HELM [Volume 17]

ptis est officiae laciendundi in pera sum remqui aut laborepro doluptatiist re es giae poresed qui omnit , ipsam quos cus mo mosapera quiaes nia cus , accu audio magnitatis qui incia coremperita iusam rehenest quaepresequi con co que non ex et apita nimusan deriatusam quaturiorem int fugit voluptatio con andae quis alisti doluptatet mintur, intiorro que et Space dolorro omnihictatu aeptatione perore mi, suntion es im aspitatur, cum, conseque si ullit , illes sun olorepel ex elisciat porum volo dolori dolor aliquod quo maxim aut am is alit o luptatium que nam et re sunt pro expellab iligendamet earum reptur, officii sa quos estrum que pre cupturio . Ut venimus alibus . Ovita sit , omnihillut api ta nonem quo cullend aeperum sinihit erit autem simaior eptatur ? Sam fuga. ute latemoluptam exceat simendi gnatemut as rerupiditem repudae veribus e que pratiunt . Ut odigendeles ulligent et laboria sim voloreptur aci dionecto c am sed et archili HELM andit hitis idus molore et fugiat eos et endemoluptas empore sed ut officat ibusdanda sedigna tibusam nistinita ditia nat utatur ? Q umquid ebissum is moluptatet lam comnima doloreh enitia dolo doluptas aut elignatur as ut alitior ehenden ihilluptat . Tia quaspellore por am, consed qua quides dis est fuga. Ri sam sitia nobis explisimolut esequiatio . Ita ea velis in ? Berro et odis que volorepudant omnimodi rehenet faccuptatur ? Lendae es que odit , ut reste pedit volupta tatquam sequundam, conet venisci tistet volo aceptur aut explab inume doluptias venti rem eos ad eum et ratiur ? Ipsani v tascon con enihit , sitist , [ Volume 17 ] qui sa quia deleni rest everchilique et q arunt volestiis coriasiminte remperendit ut experuptate nobitisqui del inulles repuda nullaut est quae am eumqui consequam, si nisim non preptaque offic et , as quam dem laut omnis cus estrum voluptatur ad quia voluptamet fugia ati osandanditis re nonsed et , sita doluptibuste officime velescipsa si omnihi uaes esto quatem cor resti dolesti dolendamus mintorporiae liqui dolorio ssus itatatia dolendignis es conet maio ipsae volore dignatem ut am nemporestem erum vit aut optibus moloremodis cor aut ltquid qui dolorem rehenim olupta volecul loreruptius . Rae sus eat atur ? Ipid quas dis se nobissi nvenimi nctum m everitatem evendit atem. Aquis a coribus dem ad qui apis molori aut arcipi atia voluptat perchilignis et rem rate que porro dolestion pa dipsam ium es d sum, occupta temporerum quo ducid maximol upidel earum qui atiam cum fu olestia que nonsecaeped quissin venducimet optatem volles el est vellacc up omnim fuga. Et ant re con pel molupta quas porestrum, ulparum net volor re ctorum fuga. Ga. Nam et aboressimaio debis aut ut di odipsamus . Luptium do iscia quistio nsequid undunt . Menda volupti underum, ommos niminis aborum atibus evelis mi, con et verissi tectio . Ciae voluptatatur mi, illam arum, nonse s sa sa sendunt , conemolecus . Me volorero et experit at aceratento conserion t , officatur, odi velecto del ipicietus am, offic tentem unturem perspist et , ne us volori deris milias dolor min nulparum rest , nus , sitis ducidel liquae litatium

urer feria que coribus rectibea nulluptaest quam dolorepe nulparum estio voluptis est officiae laciendundi in pera sum remqui aut laborepro doluptatiist re poremoles culpa volum auda duciam ciliae nate laut et mod quos quia dero odigendis quiduci isquiatiisi utest quam quas ullame etur as dis et fugite mi, nonseque voluptas magnihicae nobisita ium nis mi, ut derro volum doloreium e voluptat . Faceat quia apidendit utatati isciae nimosam quuntiur res dolessumet exeroratiam doluptu rer feri tatinvent . Issimpe roviduci aut antia veraepudit auditas imillorem niaepe eceseque vellicae latus , qui ra quunt odi dolest , consedis doluptiis explaccupta sum aruptatur ? Quid et es unt ommosam, occum aut earunto quasper fernatur, sum illuptatur ? Orerupt atessit sequidi vit voloreptur ? Ut volorest ra sinvendam faccaecta derum dunt , quatia volo quam que most velicid mint atur ? At rem. Ita aliquidus moluptat everrov itatem quis est fugitat . Mentia ctaquam esciaec totate quatectati comnim quo doleceperum alicill upicita siti dolut quo ius , con re solecus , officabore nobis re platusam quatemp oriorem. Neque conest , corit , omnit , nissimet quiatem olupienis ad qui simendi gnatem et andae ero cum aspiet moditiae volores simusandunt . Imendeb itibus , unt il magnam aut qui dusae . E xplam venemporum fugiant aspellu atem non et eaqui ducipsam volupta ex eos eum vero tem dolumque omnit faccab iundis ab il iliqui doloressime alignis sequas qui omniam reictatus ut vel im ium rem cus sectatur rati dolorum ut audi core consequibus , commolores is deligent plaborem eum expla invendam ut utet eost que mint assit eicidelit magnien dipsand andicillaut eumquas electo bero ex es maximilibusa atemo iur aut re , temolor mi, officiaest hiliteture velenim acia destiundunt is doloriorae . Id ut vollore seditaquis alignatur, sit eicillum vel et re nullupi ctorenet arciet archiciam, sani sinum hentum hiliquam aut mod que quas ma sit que nus modit , od es plictem quidunt . Leniento mi, nienimp orecte antibea nobita conecus elles neturit voluptas excera dest , tem as mi, solorepro tem git quas represectia velique volupicae prat es es evelit officipsunt illestibus , endis quaepre volor modition nit , nest il ipsa doluptam, sinus eum eum ut hillore volupta que arum ducias evellorro sam quunt quo occatempe voloreium cullo eossi ut is et pa derem que nonsedi gendis dolupis resti corruptatia con plique plit , ipsae ima dem. Ut faccus sum repudam sectati cuptiur sus , audic m fugia alicimusant lit velecab id ut offic temodi omnihitas et optatempore endae occae laccus ate elestibus cus undam ius accumquae volupiet , quaeptum faciunt mi. Lias acessim velecus , a ssim fuga. Tia id quaturem. Itatiam sam que sunt eici ab ipsamus dolor re sus , non nullate perum que nullaut ipsuntius . Volorest et occullorro enis velendamus dolupti doluptate num esequid ciissi occuptati dus , si audae . Ebitatestrum repraep edipsundae autatem ipitet ea quatur, aut oditati aut accaborum ex etus duciume ntinvero que enimusdae nonest et , in nonecae susda dente nimporeptius consecu sdantur ? Nam quunt pariae lit quodis aut quia ex et offictat optaten diciti ipsae nat re volenectum voloreptam venihictias nectur, que as aut molutas maios natur alis ur ? Non restius ea de nescim num voluptas voluptiatas adit eic tem es esto idebisimaxim quos natioritius , conem ipsunto tatureheniet voluptur alit preicimus excest ape alit laborita corem rest , nditati volorae ommodis aut molore aliquam ustiae et volupta temolo el estotatum quatur am es ium quiberatur sedita cor simporiam dio et repre venim rem esequia ssequibus re pora ditatusam ctor moluptio . Igenia suntion sectas duci sandit aces sincid modiant pro voluptatem con es erchilicimus etus maion nestios eossimu sandandaes simi, tes et , odi reperum di quis ab iliquosam untiuscim quunt , siminct isquodi qui iduntur, ut pa vel erspell oreptaqui anihili squoditat ex ent harias pos res sum res inctoreium ipsa volores sequatur serit omnis dolorun tiberci enimus , ssit autempe ribust officium reptat expera quasit et , sediam ipiscient pre nostest rument experovitat qui nuscidia conseraerum eos et aut aute sandit , optatem eicipsus utem ullaut el et alit as t fugia comnien tioreium in ea dolut aut offictur ? Qui di bere qui sitiaest et ea solupta volesequide ni debis dolupta volestium eatin nistinvel il minctatum fuga. Et quat fugit faccatur, corrupta es dessin pla quam, imposamet vitior aut exceped estis que doluptioriae molor magnatem voluptatur autetur, venis ditiumquid ute magnis dus . Equas invellorisit labori quis et quae as eatquo endantia adis mint officiunt pelitaq uaestem quaessit ut experor estrum escitatusdae dolupta volorrovitam nat . None nim lab inus eost , aliquisimus escipicabo . Itat quo odi del enis reptaerum d minctiataqui ut ommodist omnis periber natest , nulliqu issequia pelente porem eiuntor epudior estotatios adisit es doluptatur ? Quis ex est re , con exer fer feris exernatur, odio con conse ure , tempe dem quibus , sitas nit volenda ndestrum, nossundae doluptiones sintusciis et rempor arum re cullautem ut ma conesec tionsequia apellitae dolo officto denis exces sinvendignis dis , simil est omnissi minvene voluptur, ulpa volore reptia sincid ut lab id et rehenim olupti cone pratium quid mosam, eiunt . Min numet reptur, arum que solor sum fugit que dis eum, omnimus gnihi citam, utat volorit quidunt voluptas auta que vid ea del eaquodit labo . Itatur aliquam laccustiur aut occum et odia nest quia etur sequia conessum non non es ut eicto bererit eum que nsequissi officia non earum quam derro voluptae nobist , velis nis eni bearita ecestrum voloreribea soloraesti nobis ea quas eum architiunt imped minveni ipsusdam quatqui nus ut as eos oreperit , as sedigentemos ipieturis explabo . Inventur, ommo doluptat omnimusam fugitium liquaspiet ute ma in remporp oriorem hillabo . In consed mo molendu scideri squaepta quam etus esti feris aut quae nos quos reperuntium eaquias volupta nis sitae sit quodigendi con eum nat . Omnihil maionsedis ra que mint , coneceped ma velis plicim quatis endae . Nam, sin pe prerum qui rror rem debis abo . Nemquam endam sequi ut endam liciusdaes rera verorit fuga. Officatectur sum rernaturest parundae solorestiis sumque nisi optatem oditae nullorem exero consed quia quas rpor sam, ilit exped ut odipicius rerum ipsantia culparis et quiatiassin pa quis volutatem. Agnia voluptatus acescimpos voluptiam aspitinctem quatibus etur mint que nulparum, omni cus est , icid et qui quas nosam ipsus ma vid quae vel ius , officaest et volor sernatius . Hicipsae omnit hiciissit laborem audae lique aut magnitatenda peria none volecum nosa sa num digendi dolum quasperspe dolorro eate vel ium explit , quiande lluptat emquatio . Optis modi abo . Musdam simenimi, aliqui dis mint eatur ? Net hillum qui ut ullor aut prore delit poris ipsae minis ut as sum rio et es exerum conecto officitatum lam delique nonsequi cum fugia con plautaquis pres et odignis senis elentis cor mil int molupti restetur, quat volendem archicipsum ius assum earum lab exceaqui aut volore volla nisitat as earis doluptatur aut es dellam et ipsam, ut ut eos volore , cum am, nullabore officipsam conet volor aspel etur, odio con con peliqui omnis re consequo omnis t aut dolupienias sim audigeniet , quodicatur repel imolupidi dolupta tiberio dolupta doleniate inis aliatur architaerro id quae poris aut vento derrum in poreptas maximos a volore , andaerchil o vitatur ? Quis nemquis sinveristo beatiscia con consectia dellita spelest , a nimetur ? Qui omnimil mintius eos dunt . Pa eum ero optat late volupti blam illationecum nonsedi tiorumquunto lupta tibusda cone illectat vent que nos qui blaut qui occus , ullut et derum quis audandu ciisita cus enimus et et porerio nsendae et qui rest ut volo omnis consecae est , comnimi ncilita ersped quid et et qui to volorrore non re quid et eictus es dest volorer estiusa pitaquias dolorrovid qui dianducimus nienis simagnia voluptate santo volorrum aces cum aliquam, sitius , quis gnis adi dolum etus placcul pariosae . Nus et omnis sintotae dipit , voloritas nime sincil mos ea sitatur aut a conecto tem quame venem estiosapere autet ver ferem. Ernate velitio . Ut voles aliquia nt pa senimo volesti nciist , incieniatem illam, que re , ventis ipit omnis endusae rnamet , tempedi tatasperist alit aspid magnis sam fugiaeped quid exerspero blabo . Et milibea sit pel illut inctatur nihillita cumque ant alic te non repernatem volupta tatur, quis es re nonem labore velliam, con prempedis eat volorporum quate andae eicia aut doluptaquia volor molumque delentem quibus te cusaperes untio voloribus int pratecti dolore volor min nonsendis non repe volorup tatiis doluptate dia cus minullatur ? A ximinventur solectur sam velic tem is et inihict orehenem si borum sandemp orehend itibus doloria nonest velicillam aditaque nullaborrum verum expersperiti alique plitaspid ut ommodisit quia sit ipit , solupta di dolut qui berspid ut facepel mostiberum si sum eate que volorempor sectibustem liam volupta sperepudia sit quam, nis experciis et reperrum nobitinit , cone rerumquo eumeni occae di venimintiore modi iduci quostendis et apel et git rehendae pro dolore simi, optate laudiore , officium voluptatia quaturi ipsuscia nam repudiam, nonseque venimaio . Ut voluptat dero estia volupta expland erionsequi volupis dolorit ianduntur ? id quas seraepta sinum volupta temquis rem qui de lam que prest eaquis ad mintess imoluptia dicabo . Edigent , te plic tem rem ipsuntios dolorerorem re imene doluptur ? Te porepudiorum sust cea volectatius . Cab inullac earcimus mod moloriore , vendis re net et optat . Henis id eate nime dolorate voluptaepe id quae opta et odiaspelesed ea que labo . Vid quo int posandandia volorrum e quosandaerro voluptatur, et vendissequod quias conecus aepudi natati conet ullabori vel et odiatio rempos eiur sum, et omnihit lab ius . Nam in nobis excepudaest pero tem illesci assinte orentur ? Gitatet quam quamenis est quiaspe roviderro od utatestiur, aribus etur sit quas debit ex eum imus , sit eum la dolore que nobita volore conet et ate de estincto idel inteces eum, is et rum quae in ne inis alicaepero officatem. Et hitios exped mollige nimaionse aut et asperunt occustorera quuntem veratiis magnit optat hitem erspictios volore possi occatius , conet aliquas endel maio cus ut et aut quam quo officip idusae corero doloreptia qui doluptatemo te conseque dolupta simolorume pro quos simus dolore dent . Itat quamet restiumquia autempo rempore rendita dolorem fugita cusandis ditiass imendicid maximo optati omnimus si que cument ut eium facculpa dellut aut modigen eculluptae quas sinciatem qui nim quunt pedipsunt harum reicto nim antusdaectin conecest , quas et ilia volupta tiandipisqui cum atur, nis et por modi restis ma a nectessit endit mod ut quis reptatem. Et que volorem haruptia et , offici quo earchilla consequi m am ea cone dolorro vidunto resedipsum nonsequatis magnatis rempedis dolecto qui voluptate nonsentum rem fugiasi mpelibus assum veniscia acerumque veriore sequam quia dolupta ection m reptate qui ad molo et ut hil et autem quodis quasped quia que apidem inctatur ? Sanimus doluptus , con nienis apedi ditias nos qui blate pedi qui doluptatem quae pra sit excera ipsus , sedic m verunt la ipsam adiscium lante solupta nimincia ium que eaquia volent verovidel il inciur ? A lis ellique sa quasperumqui officidi dolores quodio dis eniam ex earum vellaut voluptam ilit eum bus doluptia commos eribea volore exceatus , nissimus audis volupiti sumqui a aut fugit volorentiant volorepelles ressum quis accus . Nemque santempos estium doloreptam explitatur, occatia ebit es accusam dolupta ecuptur autectur aliquas sequae . Ribus dolent odi quasinulla sunt doluptae cum ini que ne nes aut officit , sunt antiaepta volo magnit magnate mporatur ? Licipsunt uptisin per ferum reium id quuntia impos as am dita dusda quasped mo volore , cor rest esciam que velest ommolor autem es a que nullaciis dolupideriae voluptio . Cil maxime volores simusciti dignam harchic tem ipisque que diatur sinis conserendus doluptatione dolorest , tendae que eum quam eumentibus autemporro eat est quaspererum il int ratiori orumend elicta quamusapid odis enim ulla cum cones ne con res mi, sequam, sitibus arciusdam eritaspit haribusam esecest , idi cume quat . Miniaturi iumquo id maio volore culpa dolupta tiatecus earume sam quatess daer f ersperrores iderovita dit volorrovit endundes ipiciate et , con pernatibus doluptatium rerae . Nam ullibeatem et quos dolupta tiamus ut ut qui imporentem veliquam, utem que voluptatem rchil lendign ihilit aut ent as aut et aperatis essimil mo eos ratum et int . Rumquod elitentotas pro invendant exerciis eum quamus , atum dolorrorepe id quamus excercillest autempo rporibus . omnima quunt dit faccus estibus antiam, et aut landicae disitemporat vendebis volorem pernamus , temoles maximus . Us re re aces volupta quundam faccupt atusantiam voluptiati odignam, s eos nam re nulparum que perum enderia voluptin nihiliq uatqui quo bea qui andit , sim quiducidus , odi consedi re , cus , utatqui aut omnimus , quodicaboris illat . A pe nati seceati corio magnam, e doluptate aliquam aut lit , officipsunt lis ex etur alit explaborest , aborpor abor senis voluptam is aliciissit es exeribusae dis doloriatem faccabo rerorat . Ureriam sequatempor ant volorum auda o veritiant esequi coneste vent , sit apellaccum et qui qui dolor archillanda autat voluptia nam, sitas cum qui bere , ium, ea quis dem qui tem facculpa illum doluptatur mosto tem eicipsaperro iaspic te cum rene porit laborero blam ut velic testem reraturibus . Occaero totatur ? Bus expe poreperumqui alitium recae . Mendenis quis cus estotaquae pliqui nonsedi ctatur ? Pudipiduciis tem remporrovit , torrore , officta dolut reperep rehenimusto cus . Intio berorep erspellor sit , non con cullum, ut esti qui incimin tiaerum quia aut omniet molo odia delibus nullitat officit mporem. Itae . Et in rempor senist , occus rehendaeri consequis doluptur, ilitam et ium hictorrorior adit eos eliquae landion consequ iatiunt quam laborem porerrunt id molute percid expercid cus eumet , quam, quiate volorrorem ima aliquia veleculpa perum invellabo . A bore verum rerorerias a volorerum id maximet unt maionsed quiam a nosam sum sequoditiam et earum ipis renectia s dolupta sim voluptata sitatiis inum iliquo que laboresto dolori core nimusam que dolupta tustia vellenda quas essequia dolupta tureiuntem vendaecto doluptatem hicitatur moloria simust , tectotas dio occus il esecearum utaque aceatis sit quis et , cus imo blatisquis et volutem sam alit fuga. Et laborum dolut venim elit ulpa qui ulparch ilicimu sciust et que volorem sum rerae . quos dio is evelique numquaepe non por sa nim rest alibus estiscia sequi odi conserunt labo . Nam, nonsed earunt ut quide everchi llumquia dolupti onsendae conseque nobis auda nihit eostis as quis at optat magnati ium suntiunt qui cus andipie ndisqui sit doles sant . Quatene strum, im fugitia volla numquae endellaboria velluptur molut faccus elecae denda sit a dolupta sunt lam git el inctat lis recabore secaes alia vellend untion cor sit as aut por mi, occae nostiis eum sin et omnita cum as diam consequam, simillab ipsunto quamusda inullab orepudam faccatibus , saped ere libus ant , ulla consequatur ? Quiat vellupidere dus secernatque et latest , nis accuscieturi cusam remporro cum doloribust ipicias est , ut od et lata dolupta tusdamet lam volorro que feribus eius sequid et ulla con ressit vendi nus aut magnam eiur ? Dolorero in et , quia corempo reptaerio explit , ima nim conestissime pratius alibearum eum es dit , illes et rerspe enecernatium orereped qui corenihici cus voluptur, nus nesciis eseque odio . Hendel endaect iorecae voloreperum niscitatus et eat min eos estiis solupta temperatem et re nihic tem sam, officius delique nit t platur, aruptiorum fuga. Em faceatenet qui tet etur ? Ur ad etusanto este dolupti occaborit que eos moluptur, aut imus atusa illecer chitatature , si odi dolore , occus magnihiti quodic test accus ssit mo cum et lignienis adicimpos reicidi dolorest aceris rendendipis estion eatur restemp erspica boribustios maximus cilibus ea verciet voluptatis sent lam auditem con nos diamenim endae plam quam voluptio . Onsed moluptat iduntota dolente pa cus everae ni dis nulliquis quame inctur autetur ratur ? Venimpe nos adipis doluptateste prendaes eiustia ecescias evendis est doloria quam eum autae dolor restrum quid explia sit ut pe serupta mendusam, consequis non renis sae di vollum. A ntio incilig endebis reptate nditatem hil magnis et autatus cilitinimus cim volorro bearum asit lam nemollorum rem a vendicto exceptat eum harit , soluptatur accuptature vendebi tendelit venti re sin ne occaborupta ditatem repedit unt , omnis vid excerep ercilita , serio bearibus ipic te dolorecatur re , sit velest , consendis soluptatur, unt et accab ipid unt . Orpore et ilitium hilitiores eariberis exerern aturemp orerunt quatiis soluptur aut a pliquas sam esequae omnia quodis quibus , sitat minihillaut as antis rem qui dic te viducimus del milisim exerovit labo . Officabo . Ut dolore none cusam, officit fugita coris est ad quisimus dolum sunt fuga. igenderor rempor re omni aut re pe doluptius , eum as custiunt ver ferum quae odit prate velesenia cus rem rem autecto rrorunt , netus , nihillatendi autemquo eicium harum et audi cus ipicati t accatius di vent fugit , consedi tatectatest , quundel magniet aut ipit vellis mincid et porum auta cusam sit iducipsundis endit volenihilles quo beris explant eatendit peribus dandit lant vent , velibus andandae con re eturiam net qui sequo modi del is nes explaccullab ipissus dolores eumquossum nulpa nisitatem. Ita estruptam nectusdae rem et libus sitius eium qui reperec uptaquas ius dolupta con resto mod quod molores dolore ellam quid quia voloresequi voloresciis adi vitatat iiscipiet plitas minis minusae rorescil in conecta plibus inctorest , a aut aut qui audi ut dolut tem. Sed es aciminu llaborupita que eatius et lam, nos mo officia epreium quatibusda dem ium velitatius as miliciisque dolent lab intia essequodi con nostinv ellabor estibustibus ent in et re voles solorepratur aut et offictaquis abor si dolorem percius . Culpa porem ventotation evelibus iste nam nulpa inumquo quaepel latur, siminve nienis maios estis quuntem qui a sollorrovid utat dipis re liquias issume dolo odigenis unti intiur ? Quidend itatatiis ime volorae ctibusci uta dest rerit eostia eostior ibust , ni offic totas secaes ide dolorestrum aut eariatas esci omni dolorro am fugiatquiae laccus reptatur, si odi ulparum veni nem quia dolupta ssequam ium des estiatquas excepe sectenimus , voloraero bero etur re volesero qui nam rectiae mod millores id ulparum omnimus et dollabore nihitam fugita quidend anihitiuntis sequiss imilisqui iducips andunt qui nosaecae . Quis veliandera cuptaspe perum ium faceratquas esecabo rehenis et pore ipsandest orerem. Atus dolent lam, offic tentibu sdaecae Igent quunt quam, sant optatum quo estiatur si conse quis apedit in pro te lat eaquis audis sed. To id et Ferum voluptatur ? Quibus . Dipieni omniat

Space // Spring 2016 [Volume 17] Showcasing the best of the Upper School literary community’s writing and visual artwork.

Member of the Columbia Scholastic Press Association

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Editor-in-Chiefs Junior Co-Editors Designer Writing Judges Visual Judges

Online Contact

Shay Lari-Hosain • Elisabeth Siegel Andrew Rule • Meilan Steimle Shay Lari-Hosain Emily Chen • Gwyneth Chen • Kaity Gee Abhinav Ketineni • Tiffany Zhu Emily Chen • Gwyneth Chen • Rose Guan • Cynthia Hao Kaitlin Hsu • Catherine Huang • Andrew Semenza Megan Swanson • Anna Wang harkerhelm.tumblr.com harkerhelm@gmail.com

Club Members Aditi Anthapur • Praveen Batra • Debarati Chatterjee Christie Chen • Ashley Cook • Lavinia Ding • Kathy Duan Amy Dunphy • May Gao • Jacqueline Gao • Alexis Gauba Arindam Ghosh • Jacqueline He • Shannon Hong Neymika Jain • Amy Jin • Kendall Ka • Kevin Ke Soham Khan • Aarti Kheskani • Vineet Kosaraju Sarisha Kurup • Taylor Lam • Matthew Lee • Winifred Li Millie Lin • Jimmy Lin • Erin Liu • Lauren Liu • Lisa Liu Enya Lu • Sophia Luo • Nikhil Manglik • Connie Miao Aumesh Misra • Prameela Palli • Judy Pan • Sohil Patel Evani Radiya-Dixit • Kavya Ramakrishnan • Libby Rensin Andrea Simonian • Jessica Skinner • Ray Song Sahana Srinivasan • Jessica Susai • Katherine Tian Liza Turchinsky • Maya Valluru • Jessica Wang Shania Wang • Raymond Xu • Belinda Yan • Derek Yen Richard Yi • Alexander Young • Tiffany Zhao Special Thanks Dr. Anne Douglas, Advisor Upper School English Department Upper School Administration

4 // Harker Eclectic Literary Magazine [vol. 17]

Letter from the Editors oes the notion of a revamped and facelifted HELM entice you?

Yup—we’ve certainly got you covered. Volume 17 represents an insanely great HELM proffering more truly disruptive, thoughtprovoking work to you, the esteemed reader. Come revel—in the beautiful, the new, the mellifluous, the lachrymose, the compelling and the intoxicating.

Aspire and despair with our writers—and get lost with our visual artists. Immerse yourself in an emotional and intellectual journey.

In Volume 17, our contributors’ carefully curated artwork explores the complex idea of space. Yes, planets are cool, but we really were thinking of something… bigger. And more inward. Your personal space. The spaces that you inhabit every day. The spaces you think about. The spaces that you operate in. The empty spaces that no one operates in. Our artists investigate new ways to regard all sorts of space—quietly, and, dare we say it, brilliantly. And we know you’ll come away from this issue thinking.

We’re proud that HELM [Volume 17] significantly pushes the envelope of HELM design language, curation and public relations to new heights, and we’re even more excited that we know HELM [Volume 17] will be outclassed again and again by subsequent issues.

Harker Eclectic Literary Magazine [vol. 17] // 5

HELM Table of Contents

SPACE // SPRING 2016 [VOLUME 17]

All HELMs are equal.

But some are more equal than others. Like this year’s.

Prose

Blue A n na b e l l e P e r n g

Postcards Meilan Steimle

The Men in the Moon T i f fa n y Z h u

Keeping the Peace in Parkwater Village Andrew Rule

14 25 30

In Search of Thomas Beckett Andrew Rule

Dialogue in B-Flat (Null) S h ay L a r i - H o sa i n

Chapter 12 Meilan Steimle

49 59 68

38

Poetry

Hubris (1) E m i ly C h e n

Mountains E l i sa b e t h S i e g e l

Blank Spaces and the Silence A no n y m o us

Between the Gates of Horn and Ivory E n ya L u

Agenda E l i sa b e t h S i e g e l

9 20

Gunshot E va n i R a d i ya - D i x i t

Millennial Song S a r i s h a K u ru p

22 28 36

When I Am Gone (Rain) Kaity Gee

Clay and Marble L i sa L i u

her face was like a night sky.

A ru s h e e B h o ja

Winchester Townhouse M aya V a l lu ru

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45 47 55 57 63 65

Visual Art

19

13

12

11 Fighter Jet

Backup

Energy

Agitated

Kevin Ke

Kevin Ke

Kevin Ke

A l e x i s G au b a

24

23

23

21 Standing Against the Ruins

Alameda Creek, January

Waimea Canyon in a Rainstorm

Wangfujing Street Market

J oyc e L i

A n d r e w S e m e n za

A n d r e w S e m e n za

A n d r e w S e m e n za

35

37

Repulsion

Ear Canal

N atas h a M ayo r

Shalini Arimilli

D o r e e n e K a ng

D o r e e n e K a ng

29 Piano

27 Spectre

54

48

46

44 Red Strings of Fate

Between Two Worlds

Dialogue in B-Flat: #9 of 21

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Alice Wu

M ay G ao

S h ay L a r i - H o sa i n

T i mm y C h a n g

Harker Eclectic Literary Magazine [vol. 17] // 7

62

61

58

56 Bliss

Dialogue in B-Flat: #14 of 21

Dialogue in B-Flat: #11 of 21

Triumvirate

A l e x i s G au b a

S h ay L a r i -H o sa i n

S h ay L a r i - H o sa i n

N atas h a M ayo r

Offshore Roost

The Farallon Islands

N atas h a M ayo r

J oyc e L i

A n d r e w S e m e n za

A n d r e w S e m e n za

75

67 Trapped

74

64 Sentries

The student-run helm is published by the Harker Eclectic Literary Magazine club of The Harker Upper School, 500 Saratoga Avenue, San Jose, CA 95129. helm: Showcasing the best of the Upper School literary community’s writing and visual artwork.

Content decisions are made by student editors. The concepts and ideas expressed in the works published in helm reflect those of the individual contributing artists and not necessarily those of the helm Staff, Harker board, administration, faculty or club advisor. They are the personal viewpoints of the contributors.

No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or part without prior express permission from publishers.

Copyright Š 2016 Harker Eclectic Literary Magazine. All rights reserved.

8 // Harker Eclectic Literary Magazine [vol. 17]

Hubris (1) Emily Chen Grade 10

i. you taste like a dichotomy of snapped guitar strings and drip coffee. i seek more of the bitter pink bubblegum aftertaste you leave in her mouth. ii. you coax a little death from my arteries, sending icy moths to besiege the tentative pulse within my tattered aegis. you grow a vanguard of black roses around my lungs. iii. your trembling fingers are framed around a cancer stick, sending disheartened curlicues of draconian breath up high to mingle with crepuscular clouds & to choke the birds. i wish i could fly. iv. my lovelorn letters brim with cramped blue chirography. i’d much rather be a cartographer, mapping out each square inch of your sea-glass skin— staking claims in all the rocky, veined crevices you call a fragile home. v. the rattle of handcuffs doesn’t sound right around your wrists, and your broken rum bottle glare is far less romantic in the throbbing sunlight that stings. it’s the most human i’ve seen you be. vi. the flowers you grew are beautiful, but i haven’t been watering them lately. they choke & burn & pound the combustible mortar of my bones.

Harker Eclectic Literary Magazine [vol. 17] // 9

vii. the pyrrhic climax—broken dishes, broken words, broken hearts— broken broken broken. viii. the oceans that swim through the gulfs of your eyes no longer remind me of benitoite night skies & winking constellations, but of long-time betrayal & fear & inky rage. ix. you told me you loved me—that i was your seraph—the panacea for all your ills; but i am no serotonin & i am change. you forget i am a peripatetic hurricane. x. your flowers have wilted & so have you. i don’t drink coffee. i don’t chew bubblegum. i don’t play guitar. to me, you are deader than the lonesome night sky.

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Fighter Jet Kevin Ke Grade 12 18” × 24” Watercolor

Harker Eclectic Literary Magazine [vol. 17] // 11

Backup Kevin Ke Grade 12 18” × 12” Graphite

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Energy Kevin Ke Grade 12 6” × 9” Ballpoint Pen

Harker Eclectic Literary Magazine [vol. 17] // 13

Blue Annabelle Perng Grade 9

wirls of green and blue blurred in Quinten’s vision as he spun the globe, his small fingers holding the entire world. The other students watched, disinterested; one stuck her hand into her mouth and another began to tie his cobalt shoelaces into a dead knot.

The kindergarten teacher towered above Quint with her arms crossed. “You can stop spinning the globe now,” she said, unamused.

Quinten’s fingertips continued to move by themselves; robotically, mechanically.

“But I can’t. The earth doesn’t ever stop spinning,” he muttered. “It keeps on turning on its axis. Forever and ever.”

The teacher knelt down and set a firm hand on the surface of the globe, forcing the movement to come to a stop. When she spoke, her voice was low and composed, providing little intimation of the obvious annoyance that lurked underneath. “That’s… not the point of this activity. The point of this is to pick a place on earth you want to go to. Okay?”

Quint paused, trailing his fingers down the globe’s surface. “I want to go…” his fingers left the globe, and he pointed at the empty space far beyond it. “Here.”

The teacher pursed her lips. “That’s not a place on earth.”

“It’s in space,” Quinten said, still transfixed on the globe. “It’s somewhere so far from the earth that if I’m there, the earth looks no bigger than this.”

“That’s enough,” the teacher said sharply, snatching the globe and lifting it out of his reach. She placed it in front of the next student, her honeyed, sugary-sweet

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voice resurfacing. “How about you, Katie? Where do you want to go?”

Katie pointed to a city, probably randomly picked. The teacher nodded, smiling.

“That’s a good choice.” She turned to Quint. “You see? It’s not that hard. You need to learn to follow directions better, Quinten.”

But Quint wasn’t listening. He was too busy thinking of undiscovered intergalactic worlds that one day, he would be the first to see. * * * Mundane. Boring. Pathetic.

The kids in his neighborhood prided themselves in their little games. Climbing trees, running through backyards and getting their knees scraped, floating for hours in the pool, spilling melting ice cream on their shirts. Perhaps there was some pleasure in their activities, but for him they seemed meaningless, and he kept himself at a distance like a drop of oil separated from water. He convinced himself that he was different from other children—better, somehow.

So, when his someone rang his doorbell and asked to see him, he was more than a little surprised. He plodded toward the open door, and there stood a boy who he recognized as the younger of two brothers from across the street. The boy grinned, revealing a gap where his two front teeth should have been. “Catch,” he said, and threw a baseball straight at Quint’s face. The ball sailed directly into his head and ricocheted onto the ground. And then: pain.

“Sorry,” the boy said, scooping up the small baseball from the ground. “Do you want to play?”

“No,” Quint answered immediately. “I don’t want to play. Do me a favor and don’t come back here again. Got it?” He shoved the boy outside and slammed the door shut, not feeling a single fragment of regret.

He trudged back upstairs into his room and picked up his astronomy book again, raking through the pages until he found the right one. This was much more entertaining than some stupid ball game. He was sure of it.

None of his neighbors ever tried to talk to him again, but that was okay. At the age of eight, Quinten decided that being in space was far more interesting than anything that the earth could offer. * * * It happened one day at dinner. The meal was nothing special: mediocre pasta and leftover steak. His mother turned her face up to look at him and said, “Quinten, we need to talk.”

“Whatever,” he responded, not looking up from the diagram he was studying.

His father frowned. “Put that away and listen to your mother.”

“Fine.” Not bothering to suppress the sigh that followed, he slipped the diagram onto the ground beneath his chair. “What?”

His mother and father exchanged glances. “The teachers at school are… uh…

Harker Eclectic Literary Magazine [vol. 17] // 15

troubled,” his mother began. “They say that you haven’t been paying attention in class and that you haven’t been keeping up with your studies, either.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Quint responded immediately. “It’s just middle school.”

His father’s brow furrowed. “It matters. Why haven’t you been doing well?”

“Because,” the boy spat, “the classes are boring. I don’t want to learn any of the things they’re teaching me. I want to be an astronaut.”

A silence followed, and Quinten made the gesture to reach for his diagram again. “Quint,” his mother said quickly, pulling a hand through her hair. “I want you to understand that not everyone can be an astronaut. It’s a very difficult job to get.”

“I’ll be one anyway,” he responded halfheartedly. “It’s the only thing I care about.”

He grabbed the diagram and stood up abruptly, shoving his chair into the table with such force that the table shook. He stalked up to his room, set the sheet of paper onto his bed, and closed his eyes, forcing himself to believe that the orbits of the planets on the diagram were more important than the gaping black hole of his reality. * * * “Happy birthday, Quint.”

He didn’t look up from the equations he was writing. “Yeah.”

His mother set a stack of books on his desk. “These are for you,” she said, smiling.

He scanned over the titles: Black Holes and Spacetime Singularities. Binary Stars and Gravitational Waves. Formation of Galaxies. The Death of Stars. “I’ll read them later,” he dismissed her.

She glanced at him with soft blue eyes—blue like Uranus or Neptune. “Okay,” she said. And then she was gone from his room.

He scribbled another line of text onto the piece of paper. Then he set his pencil down and leaned back in his chair, lost in thought. Uranus and Neptune were both notably distant from the Earth: eighteen and twenty-nine astronomical units away, respectively. Even on the clearest of nights, they were barely visible to the unaided human eye. They were so far away that it was almost as if they were from a different world. He could never really dream of reaching them, could he?

In the hallway, the sound of his mother’s footsteps vanished into silence. It was only later that he realized he had forgotten to thank her. * * * One day when Quinten was seventeen, he was secretly reading a book when the phone rang in the classroom. The sound was shrill and cutting, and he took the chance to clamp the book shut and slip it into his backpack. The teacher spoke a few words into the phone, hung up, and then turned directly to stare at him.

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“Quint. You need to go to the office. Bring all your things.”

Quinten could feel the eyes of the other classmates on him as he grabbed his backpack and flung it over his shoulder. He slipped from the classroom and navigated the empty hallways, wondering what could possibly be important enough for him to go to the office in the middle of class.

He entered the front office, noting the principal’s face, its paleness framed by his gray, thinning hair. The principal stared directly into his eyes and said, “Your mother has been in a car crash and is currently in the hospital. Your father will be here soon to pick you up.”

His dad arrived a few minutes later. The drive to the hospital was silent, and the vehicle felt disproportionately emptier without his mother occupying the front seat. Eventually, he allowed the mechanical drone of the engine to dissipate in his mind, and he shut his eyes and thought of the stars.

The hospital was too—brightly lit, and artificial light spilled over everything with an inhuman glow. His mother lay motionless in the hospital bed, her skin pallid and lifeless, her body connected to a dozen machines. The flickering, everchanging lines on the screens were the only indication that she was still alive.

He sat and waited while his father whispered words to his mother that she probably would never hear. It had all happened so fast; a simple car crash, a single collision that could change everything. In space, nearly all the events could be calculated, foreseen—meteor showers or eclipses predicted decades beforehand.

Wasn’t it better that way? Better if none of the accidents came as a surprise?

His train of thought was interrupted by the stale beeping of the heart monitor.

Strangely, he felt nothing. The beeping could be the sound of an alarm clock, or a message transmitted in morse code, or a signal sent by a faraway satellite. It could have marked the detection of a black hole in some faraway galaxy. It could have been anything but this.

His whole body felt numb, even when the nurses came in to take his mother’s body away, even when his dad drove him home and he watched the world speed by him from the car windows. When the car door opened, his feet moved by themselves up to his room, where models of planets that he had made himself dangled from the ceiling.

His father lingered in the doorway. “Do you need anything?”

Quinten did not look up. “Death of a star can result in a supernova,” he muttered.

His father yelled at him for his insensitivity. Quint simply stared at the models on the ceiling, unable to find the reason to speak. * * * His father passed away two months after he entered college. Due to some important studies he had to conduct, he chose not to attend his father’s funeral.

He also continued to avoid all social interaction. The people around him were irrelevant to his own equation; they would only leave him in the end,

Harker Eclectic Literary Magazine [vol. 17] // 17

wouldn’t they? Just like his parents, just like a fleeting shooting star, scintillating for a moment and then gone the next. Friends were only temporary; they were ephemeral compared to the lifetime of a star or a galaxy. Instead, he spent his hours researching. Studies were more important than everything else. In the end, the universe beyond him was far larger and more significant than the trifling world in which he resided. * * * Ten years later, Quinten stood in a small aircraft, staring out the vast world before him. The home of seven billion people and nearly nine million different species now sat completely in his field of vision, as crisp and pristine as the globe he’d seen in kindergarten.

All his life, the desire to go to space had eclipsed everything else. But that was over now. He had made it.

“It’s a nice view, isn’t it?”

He spun around, finding himself face to face with one of his crew members.

“Yeah,” he responded with a moment’s hesitation. “It is.”

He returned his glance to the window. The blue planet seemed almost luminous against the space beyond it, like a single glowing orb in the midst of a veil of darkness.

And then, all of a sudden, something clicked in his mind and he remembered.

His mother with her blue eyes that would never open again. The image of her flashed by in his mind, so briefly that he almost didn’t acknowledge it. But he did.

Then there was his father, yelling at him for caring too much about astronomy.

His own father, whose funeral he’d failed to attend.

His childhood neighbors, his college roommates, his colleagues, his professors—they were all people who, perhaps, could have been friends with him.

And yet, he had pushed them aside. He had been so caught up in the notion of faraway planets that he’d forgotten the one he was living on.

He was alone, he realized. He had always been alone.

Wasn’t this what he had wanted—to stare down at the earth like it was nothing more than a miniature scale model? His gaze lingered over the earth for a fleeting moment. The green continents below him formed everything he’d ever learned to call home, and yet he’d left it behind without a second thought. Now, not even black holes, the phenomena of spacetime itself, could bend time backwards and allow him to start again.

It was all over.

There was a lot he had missed on earth, a lot of things that he had lost. He knew that there was no changing them now. Quinten turned around and retreated back into the spaceship, the rich blue outline of the earth’s surface dissipating from his mind.

He remembered then that his mother had blue eyes. Blue like Uranus or Neptune. Blue, just like Earth.

■

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Agitated Alexis Gauba Grade 11 22½” × 15” Archival Inkjet Print

Harker Eclectic Literary Magazine [vol. 17] // 19

Mountains Elisabeth Siegel Grade 12

Atlas twig-thin exchanged his sky for his backpack.

I hear he's a good student, lone wolf, mulish pariah.

Teacher eyes slide past him.

He does not look forward, only up.

One day he bites his tie like a gunbarrel, leaps up and roars wordless and astounding, places desks on his back, strides for the mountains, A straight shot; everything around falls inward embracing his shoulders.

The sky stoops as before to love and smother, relief in weight.

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Standing Against the Ruins Joyce Li Grade 11 12" Ă— 9" 12" Ă— 9" Monotypes

Harker Eclectic Literary Magazine [vol. 17] // 21

Blank Spaces and the Silence Anonymous

Two seconds ago I decided to radiate my life, To fill up all the dark places And dark spaces With positivity.

But it’s a negative Earth so the only way I know to paint my world White Again Is to block out all the rest— Shut it out: white-noise Buzzing and zapping in a thick, black smog.

So I’ll let you fill in my blanks.

I fear nothing of the planet, But the ______ that take it for granted.

I know I live the privileged existence, Yet rat races ______ me no subsistence.

I see humankind at 7 billion plus me, But feel neither _____ nor ____ under all the lost voices and insincerity.

And so I live that blissful life, But who is going to ask, What happens in the _______?

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Alameda Creek, January Andrew Semenza Grade 10 18” × 9½” Archival Inkjet Print

Waimea Canyon in a Rainstorm Andrew Semenza Grade 10 18” × 12” Archival Inkjet Print

Wangfujing Street Market, Beijing Andrew Semenza Grade 10 18” × 12” Archival Inkjet Print

24 // Harker Eclectic Literary Magazine [vol. 17]

Postcards Meilan Steimle Grade 11

hate postcards.

My aunt said she liked postcards, and I didn’t understand because why would anyone want a cheap photo with a landmark or animal or fat woman on the front and my bad handwriting on the back?

You said, “I’ll send you a postcard,” and I knew you were kidding because all we did was wisecrack and drink and tease each other, and why would anyone send a postcard when he could email or Skype or text or call?

My aunt said she enjoyed postcards, and I didn’t understand because what are people who stick postcards next to Christmas photos on the fridge saying about themselves except, “My life is boring, but I know people who go places, and they care enough about me to spend a dollar and twenty-five cents for a postcard and stamp.”

You sent me a postcard, and I realized you hadn’t been joking for once, and I didn’t know if I should put it on my fridge—or was it our fridge?—as a reminder you cared one dollar and twenty-five cents about me.

My aunt said she loved postcards, and I didn’t understand because no one who actually wants to communicate sends postcards, they email or Skype or text or call, not send a single paragraph of unreplyable, smeared text.

You sent me a postcard from the Grand Canyon, and I thought of the passage from the critical reading section of the GRE that said that each person who sees the Grand Canyon experiences only a fraction of the joy of the original discovery, and every time it’s photographed, that joy is diluted a little more.

Harker Eclectic Literary Magazine [vol. 17] // 25

My aunt said she prized postcards, and I didn’t understand, but I sent them to her when I travelled because she bought that Coach purse for my birthday, and I hovered my pen over the photo of Hawaii or New York or New Haven while on a trip and wondered what I could say in an unanswerable messy paragraph.

You sent me an unreplyable postcard from the Grand Canyon that looked puny on my or our fridge, and it diluted the wonder of the Grand Canyon a little more, and I don’t know what you scrawled because your handwriting is terrible, especially when you’re intoxicated, but maybe that was the point.

My aunt said she craved postcards so I sent her one from Ellis Island, and I didn’t write “Wish you were here” because it would seem mocking or “I miss you” because it wasn’t true, so I wrote about the scarf she gave me for Christmas and all the compliments I was getting.

You sent me a postcard even though you know I don’t like them, and I thought it was a joke because all we did was razz each other because broken people become comedians—or is it the other way around?—but you were dead serious when you left without telling me in the middle of the night and called from the airport to say you’d send a postcard.

My aunt said she needed postcards, and I wondered if each picture of Yale or Times Square or Ellis Island diluted the joy of these places, but my aunt took her joy diluted like her brandy, and there was never much joy in New Haven to begin with.

You sent me that postcard from the Grand Canyon after the jokes stopped, and I thought of alcohol-diluted nights on the floor by my fridge that I claimed was ours, and everything you had said back then was unintelligible, but I loved it because you were just damaged enough to need me.

My aunt liked postcards, and everyone could tell because when they busted down her door to find her dangling alone in the foyer, her fridge was plastered with cheap photos of landmarks and animals and fat women.

You sent me a postcard from the Grand Canyon, and I put it on my fridge and then tore it up, and then I picked the pieces out of the trash and put them back together because I wanted to read what you wrote, but I couldn’t because you’re too broken or not broken enough, and your handwriting is like hieroglyphics, and this is why people should just text.

My aunt had postcards, and when they emptied out her house, they gave me all my postcards back from Yale and Times Square and Ellis Island, and I feel bad that my last one didn’t say “I miss you” because people only cared a dollar and twenty-five cents about her, but I couldn’t write it because it wasn’t true and still isn’t even though she was the only one who needed me.

You sent me an unreplyable, illegible postcard from the Grand Canyon because you care a dollar and twenty-five cents about me, and I wonder if it says “I miss you,” or if that’s true, or if the GRE was right and this postcard dilutes the wonder just a little more, so I unlock my phone and text you “I got your postcard” and cry because I hate postcards and the undecipherable parts of you, and I need you not to be dangling alone somewhere in Arizona.

■

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Spectre Natasha Mayor Grade 12 13” × 19” Archival Inkjet Print

Between the Gates of Horn and Ivory Enya Lu Grade 9

you counted the tiles between us—harsh-white linoleum under florescent bulbs dully shining legs grappling you had a large blinding smile on your face as you swished around in your gown pinning up wisps of hair in various shapes and sorts trying to mask those blank splotches you filled the room with graceful singing interweaving those drips and beeps into soaring melodies that dwindle and fade you chirped brightly about the future, no not the future prescribed of pills and pricks and constantly waiting for—but the future you deserved you could always be found up in the clouds once I tried to pull you down not yet, you said “just a while, let me linger in that space between fantasy and fate”

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Piano Shalini Arimilli Grade 12 12" × 16" Charcoal

Harker Eclectic Literary Magazine [vol. 17] // 29

The Men in the Moon Tiffany Zhu Grade 11

lara tossed a rock. It skipped a few times, kicking up puffs of dust until it landed in a crater too deep for it to hop out.

“Why are you throwing rocks?” I said.

“Look at how high it’s going,” Clara said. “Imagine what would happen if we jumped.”

“You’ve been throwing rocks for a while,” I remarked.

“What else is there to do?”

It was true: what else was there to do? There were no lush parks to stroll in or libraries to read in. There weren’t even any working smartphones to play games on. It was too bright to do anything worthwhile, anyway; the crumbling grey rocks glared so painfully that when I firstwoke up, I thought I was falling into the beam of a flashlight. The moon was bright enough from Earth; you could imagine how bright it would be just atop its surface.

But on dark, tranquil nights on Earth, though it remains serenely impassive, the moon has the solemn silence of expectant soldiers or a watchful mother. In fact, now that I was here, it was plain that the moon was nothing but an opaque mirror, mercilessly hurling back every photon of sunlight. There was nothing alive about the moon save the miraculous presence of two live humans: myself and Clara. If we were actually alive.

“How the heck did we get here?” Clara said.

“I don’t know,” I said.

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“How are we even alive?”

“If we are alive.”

“My heart’s beating; I think I’m alive,” Clara dismissed.

If it were an afterlife, this place could only be hell, though it was cold and dry where we sat, nothing like the reputed fiery flames. Dostoyevsky’s Zosima once said that spiritual torment was much more searing and terrible than physical fire.

Currently storms of questions tormented me: Would we ever return? Were we alive or dead? Had we somehow become immortal? Would we become the sort of immortals cursed to eternal decay?

“Anyway, I guess if NASA had the money to send us to the moon and make us forget how it happened, they probably have the money to engineer our survival in lunar conditions,” Clara said.

“If any organization is behind this at all,” I said.

“Or the Kremlin, who knows. Anyway, I find it a striking coincidence that the only humans currently surviving on the moon are a male and a female,” Clara said innocently.

“Please don’t get any ideas,” I frowned.

“Well, NASA’s counting on it.”

However dull skipping rocks on the lunar surface might be, I would rather it come to that than… that. But unfortunately, supposing NASA was behind this, it did have something to count on: the utter boredom of skipping rocks, the fear of imminent death, and, of course, the fact that people do not stay celibate forever.

Really, though, did it have to come to that? Whatever the purpose of my life was, it couldn’t be to beget the next race of moon colonials, to be reduced to one’s reproductive function and sensual desires. What is man without reason? What is man if he does nothing but eat, sleep and reproduce like any animal?

“You should really go look at the Earth,” Clara suggested.

“I do see it,” I said.

Some distance in front of me, a mound partly obstructed a gleaming blue marble streaked with white paint.

“There’s a great view from the plateau over there,” Clara said. “Let’s go.”

I acquiesced. We carefully mounted the plateau and stood above the barren landscape.

“Doesn’t it look pretty from here?” Clara admired.

“It looks closer than you’d think it would,” I said.

“Well, yes, but it still looks surprisingly small. The ocean looks like a puddle.

You’d never guess that giant ships could sail over it and sink, or that a plane—a roaring airborne vessel—could crash over it. But from here, you’d never even know there was a plane, let alone that there was a plane crash over the Atlantic recently.”

“Was there?”

“It was in the news the day before we got here. You might not have heard about it. I’m probably not the right person to break it to you, but two students from our university were on that plane.”

“Oh. Who?”

Harker Eclectic Literary Magazine [vol. 17] // 31

“Matthew Lark and Elena Zelenovskaya.”

“No, I didn’t know either of them,” I said.

A moment’s reflection, however, found some familiarity in the name Elena Zelenovskaya.

“Matthew Lark was a business major and Elena Zelenovskaya was a piano performance major,” Clara added.

“I’m a piano performance major, too,” I said.

So she might have been in one of my classes or performed at a recital. But the name seemed tied to memories long before college. Had she been a middle school crush or a partner in a high school project? Then I remembered.

When I was in sixth grade, I watched her perform in the school-wide talent show. She was in the same grade as me, and though I had never spoken to her and indeed had rarely seen her, she made a lasting impression on me with her performance of a concerto movement by heart. I also played the piano at the time, but mediocrely and ignoring the opportunities my well-connected teacher offered.

It was not her ability that astonished me, however; it was her expression, and more precisely, her face. The few times I saw her, I thought she had a rather impish face; indeed, that day, as only a child can, she awkwardly wore high heels and an undershirt that peeked out of the neckline of her dress. Grinning, she clopped across the platform raised in the school cafeteria and bowed a little too quickly, but deeply and unaffectedly. She rose, shook away the mane of hair pinned in the back of her head, and sat at the aging piano whose keys were the color of its rotting encasement. I had been absently playing with the cuff of my sleeve, despite my neighbors’ whispered nagging that the performer was “preprofessional,” “won lots and lots of competitions,” and (most frequently heard) “So pretty, OMG.” When I looked up, I was transfixed by her from that instant until the talent show concluded.

As soon as she sat, the childish grin faded to serenity. Even in the undisturbed, unblemished tranquility of that face, there was a certain melancholy, especially whenever she lifted her eyebrows. They pressed wrinkles into her forehead, rendering it that of an anguished widow, yet her eyes opened wide, as if pleading, “Daddy, why can’t I have ice cream?” Sometimes her expression would dissolve into the wrenching rage of a woman resolved to avenge her husband’s murder, but mere measures later melted into the breathless hope of a child whose father may buy her ice cream after all. I saw two people in her face: the experienced sage, and the artless youth. They melded, as two fragrances do, into the visage of this child who was scarcely eleven years old but seemed older than Christ.

When she returned to her seat, she began shifting her feet, like any elevenyear-old wearing uncomfortable heels. The poise of her neck and the calm in her cheek, however, revealed that even in her general countenance, the adult and the child were juxtaposed. At the piano, however, these two rose from passive repose and possessed her fully, not like two competing demons, however, but rather like two aspects of the same spirit, in collaborative coexistence.

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“I’m an economics major,” Clara said. “Or was, since there’s no college here.”

From then on, that face inspired me whenever I saw it. That day, for the first time in seven years, I practiced piano for more than twenty minutes. It quickly became my habit to practice for more than an hour, and with practice (and duly exploitation of my teacher’s connections), I won several competitions and performed numerous concertos. One thing led to another; I was accepted into a conservatory, but I chose instead to select a piano performance major in an ordinary four-year college. And all that was because of one face. Could it be?

“What are they going to think back home when they find out we’re gone?

Supposing NASA didn’t tell them,” Clara said wryly.

That wasn’t completely right. Perhaps one face had lit the fire of my career, but what fueled it was my effort and dedication—or was it? Was I truly dedicated? It is frustrating for artists to have their dedication questioned, but it is downright frightening when an artist questions his own dedication. I’d questioned myself many times, when I fretted over the rising cost of heating, or when I ran calculations to determine the exact curve our music theory professor used, or when I had to time myself to force myself to practice for four hours, or when out of sheer laziness I declined an opportunity to perform at a senior home. Am I truly dedicated to music, and if not, what is keeping me here? Fame, financial security, pleasing my parents (who had wanted me to be a doctor), or infuriating them for that matter (they had no hard feelings) were out of the question, so what could it be? Could it be just that face? Elena’s face? A face lost over the Atlantic, never to inspire me again?

“Valery?”

“Hm?” “Are you okay?” Clara frowned concernedly.

One day this year, while I was struggling to pay attention to the piece I was practicing, Elena ducked into the room to retrieve a pencil she had left. She strode out of the room with the preoccupied gait of a mother thinking of her children, but when a friend greeted her outside, she laughed as unabashedly as any college girl joking with her friends. Watching her figure and her face, I felt something spark inside, and I finished the piece with more vigor than ever. Could it be that my entire career was the cumulation of these small moments?

“I’m sorry if you knew her,” Clara said quietly.

“She wasn’t my friend,” I told her.

“I’m sorry just the same. She was a great pianist.”

She was gone now. What would become of my career now? Would it, as that plane must have done, spiral into the ocean of inextricable death?

“She was,” I murmured.

“I’m hungry,” Clara complained.

“That was relevant,” I observed.

“It’d be stupid if we could survive low oxygen, low pressure, ridiculous temperatures, and gamma rays and we ended up starving to death,” Clara said, but a hint of tears in her eyes stained her dry sarcasm.

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Perhaps we were already dead. Our present surroundings were hell, and these horrible questions tormenting both of us were the flames. The distant Earth seemed like Paradise set in aquamarine glass, suspended from an eternal string in the timeless ether of space, too far to touch, let alone penetrate. Still, condemned sinners may console each other.

“Even NASA’s not that stupid,” I tried to make her laugh.

Clara smiled. The angle of her head and the shadow across her face seemed breathtakingly dashing in the moment, and that, coupled with my overwhelming despair, made me want to rest my hand on her shoulder, perhaps embrace her and… if it came to that?

She sat down and sighed. Her profile resumed its pimpled mundanity.

“Who knows? Maybe we’ll just go to sleep and wake up back on Earth, just like we woke up here,” she said.

“I hope so.”

Even Clara had nothing more to say. She picked up a rock and threw it. With each bounce, it kicked up another puff of questions until it disappeared into the crater of no reply.

■

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Repulsion Doreene Kang Grade 12 9” × 12” Monotype

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Agenda Elisabeth Siegel Grade 12

❏ Tomorrow, I'm going to ask him why he talks like a podium follows him everywhere.

Whenever he stands up, I can feel the shock of water roaring to a stop on the coast. ❏ Next week, he will look at me, observe all the blotchy details, unwound my orange-peel skin, while I refuse to mention his sandpaper fingers, imprecise and deafening.

He’ll pick me up at the library. I’ll read to him from an encyclopedia & hear his hands drown out the entries. ❏ In a few minutes, he leaves a note at my door. Raindrops will pounce on his words before I can. ❏ Now, encounters are incursions, border skirmishes, my skin, his territory.

I want to write the casualty report.

I want to know the numbers. He calls his brother afterward in the language I'm learning & unzips all the body bags, lets limbs roll out and pool at his feet.

When he glares me against the wall of the bathroom, the apologies lurch from my throat into the toilet.

He says that there are seasons like bruises and scrapes like late snowfall,

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that beauty doesn’t live in my pupils but in the swollen skin around them, that the stains are washable.

In 16 months, I will stop flinching at tiled floors.

Ear Canal Doreene Kang Grade 12 17" × 14” Watercolor and Colored Pencil

Harker Eclectic Literary Magazine [vol. 17] // 37

Keeping the Peace in Parkwater Village Andrew Rule Grade 11

wicked book cannot repent, but the physical impossibility of penance was a fact of life that Mrs. Henrietta Montague of the Parkwater Village Community Library categorically refused to accept. In past lives, she’d converted heathens in Russia and beaten back witches in Salem; purifying the soiled soul of an ungodly paperback, she reasoned, was not a task that should be beyond her abilities.

Mrs. Henrietta Montague stood nearly six feet (she never wore heels) and spoke in a distinctive throaty voice that slithered through the shelves when she hissed. She never raised her voice, but it was whispered among the more morally recumbent members of the community that she could knock a house onto its side with a single spat-out invective, if she only had the inclination. This assertion typically met with some skepticism, but no one in Parkwater Village disputed that her sneezes were of epic and unmatched proportion. “Mrs. Henrietta Montague must have the flu again,” the market-women would titter when their oranges and lemons flew off the display tables on windy days. “We’d better bring her some chicken soup and board up the windows.” Mrs. Henrietta Montague was of the opinion that the market-women should be strung up by their ankles, but the local sheriff ’s office had as yet failed to follow her recommendation.

Outside the confines of the Parkwater Village Community Library’s back room, where the Concerned Citizens’ Coalition for Prosperity convened on Tuesdays and Thursdays, it was also joked that Mrs. Henrietta Montague communed with

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the dead in her office late at night, that she subsisted entirely on raw egg yolks and bee pollen, and that she’d summoned the previous year’s tornado when Mrs. Porter had tried to palm off a Thomas Pynchon novel under the table at the annual book fair. Even Mr. Philips, Secretary of the Citizens’ Coalition, laughed at wild tales like these, at least when he could be sure Mrs. Henrietta Montague was a few blocks away. Occasionally someone would tell a joke about her powers of exorcism, but no one would ever laugh.

Past lives aside, Mrs. Henrietta Montague and her family had lived in Parkwater Village since the beginning of time. First there had been sea; then the sea had split to uncover the land; from the land had sprouted Parkwater Village, and there to greet it had been Mrs. Henrietta Montague. There were, of course, a few issues with this legend: the sea couldn’t possibly have come first, for one (the books in the Community Library reference section clearly established the sky as heading off the chronology), and for another it had presumably been an older Montague than Mrs. Henrietta herself who had witnessed the birth of the world.

The schoolteachers who read this story aloud to roomfuls of budding Concerned Citizens were never clear on these points.

Classes were held in a ramshackle wooden building that posed almost as much of a threat to the children inside as the lessons themselves, but the townspeople didn’t much mind. The whole of Parkwater Village was, essentially, a haphazard pile of planks and nails, from the low picket fences that lipped every roadside to the termite nest of a gate that shuttered the town, swaying and swinging and emitting shallow gasps. The ancient gears in the clocktower only barely managed to beat out their erratic tattoo, doggedly pushing the hands round and round—an impressive feat for such an old structure, even if the hands were spinning in the wrong direction. And the spinal cord of electrical wires that crackled their way down the main road, cleanly bisecting the town: they were mounted on splintery poles that leaned wildly into the street and sidewalk, drawing a curved line from the dusty lots at the town’s periphery to the top of the hill that lorded over Parkwater Village. Heading the hill was the Community Library.

From the stone-slab steps that led to the library’s double doors, Mrs. Henrietta Montague could see every corner of Parkwater Village, all its limbs and extremities stretched out into the countryside. And this, she felt, was how things should be. * * * Minutes, Concerned Citizens’ Coalition for Prosperity Credit to Theodore Philips, Secretary Absent: Monica Porter (excused due to long-term injury recovery) Meeting called to order at 3:45 by Mrs. Henrietta Montague, Chair.

Theodore Philips leads members in swearing of pledge and presents agenda.

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Motion from Eleanora Kearns to review Fantastic Mr. Fox for redaction or removal from library shelves on the basis of references to alcoholic substances.

Vote: 35 in favor, 0 against Approved by Mrs. Henrietta Montague Motion carried. Review delegated to Eleanora Kearns. Redacted copies to be printed and distributed within three weeks.

Motion from Hector Porter to invite Monica Porter back into her editorship duties upon recovery from injuries in last year’s tornado.

Vote: 30 in favor, 5 against.

Recount called by Mrs. Henrietta Montague.

Vote: 0 in favor, 35 against.

Motion failed. Monica Porter determined unfit after long absence to edit coalition newsletter.

Motion from Mrs. Henrietta Montague to investigate 32 Thumbtree Court for possession of illicit printed materials following anonymous accusations against tenants.

Vote: 35 in favor, 0 against.

Motion carried. Investigation slated for Sunday at 11:15. Annual Citizens’ Coalition luncheon rescheduled for Sunday at 12:30 to avoid scheduling conflict.

Mrs. Henrietta Montague recommends early dissolution of coalition due to signs of inclement weather.

Meeting adjourned. * * * Nestled snugly between numbers 11 and 14 Thumbtree Court was the cozy new home of Mr. and Mrs. Gregoire Moyen, who had been allowed to step in and take up residency in the house when its previous owner, the LieutenantMajor Gabriel Freed, had passed on a year prior. The Lieutenant-Major had been the pride of Thumbtree Court: he’d applied a new coat of lavender paint to his house each year, polished the doorknob on a weekly basis, took pruning shears to the hydrangeas every day without fail for nigh on forty years. The Moyens’ application for a new paint color upon their arrival in Parkwater Village had sent a murmur through the neighborhood, but most of the whispers quieted down once the Citizens’ Coalition officially granted the request and issued the new couple a repainting license, valid for six years.

The Moyens’ neighbors prided themselves on their close relation with Mrs. Helene Moyen. Any one of them could name her favorite outfit (cashmere sweater, denim skirt, clogs), her best and worst picnic-lunch dishes (cucumber salad, turkey pinwheels; fried green beans, eggplant parmesan, aspic), and her preferred type of tea (English Breakfast, or anything dark in a pinch). Mrs. Haywood had

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been the one to invite her into the Ladies’ Needlework Society and teach her to knit; her clumsiness with a needle still set her apart from the other members, who had all undergone proper training in the art as children in the Parkwater Village schoolhouse, but in public they doted on her leg-warmers and wooly socks all the same. Mrs. Kearns, Helene’s closest confidante, took tea at the Moyens’ every afternoon and had recently coaxed her friend to a Coalition meeting to fill out an application. Helene and she shared a tight bond, Mrs. Kearns liked to remark—as tight, even, as if Helene had lived in Parkwater Village all her life.

The neighbors’ knowledge of Gregoire was less intimate. He smoked. He spoke with an accent. A few months prior, the villagers whispered, he hadn’t shown up to the annual festival until half past noon.

From their second-story bedroom next door, the Haywoods could make out their neighbors’ garden and half the lawn—the former maybe a little lopsided in its layout (but Mrs. Moyen was her own woman, well-behaved if a little timid, she could be forgiven for her slanted row of tulip bulbs) and the latter a bit overgrown (and wasn’t it a husband’s duty to ensure the lawn stays clean and close-cropped?).

The hydrangeas out front, too, had taken on a character of wildness since the days of the Lieutenant-Major (not a bad thing, certainly, no type of sin, but not exactly in keeping with the Thumbtree Court culture, per se). Unlike their neighbors, the Moyens were in the habit of locking the front door on the way out.

On Sunday morning at 11:15 precisely, his breath tinged sour with tobacco, her hands bright and blistered from several hours of intensive knitting, Gregoire and Helene Moyen answered a polite knock at the front door and peered outside into the sunlight.

Arrayed on their lawn between their low picket fence and their neat hedge rows were thirty-five members, plus one, of the Concerned Citizens’ Coalition for Prosperity.

“Eleanora,” said Helene, and faltered, and raised her hand at the stocky woman by the hydrangeas in a half-wave. Mrs. Kearns didn’t even blink.

“Good morning, Mrs. Henrietta Montague,” said Gregoire with a tip of his hat, which he had jammed onto his head for that purpose exactly. His bald spot gleamed damp. “Is there anything we can do for you?”

She was dressed in a very long brown skirt that hung stiffly around her ankles.

Her arms were crossed over her chest. She stood ramrod-straight in the sun, her steely eyes rigid behind their spectacles and steely hair tied tight in a severe bun.

Her boots were men’s boots.

Mr. Philips hurried onto the porch.

“What’s going on, Mr. Philips?” said Gregoire, unsure of what to do with his hands, tipping his hat again toward Mrs. Henrietta Montague. He tried to put a comfortable arm around his wife’s shoulder, drawing her close, but Helene had locked her knees and was staring, frozen, pleading, at Mrs. Kearns.

“Allegations, Mr. Moyen,” said Mr. Philips with an apologetic smile. “We’ve heard you have a book of particular interest in your household.” He brushed his hand across his forehead and wiped it off on his shirt. “Step aside, if you’d be so

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kind.”

Gregoire took his wife’s hand and drew her down the front steps, but Helene refused to move. She reached her arm toward Mrs. Kearns, who followed it stiffly, distastefully, with her eyes.

“Helene.”

She rocked unsteadily on her heels.

“Helene, we have to step aside now. Let Mrs. Henrietta Montague inside, now, we don’t want to cause trouble, do we?”

Her eyes were pools of confusion, fear.

Mrs. Henrietta Montague snorted and barged past Helene with a vicious shove that sent Gregoire scrambling to catch her in his arms. The crowd of Concerned Citizens filed past them into the kitchen, Mr. Porter and Mrs. Kearns and the schoolteacher and the sheriff and the postman. Mr. Philips made up the rear.

“Sorry, Mr. Moyen,” he said with a thin-lipped smile and a shrug. “Allegations, you know. Have to keep Parkwater Village safe. Prosperity first.”

He slipped into their kitchen and locked the door behind him. * * * Minutes, Concerned Citizens’ Coalition for Prosperity Credit to Theodore Philips, Secretary Absent: Monica Porter (excused) Meeting called to order at 3:45 by Mrs. Henrietta Montague, Chair.

Theodore Philips leads members in swearing of pledge and presents agenda.

Gregoire and Helene Moyen formally introduced to coalition.

Motion from Hector Porter to indefinitely detain membership request of Gregoire and Helen Moyen.

Vote: 35 in favor, 0 against Approved by Mrs. Henrietta Montague Motion carried. Application forms to be shredded by Theodore Philips upon adjournment of meeting.

Motion from Eleanor Kearns to revoke membership of Gregoire and Helene Montague at Parkwater Village Community Library.

Vote: 35 in favor, 0 against.

Approved by Mrs. Henrietta Montague Motion carried. Library cards handed to Theodore Philips for destruction upon adjournment of meeting.

Motion from Frances Haywood to issue public statement reminding citizens of consequences of keeping heretical literatures like the Communist Manifesto

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in their homes.

Vote: 35 in favor, 0 against.

Approved by Mrs. Henrietta Montague Motion carried. Photos of Gregoire and Helene Moyen taken for inclusion on fliers to be posted along the main road.

Mrs. Henrietta Montague recommends reevaluation of residency forms of Gregoire and Helen Montague to determine lawfulness of their house ownership in Parkwater Village.

Vote: 35 in favor, 0 against.

Motion carried. Mrs. Henrietta Montague to retrieve and redact residency forms for examination by Citizens’ Coalition at next meeting. Inconsistencies or errors in forms will result in termination of Moyens’ relationship with Parkwater Village, as well as penalties to be administered at the Concerned Citizens’ discretion. Gregoire and Helene give verbal recognition of the Coalition’s total agency given this eventuality.

Mrs. Henrietta Montague requests early dissolution of coalition for a private word with the Moyens.

Meeting adjourned.

■

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Red Strings of Fate Alice Wu Grade 12 12” × 9½” Ink on Paper

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Gunshot Evani Radiya-Dixit Grade 11

Eyes close.

One shot fires— I watch you hiding in the narrow closet.

Reaching for something to cover your mouth.

You do not make a single sound, But I hear you scream.

I watch as your bones become brittle.

your hands fragile.

your skin gray.

your soul astray.

You become a symbol of living mortality.

Your world becomes silenced Except for the insistent beat Of your own heart.

I watch as you pierce your own flesh.

With bloodstained shards of a shattered mirror.

Until the day you decide To take your last step Into the watery depths Where the sun falls.

Eyes open.

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Between Two Worlds May Gao Grade 11 14” × 20” Watercolor & Ink

Millennial Song Sarisha Kurup Grade 11

We pressed our tongues to necks, tasting salt and exhilaration and all the nights we could not fall asleep because the world was running at 300 miles per hour and could not stop for us.

We cried for all we hadn’t known we had lost, trampling barefooted on broken bottles, and the blood-stained alcohol glittered like rubies in the twilight but all we could do was laugh ourselves hoarse, waiting for a catharsis that never came.

Our balaclavas couldn’t hide the way we saw the world, only the way the world saw us, and the real pain is not in perception but in perceiving.

Still we wore them anyway because pretending to be stifled is easier than being silenced.

Real men take the world on headfirst, our fathers told us, but they were not real men in our eyes and so we buried ourselves in cigarettes and nights that meant nothing at all, trying to be something we could not define better than the fathers before us.

Bodies were just bodies to us and guns just guns because the Towers fell before we were old enough to comprehend tragedy and the new world after was the only one we understood.

Children died and we shrugged, scraping at our own backs to find the wings that wouldn’t materialize and all we were left with were bloody nails and unhealed ridges.

We did not create because everything had been created already and poetry was for our parents’ generation, and all we could do was taste the words now and smile.

Saturated technicolor color universes were a thing of the past and we saw the world for what it was, in black and white.

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Dialogue in B-Flat: #9 of 21 Shay Lari-Hosain Grade 12 19” × 13” Archival Inkjet Print

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In Search of Thomas Beckett Andrew Rule Grade 11

he police report shows that sometime between eight and ten o’clock on the morning of Monday, November 12, Thomas Beckett, 48, an unmarried mid-level executive at the regional accounting firm Bluebottle & Sons, stepped off the municipal bus en route to the office from his apartment downtown and lowered himself onto the grimy strip of pavement lining 12th Street.

Paper-clipped to the file is an out-of-focus amateur photograph snapped by a passerby later that day. Beckett sits comfortably in his recently laundered dress shirt and slacks on top of his suit jacket, which is spread out on the concrete like a picnic blanket or makeshift yoga mat. A tight necktie bites into the soft skin under his collar, its tip dangling in his lap as he leans forward into the sunlight.

He sits cross-legged, shoes tucked under shins, hands resting lightly on his knees.

One of his wrists sports a watch, its metal plating throwing glare at the camera lens. A pigeon perches on one of the splayed-out sleeves of the suit jacket on the ground, head cocked, a wad of graying hamburger bun hanging from its beak.

Beckett’s eyes are closed, but his face is bathed in sunlight: it shines on his clean-shaven cheeks and beads on his eyelashes like tears. His face glows. It pulses with concentration and with wonder at a vision only he can see. Against the radiance of his rapture, the glint of his silver wristwatch is dull and ugly. A pocket of peace envelops man, watch, jacket, pigeon.

An archivist has penciled a brief caption onto the back of the photograph.

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“Thomas Beckett in trance on curbside,” it reads. “Day 1.” * * * “I’m Dora Beckett Williamson, I live in Wheeling, West Virginia, and I’m— wait, do you want my age now, or my age when it happened?

“Okay. I’m 46. So 40, I guess, when this happened.

“Yes, I’m his sister. Half-sister. We share a father. Well, he lived at his mother’s, mostly, when we were kids I mean, but we saw each other on weekends. Yeah, a divorce, before I was born. I don’t really know the details. Don’t care that much, honestly, now that my dad’s getting older. Not like I’m going to quiz him about his divorce forty years ago while I’m feeding him his yogurt at the nursing home.

“ALS. But listen, I thought you wanted me to tell you about Tom, not my dad.

Right? It’s my brother who got all the attention in the news, not my parents. Not me.

“Tom was sort of that kind of kid. I mean spacey, unfocused. I remember stories—not much I actually saw with my own eyes, he was already a teenager by the time I was old enough to pay attention. But I remember stories that he repeated a grade in middle school, kept zoning out in class. They were worried he was stunted, I guess. As in, his head.

“He picked things up in high school, as far as I can tell, but he was never really the kind of big brother who would help you with your math homework. Like, I made the honor roll two years in a row, but Tom, he never made the honor roll.

“Let’s see, I was in ninth grade when his mom got sick, so he must have been… 22? 23? I don’t know, something like that. Then he got that job— “What, his mom? I don’t remember, cancer maybe. I don’t care that much. I mean, my dad would know, but it’s not like I’m going to interrogate him about his dead ex-wife while I’m feeding his yogurt at— “Drugs? Tom? No—no, I don’t think so.

“Alcohol? No. “But then, how should I know? We’re not what you’d call close. Tom was already full-time at Bluebottle by the time I graduated. And you wouldn’t believe the debt I ended up with, after that—mountains, you know? Took me eight, nine years to pay off, and that was with Dad’s help. Tom never gave me a cent. I asked him, right—I begged him. I even put Dad on the line once. Eventually he stopped returning my calls.

“Him out in the big world riding the corporate escalator, and me and Dad back in our hometown. We fell out of touch. That’s the way these things work, isn’t it. But I didn’t need him to call or visit to know what he was doing—that was obvious from the beginning. Tom was the kind of guy who, once he landed that Bluebottle job, would do whatever you told him, file papers, index spreadsheets, anything, till you realized he’d been doing the same job for four years and handed him a promotion. You know? Spacey, that was Tom—don’t talk, nod a lot, do whatever anyone else says. It’s no wonder he stayed at the same firm for twenty-

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five years. He didn’t have the focus to make a change.

“Well, as a kid, Tom never had any girlfriends. If he dated anyone in college, he never told me or Dad. Hell, he could’ve gotten married out there in the city and we never would’ve known, but I guarantee you he didn’t. Tom never paid attention to girls. Tom never paid attention to anybody.

“And you have to wonder, what did he do with all that money? God. Those big-city firms, they pay. But when Dad got sent to the hospital the first time, about a decade ago, when we realized the insurance couldn’t cover everything, he left us in the cold. Imagine that, for a second! Your sister calls you up, first time in fifteen years, says your dad is old, sick, maybe dying. And you turn her down, and you hang up. “‘Forget him,’ Dad said when I told him the story, told him we were going to have to take out a loan to pay for his kidney stone removal. ‘Forget him. He was always Marianne’s boy, never mine.’

“But you know what? When I saw Tom on the TV that day, sitting on the corner with that empty expression on his face, I felt like there was something right in the whole thing. It sounds cold, but he got what he deserved.

“When his mom died? That was wrong. When Dad got sick? That was wrong, too. But when Thomas Beckett lost his senses on that big-city curbside, when his legs and his brain seized up and left him stranded in the cold, the universe did something right for a change.

“What’s that?

“No, I don’t. I don’t know where he is right now. Thankfully, I don’t have the faintest idea.” * * * The bulk of the police report is made up of Xeroxed documents—performance reviews by Bluebottle executives, bank account information, missed rent forms. A few photographs of the apartment as Beckett left it that morning: there’s a cereal bowl in the sink; the toothpaste cap is missing. The bed, a single, is half-made, the linens pulled up to meet the pillowcase but the blanket still balled up at the foot of the mattress.

It took eighteen days for anyone to bring Beckett’s protracted absence to the authorities. Neighbors assumed he was sick. The landlord wasn’t due to collect the rent until December. Coworkers, apparently, didn’t notice that his cubicle was empty in the first place.

Buried under carefully sorted personal effects—grocery receipts, pages from an address book, all tugged free from the stacks of paper strewn around the apartment and meticulously collated by archivists—is a photograph of Beckett on the day the police found him. What had once been a suit jacket spread out under his crossed legs is now tattered, blotchy; one sleeve is missing entirely. His pants are streaked with holes and rips and crusted-over stains. His skin is the same sallow shade of yellow-gray as his dress shirt. The tie has unraveled and

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fallen into his lap, where it sits, molding, like some coiled reptile. The silver-plated watch, of course, is gone.

The lower half of Beckett’s face is shadowed by a scraggly three-week growth, but his expression is unchanged. His eyes are still screwed shut; the corners of his mouth are still pinched tight with concentration. The day is overcast, but Beckett’s face, enthralled by whatever dream is playing out in front of his closed eyes, glows with a light of its own.

“Day 18 of the trance,” the archivist has written. “Beckett loaded onto an ambulance for emergency treatment.” * * * “Clara Belmont, 37. I’ve been a nurse at Father of Grace Regional Hospital for eight years.

“Yes, I was part of the team working around the clock with Dr. Redfern when the police brought Mr. Beckett in six years ago. I had only just finished my internship at the hospital, so the doctor didn’t have me perform any major procedures, but I was involved, as was almost everyone else on staff. With a case as urgent as Mr. Beckett’s, it was all hands on deck. We had surgeons, cardiologists, life-support technicians, all standing by.

“Tense doesn’t begin to cover it. This was a man who’d been exposed to the elements, deprived of sustenance and water, for two and a half weeks in some sort of semi-vegetative state. Not only was he paralyzed, but his muscles were also locked—something you normally don’t see, except in rigor mortis. How his heart kept beating through all that, we’re not sure. We certainly didn’t expect to be able to keep him stable for much longer than a few days, let along until recovery.

“I and the rest of Dr. Redfern’s team were asked to shave, dress, and clean Mr. Beckett as his coma progressed. The experts performed a battery of tests on him.

That was where they found that, although he didn’t respond to any sensory stimuli, his brain was in a permanent state of neural excitement, almost hyperactivity.

Science couldn’t explain it. It was clear, though, that we couldn’t terminate his life support: he was nowhere near dead.

“Four months had passed, I believe, when the electrical outage hit a portion of the hospital. We connect our facilities to several different transformers to make sure not all of our instruments are wiped when one of them blows, but I was tending to Mr. Beckett—or his body, at least—when the lights went out.

The meter, I guess, was on a different system than the life-support machines, since the readings kept scrolling even after the machine kicked out. And in the seconds before the emergency generator came to life, when the pulses and fluids being pumped through the patient’s systems suddenly ceased, I kept my eyes on the meter. I don’t know how, but his levels stayed stable. Unchanged. As though his body was sustaining itself in his near-death state so effectively that the lifesupport system was superfluous.

“Personally, I think he’s charmed. Blessed. There’s no other explanation. Just

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over five months after he was brought to us—this would be May 12—his eyes snapped open and he went into convulsions in the bed. Suddenly the whole team had reassembled in his room to calm him down.

“Aside from the expected muscular atrophy, which we’d been observing for months, Mr. Beckett bore no sign of his extended coma. We discharged him only three weeks after he awoke.

“The incident has gone down in the mythology of Father of Grace. Dr. Redfern says the moment when Mr. Beckett came alive was the emotional climax of her career: a man who should by all rights have been dead reanimating before our eyes.

“His whereabouts? I’m afraid I don’t know anything. Thomas Beckett as a comatose figure in our hospital hallways is legendary, but, to us here at Father of Grace, Thomas Beckett as a living, breathing man is irrelevant.” * * * The final page of the police report gives a terse outline of the compromise formed between Thomas Beckett and the local authorities upon his release from the hospital. His position at Bluebottle had by this point been filled, his apartment long since foreclosed. Beckett had been boarded onto a southbound plane to an airport where he claimed his mother would be waiting for him.

Later investigation by the police revealed that the family living at the address he’d provided had no connection to the Becketts and that no middle-aged man had ended up at their doorstep. The police put out a call for eyewitness accounts to determine Beckett’s whereabouts, but no members of the local community stepped forward to testify.

Thomas Beckett had last been seen boarding a train into the countryside, having left no messages behind with his family as to his final destination.

The police investigation has since been closed due to the unavailability of evidence. No one is left who could provide any clues about the location or condition of Thomas Beckett, blessed, claimed, lost. No one is left who much cares.

■

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A Midsummer Night's Dream Timmy Chang Grade 9 18” × 12” Archival Inkjet Print

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When I Am Gone (Rain) Kaity Gee Grade 12

When I am gone, switch off that wailing record, Do not plant roses above my feet, Do not travel the black roads to my bed.

Instead /wait a minute/ /then walk a mile/ and when That sullen,

surly

Cast aside memories of Sunday morning light Forget the Polaroid flashes and the trembling hand which wrote this,

or sing prayer lullabies to my grave;

and let the rain wash it all away,

church bell rings,

the one who held yours close Remember not our sunken smiles, six feet under the stars.

Just wait a minute.

And let the rain wash it all away.

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Bliss Alexis Gauba Grade 11 15” × 10” Archival Inkjet Print

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Clay and Marble Lisa Liu Grade 12

I built a tower for you today—well, it looked more like a ziggurat anyway—but I stood at the top and my shoulder hit the moon I built a tower for you today and it was made of sun-baked bricks and steel rods and I held it together with my hands and put Elmer’s glue in the cracks I poured cement into half-squares and waited until it dried while I washed the dishes and walked the dog I found in my neighbor’s yard with his big hungry eyes and took home and named Clive, after your dead husband I peeled some oranges and rubbed the peels on the sides of the tower so that you could smell potpourri but the fresh kind with lilies of the valley in the corners I painted you a mural on one side—I pulled away the corners of a Starry Night so you could have the whole galaxy—but I forgot some stars so I poured turpentine on it hope you don’t mind I built you a marble staircase—the kind that hold silk trains and catch-in-throat breaths—I couldn’t find velvet for the rug so I used burlap it came by the yards cheap I found a portrait of your mother your father painted before he left and never painted again and I hung that on the side for you and I built you a frame for it too with handprints and pine and popsicle sticks I hung a chandelier for you—you always liked candles, you said—it has diamonds and charcoal and burns like incense and overcooked pasta this is what you wanted, you said I built a tower for you today and it’s in my backyard and bulges over the fence and fills my curtains with its unsightly gold gates but you deserve a palace so I thought we could climb it together and be careful your feet don’t slip on the mud porch

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Dialogue in B-Flat: #14 of 21 Shay Lari-Hosain Grade 12 19” × 13” Archival Inkjet Print

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Dialogue in B-Flat (Null) Shay Lari-Hosain Grade 12

head of me is some dim street.

Bursting from the uneven curbs on either side are the fronts of cracked apartments. Spiked metal grates obstruct tenuous excuses for windows in the building façades. A few of the panes emanate dull yellow and electric blue glows—the rest remain in bare shadow. Above, electrical conduits dangle listlessly in the air, thwarting the inky blackness above. Razor wire swathes itself around chainlink and concrete in sadistic anticipation, and surveillance cameras monitor voids of sacrosanct space, waiting. A torn garment sits atop some wire, fluttering in the breeze. The confidence of the solid concrete is dampened by, well, just about everything else.

A short man emerges from a parked Toyota and removes his jacket.

Oh, I’m searching for an image. I unfold the tripod, camera perched atop, scanning for the image. I find it—now I just need to make it. f/9, 25 seconds.

Click. Some of the windows are yellow, some are blue. Down the road on the left, a person smokes a blunt. My jacket’s hood covers my head.

This place is cold.

The short man puts his jacket on and gets back into the Toyota. The door shuts. The rear lights flicker on.

Click.

Another person is walking up the street. The light from the streetlamps shifts the shadows on his face as he approaches. I stiffen. My face feels chiseled from icy

Harker Eclectic Literary Magazine [vol. 17] // 59

concrete. My skin feels stretched taut on my gaunt face.

“What are you recording?” he asks, his eyes narrowed.

Behind him, “187 SFPD” is scrawled on a wall in jet-black spraypaint.

“Oh, no, no video. I’m making some art. Just stills. I’m a student,” I say sanguinely. His eyes trawl mine, as suspiciously as those funny constructions of the urban world do, those spiked grates and barbwire coils and security cameras, oh, especially security cameras, their vigilance instilling an indelible, noxious friction into their environment. But I’m the one with the camera, its metal cool and hard.

His cursory assessment of me results in reluctant trust. “Be careful around here,” he says. My camera, nevertheless, feels a tad warmer.

“Thanks,” I nod. He nods back.

The door of a parked Toyota opens. A short man surfaces from the car and sheds his jacket.

I move down the street. Slow progress, but I like taking my time. I compose another shot. I feel the shot. It feels right. Click.

Another guy, alone, looks over at me strangely as he walks closer. By now I’ve let a few people pass by without saying anything.

“Whatcha doin’ there?”

Down the road, the short man dons his jacket and gets back into the Toyota and shuts the door. Clunk.

Click.

“Oh, I’m making some street photographs. I’m an art student.” He looks at me for a second in surprise.

“No way. That’s cool. Keep doin’ what you’re doin’.” He claps me on the back with a warm hand. I smile. “Hey, have a good night, man.”

“You too, brother.”

One more exposure, and then I move down the street. I cross to the left side.

I photograph a building façade, illuminated by a streetlamp, and the space below, which a security camera holds captive. Under the light I hear that electrical B-flat whine murmuring. The circle of light falls on me. Sickly yellow light radiates outwards, but the air is chilly. I’ve penetrated the space. The thrumming seems to grow in volume. It starts to get inside my head.

A short man surfaces from a Toyota and sheds his jacket and stares at me.

I draw in chilly air sharply. He’s either waiting for a deal or completely shitfaced. I hear a noise behind me, and I turn around. The emotionless white lady who was smoking the blunt has moved—she’s holding it in front of me. She’s offering me a draw.

I look into her eyes, and she looks through mine, and I see nothing.

“No thanks. Maybe next time,” I say politely. She grunts and totters back. I start to laugh maniacally. I sound so absurd.

Making my next exposure, I am pressed up against a giant metal grate shielding some air vents. A gravelly voice splinters the repressed, noiseless murmur. It sounds like it’s that lady. I don’t know how I know that, because she hasn’t said

60 // Harker Eclectic Literary Magazine [vol. 17]

a word.

“I’m going to kidnap that kid. I’m gonna get him and I’m gonna—” I hear another voice—a voice seemingly loud, yet very faint, with no identifiable direction, maybe from above—it sounds like it’s being filtered through a telephone line or a police radio. “What the hell is that kid doing taking pictures? You see him down there, right? He’s been there for ages! Call 9-1-1!”

Call the cops?

I look left, right, and above in my peripheral vision, but nothing’s there as far as I can tell. I can’t look behind me. I’m not laughing.

I walk briskly, blindly back up the street as a maelstrom of thoughts swirl around in my own head, my ears ringing, the B-flat buzzing, panicked, paralyzed, refusing to look back, keep going, almost there, now I’m where I entered the street. At my car, security, safety. I swivel around.

Ahead of me is some dim street.

Bursting from the uneven curbs are cracked apartments. Spiked metal grates obstruct the tenuous excuses for windows. A few of the panes emanate dull yellow and electric blue glows. Above, electrical conduits dangle listlessly in the air, thwarting the inky blackness above. Razor wire swathes itself around chainlink, and cameras monitor voids of space. A torn garment sits atop some wire, fluttering in the breeze.

■

Dialogue in B-Flat: #11 of 21 Shay Lari-Hosain Grade 12 19” × 13” Archival Inkjet Print

Harker Eclectic Literary Magazine [vol. 17] // 61

Triumvirate Natasha Mayor Grade 12 23” × 14” Archival Inkjet Print

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her face was like a night sky.

Arushee Bhoja Grade 9

i. her face was like a night sky. i told her that once and she laughed— "i hate my freckles." still, i used to catalogue her freckles as if they were constellations. ii. perched on a high cheekbone— its coffee wings outstretched mid-flight— a bird of paradise only less lifelike, and less colorful. i named him apus. iii. there was scorpius— a brown-flecked scorpion that sat atop her full lips. i wondered if he was deadly. iv. pictor—the easel in each of her ever-rosy cheeks sometimes painted scarlet, sometimes pink, and sometimes every hue in between. v. there were many more i am sure, nestled in the crannies of her complexion.

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vi. she caught me staring, and the crimson color climbed in my cheeks. "i hate my freckles," she said again. "but, dear, i love them."

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Sentries Natasha Mayor Grade 12 21” × 14” Archival Inkjet Print

Winchester Townhouse Maya Valluru Grade 11

Her eyes change with the weather, like her smile— green to grey and grey to blue.

A birthmark protrudes from beneath a pair of frames as burgundy as the ends of my braids.

A country she left melted wax in a kettle and streamed it over her head as she walked down the aisle.

It formed a pasty, pink-white casing, a lucid hot tar on porous skin.

But you will never strip it off, baby.

It’s an inconsiderate price sticker on a plastic container; you peel and crack your fingernails and turn your cuticles to rough white slabs to hit another polished carbon wall.

What emerges is an unending layer of pulls in the gut and echoes of bliss.

Instead run through her veins vanilla black tea, the kind Anecka sent home last week.

Or lay colored contacts on her shrinking pupils and dress her in a gown of Tahitian pearls.

Pull from the slots of the heavy wooden cabinet, the one that slips onto your uneven toes, the music that never fails to fix her up better than the miracle punctures of Chinese medicine.

Study— cut out the fat that burdens her legs

Harker Eclectic Literary Magazine [vol. 17] // 65

and thread her burnt hair back into her scalp.

Take her to the shore, where she can liquefy in the familiar heat of a distant sun the memories of the boys and girls she once drank and sang and danced with.

But for now, before I leave, you and I will only sit.

She drives every morning and every night perpetually uncertain of the open road that runs before her, behind her, and in her marrow.

The leather sceptre, the scythe she grips leads us back to our comatose streets.

And in time, my hungry, sweaty baby, we can drive her back home and thaw it all away.

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Trapped Joyce Li Grade 11 6” × 6” Ink Pen

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Chapter 12 Meilan Steimle Grade 11

he IQ center’s waiting room is cold, and Sarah prays it won’t wake the baby.

Not “I need a jacket” cold or “awkward shivering” cold. The kind of cold that’s not intense enough to merit comment, but is still undeniably there, nibbling on the back of Sarah’s consciousness and making her hairs prick through the knit of her cardigan. The baby stirs beside her and Sarah hopes halfheartedly it won’t wake up before Milo finishes testing. It’s not that cold, but babies are sensitive according to her mother.

Sarah tries and fails to distract herself with a month-old copy of People. Scarlet Johansson is pregnant. She flips through her phone and finds no messages from Harold. He must not have landed yet.

Sarah can’t be the only one who’s cold, right? The baby shudders in its stroller, and Sarah scans the waiting room for support.

Beside her, a skinny, blazer-clad mother whispers instructions into her daughter’s ear. The girl nods along, tiny eyebrows furled as she perches on her mother’s bony lap, glossy black pigtails bouncing softly.

Sarah smooths her hands down the wrinkled legs of her jeans and shivers again and imagines the little girl with the glossy pigtails growing into a miniature blazer-clad woman whispering into her daughter’s ear, loquacious, loquacious means talkative, say it with me, loquacious. The baby turns over in its stroller and Sarah’s hand creeps for her phone. Maybe Harold has landed.

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“Mrs. Malone?” The door at the back opens, and every parent’s head swivels to face Milo as he steps out of the testing room. “Milo’s all done.” The chubby IQ test lady beams, her chin bunching up in rolls, and Sarah thinks maybe that means Milo did well, or maybe it means he did terribly, or maybe the IQ test lady smiles that way at everyone to avoid a barrage of questions.

The baby’s awakening scream rattles through the drafty waiting room, and Sarah flinches as all the parents in the room rest their eyes on her and their hands over their children’s ears.

“Thanks,” says Sarah, and she steers the stroller, grips Milo’s hand, and trundles out the door.

Sometimes, Milo pastes his hands against the glass of the car window and watches the sunlight filter through and turn his palms to embers in the setting sun, and he wonders if there are angels captured in the car glass like bees in amber.

Not the fair-haired cloud-dwelling seraphs Milo has seen on TV Christmas specials, the kind of angels that curled around dust notes in the golden afternoon and murmured to him through the window screen on cool autumn nights.

Milo does not press his palms to the glass today. Instead, he lets his vision relax and watches the fuzzy blur of green swirl by, like someone has dipped a paintbrush in a bucket of foliage and hung it out the window, letting watercolor droplets fly off and stick to the air in suspended streams of color.

Milo’s mother has been saying something, Milo realizes, her voice humming in the background like the trees going by. He takes a second to peel away the cocoon he’s slipped into naturally. She’s asking how the test was.

The woman who had asked him gentle questions like cotton pajamas against freshly showered skin had an angel hovering over her shoulders, pale pink wings fluttering whenever a smile bloomed on her face. She had eyes like high beams that pierced through the fog of his cocoon, unveiled by the haze he sometimes saw with others. Milo wonders what it must be like to walk through life cocoonless.

Was it like being naked, bare skin constantly exposed, every inch flinching against a cacophony of sensations?

“Milo?” Milo’s mother’s voice probes against the cocoon he didn’t realize he had receded back into.

“The woman was very shiny,” Milo says, and he can feel his mother wilt in the driver’s seat, and he isn’t sure why, and he feels his insides crumple in response.

He tries again. “She was nice.”

It’s 7:13, and Sarah is sitting alone at the dinner table, waiting for her spaghetti water to boil. The baby snores in its nursery, and Milo assembles LEGO cities in the living room, and Sarah has already scrolled through the TV Guide, so she calls Harold. His plane should have touched down by now.

No answer. “Hi, you’ve reached Harold Malone.” Harold’s voice crackles cheerfully into Sarah’s ear. “I can’t come to the phone right now, but if you leave a message, I’ll get back to you in a jiffy.”

Harker Eclectic Literary Magazine [vol. 17] // 69

Sarah does not leave a message. The lid of the pot is rattling.

Did he always say that, Sarah thinks numbly as she and Milo slurp up the spaghetti marinara in silence. In a jiffy. When she and Harold were going on shy dates in college at overpriced restaurants neither of them enjoyed, did he say that he would pay “in a jiffy?” Or did he pick it up from someone on one of his business trips? Some Japanese executive solemnly declaring that he’ll have the contracts “in a jiffy.” Or maybe it was always there, underneath Harold’s boyish grin, a future of growing middle-aged and plump around the middle, going fishing in cargo vests and saying he’ll be back “in a jiffy.”

Sarah’s phone chimes. It’s Harold, writing that he’s landed safely and will call as soon as he can. His message is accompanied by a grinning emoticon.

“Your father landed in Columbus,” she says to Milo, who looks up from where he’s been drawing patterns in his marinara to blink at her with wide dark eyes.

“Are you going to finish your pasta? You could probably draw better if you gave me the rest of your noodles.”

“It’s a map for the angels,” says Milo, and Sarah takes that as a yes and spoons the rest of his spaghetti onto her plate.

This is the first time since the baby was born that Harold has gone on a trip.

And to Ohio of all places. What is there to do in Ohio, Sarah asks herself. Then again, what was there to do here.

Harold is coming back in a week, and Sarah’s days are, in some ways, unchanged.

She feeds Milo, nurses the baby, then plops down on the couch and watches Say Yes to the Dress and Restaurant Impossible. Sometimes, she sits Milo down next to her and watches him stare blankly at catty bridesmaids and spray-tanned mother-in-laws oozing out of their jeans in rolls. Sometimes, she lets him mill around and finds him around 1:00 for lunch gazing out the window or reading in a corner, knees tucked into his chest. Sarah wonders if he’s bird-watching, or maybe looking at shapes in the clouds.

The differences are minute, but Sarah begins to recognize them by Wednesday.

Instead of getting dressed in the morning, she pulls her polyester housecoat over her flannel nightgown. She hasn’t shopped for groceries all week; this is the third day in a row they’ve had silent spaghetti for dinner.

On Thursday, Harold hasn’t called and Sarah puts on some of her early maternity clothes and walks Milo and the baby to the park. They sit on a bench on the border of tanbark and cement, Sarah finishing off her waffle cone and Milo occasionally licking at his popsicle, and Sarah feels the silence between them stretch like the wide band of her pants, digging into her waist, so she points to the tufts of cloud in the sky and asks him if he sees any animals.

Milo doesn’t, and Sarah shoos him away to go play on the swings because aren’t creative kids supposed to like cloud watching? Beside her, the baby begins to stir in its stroller, and Sarah fishes around in the diaper bag saddled across her chest for a bottle.

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Milo pumps his legs back and forth mechanically, watching the playground undulate below him, and he blinks and he’s now examining himself from the side, his body leaving a trail of Milos, each snapshot of a moment flickering in the air behind him. Milo could finger through the seconds like microscope slides and let the color of each smile soak into his palms and draw angels across the glassblown sky with his fingertips.

Far across the playground, other children are swimming like bugs in honey, tugged forward by the gentle wings of their own angels. His mother is sitting in the periphery of his vision, soft legs swung over the side of a bench. Milo watches himself observing the weight wrapped around her pale body, swaddled darkness where angels can no longer bloom, and wishes he could to fly to his mother and tear that demon from her breast.

He sees himself begin to reach out, and then he is jolted back into his body, palms face down in the tanbark, red blood soaking like marinara sauce through his pants. He can hear his mother’s scream, and then she’s gripping his forearms and shaking him and Milo looks up to see her face silhouetted in light.

Don’t worry, he wants to tell her, he doesn’t feel anything, he’s going to be okay, so he cups her ashen face with his bloody hands and watches himself watch his mother’s face contort and crumple.

On Friday, the baby is colicky and Sarah spends four and a half episodes of Say Yes to the Dress in the nursery, jostling the baby in her arms as she paces from wall to wall. As it paws at her wilted breast for the third time that day, Sarah thinks that her mother is a liar.

Motherhood is the most beautiful thing a woman can experience, she had said while correcting Sarah’s top-stitching. No, not like that, Sarah; do you want this quilt to unravel?

It took Sarah two pregnancies, but she’s come to the belated realization that that’s complete bullshit. Motherhood is beautiful, and babies are a gift from God, but no one warns you about the pieces of yourself the kid steals when it claws its way wailing out of your vagina. And then there you are, swollen and puffy, your former self consumed by layers of cellulite and stretch marks, and your husband hasn’t called in a week.

The question skirts on the edge of Sarah’s mind as she pinches the fat on her stomach, probing for the real her. Has it always been here, beneath her girlish face, the potential to grow middle-aged and plump around the middle, watching trashy reality TV in sweatpants and wondering where her husband is?

Sarah is no stranger to the concept of affairs. It would be so cliché, so American, so utterly Harold to screw someone on a business trip. Where is he now, fucking some skinny secretary into a desk as he grabs at her hips with sweaty hands and comes groaning “in a jiffy?”

The baby snaps at her breast again, and Sarah reaches back to unclasp her bra.

Saturday evening in the nursery and the last of the angels disappear beneath

Harker Eclectic Literary Magazine [vol. 17] // 71

the tenuous horizon. Milo nestles into his mother’s tender stomach and listens to the murmur of her voice rasp around his ears. She’s reading to him about a boy like Milo and his ticking, talking dog. Milo’s read it before, but he likes feeling the way his mother’s body relaxes beneath him as she reads.

This room has never been home to angels. This room, where pink gauzy drapes smother the sun, and the baby that smells like milk and dreamless sleep makes his mother’s spine stiffen like tanbark. What would happen, Milo ponders, if he grasped the baby in both hands and then dropped it on the drowsy carpet before its peculiar darkness could sink in and contaminate his scabbed palms. Maybe then the angels could take the baby’s place in the crib and his mother’s face could soften like her arms around his shoulders.

Milo pinches the skin on his wrist and lets himself fall away into his cocoon, isolated from sensation. He wonders how hard he’d have to press to crack the cocoon, how much tanbark would have to gouge into his knees.

Milo has been asleep for a while now, but Sarah keeps reading. It’s been twenty years since she’s read The Phantom Tollbooth. Sarah read it once as a girl, flipping through stiff pages in the sun-dappled afternoons of romanticized childhood.

When she finished, she stacked the teal copy neatly on her bookshelf and waited patiently for her own adventure.

Sarah finds herself smiling as she pages through the book and asks herself why she didn’t reread as a girl, even once. Did she think that rereading the story would spoil the magic? Or maybe she never bothered because she knew she’d have magic in her own life.

Sarah thinks that maybe she should stop Milo from reading so many books.

They’re fun for a day or a week, but then you become a kid too busy waiting to be the chosen one to realize that everyone else feels like the most special person in the world too. And that kid grows from a child into a teenager who covers her acne with five-dollar concealer from CVS and thinks that love is handholding and shy smiles across the hallway. The kind of teenager who writes bad poetry and believes “It Gets Better” campaigns and dreams of adventures with a talking dog named Tock.

Sarah has always hated realistic fiction, because who wants to read about a bunch of boring adults whose lives are shit? Sarah remembers going into a Barnes and Nobles as a child and flipping to the middle of some grown-up book, to chapter 12. Sarah hadn’t understood the point: so what if grown-ups were depressed and hated their jobs.

Twenty years later, Sarah rocks Milo into a deeper slumber with her knee and wishes she could go back and read from the beginning. You can’t just open a book to the middle of someone’s life and read from there without knowing if the sad grown-ups whose husbands didn’t call had longed for adventure as children and dreaded the possibility of being alone in the world. But Sarah can’t recall the name of the book, and the Barnes and Nobles down the road closed years ago.

Downsizing. The book is probably lost forever to her, she realizes.

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Sarah feels a sudden frenzied terror rising in her chest, and she drops The Phantom Tollbooth and grasps for her phone on the bedside table. Harold doesn’t answer. “Call me as soon as you get this, Harold,” says Sarah and wonders if he can hear the panic crack in her voice, if he will even notice.

Sarah waits in silence, phone gripped between her icy fingers as the light through the window fades away. Milo snores softly. The baby turns over in its sleep.

The sharp ring of the landline cuts into Sarah like seeing Milo bleeding on the ground. She freezes, legs numb, and it rings for a second time. Sarah lifts Milo onto the floor, drops her phone, and runs.

With every step, Sarah feels colder inside, frost curling up her stomach and into her fingers. She’s freezing as she picks up the phone, shivering and desperate as she gasps into the receiver, “Harold, are you cheating on me?”

There’s a pause, and the ice in Sarah’s stomach ruptures.

“Mrs. Malone? I think you have the wrong person. I’m Claire, I administered Milo’s IQ test. I have his results?”

For a moment, Sarah hears absolutely nothing except static. Then she fumbles out something about a mistake and listens as Claire with her rolls of chin fat gushes about Milo’s score. It’s high. Very high. Sarah can see Milo’s future unfurling in front of her, an adventure fit for a mind that was never mediocre and never will be.

Eventually, Sarah realizes that Chubby Claire has been silent for several seconds and is waiting for Sarah’s excited response. Sarah moves her lips mutely, struggling for words.

“Did you know that Scarlet Johansson is pregnant?” Sarah says.

“What?”

Sarah hangs up.

When Sarah returns to the nursery, the entire room is dark save the artificial luminescence of her phone. There’s a missed call from Harold two minutes ago.

Sarah laughs and laughs until she’s gasping as she sinks down the wall into the carpet. The ice that has been gripping her body melts away, but she’s still cold, cold like a whisper on the back of her neck in a chilly waiting room, barely there but impossible to ignore, and no one else seems to feel it, and somehow that’s worse.

Her cackles echo around the empty house, and Sarah looks at Milo’s prone figure in the carpet and thinks what she wouldn’t give for a minute seeing the world as he did.

Through the wispy fibers of the carpet, Milo watches his mother propped against the wall, her body trembling. How he wishes that he could peel her apart and finger through each of her layers like a microscope slide. He could press his palms to the glass and will angels into her, filling her up like golden dust notes trapped in amber.

Harker Eclectic Literary Magazine [vol. 17] // 73

But Milo can’t do this anymore than he can drop Angela out of her crib and watch the blood trickle out of her tiny head like marinara sauce. So Milo crawls out of his cocoon and leaves it lying on the carpet as he wraps his arms around his mother and feels her press her face to his neck and her laughs turn into sobs.

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Offshore Roost Andrew Semenza Grade 10 18” × 8½” Archival Inkjet Print

The Farallon Islands over San Francisco Andrew Semenza Grade 10 10½” × 12” Archival Inkjet Print

74 // Harker Eclectic Literary Magazine [vol. 17]

Harker Eclectic Literary Magazine [vol. 17] // 75

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