The Hoya: The Guide: April 4, 2014

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the guide

creative writing issue.

creative writing issue.

C

hosen from a competitive pool of submissions, the works included in our firs t literary issue demons trate the caliber of ar tis tic skill in the s tudent body. Featuring pieces from shor t s tories to poems, this issue of the guide highlights the creative talents of Georgetown writers.

3 4

POEM

The Red Shoes

by Liz Frothingham

SHORT STORY

The Story I’m Not Allowed to Write

by Alexandra Buck

the guide

5 6 9 10

POEM

Napalm

by Laura Lannan

SHORT STORY

Two Stories Below

by Ciara Foldenauer

POEM

Ablaze

by Hannah Kaufman

SHORT STORY

Going to War

by Will Heuser

CONTRIBUTORS Alexandra Buck is a senior in the College studying English, linguistics and Russian. She experiments with hybrid forms, combining fiction and nonfiction, and plans to pursue writing after graduation.

Will Heuser is a junior in the College and a first-year transfer student at Georgetown. After studying English for two years at Northwestern University, he transferred to work with his band, The Ripples, which is based at Georgetown.

Alexander Brown, Photography Editor Ian Tice, Layout Editor Robert DePaolo, Copy Chief

Ciara Foldenauer is a senior majoring in English with a specialization in zombies and the undead.

If you’re interested in brainstorming apocalypse survival, follow her on Instagram and Twitter @ciarajordan4.

Hannah Kaufman is a freshman in the College.

She is a writer for the guide, won a contest for a short story through the Corp’s Midnight MUG Scholarship and currently works for the Georgetown University bookstore.

Allison Hillsbery, Deputy Guide Editor Jess Kelham-Hohler, Deputy Guide Editor Jackie McCadden, Deputy Copy Editor Zack Saravey, Deputy Copy Editor Sharanya Sriram, Deputy Copy Editor Megan Schmidt, Cartoonist Michelle Xu, Cartoonist

Liz Frothingham is a senior in the College studying French, English and (unofficially) food studies. She has been writing poems for many years and many of her works tend to emulate Shel Silverstein’s style, but often with a nostalgic turn.

Laura Lannan, originally from LaGrange Park, Ill., is a freshman in the College planning to study English. Aside from writing, a lifelong passion, she enjoys reading, playing the violin and drawing.

Emma Hinchliffe, Editor-in-Chief Kim Bussing, Guide Editor TM Gibbons-Neff, Executive Editor Sheena Karkal, Managing Editor

2 | the guide

PHOTO BY LIZ FROTHINGHAM

The Red Shoes

by Liz Frothingham

Two little red shoes slept beneath the green, Left and right together lay to passers-by unseen.

After walking countless roads, these soles sought only rest — It’s not a simple task being someone’s Sunday best.

So these two little shoes doze forgotten in the shade, Dreaming of the places their two bare feet have strayed. creative writing issue | 3

The Story I’m Not Allowed To Write

by Alexandra Buck

T

he semi-truck headed north on the 490 split. Tim pointed his car down the on-ramp, careful to speed up just enough to be uncomfortable with how quickly the traffic on his left was approaching. He reached the yield sign, flipped on his blinker and turned the wheel with gentle precision — just enough to clip the bumper of the semi-truck. With a growl, metal merged together; the truck dragged Tim’s car for a mile as the driver tried frantically to slow down. Tim let it all happen.

He watched the car accident from above, as if it was someone else sitting in the driver’s side of the car. He heard metal crunching, glass breaking, tires skidding. The 18-wheeler overturned. The airbags deployed. He marveled at how well timed it all was.

He looked at the chain hanging from his rearview mirror — an eclectic mix of rainbow beads that his daughter had made — closing his eyes to the destruction ahead. He welcomed the airbag as it engulfed the entirety of the space between him and the wheel. Tim welcomed the heat against his face, welcomed the crack of his glasses as they broke in half. He faintly heard the windows shatter, glass kissing the skin on his arms and his bald head. He welcomed the darkness that surrounded him.

Tim thought of his daughter once more — her bright blonde curls and big blue eyes, a slight ping to his heart.

He hoped he was leaving the world for good.

----------------------When Tim woke up in the hospital, he first saw the wrinkles in his wife’s face as she leaned over him. They were like rings in a tree, years of her life she had spent caring for him, years that she could not get back. Years of therapy, pills, long nights that turned into days on the couch. He didn’t remember when Ann went gray, but then again, he hadn’t noticed how bald he really was, or how thick his middle had grown. It pained him to think about how much he hurt her — and here he was, doing it again.

Blonde curls peaked over the side of the bed, catching Tim’s eye. Of course, Ann brought her, he thought, pain licking his insides. He was humiliated to let his daughter, his princess, his angel, see him this way. He looked back at Ann’s eyes, full of worry and sadness. She stretched her hand out for Tim’s and put her other on top of Eva’s curls.

“I’m going to call Dr. Meyers. Maybe he can come down to see you now.”

Her voice trailed off. She leaned in to kiss his forehead and squeezed his hand once more before pulling Eva into her arms.

4 | THE GUIDE

Tim watched Eva bounce slowly up and down in rhythm with Ann’s steps. She blew kisses to him, her small hand moving away from her mouth with crinkled fingers.

“Bye bye, Daddy.” A smile rose to his face. He had forgotten what that felt like, a pleasure so foreign in his life now. A flash of light across his dark horizon.

Somewhere deep inside him, Tim knew he needed help, but he had nothing left in him to call out, nothing left to fight with. The darkness had been present all his life, but recently it was everywhere. Days all blurred together. Meals were skipped, other meals binged. His daughter had stopped begging him to play outside. His wife stopped expecting affection altogether. It was like he was working part time in life, allowed to scrape by on the bare minimum requirements.

Tim brought his hands to his face. Tubes and sensors and wires moved with him, pulling uncomfortably at his skin. He glanced at the machines beeping and whirling beside him and realized with horror that he was on a slow morphine drip. Why can’t they just let me go? If Tim had believed in God, he would have pleaded for an end, but what God existed that could let a man suffer this long?

Tim heard scuffling along the floor. A nurse entered the room.

“Hi there, Tim,” she said. Her voice was excessively sweet.

“It’s good to see you awake. It’s time to take your pills now.”

She handed him a cup with two large white pills and an orange one.

“What are they?” He asked. His voice was rough and indifferent.

“Ah, well, there’s a nice antibiotic to help with your healing, and then your anti depressant to help with some internal healing. You know, right here and here.” She motioned to her heart and her head.

“Get out. I’m not taking antidepressants anymore. I’m done.”

“Well now, Tim, you’re hardly in a place to say no. This is your usual dose.” The pleasantness slowly faded from her tone.

Tim closed his eyes and saw his daughter playing in her sandbox. She was only 18 months and kept putting fistfuls of sand into her mouth. He remembered laughing with Ann — she was not yet gray then. When Tim opened his eyes, the nurse was glaring at him.

“Fine,” he conceded, holding out his hand. She placed the pills in one hand and poured him a glass of water. The pills tasted like rust and dandelions. He took a big gulp of water and swallowed hard. The nurse checked that he had indeed swallowed and sauntered out of the room.

Tim lay back against his pillows and closed his eyes. He hoped he would sleep for a long time.

Napalm

by Laura Lannan

“I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”

“Apocalypse Now” I love the bitter taste of victory, rising in the back of my throat, like the gaseous exhaust of a poison-glazed pit, brimming flatly in the sweaty haze of morning.

I love the twisted darkness of savage ruin, burning bright, into a heaped mass of blackened bones and dented cooking pots dusted over with thick crimson residue, melting away in a phlegmatic storm.

Drawing by Megan Schmidt

I love this empty room, this vacant house, the flag, flapping, out front against the bright, wide sky — alone in shifting glory, while its brother drapes a sealed coffin, secure on a plane heading home.

creative writing issue | 5

Two Stories Be

by Ciara Foldenauer

6 | THE GUIDE

M

ay Rheston was a door slammer, a quick forgiver, a lover. She was a caregiver, an insomniac (sporadically). May was an incense burner, the type of person full of unremitting care alongside a tendency toward self-neglect. She was a happily tanned sun worshipper in the summer and a cooped-up homebody during our snowy Colorado winters. May was a brown-eyed brunette deep thinker with a penchant for making a home anywhere she lived. She was the first to misplace an item in our fridge, no matter how little else was in it. Keeping track of her keys used to be a battle, too, until we installed a set of small hooks just inside the front door. I fell in love with May long before I tried to understand her. Though she tried to understand me first, before she loved me.

May wore jeans and faded tees when we met in college, but her corporate job soon transformed her closet from cotton to creased trousers. She was the type to sit in the front row; she was a participator, a hand raiser. She was the first person to say, “I will!” when someone asked something of an entire room, or offer encouraging words when she saw someone with selfdoubt. She could be so willing to help — the first to believe in the inherent good of others — and yet come home from it all believing nothing of herself. In general, May’s thing was a thing of highs and the lows that follow them.

Her memory was like the northern lights in the way it cast

a glow over a cold surface, unpredictable yet beautifully tinted.

She called her baristas by name and remembered my freshman year roommate. She shared her memories with me, like the way her mother gave her everything in bowls because they had no cups or plates. Everything else had been broken over the years. They ate bacon out of bowls; they ate potatoes out of bowls. Her mother drank her wine out of a bowl. Growing up, their round kitchen table had been cluttered with a happenstance collection of bowls. Sometimes she parroted her mother’s sayings, things along the lines of, “It’s like baby-proofing, glasses and plates shatter at the tip of a hat.” And they were broken, themselves, too. May remembered all this after a fight about God knows what; she had ended up slamming one of our round, white dishes into the sink, breaking it into large chunks of ceramic. I think it felt good to break something of value out of spite. We were at an age where we were expected to buy nice things for ourselves, to take care of them, to stop drinking wine out of Solo cups.

----------------------Many mornings began with May asking me, “What day is it?” in the interim haze immediately after the alarm was silenced.

The night made our studio apartment crisp and I reached to turn on the furnace below the window. The hissing air always masked the subtler sounds — like the hum of her breath, pedestrians outside — and took a few moments to warm. Snooze lasted for 10 minutes. Getting up at the first alarm would have meant time to make coffee, I would think to myself. She began to squirm once I broke skin contact.

“Wednesday,” I said.

She was not yet fully conscious, sleep still in her eyes. Her short brown hair tousled on the pillow. She pawed at my side, fingers snaking slightly around my torso in an instinctive longing, one foot still in the dream world. The light was trickling into the bedroom through taupe sheets repurposed as curtains, the resulting light golden yet blanched from the winter sky. The morning traffic on 33rd, two stories below, pierced the furnace humming and a breeze rocked the tree outside.

It was like this most mornings: a well-intentioned alarm postponed, me tracing May’s features, a quick shower.

The wooden floors would feel icy.

May would slip on a corporate blouse.

We would each toss something in our bags that would pass as breakfast. These patterns seeped into our apartment and provided a rhythm to the world outside, about to begin, on the brink of our consciousness as if it were a shadow on the present.

The snoozed alarm severed the silence and my fumbling hands found the button in the cool morning. I rose to get dressed, stepping over heaps of our discarded clothes mingled and indiscernible in cleanliness. Her black lace was thrown on top of my college sweatpants in the general direction of where the hamper sat, overflowing with cotton and denim. I picked out the least wrinkled button-up from my closet.

“How did you sleep?” May asked me as she sniffed a pair of business khakis found alongside the floor-borne mattress.

“Nightmares,” I said. “You?” She was fitting herself into the rest of her clothes and scurrying towards the bathroom. “I slept all right.” Asking about sleep had become a soft-intended tradition. My torments had their place in conversations at one time, when I would confess the chasing of murderers or falling out of a plane until I suffered the sudden snapping sensation of waking one’s self from the depths of imagination. Those stressors no longer had a space in our small bedroom. For weeks, May had been littering our single nightstand with twisted plastic ZzzQuil packets and melatonin. Last night, she had washed down the over-thecounters with a glass of red — one of the few nights I had not

elow

woken throughout the night to the rustling impatience of her insomnia. Over time, the conversation of sleep had become a comfortable ritual, as if it were a sign of affection to ask without really answering.

----------------------The following morning resembled any other: I hit snooze once or twice, and we hurried the morning routine to make it out on time. I could smell our warmed bedding on my skin, our sleeping body smell — a smell that contradicted the highspeed rush of getting out the door. I tried to begin that day with more responsible decisions, like tea and yogurt and getting to the office a little early. It didn’t work out. She was running to get ready; I was wishing we had disposable spoons and grabbed a bagel instead.

We shoved our feet into shoes by the front door, keys in hand.

May’s purse was prepared (finding her bus pass took an extra moment). Then she asked me, “How would you describe the taste of pancakes to someone who has never eaten pancakes?”

I looked at her and took my best guess, checking my phone for the time. “Warm, fluffy goodness. Sweeter and lighter than bread,” I said, flashing a quick smile and touching the middle of her back. “Ready?” She was checking her purse to make sure everything was in place.

“We never make pancakes anymore.” Her eyelashes fluttered, looking down into the brown leather. I could feel her tenseness; it was a mounting anxiety, a growing fissure that pitted us against each other as negativity seeped ink-like into her thoughts. Her confidence seeped away as the week progressed towards her Friday morning appointment.

I watched her fingers touch everything in her purse to verify that they were there, that they would be with her once we locked the door behind us. She fidgeted with her bracelet and held her bus pass for good measure.

“What time is it?” she asked. “I might change into the other skirt and —.”

“May, we don’t have time.”

“You can go ahead, I’ll just —.”

“May, you look great. I’m not leaving without you.” She looked at me, our bodies on the brink of the day, her energy fluttering around us. “And as for the pancakes: How about this weekend?” I suggested. “Or even breakfast for dinner?” I was caught between reassuring her that it hasn’t actually been that long since we had pancakes and hurrying to get out the door so she wouldn’t feel the stress of being late to her job.

She was just about to exit the apartment before she ducked into a closet and grabbed a scarf in a last-minute decision. I had one hand on the knob as she came toward the doorframe. A shadow tempered with the ordinary, with what I imagined most people experienced before beginning their morning commutes. Then I would remember that we were most people, and I reassured her as best I could. Sometimes, it was anything to keep her functional.

----------------------May had chosen to take medication during a time when she was perpetually down. She had been focusing on the bad parts of every day; she had been making snide comments about herself, her looks, her smallest decisions like what she ate or wore.

It had been a glacial shift, one that had a slow-moving, charted course. I would come home from an evening visiting my parents to find her uncannily quiet, riveted with a somber tone in the way she poured her tea or did her hair. I caressed her while fearing I might break something fragile. It had been her decision to seek out a therapist. After a few sessions, May had come home with the possibility of a referral to a psychiatrist. A prescription wasn’t the only option, but it was an option. She had come home later and set the orange bottle on the kitchen countertop with a genuine smile: a solution.

I began typing her symptoms into search engines, going dizzy with what I found. The Internet was a mess, scattered helplessly between forums and published findings. The open forums felt psychotic, an endless supply of exceptions and hopelessness and contradictions. I would gravitate toward the sponsored publica-

tions, the studies crafted by Ph.D.s with stable lives who studied the unstable, the wayward. Over time I became fluent in the terminology: systematic investigations, symptomatology, depressive disorders, patients. Patients compared against “normals”; dated, cited. There were symptom clusters and pharmacotherapies, drug trials and abbreviations and percentages. Side effects like sexual dysfunction and loss of appetite were tossed at the end of a finding, like punctuating a sentence, legitimizing a language with parameters. It was a world of its own, its binary black-andwhite pixels staring back at me as if it could answer everything, and answered nothing at all.

I wanted answers as a caregiver of May’s heart. I wanted to know when one should and could call it “enough,” even though I felt like a childish monstrosity wanting to throw a temper tantrum and scream, What about me and mine?

For about two months, May followed the directions given to her in hopes that things would get better: one pill, every morning. Her psychiatrist had told her that there would be a trial period of about a month, at which point she could change the dose or choose a new medication. I watched the energy slip away from her. Her appetite was at a standstill. We began picking our meals

I wanted answers as a caregiver of May’s heart. based upon any craving she might be having, just so she would eat. Slowly, she became the glacier. She became an insomniac, she became something other than herself.

“Bacon and eggs?” I had offered one night. “We’re out of pancake mix, but you’re always craving breakfast.” She looked at me.

A pressure behind her eyes from lack of sleep made something in myself ache.

“I’m not hungry,” May said.

“You’ve got to eat,” I said, making another conversation less of a negotiation, playing the role of reason. I came up behind her, kissed her neck and snuggled my chin onto her right shoulder.

“I’ll start cooking, if you pick us something to watch? How about a comedy?”

“That sounds great,” she said.

I walked into the kitchen and pulled supplies out of the fridge.

“Hell, I’ll even watch a chick flick,” I called toward the living room over my shoulder. The dishes were stacked high in the sink after days of neglect; I would have to start there. I switched on the hot water and poured the blue, liquid soap into a sponge. I quickly decided to focus only on the dishes and pans we might need that night.

“How would you like your eggs, my love?” I called out of the kitchen, padding my hands onto one of our dirty dishrags.

“Scrambled!” Her voice returned. I set aside our last three pieces of bread for toast and lined one pan with four strips of raw pork. The cupboard was almost empty with many of our dishes still piled in the sink, so I set to washing a couple of plates and some silverware. I cracked our eggs directly into the other pan, scrambling them with a fork directly over the stovetop.

Any potential for a fluffy, golden outcome seemed stolen from the moment I cracked each porcelain exterior. The heat turned the liquid, transparent contents into yellowed, foam-like texture.

I sprinkled in some salt and pepper, humming with a pleasant feeling of accomplishment and excitement. My hunger for the food grew as I prepared it; the pops of the toaster whetted my appetite.

By the time I plated up our meal and walked proudly into the living room, I found May with a movie triggered and paused on the flat screen, her body cradled on the floor next to the couch, and her face in her hands.

“May, honey,” I said as I set down the plates on the coffee table.

“I’m sorry — I just —,” she began.

“What’s wrong?” I crouched down, confused.

“You try so hard —” The words seemed to bring even more

Continued on the next page

CREATIVE WRITING ISSUE | 7

Continued from previous page tears from the corners of her eyes, the beginnings of sobbing apparent. “And I’m still not —,” she said as she clenched her hands onto the sides of her head.

“It’s okay,” I said as I placed my hand on her forehead, helpless. “May, it’s going to be okay.”

“That must be so easy for you to say,” she uttered.

I felt my hands drift from her hairline.

“I hear you in there, practically singing, and I’m in here like — like this.” Her voice reaches a bit higher, tears clearing up as she becomes slightly more lucid. She sniffs after the thought is out. It is as if I could hear the scrambled eggs flattening, the toast losing its warmth; it is as if one could experience hope seeping through cracks, out through our

The capacity to experience positive emotions may be a fundamental human strength central to human flourishing. poorly insulated windows or the gaps in the cheap bathroom tiles. My chest deflates and I lean back slightly, looking into the pain in her beautiful face. I look into the face of a sickness, the face of a flu — or the face of a cancer, the face of a hurricane named after a person. I debated deeply whether I should stroke her mahogany hair, or offer her a bite of evening breakfast, and I feel stricken over scrambling the eggs directly in the pan in a potential exchange of overall quality.

We sit on the floor as I love her, as she debates with herself, as we quiet down with breakfast in the background.

---------------------- Thursday evenings I often returned from work to find May had come home early, her weekly anxiety at its peak.

It was cyclical since her therapy sessions were Friday morning. She would be picking at her nail beds at the kitchen table or watching television on her laptop, sometimes with soup on the stove or takeout menus set out. I kissed her on her forehead and some warmth mingled together. I would

8 | the guide

try to make her laugh and bring light to our situation, a gentle push against lingering darkness.

“Is something going on in that twisted head of yours?” I cast out our running joke with a hug, yanking her gaze into the present after having been fixed on some unreal horizon a moment earlier. She looked to me and let out a laugh, and she told me that she loved me.

“If I can’t get rid of this headache tonight, I’m not sure I can make my appointment tomorrow. Plus, I’ve made all of them so far,” May said. “Haven’t missed a single one yet.” I sat down on our other chair, scooting close enough so I can brush a strand of her hair out of her eyes.

“You’re rationalizing again,” I told her. Then I ask her how the last appointment went, so she can remember the positive for herself.

“All I know is, those ink blots looked fucking pissed,” she joked. We both laughed.

“C’mon May,” I said. “Remember what you said when you came home last time?”

“Yeah,” she said. “It was relieving, it was.”

“You’ve got this,” I reassured her and she nodded. “I’ll be home waiting for you when you’re done. I can pick up pancake mix on the way home.”

“And orange juice?” she asked. “Definitely craving me some orange juice.” She smiled.

“Then let’s do it,” I said.

----------------------From a used psychology textbook, I had cut out a page and taped it to the bathroom mirror. It wrinkled over time from the dampness, from our hot showers, but I eventually memorized it over teeth brushings. It was the most reassuring quip I had found: “The capacity to experience positive emotions may be a fundamental human strength central to human flourishing.” I would recite this as if it were a mantra, a life lesson, a prayer. I had imagined that she could do the same, reading it to herself: The capacity to experience positive emotions may be a fundamental human strength central to human flourishing.

I became transfixed on the diction. “Capacity.” Do I have any control over capacity? It felt like the size of something indiscernible, over which I had no control. Was it like inheriting a bucket instead of a bathtub, the volume of potential being a part of who we are? Over time, it became a question and a seeded doubt, and the egg shells under the soles

of my feet felt permanent. A growing gray area had begun looming in the space between May and I. I began wondering if my caregiving was synonymous with her caretaking.

----------------------Friday mornings there was no snooze. May shifted out of bed and turned on the heat. She woke to another rhythm, anticipating her morning alarm and the cold in a way she seemed to embrace. This morning painted her in a different light: Her hair wasn’t yet brushed, but her eyes were natural, calling out to me — or some reassurance.

“Good morning,” I called out to her before I left the warmth of our bed. She was flurrying between kitchen, bathroom and wardrobe.

“Good morning,” she returned.

We were both getting ready for the day. We were each tossing fruit or bread in our bags for breakfast. We each brushed our teeth, dressed our bodies and kissed each other to begin the day. The radiator breathed out air that wasn’t warm enough and the tree outside moved in the morning wind.

Then we were ready, positioned by the door. She had confirmed for herself she had everything she needed.

“Hey,” she said. She looks at me, still.

“Hey,” I said.

“Let’s start with something positive today, shall we?” She smiled and took in a deep breath. With the radiator turned off, I could hear the pattering of outside life and traffic distinctly. Her effort was labor intensive, and I hugged her deeply, holding her an extra beat.

“Yes,” I said. “Let’s. Meet you back here later?”

She said yes and gave her a hug. “We made this place, and we’ll be back tonight,” I said. “Breakfast for dinner.”

“Breakfast for dinner.”

We walked out of the apartment complex. At our block’s corner we said goodbye, and I waited for the 19 bus. May crossed the busy intersection, glancing back once for a quick wave and a playfully blown kiss. As she walked, I watched her brown hair catch in the wind; I imagined the warmth of the white woven scarf she had grabbed again at the last minute; I admired her brisk walk and the way she held her focus ahead of her instead of on the ground in front of her step.

More and more people began intercepting my view of her as she went further away. Other brunettes, other scarves, other people filled the distance that separated us until I could no longer distinguish her from the masses.

DRAWING BY MEGAN SCHMIDT

Ablaze

by Hannah Kaufman

With tendril rays that stretch gaseous golden limbs, it cuts into the smooth gem of the sapphire horizon, while thick drops of kaleidoscopic paint are spilled into expanding cracks that wildly burgeon as the gilded balloon draws a deep breath of black.

It rises from the abyss at the edge of the atmospheric snow globe to caress countless silhouettes in a thermal aura of gold.

Below, a jagged stretch of shaded sapphire roars whitecaps at the puffed clouds and pure blue beyond until at last the luminescent coin crests the waves of mountains with its silent, light-shimmering song that crescendos toward the zenith before releasing its held breath in a sigh of sleep that fades into dawn.

CREATIVE WRITING ISSUE | 9

Going to War M

argaret shuffled the packages under her arms and stepped out of the General Store. She still had hours to prepare supper for her and Jimmy, but if the daytime sky were bright, it didn’t seem so.

Everything felt gray, swept up and scattered since the trains started to carry the men to fatal forests with French names. If anything were still amazing, it was the fact that the depot wasn’t ruined by the flood of tears it saw so often, and that things like train tracks and engines still worked with an iron rigidity in the midst of such a nightmare. Nothing else held any promise of exhilaration or change; Death, dull Death, had settled over the town like a whispered word, so quietly that it seemed it had always been there, so firmly that it seemed it always would be.

Margaret walked without thought, watching her feet but making little use of her eyes. She knew the way well; hers was a house that sat a few miles from town, painted and tall, and the only road that passed it started behind the depot, cut through the woods and continued far past her front door. She used to love walking home; that one road, barely holding back the brush from grabbing at her dress and the trees from winding together overhead, the explosion of civilization in the perfect form of her one, beautiful white house. James had made it for them himself, finished it with a rag in hand and a sweaty forehead, looking at it with a pride that the house reflected with its edges and size. But she saw no pride in such things anymore. The world seemed to be standing right overhead, and when it bent so close what could compare? She saw it in the papers even when she didn’t mean to. Death by the thousands, too many to name, reports coming in long after the fact.

Suddenly the wheels that spun the world felt enormous, and herself nonexistent. If she sold everything she owned, pawned everything she could ever set her eyes on, and met the Reaper and begged him to agree to a penny for a life, a penny for a hundred lives, she would still be immeasurably unimportant. No array of stars, no refusal ever made hope seem so foreign. Nothing so horrible ever felt like truth.

Was this war? Was this always what it had meant? It shocked her that she had heard the word as a child, whispered it and giggled it and used it to invoke fantasies.

War had set the backdrop for stories; it had never been more than a setting, a place, substituted by other mythical worlds when games grew tiresome. How cruel it all had been to pull back this veil, to show her that war was nothing less than the eternity of wretchedness spun in the minds of certain men, clawing and chomping at all.

She walked with vague notions of horror past a bench covered by a pile of rags. When she got close, the pile rustled, yawned, and rolled over toward her.

“Tobacco, ma’am?” A man’s head emerged from the pile, one eye squinting open.

She hadn’t seen him but was not startled. She looked at him blankly for a moment before putting down her bags and pulling out a silver cigarette case.

“Thanks,” he said, sitting up when the case flashed closed. A bottle clinked in his jacket. He looked no older than 18, but his youth seemed absent. He was wearing a few more coats than the weather demanded, and on the ground next to him his suitcase was straining against the few remaining unbroken clasps.

“Do you need a light?” she asked, looking in her purse.

“I got matches,” he said, pulling one out. He struck it on his boot and coughed when the end of the cigarette caught. She put the case back in her bag.

10 | the guide

“You’re not gonna have one?” he asked, looking at her.

She said nothing and pulled out another, lighting it with an automatic lighter. He eyed the lighter with the same look that he had eyed the case, and took a pull from the bottle.

“S’name, hun?”

“Margaret,” she said with no voice.

“Margaret,” he nodded, watching her and then the trail of smoke swaying upward from her cigarette.

“Need any help with those bags there, Margaret?” He pointed to them but stared at her, puffing, hungry looking.

She was not a stupid girl. It was not only death that was numb to her; murder wasn’t the only inhumane impulse she felt from mankind. But what was death in a valley of death but a train pulling into a depot? What was hope but a distraction, a stray thought that pulled one’s eyes from the schedule and made one forget for a moment, at the most, that the train would be on time, would always be on time. If anything survived, it was not with her. If anything still shone from the fog that 1917 had set upon her, it would be with someone else, something she never knew existed, something she’d never encountered and felt as thought she’d never even know of. Maybe it was with this man. But she did not delude herself.

They walked, then, her ahead and him following with an armful of bags, until the stores faded into trees and the dirt and dust under their feet, less accustomed to being trampled than the road in the town, grew ragged and wild. The woods chirped and hummed like they always had: blankly, matter-of-factly, comforting only those who had read enough stories to think that the mysteries they held were both fantastical and aimed at them. But she felt no stares, no magical eyes watching her from the thicket, and the set that devoured her from behind made her feel even more unseen, even less to see. The wrong things, she noticed, remained when the world began the crumble, and who was she in all this? In this world that clearly had larger concerns of tragic intent, what were her woes, her fears, her discomfort and her depression when all she had to measure them against were widows and thieves? For this man had already stolen from her all he wanted to take, and all that remained was the deed itself and the tending to the wounds she already felt forming. She could run, but he had her bags. She could scream and shout, and all it would do is send the birds scattering from the bushes. She could grab him by the ears and yank until a shiver of fear betrayed him, or she could yell, or whisper, or even just glare to him that he was nothing, that he was a monster and a fiend, but why introduce anger to such a situation? Why do anything but get home, packages unmaimed, and sit with Jimmy, eat with him and talk about his father and try her best to fall asleep.

They still had a mile or so to walk when he spoke.

“You know, I’ll be shoving off soon,” he said. A crow screamed from an unseen tree top; she barely heard it.

“My name’s John, by the way,” he spoke again after she had said nothing. This time she nodded, turning her head back a hair for a quick moment.

“I don’t come around here much,” he said after another silence. She felt him staring, and turned to look at him without stopping. He smiled instantly when she looked and pointed over his shoulder.

“Family lives up the road some ways that way,” he said.

“Quiet house, now. Just my father and mother and sisters.

Two brothers went already; I’m going tonight.”

by Will Heuser

She nodded, feeling far away. She was there, and she knew that he saw her there and she knew what he wanted and what he was going to take and yet she was far, far away.

“Ain’t got no girl.” he said quietly after another moment, waiting. She did nothing.

“Ain’t got no girl to say goodbye to,” he said again, “I had one but she left me, went for some flatfoot who ain’t leaving. Flattened his nose to match when I heard ’bout it, lemme tell ya.”

They walked for a while longer, passing a ditch that fell suddenly along the side of the road. She saw a dry patch in it, and she saw how low it dipped away from view of the road and she knew, knew right then; but despite this and despite the fact that nothing was more apparent than his stare and his breath, her heart still refused to quicken.

When she heard his feet stop shuffling and the bags stop rustling against his coat she turned slowly but knew before she saw him that he would be standing in that ditch.

“Come here,” he said in a different voice.

She stood for a moment and tried to think of James, or of Jimmy, or of the days that would follow and bury this man in the mass grave of her memory, strip him of his details and his odor, but nothing came. She saw for a moment his eyes, his bizarrely boyish grin, and was smacked by a deep confusion of pity and envy for this man who thought such a situation was one of simple seduction. That this was a time in which she could coyly smile and slip into his

What to do in a storm but let it pass? What’s left to resist when horror is everything? arms for an evening of self-centered ignorance of the damnation that she knew he did not appreciate. And yet he was going. He had been snatched by a hand much larger than hers, lost in a game that had no rules, and this man stood, both smiling at her with saddening naivety and yet threatening everything, holding her packages for her like a cherub and yet dangling them over the mud.

“Come here, Margaret” he said again.

She said nothing, did nothing to indicate an answer, but he would have required nothing short of a tantrum to think she wasn’t just shy. She started toward him, slowly and without decision.

“Won’t you lie with me? Don’t you know I’m leaving tonight?”

He looked at her, careful to meet her eyes, impatient now, standing with his legs wide. His hands were relaxed at his sides, but she saw the fists that would curl if he were to ask again.

Her legs ached from straining to walk so slowly and yet far too quickly she found herself right under his chin, her forehead scratched by stubble and the smell of sawdust.

“The war, Margaret.” He said, not thinking of war. “The war.”

She took the packages from his hands and placed them

in a dry patch on the dirt. He smiled and put his hand on her waist.

What to do in a storm but let it pass?

What’s left to resist when horror is everything?

-----------------------

And so I took her, that Margaret, right there in the field.

That poor, sad Margaret with the drooping eyes and slow steps. I took her right then and there, surrounded by all the life that fills a forest with sounds and wonder, and we felt something, we two, we felt something besides this goddamn war, pressed together in the mud.

Making love is such a deep breath when you need it.

You never forget you’re alive when you’re with a girl that way. She wasn’t like Becca was before she went to that goddamned flatfoot. Becca at least moved a bit. But war takes it out of some people, I guess. I bet that Margaret lost her husband not too long ago. I bet he died far away from her and she thinks of nothing else but how alone she is, how there’s nobody coming home to watch over her. Poor, old Margaret! I could almost feel how far she’d sunk beforehand, and if she looked under 30 you’d never have known. But making love is like a deep breath, and she needed it most.

I’ll say it myself: Something about this war rattles me.

Excitement, fear, whatever. Something about it seems quite huge, almost insurmountable. But right then and there, with no boots on and a woman under me, what could strike me down? Right then and there I could have killed 40 Jerries with my left hand. Right then and there I could have died with a smile that would have haunted the Jerry who got me. It’s why we’re gonna win this war, and win it quick.

We know what it’s all about, this life. If you asked a Jerry what he thought about war, he’d probably just shoot you where you stood. If you asked him what it was he was fighting for, he’d probably either tell you it was for Germany or he’d just damn shoot you. They just don’t understand. A German will throw himself into war because he is bred for violence. He’s lived near it his whole life; he’s been raised by it, shown it in school. He has pointed a gun at a man before he pointed one at a piece of game. He loves blood because he’s been fed man blood and now starves for it.

Animals. Cunning, treacherous, savage animals. Goddamned animals.

But us Americans, we know. We feel God’s smile on our backs when we march where we have to go. If you asked us what we fought for some may say “America” like the Jerry says “Germany,” but we don’t just fight for America the place. We put on our uniforms and march overseas to take on these monsters in their own backyard because we know what America stands for, and we fight for that, for what it actually means. The sun shines on beauty in America. Riches are for the taking in America. Freedom isn’t just a word in America. And we’ll fight off the depths of hell to save it.

We’ll fight anyone for our homes and families. We’ll cast out every snake that threatens our wives and homesteads. We fight for our sisters and mothers. We fight for those in our country’s embrace who are too weak to fight for it. We fight for all those girls we leave in the mud who want nothing more than for us to come right back. And I’m going to fight.

I’m going to war. I’m going and I’m going somewhere, I may die but god damn it if I’m not going to die for something a whole lot better than god-damned Germany …”

These thoughts were in the small smile that he wore, head leaning against the bouncing window, watching his entire life sweep past with the flying fields and trees, daydreaming about violence without death. That same smile faded long before he was killed in the flurry of ChateauThierry, in a moment where the bullets whirled with the wind and his bearings and his mind were thrown completely into chaos. His body was dragged from the front lines to a field hospital by a private who admired him immensely and yelled loudly at the medical personal who seemed too unconcerned. The private sat at the foot of his bed, fingering the rosary beads that his mother forced him to bring and that now only left his hands when his rifle required

two, praying to every nurse that flew by to save this man, save this soldier who gave the private socks when the snow ruined his, this man without whom, the private sincerely thought, no good could ever come of this war. But the doctor who glanced at his wounds did little justice to the gravity the private felt, and pronounced Corporal John Harrison dead from gunshot wounds almost immediately.

----------------------His body was sent home with a box and a folded flag. His sisters and mother wept over his gravestone for months, and his father found solace in bottles and words like “hero.”

It was not long before each of them, privately, secret even to themselves, grew a writhing hate for a God who could send a boy like that and sweep him away; a boy who wore his potential like a horse wears a carrot and who hinted too strongly at the man he would have been for the loss to sit well with any idea of reality.

He was remembered by such minds, in stories and state-

ments that grew grander as alcohol and grief began to cloud the memory. A bull of a boy, a man without the years, a true sacrifice. Could losing the war have been worse than this? Yes, his father would shout, only bringing more hysterics from his sobbing wife; yes, it would have been, for however horrible it was to lose him, he was a soldier to the end, and he wouldn’t appreciate his gift to this country being questioned by women who couldn’t understand. Don’t you realize, he’d shout over all the rest, over his family or a crowded tavern, that he had at least 13 Jerries to his name?

Thirteen men, full-grown German killers, met and fell to his son, 13. Unlucky bastards, he’d chuckle to himself after a few, the unlucky 13, he’d say too often, as the rest of his family continued to weep and now felt ashamed for being so ungrateful.

Thirteen men his son killed in the Great War. Thirteen souls gagging on their own blood, facing death with eyes widened by fear and pain.

Fourteen casualties the war had him take in total. Fourteen robbed bodies, lying in ditches.

CREATIVE WRITING ISSUE | 11

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“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

– Ernest Hemingway

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