The Common Voice Anthology 2014-2015 by The Common Voice

THE COMMON VOICE 2014-15 ANTHOLOGY

THE COMMON VOICE

2014-15 ANTHOLOGY INNAUGURAL COMPILATION JUNE 2015

letter from the editors Hello daring and ridiculously attractive reader, Thanks for taking a chance on us. As you will soon realize, this is not your typical college literary magazine. The Common Voice believes we can only create our best work when we work through a necessary combination of risk, honesty, and collaboration. We are, first and foremost, a writers’ collective striving to foster and develop each member’s creative talent. Our greatest strength is each other. Only together could we produce the stories, poems, essays, and art that has shaped us individually. The result is the magazine you find before you, crafted and fine-tuned by the renegade fingers of our members. Here, you bear witness to that same collective’s first attempt at a collaborative issue. This evolution occurred gradually over the past two semesters of weekly workshops. Together, The Common Voice has molded, chiseled, and polished thick slabs of crude ideas into the following pieces we proudly present to you. The Common Voice is a literary magazine devoted to the possibility of growth. We revel in the art of revision. We celebrate the work in progress. We prize progress over perfection. As a group of young writers, we are still finding our voices, as well as our footing. Though many of us have studied writing for years, the only thing we’ve learned is that it never seems to get easier. And doesn’t that make us lucky? To always have something new to discover, some goal to reach for, some destiny we have kindly deluded ourselves to believe we will fulfill? Yes, we are very lucky to have the support of others to explore the possibilities of ourselves. And who knows? We might just get the hang of it. And when we do, you can say you read us when. with love and pride,

L+Z 3

CONTRIBUTORS: LINDSAY GELLER ZOË FAY-STINDT MARINA STARKEY MICHELLE CICCARELLI CHRISTOPHER GAVIN DANIEL HALPERN CAITLIN O’BEIRNE ERIN KAYATA CAMERON DAVIS

artwork: HOLLY KIRKMAN

editors in chief: LINDSAY GELLER ZOË FAY-STINDT

managing editors: CHRISTOPHER GAVIN MICHELLE CICCARELLI 5

table of contents TINDER AT HOME

BY ERIN KAYATA

AFTER I FOUND YOU 11

BY MARINA STARKEY

ALL OR NOTHING 12

BY CHRISTOPHER GAVIN

MIND YOUR PEN 16

BY DANIEL HALPERN

MICHELLE THE PICKY EATER 17

BY MICHELLE CICCARELLI

THE NIXON OF SALAD 19

BY LINDSAY GELLER

SELF-PORTRAIT 21

BY ZOË FAY-STINDT

CLAIR DE LUNE 22

BY CAMERON DAVIS

NOT QUITE SIXTEEN 23

BY ERIN KAYATA

MUSEUM PIECE 25

BY CAMERON DAVIS

FILLING THE BOX 28

BY CHRISTOPHER GAVIN

FOR FEASTING 31

BY ZOË FAY-STINDT

SYMBIOSIS 32

BY MARINA STARKEY

BLUE 33

BY MARINA STARKEY

PERFECTION 34

BY MICHELLE CICCARELLI

THE PIGEONS OF BOYLSTON & TREMONT 43

BY DANIEL HALPERN

BOSTON, APRIL 201 3 44

BY ZOË FAY-STINDT

TO MY BROTHER 45

BY ERIN KAYATA

HOW TO TELL IF YOUR CHEAP WHITE WINE CONTAINS ARSENIC OR IS JUST CHEAP WHITE WINE 47

BY LINDSAY GELLER

TINDER AT HOME by erin kayata

*Names changed slightly to protect the innocent and not-so-innocent I’m known amongst my fellow Tinderers as what we call “a constant right swiper.” This may be a title I made up solely for me. I swipe right on everyone (or at least I did before Tinder started charging you for swipes, which is bullshit). Truth be told, I don’t give a damn about Tinder. Underneath this snippy, sarcastic exterior is the heart of a romantic who cries every time she watches Crazy, Stupid Love. There is no way that I’d really be interested in anyone that I met on Tinder, because I’m 90% certain I’m destined to fall into my soul mate’s arms when our dogs’ leashes become tangled a la 101 Dalmatians. But the conversation is sometimes good, the profiles are amusing, and the stories that come out of it are one of a kind. So off I go, working my pointer finger. Inevitably, when using Tinder at home over winter break, I mistakenly match with someone from high school. This has happened before during my slightly more serious Tinder stint at home this summer, but the match was respectfully ignored. This time, however, it was slightly different. The guy actually messaged me. “Hey Erin, long time, no see.” The message came complete with that weird, licking, smiley emoji, the kind you use after a good meal. I did what any young Tinderella would do. I pretended not to remember him. But he pressed on. “I remember you playing the skin flute. I hope you’re not rusty.” To quote Clueless: “As if!” I screenshotted the conversation and blasted it out to my high school friends. Then, I realized how good this could be. From then on, no one was off-limits. I was going to right swipe everyone, even guys from high school. Let the hilarity ensue. No one measured up to my skin-flute loving friend in humor. One boy sweetly confessed that I “made him feel like he was somebody” when I talked to him during art class. Another I knew had a crush on me tried to pull the “long time, no see” card too. I quickly unmatched, only to see him the next week while out to eat with my family. Another kid that cheated off of me in Anatomy junior year tried to get me to hang out with him. Talk about shitting where you eat. It wasn’t until the night before Christmas Eve that things really started stirring. It was then that I matched with my high school dream man. For the sake of this piece, we’ll call him Ken, as in Barbie’s boyfriend. Like Ken, he seemed ideal, if a bit pretentious and fake. He also has the same killer smile (but lacks the washboard abs). So Ken and I match on Tinder. This happened before during my summer Tinder stint. Nothing ever came of that match made in heaven, but he was the only guy on there I actually considered meeting up with, partially because I still harbored the little crush I’d had on him since eighth grade. But Ken wasn’t really nice to me. Like ever. I’m trying to conjure up a nice memory of him, but the only thing I can think of is his sneering “holier than thou” comments and the whole tortured, intellectual filmmaker in a tweed jacket thing that he tried to pull off. Of course, I fell for it.

My romantic tendencies led me to ignore his asshole behavior and fantasize about him as some sort of tortured artist, who only needed a woman’s soft touch and reassurance to let him feel safe enough to love. (My favorite movie is Beauty and the Beast, in case you couldn’t tell.) But this is the guy who had the audacity to tell me I wasn’t a writer in high school and then publicly challenge me to a write-off on his Wordpress blog that he thought people cared enough to read. (He once wrote a post complaining about how hot girls like douchebags. It included a formula and a line graph so...) This time, I was determined to make things work. He just needed that soft touch, right? I waited ten minutes and then messaged him the perfect casual, flirtatious message: “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.” “You are clearly just trying to hook up with me,” he replied, AS IF HE HADN’T ALSO SWIPED RIGHT. Also, we matched automatically, clearly indicating that he had swiped me first, a fact I soon pointed out to him. He proceeded to try to invalidate me, an ominous look into what lay ahead that I chose to ignore. Instead, I reassured him that it was okay, I was into him too. We struck up a conversation where we both confessed to liking each other in high school. Once I created a safe space for him to open up, he did. It was actually working! I was transforming the beast! “I’m not exactly the uppity priss I was then,” I wrote to him, referring to our high school years. “I had a crush on that uppity priss,” he wrote back, causing me to squeal in delight, as if the last six years hadn’t happened, and I was a freshman in high school again. “So now what?” I asked him. “What are you looking for?” “Idk,” I replied trying my hardest to sound casual, while simultaneously transcribing the exchange into my diary. “I’m up for pretty much anything.” “Well, I guess we’ll have to hang out and see what happens.” Cue more squeals and me deliberately waiting hours to respond. I told him I’d text him, trying to seem like an independent woman, but really just didn’t want the agony of waiting for him to text me. I waited several days before contacting him, spending that time daydreaming about our life together that would obviously commence with this hangout. It would start out tumultuous, with him being at Notre Dame, and me being in Boston. But eventually, we would reunite and become a power couple, conquering the literary and film world together. And it would all begin with a private screening of Her, a film that he recommended I watch during our last chance encounter when I saw him while walking my dog. (Did I mention that he lives near me? Just when things couldn’t seem to get any more complicated.) “So, I still haven’t seen Her,” I texted him one Sunday. I was hoping he would remember and catch the reference. He did. “Well, we’ve got to change that then,” he replied. He revealed that he was getting his wisdom teeth out on Tuesday, so we tentatively agreed to hang out on Monday. “If you’re interested,” I added. “I am,” he replied. “Only thing is my college buddy might be coming down to visit from Western Mass so is it alright if I text you tomorrow?” Noooo. Into the trap I fell. So tomorrow arrived, and I waited. And waited. And waited. As the day wasted away, I realized I wasn’t going to hear from him. I didn’t. But Wednesday was New Year’s Eve and a chance to start fresh. He said he was interested, so that meant there was a chance, right? I mulled this over with my friend, Gertie, as we headed out to her apartment at UMass where we were having a bash to ring in the New Year. Gertie was the only one

of my friends back home who knew about things with Ken, as all my other high school friends openly hated his guts. But Gertie encouraged me to go for it if I wanted it, so I did. “I’m just going to drunk text him tonight,” I told her while stuck in traffic on the Mass Pike. “Just let it happen.” A genius plan! New Year’s ensued in a mix of vomit and confetti. Wearing a plastic tiara trimmed with pink fuzz, I drank too many mixed drinks and did a Jaeger shot that promptly caused me to puke into a nearby trash can. It was an evening of class that only increased when the alcohol hit as the clock struck twelve, and I took to drunk Tinder and texting. “Loooookkkk,” I said, shoving my phone in my friend Carlos’ face. There was Ken’s Tinder moment, showing him, puffy faced from surgery, with another high school classmate. “But he hasn’t texted me!” “Forget him, Erin,” Carlos said. But, of course, Drunk Erin fulfilled her prophecy and texted him. “KEN,” I sent him. “I AM HAVING A DRINK FOR YOU TONIGHT” “FUCK YESH” Three blue speech bubbles popped up in our conversation on my phone, but yielded no immediate reply. I panicked and sent a drunk text to my friend, Gavin Chris, who called to check in on me. That’s how I spent the first hour of the New Year lying on Gertie’s bedroom floor, holding Gavin hostage on the phone as I told him my woes. “He kinda sounds like a douchebag,” he said. I woke up the next morning, surprisingly not hungover, but very much embarrassed. I had both my shoes, but had lost some dignity. When I checked my phone, there was no text from Ken. Then I made a new resolution: stop drunk texting boys who won’t text back. I reread my conversations with Ken. He had been so crystal clear. And yet, here I was. Then I deleted those conversations. The moral of the story is this: Don’t use Tinder at home. Don’t right swipe just anyone. And don’t build your high school crush up to something he can’t be. And Ken: I will not be your friend on Snapchat.

AFTER I FOUND YOU by marina starkey

Half-past noon. Ink, the colors of a tropical bird, swells off the page. “She feels like you,” you whisper against the yellowed light of the window. A sparrow curls up from the page, alive but lacking my tiny features: the browned dot on my left cheek, the beauty mark on my upper lip you claimed as yours the night on your sister’s couch. You knew I was a nightingale, humming the private music of our purple words, turning winter conversation into stretched centuries. The oranges of dusk leave the sky. The shape of bird music doesn’t survive the morning either. I knew my beak would break before I could say the words. I knew my only tongue tasted like an off-color. I hid in your shoulder, afraid of my mouth. Your fingers stroked off all the feathers I had left. Remember when I told you I love stories about those humans who lose their hands? Their arms melt off too, becoming watercolor paintings so bright they make the birds cry.

ALL OR NOTHING by christopher gavin Cody wished he could have stopped Tommy that night. The Mustang sat at the end of the line, yards past the grand stand, an awful, twisted mass of metal. Smoke was starting to billow out of the engine, mostly on the left side, which had taken a lot of the blow from the guardrail next to it. The white paint of that small wall had a freshly contributed series of grey and black streaks along it, marking a trail of mechanical blood just past the starting line down to the crash site. The car’s taillights had quit, giving way to the darkness of the night around them. There were gasps from the crowd, and a fire crew and some paramedics ran out to remove Tommy from the devastation. Tommy had come so close to the record but for Cody, it didn’t matter what the clock said. A wave of guilt washed over him as if all the dead skin on his face had peeled off to reveal something too horrible for words. Unresponsive, Tommy’s body was dragged out of the mess with a helmet that seemed as if it didn’t serve its purpose glued onto his head, a black t-shirt and blue jeans. Cody was standing as close to the asphalt as the guards would let him, hands clenched on a chain-linked fence next to the wreck. -- Most weekends you could have found Tommy out at the strip across the river in Jersey. He threw the trophy car on a hitch and headed west, eager as if he were about to settle the frontier and with a sly grin as if he had already won the race and was reveling in the victory. On summer nights after he got off his shift and far past sunset, the garage doors would roll down and the engine would fire up. He took out the local boys— but mostly girls— for a few rides, and they could all see why he loved it so much when they sat across from him. The neon lights lined the turnpike like a runway. He could make all the noise he wanted with that engine, running and sounding as if it were going to explode at any second and creep his way down the street looking for races at any red light. No opponent was worth being scared over. Tommy told them all how the people in the car world knew what he had under the hood, and no one would object that fact. And it was true. Most nights, the pair, Tommy and whoever was lucky enough to be his passenger for a few hours, would look over cross the lane to some white Toyota as Tommy revved the engine, the other driver looking back over, hesitating his response rev, and then looking away. But it was no matter. Once Tommy and his partner for the evening got out of town on that smooth, straight road, he would open up, jumping from zero to ninety in a matter of seconds and quickly slowing down again a few seconds later. It was always enough to make anyone feel alive with the summer air blowing through the window, mixed with the heat emanating from the engine. The radio was never on because you couldn’t hear it. Tommy was always racing in the street even if he was racing alone. Watching him work on the Mustang, that red 1966 coupe with a 302 engine he put in it himself, could have given anyone chills. Tommy’s face would contort; sweat mixing with oil that ran from his greasy, black hair down to his canvas sneakers until he worked the valves just right so he could jet back around to the drivers side and fire it up. At each one of these outbursts his face would shift, not into

ecstasy, but back into a reserved demeanor as if he and the car were one and Tommy had found a way to cure himself of his own illness— to open himself up and take a wrench to his chest and repair all that was broken within. Cody would find himself in the garage, a small shack behind Tommy’s mother’s house, most afternoons when he felt that old and dead beat town had given him nothing except the mosquito bites on his forearms. He would swing open the two wooden doors, see Tommy, whom he had known for the last decade since they were ten, hunched over whatever ball of metal he had on the workbench to Cody’s right, his own reflection of blond hair and black jeans sitting on the car. His eye would catch the clock on the back wall, a turquoise relic from a 1960’s kitchen, and follow it down to the radio, providing the room with Neil Young droning on about fading away into the black, and then finally the small piece of carpet on the floor that was stain-free despite hours and hours of being laid under the Mustang. The eyes of Tommy’s father watched over the garage like a priest in a church, from a photo of the old man, Tommy’s car guru, on the workbench. Cody thought it would be a touching tribute to give Tommy the photo when his father died from cancer four years before. “Damn,” Cody said. He dropped the can of oil he was holding onto the square rug. The mark the liquid made was a noticeable intruder to an otherwise pristine and orderly workspace. “I’m sorry, man.” “It’s cool. I’ve got this.” All Cody could see were Tommy’s legs jutting out from under the car, but he didn’t miss a beat. He got up and walked over to a blue tool chest, felt around inside one of the thinner drawers on top and pulled out a box of baking soda. Tommy was a guy who could always find a way, a guy with all of the answers buried deep within his bones, as if they were porcelain like graffiti on a schoolboy’s desk. It had been that way since the beginning when they had first met during a game of kickball where Tommy improvised a rubber ball out of a few old newspapers crumpled in some duct tape and rolled into a sphere. Cody felt it was important to keep a handy man around him, someone who could fix any situation fast. He always thought he could learn a thing or two from Tommy. Tommy bent down and poured some of the white powder on the stain. “Let that sit for about ten minutes, and then I’ll vacuum it up,” he said. Tommy walked back over to the car and started rubbing a rag on the windows. Cody paused. “Would you ever sell the car, like if you ever needed the money,” he said. “Are you one of those guys, ya think?” “Hell no!” Tommy smirked. “I’m no middle-aged poser. This isn’t just some shit I do on the weekends. You know that.” Cody chuckled, mimicking Tommy’s expression. “I mean I know that…I’m just saying though. But in case YOU didn’t know this: word around here is that you’re some kind of legend. I hear about you from the kids I serve ice cream to at Carvel’s. You should hear ‘em go on. ‘I saw Tommy the other night. He beat the piss out of the Linehan’s brothers’ Pontiac.’ One girl said this one, Tom: ‘I heard he puts whiskey in the tank to make it run like lightnin’. Shit’s hysterical!” “And that’s why I would never get rid of old Daisy here,” Tommy said, his head motioning toward the car. “Plus I’ve put way too much into this thing. A lot of time and money invested. I’ve conditioned her to run the way she does. I’ve raised this car, Cody. I use her practically every night, twice on the weekends. I would never sell it to some ass-backwards collector who would only take her out on Sundays until he don’t anymore. Something this precious would be a waste to let it sit and rot.” “That’s gonna be you man: old and fat! And bald!” “Ha. Shut up and get the vacuum out of the corner.” ---

Outside the car at the starting line, Tommy put on his gloves and helmet. The flood lights shone onto the Mustang and his competitor on the other track, a silver Camaro, which had already started revving its engine. The smell of gasoline, beer and popcorn mixed into the air. For once Cody thought it must be nice to be next to the heat simmering out of the hood; the end of summer breeze brought in the beginning of autumn, making Tommy a little cold in his black t-shirt. “Yo Tom!” Tommy gave a “two minutes” hand signal to the race officials. In the stands, a few men in baseball caps checked their watches. A few teenagers in the front row pulled out their cell phones, looking for anything to keep their attention running until the action on the strip started up. Two hundred people sat waiting for the young blooded American to get back in the lion’s cage and deliver them their ten dollars worth of cheap thrills. “What’s up man? You gotta make this quick.” “I know, I know,” Cody said, moving his arm back and forth in a manner that told Tommy to calm down. “I just wanted to say good luck. If you don’t break the track record tonight, it’s fine. At least you went for it. You’re only twenty so just relax.” Tommy’s brown eyes stared back at him as he took a breath and nodded. Cody hoped Tommy knew he didn’t just say that because he felt obligated to be some voice of old worldly wisdom. “Thanks.” Tommy turned and ran back to the car. He got in, a knight bound for glory on another crusade with his eyes on the prize. All that lay in front of him was a stretch of road that looked as if it had no end. He sat behind the wheel, his hands clenched and ready, one on top and one on the shift stick to his right. As the pistons pumped in old Daisy, Cody could tell Tommy’s mind was doing the opposite: clearing itself out as if he wasn’t thinking at all. He revved his engine, pumping even more life through the veins of the car, burst by burst, and waited for that green light to turn on so he could set fourth and conquer. The tires screeched, both cars holding back for one final second as the back tires made one last mark on the earth, and the Camaro and Mustang took off, Tommy leading. Cody’s best guess was that he must have peeled out at ninety in only three seconds, which from his memory was a personal best for Tommy. He was gunning it straight down that quarter mile. They were going to call it any second. The crowd was on its feet. The cell phones had disappeared and the mass of people’s heads turned from right to left as the two supercharged cars burst into a sonic dimension inconceivable to any ordinary Sunday driver. Cody could feel the excitement Tommy had. It was in the air and it was contagious, stirring a reaction from anyone and everyone it had the chance of reaching. There was another screech. The Mustang slammed into the side wall suddenly, riding along the guardrail as sparks flew out, evoking screams out of the now standing audience members. The screams turned to gasps as the car came to a halt. Tommy didn’t move. Cody ran down the sidelines and up to a fence, pushing his head against the metal as if that would make the barrier go away. The paramedics came seconds later and carefully removed Tommy from the car. Cody couldn’t move. Daisy sat crinkled and mangled like a used cigarette butt, burnt out and discarded. Once used as a tool to get away, the car had now become an oppressor. He wished he could have stopped him that night, but somewhere along the line he knew he couldn’t stand in front of a drag racer and expect to win. ---

The following week, the strip held a brief ceremony for Tommy. It was determined that he had died on impact. By the time he was in the ambulance, it had already been too late. A few regulars at the track went up to the microphone and said a few words here and there about a “bright, young kid” and tried to lighten up the situation with a few doses of how “he died doing what he loved.” They announced that had he finished the race, Tommy would have broken the record given his velocity in comparison to the Camaro. At the end, the crowd held a moment of silence followed by applause. The two drivers on the track made as much noise as their vehicles would permit. Three weeks later, some other driver from Trenton would break the record. Even for a seasoned driver like Tommy, all it took was an inch of the wheel to turn one way or another for all to go wrong. When the car is moving that fast, it’s hard to tell who is really driving anyway. Cody sat in the stands with an entire week worn on his face. Why him, he thought. Why Tommy? Confused by how quickly the presence of his friend flashed through his life, Cody was trying to grasp answers, desperately hoping he had a baking soda solution for all of it. After a few minutes, he realized it would have been best for the Mustang to sit and rot away in some old man’s garage.

MIND YOUR PEN by daniel halpern I hope to let these words swoop Up in flames and hover in the air For only floating spirits to read. But there is paper no more, Dusty books to raise screens, and finger oils To coagulate and harden on keys. The pen’s life has been sustained, Hooked to life support that runs at a cost. An unfair trade for the freedom to write With the catch to be held for every word At every time, as one person with a flat identity. As if personal development, phases, and changes Don’t exist in the mind. As if one person is, and was ever, Just one person. The pen is still a sword That cuts through hearts and flesh, Raining ink blood onto the earth. The pen is still a saber That tears open the walls of pretensions, And exposes sometimes dangerous inner feelings.

Consider as you write that your words Are just as likely to be read To your grandchild before bed As they are to be read By the court as evidence To justify your execution. The pen is a weapon given to school children, Unaccompanied by this letter of instruction. The pen is a weapon that must be handled delicately To prevent self-inflicted wounds And the harm of those you love. One failure in articulation can result in dire consequences For your standing among the tribe. While you sharpen and hone your blade’s edge, Be cautious of how deep your ink will seep.

MICHELLE THE PICKY EATER by michelle ciccarelli Grapes, pretzels, a cookie, and a sandwich: typical foods you would expect to find in a third grader’s lunch box. Most third graders would be happy to discover a lunch like that, eating the sandwich quickly to get to the sweets (or maybe eating dessert first if they were feeling adventurous). But for me, it was a challenge: how do I get rid of the gross sandwich without anyone noticing and forcing me to eat it? Watching the lunch aides circle the cafeteria, I would stuff the sandwich to the back of my lunch box and eat my grapes, pretzels and cookie like a good kid, smiling if any of the aides walked by. But once the voice on the loudspeaker announced the end of lunch, I would casually walk to a trash can, lunch box unzipped, and quickly empty the sandwich into the trap in the midst of the sea of students. The lunch aides never once saw me do it. I have always been a picky eater. When I was little, my diet consisted almost completely of bread, fruit, and American cheese. No matter how much my parents pleaded, it was an all-night ordeal to get me to eat something as simple as a raisin. Oftentimes, even if I did put it in my mouth, I would gag or spit it out— wrong texture, wrong taste, wrong food, wrong everything. I did not want these strange foods in my body when I could just have the safe, normal ones instead. Growing up, we had a lot of picture books in our house. One of them in particular always seemed to speak to my childhood problems, as dramatic as they seemed at the time. It was called DW the Picky Eater, a story about the popular little sister to Arthur, a cartoon aardvark who had his own book series and TV show. The story mainly consisted of DW’s rant about which foods she refused to eat, much to the dismay of her exhausted parents, who simply wanted to have a nice night out. My parents would often read this story to my sister and I before we went to bed. The book, I assume, was meant to be a lesson to children that DW’s behavior was ridiculous, and that she and her parents would be much happier if she would just try some new foods. After all, isn’t it silly for her to say she doesn’t like things if she has never even tried them? At the end of the story, she finally tries spinach and discovers that (drum roll please) she actually likes it! After that, DW and her family are happy, and can go out to eat whenever they want. I secretly took comfort in the fact that DW’s problems were remarkably similar to my own. DW would not eat peas. Ugh peas? Me neither. She would not eat meatloaf. What kind of evil parents would make her eat meatloaf?? She did not like the taste of lasagna. Well, of course not, who would? Although I was old enough to realize that DW was not a real person, just a character, not to mention an aardvark in a book, I took comfort in the fact that there could be other people who shared my disgust for the majority of the foods set out on the dinner table. I ignored the ending, wrinkling my nose at DW’s decision to try the spinach. Those foods were NOT tasty, no matter what DW’s parents told her. These kinds of food problems seemed to crop up everywhere, especially at family gatherings. In the safety of my own home, I could always rely on my mom to make waffles or cereal when we had some kind of foreign, odd-smelling dish for dinner, like stir fry or fish. But when we went to a relative or family friend’s house, all bets were off. There were no back-up foods: eat or go hungry. My parents

would warn my sister and I of this before traveling, telling us to eat snacks in the car and to expect to have to try something new at dinner that night. They told us both that eventually, we would need to suck it up and try new things. They were convinced we would like the new foods, but I knew better. Christmas Eve was always the worst. My family celebrates Christmas Eve with my dad’s side, and true to our roots, we always have the traditional Italian Christmas Eve dinner: seven courses of fish. I was always nervous for dinner, knowing that I would probably eat bread and buttered pasta, or worse, be forced to try one of the mysterious fish dishes. There was lobster with linguine, cold salmon, and white tentacles floating in a green stew. My uncles and aunts constantly encouraged me to try the different dishes, to which I always shook my head, no thank you. Why would I eat that repulsive looking thing when there was bread I could eat instead? Unaware that my parents struggled to make me eat something almost every day, they often looked puzzled, or would insist that I try it anyway. I would put the piece of food in my mouth and chew quickly, hoping to get rid of it as soon as possible without gagging, telling the relative that it was “pretty good” until they walked away, satisfied. It would be too embarrassing to admit to them that I didn’t like the Italian food, let alone that I didn’t even want to try it. Although I was picky at all meals, lunch was always the worst. I detested sandwiches of almost every kind and preferred to eat only the snacks my mom packed on the side. I ended up being stuck with a bland cheese sandwich, perhaps with bologna or bacon bits added in if we had them. After a while, I started disliking those too - not because I wouldn’t eat cheese or bread, but because the mushy sandwich squished in the back of my lunch box, the cheese slimy from sitting in the warm cafeteria air, only became less appealing day after day. For a solid three to four months in third grade, I went through a regular routine of secretly disposing of these sandwiches. My mom would pack my lunch for me the night before, and I would obediently bring it to school with me the next day without a peep, throwing it out once lunch ended. Of course, this plan could not last forever. One day, I made the mistake of forgetting to throw out my sandwich before the end of lunch. Later that afternoon, my mother approached me, holding open my orange and blue lunch box, with the sad looking cheese sandwich still squashed inside. “What is this?” my mother wanted to know. I shifted uncomfortably, not responding. “Why didn’t you eat your sandwich?” I shrugged. “Michelle, have you been throwing out your sandwich at school?” Under the pressure of my mother’s eyes and the traitor sandwich glaring at me from the lunch box, I had no other choice but to admit the truth. “Yes,” I said, my eyes full of tears. My mother, with good reason, was furious. Why had I continued to ask her to pack these sandwiches if I knew I didn’t like them and wasn’t going to eat them? Why had I been wasting her money like this? I had no answers for her and instead shamed myself internally for not throwing out the sandwich like I always did. I didn’t throw out my sandwiches after that. As the years went by, I slowly became a less picky eater. I had branched out to more than just bread, cheese, and fruit, and became a little less afraid of trying new foods. Although my taste was definitely more limited than that of my peers, I was able to function as a normal eater in society without most people noticing my selective food choices. I became close friends with a girl named Adri, who was also a picky eater, and we commiserated over the exotic foods neither of us wanted to try at family gatherings. However, we were both used to having other people always prodding us to try new things, which

helped make us a bit less picky little by little. By the time I went to Europe in college, I was bold enough to try some new foods, although I definitely had a limit. On a group excursion to Amsterdam early in the trip, our chaperones announced that we would be eating at a fancy Indonesian restaurant for dinner. Indonesian?? My stomach dropped. I had never had Indonesian food. Was it like Chinese food? I didn’t like that. Was it more like German food? I had no idea, but I grimaced at the thought of having to force some unappealing mystery foods in my mouth, since there would be no way to avoid it in a nice restaurant surrounded by eighty other students. I realized that things were different now from when I was a kid: I wouldn’t always be in my quiet home where my mom could make me waffles when I didn’t like what we were having for dinner. More often than not, I was going to be faced with foods I had never tried, and there wouldn’t be a backup food just in case — what was on the plate would be what I had to eat. At the Indonesian restaurant, we were brought samplings of eight or so different dishes so we could get a little taste of everything. I tried the majority of the dishes, and I was surprised to find that although I didn’t like a few of them, I liked the majority and even was eager to have seconds. I was proud of myself, as silly as it seemed, and this gave me the confidence to try different dishes in other countries I visited. In Germany, I tried bratwurst and found it wasn’t too different from a plain old sausage, except with different dipping sauces. In Paris, after a bit of coaxing, I even tried the slimy escargot. Coated in oil, butter, and garlic, you could hardly tell it was a snail. Although it often took pressure from others to try new foods, I found that when I did, I generally liked them, with some exceptions. I started making an effort to try things without being asked, so no one would know I didn’t want to My picky eating has always embarrassed me, even when I held steadfast to it. It seemed that if the whole world could like a food, shouldn’t I be able to as well? But I’ve realized that it is not embarrassing to not like foods; what’s embarrassing is to not even want to try them. So now, when I go to my family’s house on Christmas Eve, I try the lobster linguine without anyone having to force me. Even if I don’t like it, well, at least I’ll know for next time. In a world full of crazy things, it’s silly to be afraid of food; it shouldn’t hold you back from doing the things you want to be a part of. DW was right; sometimes, you’ve just gotta try it.

THE NIXON OF SALAD by lindsay geller My impeachment occurred while I was filling up my second plate of spinach. I should have never been so greedy. Over the past two and a half months of successful thievery, I had gotten cocky. I had long ago neglected to go into the back section of the dining hall or duck into the small alcove. I had let myself get too comfortable. I guess the only person I really have to blame is myself, although the tricky dick who intimated me by the salad bar won’t be leaving unscathed either. I’d like to say that I was minding my own business when the black man in the button up shirt approached me because I believe that I was. He, on the other hand, was convinced that I was a high

level threat to his precious domain. I don’t remember if he opened up with “Can I ask you a question?” or “Can I talk to you?” but if it was the former then he’s a dirty rotten liar and if it’s the latter then I should have just said no. Instead, I said, “Sure,” like any other bored, tired, and mildly unstable college student. I thought he was going to ask me my opinion about the quality of the vegetables available at the salad bar, a topic on which I do consider myself an expert. However, he said, “I know you’ve been stealing, and you need to stop. I’ve been watching you for a while now, and if you do this again, I’m gonna have to report you.” Truth be told, my heart plummeted when I heard this. I don’t know if it was from a fear of consequences or a feeling of betrayal from my home, but I was devastated. I wanted to cry, “I am not a crook!” I also just wanted to cry. (It should be noted that I was in a very stressed, emotional state of being for a reason I cannot now remember so it must not have been that important. Nonetheless, whatever it was had been weighing on me when this interaction occurred, so I’m going to attribute part of my reaction to that forgotten affliction.) Luckily, I was able to keep myself together long enough to retort, “Okay, so do you want me to put this back?” I gestured to the spinach on my plate in an effort to remind him of the ridiculous topic of debate, just in case he had forgotten. “No, I don’t want you to put it back. I just want you to stop.” I wondered if he was wearing a wire and, if so, who I could pay to erase the tapes. “Okay, I completely understand,” I said into the hidden mic, even though I didn’t. I mean, it wasn’t like I was stealing pizza, ice cream, or the Declaration of Independence. Who, besides me, even wanted this spinach? Who was I hurting with my acquisition of leafy greens? There was always more than enough to go around, even by the time dinner ended. In a popularity contest among foods, spinach is a mathlete. Introduced into modern society too early to be hip like kale or quinoa, but too late and too bitter to have the devoted following of bananas and apples, spinach is an overlooked and underappreciated food. If anything, I was performing a public service by putting those unused leaves to good use rather than letting them rot. I was the Nixon of Salad, but, like a Watergate security guard, the manager took me by surprise and indicted me. Feeling justified in my injustice, I wanted to find someone in power at my overpriced private college and report the incident. That, however, would require me to tell them why I needed to steal the spinach in the first place, which would mean admitting to a far worse crime than petty vegetable theft. I possessed a contraband item— a blender— to make daily green smoothies, hence my need for greens. Short of going to the Boston Common and plucking wild greens in between the bodies of sleeping homeless people and rabid squirrel territories, the only way for me to get my fix (for free, anyway) was picking them from the dining hall. Now, however, my secret garden was found out, and I was banished from it. Though I narrowly avoided being banned from the subpar dining hall I spent thousands of dollars a year to tolerate, I didn’t stop stealing food from it. The jig was up with spinach, but I believe my banana and apple smuggling days will continue even after I graduate. The next year, the college switched food providers and changed the management staff. Many employees lost their jobs, including my personal frenemy the manager. I moved off-campus anyway, and was thus forced to acquire spinach the old-fashioned way (trading my best ox and a future daughter’s hand in marriage for a lifetime supply). I had hoped that the manager’s and my relationship, from its lack of personal interaction, would have improved. We could have looked at each other askance the few times an underclassmen friend offered to give me a guest meal. Yet, it was not to be. I never saw him again, but I never stole spinach again either. But it didn’t matter, I was already the Nixon of Salad. No matter how many honest meals I ate throughout my college career, I would only be remembered for my scandal.

SELF-PORTRAIT by zoë fay-stindt I can’t help it, I keep peeling – inside, I find myself pruned like bath fingers and unruly, hard to untangle, a mess of colors like deep, period red and box dye auburn, R57. I am who I was taught to be: photography dad’s photographer wannabe, poetry mom’s poet daughter, feminism drenched, a hybrid of aspirations they spat over, yelling from different rooms and between car windows. From their clutters I build a fantasy of myself, and believe it: nice girl, nice popular girl, and twist: with morals, motivation, good words and a good brain, a round fierceness. Protest participant, leading chants, good hygiene, passable complexion, bilingual, loyal, OK cook. I hide my bottom row of crooked teeth, the blooms of discolored skin on my biceps, the patch of peach fuzz at the bottom of my spine. I duck under unwashed comforters at the peak of things, can’t get basil or any other small plant to grow but at least I’m green, growing, little sprouts coming out of my fingers, inching outwards and looking to cling, thirsty for earth and feeling, thirsty for me, thirsty to start and keep peeling, a little tangerine stinging the torn cuticles of those reaching for pulp.

CLAIR DE LUNE by cameron davis All day today, I was at a loss for words. Then, without a shadow of doubt, I immediately knew what I would write about. It’s all about Clair de Lune. It’s a ubiquitous classical piano song, the kind without words. It’s also really sad, and unbearably big. I’m writing about this song because I know, one day, it will make me cry. I’m not a big crier at all—as a fairly reserved person, I keep my emotions under the surface. I’m stingy with them, maybe even a little afraid of them. The term “tearjerker” is null and void when it comes to me. There will be no tears to jerk. I don’t weep at romantic films or old people dancing. I just observe them. There was this day, in Washington Square Park, back when I thought I was going to NYU, back when I thought a lot of things. I walked through Greenwich Village with my dad, and we just looked at all the people and places (so many crammed into such a small space). Once we got to the park, it was overwhelming— there was too much. Once we got to a bench-lined path under some trees, I saw a small crowd gathered around a grand piano. They were sitting on the grass, the benches, standing, listening. There was no earthly explanation as to how the man, wearing beaten combat boots, could have dragged such a monstrous instrument down crowded Manhattan streets on a beautiful day. There was also no explanation as to how he, with his tattoos and suspect ponytail, could be creating music with such precision and fragility. Like many things in New York, it was a contradiction you had to watch, not question, because there was no answer. My dad looked at me. “Let’s sit down for a while.” So we did. We sat, saying nothing, and listened to the pianist piano his way through a song that sounded like a million things all at once. I thought about how lucky I was to be there, with someone who cared about me so much. And I realized that soon I would be headed to college, and adulthood. On some level, I knew that my dayto-day life with my family would change, and there wouldn’t be any going back. So now I realize that one day, when I truly live independently, this song will be a relic of the past and not a reminder of my present. Maybe I’m just kidding myself and it already is. But when I’m really and truly away from my family, it will be just a song, not a memory. And maybe then I’ll cry. I guess that’s true with a lot of things, though. Empty things, like songs and smells and places, are just vessels that are filled with what actually matters: memories and feelings of our most loved people. When the people go, the songs and smells and places will hurt because they’re representative of an absence. But the sadness doesn’t make them any less beautiful. After the pianist finished the song, there were a few moments of stunned, heavy silence. Everyone considered the enormity of what they had just heard. After a while, the pianist rose from his bench. “That was Clair de Lune.”

NOT QUITE SIXTEEN by erin kayata December 19th, 2009: I am less than two months away from turning sixteen. I have only kissed one boy, and it was a brush on the lips at my eighth grade science fair. And then I meet him. I ask him to dance at my friend’s Sweet Sixteen. We begin talking after that and he tells me about how he sails pirate ships and spends his summers by the sea. He gets drunk sometimes with a friend called Lettuce, and his ex-girlfriend, Dusty, killed herself a few months ago. I don’t know anyone who drinks, and I don’t know anyone who died. Something inside me begins to grow— the nerves that want to protect him. We go to another Sweet Sixteen together, and he kisses me. This kiss is more than just a brush on the lips. I agree to be his girlfriend, wanting to cherish him and learn his secrets. He promises to stop drinking for me. I am still not quite sixteen. 4 months: I’ve just turned sixteen. My mother tells me I cannot be in love, because I don’t really know what love is at this age. She tells me to be careful. His eyes are like sea glass, and his affections may change like the ocean that shaped him. But he is all I ever wanted. He is the first boy to call me “beautiful” when I know that my nose is too big and my thighs are never thin enough. He says he loves me for the first time in a note written in pencil that I still keep in my nightstand drawer. He says he’s felt this way since the first time he kissed me. He draws cartoons of faceless people and I want so badly to curl up inside him and learn why. The first time we fight, I hide in my upstairs bathroom, so no one knows I’m crying. The familiar sensation of sobbing somehow feels alien and I realize this is the first time I’ve cried over a boy. The nerves are growing, and I cannot turn back. 18 months: In health class, they warn me that alcohol or nicotine could be my first addiction. They never tell me that it could be a boy with freckled shoulders, born from too much sun. He tells me I’m like the summer night to him. I captivate him and cured him. I am the most important thing in his world and to me, that means I matter. He tells me as we sit on the beach that he knows he wants to marry me. Still, no one gives me the most important warning of all: do not want. 31 months: I am hopelessly consumed by him. We say goodbye before we leave for college at his house by the sea and once again, I am surprised at how many tears I am capable of producing. “We’re tethered together,” he writes to me in a note left in my mailbox the morning he moves away. He immediately cuts ties with me when I get to school, two weeks after him, but something feels off. My mother calls him heartless, but I know there is more.

This is the first warning sign, the edge in his deep voice and the swirling panic in his ocean eyes. I don’t eat much and tell myself that’s fine. We get back together a month later. He shows up at my doorstep with my favorite pink roses. I thought I got him back, but I had already lost him. We come home again for Thanksgiving and this time, he cries to me of losing everything around him, including himself and me. I am helpless. We forget about it the next day. 42 months: We are driving home from his beach house, and his car is low on gas. I beg for him to pull over; he resists. We go on this way until he relents, getting off at a random exit. He gets lost getting back on the highway. He makes a wrong turn and pulls out his phone for directions. I tell him not to use his phone and drive; I insist that I’ll read it to him. We go on like this, back and forth. The rest of the ride is filled with miserable tension and slammed-brake turns. We pull into my driveway, and he breaks. He hates school, and he hates his life. I think he must hate me. He tells me no one would notice if he died, and I wonder how he’s not yet noticed that not having him in this world would kill me. “I just want to die,” he says through his tears. I get him a glass of water and try to calm him down so he can leave, but his words make me cry, breathless, consuming sobs. I don’t know what to do. He has a panic attack when driving home, and I stay on the phone with him until I fall asleep, promising to do what I can to help him. But the fear of losing him has crept in and will stay with me for many, many nights. This is not the boy who drew me cartoons of blissfully blank-faced people. 48 months: I’m trying so hard to care for him that I don’t take care of myself. I get worse about food. My nerves are electrified, and I can’t rest. I grasp for comforting words like straws, but each one is never enough. Telling him to go to therapy is no good, but listening to him only makes me feel like he’s drowning and pulling me down with him. He tells me that I make him feel broken. He tells me that he doesn’t know what he wants from me. He lashes out whenever I cause him stress, once yelling at me because I wanted him to visit. He says he hates me seeing him cry, because it’s not manly. I am nineteen, and I miss being not quite sixteen. I miss being what he needs. He leaves, and I go under. The promise that he would live for me is broken, and I’m scared of how he’ll be. 54 months: We are no longer together, but I still feel him. My nerve endings are frayed and I am constantly panicked, not knowing what has become of him. I have nightmares, images of him and violence that taunt me. Sometimes the violence is towards others; other times it’s toward me. Either way, I wake up fearing for him. I hear that he’s dropped out of school. I date someone else, and even though I’m happy, I still feel guilty. I don’t even think he draws anymore. 58 months: I am on my third therapist. The questions that she asks during my first appointment are routine to me by now. She asks if I ever experienced any trauma, and the memory of the night in the 48th month comes out. She tells me it’s trauma, just not the kind we normally think of, like losing a leg in war. I feel guilty that some people can handle that, but I can’t handle this.

I remember telling my first therapist about that night. She tried to blame all my problems on him. I cried so hard my too fat thighs broke into a rash. I didn’t go back to that therapist again. My family drives by his house on our way to Thanksgiving at my uncle’s, and my mother makes a joke about how he’s dropped out of school. My stomach churns, just like it does when I look at my driveway sometimes. I know it will be a long time, if ever, before I am unafraid to feel not quite sixteen again.

MUSEUM PIECE by cameron davis Museums, I thought, were the kinds of things that were grandiose in the realm of the theoretical and a letdown in practice. Every time, I showed up expecting to be swept away by the art. But it never happened. Inevitably, it was always the people who fascinated me more. Moony new-love couples, parents desperately hushing miserable children, and people who showed up alone. And those esteemed and beautiful works of art could never compete with the humanity playing out in front of them. It was with great reluctance, then, that I went to MOMA that day. The truth was that I really had nothing else to do. The train was agonizing. We traveled through cheerful suburbia, concrete jungles, vast marshland, and back again, five thousand times over. Those were the different patches that made up New Jersey. By the time the train disappeared down into the Hudson, I was already regretting my decision to come to the city. I walked to the museum with weights on my feet. If nothing else, I decided, I would at least eat something. I waited through the line at the museum café. I stared down at my shoes. The hostess led me to a seat at one of the large communal tables that filled the space. They were so artisanal, so ruggedly crafted that it made me ill. I envisioned highly educated Brooklynites wearing small glasses— glasses so small they could only be functionally used by a rodent of some sort— prattling on about gender politics. The smarter you were, the smaller the glasses. But these weren’t the people who were sitting at this ridiculously rustic table. (Did MOMA have a Ralph Lauren sponsorship?) To my right was an old man, at least 85. He wore a sailor cap, a red and navy striped shirt, and a blue down vest. A younger woman I took to be his wife sat across from him. To my left was a young family. I sat in silence, toying with my water glass as the warmth of strangers’ conversations hummed around me. How strange it is, to be silent when everyone else is not. An apple juice arrived for me in a glass pitcher. “What is that?” the sailor-man asked. “It’s juice,” I said, pouring it in a glass.

“Looks like rum,” he said. I sniffed it. “Smells like juice.” I took a small sip. “Definitely apple juice.” He smiled at me. “I didn’t know they could make rum taste like apple juice these days.” “Miracles happen,” I said, returning his grin. “I guess you must be here to see the Matisse.” “I am. I want to see the cutouts.” “I met him, you know. In Paris, in the ‘50s. He helped us with our art. Very encouraging.” “Why were you in Paris?” “Everyone has a Paris.” He nodded to his wife. “She certainly had a Paris. It just wasn’t Paris.” “What was it, then?” “New York,” she said. “I just never left.” She moved her hand slightly, and the sunlight caught her ring. It was just this side of gaudy, but managed to be completely beautiful. “I love your ring,” I said. “Me too. It’s a fake, of course. At parties I would tell people it was real, and they believed me. The truth is, I got it for free. I worked for a very prominent jeweler on Fifth Avenue, and he made me cheap copies of different pieces to show off the merchandise. Costume jewelry is just so fun. Nearly all of my jewelry is fake.” The old man pointed at her. “Not your wedding ring, that’s for goddamn sure.” She laughed. “No. Not my wedding ring.” “It sounds like you’ve lived such interesting lives,” I said. “We have. And you know what’s so strange about the jewelry industry?” She stopped to take a sip of wine. “You learn how easy it is to create beauty.” I stood in front of an astonishing piece of art. It was a Matisse, filled with intricate paper cut outs and vivid colors. I tried to be fascinated by it, but it stood there flat against the wall. I looked at it, but it didn’t return my gaze. It was then I realized that maybe I should stop trying to appreciate art. The reasons why we create will always be more interesting than the products.

HOLLY KIRKMAN

FILLING THE BOX by christopher gavin Mary sat on her knees in the corner of the room next to the radiator. She was careful as she packed each plate, the happy, radiant colors no longer mattering, into a brown cardboard box marked “kitchen.” Every couple of minutes she sighed, tilting her head so her curly hair, a mix of light brown and grey, fell in front of her green eyes. She took a deep breath each time, working to relax herself as she pushed her hair back behind her ears. Jim, his work boots sounding heavy on the old wooden floor, appeared in the doorway on the other side of the room. “How about you just take a break, and we get something to eat?” he said. Mary continued to wrap the ceramic circles in paper towels. Each one would have to be well-protected for the journey ahead. “Oh, so now you don’t tell me to make something?” Mary said. “Nice one there, Jim.” “I’m just saying it’s already a quarter to seven. We can just go up to Gino’s and talk for a little. The plates can wait. This doesn’t have to be hard.” Mary froze and looked up at him. The inside of the room was now darker than the sunset outside. If James Jr. was at the apartment that night, this would be when she made sure he had his pacifier. Instead, the infant was at her mother’s, and in that moment she was thankful he was. She wouldn’t have to feel guilty for saying what she was about to say. “It’s been hard, Jim,” she said. “The fact that you’re trying to take it all in the other direction is actually only making this harder.” Jim’s face shifted, realizing he was under attack. Mary could see his blue eyes squint and his shoulders rise as his back became tense. “Oh, here we go again,” he said. “No, not again. It’s the same fucking problem, Jim. But how would you know? It would be easier to communicate with a whale with how goddam inattentive you are. You just nod your head with everything I say, and you think that makes you a good husband. And you know what? The whale would still know when to chip in. Can I be the one who can’t be bothered with anyone except myself for once?” Jim crossed his arms and looked down. She knew he would do that too. It had happened during all of her monologues during the last year or so. He turned his head to his right side, keeping his eyes on the floor. For a brief second, Mary wondered if he too saw all the scratches in the wood boards that had collected since they moved in five years ago; marks from moving the furniture and scuffs from shoes— the small movements of a life moving too quickly. She always wished she had the time to fix them. “Fine,” Jim said. “If you’re busy then, I can pick up Junior tonight.” Mary started packing again. “No, he’s staying there. It’s just easier, and my mom doesn’t mind.” “All right. Well do you have everything else you need for Saturday?” “Yeah. The movers and my sister are coming at nine.” For once the reality of the situation didn’t hit something cold and desolate inside of her. She could stomach the idea of letting her words sit in the air. It was only harder when she wore her little silver circle on her finger, but she wouldn’t need it anymore. ***

Five years earlier, the apartment was bigger than the last one the realtor had showed them. Anything was better than Jim’s mother’s basement, even if it was just to save the newlyweds some dough. There was an aura in the place that made it feel like a home. The walls in the hallway were a worn out shade of light blue with a few cracks that a little Spackle could fix. The green shag needed to go. But, as a bonus, the hardwood floors in the living room were had just been redone. “The rent is $3,900.00 a month,” said the realtor, whose shiny, advertising smile could charm the devil. The price was a little more than they’d hoped for, but it would work. With Jim’s contracting business gaining attention around Boston, money was less of the concern than it had been months before. Things began to take shape. “Can me and my wife discuss this in private for a few minutes, sir?” The realtor left Mary and Jim alone in the kitchen. The empty, white counters and cabinets held a sense of urgency in the decision-making. Mary was eager, thinking about what kinds of things they might hold. The absence of cans of corn and soup and a roll of paper towels and a toaster made Mary want to go out and beginning building her nest perched right up on the third floor on Concord Street. “I think this is the place,” Jim said. “The price is all right. Now that Stephen is working with me, we can pick up more clients, so that will help.” “Yeah definitely,” Mary said, her eyes scanning the kitchen’s ceiling. The square light fixture needed to be dusted. “I think we should move on it. How much longer can a place like this stay on the market? Someone else is going to see the potential in it and it’ll be gone.” It played out like it always did. Mary ran through the obvious, verbalizing all her thoughts. When finished, she waited for Jim’s response—always in agreement. Two different collections of plates sat in the shopping cart. On the right in the child seat of the cart was Mary’s choice: a light blue, ceramic set with little suns around the edges that looked as if they were hand drawn. Jim preferred the plain red ones on the left. Mary thought his defense that plates don’t have to be fancy was insufficient. Either way, Mary was glad to have small decisions in her life again. She didn’t have to rush out to look at apartments every weekend of the fall anymore. She could pick each little piece of the life she wanted, whether it was the towels in the bathroom—like the beige ones in the cart—or the mugs, doormats, candles or linens. “We can just get both,” Mary said. “I mean, why not?” As the words had left her mouth, Mary realized Jim might feel this was the first and only time any of his suggestions for items would be bought. “Whatever you think is best,” Jim said, wrapping his arm around her. “You always know what is best.” There it was again. Mary kept staring at the plates although she wasn’t looking at them. The tender and small agreements were coming more and more from Jim. First it was the wedding the year before where he took the stereotyped groom approach and “Yessed” her to death. In Jim’s defense, she told herself that all men did that. It was expected from like a guy like Jim, who would probably wear the same all-white New Balance sneakers his entire life, not to mention his light blue, 505 cut Levi’s. Yet this time was different, or rather, was different since the wedding itself. Everything from the laundry gathering in the corner of their bedroom back in the apartment to the plates in front of

them in the cart, she realized—in a fleeting second—Jim made the effort to slip these duties to her without making a fight out of it. As crazy as it sounded to her, she wished he would just put up a fight every once in a while to challenge her, to know what partnership could be. She knew he was working more at work though, building other people’s homes with his brother, and so she thought maybe these smaller things were her problems. But still, had Jim’s definition of being a spouse consisted only of adhering to what she wanted? They were only 25 when they married, but Mary thought Jim would surely understand what would be expected of him. Even after five years, Jim was often quiet when she brought up the conversation about beginning to have children. He stiffened when she mentioned giving up teaching and becoming a full-time, stay-athome mom and how she wanted to name the child James, if it was a boy. With the move-in to the new apartment coming up the next week, she was reminded about how easy it was to get him to say “yes” to the place. She was clearly more invested in it, letting her eagerness at the signing get the best of her. Mary realized she hadn’t given Jim a definite answer on the plates. “So, we will get both,” she said. *** There was a time when Jim was unpredictable. When they were younger and Jim drove a black muscle car and liked to tease her about little things like how much she would fret about her Friday night outfits. He had a sly grin and eyes that always searched the horizon when he was talking to anyone, a dreamer looking for what would unfold next. One night they had driven two hours on a whim to get to the coast and see that big, June moon laying low over the sea. He hadn’t told her where they were going, like he did when they would go to the cliffs on the far side of town. He would have fought to protect her from anyone. It was the man she fell in love with. “It’s so easy to love you,” Jim said to her on the beach that night. Mary knew it too. It wasn’t something he said just to find paradise by the dashboard light. But his eyes began to look further downwards each passing day after their engagement. He took up a job working in construction. His change in character could have been due to his fatigue, but also because of his need to shape up for a family. He shaved his beard. He quit smoking. He sold the car for the deposit on the catering hall for the wedding. It wouldn’t be for another five years that she would want the fighter inside him back to fight for her and the marriage, to fight against her and make her grow. She would want his once bruised and battered knuckles to resurrect in his speech, in conversations about what he thought was best for them and Jim Jr. It wasn’t always about keeping their plates protected in those white cabinets. It was about buying new ones when the old became broken and shattered, as they would in time, about updating when they outgrew those bright, ceramic discs for something sturdier. But with the ignorance that comes with the passage of time, Mary thought nothing of it. ***

Mary continued to pack the plates. The small things were close to filling the whole box up. “Ok. There are enough quilts in the box I just finished to last all hibernation,” Jim, said.

“Ok. Thanks. I think these are just about done.” Mary stood up and folded the top of the box up so it formed a pattern of overlapping squares. Each individual plate—some blue, some red— was wrapped up, the contents of an almost former life closed up in a box. Oh how she cared about each little one when they moved in; how badly she wanted each to be a piece of a puzzle she wanted to make into her life. The small decisions she made didn’t even matter. They, too, fell to the side of the road. When she taped the box shut, Mary felt as if she were putting the last period on one of those long-winded papers she wrote in college. Jim stood in silence for a moment before turning to his right and leaving the apartment. Mary turned the other direction and headed towards the kitchen to make something to eat. It wasn’t until she opened the cabinet that she realized she no longer had any plates to spare.

FOR FEASTING by zoë fay-stindt You love being born in the piled bones that scream for you, love being rebirthed each shower that slips off your skin, love the anxious energy of someone too nervous to play a cool attitude like they only happened to be there with you, only happened to bump your elbow then cup it like they knew what they were doing in the first place, had any fight in them when you walked in and loosened a piece of their stomach lining for a snack, made their lungs hope they’d refill, made the frame of the door around you shimmer like a mirage, and you’re thirsty enough. Yes, you love it – the cold heat of burning eyes, the unsettled, the bottom lip that quivers, bitten already before you got the chance. There is an anxiousness you eat, only found in the shaking of those who still believe in love — there’s a candor in it that tastes new, young meat, and you’re hungry enough.

SYMBIOSIS by marina starkey I only knew you in the deep tides of winter, with the cold piercing my skin like steel syringes, warming my blood with the tips of your fingers and your palms on my face: a doctor running through the movements. You hid the missing vertebrae from your spine, and I never knew the difference. When spring bloomed, the sun reflected off your lily leaves; I saw them browned and brittle with caterpillar holes. I ached to know the sweetness of your petals, but you grew weak; you let me thirst. In the summer I became the stomped bee with spindly legs twitching, trying to crawl, still in love with your foot and my blood between your toes.

BLUE by marina starkey Nearly eight and still quiet: the sky turns muted, and we hide behind the twilight, not dark enough to plead blindness. The stars do not light my room. Instead, the dark blue of night begs forgiveness -- tells me to rest in contentment, tells me this is how the times change. Here we will think we become new selves: once separate and eager, now trapped and fused. The sight of blue gets stuck behind the window.

PERFECTION by michelle ciccarelli Shauna stuck her finger as far down her throat as she could and vomited in the porcelain toilet. She smiled and wiped her mouth, her body feeling light and clean. She hooked her fingers under her protruding ribs; there was still work to be done, but she knew she was getting back on track, as long as she kept purging right after the nurses passed through her hall. A sharp knock on the bathroom door interrupted her thoughts. Shit— she hadn’t even heard anyone enter her dorm room. Shauna hated that those witches had all-access keys; it was a gross violation of her privacy. “Can I finish peeing, please?” Shauna snapped. The nurse outside sighed. “I know you’re not peeing, Shauna. I heard you as I passed your room for a double check. I was worried you might be doing this. I’m disappointed— I thought we were making good progress.” Shauna flushed the toilet, popped a mint in her mouth, and ripped the door open. Nurse Helen stood outside, her wrinkled, bloated face scrunched into a frown. “I wasn’t feeling well, okay? But of course, you’d assume the worst, wouldn’t you?” Shauna snapped. “Shauna, if you want to recover and get to go back home, you need to be honest with us. I understand that this is difficult, but lying to me won’t help either of us, and I don’t want to have to violate your privacy like this.” Shauna snorted. “It’s a bit late for that.” Ever since she had arrived at the Planchard Institute, every inch of Shauna’s body, room, and possessions had been scrutinized. They took away her diet pills and laxatives, they checked her room for sharp objects (because you couldn’t be too careful with these types of patients), they poked and prodded her body with cold instruments, sighing in disappointment. They had no respect for the discipline it had taken her to get this far. Before the institute, Shauna had meticulously counted the calories in each teaspoon she allowed herself, carefully slicing olives and grapes to fit her strict requirements. She had learned how to take just enough laxatives to purge her system without giving herself the runs. She had been able to fast to the point that her fingers trembled violently and she passed out, waking up deliriously happy, feeling her bony fingers in glee. But Nurse Helen didn’t give a damn about this-she just wanted to get paid so she could shove carbs in her disgusting face. Nurse Helen shifted in her feet awkwardly. “I’m sorry you feel that way, Shauna. I wish you were comfortable in your stay here. We will try our best to make this feel like a home, but you need to earn our trust back first. Because you’re a minor, I’ll have to tell your parents about this— I’m sorry.”

Shauna groaned. She could picture her father’s sad, beady eyes poking out of his fleshy face, her mother’s pinched lips and aggressive cheekbones, accusing her. This is an embarrassment, Shauna, her mother would say. I can’t hide the fact that you’re at this place for much longer— please pull yourself together. Our family doesn’t deserve this. Her father would hug her and slip her a candy bar, telling her it was okay to eat, that she was only a teenager and needed to get healthy again to live her life. Not everyone eats their feelings, Dad. They didn’t have her resolve, her commitment, and she knew at the end of the day nothing they could say would faze her. They had visited her, once, shortly after she had arrived. Her father was humiliating, constantly trying to crack jokes with the tight-lipped nurses, while her mother barely said a word to them, sniffing at the beautiful paintings and plush beds in Shauna’s room. “God, Shauna, this place is expensive,” her mother hissed once the nurse left them alone. “The least you can do is get better as fast as you can.” “Please, Linda,” her dad said, rubbing Shauna’s back. Shauna resisted the urge to shove his hand away. “We will do whatever it takes to make sure our baby gets better.” Linda rolled her eyes, picking invisible lint off of Shauna’s bedspread. “You’re lucky I’ve convinced our relatives you’re away at boarding school,” her mother said. “But that won’t last for long. My mother would roll over in her grave if she knew her granddaughter was at an institution.” “Then why don’t you take me out of here, Linda?” Shauna snapped. Her mother narrowed her eyes. “I will not have an emaciated daughter. You will gain weight as fast as you can, so help me God!” “Okay, okay, that’s enough,” her father said, standing between them. “Let’s go get some lunch in the cafeteria, shall we?” “Shauna? Are you listening?” Shauna snapped back to reality. Nurse Helen scribbled something on her notepad, then turned to leave. “The dinner cart will be here soon, and I expect to see a clean plate. The bathroom will be locked while you eat, and I’ll check the trash.” “You can’t keep me from using the bathroom!” Shauna hissed, but she was already gone. Shauna rolled into her bed, trying to figure out how she would dispose of her next meal. The maroon walls, with intricate gold details around the large windows, looked out onto a sprawling lawn with fountains and a massive inground pool. She didn’t care. They couldn’t use luxurious things to make her gain weight— nothing could. Shauna lifted her queen size mattress and took out the pile of pictures underneath it. They were all of the same person: French supermodel Suzanna Baudelaire. There were pictures of her on the runway, at New York Fashion Week, out and about with her millionaire boyfriend. Shauna’s favorite picture was the one of Suzanna on the cover of Vogue. Her teeth were impeccably white, her smile flawless. She was wearing a skintight black dress and had voluminous brown hair and large round eyes, much liked Shauna’s. Her twiggy legs extended for miles, and you could make out the outline of her ribs beneath her dress. She was perfect, the only perfect human Shauna had seen. Everyone else was fat and repulsive. Once she got out of this place, Shauna would be right back on track to be a model like Suzanna. Doctor Brenda said she needed to gain at least ten pounds to leave Planchard, but to be like Su-

zanna, Shauna knew she needed to lose at least ten, if not more. Suzanna was everything, and Shauna was nothing. Suzanna had left the modeling scene for a year to do some kind of activist work and had not been in any magazines recently. At least, none that Shauna had access to during her six months at Planchard. But that was no matter. Shauna knew Suzanna would be back, and better than ever. She just couldn’t wait to be at the top, finally skinny and perfect too. *** Early the next morning, Shauna awoke to a knock on the door. Her stomach growled violently— she had thrown up last night’s dinner into the exotic potted plant in her room and carefully buried it under the dirt, spraying perfume to mask the smell. Perhaps the nurses would catch on eventually, but by then she would have already purged successfully. She looked at her arms— her elbows looked pointy, but her flabby arms disgusted her. They were nothing like Suzanna’s: white, thin, angelic. Nurse Helen peeked her head through the doorway. “Good morning, Shauna. Please get dressed quickly and come to the lounge. We have a special guest speaker who I think you’ll really like.” She shut the door quietly and left. Shauna groaned. The speaker was probably some repulsive ex-patient who had gained back the weight, claiming they were “happy and healthy”. They would babble on about the meaning of health and how to treat your body right. It was all bull. They weren’t even happy; they were sad, fat, and alone. Shauna dressed quickly, alarmed to discover that her size 00 jeans did not fit any looser. The nurses were getting to her; they were crushing her dreams. She angrily kicked her dresser, cutting her ankle on the side. A small cut opened and blood began to trickle down her leg. Good— maybe she would bleed the extra pounds out. Bleed and bleed and bleed until her fat body was glowing and perfect. She had begun to make cuts on her ankles a few weeks ago, making them small enough to pass as nicks from her razor but large enough that they would bleed. It was a small thrill, a thrill of disobedience, the same kind she got each time she purged successfully. And who knew, perhaps if she bled enough, she would lose extra weight. Most of the other patients were already in the lounge by the time Shauna arrived. At the time, there were about twenty patients in the institute, but often there were less. They were male and female, and ranged from adolescents to middle aged adults, but all had some kind of problems with food. They chatted amongst themselves quietly, gaunt cheekbones flashing in the morning sunlight. For her part, Shauna tried to avoid them. There was no need to make friends with these people— everyone was fighting for themselves. She had no interest in them or their problems. It was easy to tell which people were the newest; they had a frightened, defensive look about them, and they were often the thinnest. They were not yet used to Planchard’s day-today schedule: therapy/motivational speakers, school if you were an adolescent, then exercise and nutrition in the afternoon, and some free time here and there. Free time was limited, though. You never knew what patients could be doing in their free time. The high-ceilinged room was brightly lit by a massive chandelier. There was a beautiful grand piano in the far corner, rumored to be the present from a grateful ex-patient. It was meant to be extravagant, to give the patients a luxury experience to inspire them to “get better,” but Shauna found it exaggerated and ridiculous.

Shauna sat in a leather chair in the back of the room by herself. The nurses then served breakfast: eggs over easy, wheat toast, garnished fruit, and yogurt. She hated that they hovered over her, leering to find any sign that she was refusing to eat. She stealthily shoved pieces of bread in her long sleeves, but she knew she would simply have to purge the rest later. “Ahem,” said a voice from behind her. Shauna turned quickly, glaring at the thin woman who had walked in behind her. “I’d be careful doing that, if I were you,” she said, looking pointedly at Shauna’s sleeves. Shauna narrowed her eyes. “I’d mind my own business, if I were you.” The woman frowned and walked towards the front of the room to take a seat. Shauna continued to shove small pieces of bread in her sleeve, eating as little of the breakfast as possible, mostly only the fruit. “Shauna.” Nurse Helen approached her. “Are you eating your breakfast?” “Yes,” Shauna said, rolling her eyes. “Could you please roll up your sleeves for me, Shauna?” Shauna glowered. “No.” “Shauna.” “You can’t make me.” “Roll them up.” Shauna rolled up her sleeves, allowing the small pieces of bread to tumble onto the floor. Nurse Helen sighed and bent to pick them up. “I’ll get you some more toast, and I will sit next to you until you eat it. I don’t want to baby you, but you have given me no choice.” Shauna’s face burned as Nurse Helen walked away. She couldn’t believe that bitch had ratted her out. Everyone was jealous of Shauna’s resilience, her perseverance to get the perfect body, and they wanted to tear her down in any way they could. She was sure Suzanna had had to deal with these kinds of malicious people on her way to the top too. The snitch woman walked towards the back of the room, eyes full of false sympathy for Shauna. As she passed, Shauna kicked her in the shin, hard. “Ow, jeez, what the hell?” the woman shrieked. Nurse Helen ran over, a new plate of breakfast in hand. “Shauna! You must be kidding. I’m sorry, Lillian, this will not happen again,” Nurse Helen said apologetically. “Are you hurt? “No,” Lillian snapped, glaring at Shauna. “Some kids just have no respect.” She walked away angrily. Nurse Helen frowned at Shauna. “You are too old for this. Don’t make me have you stay in your room and not even come to any of these sessions. Enough of this childish behavior. If you lash out at anyone else, there will be serious repercussions.” Shauna rolled her eyes, looking at the floor. She wished the old hag would let her stay in her room, anything would be better than this. “Here is your breakfast. I expect you to eat every last bite.” Nurse Helen pulled up a chair next to Shauna, crossing her arms. Shauna sighed. Nurse Amelia approached the podium. She was the head nurse, and by far the oldest. Her gray hair was stretched thin across her tanned scalp, and the bulbous glasses she always wore magnified her already large eyes. Shauna figured she would croak any day now. “Thank you all for joining us this morning,” Nurse Amelia rasped. Shauna snorted— as if

they’d had a choice. “The speaker we have for you this morning is someone many of you may recognize. She was admitted to the Planchard Institute in the fall of 2008, and, upon recovering, pursued a very successful professional career. She has had one or two relapses, but she has now decided to change her career in favor of bringing support and help to teens like yourselves at institutes around the world. We at the Planchard Institute are very proud to present to you Ms. Suzanna Baudelaire.” Shauna’s head shot up. Suzanna?? Her breathing quickened as the door to the lounge began to open. Shauna smoothed her hair, cursing herself for not dressing better. She couldn’t believe today would be the day she would finally meet Suzanna, her role model, her idol. If Suzanna had gotten out of here unscathed, who was to say Shauna couldn’t? She began to grin foolishly, playing with her bony knuckles. The door opened, and Suzanna strode in, teeth gleaming as white as in Shauna’s pictures. Her hair was shiny and fell in perfect waves, framing her lovely oval face and glimmering brown eyes. She was wearing a tight pastel sweater and skinny black jeans with heels. Shauna looked eagerly to see if Suzanna’s ribs were visible underneath her sweater, but instead was alarmed to see a small roll of fat nestled at Suzanna’s hips. Her legs strained against the denim, threatening to rip open and reveal what Shauna imagined to be fatty, cellulite-ridden thighs. Even her arms seemed flabby. For the first time since entering the Planchard Institute, Shauna didn’t have to force the feeling of nausea to rise in her throat. This was not the Suzanna in the pictures, not even close. Suzanna reached the podium and shook Nurse Amelia’s hand, smiling serenely. She brushed a strand of hair from her eyes and faced the audience. “Good morning, Planchard Institute. It is so wonderful to be here,” Suzanna said in her soft French accent. “A little over six years ago, I was admitted as a patient to the Planchard Institute. I was seventeen, and I had been modeling in the United States for some time. However, my mother, who had come to the United States with me, had become very concerned for my health, so she insisted that I attend the Planchard Institute until I was at a healthy weight to model again.” Suzanna paused, shifted her feet. “When I first arrived here, I felt exactly the same way many of you may feel now: I was angry, and frustrated. I didn’t need help, and I felt that the people here were blocking me from achieving my dreams to become a model. I thought I was at a healthy weight, and I resisted the institute to the best of my ability. But I came to realize that I was wrong. Anorexia is a disease, and it twisted my thoughts, made me think I was fat and ugly when, in reality, I was almost fifteen pounds underweight. Planchard helped me see through new eyes, to see what I was doing to my body because of this disease.” Shauna shook her head. It was a trap— it had to be. The witches here must have secretly pleaded Suzanna to gain weight and come talk to the patients. This was not the Suzanna Shauna knew, the one with thin arms and flawless legs that needed custom jeans to fit their small frame. Shauna knew she had to get Suzanna away from the nurses so she could ask her about the real story. “I have had some relapses over the years, I am sad to say,” Suzanna continued, “Looking at some of my magazine covers and photo shoots, I am ashamed of how I treated my body.”

She paused, looking into the distance. “But with the help of my friends and family and places like Planchard, I was always able to get healthy again. Although I loved modeling with all my heart, I came to the realization last year that what I really wanted to do was to help girls who were like me and struggling with this disease. So I got myself to a healthy weight and began speaking at institutes across the country for people who needed mentors. Planchard is so dear to my heart, though, and I know that they will work their hardest to make sure that each of you becomes healthy.” Suzanna beamed at the patients, who clapped politely. Nurse Amelia stepped up to the podium. “We will now have a Q&A session with Suzanna. You may ask anything you wish.” Shauna fidgeted through the Q&A session, eager to talk to Suzanna alone. Suzanna’s answers were all the same, lies about learning not to purge her meals and adopt a healthy lifestyle. Shauna pictured the Suzanna from the poster, knowing that she was the true Suzanna. It was horrifying what Planchard could do to people; Shauna would have to try extra hard not to let them get to her. She thought of Suzanna’s chubby thighs and shuddered— she would never let that happen to herself, no matter what any institution bribed her with. Finally, the Q&A finished. The other patients began heading to their next sessions. Suzanna and Nurse Amelia stood chatting at the podium. “We have arranged a special meeting for you with Suzanna, if you’d like to ask her any questions,” Nurse Helen said. “We know how much you admire her from what you’ve said during our sessions.” “Really?” Shauna’s heart quickened. If she could be with Suzanna alone, she would hear the real story, what the real Suzanna thought. “Yes, yes definitely.” Shauna nodded vigorously. “All right then, follow me.” Shauna followed Nurse Helen out of the room and down the hallway into a small, well-lit conference room that was usually used for group therapy. The room was on the fourth floor and overlooked the sprawling garden below through a massive full-length window. She sat down in one of the chairs. When Shauna heard the clacking of heels coming down the hallway, her heartbeat quickened. Suzanna entered the room smoothly, shaking hands with Nurse Helen. Shauna stood up, smoothing her top so her ribs would show through. “Suzanna, this is Shauna, one of our anorexia patients,” Nurse Helen said. Suzanna extended her delicate hand for Shauna to shake. Her hand was cold, her fingers bony despite the extra weight on her body. Shauna shivered, her excitement growing. “Nice to meet you, Shauna,” Suzanna said softly, smiling at her. “Nice to meet you as well. I’m a big fan,” Shauna said, trying to speak confidently. “I’ll leave you two alone to chat,” Nurse Helen said. “I’ll be right down the hallway if you should need anything.” “Thank you,” Suzanna said, beaming. Nurse Helen closed the door and left. Suzanna sat down across from Shauna with her back to the window. “So, Shauna, is there anything you would like to ask me?” Suzanna said. “I did have a question or two,” Shauna said. “Go ahead then.”

“How much did they pay you?” Shauna asked. Suzanna laughed. “What do you mean?” “The Planchard Institute, I mean. I know they paid you to come make the speech and to help all of us out. Did they pay you to gain the weight, too? It must have been a lot for you to give up your perfect figure. When are you going back to modeling, though? I want to be a model too.” Suzanna shook her head, her eyes darkening. “No one paid me to come here. I came because I wanted to, this is what I want to do with my life now. I gained weight because I was too thin, it was unhealthy.” She looked at Shauna’s emaciated frame. “I see that you are struggling with your weight.” “No, I’m not, you’re just fat!” Shauna snapped. Suzanna narrowed her eyes. “This is a healthy weight, Shauna. One day you will understand that.” “You were so perfect,” Shauna said, shaking her head in disdain. “And you gave it all away to be ‘healthy,’ even though we both know you’d rather look like you did on the September 2012 cover of Vogue. Or on the red carpet in that Valentino dress, which was custom made for how thin you were. Or with your boyfriend, on vacation in the Bahamas, although I’m sure things with him must be rocky now with how much weight you’ve gained—” “That’s enough.” Suzanna stood up. “I will not be insulted by some ignorant teenager.” “You’re just jealous,” Shauna said, smirking. “You wish your ribs still showed and your elbows were sharp. You wish you could purge as many times a day as you needed. You wish your body could tremble with hunger. But instead, you’re stuck with chubby, cellulite-ridden thighs, a muffin top, and flab everywhere else.” “Listen, Shauna,” Suzanna said coldly, her voice rising. “I don’t know what anorexia has done to you, but I will not accept such language from a little nobody like you. You want to know the truth about me? The truth is, designers don’t like to accept underweight models anymore. With all the backlash they’ve gotten from the press, it’s making them look bad. I didn’t want to gain weight; I had to. And when I couldn’t stand looking like a whale in my photo shoots anymore, I stopped. By some rare twist of fate, these institutions seemed inspired by my weight gain, and asked me to come speak to you sad people.” Suzanna stepped closer to Shauna, her brown eyes boring into Shauna’s. “So you may as well stop trying, because guess what? Modeling agencies will take one look at you and say ‘no.’ And then if you gain weight, you’ll hate yourself. I know I do. So good luck to you. You’ll either end up starving and alone or fat and hideous and broken like me. There’s no way to win.” Anger boiled up in Shauna’s stomach. That couldn’t be true— it wasn’t possible. Suzanna was a fake. She was just jealous of her, jealous that Shauna was the pretty girl and Suzanna wasn’t anymore, jealous that Shauna’s ribs protruded sharply from her chest, jealous that this institute hadn’t gotten to her like it had to Suzanna. She didn’t need another person putting her down to get ahead. “It’s not true!” Shauna yelled, standing up and lunging at Suzanna. Suzanna leaned backwards to avoid Shauna but tripped on her heels and fell, hitting the large window. The glass shattered upon impact, and Suzanna tumbled out of the window. Shauna stood frozen, unable to take her eyes off of the shattered window. She peered carefully out of the hole and saw Suzanna’s body mangled on the cement four stories below. By the an-

gle at which her neck was twisted, Shauna knew she was dead. She hadn’t meant for her to die, she had just wanted to… show her what was right. Show her that there was no such thing as too skinny. Show her that people who are meant for greatness will reach the top, and stay there. Show her that she was tired of people telling her not to reach for perfection. With an attitude like Suzanna’s, it really wasn’t even a shame she was dead. Shauna turned around and walked to a trashcan in the corner of the room. She stuck her finger down her throat and vomited the breakfast she had been forced to eat. She mustered up some fake tears in her eyes, then screamed for Nurse Helen, who doubtless had heard the crash. Nurse Helen ripped open the door a few seconds later, gasping in horror at the broken window. “Oh my god, what happened??” “She said she didn’t want to live anymore,” Shauna mock cried, and Nurse Helen rushed to hug her. “She just threw herself and I, I, think she’s dead.” “I cannot believe this. I am so sorry Shauna, your own role model too, I’m sorry. You should never have had to see this.” Shauna sniffled into Nurse Helen’s powdery shoulder. “It just makes me so sad. I used to think Suzanna was perfect. But not anymore.”

THE PIGEONS OF BOYLSTON & TREMONT by dan halpern They fly in circles, around and around and around in a massive flock only to land back down in the same spot of grass to pick at crumbs and seeds that will never grow. There, they eat off the ground, from the edge of the Boston Common to where it meets the hard, unforgiving concrete. There, they sift through puddles of their own waste and filth to scrape up something to fill their gullets. There, they wait hoping someone passing by can spare something to eat. Then they fly up again. The Pigeons flap their ruffled, beaten wings in a constant circle above this great intersection of Boylston Street and Tremont Street where the common people frequent the crosswalks with every breath of the city’s traffic. The people pass under the birds, fearing the occasional drop of white horror that might land on one of their heads. And the luckless souls who do catch one then try to convince themselves it’s just a sign of good luck. Because of this, every person’s goal when the birds fly overhead is to move as quickly away from them as possible, before they swoop down on you, causing you to drop your leather briefcase onto the soiled street. What filth! they cry. What a horrible thing it is to be a Pigeon! But do these people ever wish to catch these birds and give them a home? Perhaps if these birds were beautiful white Doves sipping water from courtyard fountains, then maybe some birdwatchers would come swoop them up in an instant. But perhaps that is just speculation. After all, their gray, blackish feathers mean nothing to their character. Each of the Pigeons has a different appearance, a different pattern, a different size, headdress, beak color—what difference does it make? Nothing can change the fact that they are Pigeons. But what constitutes the fundamental difference between the Pigeon and the Dove? Are the droppings of the Dove that much different from the droppings of the Pigeon? Is the stench any sweeter? Where is the line drawn? What determines the sense of worth and value between a caged, routinely fed, pampered Dove to a wild, dirty, city Pigeon? But they keep flying, round and around, every day. They stop in the nooks and crannies of building ledges, huddled together in the cold winter, without nests, or nests that remain unseen. Where do their families lie? How often does one encounter a Pigeon and see it feeding its young in a nest snug in a sturdy oak tree? We think of Pigeons as worthless pests that approach us too often on the street and get too close begging for something to eat, something to peck at. We think Pigeons always thrust their necks at us. They seem so comfortable approaching the people of the city. They do not fear being hunted by humans because they realize they are not our prey. They are not our priority. But there is a man who comes out of the brickwork of Boston every now and then with a bag full of spare bread for the needy Pigeons. He rips it into pieces and distributes it among them. However, the bread does not get distributed fairly enough. The Pigeons tussle to stuff every bit of food into their stomachs, as much as they can, each for themselves, even if it means stealing it from each other. And because they have gotten just a bit of sustenance, they stay. They don’t want

to leave. They stay because they are uncertain of the next time they will get the chance to find breadcrumbs anywhere else. So they stay put, flying in circles over Boylston and Tremont, waiting for the man to return. They wait to be fed when he chooses to feed them. He gives them just enough to tide them over. This bit of hope and charity that comes and goes is what convinces them to suffer the dark nights when they scatter and hide themselves in whatever corners of the nearby alleys they can find. There is no place for them to go. They know no other place but Boylston and Tremont. What a nightmare it is, for a bird of any kind, to fly and not be able to see over the tall buildings that tower above them and entrap them. To live their lives only being able to fly just so high and no further up. To live without the feeling of soaring over the wide open landscape, chasing the horizons in every direction. This is the true pity of the Pigeons of Boylston and Tremont. This I do not have an answer for. Though I cannot conceive of where these Pigeons have originally come from or where their true nests belong, I am certain of only one thing. The Pigeons will always be with us.

BOSTON, APRIL I don’t hear it, but it spreads. The finish line rattling with metal fragments, my palms pressed against the warming window six blocks from the finish line.

201 3 by zoë fay-stindt

I let the news stream, reporters reporting the same things circularly. A canyon opens between those of us who were in the city and those who weren’t. When a friend comes back days later, chattering off music blogs and drunken Colorado stories from her trip that missed the bombs, I am silent. The streets stay quiet, warm, the warm quiet that makes your skin itch when it’s April in Boston. The boy who was first to break my heart only weeks before was stopped at mile 24, too close, the breakup the only thing keeping me pinned inside my room, not at the finish line. The electric blue jacket he wore like a trophy still triggers a soft punch.

I am quiet but what else can you ask from me when I hold my breath with the quivering strength of a city’s lung? Days after the bombings I sleep late, curled with the new body of a new someone or leaning over the wood rail of his small balcony, gulping in the skyline and the still air. I get high for the first time in over a year, crawling over couch pillows and eating cereal like an animal. My new someone tells me he loves me, we sleep, we sit still, he makes me hot dogs for breakfast. The city pushes together, gripping terrorism for strength and bombs for stitches. All of my memories of this are quiet.

TO MY BROTHER by erin kayata It was hard to imagine anyone who didn’t like Sean. At least, no one comes to mind as I speed through the barren highways of Western Massachusetts. My brother did not fit into the rarely touched upon archetypal role of a younger brother. He was not annoying or pesky. He rarely irritated me or my friends. In fact, he rarely irritated anyone. In a world of teenage boys who are careless and harmful, he stood out. My brother died of bone cancer yesterday. Where did he fit in this world— a world filled with two-dimensional ideas of people? He didn’t fit at all. I tell myself that’s why he’s gone, but my knuckles grip the steering wheel as I enrage myself for even trying to excuse his now permanent absence. My heart aches more than it ever has before and the hurt is becoming physical, a nagging sense of emptiness mimicked in the passenger seat next to me. How could I have ever thought a jaded love affair, a bitter academic rejection, a dissolved friendship could hurt more than this? It wasn’t until I was safely tucked away in the mountains of Switzerland for grad school that I could imagine this reality. The calls did not come all at once. There was no atomic bomb explosion. The long-distance calls came as drops of water, sneaking into my warm room and connecting together until I couldn’t help but notice the presence of a brewing catastrophe. “Sean’s been having some aches and pains lately in his legs. Probably from working out too hard.” “The pain in his leg is getting worse and there’s been some swelling. We think we might take him to see a doctor. It’s probably just a sport injury, though, or growing pains.” “It hurts for Sean to move his leg and he’s in a lot more pain. We’re trying to get an earlier appointment.” “It’s getting harder for Sean to walk now. The doctors are planning some X-rays soon.” Until finally, mere months later: “Honey, we have some bad news.” You don’t notice water dripping in until it’s a puddle, staining your floor. But by then, it’s already too late. I hate cancer and I hate death, but most of all, I hate myself for not coming home as soon as I heard the news. I tried to reason it away. Sean was always pushing himself to do better, of course he hurt himself. Sean towered over me; he was probably just growing. Sean was so healthy, of course he’d beat cancer. Sean was a constant; there’s no way he could leave. Funny how someone as obsessed with logic as me could try to imagine away death. At first, my parents insisted I stay, protesting my nonexistent intent to leave school. But soon, they began dropping hints, saying how nice it would be to have me home and how much Sean wanted to see his sister. Towards the end, the hints were abandoned in favor of sheer honesty: Sean is going to

die soon, and you need to see him. But doing so meant facing reality, when instead I could continue to hide in my world of books within the Wonderland I lived in. I couldn’t even bring myself to be with him at the end. My three-year-old self had more courage than me. I remember her with her toothpick limbs and overalls, stumbling into the hospital to see the baby brother the world had promised her. Step by step, she made her way down the brightly lit hospital hall, her brand new white sneakers leading the way. She arrived with her grandparents and oh, did she love her promised bundle, all wrapped in blankets like a doll. She was the protector, a role I can’t make myself embrace now. It was she who yelled at the nurse for “taking her brother away,” she who held him close whenever her mother asked her to, she who fell asleep with his crib by her side in her room, listening always for his tiny baby breathing. I wish I were still that girl. My brother died of bone cancer yesterday, and I could not save him. I could not be that little girl who kept him from tumbling to the floor as she held him, and I could not be like my brother and mend every wound with love. I couldn’t be the one who was always patient, forever kind whenever anyone needed it. I could not save him, and I could not save me. This unsettling pain twists every inch of me, and I spend the rest of the drive trying to make peace with myself. Eventually, I arrive in Sunderland, to a house shrouded in agony and black. My father greets me at the door with a firm, sorrowful embrace, clumsily patting my long neglected curls. My mother stands aside, her thin, red lips pursed into a frown of dismay. Her embrace is cold, and I can taste the resentment lingering in the air, intermingled with her perfume. It’s no secret that Sean was the favorite child, with his ever-present dimples and affectionate ways. Sean would have been here for her, if it were me. If I was the black cat lurking in alleys, Sean was the kitten curled by your side when you needed comforting. Sean’s death made many cracks, and I could tell that my mother’s resentment of me was one. My father asks me to write a eulogy. “We know it’s last minute,” he apologizes in his deep voice. He wrings his hands over the polished coffee table, and all I notice is how they are filled with veins, more, it seems, than ever before. Age overtook him as he lost his son. My mother stares off into the distance, pretending she isn’t there. Every family mourns differently, I suppose, and I decide that mine mourns separately. So I dismiss myself to write my eulogy. My room is the same as I’d left it before college. I could never be bothered with mementos, so there was little from high school and nothing from college, despite how much I relished the former. I didn’t care to adorn a place where I wouldn’t stay. It seemed to me like trying to decorate a cage; a cage from which you would eventually break free. I’m grateful now for my callous attitude towards home, because my room now reminds me of a simpler time. I prepared myself for heart-wrenching pain to come upon entering. I was terrified to face the overwhelming sensation of being back in a place that belonged to Sean and me. Instead, I feel a strange peace. I lie down on my canopy bed and stare into the dark, feeling for the first time like I am not so alone. Warm orange lights from the street below throw geometric shapes on the wall that shift whenever a car drives by on the street. Downstairs, I hear my parents speaking in hushed tones, trying to confront a fridge full of well wishes and the task of honoring their only son. I begin to dream, imagining my brother there by my side. What would Sean say about his own death? My brother looked like me. We both had the same wide smile, the same dark hair, and identical freckles sprinkled across the bridge of our round noses. I see this now as I see him lying

next to me on the bed, our heads turned to face one another. “I was ready to die, Katie,” he says with a smile that reveals his slightly crooked front teeth, one chipped from when he fell while I was giving him a piggyback ride once when we were little. “No, you weren’t,” I whisper. “You had so much to do.” “Nah, I didn’t,” he says quietly and turns to stare up at the ceiling, as if we were gazing up to count the stars, like we used to on camping trips. “Seanie,” I say as my voice begins to crack. “You were so great. Everyone loved you.” I pause for a beat, debating whether or not I should say what I’d been thinking from the moment I heard about his disease. “It should’ve been me.” He turned and smiled and kissed me on the cheek. “No, it shouldn’t have. And you know it.” My brother looked like me. He was a mirror in which I saw reflected a better version of myself, a self I can see now. I turn on my lamp and begin to write. “To die would be an awfully big adventure,” I conclude. “JM Barrie once wrote this in Peter Pan. And my heart breaks to know that my brother went on that next adventure without me. But I know it was his time.” As soon as I say this, I hear slight murmurs throughout the church. Now my mother purses her lips in the disapproving way that she always did when I said what she didn’t like, such as the truth. “And everyone says that’s not fair,” I continue. “But the truth is, Sean touched more lives than any of us ever did. And that is enough. And knowing somewhere, he’s waiting for me… well, that will have to be enough for now.”

HOW TO TELL IF YOUR CHEAP WHITE WINE CONTAINS ARSENIC OR IS JUST CHEAP WHITE WINE by lindsay geller In light of recent events, I felt compelled to write a guide to save all my fellow cheap wine drinkers from certain death at terms other than their own. Because many of the symptoms of drunkenness overlap with those of arsenic poisoning, a definitive guide is necessary for those who plan to die through long-term alcohol poisoning than short-term arsenic poisoning. If you notice a slight gray tint distorting its usual color: it’s probably arsenic, but who really knows? Cheap white wines can vary from a transparent rancid milk to a bolder morning after yellow bile, though most of the arsenic laden ones fall somewhere on the light earwax cream color spectrum. Unless, of course, you’re drinking Charles Shaw White Zin, in which case you’ll never know and might as well start writing your will now. (Jackie: You promised you’d leave me your Netflix account. Don’t forget the password.) No matter what color your favorite wine is, you may still encounter difficulty identifying its possible arsenic content while chugging it straight out of the bottle or slapping the bag while your friends count down from ten. In these circumstances, hold the bottle up to the light as a symbol of triumph as well as a sneaky way to glean any discoloration. Though you might be seeing two bottles at this point, at least you tried. If it makes your tongue numb for a few seconds but then goes away: Don’t worry, that’s just the tongue’s natural self-defense mechanism in response to the extra sugar used to up the alcohol content in all bottles of wine costing less than five dollars. Besides, if you’re at a lame party, tongue numbness provides the perfect material on which to base a drinking game. If you have abdominal pain: it’s either arsenic or the pressure put on your bladder from drinking an entire bottle in less than thirty minutes. Grab a friend and go to the bathroom together. Gossip about that guy Jenni is talking to and bet a $4.50 bottle of Moscato how long it’s going to take before she goes home with him. Take turns peeing. Retain just enough mental clarity to land squarely on the toilet and wash your hands properly. If your pee is blackish and/or your stomach isn’t relieved, maybe go to the hospital, but not before collecting your winnings.

If you’re dehydrated: This may be the most dangerous symptom of arsenic poisoning because it’s pretty much impossible to tell arsenic dehydration from regular ol’ alcohol dehydration. Drink some water and hope for the best. In the meantime, call all your remaining friends and family and leave affectionate, if incoherent, voicemails. Text all your exes with broken sentences and emoji sequences so esoteric an Egyptian hieroglyphics scholar would cry. If you make it to morning, swing by a Catholic Church and do the whole confession thing, just in case it’s time-release arsenic. If you lose control of your ability to make and voice good judgment: Just alcohol. Totally normal. Proceed with abandon. If you vomit: It’s definitely arsenic. Most of the wines on the no-no list are White Zin or Moscato, all of which basically taste like juice. Unless you’re a thirteen-year-old girl getting drunk for the first time to impress your cool friend Samantha in the basement of your suburban townhouse after stealing a bottle from your mother’s wine cabinet, you will not throw up from this wine. Those who consume a bottle of this wine regularly should especially be on the lookout for sudden vomiting because that’s the only way you’re going to save yourself from an embarrassing death. If you spill some of the wine on the carpet/floor and the floor immediately begins to disintegrate: You’re an idiot who doesn’t deserve wine if all you’re going to do is accidentally waste it, Cuhlaire. Stop acting like a freshman and get your shit together, honestly, or just go home and get some sleep, you poor excuse for an alcoholic. If you die: If this symptom occurs a few hours after drinking your wine, it was probably arsenic. Make sure you get a coroner to confirm. I’ve found it’s helpful to have one on retainer, for cases such as this. Send the coroner a quick text when you start to see the bright light as a consideration to the host and other party guests. However, if you die when you’re eighty-plus years old and have liver cancer but no one will put you on the organ transplant list because the nurses are punishing you for switching out the fluids in your IV bag with Moscato, it was probably the alcohol.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS erin kayata is a junior journalism major with minors in writing and publishing. She also

writes for Emerson’s Atlas Magazine and HerCampus Emerson. Her work has also been on USA Today College and HerCampus’ national website. In her free time, Erin enjoys reading fiction and nonfiction, exploring her home state of Massachusetts, and watching bad TV. The Taylor Swift lyric she most identifies with is “Darling, I’m a nightmare dressed like a daydream.”

marina starkey is a student who finds most of her comfort in food and in cooking.

She runs her own adventurous food blog, fondly called “Marinated” which you can explore at www.marinatedblog.com. While studying abroad in London, she realized that all she wants from life is to eat through all of the cities in the world and write about it. In between meals, Marina enjoys reading and writing poetry, playing her ukulele, and dreaming up the places she wants to travel to next. She’s currently finishing her degree in Writing, Literature, & Publishing at Emerson College and pretending the future isn’t happening yet.

dan halpern is a junior studying Writing, Literature & Publishing and Entrepreneurial

Studies at Emerson College. He is originally from West Orange, NJ. He has written and selfpublished three novels Spray the Bees, Hangwa, and O Sweet Angel, and is currently working on his fourth. He decided he wanted to become a writer after getting emotional reactions from family and friends in response to his first book Spray the Bees. He realized the power of writing and was inspired by the ability one can have in creating emotion in an audience. He enjoys writing fiction and short stories dealing in allegory, satire, and the supernatural as well as nonfiction essays. In his spare time he also plays music, makes documentaries and short films, and dreams of one day becoming a beekeeper.

cameron davis is a first year Visual and Media Arts major at Emerson with hopes to focus on

writing for film and television. Fiction and prose are also very close to her heart, and she tries to blur the line between scripts and stories as much as possible.

michelle ciccarelli is a junior Writing, Literature, and Publishing major from Ashland,

Massachusetts. She enjoys writing fiction and nonfiction, and hopes to land a job as an editor for a fashion magazine upon graduation. Michelle likes cats, figure skating, and trying not to be a picky eater. She has been writing for The Common Voice since fall of 2012 with these wonderful people, and can’t wait to write with them again for her senior year.

christopher gavin is an associate editor for The Common Voice and a senior

journalism student. He began as a staff writer in 2012 and has contributed opinion and fiction pieces. His articles have appeared in The Boston Globe, Five Cent Sound magazine, and for Anton Community Newspapers in New York. When he isn’t reporting, Christopher enjoys playing guitar and writing fiction-usually in that order-and is probably best known for his puns, hopefully. He plans to graduate in 2016 with a writing minor.

holly kirkman is a junior at Emerson College, where she studies creative writing and holds an on-campus publication illustrating monopoly. Someday she hopes to no longer be filled with existential dread.

zoë fay-stindt was simultaneously raised in the boondocks of North Carolina and a

small town in the south of France, and has been published in Gauge, Stone Soup, The Catharsis, and Concrete Literary Magazine. She’s the editor in chief for Concrete Literary Magazine and co-editor–in–chief for The Common Voice, and pays the bills by writing about mutual funds. Guilty pleasure: stealing free office supplies. If all fails, she plans on escaping to Spain and becoming a mediocre farmer.

lindsay geller recently graduated from Emerson College with her BFA in Faith, Trust,

and Pixie Dust. Originally from a one-walled barn in rural Pennsylvania, she has a found a home in Boston. Well, she’s technically leasing a cardboard box on the mean streets in Brookline but potato, podildo. Her illustrious foray into adulthood has begun with a copywriting internship (paid) at GSN Games that offers no health benefits but has pretty good snacks.

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