Burial: The Strand Magazine | Vol. 66 Issue 5

the STRAND

Dear reader,

As the production of The Strand’s Fall magazine comes to an end, it’s only fitting to give it a proper eulogy. Though it can be tempting to rush to new beginnings, a burial allows us a quiet moment of contemplation on what has past, and the threads of connection it still holds. It’s a time to let memories unearth themselves, to exhume legacies, and to resurface sentiments.

Entombed within these pages are pieces that explore various aspects of burial. You’ll find musings on buried civilisations and treasure maps, reflections on vision impairment and the decomposition of our planet, and of course, goodbyes in all its forms.

I’d like to extend my deepest gratitude to our team who made this magazine possible. To Anya Shen, our Poetry Editor, Michael Elsaesser and Charmaine Yu, our Features Editor and Associate Features Editor, thank you for all your editorial work fleshing out our pieces. To our visuals team, Chelsey Wang, our Art Editor, Sara Qadoumi and Elmirah Ahmad, our Photo Editor and Associate Photo Editor, Chloe Loung and Wendy Wan, our Design Editors, and all of our illustrators, thank you for bringing our vision to life with your gorgeous creativity. To Kyleeanne Wood, our Senior Copyeditor, thank you for ensuring that no piece is left unturned. And finally, thank you to Lila Carr, our Managing Editor, for your support every step of the way.

Thank you as well to all our contributors for sharing your work with us. We hope that by uncovering their pieces, you’ll be as haunted by them as we were.

Forever yours,

Shelley Yao Editor-in-Chief

editor-in-chief: Shelley Yao

managing editor: Lila Carr

business manager: Victoria Allder

features editor: Michael Elsaesser

poetry editor: Anya Shen

senior copyeditor: Kyleeanne Wood

art editor: Chelsey Wang

photo editor: Sara Qaduomi

design editor: Chloe Loung

Wendy Wan

cover artist: Chelsey Wang

features associate: Charmaine Yu

associate photo editor: Nicholas Tam

illustration team:

Chelsey Wang, Vincent Quach, Cameron Ashley, Maria Vidal Valdespino, Sharada Mujumdar, Anella

Schabler, Birch Norman design team: Chloe Loung, Wendy Wan

copy team: Sharanya Tissera, Ilhyana Keskas

The Gathering

Ben Murphy

Hyperborean

Marie Kinderman

my father, the water

Xarnah Stewart

Nihilistic Fatalis

Adrian Chung

The Five Stages of Climate Decomposition

Kieran Guimond

My half, and I

Sooyeon Lee

The Hardest Goodbyes

Isha Rizwan

Why Are You So Silent

Max Friedman-Cole

Photo Essay

Sara Qadoumi

Maps

Elaine Lee

Little Wisdoms

Anya Shen

In loving memory of my 20/20 vision

Lois Lee

Bog Body

Malaika Mitra

Blue Riband Burial

Birch Norman

Names on the Gravestones

Robbie Janzen

Untitled

Cypress Chenik

The Gathering

Terrified, We march towards the horizon

With shovels on our backs.

There is no protocol For resurrecting the dead.

Breathing life

Into their damp lungs, And shielding them

From the unyielding sun

With 10,007 cocktail umbrellas, Armed with nothing but a gardening tool.

words by ben murphy

illustration by vincent quach

Though we must do it.

Find a way

To invent possibility For ourselves.

We have learned to Cultivate the Arctic And ski in the desert.

We can do this, surely.

If we hold hands

And touch foreheads

In one last solemn prayer, One last effort

Known to the fading species, We will prevail. We will arrive at the horizon, Holding their limp bodies above our heads for the clouds to inspect. And as lightning boils their blood, We will know

Who builds, Who destroys, And who saves the soil.

So we can all go on living, Inhaling our sweet smog.

my words serve boreal soldiers nested in the hearth evergreen 2s in snow escape hearts numbed by fright frozen in punishing sun hacked by lumbermen losing their ring(s) regenesis of microorganisms quivers smiles warm enough to plant evergreen generals in our path artificially brought by southern smokestacks warming unstirred land

hyperborean

words by marie kinderman

words by xarnah stewart

my father, the water my father, the water

My father told me when I was very young that Water was the only recurring character in the history of the Black people who are from nowhere. I asked him, “How can people be from nowhere?” He told me it was the Black people who were carried away on boats, pressed together in filth, taken away from where they were from, only to lose but then to create a whole new identity the longer they spent away from their land. The Ships were the start of their aquatic history—a treacherous one and one that would continue to test them. Hanif Abdurraqib says that there is, in Black music, “an imagery of water, that which carried Black people to this place, and that which will save them from it.” I think this is what my Daddy meant when he told me about the Water and her movements.

I wasn’t on those ships, and neither were my parents, but the Water still flows

through the history of me. It is my second nature, and water flows through me instead of blood. I used to feel the most comfortable there, and I am still learning to love it again.

My first memory is of a bath because it is the first memory of my sun-drenched childhood home. I’m not sure if it is a collection of baths into one or if it is actually just one bath, but nonetheless, I remember it fondly. And I remember my bath toys, my orange tiger in particular because my Mama used to hide behind the edge of the tub and put on puppeteer plays for me. She told me stories of the tiger fighting evil like a night-fighting vigilante before I knew who Batman was. She told me stories of her slaying dragons and throwing evil rings into giant volcanoes before I knew what hobbits were. She told me about wishing to be older only to realise the value of being younger before I saw

Jennifer Garner do it. This was when I learnt the value of stories and the strength of words. When I reached a certain age, it was me telling stories off the top of my head to my mother who listened with excited eyes. She still does.

It had to have been a Sunday because my dad was home, and he came into the bathroom with his face crinkled into a smile. His smile used to light up the room, big and toothy and so wide that it took up his whole face.

And I remember my first trip to Trinidad because it was around the time that my little sister was finally able to walk and form babbling words. I remember holding her hand and pretending I knew Port-of-Spain like my parents knew Port-of-Spain. I wanted her to think that I was smart, and I wanted my parents to know that I was a good sister. So I puffed out my chest and marched along the

coast of Maracas Beach. I told my sister about its strong current and explained to her that she could not leave Mama’s eye—that she should not wander around without me accompanying her. She nodded her head violently as I explained, but eventually her eyes wandered, and she squealed, “Look at Daddy!” She pointed with excitement at the ferocious form cutting through the waves.

We both watched my father swim through the ocean as if he was breathing it. We couldn’t take our eyes off of him as we slowly made our way back to our mother, who had been keeping a close eye on us.

I shook Mama’s shoulder, “I wanna swim like Daddy!”

Mama lowered her sunglasses and looked at me with her bare eye. She searched my face. “You wanna swim like that?”

“I wanna swim like that,” I repeated back to her.

So when my Daddy came out of the ocean with beads of water dripping down his skin, his face broke into that brilliant smile when my mother explained my goals. My sister’s face collapsed when my parents told her she was not old enough to swim

yet. She sulked off and sat in the sand, but she got over it soon enough as she searched for the tiny seashells that my mother told her Maracas had to offer. My father led me to the ocean, “We’re gonna stay in the shallow end for now, okay?”

“Okay,” I repeated back because my parents told me that simply nodding my head was rude. When the water ghosted the edges of my toes, its chill did not make me jump back. I stepped further and further in until it was just at neck level. Daddy told me to lean on my back and watched as I bit my lip to keep it from trembling.

“Daddy’s always got you,” he encouraged.

I leaned back and let myself float. Sure enough, when I felt myself flutter for a moment, I felt his large, calloused hand on my back. Years of heavy labour sent waves of history through my back. The water was circulating me. Something that has killed my people, something which might save my people splashing against my sides. The no-sound of water, the white noise of it. There was nothing to be scared of because of the blue skies looking down at me and the white clouds that danced a waltz with the wind.

That was the first time I thought, “Everything is gonna be alright.”

When all of us got older, everything good was still the same. My sister going to university and her first time away from home; my mother retiring to ease her cynical nature; my father grappling with his thought of retirement because what was he without his physical work that was such an important part of him; and me, too, in university working with words. Of course, growing up made a lot of things different. My Mama’s snapping remarks, my Daddy’s anger expanding with the slight shrinking of his body, my sister’s wits as her downfall.

but no one told me that love could sometimes kill. love is violent.

My Daddy loved Water. It flowed through him and made him who he was. But it also took him.

Water has a history with Black people, and it has a history with New Orleans. Daddy went to visit some friends at the wrong time in the wrong place. It was the first time he spent away from us since I was born, and still the Water took him.

it crashes. it crashes. it crashes.

Love is violent, and it crashes, and, for some, it kills.

A man plays Louis Armstrong on the roof of a damaged house as bodies float along the river that was once a street. He plays the blues. I wonder if my Daddy’s body floated past. He plays What a Wonderful World, and I think I laugh.

And now, I am sitting in front of a waterfall, which I will dip into when I am done writing this. Water in the form of falls is something foreign to me, something mostly seen in movies and TV shows, something that I only briefly saw on one of my trips to Trinidad. It is louder than I thought it would be. Louder than any water that I am familiar with other than the thunderstorms that had scared me as a child. But I will dip into that water and bath myself in its depths. I will dip into that water, and it will heal my wounds. I will dip in that water because it has carried me to this place and it will surely save me from it.

The solemn wind hums a winter tune

What’s been living will cease to, soon

Trees bleeding red, grass fading amber

The colours of autumn will be the last thing I remember

I. FRESH

Why do things live to their fullest

Only to wither, decay and perish?

nihil istic fata lis nihil istic fata lis the five stages of climate decomposition the five stages of climate decomposition

words by adrian chung

words by kieran guimond illustration by cameron ashley

This is also known as ‘autolysis,’ which refers to the destruction of cells. This is the first step immediately after death, in which the corpse is mainly intact. This can be further subdivided into ‘algor mortis’ (reduction in body temperature), ‘rigor mortis’ (the stiffening of the limbs), and ‘livor mortis’ (pooling of the blood in the body).

Did you know that in 5 billion years the Sun will expand and destroy the Earth?

The Sun is currently burning hydrogen, as it has been since its birth 4.6 billion years ago. However, at some point, it will start to burn helium and transition from a yellow dwarf into a red giant. The Sun will use up all its resources, and it will simply switch to another one. Huh.

What does it look like when a planet dies? Is this when we bury it in the ground, wipe our hands of the dirt, and say, “well, that was a bummer, but it’s time to move on”?

At what point do we give up?

II. BLOAT

The organisms that reside in the digestive system will begin to digest the body—literally eating it from the inside out. The name of this stage refers to the way that the body will begin to ‘bloat’ due to the release of gasses. This is the stage where the corpse will start to truly smell like a corpse, and this scent can linger long after it has been removed.

It starts with the temperature.

Warmer summers, shorter winters, increased droughts across the surface. New wildfires every month, passing from one forest to another. There’s a constant smell of smoke in the air that doesn’t go away no matter where you are.

Did we really cause all this?

III. ACTIVE DECAY

This stage can be triggered by insect activity or by a tear in the skin. Liquid will be released from the body’s orifices, such as the nose and mouth, as the tissue liquefies. As a result, the body will lose the majority of its mass at this stage.

The voices on the radio sound more concerned every day. They use words like ‘unprecedented,’ ‘catastrophe,’ ‘unpreventable.’

The voices on the radio are wrong. The signs were all there, had been for decades before the rest of the world noticed. But now it’s all moving too fast. Spe-

cies which have lived here for centuries flee north to try and reach colder temperatures, but they die before they could get there. The insects are quieter than in the year before.

Is it too late?

IV. ADVANCED DECAY

The skin has mainly been lost, and the majority of the soft tissues are dissolved. The bones will be visible at this stage and may lighten in colour. Larger bugs can arrive at this stage, attracted by the tougher materials that other bugs cannot eat. The body will release nitrogen and phosphorus, which can enter into the soil.

It is almost at an end.

The trees have mostly rotted and died, the sun blocked out by clouds and clouds of gasses. The only rain that falls is too acidic for them. Their stripped bark is reminiscent of the white glint of bone. Even the scavengers—the crows, the vultures—cannot find food. They circle above the land, searching for one more body, one more long dead corpse they can feast on.

insects. In some environments, fossilisation may occur. This can also be called ‘dry remains.’

There is nothing left.

The rivers run dry, the roots of the trees have withered into dust, the rain falls onto an empty landscape.

The wind is all that can be heard, no birdsongs, no scratching of a squirrel’s claws on a tree branch.

However.

The Earth is not a human body.

The Earth has been spinning for 4.5 billion years.

Did you really think a small group of highly intelligent monkeys would be enough to stop its rotation, to destroy it to its very molten core?

No. It will come back.

We can only hope.

Is it too late?

V. SKELETONISATION

At this stage, all the flesh and muscles are gone from the body, only leaving the bones and some dried cartilage. The length of time it takes to reach this stage depends on multiple factors, including the climate, temperature, and presence of

met in a linoleum-tiled gym on a balmy September morning aged 11 and 12, bonding over colourful backpacks and homeroom teachers in a way that girls do

the legend of the red string of fate says that everyone has an invisible red string tied to their pinky, leading them to another person with whom they will make history

we did not move mountains of god or fill craters of parched lakes but we shared knowing looks in science labs and english class and whispered secrets from hushed breath to awaiting ear and baked M&M cookies at late hours which turned out rather square and funny to us falling apart in peals of laughter, weaving a web of red cradle with every giggle in a way that girls do

my half and i

words by sooyeon lee

i didn’t believe in fate until my own red string wore away and I realized we weren’t girls anymore history (my history) sounds like echoes of violin strings and looks like curved mouths of toothy grins and feels like the stretched seams of girlhood outgrown and tastes like grief and love and smells like square cookies with M&Ms

we are now 21 and 22 and I haven’t seen my half in

the hardest goodbyes

words by isha rizwan

illustration by maria vidal valdespino

“Do not get too attached to the place or the people. It will end up in nothing but hurt.” This phrase constantly plays in the back of my mind like a broken record. It’s a mantra I keep chanting whenever I feel like I am drowning.

Growing up, I had to move around a lot. New faces, new places to call home, and new horizons every few years. When you move frequently, you lose the meaning of a home; you lose the meaning of the word ‘friends’; but most importantly, you lose the meaning of attachment.

I used to restrain myself from getting attached to a place or its people because it only made it difficult to move

It's like stripping a piece of your soul and shoving it in a cardboard box that will stay under your bed forever because you will never gain the courage to open it again. As soon as you get used to things changing, it changes again.

“There are four convenience stores near my place; it takes me exactly eight minutes and 47 seconds to walk to my school, the lunch bell always rings a minute late, and the closest

It made me feel special, it made me observant, and it made moving on a little bit easier. Through memories, I was taking along a piece of the place I once called home and locking it forever in my heart.

Seasons changed, surroundings changed, faces changed, but one thing always remained the same, and that was me. When you move, you leave everything behind. Your emotions always take the back seat, and you start to lose yourself. As years passed, I learned, through my trials and tribulations, to remain loyal to myself. Instead of having a variant of me in every new location, I stayed true to my original self, the little girl who made her first move.

I never hid or altered any parts of my personality to fit into a new place, even the times when I was on the brink of giving up. During those emotionally taxing moments when I thought of giving up, the fear of letting myself down kept me from breaking character. Being the authentic version of myself was the only constant in my life. I held onto myself with a tight grip. Sometimes this tight grip would form blisters on my fingers, but I knew letting go would be more painful.

The hardest part of moving constantly is the losses that come with it. When I was in middle school, I moved to Pakistan because that’s where my parents are from and where all my extended family lives. When I was in high school, I moved back to Canada, back to isolation. I started calling it home again, and my new life started settling back to normalcy. I graduated high school and started university, allowed new faces into my life, and grew attached to them. I no longer needed a journal to remember because deep in my heart, I knew that this was my last move for a long period of time.

As I look back in time, I wish I had never moved back to Canada. Then, I would not have to say my hardest goodbyes. As more time passes, I regret this move back to Canada even more because this move was cruel: it took everything away from me. In January of 2023, my family got a call from my dad’s brother informing us that my paternal grandmother had passed away

in her sleep. I still remember that exact moment when I received the news. The ground beneath my feet vanished. My heart was ringing in my ears. I was so numb that I didn't even cry. My grandma’s voice kept replaying in my head from a phone call we had a few days earlier: she said to me, “Come visit me soon; I’m not getting any younger waiting for you.” I couldn’t visit her. I couldn’t see her for the last time because I moved six thousand four hundred and fifty miles away from her. The same year, four months later in May, my maternal grandmother lost her battle with cancer, and I could not say goodbye to her. I

knew she was waiting for me to visit her, but I never did. Some days, I still wake up in the middle of the night, missing her.

Why are you so silent? You stand, a phantom

In a far dark corner

" Come visit me soon; I'm not getting any younger waiting for you. "

Moving away is cruel. It prevented me from saying a proper goodbye to my grandmothers; it prevented me from seeing their faces one last time, and it prevented me from attending their funerals. Sometimes, I wish I could just stop time and rewind it to when I was living with my grandparents. I would hug them for the last time and remind them how much I loved them again before I lost them forever. My grandmothers will always have a special place in my heart. They are a part of who I am now: wherever I move next, a piece of them lives in me and moves along with me. I know that both my grandmothers are in a better place now, where their pain ceases to exist. They are watching down on me, and I hope they are proud of me or who I will turn out to be.

When you move away, you bury a piece of you in the place you left; you bury the people you left behind, but you always hold the memories you made close to your heart. You miss out on the important moments because you are always in a rush, and you find it hard to settle down, but in the end, you always learn to adapt. You get used to the hardest goodbyes because in the end life always moves on.

When you swallow

Your throat churns the dirt

Around a coffin where meaning waits Decomposing

why are you so silent? why are you so silent?

words by max friedman-cole

The following series of photos highlight the interconnected relationship between art and activism. Similar to the process of a burial; photography preserves the essence of a cause, capturing the emotion and fury in collective fights for justice.

caputuring a mo(ve)ment

For me it’s not just the fight of one group. It is the fight of everyone who is oppressed under our Anglo-Saxon patriarchal capitalist world. It is this intersectionality of all of our struggles. People forget how powerful mass mobilization is. So, in my perspective, it was about capturing this diversity at protests, to show how people can advocate for what they believe in while also standing up against the oppression of others.

by aliza sabih

by ahmed raef

The last time I left Palestine I was two years old. I left without a memory of our home or the ones who lived in it. But I was passed down two things, pictures and stories. Palestine lives through our memories and our cause is that it may never be forgotten. My pictures are my part in preserving the stories of our struggle for a liberated Palestine. For one day I hope there will be pictures and stories of our return.

by kevin aichele

words by Elaine Lee

Marc Newberry

D re am s

In the dark and mapless is where each night each life begins

All expanse no road no X marks the spot no spot to aim for just big solemn land with its many inhibitions and mysteries

But then along the way a breeze across your neck a palmful of gentle entering your forehead creases easing them

Things can be easy like soup clouds can still waft through you touch can still be silken fingers can still sweetly tap their easy wandering humming drumming song on your thigh

Easy like slow trimming your sister’s hair going to the store writing down your dreams cleaving them away reciting old fables believing them

And making pinky promises saying yes

Changing your mind knowing when There is a cooing in the branches just beyond your bedroom window early in the morning

It plucked the quiet away

You can see it the bird

It’s mid-air now

It’s a scout or a pebble dislodged from its beach a daughter or a son

[…] now they are flora and fauna, a chain of creatures spreading north and south and east and west from all shores. A dandelion seed under the feathers of a gull.

A pregnant spider in the deep dry knot of a driftwood branch. When Fletcher tells her that they call seeds that drift over on the wind ‘diaspores,’ she makes him show her the book that says this. She re-reads the sentence five times over.

—Wayde Compton, The Outer Harbour

Little Wisdoms

words and photographs by Anya Shen

This fall, when my classmates compete to talk about everything that they got up to this summer, I will say, I drank a lot of lemonade, went to the hospital, and thought about death.

I’m about to say a lot of upsetting things, and then I will pretend that they are funny. Sorry. My mother told me the worst thing we can do during bad times is to be sad about it. Being sad hurts our bodies. So there.

My second roommate at Toronto General Hospital was an 89-year-old Italian lady who made everyone guess her age and call her “grandma.” Doyouhave familyhere , she would ask. Me,Idon’t.It’sjustthesixofushere.Therestofmy familyisallinItaly.Onebyone,they’redying .

In 1989, the day after the Tiananmen Square incident, my dad, from the wrong side of Huangpu River, mailed in his VISA application to Japan.

After he started work at Mitsubishi, he married the receptionist.

After that, the newlywed couple rented an apartment on Silver Ave., Burnaby, BC, baby.

One by one, their parents started dying.

He told me this the fourth time I went home since moving out for college. My mom told me this on Facetime.

I found the address on my birth certificate, which was ceded into my safekeeping after I turned 19.

All the hard truths we learn by lingering around the corner when the adults are talking. The deaths of our grandparents teach us about what we are really made of.

Mountain town was so far away from home, but mountain town was home now.

Then, their only daughter was so busy running away from home that she popped a lung in the middle of teaching art camp in Northern Ontario.

And pandemics teach us about the consequences of borders.

Anyways.

So I told my new Italian grandma, my friends were here with me in the city. My friendsareheretoseeme . Open arms and fidgety hands. That’sdifferent , she said, that’sdifferentfromfamily . But was it, though? After two years of saying I grew up all over the place, was it not enough to call you my home?

There was home in a hospital room, being my own chargé d’affaires to make sure my family and my found family didn’t find each other. I indulged in the brief luxurious mischief of being loved in all the different ways that couldn’t tolerate each other.

This fall, I’m going to live it up in the sun. If this is the season of graveyards, how can loss feel like every tree in this neighbourhood on papier-mâché fire? The sun is not afraid of anything, is she? If the land is sick, if every day after solstice loses an inch of daylight, how can every morning still have so much gold? Do you ever think about how maybe we never stopped being the sun’s favourite child?

Death (XIII) rides forth on a white horse. It’s not so scary, you see? There are little wisdoms in little losses. I can tell you something Freudian about this, but you hate Freud. It’s just that I realise, by the way I offer snacks instead of hugs when my friends are in trouble, that I’m turning into my mother. It’s just that I believe, at age 53, if I scream every word of the Time Warp again, I can still warp time and conjure you here, young and tipsy. Loss becomes. And how can you call that losing?

Mom is giving away everything she put in storage from the Shanghai apartment. Dad is sick, and dad is here now. She changed her profile picture to the mountains. My family is still learning how to make a home. My family is letting

go of things that we grew out of.

My grandmother, my real grandmother, my mother’s mother, never wanted to be buried. Letmyashesgo.

I wonder if my family’s travels by wind mean that I can never grow roots.

Long walks in the cemetery where children play, old couples hold hands in silence, and edgy twentysomethings go to be honest about their feelings. I can see it: home with roots in the ground. Photos on fridges and Thanksgiving leftovers. Books collected from forty years of not moving. A stone that says love andbeloved.

So much for not having a beautiful rock. I have loveandbelovedspun into my spine, sealed into my lungs, so every time I breathe, I remember. Want burns a steady fire in the centre of my chest, the part where it’s flat, just skin and a bit of ribcage. It flares and simmers, and sometimes, at night, it shows visions of homes I can never return to. Get close enough, and you will see that our bodies are magical.

Neil Gaiman writes that even gods die when we stop believing in them. So, hold me. To next dawn if not next spring.

Have you ever caught a seed from the wind and marvelled at the tree it carried?

Have you ever looked into the eyes of another person and thought about the absolute swash-buckling madness of believing in conjoint possibility in this universe?

This winter, when the first snow buries the leaves so all the reds and yellows decompose into black mulch to feed the earth, and my friends ask how I felt about this fall, I will say, every day I thought about having the time of my life.

Note on the epigraph: The quote from Compton’s book, The Outer Harbour, is about the perspectives of Jean, who is Black, and Fletcher, who is Indigenous. These are their words. My interpretation of diaspora is only a very small wedge in a very large sphere of stories, bodies, and realities.

loved

love and be

words by Lois Lee illustration by Sharada Mujumdar

In loving memory

of my 20/20 vision

As I left my mother's womb, I was gifted a set of eyes.

I now hold one in each hand, digging my nails into the irises, puncturing them through and through until they ooze into my palms.

I toss them to the ground, stomp them into oblivion, force them into the dirt where my dead relatives lie.

I sigh a breathy prayer.

I adjust my glasses.

I walk away leaving the eyes to decompose.

I wade through hazy dreams of everything that is too small, too distant, too dim, too blurry.

Every morning, I host yet another funeral. This time, I tried to write a eulogy:

The eyes taught me that the world was not built for someone like me. I would ██ th█████ my █████ life, g███████ everything ████ █ ███

I berated the eyes everyday of my life. They would roll back to me, begging for another chance to give me my vision.

But they were too ambitious for me to love them. Trying so hard to convince me that the world will look different tomorrow. That I too could enjoy the trivial tasks of reading street signs and overhead menus and presentation slides.

How beautiful the world would be if it was created for someone like me. How gracious it would be if it allowed me to traverse with freedom, navigate words with ease, and lounge at the back of a room.

My decaying eyes saw clearly that the world does not want me to see.

Why would the world give me something that I couldn’t use?

The world failed to realize that sight is not the end.

The eyes did everything they could, taught me that I could combat the world with my ears, my hands, my mind, and my soul.

It was a brutal farewell, but I knew the eyes could handle it. It was time to set them free.

Mitra

Bog Body

You stand at the edge of the lake. A moderate wind blows mist over the surface, breaking the water with air and the air with water. When you think of liminal spaces, you often think about airports and halls and doorways. But the lakeshore is as much of an in-between space as the rest—transitional, full of meaning, anticipatory. You step into the lake and let the water bury your shoes. Burial is the right word; it signifies that you will not return but also anticipates discovery. Your water burial begins now, with a soft autumn wind brushing through your hair for the last time. Say your goodbyes to the trees as they part with their leaves, to the jagged rocks blown apart by merciless explosives. To the artificial beach, to the young forest taking over a slice of

meadow, to the wisps of fog severing the trees across the lake from their roots and letting them float above it.

You continue to walk in until your knees, then hips, then shoulders, then head is submerged. Now, you are face to face with the first layer of the lake, the epilimnion . What will you see? It’s warm, but unlike in the air, the warmth doesn’t concentrate on your face and instead becomes all-encompassing. When you look up, the surface of the water is your ceiling, the thin shield of the meniscus intermittently broken by winds and drops of rain returning home. Small fish swim past you, stirred by the rain, moving their entire bodies fervently in a feeding frenzy.

You step lower as if descending down a jellied staircase. You are now in the metalimnion . The temperature is colder, and it’s a little harder to breathe. The rain has stopped now, or maybe you’re too far down to tell. You get the distinct sense of transience; the layer of

lake you’re in right now has character, but you can’t quite glean it—the closer you listen, the more it laughs at you, shifting into another unrecognisable form. A deep wave passes through, pushing you up then down and shattering your layer into many. The wave breaks, creating turbulence. You are not afraid; at this point, there’s no wrong place to go.

Before you’re able to settle yourself, you’re thrust down the steps once more; this time it’s more of a stumble than even-heeled descent. The final layer is the hypolimnion . You have reached the last dregs of your limnal knowledge. By now, the season has changed to winter, like the click of a backdrop in a stop-motion animation. Because of this, it is warmer than you thought it would be, and you can barely breathe. You wait for the upper layers to mix with this one and for the carcasses at the bottom to decompose, releasing oxygen into your lungs. Your breath fills with death and stagna-

tion, but you don’t necessarily think this is so bad. Your eyes take a while, or never, to adjust to the dark. The texture of the lake sediments paradoxically penetrates the soles of your shoes, feeling sandy and silty and having the soft quality of freshly decayed material. Each of your senses is occupied, even your sense of smell has come back to encompass you in fresh rot, enhancing the sharp-metal taste of blood on your tongue.

A shovel is in your hand: you dig. You have no choice but to dig—you know this very well. Each lump of sediment in your shovel makes your part of the lake deeper, burying you further into the lake as you step in the hole and are compressed by even more water. You can’t yet feel the weight of the lake on your body, but you can certainly feel it in your mind. You dig and dig and dig, digging up fish bones and lost sunglasses and aluminium cans. No matter how deep you dig, the bottom of the lake remains soft, and so

words by Malaika

illustration by Anella Schabler

you keep digging. Galvanised steel hits your shovel, so you dig around it. A corner of a building reveals itself, first one foot, then one story, then ten. Soon you have revealed twenty stories of the building, only the corner since you didn't bother going around too. It's only the frame, but you can easily crawl inside — you haven't needed a floor so far, why would you now?

Abandoned office supplies and equipment float in their turbid matrix of fluid, one of the computers still on, screen flickering. You float over and see gaudy, saturated pictures of beaches and palm trees. Discounted ticket information for a flight to Hawai’i (misspelt) blinks in a bright red box, but you’re not the type of person to travel. A mass of large debris, maybe a printer, floats through and knocks the computer away. Without its blue-tinted glare, you lose interest in the abyss of water in the tower, so you swim out. You must go lower. You know this. You must keep digging.

You dig beyond the foundations of the tower: concrete pillars reinforced with metal bars, lodged in large cracked concrete blocks. You assume there are multiple, but the tower is so thoroughly lodged in the deep sediment of the lake that it doesn’t matter. The bits and bobs of civilisation you encounter on your way turn your hole into a trench, forcing you to meander and wend. You don’t mind. You know what your purpose is now. 200 more feet down, you encounter flesh. Your shovel can’t quite pierce it, but you make dents in the skin that take a while to return to their originally smooth, supple state. This is the first time that you feel the need to stop descending since you entered the lake, and so you follow your instincts. Part by part, you uncover the form of the flesh. A finger, an ear, a soft thunk against the bone of the knuckles. Untangling obsidian hair from the soft silts, watching the sediment disappear into the lake’s abyss and the hair float, motion untethered to the gentle

rocking of the water.

After an unknown amount of time, you step back. You uncover the naked carcass of a giant human, each of its fingers the size of you. It has enough of the ambiguous air of decay that you won’t be able to describe its features with relation to anyone else’s but those of the other dead. You can balance on one of its fingernails, the keratin layer as thick as your head. No colour returns to the fingernail bed once you step off, so you are quite sure that it is really, truly dead. You are both deep in this lake, waiting for the water and sediment to crush you, and so you have more in common than not. The eyes are open, and so you put your hand on its cornea, testing out the strength of it. Each eyelash is as long as your arm, remaining absolutely still amongst the lake’s slow motions. You aren’t scared. It’s hard to be: the carcass is dead and was human. There are very few unknowns in this situation.

A strong push and pull from even deeper in the lake brings your body closer to the bed. You are comfortable with lying down, and so you sink. Your body sinks below the sediment you dutifully dug up, below the layers of rot and bones and aluminium and sludge that lay even further down. On your way down, you see the cans, the fish bones, the sunglasses, the tower. You are now the carcass, but you feel very much alive. The weight of the sediments grows, the seasons change. Eternity happens, and the geomorphological scale of time stretches into eons. More things die, more things are discarded, more things erode into sands and silts and clays. The trench fills up once again, and the lake becomes shallower. The layers collapse, epilimnion into metalimnion into hypolimnion into nothing. You lay there, under a bog, the lack of oxygen having long choked you into non-existence. You are at peace. You do not need to dig anymore.

butyoufeelverymuchalive.

Blue Riband Burial

contentwarning:selfharm

Don’t forget, darling, to water the garden Or the bodies we buried won’t grow. There’s a prize for despair at the county fair, And they have tales to tell full of woe.

One was a writer who would have been brighter If he’d opened his arm onto the page, But he stuck with straight ink and stood up his shrink And took his own story to the grave.

The second’s a soldier who should have been older

When he watched his world get all war-torn. But movies made it cool, he hated high school, And ladies like a corpse in uniform–

Still better than to expire in your birthday attire

Like the actress’ funeral had gone. For her last shot at fame, they miswrote her name, And the director got her colour dead wrong.

Now if this is what the worms will remember, Why not allot their lives a new lease?

For the necromancer knows there’s nothing so low

As letting the lost lie in peace.

Names on the Gravestone

I remember one time when I was young, I was talking to my dad about what happens when we die. He said that he used to believe there existed only one human soul that consistently got reused. Basically, he thought that he had experienced the lives of every human to have lived, and just didn’t remember it. Even though I don’t believe this to be true, it did have an influence on me. I often wonder what it would be like to experience another person’s life. Not just the big moments, but all the tiny mundane routines.

I grew up in Brooklyn, not too far from Greenwood Cemetery. It’s a massive area that’s almost as much a public park as it is a cemetery. I’ve been there multiple times, and I’m always amazed at just how many graves there are. Whenever I look at them, it’s hard not to wonder,

“Who was this person?”

words RobbiebyJanzen

illustration by Chelsea Wang

illustration by Chelsey Wang

For example, if I see a gravestone of a guy named William, I may think,

“What name did he go by?

There are a lot of different nicknames you can get from that.

Maybe his friends called him Bill, but his mom called him Billy.

If I see the gravestone of a woman with a Greek last name, I might think,

“Her mom probably cooked a lot of Greek food. Maybe her favourite was the Spanakopita. Maybe it was Souvlaki.”

Even if someone’s name doesn’t inspire much imagination, I still think about the small details of that person’s life. I wonder what their hobbies were and

what they did to decompress after a long day. I wonder what their quirks were, the little mannerisms that made them unique. I wonder what movie they saw when they were six that completely blew their mind.

This curiosity plays into my love of history. One of the coolest parts of learning history is finding out about people’s daily lives from a long time ago. I’m often reminded of what my dad said about living the lives of every human ever. Wondering what my hobbies would have been had I been around back then is quite interesting. I remember reading about these preserved pieces of bark from thirteenth-century Russia that this little kid had written and drawn on. One of them had him drawn as a knight on a horse. When I read about that, it stuck with me for a while. This peasant kid from nearly a thousand years ago had fantasised about himself as a hero, which everyone must have done at some point. Learning that and knowing he had been dead for so long was a lot to take in. When I look at a name on a gravestone, I feel something similar. The person buried there had countless moments of imagination, happiness, and creativity, just like we all do. Now they’re gone, and I have no way of finding out what those moments were. That doesn’t mean I can’t wonder, though.

Untitled

words by Cypress Chenik

My dear, how you tempt me again.

Rain, crawling down my face, biting and chewing at my hair, this unearthly passage from autumn to winter covers me in diaphanous saliva.

I am so beautiful drowning in death, so beautiful, that it seems a waste not to grow still right here, my skin growing translucent as traces of summer float away in terrified wisps of sunlight.

There is a mute, dull stinging in my bones, singing for the ground, only deeper will suffice.

Would it be familiar if I let the currents drag me down, leaves of red sheathing themselves in the romantic tangles of my hair, my eyes closed serenely, and my body hidden in something that helps the mind imagine divine beauty? Let me rest my aching head in the ground.

November, my love, put me to sleep.