes, we all feel the same way.
Get over yourself! Go to the karaoke bar and sing your terrible rendition of “My Heart Will Go On”. You are going to kill it!
Your incessant need to always be in control is why nobody wants to work with you on group projects. Learn to relax and ride the wave more often. g
OCTOBER 2019 33
DIVERSIONS
CROSSWORD TEXT & PUZZLE CHRISTINE MCMANUS
ACROSS
DOWN
3. Temporary stiffening of the body shortly after death 7. Colour traditionally worn by mourners 8. An extremely popular poisoning method in Victorian England 10. A miniature environment consisting of all the organisms found in a corpse 11. A buildup of gases within a body as it decomposes 14. Large, underground vault that acts as a final resting place for bodies 15. Land set aside for the burial of dead bodies
1. Treating a body (usually with chemicals) to stall decomposition 2. Storage container for a person's cremated remains 4. French invention designed to efficiently carry out public executions by beheading 5. The leading cause of death in Canada 6. Greek god of the underworld 9. Fly larvae that eat the flesh of decaying corpses 12. Ceremony or set of rites intended as a farewell to someone who has died 13. Widely believed to be the last sense to go before you die
Find answers on our website, gtwy.ca
Student Admission: $10 ($8 Matinée) Metro Cinema is a community-based non-profit society devoted to the exhibition and promotion of Canadian, international, and independent film and video. metrocinema.org Häxan October 13 @ 3:30PM Häxan is a terrifying and nuanced look into the history of witchcraft. Part documentary, part horror fantasy it explores torture, mental illness, medieval science, and more. Initially banned and heavily censored, Silent Sundays is proud to present Häxan in its uncut and restored form.
The Evil Dead October 27 @ 7PM Five college students take time off to spend a peaceful vacation in a remote cabin, where they discover a book that turns out to be powerful evil once the incantations are read out loud. They find themselves helpless to stop the evil as it takes them one by one.
Ghostbusters (1984)
October 30 @ 7PM After the members of a team of scientists lose their cushy positions at a university in New York City, they decide to wage a high-tech battle with the supernatural for money. When they stumble upon a gateway to another dimension, it releases evil upon the city, and they must now save it
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STUDY BREAK FRIDAY OCT 18 NO COVER WITH STUDENT ID DRINK SPECIALS WITH STUDENT ID
HOME OF EDMONTON’S BEST DRAG AND BURLESQUE OCTOBER 2019 35 SHOWS EVERY THURSDAY AND SUNDAY AT 9PM
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Stewardson Jack Stewardson By Jack ByBy Jack Stewardson
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the Battlefield, the Northern Battlefield, the Northern On the On On the Northern Battlefield, the sensations... many has Fear Fear Fear has has many many sensations.. sensations....
...the stench ...the ...the stench stench Iron, of sweat,Iron, of of sweat, sweat, Iron, rubber... rubber... rubber...
ear... one’sear... inone’s ringingin ...theringing ...the ...the ringing in one’s ear... Pale the of Vision The The The Vision Vision of of the the Pale Pale Death? rider: rider: Death? rider: Death?
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the beingin Fearis Nay!Fear Nay! Nay! Fear isisbeing being ininthe the TIRE FAT the path...of path...of path...of the the FAT FAT TIRE TIRE VEGABOND! VEGABOND! VEGABOND!
36 GTWY.CA
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big
prints small price
Lower Level Students’ Union Building subprint.ca