Thread Volume 6 by Thread Literary Inquiry

thread volume 6

2012 Selected and edited by: Sasha Deter Jessica Edmondson Kyle Ligman Francesca Martin Kevin Potter

Advised by: Ira Sukrungruang Cover photo by: Yunet Holmes Design & Layout by: Hunter Taylor Special thanks to: Isaac Taylor Sponsored by: USF Student Government USF College of Arts & Sciences USF Council of Undergraduate Research

thread Literary Inquiry is an undergraduate literary journal staffed by student editors. We strive to publish the best undergraduate writing that the University of South Florida has to offer. Submissions are accepted across all genres and within these categories: short fiction, nonfiction, poetry, literary criticism and screenplays. Learn more about thread at: english.usf.edu/thread facebook.com/threadUSF Copyright thread 2012 All rights reserved and revert to authors and artists on publication.

contents Editors’ Note

The Art of Avoidance by Sara Walters

Allie by Sara Walters

Baseball Season is Over by Connor Holmes

A Pair Apart: Beatrice and Benedick as the Golden Mean of Shakespeare’s Lovers by Jerred Metts

In Regard to Migrating Monarchs by Andrew Hemmert

Consumed by Scott Griffin

I was 5’4” and Seventeen by Scott Griffin

Bread by Victor Florence

When God Didn’t Know Any Better by Breanna Henry

Home by John Caudill

Chaucer’s Rhetorical Prick by Paul Vinhage

That oak tree is like me by Amanda Molinaro

cont’d 56

Teenager Seeks Control by Amanda Molinaro

Écriture Féminine and the Problem of Molly’s Body in “Penelope” by Ariel Nagy

New Paint by Vicki Entreken

Distractions by Robert Annis

Lines by Thu Can

“Burial on the Presidio Banks” by Mark Farag

Recovery in 9 Steps by Jason lee Saffels

Board Games by Neil Pepi

editors’ note “Thread is what holds your clothes together. You should like it.” —John Fleming

that perfect pair of pants from the thrift store—irreplaceable in uniqueness, yet woven perfectly into all ensembles—thread launched in 2007 as an experimental, online-only venture into USF’s creative population. This 2012 edition of thread is the sixth draft of a student literary journal that is quickly gaining in popularity. This year thread Vol. 6 stretched its legs in the community, branching out across and beyond campus life. In September, thread hosted a fundraiser event at Mojo Books & Music that brought together students, faculty, and staff. Creative pieces, spanning various genres of literature, were read by USF undergraduate and graduate students, some of whom have graced the pages of our past publications. In November, thread joined the USF Contemporary Art Museum in the Magic Base Performance Parade on campus that focused on a movable pedestal, inspired by Piero Manzoni’s interactive “Magic Base - Living Sculpture.” Both events wove together the USF community with the Tampa community. Thus spread in both communities, thread is more able to continue and expand its legacy as a means to social commentary and unification. The pieces published in our journal each act separately as individual threads, representing a different shade and texture of voices in the USF community, but it is our goal to take these threads and make them into a larger piece. While we place no thematic restrictions on submissions, the authors in our journal destabilize social institutions such as family and question the conflict of conformity, deviance, and social inequality. Through thread, authors engage in a contemporary conversation where these issues extend beyond the student-teacher or classroom environment, showcasing the student body’s true concerns and experiences. thread creates an indelible portrait of the importance of sharing human knowledge through creative exploration.

The Art of Avoidance by Sara Walters

he reminds me of the counselor in my pediatrician’s office. The one who’d tell me everything I wanted to hear. I click my teeth and study her. Her hair is neat, pinned back in a simple clip. I can see her bra strap sneaking out from under the collar of her blouse. It’s off white. I imagine it is attached to one of those bras for old women. The ones designed with security in mind. “Well, what brings you in today?” “I’m feeling a little bit overwhelmed.” I’m out of breath but not sure why. I don’t recognize my own voice when I speak. I cross my legs. They seem pale and fat in the awkward office lighting. “Have you ever spoken with a counselor before?” She asks things I figure must come from the same script they all read from. “Yeah,” I sigh. “A few times.” I’m extremely skilled at belittling things that are actually very important. I want her to see this. She doesn’t. “Okay.” She writes something. “Have you ever tried to harm yourself before?” Her nonchalance is dull and thudding in my ears. Green carpet. Window with a view of the dirty parking garage. Concrete. A sad looking plant in a tiny pot on the sill. A poster with a blurry picture of a man speeding by on a bike-- PERSEVERE. “No.” I touch my pale, fat leg. “I haven’t.” The dark roots of her dyed blonde hair are growing in. She wears glasses,

the sort of glasses you find on a rack in a drugstore. I touch the bridge of my nose, but find it naked, and I feel exposed. It’s cold, like a hospital, and not even the ugly green carpet is soaking up any of the cool air. I curl my toes into my flip flops, but they’re already numb. “Have you ever been prescribed any medication for your depression symptoms?” She breaks the long pause, nudging the side of her drugstore glasses up with her thumb. My lips feel dry when I purse them, trying to decide on the right inflection to use in the lie I’m about to tell. “Once.” Three times. “But it didn’t work.” But I never took them. This is the first time she looks at me with doubt. I’m still pursing my lips a little, thinking of the lip balm somewhere at the bottom of my backpack, but it’s too quiet to move. I think she expects me to say something else. She writes and I think about other quiet things: churches on Monday afternoons, Allie’s voice when she got tired, drowning. My lips hurt. The watch on her small wrist ticks slowly, and it’s quiet enough that I think I can hear it. I can hear the tip of her ballpoint moving across the blue lines on the tablet, the tiny pop it makes when it separates from the paper, almost inaudible, but I know it’s there. I chew the inside of my cheek and pick at my cuticles, counting the pops of her pen tip. “Is there anything else you want to tell me? This is all just preliminary stuff. Your next appointment will be different.” Her smile barely lifts the corners of her mouth. Is there anything else I want to tell her? No. I don’t want to tell her anything. I need to tell her about the thin red line in my skin, just hidden by the hem of my shorts, fresh and aching. I need to tell her about how my chest caves in on itself sometimes, and I lose my breath, each pull of air tight in my lungs and burning when I breathe out. I need to tell her about how often I cry until my eyelids feel raw and hurt to close, and waking up with stiff, salted cheeks. “No.” I look down at my lap. “That’s all.” * I remember the last few seconds of my childhood. I had my feet against the door to the basement stairs, laying on the linoleum floor in the kitchen. It was

near the end of summer, and I could taste the beginnings of adolescence that I hoped seventh grade would bring. It was before I knew any better about what it meant to get older, when the days felt long and I still had to stretch my arms out to try and reach the top shelf of the refrigerator. I had my head on the floor between my dog’s front paws, and I watched out the back slider. I had almost every branch of those trees memorized. I knew the shapes they took on in different seasons, the shadows they made on the kitchen floor in the afternoon. I tangled my fingers into Annie’s fur and listened to my mother moving around the other side of the kitchen. I could feel her footsteps, rattling up through the linoleum and into my small shoulders. The phone rang. My mother cradled the black receiver between her ear and shoulder, her hands still moving through dinner preparations, stirring pots on the stove and slicing vegetables for Chris, Mike and I to snack on while we waited. She knew we always got impatient. But she stopped. She held the phone in her hand instead, and stood still. “Is she okay?” The last time I had heard my mother’s voice so unsteady was the day she’d hugged her father goodbye before he moved away to Florida. I remember coming around the corner and finding her in his arms, crying into his chest. She was a girl again, small and fragile, and it scared me. She looked at me on the floor as she listened. I watched her. Annie watched her. “Oh my god.” I sat up, slowly. Annie lifted her head, and I cradled it gently in my small arms, scratching behind her soft ears. We listened to one side of a conversation I was not ready to hear the other side of. My mother put the phone back in its cradle, and rested her hand on the edge of the counter. She looked at me, and I looked at her. “Who was that?” I spoke, my curiosity eating away at me, my teeth biting at the insides of my cheeks. “Allie was in a car accident last night.” Allie? My Allie? I almost smiled just hearing her name, until I heard what my mother had attached to it-- was in a car accident last night. Another teenaged friend of my older brother’s had just been in a fender bender a few

months before. We went to see her in the hospital, and she showed me the purple and yellow bruises across her stomach from where her seatbelt had pulled into her. She smiled and rolled back and forth in a wheel chair they were making her sit in until her parents could come get her. I assumed that’s where Allie was right then, smiling in a wheel chair and boasting battle scars and stories about screeching tires and that jerk who cut her off. “Well, are we going to go and see her?” I got up from the floor and stepped up to her, trying to read the way she was looking at me. She was quiet, but didn’t look away. My stomach started to ache. * He thumbs through the pages of the notebook my mother had handed him. It feels strange to be at Dr. Graw’s after hours. The little train that runs around the tops of all the rooms has been shut off for the night, and the waiting room is empty. I can’t hear the sounds of movies playing on the little closed circuit televisions, or babies fussing in their mother’s laps. I haven’t been in this office before. This man’s face is unfamiliar, his glasses small and his hair graying. He smiles, and I know he’s trying to make me feel relaxed, but all I feel is my blood in my pulse points. All I can hear are my mother’s shouts in my ears, and I want to cover them, even in the silence of the office. “It’s okay to be upset, Sara.” He sets the notebook down on his desk and my eyes follow it, ashamed of its contents and wishing I’d thought to hide it better. “You should be allowed an outlet, whether it be a notebook like this one, or even just someone to talk to. You are allowed to feel the things you are feeling.” “She won’t listen to me.” I look up to the corner of the room, the little square hole with the shelf running through it, the train track empty--quiet. “She’s your mom. She is just worried about you.” He sits back in his chair, and the leather groans under him. “She won’t let me even listen to music anymore.” I look at him finally. He seems more amused than moved, and I can feel my chest tightening. “I’m in trouble for being sad.”

He drums the graying stubble on his chin with his fingertips and watches me. When he doesn’t speak right away, I know I’ve opened my doors too wide, let too much out. My ribcage shakes when I breathe. When you cry, they’ve won. I bite down on the inside of my cheek and hold myself together. The edges of my eyelids burn. “Well, we will work things out with your parents and find a middle ground for you.” I don’t want a middle ground. I don’t want a compromise. I want to keep my pain. I want to feel it and live in it and grow in it until I can get myself out of it on my own terms. I want to be allowed to hurt. I don’t want to be fixed. I don’t want to be medicated, or forced to talk about things. I want to be consoled. I want a tight embrace and a it’ll all be okay, I promise. * I drove a friend home one night after a movie, and she told me about how her brother died. In the middle of the night, he locked himself out of the house. They lived on a lake, and he had a little dingy boat that he would sometimes row out into the water to go fishing. He rowed it out into the lake, and called their uncle. When his uncle answered, her brother told him calmly that he didn’t want to live anymore. Panicked, his uncle silently signaled to his wife to call the police on the other line, and send them to my friend’s home. He managed to keep her brother on the line long enough for the police to arrive. When the boy saw the police lights approaching his home on the shore of the lake, he hung up the phone. He secured one end of a rope around his ankle, and tied the other end around a cinderblock. He tipped the boat over. I looked at her when she finished the story, and she smiled a bit. She shrugged one shoulder and looked straight ahead again. I stared past her house as she got out of the car, looking around it at the lake. I imagined what he must have looked like when they pulled him from the water, bloated and blue faced. On the drive back home, I wondered if I would have ended up as someone’s

sad story. A half smile, the shrug of one shoulder. The explanation for someone’s emptiness. Someone’s what can I do? She’s dead. It’s over with. This is my life now. * My older brother is beside me. The waiting room has quieted since I first came in, but the chairs haven’t gotten any more comfortable. My parents are back speaking with a doctor, so we’re alone. We got a popsicle out of the vending machine, the kind with two sticks that you break in half to share. We’re eating quietly, and every few minutes, we compare tongues to see whose is purplest. He doesn’t ask me about the bandage on my wrist, or the IV taped to the back of my hand. He doesn’t ask me why mom was crying when he walked in, or why dad can’t seem to look either of us in the face. He tells me about his day, about work. About the classes he skipped to go play pool at Bill & Billy’s down the street. He smiles, and laughs. So do I. * There were cars lining the street outside of Allie’s house when we got there. It was overcast, and the air was wet and heavy. We walked in silence up the front walk and onto the porch, and I opened the door to go inside. Even filled with people, the house was still. As I moved through the living room, my ears were met with whispers of she died on impact and poor Susan, I can’t imagine losing a child. I took the stairs and left my mother with the dim lights and heaviness that hung in all of their voices. I focused on the feeling of the polished wood under my palm, holding the banister tightly and stopping at the top, turning slowly around the corner. Her bedroom door was half open. The blinds were letting in the gray, overcast light from outside. I walked up to the door and gently nudged it open all the way, my eyes surveying the room. I stepped down onto the carpet, dragging my fingers along the blue painted wall, following it around to her

dresser. I saw her move around me, watched her dress and brush her hair. The room was heavy with her scent. I wrapped my fingers around perfume bottles and mascara tubes. She stepped up beside me in the mirror, leaned in and pursed her pink lips, smiled at herself. Her bed was unmade, and I settled on the edge of the side she slept on, the covers pulled back and rumpled with the shape of her body. I slipped my feet out of my flip flops and sank into the empty space, laying my head against the gentle indent hers had left in the pillow. I breathed slowly. I waited to feel her fingers in my hair, her delicate hands on my bare shoulders. To hear her breathing. To feel the bed shift beside me. To open my eyes and find her there, alive and smiling. * From the rocking chair in the living room, I watched my mother’s face fall. Her shoulders eased down, deflated, like a leftover balloon from last year’s birthday. I looked away from her. My eyes followed the tangled black phone cord, watched the knot of it swing lightly against the kitchen cabinet while she spoke. My mother’s voice always sounded different depending on who called: family and friends merited a casual, low tone, while strangers brought on a higher, more proper and unnatural sound. Her words were clipped. Each of her sentences seemed to end in a question. “Hello? ... This is she? ... Oh? ... No, no I wasn’t aware of that?” I curled my bare toes against the carpet, keeping the rocking chair going in a gentle rhythm. I moved my foot in time with the living room clock, the one with the plastic gold trim that we’d had since before I was born. I wondered if it was a wedding gift. Something my mother kept just in case the person who gave it to her ever decided to visit and asked where their clock was. It ticked loudly. Sometimes, if it was quiet enough, I could get my heart in sync with it. It was quiet then. Quiet enough to hear the gentle swish of the rocking chair as I moved it. Quiet enough to be able to pick up the soft mumble of a voice on the other end of the phone. “And she came to you with this?”

She looked at me, and then away again. I stopped moving the chair, and pulled my feet up. “I understand... yes, thank you.” Her voice sounded less than thankful, heavy with some emotion I couldn’t place. “You too. Bye.” She placed the phone back in the cradle, its gentle clatter seeming to take a moment before it reached my ears. She touched the edge of the counter and her wedding ring tapped the laminate while she took a slow breath in, and finally looked at me. “That was your guidance counselor.” I caught part of my bottom lip between my teeth and slowly let it go again. She waited, and I wondered if she thought I’d confess, but I didn’t. “He said some girls came to his office today and told him that you--” The words sat on her tongue like lead for a moment. I watched her struggle to push them out. “--that you had said you wanted to kill yourself.” My guidance counselor was young, barely into his mid-twenties. He was new that year, and all the girls already had crushes on him. He smiled in the hallways, and always had the good candy in a bowl on the edge of his desk. “Is that true, Sara?” Almond Joys. Tootsie Pops. Snickers. He had a smooth jaw and wore skinny ties. His chin had a tiny dimple in it. His office smelled like aftershave and the cinnamon plug-in he had in the wall just beside his desk. “He said it was Kelly who told him. She told him you said these things to her online.” I was in the middle of writing a long story about a girl named Meredith. I put her through all sorts of tragedies. I made her boyfriend cheat on her. I killed her best friend in a car accident. It rained a lot, in that story. I tapped it out on the keyboard of the PC my parents had given me the previous Christmas, instant-messaging Kelly while I wrote. In Spanish class, she’d told me her sister had known Allie. She told me about seeing a photograph of the wreckage. She was tall and thin and wore her dark hair in a long ponytail. “Sara, is it true?” I’d finally gotten my heartbeat in sync with the clock. I watched the second-

hand shudder a bit each time it ticked forward, counting the sounds it made. The trees outside the living room windows rattled, stretching against one another. Early autumn always left their branches dry and cracked, heavy with the absence of summer, and I would touch my hands to their bodies, wind myself up in their heaviness, a scene from a movie unfolding in a place where only I existed. The movie outside played on while I sank into the rocking chair, remembering unhappily that I was alive. * It’s July. This one’s a little older. She counsels young kids, mostly, judging by the pair of seven-year-olds that occupied the couch just before me. She looks at me over the frames of her glasses, and taps the ballpoint of her pen against her notepad. “Do you ever feel like you want to hurt yourself ?” She’s got too many things on her shelves. Books, photos, even dolls. Their eyes follow me, and I glance quickly back to catch them still staring. “I used to.” When I breathe in, the room smells like the inside of a paper bag. She sets her pen down. “What changed?” The three o’clock sun is harsh outside of the wide office windows. It creeps slowly across the carpet, a stretched square of sunlight getting closer and closer to my feet. I move them further into what is left of the shadow and shrug one shoulder. “I changed.” A car door slams outside. A child laughs. “If you changed, then why are you here today?” She curls her fingers around the pen in her lap and watches me. I feel it, but I don’t look at her. Two days ago, in a tiny booth at the hole-in-the-wall restaurant my mother loves to get breakfast at, I ignored the food on my plate and told her I needed help. She didn’t ask why this time. My long sleeves told her. The clatter of dishes and all of the voices around us became white noise, sounds we couldn’t distinguish over our own quiet conversation. This time, she did it right. This

time, she didn’t just hear me. She listened. “Because I change a lot.” I answer. “I change every day. Tomorrow, I won’t be the same as I am right now.” My voice sounds small and defeated. “Some days, I don’t care. Some days, I let myself hurt. I let it become who I am. Other days, like today...” I look at her and lift my shoulders, dropping them as I breathe out. “Everything feels okay.” “And when things aren’t okay? What happens on those days?” I press my lips together. I always want to smile when I think of it, that heaviness, that all consuming feeling of being absolutely alone, finding peace in the absence of peace. “I remember all the things that I spend all those other days ignoring.” “What things?” She wants to know. “What do you think you could do to try and deal with those things in a more productive way?” I smile now. Whenever it gets to this point, I stop appreciating their efforts and begin to be amused by them. I uncross my legs, and direct my smile at her. “It doesn’t matter.” I tell her. “It’s over with. This is my life now.” Outside, a car door slams.

Allie

by Sara Walters

n her bedroom, angels kissed her walls and left my palms upturned and empty. She held my lungs in her stretched fingers and when I breathed out she cried onto my cheeks. I filled up empty bottles with her words and spoke in languages only summer could understand, vowels smooth and crisp like an unfamiliar taste. The radio volume was low but I heard it mumbling about the weather and thought of when sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d told me the difference between hearing and listening. Her voice painted the floor under my shoes with the pennies we wished on right before we grew up. Her bed was unmade and under the covers, I found the years she left me with, scattered like pearls from a broken necklace.

Baseball Season is Over by Connor Holmes

“No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun - for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax -This won’t hurt.” –Suicide note left by writer Hunter S. Thompson a.k.a. Dr. Gonzo, 20 February 2005 “Look, I don’t know what we’re supposed to do or what we’re supposed to say, but we’re here, fighting for our lives together, now doesn’t that count for something?” –Diane Chambers on her relationship with Sam Malone, Cheers

’d begun inhaling the mountainside ashes of Hunter S. Thompson the way American youth had been doing for decades. Ingesting documentaries and sports articles, eye-humping his image as Johnny Depp drives endlessly through infamous bat country. Why now? I’d seen Fear and Loathing years ago and hated it. Its stuff resisted meaning. Hunter seemed purposely obtuse, his storytelling sacrificed to some Merry Prankster loyalty to the autobiography of weird. How was it that suddenly Hunter’s excess had spurred starvation in my own gut, that life seemed a slipping thing that needed to be grabbed in handfuls? It certainly seemed appropriate in a time when Florida’s governor had written the obituary for liberal arts in the sunshine state. Hunter’s people.--survived by the governor’s working class. But death had always followed Hunter, so say the people who knew him. Or maybe it was the image of Dr. Gonzo he couldn’t shake, Fear and

Loathing’s Raoul Duke, whoever the hell that was; a paint-splattered, abstract visage, who secured his place as heir to the throne when Hunter left his wife suspended on the receiving end of a telephone and put a Colt .45 to his bald head in Woody Creek--as if Ralph Steadman’s notorious illustrated Gonzo was the glorification of that and all the years leading to it. With Hunter out of the way, the cyclonic drug and violence-fueled plunge to the Earth in a doublethumbed fist could take control of anyone at any time. Yet it’s the Hunter that Dr. Gonzo erased, obscured somewhere behind a pair of Duke’s oversized yellow sunglass lenses, who is a cigarette-smoke apparition behind my back. What would he have told me about the phone call last night from a friend? The older brother of the friend, a father, a husband, a pizza chef from Chicago and a nursing student in his mid-thirties trying to start again found dead of a heart attack in his home. Was there enough weirdness in the world to make it okay again? I thought of my two brothers. My first instinct was to write. To write like Hunter, madly and with plenty of fireworks. I had planned for some time to write about one brother’s alcoholism and adoration of former Boston Red Sox relief pitcher Sam Mayday Malone, the embodiment of a true badass like Hunter, the kind of masculine figure my brother shaped himself to be. I wanted to understand Sam’s sobriety in the face of the character he represented. It seemed illogical; my brother’s drinking seemed more real to me than Sam’s ability to overcome. Hunter’s drugs and orgies seemed more real. But why? I could feel the weight of my fingers needing to press down and make some sense of things. But somehow in a time like this words could do nothing, help no one. We were all fucked without means to articulate it. Everywhere, hearts were stopping and nobody seemed capable of remembering the sound. My brother and all the deep Massachusetts winter aches, drowned away in basement barrooms, became frivolously lost to the flamboyancy of dying. My topic seemed somehow inappropriate. All I mustered was a text message to both my brothers, “Life is fucked. Family is everything. I love you.” Yet my fascination with Hunter drove me to obsess, and my interest in Cheers turned to compulsion. I sat for hours watching episode after episode, sometimes entire days spent with Sam and staff. I understood Norman Peterson’s yearning to be there always, to know these people intimately, to turn away from the cold Boston air that proclaimed him a fat, unemployed, sad little nobody, unfit for the likes of Governor Scott’s working class, and numb himself with the magnetic energy of this tavern.

I loved the people in Cheers, invested my emotions in them, and Sam had perhaps the most profound effect. He filled me with anxiety, threw the inner ear tormentingly off-balance the way my brother did with his angry-drunk persona, the way Gonzo did when the caricature eclipsed the man. The only difference that I could cling to with Sam was his sobriety. But that wasn’t what it seemed my brother admired about Sam Malone. In fact not drinking was the largest detraction from the bad-ass image he’d been built into. If anything it exposed the pantomimes of Mayday Malone and Dr. Gonzo to be drawn of the same stuff. Mayday was the chauvinistic, aggressive, simpleminded jock, emotionally barren and a selfish, image-obsessed once-was. Sam was a guy struggling to survive in the wake of a shattered career, vanishing youth, severe alcoholism and identity crisis–-for if he wasn’t Mayday Malone, was he anyone? Did anyone remember Hunter Thompson the writer, or was mourning Thompson too sad when there were Gonzo, Duke to revere? Mayday was the name that carried Sam through life but it burdened him, disabled him from coping with the emotions he kept hidden deep between the legs of strange New England women at night. Sam struggled to be Sam, even in the moments that would change his life forever. Love battered him for years before he could even understand what it was that’d been striking him. He fought to escape the character built for him and to persevere. And impossibly, finally, he always won those fights. He wretched himself from the filthy booze-soaked dugouts, and found sobriety serving drinks in a bar. He dug past his hairy chest and found the heart to love and say goodbye to the single most important woman of his life, and to drag his torn out ventricles through the encore. Why is it Thompson could never escape the Doctor’s hallucinatory madness? Why did my brother play his part so well: Irish-American beerfisting U.S. warhead tearing through the wind with patriot glory exploding from the lips? Why did he have to fight wars on all fronts? The last time I traveled home he bitch-slapped our younger brother across the mouth. One person was the bitch, emasculated, the other was not. They slammed each others’ faces and shattered furniture in the early morning quiet. The bitch cried. The other celebrated the victory of the great character, the IrishAmerican beer-fisting U.S. warhead tearing through the wind with patriot glory exploding on his lips. I didn’t want to think of him that way. I wanted him to pull past it the way Sam inexplicably did, but the character consumed him. It was Mayday hiding something in him, something I knew I’d see if he’d let me. But if he wasn’t this, if he couldn’t obliterate the world with his fists, what could the world offer him in return?

Maybe the answer echoes through Sam’s great sacrifice, the moment of grief and loss that split him wholly from Mayday Malone and threw him into a world devoid of the padding to life’s edges Cheers offered before last call. The moment he gave the arms he’d die in away, unburdened Dianne Chambers of his love and addiction to her excess, and said the thing I’d wanted for my brother, the thing I’d wanted him to take from Sam Malone along with the autographed baseball and beers. Because it could happen to anyone at any time. One of us could die, warns Sam. One of us could fall and hit our head, wander the streets forever with amnesia. Maybe if Hunter had known Sam, he could’ve heard his words and escaped the weirdness from time to time. Maybe my brother could earn his freedom, too, if he really listened to what Sam had to say, when to a dark and empty barroom he whispered, Have a great life.

A Pair Apart:

Beatrice and Benedick as the Golden Mean of Shakespeare’s Lovers by Jerred Metts

sk any reader, whether critic or casual, what the most captivating aspect of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing is and the answer is sure to be the memorable “merry war” between two of comedy’s sharpest wits: Beatrice and Benedick. The prominent presence of the duo immediately appears in the opening scene, which marks the beginning of a banter that leads to a harmonious union that manages to overshadow the “resurrection trick” of the play’s resolution. Given the two lovers’ predominance it is no surprise that Charles I scribbled the title revision “Beatrice and Benedick” on his copy of the Second Folio (Scott 501). These show-stealers of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing are arguably the most beloved of his couples. The near universal praise that Beatrice and Benedick receive is not only a product of their humorous banter. The quarrelsome couple represent Aristotle’s “golden mean,” a balance between excess and defect that is illustrated by comparing Beatrice and Benedick’s relationship to that of other Shakespearean couples. Aristotle writes that “a master of any art avoids excess and defect, but seeks the intermediate” (232). This preoccupation with balance colors many aspects of Elizabethan society. For example, the theory of Humors holds that an excess of blood, bile, or phlegm dictates a particularly “dominant” trait such as melancholy or volatility; similarly, the practice of bloodletting was performed in hopes of curing sickness by reducing excess blood. Balance was relevant on a cosmic level: the Elizabethan geocentric view of the universe observes a cosmos divided between the perfectly balanced superlunary region and the defective, decaying sublunary region that was cursed with tumult following Adam’s fall. These views were undoubtedly influenced by Aristotelian dialogues on an ideal balance between two extremes, commonly referred to as the “golden mean,” in which moderation becomes the definition of virtue. So what of art, balance, success, and Shakespeare? The plays themselves reveal the art inherent in love, illustrated by the courtships and romances that populate

Shakespeare’s comedies. The equilibrium of a romantic relationship dictates the play’s resolution—from the reckless excess of Romeo and Juliet’s passion to the methodical growth of Rosalind and Orlando’s union—and we all know how these two plays end. If love is an art and its success is dictated by behavior in accordance with Aristotle’s “golden mean,” then Beatrice and Benedick are its champions. Unquestionably, the central couple of Much Ado About Nothing is Beatrice and Benedick, for the proof is in the poetry. Benedick usurps the lead role with three hundred and forty-nine lines, the most of any character in the play. His dear Beatrice follows closely behind with two hundred and eighty, second only to Leonato. Both characters overwhelm the other conversations of the play, not just in volume (at times characters question just who Beatrice and Benedick are speaking to when they are separated) but also in substance. Beatrice and Benedick provide comic relief and emotional poignancy in equal measure, and are universally lauded by critics as ideal foils to Claudio and Hero because of their playful-yet-intellectual banter. To relegate Beatrice and Benedick to the role of a subplot commenting on Claudio and Hero’s empty relationship is to do Beatrice and Benedick a terrible disservice. The complexity of character displayed by Beatrice and Benedick dwarfs the misogynist entitlement of Claudio, overshadows Hero’s vapid passivity, outperforms Dogberry’s helpless humor and undermines Don Jon’s malicious machinations, all of whom are flat characters easily categorized as Aristotelian extremes. Beatrice and Benedick have provided an inexhaustible source of critical analysis for many years due to their multidimensional development in the play, such as the indication of a previous relationship that sends the more imaginative analysts up a wall with dramatic possibilities. Of course, the respective success of Beatrice or Benedick is relative to his or her counterpart, and it is exactly that synchrony of character that makes them so endearing and captivating both to casual and critical readers. Beatrice and Benedick are cut from the same delightful cloth. In their similar qualities the reader finds evidence of their mutual attraction. With her very first line, Beatrice inquires, “Is Signor Mountanto returned from the wars?” (1.1.29). Similarly, Benedick is occupied with Beatrice’s presence in the first scene, glossing over the introduction of Hero so that he may engage “[his] dear Lady Disdain” (1.1.113) in the first of what will prove to be many playful exchanges. Both characters maintain the illusion of a disdain for love as their peers know it. Benedick derides Claudio for fawning over Hero and his immediate forfeiture of bachelorhood in exchange for the “yoke” of zealously

devoted love and marriage (1.1.193). Similarly, Beatrice encourages Hero to reject the arranged marriages of her father and “make another curtsy, and say, ‘father, as it pleases me’” (2.1.49-52). Both Beatrice and Benedick defend their adamant bachelorhood with unrealistic ideals of prospective lovers, boisterous constructions built to prevent courtship from the less virtuous members of the opposite sex that surround them. A man for Beatrice’s heart must be simultaneously bearded and beardless (2.1.27-37) while Benedick’s ideal lover is equal parts wise, fair, virtuous, wealthy, musically talented, and noble--a lofty laundry list of prerequisites unlikely to be matched by any one woman (2.3.28-34). Of course, Beatrice and Benedick find these things precisely in one another; their paths to a union are symmetrical, landmarked by a series of identical changes that shatter their self-deceptions and mock-denial of love. As David Bevington explains, “the beauty of the virtuous deceptions…is that they are so plausible—because, indeed, they are essentially true” (115). The merry war threatens to venture into hurtful territory during the masquerade, and it is the “Herculean labor” (2.1.348) of Don Pedro that aids a romantic process that is clearly already in motion. Both lovers are “fooled” by arranged eavesdropping, but it is important to note that in both these occurrences Beatrice and Benedick learn of potential harm they have caused the other through their bantering, and both summarily decide to requite the other’s love. Beatrice and Benedick are by no means duped; rather, they are presented with an excuse that allows them to circumvent the thorns of their witty and often romantic “virtuous deceptions” and proceed toward a balanced love. The symmetry of Beatrice and Benedick’s courtship is apparent in the changes they undergo as they near their union. They retain the qualities that make them dynamic, multidimensional characters. Benedick shaves, incidentally satisfying Beatrice’s double requirement, and Benedick acknowledges Beatrice’s numerous qualities: her beauty, reason, and wisdom. Beatrice catches cold, Benedick a toothache, and in the end it is love poetry, secretly written by both, that serves as the final evidence needed to dispel their love-resistant charade completely. Although they are playfully loathe to admit writing the poetry, one cannot resist wondering if Beatrice and Benedick have performed some comedy subterfuge of their own by planting evidence to pleasantly incriminate themselves. Beatrice and Benedick enter into a relationship centered on mutual respect and reciprocated love. Juliet Dusinberre writes that “where Beatrice and Benedick both sound the hollowness of single liberty, they relinquish it only because they are confident of liberty within marriage” (96). Following the abuse of Hero at the wedding, both Beatrice and Benedick display the utmost

concern for others, rushing to champion respect between a husband and wifeto-be. Benedick, in a gender-symbolic gesture explored in depth by Barbara Everett, is the only one of Claudio’s companions to remain at the altar. Both lovers avoid the pitfalls of conventional love: the shallow companionship of Claudio and Hero that reveals itself to be vulnerable to ruin at the hands of hearsay and deception. The appearance of Leonato’s beautiful daughter is praised by many characters in the play, and Hero lets her beauty speak for itself. Indeed, it has to, as she barely speaks at all. Weighing in at a paltry forty-four lines, the daintily silent Hero seems mute when placed beside the loquacious Beatrice, whom no one but Benedick can seem to silence (and then only through kisses). If Hero was ever meant to be one of Shakespeare’s leading ladies, she is an anomaly amongst her peers. Hero retains nothing of Portia’s intelligence, or Rosalind’s instructive confidence. Only in her ordeal as a victim of misogyny is Hero’s purpose revealed. In taking up arms against Hero’s mistreatment, Beatrice is going to war with an ideal with which she has sparred her whole life: the domestication of women by men and the defective imbalance of their marriage. Embattled, Beatrice becomes a mouthpiece for fair and balanced matrimony, and Benedick is her weapon of choice. Everett comments that “‘kill Claudio’ has become such a famous line that perhaps something of its importance…has been lost” (325) and argues for its significance as a moment of conflict between “two worlds” of gender. Indeed, the line is significant: Beatrice is imploring Benedick to murder the inequality that has theretofore become inherent in love, a dangerous unbalance of love’s art caused by Claudio’s objectification of Hero and his misguided abuse of her. Benedick is up to this task, accepting the role that he has practiced in his pursuit of Beatrice: a practitioner of balanced, reciprocal love based on mutuality and fair-treatment. The two couples’ differences are abundant. Claudio lacks the wit and virtue of Benedick and is derided for his “gossip-like humor” (5.1.184) even whilst Benedick considers killing him; Özlem Özen observes that “Shakespeare draws [Beatrice’s] picture as a strong woman who will not be easily manipulated, victimized, or silenced by masculine power” (7), a list of things that Hero cannot muster the courage (or voice) to rise against. As Beatrice and Benedick move toward open conflict with the imbalance Claudio and Hero’s relationship represents, it is only the rescue of the festive deus ex machina that prevents a duel between Claudio and Benedick. Bevington muses that “Much Ado comes perhaps closer to potentially tragic action than

Shakespeare’s other festive comedies” (115) and this brush with actual murder is why. Claudio and Hero’s male-dominant relationship cannot exist in the world Beatrice and Benedick have created for the reader, a world constructed with the timeless timbers of equality. Claudio’s coveting of Hero based on superficial qualities and Hero’s quiet acceptance of his abuse could not be further from the intermediate Aristotle advises and the moderate harmony that Beatrice and Benedick represent. Claudio’s dominance of the relationship leads to near-disaster, and readers cannot help feeling the bully may not be sincerely repentant even in the face of Hero’s return. The gross excess of masculine dominance in Claudio and Hero’s relationship accentuates Beatrice and Benedick’s position as a reasonable “golden mean” of Shakespearean love. Let us move to a more complex comparison, that of our golden lovers Beatrice and Benedick to the shrewd Portia and her financial liability Bassanio. Lars Engle asserts that “The Merchant of Venice shows a woman triumphing over men” (36), and I would argue it shows Portia triumphing over her husband, in particular. The reader’s very first impression of Portia is filtered through the financially devastated Bassanio’s eyes; Bassanio introduces her to Antonio first as “a lady richly left” (1.1.161), and the placement of this detail before her fairness or other “wondrous virtues” (1.1.163) speaks volumes about Bassanio’s character as a wastrel. Despite his obvious preoccupation with wealth,— if he is not requesting money, he is spending money that does not belong to him (2.2.161-163) – he is exactly what Portia desires in a man: someone to be controlled. Portia maintains severe standards as she is beset by suitors; her disdain of them lacks the playful flirtation of Beatrice and borders on intolerant, belittling contempt that has been perceived as racially prejudiced by some critics (1.2.38-130). Where Beatrice’s impractical prerequisites for a lover are revealed as a charade in their ridiculousness, Portia’s harsh dismissals paint her as a woman in search of a man she can manipulate. Engle asserts that the coffin selection scene “tests [Bassaino’s] willingness to take subtle direction from Portia” (32). Portia proclaims her dissatisfaction with the “ownership” inherent in marriage in her admonishment to Bassanio, “so, though yours, not yours” (3.2.20), and the statement foreshadows Portia’s plan not only to reclaim ownership of herself, but also of Bassanio. Engle notes that “the instant Portia’s house becomes Bassanio’s, it begins to fill with guests” (33), as Bassanio’s fellow wastrels begin to endanger Portia’s economic station. Bassanio’s economic negligence is precisely the opportunity that Portia needs to ensnare him, and for the remainder of the play she leaves absolutely nothing to his discretion, perhaps rightly so.

Unlike the misogynist-driven relationship of Claudio and Hero, Portia and Bassanio’s union is dominated by Portia’s masterful manipulation of the law and economics to ensure Bassanio (as a liability) is under her sway. Indeed, Bassanio’s relatively easy relinquishment of Portia’s ring to Portiain-disguise is symbolic of his character: a man who values things and people as economic currency, with meager appreciation for an object’s sentimental quality. Of course, it is the wealth of Portia that has drawn Bassanio initially to Belmont, and his focus on wealth is not unlike Claudio’s sense of ownership. As Benedick informs him, Claudio talks as if he wants to purchase Hero (1.1.172). Although “wealthy” is one of Benedick’s mock prerequisites, money is no obstacle to his love for Beatrice. Portia’s deliberate manipulation of Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice is a microcosm of their relationship, a one-sided union that Portia controls as expertly as she controls her funds. Little is left in the form of trust and reciprocity as Portia dupes Bassanio into her emotional debt, securing his good behavior and potentially ending his days of being a spendthrift. Although this is a change for the better, it is a blatant manipulation of Bassanio inappropriate for a balanced, intermediate relationship based on equality. Although Beatrice and Benedick are “too wise to woo peaceably” (5.2.68), their courtship is mutual and proceeds in an orderly manner, devoid of any terms of “ownership” such as Portia’s ring. Aristotle writes that “the intermediate is praised and is a form of success” (233). If the relationship of Claudio and Hero is imbalanced by excessive male dominance, the flaw of Portia and Bassanio’s relationship lies in Portia’s excessive control of finances that, by extension, includes limiting Bassanio as a potential economic liability. Neither of these relationships can be deemed successful; despite the comedy-appropriate endings, there is no guarantee that Hero will ever speak up, or that Bassanio will keep his wallet in the pocket of his doublet. The two pairs represent opposite extremes in terms of Aristotle’s “golden mean.” Aristotle posits that “the object which is equidistant from each of the extremes” is the intermediate, and in this regard Beatrice and Benedick demonstrate their adequacy as a truly balanced couple. Everett proposes that through the events of Much Ado About Nothing, “both Beatrice and Benedick gain a new and much more complex equilibrium and dignity” (333), and the equilibrium of Beatrice and Benedick’s relationship reflects their status as the “golden mean” of Shakespeare’s lovers. I have demonstrated that the perfection of their union is highlighted by comparing them to other lovers such as Claudio and Hero or Portia and Bassanio. We do not need look very far for evidence, however, for as Francis Fergusson proclaims with pleasant simplicity, “the harmonies may all be heard in Beatrice and Benedick’s words” (36).

Works Cited Aristotle. Aristotle Selections. Ed. W.D. Ross. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938. Print. Bevington, David. Introduction. Much Ado About Nothing. By Bevvington. 3rd ed. Pearson Education, Inc: U of Chicago. 113-116. Print. Dusinberre, Juliet. Shakespeare and the Nature of Women. London, England: Macmillen Press, 1975. Print. Engle, Lars. “Thrift is Blessing: Exchange and Explanation in The Merchant of Venice.” Shakespeare Quarterly, (1986): 37 20-37 Everett, Barbara. “Much Ado About Nothing.” The Critical Quarterly, (1961): 3(4) 319-335. Fergusson, Francis. “The Comedy of Errors and Much Ado About Nothing.” The Sewanee Review, (1954): 62(1) 24-37. Özen, Özlem. “Mr. ‘Prince’s Jester’ and Ms. ‘Disdain’: The Male Power and Women’s Response to it in Much Ado About Nothing.” Dumlupinar University. Web. Scott, Mary-Augusta. The Book of the Courtyer: A Possible Source of Beatrice and Benedick. University of Pennsylvania, December 28, 1900. Conference presentation.

In Regard To Migrating Monarchs by Andrew Hemmert

am not one of those beautiful butterflies you read about in the fall issue of National Geographic who wrap themselves in orange pilgrim cloth and set out on a grand hejira to the Southern Holy Land. I have no intention of perching valiantly on a Milkweed plant, laying eggs and dying, puffed-up and grinning with self-righteous kingly honor. You will find me with the flies, grime obscuring my tiger stripes, hovering dangerously close to the porch light, laughing at those who fry and flutter down in tiny circles like brittle brown leaves in Autumn.

Consumed

by Scott Griffin

eau, who lives on my couch, steps out of my car and into waves of heat dancing in the parking lot. He shades his eyes from the summer sun and looks at me with impatient eyebrows. We’re home early from the diner where we work. He gives up on me as I’m still rolling up the windows and sticking to the driver seat. My housemate and oldest friend Brittany leaves the front door unlocked regardless of my repetitive lectures on the singular but nonetheless pivotal use of a dead bolt and its one fatal flaw: it must be turned in order to work. Beau, who is closer in size to a bear than a man, bursts through the brown door in his humongous way. It slams into the hole in the wall made by similar entrances and it shakes. He leaves it wide open. By the time I make it out of the hot car, through the bright and humid afternoon, and into the dark duplex, he’s already snoring on the couch. His capability to fall into a deep sleep at will, anywhere, during anything, brings him pride. It’s my personal rule not to allow this or any of his similar feats to incite awe or jealousy within me. Brittany and I call them his “hobo traits”. I sit on the floor—we don’t have a table—and pull out the food I brought home from the diner. Brittany has left the muted TV on, so I stare at the flickering pictures while I unwrap my burger and pull out my fries. I’m still wet and salty from the heat, shirt sticking to my back and hair clumped on my forehead; the unit’s tiny wall A/C hasn’t been able to compete with a Florida summer. I take my first bite, and I don’t think about the series of poor decisions and bad luck that led me to this apartment. I don’t think about how I dropped out of college or about the night I spent in jail sleeping on cold linoleum. I don’t want to think about my father, who told me he couldn’t stand the sight of me or the sound of my voice. Or about how, with wild fire in my eyes, I packed

and left, and he didn’t stop me. The front door slams against the wall once again. An out-of-breath Brittany, glistening with musty perspiration, heaves a rotund black garbage bag inside. Not stopping to catch her breath or say a word, she leaves the bag to prop open the door and staggers over to me, picks up my burger, and takes a huge bite. Her pock-marked face dripping, she hands the remaining sliver of burger back to me. She smells faintly of marijuana. It mixes with sweat, creating an odor profane and sour. “I just dragged that...” she begins, but Beau’s obnoxious snores increase in volume as she speaks. Raising her voice, she begins again: “I just dragged that damn bag all the way from Preggers’ house!” Struggling to be heard over Beau, every word is louder than the last. Thunder rumbles outside and like a bullet from a gun, a large orange and white blur shoots through the still open front door and lands with its face buried in my box of fries. It’s the stray cat Beau lets in regularly. Brittany finds the sense of entitlement it’s gained for everything under our roof unacceptable. I feel… resigned. “Beau, get that damn cat out of here,” she bellows. I look over at Beau, now sitting upright and awake. I wonder how long he’s been awake as I finish the remaining fragment of burger, leaving the fries for the stray. My mother often tells me I look sickly and thin. Her deep brown eyes water with emotion when she says my eyes are hollow and dry. Like my soul has been consumed. The cat has no name. Ignoring her demand, Beau asks simply, “What’s in the bag?” Ignoring him, she speaks to me, “I scored an eighth from Preggers. She’s kinda wacko today. Hormones. Pregnancy’s the worst STD. I smoked out with her mom, though. She’s over cooking dinner for her. I’m gonna go back later and mooch some leftovers.” Preggers is her nickname for the pregnant pot dealer who lives down the street. Ignoring Brittany, the fat stray runs over to Beau, knocking over my drink, and jumps into his lap. Pulling a thick stack of napkins from the paper bag, I vigorously rub the soda out of the carpet, leaving tiny snakes of paper as the cheap napkins disintegrate; Brittany grabs the unwieldy black garbage bag and staggers toward my room. Beau and the stray settle into each other. The cat is large and clumsy and—if it wanted to—it wouldn’t fit in any other lap but his. It

doesn’t want to. “I’m putting this in your closet,” she says to me, stating not asking, from within my bedroom. I don’t bother replying. She’s always eclipsed my will. Beau says that he keeps his stray cat around because it’s his feline doppelganger. He loves it with the brotherhood one feels toward a kindred spirit. The cat keeps him around for the easy meals and warm place to sleep. Sometimes I wonder if that’s why Beau sticks with us. “I’m getting my pipe and I’m packing us a bowl. This weed is some good shit,” Brittany calls, now from the bathroom. “By the way, Preggers was crying. She doesn’t want to see her old clothes again ‘til after the pregnancy. So don’t let me forget they’re in your closet,” she tells me like a coward, speaking from the other side of a wall. Once, when she was throwing one of her tantrums, Brittany bashed a hole in the bathroom door with the wooden end of a plunger. If it had punched all the way through then I could have seen her now. It’s been only three months and I’ve lived with her too long. “Did you know,” I ask, “that Heather’s been cooking crack in our back yard while Beau and I are at work?” “What? No! Of course not,” she says. She is a habitual liar and I instantly scold myself. I should have waited until she was in the room before asking. I’ve become a connoisseur of her visual ques. “She’s your friend,” she says. Her deflecting tone tells me she knew about the drug operation. “Heather’s not my friend any more. Not since she got out of jail. She’s changed. She’s your friend and your friend only,” I say. Heather’s parents have kicked her out of the house many times for stealing, for her drug habits—or for being a lesbian—and sometimes she comes to stay with us. I wonder if they’ve given up on her for those reasons or if she does those things because they’ve given up on her. When I first met her, she had bright, laughing blue eyes and long hair in wild curls. Now her eyes are empty, the humor consumed, and she has a wellkept Mohawk. She shaves the sides of her head in our sink. Brittany prefers the new Heather. I’ve asked Brittany about the crack only to see if she knew; the drugs don’t concern me because Heather isn’t coming back. The last time she stayed with us she said, in a drug induced mania, that she would kill Beau with a shotgun.

I said I’d kill her first. I vowed to run her Mohawk down with my mother’s old red Dodge Intrepid with the yellow racing stripe down the sides while she sold her crack in a black tank top and camo pants on a skateboard across the sweaty streets of Tampa. When I informed Beau, he laughed and said I wouldn’t. I wondered if he was right. He said he wasn’t worth the jail time anyway. I dreamed about it the next night, hearing the sound of her bones crunching under my tires as her shotgun skated metallically across a Wal-Mart parking lot at two in the morning; my subconscious mind was trying hard to convince me that I could. Beau remains uncharacteristically silent during the argument between Brittany and me, cross-legged on the couch like Buddha, and petting the massive orange tabby lying against his belly. Outside the open door, the blue sky darkens. Cold air coming from the open door—not the wall unit—slowly encroaches on the humid heat of the room. Exhaling a cloud of smoke in my face, Brittany commands my attention and hands me the pipe. I accept it and inhale, hold the pungent earthy smoke deep within, and hand it back. Beau and the cat watch in disdain from the couch. Beau, an unusual stray, abstains from both drugs and sex. He is, however, proudly alcoholic and a fun drunk. Like a giant carnival teddy bear twice the size of the child holding it, he becomes happy, goofy, and cuddly. He knocks over to-go cups with day old soda and trips over the couch as he dances with himself. He’s also smarter, wittier, and more profound the more alcohol he consumes. I exhale and the world becomes brighter and more vibrant as the weed inhales me. He tells me things when he’s drunk. He tells me stories of his adventures as he wandered from one corner of the country to the other. He tells me about how he’d been in New Orleans during hurricane Katrina. He had sat in a chair with a rifle pointed at the door every night for days, protecting his belongings from looters—until one day when a massive tree uprooted from the marshy earth, narrowly missing his waterlogged steel-toed boots. After that, he left behind all the things he had thought important to escape with his life—hungry, exhausted, and diminished. He found himself at a bus station in Tallahassee, where I met him. He had only what he could carry. I had a two bed dorm at the university with no one to fill the lonely bed and a heart too big for my chest. He lived with me the whole semester, but when I dropped out he moved on to California.

Thunder crashes and the windows shake. He liked to preach about the Gnostic gospels and the power of love. He refers to his friend Steven as his Mentor and tells me I’ll never meet him but won’t say why. His sadness frightens me. He calls me Scotty when he’s drunk. When he came back to Florida and wound up at our door, he had terrifying stories about the bad crowd he hung with in California— all high school drop-outs in leather jackets with baseball bats and manhood to prove. He said that he barely escaped with his soul. He tells those stories like Confucius or Jesus—like a Grand Teacher imparting wisdom to a lost and aloof soul. “Scotty,” he said once, with a wide sweep of an arm knocking over his beer, “I’m ready for the zombie apocalypse. You really only need enough provisions for three years. In the sun, the dead flesh decays faster, and by then they can’t chase you anymore. I’d go to my mother’s farm. Oh, and I’m prepared to kill anyone they bite. Friends. Family.” “Me?” I asked. “I love you like a brother. Yes I’d kill you. No guns, though. It calls the undead,” he pushed his dark sunglasses, reflecting the crescent moon, further up his nose, “but if I don’t have enough cigarettes, then all bets are off. I’ll probably just off myself. I’d have a shotgun.” “I thought you said no guns.” Not for the zombies.” “Then why?” “To off myself,” he said, his tone accusing me of not paying attention. This confused me. Then he downed the rest of his spilt Corona. I take another drag from the green frosted glass pipe. Sometimes he tells me that I don’t belong here, that he can see my future before me. He says he can see me working towards a doctorate in something, anything I choose. He says that I’m too smart for this duplex with dishes molding in the sink, a Mountain Dew butter cake spawning maggots on top of the fridge, and a wall A/C unit that runs rivers of pink algae into the carpet; he says that I have too much passion, too much talent. He tells me with a sad little smile on his bigger-than-life face that he and Brittany, who shatters dishes against the porch when angry and buys cocaine from strangers as they walk

down our street, are white trash and that this is where they belong. But that I... I take another drag... What am I? Where do I belong? Is it really here? Somewhere someone farts. Beau and Brittany hate each other with white-hot obsession. Beau says he doesn’t usually stick around in one place for very long. Though he doesn’t tell anyone but me, late at night—after more than a few beers—Beau will say that he’s still here because of me and because I have no one else. Recently, my parents threatened to call the cops on me for stealing money that my grandmother left me in her will. I think they thought I would buy drugs with it, though I told them the money went to pay rent. They’re scared for me, or of me, and I’m not sure which. They make me think of Heather. But Beau won’t give up on me. He won’t go anywhere until I... do what? He writes a fan-fiction novel late into the night when it’s just him and me, and Brittany is asleep. I tell him how much more talented he is than me and how he should keep on writing. Whenever he offers the word processor to me, I refuse, saying his Resident Evil novel is so much better than anything I could do, and he just sighs. I exhale smoke and for the first time notice the cacophony of the Florida afternoon summer rainstorm outside. “Beau, get that damn cat out of here!” Brittany’s hellish voice reverberates through me. “But it’s pouring outside.” “It’s a fucking stray cat! It’ll live!” The sudden argument scares my thoughts and they run off. The drug clouds my brain and I lose sight of them completely. What was I thinking about? I swear there was something important... a moral to some story that was playing out... I try to track it down. I was thinking about Beau... and his drinking... then... “Come on!” Suddenly Brittany is shouting inches from my face. “Let’s go play in the rain!” I discover myself standing up and running after her out the door. I find

the earth flooding. It is biblical and magnificent. My feverish eyes see each individual raindrop fall; my body feels the coolness of each pinprick of water. Drenched, I focus on Brittany and see her smiling, her face upturned and eyes closed, her arms held out like a prophet of the present. I am two inches tall and at the mercy of wrathful gods. I am a child’s little green army man drowning in a swiftly filling bathtub. An invisible hand has turned the knob, and the shower head is on somewhere impossibly high above, and the drain is plugged. I am in awe. I wonder what has angered God into recanting his covenant with Noah. My stare wanders back to the open door. Beau leans against the door frame watching, a cigarette in his left hand. The wind tears the smoke away from its glowing tip, sending it lurching like a marionette before ripping it apart. An open flask hangs from his right hand and a fedora hides his eyes from my stupefied gaze. I can’t see the expression on his face, and I don’t want to. I know he is watching my shivering frame. I find Brittany’s hand in mine and she shouts over the tempest: “Come on!” Thunder cracks and I barely hear her, though her wide smile, chattering teeth, and squinting bloodshot eyes are suddenly illuminated inches in front of my face. I know we are running down the street only because I stumble. Like children we run, as if nameless, shapeless demons have given chase. I can’t help but glance over my shoulder, though, of course, through the sheets of rain all I see are our two-bedroom duplex with the door wide open, Beau leaning against the frame and taking a swig from his flask, and my illusive thoughts. It all retreats behind us as we race further away and the distance actively evaporates the demons in my head. Adrenaline courses through my veins as I run, my legs pumping as hard as they can, the two of us hand in hand. She pulls me with every ounce of power and effort she has, and we are thirteen years old again. We are the same kids that met six or seven years ago, she, a loner with braces, and me, a college-prep nerd with a bowl-cut, both still awed by downpours and irony and subsistence and vitality. We steal energy from the very wind and rain, our arms flailing and our mouths screaming, our voices lost in the deafening gale, invisible terrors at my back as the tempest tears the shrieks from my throat. Through the thunderstorm I see none of the grey concrete dwellings where the pregnant drug-dealer sells her weed or where the Mexican day-laborers—whose carpool

van’s horn wakes me up before the sun every morning—try to sleep through the late afternoon summer storm; I can’t see the dirt road or the vacant lot. I can’t see our duplex or Beau. We are children running from demons on Halloween night. She tugs at my hand and we run, and the running consumes me.

I Was 5’ 4’’ and Seventeen by Scott Griffin

ut I shrank two inches about a month ago. It was the day my mother’s fiance and his son moved in, and since that day I shrink like it’s a nervous habit. Like biting your nails, except nothing like biting your nails. At first, I didn’t believe I was shrinking; I thought it was all in my head. I’ve always been short, and it was just getting to me, that’s all. Puberty was breathing its last, and I still thought I should’ve had plenty of growing to do. These thoughts were already in my head when Dan, my mother’s fiance, said to me at dinner the night after they moved in, “Hey Boy, I didn’t realize you were a full head shorter than Mike till yesterday when you were carrying boxes side by side.” I looked across my grandmother’s old dinner table at fifteen-year-old Mike, who smirked through his peach fuzz into his mashed potatoes, and I shrank another inch. Mom said, while contemplating Dan’s eyes across from hers, that she hadn’t noticed. I shrank another two inches when I realized I thought Mike was beautiful. Though he was only fifteen, he was tall, had a sideways smile, clever eyes, and skin that looked like it would burn to the touch. That’s when I knew for sure I was shrinking. He’d come out of what used to be my bathroom after a shower, hair wild, rivulets of water following the curves of his chest, and wrapped so tight in a towel I could see the outline of his penis. I lose half an inch every time I touch myself after he comes out of the shower, but sometimes it’s worth it. About a week ago, I asked Mom to take me to the doctor. “You’re not shrinking,” she said without looking up from the hem of Dan’s new work pants. “You just need a male around here for once. There’s a lot Dan can teach

you, y’know. I’m sure he could use your help with the car.” In the garage I found Dan and Mike huddled over the engine of their pickup truck. “Hand me the spark plugs, Boy,” Dan said when he saw me. “These?” I said, picking up a handful of hexagonal objects from the workbench. “Those are lug nuts, Lug Nut,” said Mike. I shrank another inch and now I was too short to see over the workbench. “Why don’t you go help your mother,” said Dan. Mike lost his virginity last night to his blonde lab partner with huge tits while Mom and Dan were at the movies for their date night. I stood outside his door with my dick in my hand and listened as he grunted and the bed creaked and the sheets rustled. I thought about my own virginity and how I didn’t want girls. I thought about Mike and how he’d never want me. I felt myself shrinking as I pumped my fist, but I didn’t care. He gasped for breath. I gasped with him. This morning, I wake up early. I know it’s time to say something because I’m only an inch tall and, if I don’t, the next time I shrink I will disappear. I climb down the mountain of my bed, and it takes me hours to hike through the thick carpet and into the kitchen. Mom towers above me. “Mom, I’m not like other guys.” I yell to be heard from the tile expanse. “I really am shrinking and I don’t know what to do. I thought if I just ignored it…” Mom doesn’t turn around. Instead, she dishes up two plates of eggs and bacon. “Mom,” I scream, “my body isn’t working like it’s supposed to and I don’t know what to do!” She turns and thunders out of the kitchen like a titan, taking the two plates to her bedroom, and I shrink again.

Bread

by Victor Florence

he smooth bitterness of chewed coffee beans pours from my fatherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mouth as he speaks to me about the Catholic Church. Something he does when we drive back from the supermarket every Sunday evening. When we pass the church where we both had our first communion, where he married my mother, where he had her funeral, he talks about the bones of Spanish saints he saw while in the navy. He talks about Mary while I watch the streetlights flicker on like ruffling feathers before flying away in the rear-view mirror. We arrive home and he hands me the bread and milk and I put it away before I go to my room to wait for supper.

When God Didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t Know Any Better by Breanna Henry

egos have constructed the earth inhabitants are pliable green army men weather is a sleepy mother knocking over the built up world stepping on the pieces yelling profane words SHITDAMNFUCKHELL raging at the sting of sharp corners into bare feet evil shows itself with wiry fur cold wet nose eating up the people leaving a trail of mangled bodies leading to a weeping child holding a new found responsibility of watching over the things he loves while in his room without a companion who is playing behind a closed door with Play Dough that just looks too pretty not to taste just once or more. Planet reconstruction can begin again jaws failed to alter the material at hand however life must be rethought G.I. Joes hold up better to that with padded paws perhaps this time it can all remain.

Home

by John Caudill

:00 am and I’m still awake. All around me are the sounds of fitful dreamers, crushed in close to one another in a damp, smelly cornucopia. I’m surrounded by the sounds of sleep apnea: coughing, mumbling, crying— there is something forlorn and annoying about a grown man crying. A man nearby is vomiting onto the floor in terrible heaving wheezes. He sounds like he’s dying. Urine is thick in the air, fresh and pungent. Sleep is as impossible as a dream of being somewhere else. In an hour, the lights will come on and send a sharp splinter of pain through my head. A couple of men will be at the door and they will tell us in brusque, ex-military tones that it’s time to get out. I’m at the Sacramento Street YMCA right in the middle of Chinatown. Every time. Every fucking time I tell myself this will be the last time. Well. Here I am. Free showers and a hot meal. These things take on significance. I sleep better in the park. But you have to watch out for the crackheads in the park. A guy just last week got stabbed in broad fucking daylight. They took his coat. **** The Golden Gate has these little signs on it, posted on the big red rails that they drove into the bay. When you cross the bridge on foot, you pass these signs about every two hundred feet. Tourists think they’re funny. They take pictures next to them and do some kind of ironic display like pretending they’re going to jump over the side.

The little signs have the suicide prevention hotline phone number and some words of encouragement printed in docile blue ink. More people jump off this bridge than anywhere else in the world. The world’s most famous suicide spot. This was only the second time I’d crossed the bridge on foot. The first time, I was a poor man, dressed as a rich man looking for a job in the city. The second time, I’m a rich man dressed as a poor man, looking to get out of the city—funny shit. **** 6:40 am-something crossing the bridge on foot. I’ve got to get back to the town house in Marin City. My face is covered in sticky, dried blood. My ribs are sore from being hit so many times I lost have count. The wind is whipping over the bridge, coming up under me and ballooning my shirt out. I realize my jacket is missing. Stolen during the attack. I shiver and try to rub the gooseflesh off my bruised arms. I have to get home and get cleaned up. I have to go and see Maurice, my doctor. He can give me painkillers and stitches. I can’t see him like this. He’d think I needed to be committed. I have to get home and shower and put on some fresh, clean clothes. One of the pressed shirts hanging crisply on a plastic hanger in my closet. The thought makes me thirsty. I lick my dried lips and feel the wind sucking the liquid off my weathered, stubbly face. A gull flies overhead, squawking emphatically. Rosa will be there at 11:30 am to clean and take my dirty clothes to the dry cleaners. I’ve got to get home before she gets there. She always comes after I’ve gone to work. It’s better that way. I can’t let her see me like this. Poor Rosa, she’d probably keel over right there. ****

I started when Dad died. His dying words were “You ungrateful piece of ssssshi—” Dad did logging up in Humboldt until he was laid off. We were poor, dirt poor. Mama told me to cry and make a scene in the grocery store whenever she wanted to steal food. When we moved south, we were living in the car. I was 15. When I crossed the bridge that first time, I was coming from the car, parked pretty much permanently near Kirby Cove on the north side of The Bay. Dad told me it was time to go get a job. I dressed nice and managed to sweet talk my way into a mail room gig. A few years later, I was taking night courses at a Community College. A few years after that, I was in Business School. And a few years after that—well, you get it. When Dad died, he died poor and unsuccessful. That’s why I did it. I knew what it meant to be poor but I wanted to know what it meant to be lower than that, lower than poor. I wanted to forget everything. I went through my clothes and found my rattiest looking shirts and pants. I took an old pair of loafers and scuffed them up. For two weeks, I was homeless. And it was great. I was free. I told my wife I was going fishing in Alaska to get over Dad’s death and that I needed to be alone. For all I know, that’s when she started cheating on me. I did it the second time when she told me she was leaving me for another man. I don’t know why I did it this last time. I guess I just needed a vacation. **** It rains a lot in San Francisco. That was one of the reasons I went to the Y. I was getting tired of waking up to cold rain. So I ended up at the Y on Sacramento around 7 pm, standing in a line of probably 200 homeless people of varying age and physical condition. Most looked ill. The man in front of me had a wiry white beard and an old Dodgers cap resting on the extreme highest point of his skull. Every few seconds he would sort of guffaw to himself and rub his nose vehemently. The man behind me was inching his way closer and closer into my personal space. I turned to shoot him a dirty look but he appeared to be blind. You get a free meal and a shower at the Y. I know I already said that, but

it’s important. San Francisco is one of the most expensive cities in the country. You spend all morning panhandling for enough change to get a cup of coffee. They served chicken and rice, I guess because it’s Chinatown. Both were cold. I never sleep in the place it’s so damn noisy and smelly. The smell alone is enough to keep you away forever. The cots are just long enough for a midget— or little person or whatever—and the blankets, if you get one, are covered in lice. But I went that night because it was mostly dry and warm. And of course I told myself I would never fucking go there again. **** When I get to Marin, it’s almost 9 am. I have just enough time. I move quick on foot now. I can cover great distances in short periods of time with little consideration. It’s not about fancy shoes. It’s about learning how to walk properly—using the ball of your foot instead of heel-to-toe. The city is awake and bustling, filled with the soft idling of expensive foreign cars and the teasing aromas of the bistros and bakeries downtown. Cars slow down and look me over. They don’t like my type in this white-washed, suburban town. No Loitering. Vagrancy Prohibited. I have to go through alleys and avoid roads wherever possible. Cops are the enemy unless you have at least five dollars and a photo ID in your pocket. I have neither. Both pockets of my worn and frayed khakis are full of holes. **** After the Y, a night in the park is often welcome. Some nights, I’ll stay down by The Warf in one of the pavilions on the water. It was cold this week though and the park was less breezy. I found a nice bench just far enough away from a light that it wouldn’t bother me but close enough that I wasn’t in total darkness. I was huddled into a ball, in that fitful place where thought patterns

become dreams when I felt hands grab me violently. My heart shot a blast of adrenaline through my limbs. I was wide-awake, being pummeled by two sets of hands. The punches sounded distant and far away, like the echo of steps in an empty hallway. There was a dull, irritating pain that I could feel was going to be a lot worse as soon as I started moving. One pair of hands continued working on my face and chest while the other moved through my pockets nimbly. I had nothing of value except my watch, which was removed from my wrist in surprisingly gentle fashion. I was pushed to the ground. A knee was on my neck, forcing my face into the dirt. The bits of grain mingled with the blood in my mouth making a warm, bitter paste. I was on the verge of blacking out. The punches stopped. I groaned pitifully and tried to open my swollen eyes. All I could see was flowing red fractals. I rolled around on the grass, trying to find a place where it didn’t hurt. I was sobbing but no sounds would come. **** When she left me for her divorce lawyer Simon Silverstein, I did it again with pleasure. The first time with Dad was cathartic. I needed to feel proud of myself, like I’d accomplished something the Old Man would understand. The second time, it was like I was coming home, like I was walking into the forest of night and illusions to be cleansed of my sins. I mean, I could have gone to the actual woods. I could have hiked the whole Pacific Crest Trail from Mojave to Canada if I’d wanted to. I thought about it. I realized escaping people wouldn’t solve the problem. There is this thing called ego-death. Your ego predicates your reactions and emotions about particular circumstances. When you kill that, when you have ego-death, it’s like you’re born again. My life up to the point of the first time had been about pleasing people. Making sure they thought highly of me. Making sure they didn’t think I was just some trash from up north raised in rented trailers and the back of a Buick Skylark. You’re nobody on the street. You’re another faceless, formless hand reaching

out for alms. I pass a tribe of homeless every day outside of the parking garage near where I work. I know it’s the same group of people, I can tell by the way that they stand. I’ve seen them maybe 200 times and have even given them money once or twice. But if you were to ask me to describe their faces to you— anyone of them—I couldn’t. When I give them money—or when someone drops a couple of nickels in my ‘Yesterday’s Styrofoam Cup’—eye contact is impossible, for both parties. **** I kept the townhouse when Grace left. She got the Bentley and the Tahoe property and a hefty settlement. But I kept the townhouse because I worked in the city and I felt attached to the place. I couldn’t stand the thought of Grace fucking Silverstein in the bedroom, the office, the living room, on the carpets and couches we’d acted our lives out on. It was too much to bear. A man’s home is his castle. **** The door is unlocked. I’m bothered by this, frightened even. This is not how I left the place. I begin to grow angry at Rosa. My mind races, collecting other misdemeanors she’s committed recently, compiling an argument for her resignation. I’m in my living room. The clean, white Berber carpet and the Italian Leather Sofa, the Big-Screen TV. The Pollack print on the far wall brings it all together. Chaos existing in containment. I pause. The TV is missing. There’s no fucking TV. A giant blank spot in the center of the Wrought-Iron Entertainment Center. Rosa. She knows I haven’t been home for almost three weeks—away on business. I walk towards the hallway and the kitchen. The house has a familiar smell that I’ve always noticed upon return from a long trip. A sort of dry cherry wood. It’s musty though, the smell. The house feels close and cramped and I think maybe I should open the windows and let in some fresh air.

The Double French Doors leading out to the patio are opened. I follow several sets of greasy footprints leading towards the garage. My SUV is missing, presumably with my television and a few other choice goods. Lying in a puddle on the floor of the garage is a jacket. I pick it up and immediately recognize it as the jacket stolen off my back during the attack in the park. The jacket was a gift from my ex-wife’s dad, Chuck. I never much cared for it and always thought it was kind of trashy, even though it was probably pretty expensive. The hasty, pre-vacation plans are coming back to me now: I was eager to get out into the streets and had simply plucked an unused jacket out of the back of the closet to serve my purposes. I check the inside of the lapel, remembering that Christmas so many years ago when Chuck had handed me a pen and told me to write my name and contact information on the little tag inside the lapel. I look—the tag is missing. The fancy watch. The designer jacket. The muggers must not have been too strung out to realize I wasn’t an ordinary bum. I walk back to the house and make to shut the French Doors. One of the glass panels falls loose and splashes on the back patio. I drop my head, feeling the throbbing pain reach a new crescendo. Suddenly nothing seems more important than the embrace of a warm shower. I plod upstairs and peel the blood-stained clothing from my wiry body. Purple bruises erupt over the surface of my torso like flaming continents on the sea of my skin. I can’t pull myself away from the image in the mirror. I’m emaciated, overgrown, sickly, pale. I look dead, or very near it. The warm water feels so good I almost pass out. I’m deep in meditation when I feel the shower curtain brush my side and a deafening roar engulfs the tiny space. My ears are numb and ringing and I’m staggering drunkenly through the hot water stinging my eyes. I can look down and just barely see my black feet and the black water rushing towards the drain. Rosa is screaming in the corner of the bathroom, holding the pistol she knows I keep in the desk drawer in the living room. I can’t hear her screaming or crying. I can’t hear anything. I fall out of the water and realize I’ve been shot. “Jesus!” “Ay...dios.” “Rosa...you shot me.”

I can’t tell if it’s dirt or blood that stains my hands. I feel a cold sensation

radiating from my abdomen. “What...” I look at Rosa. “You were on vacation for two more days,” she says to me. “The house...it looked like...” “Why would I do that to my own house?” “You were on vacation for two more days!” “Did you call the police?” “...si.” “You better call an ambulance too.” “I thought you were...I thought you were a burglar.” “So you shot me?” Red hot pain was streaking at the sides of every movement, every breath. I couldn’t hold still but the pain of movement was crippling. I screamed in agony and Rosa started crying again. “You...you look...I thought you were...thief...”

Chaucer’s Rhetorical Prick by Paul Vinhage

“And now the braying trumpet splits the air And cracks the heavens with its alien sound.” (Capella 2)

n Late Medieval England the study of rhetoric was the cornerstone of public speaking. Whether a courtier, preacher, or poet, rhetoric provided each vocation with the decorum and verbosity appropriate to their station. One of the most influential books on the subject, although now disregarded, Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii formed the basis of liberal arts study throughout the Middle Ages. In his work describing “Dame Rhetoric,” Capella paints the lady in exalted, stately hues to express the full measure of her majesty. He writes, “there entered a magnificent woman of noble bearing, beautiful of face, impressive of stature and completely poised, wearing on her head a helmet, upon which rested a royal crown” (3). With her arguments and art she is “able to lead men where she would” (3). Wielded by and working through men, “Dame Rhetoric” represents the full power of speech, echoing through the courts and halls of kings. Her manner, ornament, and style only reaching its peak when dealing with the loftiest matters, do not trifle with “Dame Rhetoric,” lest her art be abused. Besides her imposing stature, “Dame Rhetoric” follows the classical model of rhetoric (its simplest definition ‘the art of persuasion’, but also including Aristotelian notions of logos, ethos, and pathos. For more, see Aristotle’s Rhetoric) (Payne 273). Her greatest aim is to empower speech to affect the world around her, to move men to fear, awe or reverence, and to accomplish

these ends like a “braying trumpet,” “[cracking] the heavens with its alien sound” (Capella 2). The issue of this lady can only serve to ennoble its subject matter through laborious, overwrought language meant to cow the laity. On the other hand, Geoffrey of Vinsauf wrote his Poetria nova nearly 800 years after Capella’s treatise (the publication dates c.1210 and c.410, respectively), thus re-centering the object and aim of poetic, rhetorical and stylistic composition. Focusing on method and practice, the purpose of rhetoric turned to effectively communicating an idea--from conception to its birth on the page. Geoffrey of Vinsauf neatly summarized his practice when he wrote: If a man has a house to build, his hand does not rush, hasty, into the very doing: the work is first measured out with his heart’s inward plumb line, and the inner man marks out a series of steps beforehand, according to a definite plan; his heart’s hand shapes the whole before his body’s hand does so, and his building is a plan before it is an actuality. (34) A seminal book for lexical practitioners in the Late Middle Ages, Poetria nova was even familiar to Geoffrey Chaucer who, in several cases, paraphrased the Latin text in his poems (Geoffrey of Vinsauf 29). With both these works in mind, let us inspect Chaucer’s Tale of Sir Thopas, a tale alternately panned and praised by critics, who read it as a mockery, farce, failure, or joke. Under these interpretive models, the tale is oftentimes only inspected through the narrow frame of tail rhyme romances, to which Chaucer owes a large debt for the composition of Thopas, but the tale creates, while putting numerous romances into play, a space, which disappears as we find it. Through a minimizing rhetoric, that is both a rhetoric of condensation and miniaturization, Chaucer sets his Tale of Sir Thopas against the rhetorical grandeur of Capella and constructs a little, crooked house. The Prologue to Sir Thopas, containing the Host’s invitation to Chaucer to tell a tale, provides at once a stark contrast in style, rhyme royal to tail rhyme, and, as Alan Gaylord suggests, an apt foreshadowing in the line, “He semeth elvyssh by his contenaunce” (7.703) (“Dainty ‘Dogerel’” 285). The rhyme royal stanzas in the Prologue to Sir Thopas are unique among the prologues and links in the Canterbury Tales and should give the reader some pause before entering Sir Thopas proper. Offering high style, rhyme royal creates dissonance with the Host’s playful japing with the pilgrim Chaucer and furthers that dissonance as Chaucer begins his tale in tail rhyme, “Listeth, lordes, in good entent, / And

I wol telle verrayment / Of myrthe and of solas” (7.712-14). Immediately, the Host, readers, and pilgrims are startled, as the plodding iambic pentameter jets off into tetrameter, trimeter, and little spurts of monometer during the bobs. Furthermore, the pilgrim Chaucer eschews the customary “whilom” or “there was”(1.859-60 et al.), but instead begins his tale with a direct address to his audience, “Listeth” (7.712). Although Laura Loomis has demonstrated that such addresses and calls were commonplaces in English minstrelsy, they cannot so easily be dismissed as “derisive imitations” (497). Instead, the calls make readers and listeners repeatedly aware that Sir Thopas is meant as a spoken, performed tale; and, as such calls become more frequent (Chaucer manages to cram three into the first stanza of the third fit (7.891, 893, 896)), they may be read as anxious reminders to an audience quickly losing interest. Framed in awkward fashion, Chaucer’s “deyntee thyng” (7.711) takes flight. The Middle English Dictionary defines “deyntee” as “(a) excellent, fine, elegant; (b) delightful, pleasing.” However, the unsuspecting Host does not know just how wrong his judgment of Chaucer and his tale is and will listen for just over 200 lines before he has had enough. After hearing the tale, the pilgrims would be justified in calling it a ‘dainty thing’, presaging the modern definition of ‘small and pretty’. Why should the Host expect “som deyntee thyng” from the pilgrim Chaucer, who, until goaded by Harry Bailly, has kept his head down and mouth shut? Why should Chaucer promise a “rym [he] lerned longe agoon” (7.709), since there is no clear analogue, only small pieces from popular romance? In both instances Chaucer the poet twists reader’s expectations and the pilgrim’s expectations by ironically disfiguring the promised Tale of Sir Thopas. Laughter and frustration meet with any attempt to reconcile the tale to its prologue. The unsociable pilgrim Chaucer must now piece together a tale, having been wrenched from silence; and he constructs a hasty tale with which to prick the jocund Host. Using Geoffrey of Vinsauf ’s model of poetic invention and rhetorical composition, Chaucer devises his house and executes his plan with alacrity. He writes: He priketh thurgh a fair forest, Therinne is many a wilde best, Ye, bothe bukke and hare; And as he priketh north and est, I telle it you, hym hadde almest Bitid a sory care. (7.754-59) Sir Thopas’ constant “prikyng” in the first fit of the tale, wherein occur

seven of the eight uses, distracts readers from any straightforward plot. Thopas pricks “thurgh a fair forest,” “north and est,” “on the softe gras” (779), et passim. With every prick the listeners wince as they are driven with Thopas hither and thither, “almosting” (as James Joyce says) any real danger, “sory care” (759), plot, or stable signification. In his tale Chaucer builds a house that is no house. Although plain and repetitive, his language thwarts any attempt toward moralization, toward any sentence. I use the term sentence here in the context of the Host’s criterion for the best tale which would contain, “best sentence and moost solaas” (1.798). Sir Thopas lacks sentence and sense altogether and gambols in infinite “solaas”. However, if the Host marks “solaas” as one of the criteria for the best tale, then why is he so quick to stop Sir Thopas? Through the analysis of “solaas” in Fragment VII and wider contexts, Alan Gaylord argues that, to the Host, “a tale of solace is expected only to be salacious--and, possibly, as part of the game, to slander some member of the immediate party” (“Horseback Editor” 231). While Gaylord’s account of the Host’s displeasure with Sir Thopas is valid, other problems, which threaten the Host’s authority as judge and editor, arise and confound critics within and without the Canterbury Tales. Using the word frequently within the first 120 lines of Sir Thopas, Chaucer problematizes “priken” for himself and his readers. The MED gives several definitions for the word from “to pierce; stab lightly,” to “to produce a sharp pain,” to “to incite to action, stir; urge, encourage.” The lines, “Sire Thopas eek so wery was / For prikyng on the softe gras, / So fiers was his corage” (778-80), echo the sentiment in the General Prologue, “(So priketh hem nature in hir corages), / Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages” (1.11-12). So, who pricks whom? Just as the pilgrims, like “smale foweles” (1.9), are pricked by nature in spring to “goon on pilgrimages”, Harry Bailly pricks each pilgrim to tell his or her tale; but, when he pricks Chaucer to tell the next tale, Chaucer pricks back. The errant ‘prikasour’ Thopas poses a threat to the pilgrims and their goal. Lee Patterson identifies Thopas as a child, and, as such, somewhere “between an innocent infantia and a naughty pueritia.” Infantia represents the purity of early childhood, when the child is not yet weaned, pueritia the troubles and adventures of boyhood (165). Moreover, as an “elvyssh” puer both Thopas and Chaucer partake in what Patterson calls “‘literature’: a discourse that insists upon its autonomy from both ideological programs and social appropriations” (173). I wish to suggest that Chaucer as pilgrim cannot maintain autonomy, since he is reliant on other pilgrims and their tales to create the corpus of his work, but as author can open within the confines of tradition and authority,

whether biblical, societal, or literary, a space for criticism and creation. Sir Thopas partakes in both, subverting the Host and English romances as authorities, but never directly attacking either. The anticlimax of Sir Thopas, a near-conflict, displays Chaucer’s roguishness in full tilt: Til that ther cam a greet geaunt, His name was sire Olifaunt, A perilous man of dede. He seyde, ‘Child, by Termagaunt, But if thou prike out of myn haunt, Anon I sle thy steede With mace. Heere is the queene of Fayerye, With harpe and pipe and symphonye, Dwellynge in this place. (7.807-16) Previously alone in the “contree of Fairye” (802), Thopas encounters this “perilous man of dede” and quickly runs away. It is no coincidence that sire Olifaunt should be a “man of dede,” since Thopas shirks typical knightly behavior in his aimless pricking and prancing. To realize his dream of “an elf-queene [he him] take” (795), he must confront the world and men of “dede.” (Remember Chaucer’s earlier gloss of Plato in the General Prologue, “the wordes moote be cosyn to the dede” (1.742).) With no “dede,” however, the words loosen themselves from the concrete; and, in Sir Thopas, they are thrown into unrestricted game. The knight turned child, and child turned knight, upsets authority, just as sire Olifaunt wielding a sling against “child Thopas” upsets the biblical authority of child David wielding a sling against Goliath. There is a double movement in the confrontation: Chaucer undercuts biblical authority through Thopas’s yielding to the authority and danger of “dede” (Smith 102-3). The contradictory, ambiguous movements between biblical, parental authority and topsy-turvy “pueritia” mark the boundaries and rhetorical field within which Sir Thopas functions. In her essay “Chaucer and Rhetoric,” Rita Copeland posits that “the realm of is not limited to style…but rhetoric is the preeminent system for articulating a theory of form” (137). So, having set up his argument in the first fit of Sir Thopas, (the child-hero submitting and dodging authority and “dede” in one and the same action), Chaucer moves the action to town and begins his process of diminishment. With the number of lines in each fit decreasing by half, from 120 to 60 to 30 to the Host’s interruption, Chaucer miniaturizes the action accordingly in a kind of diminutio ad absurdum. Having shrunk away

from his enemy, Thopas “[makes] hym bothe game and glee” (7.840) and bids his “geestours” come “for to tellen tales” (846). Already set among and alluding to dozens of English romances, the arming of Thopas in fit two seems as if it will devolve into the repetition of even smaller, daintier romances. Hoping to escape the maddening mise en abyme, Harry Bailly finally cuts the tale short. Capella’s “alien sound” (2), by which he defined Dame Rhetoric’s blast, is an apt description of the textual phenomenon Sir Thopas. Chaucer’s only tail rhyme romance, the tale stands as the end of all romance, the effete fizzle of an overwrought genre, sounded on a piccolo trumpet. Whatever house Chaucer’s “heart’s hand” had drafted, now stands as a doll house, each door opening into a room smaller than the last. The tale is perhaps the most rhetorically efficient, persuading the Host and critics alike, in just over 200 lines, that it is winding toward insignificance in an elaborate, allusive romp. Ultimately, the diminutive rhetoric exemplary in Sir Thopas only “[despendeth] tyme” (7.931), but does so reflexively, with tongue-in-cheek, reminding pilgrims and readers that tales are told “to shorte with oure weye” (1.791).

Works Cited Benson, Larry D., ed. The Riverside Chaucer. 3rd ed. Oxford, UK: Oxford U P, 1988. Print. Capella, Martianus. “De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, V: ‘The Book of Rhetoric’ (excerpt).” Trans. Joseph M. Miller. Readings in Medieval Rhetoric. Eds. Joseph M. Miller, Michael H. Prosser, Thomas W. Benson. Bloomington, IN: Indiana U P, 1973. Print. Chaucer, Geoffry. The Canterbury Tales. Benson 23-328. Copeland, Rita. “Chaucer and Rhetoric.” Lerer 122-143. Gaylord, Alan T. “Chaucer’s Dainty ‘Dogerel’: The ‘Elvyssh’ Prosody of Sir Thopas.” Chaucer’s Humor Critical Essays. Ed. Jean E. Jost. New York, NY: Garland, 1994. 271-294. Print. ---. “Sentence and Solaas in Fragment VII of the Canterbury Tales: Harry Bailly as Horseback Editor.” PMLA. Ed. John H. Fisher. 82.2 (1967): 226235. Print. Geoffrey of Vinsauf. “The New Poetics.” Trans. Jane Baltzell Kopp. Three

Medieval Rhetorical Arts. Ed. James J. Murphy. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971. 27-108. Print. Lerer, Seth, ed. The Yale Companion to Chaucer. New Haven, CT: Yale U P, 2006. Print. Loomis, Laura H. “The Tale of Sir Thopas.” Sources and Analogues of Chuacer’s Canterbury Tales. Eds. W.F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1941.486-559. Print. The Middle English Dictionary. The Middle English Compendium. Ed. Frances McSparran et al. Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan Digital Library Production Service, 22 February 2006. Web. 5 November 2011. Patterson, Lee. “’What Man Artow?’: Authorial Self-Definition in The Tale of Sir Thopas and The Tale of Melibee.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer. Ed. Thomas Heffernan. 11 (1989): 117-175. Print. Payne, Robert O. “Chaucer’s Realization of Himself as Rhetor.” Medieval Eloquence. Ed. James J. Murphy. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978. 270-287. Print. Smith, D. Vance. “Chaucer as an English Writer.” Lerer 87-121.

That oak tree is like me . . . by Amanda Molinaro

and here are the things you didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t notice

Last year, at this time, before the acorns started fallingâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; did you notice the pollen? How it coated everything yellowgreen like its turning leaves, how the thick smudge of color smeared across all surfaces, how it made the ground slimy and moldy as ice? This year, no one can seem to remember the yellowness of it imposture green. All that is noted is the bang of seeds dropping onto the roof and thudding into wet dirt. No one minds the changes in the tree until they are sitting under it and start to wonder if it behaved like this beforeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;

Teenager Seeks Control by Amanda Molinaro

chool lunches became the symptom of a need to control: Every day it was turkey breast, yellow pungent mustard, machine baked, sandy leavened wheat. Plastic wrapped in a shopping bag. A tangerine and a high-c. Things my father packed for me. Through first and homeroom, I kept my book bag closed for fear of the smell of slime, of wheat and yellow vinegar permeating giving me away. Third orchestra, standing in third chair, keeping my head level so I wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t see spots. My feelings are of overall fatigue and yawning makes my jaw crick. I do it often and with each refrain my black eyes get swallowed by sockets, bubble, then resurface. When itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s time to leave my hand strangles the neck of a contrabass in an excruciating vice grip. For lack of sodium or potassium I have no control over my hands until what is clenched is ripped and thuds out-of-tune on the floor. People are concerned about the well-being of the instrument, Nothing is the matter.

I walk slowly along sidewalks exhausting, no friends just myself and the part of myself that wants to destroy me. Feeling like the bones I have begun to become cold. I sit alone and dissect the fermenting sandwich, peel off two or three folded flaps — 40 cals a piece — and wrap them around my wrists. Then I throw them away and the tangerine too and hide out of sight for fear of being noticed. After school I think: My meat would not make a satisfying sandwich. My dad thinks this is Anorexia Nervosa and plunks a stack of internet researched materials on the coffee table. I’ve resigned to only drink tea. I am the cliched troubled teen. It gets better™ baby. Believe that.

Écriture Féminine

and the Problem of Molly’s Body in “Penelope” by Ariel Nagy

olly Bloom’s episode “Penelope” in James Joyce’s Ulysses offers a woman’s interpretation of her world, one that is subjectively and inherently feminine and entirely personal. Within her flowing narrative, Molly discusses many related topics including marriage, womanhood, her sexual exploits, her bodily functions, men, and motherhood. Many critics see the style of “Penelope” as “feminine,” that is, as an exploration of écriture féminine. Helene Cixous writes that although “it is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an impossibility that will remain, for this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded . . . [this] doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist” (883). Some common themes of feminine writing include: construction that flows without a specific structure — such as stream of consciousness style — a focus on the body, writing from the unconscious, and writing from a woman’s point of view about the topics women value. “Penelope” creates an unstructured and intimate portrait of Molly’s mind through the use of écriture féminine, which focuses on Molly’s thoughts centered on her body, presented in a stream of consciousness style that lacks punctuation and allows for authorial mistakes including misspelled words. After establishing “Penelope” as a work of écriture féminine, the specific theme of emphasizing the body will be argued as a positive stride towards liberating the feminine from patriarchy. Some critics and authors sought a new voice to represent women in literature, something historically overrun and dominated by male voices. Within the literary tradition, “with a few rare exceptions, there has not yet been any writing that inscribes femininity,” and even out of the small number of female writers there is an, “immense majority whose workmanship is in no way different from male writing, and which either obscures women or reproduces the classic representations of women (as sensitive-intuitive-

dreamy, etc.)” (Cixous 878). For Cixous, writing has followed a “phallocentric tradition” that privileges reason and the men that have upheld and progressed reason (879). Characteristics attributed to men, such as logic, reason, and rationality structure the language, writing, and grammar used in the phallocentric tradition of writing. Feminine writing seeks to represent women and the feminine in a way that breaks from the methods of writing that repress them. Bernard McKenna writes, “écriture féminine seeks to develop new definitions of women that exist outside of those imposed on them by a patriarchal society” (214). Not all critics agree that the style and structure of “Penelope” captures the flowing nature of écriture féminine or that employing this mode of writing has beneficial results for women. Vicki Mahaffey cites several critics in Reauthorizing Joyce who all critically evaluate “Penelope” negatively, commonly agreeing that the episode offers little to the stylistic development of the novel as a whole and offers no form or style in itself. Hugh Kenner describes “Penelope” as, “unpunctuated, unnarrated . . . a great feminine welling of lore and opinion and gossip and feeling with (as Joyce himself said) neither beginning nor middle nor end” (98). Yet it is not that the episode lacks structure; it is simply that the structure is feminine and does not subscribe to the grammar and style of the dominant masculine form, a style that has limited and repressed women for centuries. Molly’s monologue, through free association, reveals the connections between thoughts and memories and how these connections are not systematic, structured or coherent in any objective, universally logical way. This structure may not follow reason and logic, as masculine writing traditions do, but in doing so it resists the structures and grammar that limit writing. Feminine writing is freed of these restraints and so depicts the subject matter of the text more immediately, truthfully (because it is not edited or restricted to the demands of society and patriarchy) and in a method that is more consciously aware of the unconscious. The untraditional structure and cohesion of feminine writing, and therefore of “Penelope,” exists within the subjective mind of the creator (Molly). The narrative order of the episode, arranged by Molly’s stream of consciousness, develops her thoughts and “suggests that Molly gathers her memories valuing her own organizational and expressive structures rather than those of the patriarchal Dublin or British military society” (McKenna 215). Often described as the narrative “flow” of “Penelope,” some critics such as Derek Attridge assert that the association of women with the term “flow” represents: one link in a chain of metaphors that associates the idea of ‘woman’ with such ideas as ‘nature,’ ‘physicality,’ ‘irrationality,’ ‘unreliability,’

and ‘impulsiveness’ — one of the many chains that bind women to specific and subordinate, social and economic roles. Among the places where this stereotype has been most strongly reproduced is, of course, literature. (553) Critics such as Cixous view this connection positively, desiring that women to write and proclaim; “I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs. Time and again I, too, have felt so full of luminous torrents that I could burst” (876). The curvilinear episode begins and ends with “yes,” the female assertion of affirmation. Flooding pages with her inner speech and thoughts, Joyce’s depiction of Molly’s unconscious does not stop to correctly apply punctuation or grammar and exhibits exactly what Cixous desired for women to do in their feminine writing, to overflow. The less-educated diction of the episode reflects the less-educated Molly, complete with misspellings and malapropisms; carrot for carat, omissions for emissions and her conscious awareness that she always misspells sympathy and nephew as symphathy and newphew. She varies in her feelings towards the topics she explores not because she is illogically governed by emotion, but because attitudes and thoughts are never static, and imposing a logical structure or organization on them retracts from their truthfulness. For example, she returns time and again to her husband Leopold Bloom, initially criticizing him, but ending with a positive and accepting affirmation of their marriage. The structure of the episode actually reflects the reality of thought showing that “reality is neither hierarchical nor dialectical. Instead, it is an alternating movement between coherence and incoherence” and also the style of “Penelope,” “affirms the value of inconsistency, which has been culturally designated as a ‘female’ trait” (Mahaffey Reauthorizing Joyce 189). Cixous credits a lack of women writers and a feminine writing style to the fact that “we’ve been turned away from our bodies, shamefully taught to ignore them, to strike them with that stupid sexual modesty…why so few texts? Because so few women have as yet won back their body. Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes” (885-86). She traces the silence of women to patriarchal subjugation that used women’s bodies as a weapon against them. Denied so long of their bodies, further denial, such as in writing, amounts to further subjugation: “censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write your self. Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth” (Cixous 880). A woman reclaiming her body now equates to reclaiming the female self from patriarchy. Cixous believes writing through the

body helps access and develop the unconscious, “the place where the repressed [women] manage to survive” (880). Trapped in a psychological prison, women focused on and understood their pent up words and thoughts in a way men could not, allowing this unconscious area to become overrun with creative energy. Used together in writing, the unconscious and newly reclaimed body expresses what it means to be a woman. Cixous reasons that feminine writing must emphasize the corporeal because it offers a wealth of artistic material and is a way to escape patriarchy. She proposes for women “To write. An act which will not only ‘realize’ the decensored relation of woman to her sexuality, to her womanly being, giving her access to her native strength; it will give her back her goods, her pleasures, her organs, her immense bodily territories which have been kept under seal” (880). As discussed later in the essay, Molly embraces her body and sexuality, using both in her pursuit of love and self-enhancement. Mahaffey, less enthusiastic about an emphasis on the body in feminine writing, posits that “with few exceptions, “Penelope” has been placed in critical quarantine and examined in only the most clinical or personal ways” (Reauthorizing Joyce 138), and that “the only consensus to be found among the critics is the conviction that Molly represents that too, too solid/sullied flesh that most readers, like Hamlet, would apparently like to see melt and dissolve” (140). The focus on the materiality and physicality of women, historically, created an oppressive force. Mahaffey notes many feminist critics and scholars who agree that women were confined to the material world and excluded from the world of language (the man’s world) and so had to express themselves “silently” through material/physical means and appearances (208). Writing from a gendered perspective thereby creates: a significant difference between male and female ‘styles,’ a difference which is far from innocent . . . The culturally imposed restrictions on female style have made it possible for women themselves to be fetishized and framed, their expressiveness constricted as abnormally as their waists once were . . . The association between women and materiality has worked to silence women, branding them as interlopers in the world of language. (208-209) However, Ulysses takes this negative convention and subverts it, not only by its employment of écriture féminine, but in using physicality as a source of empowerment for Molly, a method more aligned with Cixous’ vision of écriture féminine. Although “many characters in the text notice only her physical and sexual attributes and potential,” Molly, a very beautiful and “feminine” woman, as denoted by her large breasts, beautiful singing voice,

and the pale skin her society favored, “manages to not limit her own selfperceptions; she sees herself as more than a sensual, pleasure-giving machine” (McKenna 184). Mahaffey suggests that, “the final irony of Ulysses is the realization that Molly, so frequently regarded as a ‘great lust-lump’ preoccupied with exclusively material concerns, uses the material world to live out a private poetry, trying to keep faith with her memory of a dream” (Reauthorizing Joyce 179): the dream of a life, a youth, a marriage, a lover she once had. In “Penelope,” Molly passes wind, starts her period, and remarks on her and others’ physical appearances. These explicit encounters with the body directly involve the aim of feminine writing that seeks to emphasize the body, but do not risk perpetuating patriarchy by an objectification of Molly’s body. Throughout “Penelope” Molly continually returns to memories of her inexperienced sexual encounters as a youth and present sexual affairs. These memories invoke the image of her body in sexual terms and step dangerously close to objectifying her. These ruminations can be thought of as a selfobjectification that degrades her to nothing more than a sexual object, but the important thing remains that Molly, herself, views her sexual encounters as a liberating and enhancing force. Joyce attempts for Molly to reclaim her body as her own, via her monologue, and is therefore in accordance with écriture féminine: “writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it” (Cixous 876). Joyce enables Molly to discuss her body as her own and although it is almost always in relation to men, her body remains under her control. She remembers when “I pulled him off into my handkerchief pretending not to be excited but I opened my legs I wouldn’t let him touch me inside my petticoat because I had a skirt opening up the side I tormented the life out of him…what was his name Jack Joe Harry Mulvey” ( Joyce 626). Here she seemingly objectifies the man, hardly remembering his name and toying with his mad sexual drive while denying him the pleasure of knowing how excited she was. This sexual focus on the body elicits the question Mahaffey asks: “Which is the more misogynistic stance, the one that celebrates the full experience of female flesh, or the one that censors even the mention of intimate articles of female clothing?” (Ulysses and the End of Gender 165). Joyce characterizes Molly not as a temptress or adulteress (although she is the latter), but as a woman in command of her body and sexuality, embracing both. Mahaffey argues that “Joyce sees woman as powerful…he does not brand female sexual power as evil” (Ulysses and the End of Gender 166). Living as a woman in a time when marriage was essentially required if one hoped to live comfortably and with no real job opportunities besides wife and mother, Molly capitalizes on aspects of her appearance to ensure a better life.

She actively sought and won an engagement from Bloom using her physical appearance and still uses her feminine attributes, specifically her bottom and breasts, to navigate him. She remarks, “I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes” ( Joyce 643). Joyce avoids simply objectifying or sexualizing Molly by creating a portrait of a rounded character, complete with complicated desires and flaws. While fantasizing about Stephen Dedalus and poets as a whole she remarks that, “they all write about some woman in their poetry well I suppose he wont find many like me” ( Joyce 637). She views herself as different, special and as a possible Muse and although this rests on her beauty the effects it produces drive Molly toward intellectual goals. The thought of seducing Stephen creates a positive urge to “read and study all I can find or learn a bit off by heart if I knew who he likes so he wont think me stupid if he thinks all women are the same and I can teach him the other part Ill make him feel all over him till he half faints under me then hell write about me lover and mistress” ( Joyce 638). Molly has been excluded from scholastic enterprises, but has learned her body and can use it and the love that it offers to teach Stephen of things he does not know. This symbiotic relationship exists because Molly knows how to use her body to her advantage, as an instrument for intellectual upward mobility and not simply as the object of sexual desire. According to McKenna, “sexuality becomes a method to escape transience, a pathway to a secular religious association with forces that can elevate the human experience” (189). Molly searches for love through sex and is disturbed by sex that lacks passion and love and hinges on base animal desires. Reminiscing on her sexual encounter with Boylan earlier that day he was “like a Stallion driving it up into you because thats all they want out of you with that determined vicious look in his eye I had to halfshut my eyes” ( Joyce 611). These debased sexual ideals, are why she hates to see men so animalistic during sex, taking away the pleasure and passion in it; “they want to do everything too quick take all the pleasure out of it” ( Joyce 615). As a woman Molly understands that her body offers more than sexual pleasure. Commenting on men’s lack of acknowledgment of the life creating and sustaining powers of her vagina and breasts she scoffs, “nice invention they made for women for him to get all the pleasure but if someone gave them a touch of it themselves theyd know what I went through with Milly nobody would believe cutting her teeth too” ( Joyce 611). McKenna voices the limitations of feminine writing in “Penelope” and what frustrates a positive feminist reading: “Molly is contradictory because

she represents a transition from oppressive and limiting discourse to a more liberated discourse, she articulates the principles of liberation but does not yet act on them” (185). Of course at the time of publication in 1922 women still did not have all the rights and opportunities that they do today. Besides, Joyce never intended to make Molly a perfect picture of woman to be emulated because he recognizes that all people, including women, are different and imperfect. Despite the power she possesses internally and psychologically, Molly is unable to utilize it and change the patriarchy in which she lives and in some ways supports it. Furthermore, Molly derives her power from her body, something that McKenna sees as problematic and representative of all women at the time; her physical form remains her primary method of interaction between herself and men, her primary method of creative endeavor . . . Molly’s experience with imaginative expression is limited . . . in many ways, Molly expresses the fate of women in turn-of-the-century Ireland; thwarted by convention and unable to communicate their own creative drives, they yield their impulses to another. (194) In “Penelope” Molly finally establishes her self in her own words. She speaks about what she knows: her body and how others are effected by and view her body, her memories as she experienced them, her desires, etc. The emphasis on Molly’s body represents one aim of feminine writing: to reclaim the body for the woman and to express the desires and thoughts that have been silenced by patriarchy. Because Joyce refuses to idealize or objectify Molly and treats her body and sexuality as a positive effort towards life-affirming goals, the text distances itself from perpetuating patriarchal tactics to oppress women. Joyce makes great strides towards interrogating and examining the effects of patriarchy on women, but the fact that Joyce, as a man, writes in a feminine style poses a problem of authenticity. Indeed, Cixous wrote her essay as a call-to-arms for women to liberate themselves by writing about themselves and not letting men do it anymore, but even Cixous later cites Joyce and “Penelope” as an example of écriture feminine. But for Joyce to express the struggles of women living under patriarchy in a masculine style would possibly undermine the authority and truthfulness of the ideas examined. The use of a feminine mode of writing returns language from a repressive masculine style to an unstructured, honest method of depicting thoughts and ideas. Molly makes no pretensions for what she discusses and no patriarchal, phallus-driven editor (except for possibly Joyce) shapes her thoughts. But simply writing in a feminine style is not enough for, “Joyce recognized that preserving or even reversing the hierarchy of traditionally ‘male’ and ‘female’ arts validates the

artificial distinction between the two. It effectively limits both women and men, so that the wholeness, the interconnectedness and autonomy that is the goal of…writing, becomes a mirage” (Reauthorizing Joyce 212-213). One thing is certain: Joyce gives a voice, and not only that, but the final voice of the novel to Molly, a woman, but like most things in Joyce’s writing the meaning and purpose of this is plural and never singular.

Works Cited Attridge, Derek. “Molly’s Flow: The Writing of “Penelope” and the Question of Women’s Language.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies Fall 35.3 (1989): 543-65. Project Muse. Web. Nov. 2011. Cixous, Helene. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs Summer 1.4 (1976): 875-93. JSTOR. Web. Nov. 2011. Joyce, James. Ulysses. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler, Wolfhard Steppe, and Claus Melchior. New York: Vintage, 1986. Print. Kenner, Hugh. “Beyond Objectivity.” Joyce’s Voices. Berkeley: U of California P, 1978. 64-99. Print. Mahaffey, Vicki. Reauthorizing Joyce. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. Print. ---. “Ulysses and the End of Gender.” A Companion to James Joyce’s Ulysses: Biographical and Historical Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Five Contemporary Critical Perspectives. Ed. Margot Norris. Boston: Bedford Books, 1998. 151-68. Print. McKenna, Bernard. James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Reference Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002. Print.

New Paint by Vicki Entreken

t was a Friday morning when my ex-husband drove away with my little girl for their summer visit. I sighed. I had two weeks to myself and I knew I would miss Jamie, so I planned to paint the living room, do some reading, grow up. I flicked on the stereo and my new Matchbox 20 CD played first. I looked at the four living room walls with drab beige paint that my ex got a few years ago from a contractor. Cheap paint. I hated the color. I hated how flat it was and how every dirt-smudge looked like the remnants of a cockroach crunched to death with the bottom of a shoe. I hated the way he slapped the paint on in a hurry, leaving curvy lines and marks on the white ceiling where it meets the wall. He always did stuff half-ass so he could say he was done and go out drinking with his friends. “But that was the past,” I said aloud as I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Then I grabbed my paint brush and dabbed it in the paint; a nice calming shade of green that I picked out all by myself. In big letters on the largest wall, I wrote the word “LONELY.” Then I stood back and with my head tilted slightly to the left, I gazed at it. Yep, that’s me. I closed my eyes again and listened to Rob Thomas’ voice:

And it’s good, that I’m not, angry

I just need to get over,

I’m not angry, anymore.

The phone rang but I didn’t answer it. Instead, I turned up the volume on

my stereo, pulled my hair back into a ponytail, and started painting. *** It’s easy when you’re with the same person for sixteen years to fall into a routine. Get up, go to work, come home, fix dinner, watch TV, and go to bed. Wake up, do it all again. Next thing you know, you’re eating sushi because he liked it. You’re listening to Garth Brooks because he programmed the buttons on your car radio. And the dreams you had are boxed up and stored in the dusty back corner of your mind with all the other passions you used to know. It’s easy to forget who you are. That’s what my therapist said and she was so right that it hurt. But it took a rebound for me to find out how much it hurt and how much I’d forgotten. I met him at a dance club. We talked until closing. Then in the parking lot, for two more hours, we chatted in his truck. We had country music in common. We both were married for sixteen years. We each had a kid. Both of our spouses cheated. There were other things in common too, so we dated. He made me laugh. He touched me like no one ever did before, arousing parts of me that had been dormant for years. The lovemaking didn’t feel routine, it felt like love, and I fell hard. So when I found myself naked and crying uncontrollably on this guy’s cold bathroom floor, I knew something had to change. We’d been dating for five months, three weeks and four days. We lived almost an hour apart, so we didn’t get to see each other during the work week. I spent each day looking forward to his nightly call. By the time my house phone would ring, I’d be showered, the kitchen cleaned, my kid in bed, and all the lights out with soft music playing. His phone calls were all I knew during the weeknights. The morning of our date, I bought a new dress because nothing in my closet was sexy enough. Besides, he’d already seen it all. I hadn’t talked to him since the night before, so I sent him a quick text message. ‘Looking forward 2 tonite. C U soon.’ Actually, I looked forward to it all week. Since he was picking me up at my house, I started cleaning. I scrubbed the bathroom and glanced at my cell phone. No blinking lights, no messages. I washed the bed sheets and checked the phone again. No message. Something must be wrong with the message light, I thought. So I called it with my house phone and left a message. Nope. The message light worked just fine. Then I scrubbed the floors and sprayed the sofa with Febreze. Still no blinking lights, no text messages.

Stupid dumb phone. Later, as I was pacing the living room, waiting for him to arrive, a text message came in. ‘Had to work late, sorry. need a shower. will b another hour.’ I looked at the clock. That’s an hour less that I’d get to spend with him. My chest tightened. But I was clever enough. I offered to drive over to his place. He said okay, and I smiled because I’d see him in 30 minutes now, not waiting an hour. After dinner, we went back to his apartment and watched TV until he finally touched me. That was all it took. We hit the bedroom like a tornado and didn’t leave for hours, then fell asleep in each other’s arms. Every moment with him was like an escape, like a long-awaited vacation. Suddenly he turned and sat up on the edge of the bed and I realized he hadn’t invited me to stay over. My chest tightened again. I looked at the clock. It was after eleven. He wasn’t going to, I thought. Soon I’d have to leave and I dreaded walking out that door, away from him. I just wanted to hold him during the night and wake up next to him in the morning. That’s all. “It’s getting late,” he said. “You have a long drive.” The smooth skin on his back glowed in the moonlight. I moved to touch it but couldn’t reach. So instead, I rolled on my side and squeezed my breasts together the way he liked. He turned and grinned. Then I farted. I was terrified. He never heard me fart before and it was loud. There was no covering this up with a cough or a sneeze either. No, it happened and he was looking right at me. I don’t know why I was so terrified. I farted many times in front of my ex and we’d giggle and then he’d fart back. But this guy was different. For some reason, everything had to be perfect with him. Farting was not perfect. I covered my face with the sheet and he laughed. Then he tossed my dress over to me and I frowned. “I could stay, you know,” I said as he put on a pair of shorts and a shirt. “The kid is at her dad’s until tomorrow night.” He didn’t look at me, but I knew he heard me. “I really have to get some sleep,” he said. “Besides, you don’t have your -” “My bag is in the trunk,” I said. He frowned. “Well, isn’t that something. But I really need to get some sleep. I have a busy day tomorrow.” He was so polite. I hated how polite he was. I hated how he could send me on my way and not feel let down like I did every time we parted. Going out that door hurt so bad, but I didn’t know why. I stood up, naked in front of his clothed body, and looked up into his eyes.

“I love you,” I said. He looked down at the floor, biting his lip. I waited as

the knot in my chest tightened. The A/C kicked on behind me and a strand of hair plopped down awkwardly in front of my face. He moved it with his finger. It wasn’t supposed to go like this. I knew I made a mistake. “I like you. You know that,” he said. I placed my hand on his shoulder, but I couldn’t say anything, so I ran into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. Where the hell did that come from? This wasn’t me. “Stupid. You’re so stupid!” Crying, I rubbed my eyes which of course smeared mascara all over my face. I looked like a pitiful wet raccoon. “STUPID!” I fell back against the wall and slid all the way to the floor and continued to sob uncontrollably. I didn’t care that the floor tiles were cold on my bare ass. I didn’t care that he cracked open the door, dropped my dress onto the bathroom floor and closed it again quietly. I just wanted to know why it hurt so bad. He didn’t do anything wrong, so why did it hurt? Why, at the end of every date with him, did it feel like my insides were being ripped out? When I got back to the house, I should have been glad that it was spotless. The floors smelled of purple Fabuloso, fresh and clean. But it was too quiet so I turned on the stereo. The rooms were too dark so I turned on all the lights. Then I saw the bed, the king-sized bed that I bought with my ex-husband. I tried to make it mine by getting a new comforter set. But it was still a big bed and it was still just as empty. So I grabbed a throw and a glass of wine and stretched out in my recliner in the dark. By this time, it was two in the morning. Too late to call anyone just to talk, so I watched the green lights from the stereo through half-closed eyes. They flickered, then blurred, then flickered again at my command. James Taylor’s guitar was soothing as he repeated the same line several times.

Don’t let me be lonely tonight

I don’t want to be lonely tonight.

No, no, I don’t want to be lonely tonight.

I cried myself to sleep that night. *** “So, lying naked on his cold floor, you think you hit rock bottom?” my

therapist said. “I guess. I couldn’t stop crying, even when I wanted to. It just didn’t feel like me.” “So, who are you?” she said. I thought about it, but I couldn’t answer. So I took her question with me. Homework for the heart, she called it. On the way home, I changed the radio station and discovered Matchbox 20, Maroon 5, and Nickelback. I immediately reprogrammed my radio buttons and stopped at Best Buy. Between the three bands, I bought five CDs because that’s how many my stereo would hold. Then I requested two weeks off work. Approved. *** The first coat of paint was finished on all four walls of my living room. The word “LONELY” bled through the single coat. I stared at it and shuddered. Then I showered and went out to dinner. Applebee’s was busy when I walked in. A couple in their mid-thirties entered in front of me, his arm around her back. He whispered something in her ear and she smiled and pecked him on the cheek. I frowned out of habit because my ex hated public displays of affection. I continued to watch them even though my gut wrenched. I missed having someone at my side. The hostess asked if I wanted to sit at the bar. I declined because for the first time, I needed to ask for a table for one. It felt weird, but once I was seated, I noticed I wasn’t the only person eating alone. Another woman, about forty-five, sat a couple tables away reading a book and glancing occasionally up at the Rays game on the TV. Funny, she didn’t seem lonely. She was just alone. A father and his young daughter, about four years old were seated in a booth across from me. As she climbed into her seat, blonde curls bounced on her shoulders. Her purple sun dress poofed up around her waist and she giggled and smoothed it back down. Immediately I missed my little Jamie even though we spoke that morning. I couldn’t remember the last time she giggled like that. She took the divorce hard and missed her daddy with tears every night for weeks. I blamed myself for her pain, though we knew no one person was to blame for the divorce. I did all I could to make her feel better. But I couldn’t remember the last mother/daughter thing we did together. Was it the zoo? That was months ago. Just where had I been all this time? The woman ordered a rum and coke and noticed me watching her. She nodded as if she understood why I was alone. As if she’d been there.

Deep down, I knew where I’d been. Distracted and lost in the loneliness. So far gone in satisfying that hunger, that I didn’t see her, didn’t feel her. I glanced over at the little girl again and she was now sitting on her legs and coloring as she talked to her daddy and sipped from her kiddie drink. I’m going to take Jamie to the zoo when she gets back, I thought. It didn’t feel like progress, just planning it; it didn’t make me feel better. But she wouldn’t be back for another week. That was all I could do for now; plan something. The painting was done and my old pictures hung back in their places; landscapes and roses. The new color gave the room a nice feel, I thought. But something still seemed to be missing. Mom came by to admire my new living room before we went to brunch and the zoo. “This looks really nice,” she said shortly. That was how she fibbed her compliments. I looked at her puzzled and let it go, intent on enjoying the afternoon with my mother and daughter. A couple weeks later, as Jamie and her daddy drove away for their weekend, the UPS truck pulled up. It was a package from Mom – a framed photograph of Jamie and myself from our zoo trip. It was beautifully trimmed with ornate wood, like a prize, and the matting contrasted with the new color in my living room. I hung it immediately and called Mom to thank her. I didn’t used to do that, call her immediately. But this time was different. This time we understood each other. After the call, I turned on James Taylor and sat in my chair to stare into the photo, into that very moment. Jamie was pointing at the tiger, her profile so animated. I was not just smiling in the photo. I was watching her, listening to her, and smiling through her as if nothing else was on earth at that moment. I don’t know how my mother captured that moment, but I do know it was the very center of focus I needed. Applebee’s was busy that night. The hostess knew I wanted a table and as I sat, I saw the same woman reading a different book. Occasionally, she glanced up at the Rays game on the TV. The server brought her a mixed drink from the bar and she was eating apple pie. She noticed me and held up her drink to gesture a toast, as if we belonged to a secret society of single diners. I smiled because she understood. Then I ordered a glass of wine and chocolate cake -for dinner.

Distractions by Robert Annis

he backs of her legs exist in space with the same shape as a book opened to its center page: perfect symmetry with a natural curve. She walks like half of our story is already behind her. She’s kneeling to tickle the lace of her boot. Her fingers work slowly; she knows I’ve been watching for a while and she doesn’t care. I’d like to write her down inside a love letter filled with simple phrases: tiny images, like stamps, that stick to the paper and carry my words away.

I want to make love to her with cursive strokes and give her a life full of words I canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t define. How many girls have I walked behind, through the freezer aisle, past the bread, past the sweating milk bottles and fruit that will rot before its picked, kissed and swallowed? Every romance revives me, relieves the scratch of boredom for a second or an hourâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve had a thousand wives leave me in the dirty light of a Wal-mart.

Lines

by Thu Can

ou have a fierce fire inside. You, rising five feet, four inches at one hundred and twenty pounds, have powerful veins carved against your dark, sun-dried skin. Your plum-colored mouth carries a deceptive smirk. Your stoic face wears the wrinkles of your past, your lines of pride. There is a deep crease that lies in the space between your burly eyebrows. Who are you? What do I owe you? ii.

My father is a nostalgic man. Born and raised after the Vietnam War, his speech and mannerisms are marked by the poverty and destruction left in its path. The songs my father sings and the proverbs he speaks are tainted with images of soldiers’ wounds, starving children and the longing for Vietnam’s forgotten beauty. Over dinner my father converts the cost of our meal from American dollars to Vietnamese đồng, remembering out loud the white rice and fish sauce dinners of his youth. For someone who never finished high school, he tells elaborate stories about teachers who admire his cleverness, girls smitten with his wit and boys who fear his unpredictable aggression. After each grading period, my father reminds me of the unstable electricity poles he scaled in rural Vietnam at seventeen to support his family. During my parents’ daily walks, my mother meanders through the neighborhood while my father strides three feet in front of her. His arms swing fervently at his sides. His forceful steps create a monotonous rhythm with the bottom of his sandals. He does everything with urgency, as if time is always vanishing.

“Life is not easy,” my father often warns. iii.

I believe my father to be fearful of many things. He will never compromise the head seat at the dinner table and is weakened by a whisper of his daughters’ hesitation with higher education. Growing up, I was convinced that earning anything less than a “B” was as morally failing as stealing from the poor. I remember the agony I felt when I was eight, anticipating my father’s disappointment when I brought home the “C” I received: The leather seat was melting. Sunlight poured through a dull school bus window. My sister, Ngoc, tapped her dirty sneakers against the leather seat in front of us. Why are we moving so fast? I wiped the moisture off the back of my thigh. My chest tingled. My breath became short. There is no air in this place. The bus made a right turn into my neighborhood. I saw my dad’s green Honda in the driveway. My legs were shaking. I heard a screeching halt. I rose from the seat and walked the aisle. They’re talking about me. They know. How do they know? I could see my father’s shadow moving in the house. Thin clouds began to cast dark shadows over the oak tree in our front yard. I walked gingerly over the weeds and dandelions that cracked our walkway. A strand of hair pricked my eye as my fearless sister rushed passed. I heard the wind howl. Leaves fell from the oak tree. They twirled for a moment then flung themselves against my arms. Even they are attacking me. I had reached the familiar step to our front door. I took a deep breath. My father turned off the TV when I entered. “Ngoc says you have something to show me,” he said. My face became inflamed. The crooks of my eyes began to twitch. I swallowed the air trying to escape my lungs. I felt words of explanation stick to the inside of my throat. “My teacher graded my test,” I said. “What test?” “Geography.” “Let me see it.” I fumbled to turn my clumsy body around; my arm trapped itself in the straps of my backpack. I placed the vinyl bag on the dingy carpet of our apartment. I saw the folder that held my test. The paper slipped out of my fingers as I tried to grab for it. The air inside our living room was dry and tense.

Dust particles, visible in the afternoon sun, were colliding with the static from our floor. I finally gripped the paper. I handed him the test, my thumb placed to the right of the “C”. He wrinkled his eyebrows; the line in the middle of his forehead deepened. “Why did you get this?” he asked. “I don’t know. I did the homework.” “I don’t see you study. I see you run around with your sisters and spend five minutes on homework.” My head was toward the ground, my feet shuffling against one another. “Do you know how hard I work here?” he said. “Do you know I left my country so that you and your sisters can get an education?” My younger years have been dedicated to avoiding such confrontations. While my friends were attending sleepovers, I was at home having my assignments cross-examined by my mother. When my friends competed in weekly soccer games, I’d cry with frustration over my algebra homework. I remember discussing American policies while my classmates attended their senior prom. I was a slave to my education. Because the most important reason for my father’s immigration was my education, I believe he waits to see his sacrifice prove worthy. I believe he recalls the stories of his past so that I can avoid the hardships he endured. I understand his concerns, but to be reminded each time I fail of his motives for moving is like having to repay an accumulating debt. Though I commend my father for his selflessness, I do not want to spend my life waiting for his approval. iv.

A Vietnamese riddle my father once told me:

A man sits alone, studying imprints on the sand. He notices scratches of seabirds, lines of fishing wire and trails of beach wanderers. He comes across an impression of a left foot next to a deep, half-moon groove. To what do these impressions belong? v.

At twenty-eight my father married my mother and after three years of

marriage he applied for permission to immigrate to the U.S. The request was granted, but my parents had to learn English in the Philippines before they were able to enter American soil. My father’s recollection of his arrival to the refugee camp explains his overcautious nature, which has caused me to arrive an hour early to every doctor’s appointment and resulted in my trudging of heavy backpacks filled with water bottles and sunscreen as I roamed through theme parks as a kid. Dismissing advice from families abroad who had brought suitcases of instant noodles and dried fish, my father realized that the money he had from selling his possessions in Vietnam would be of little use in a place that did not have a market. My father left his country with a cardboard box of clothes and a duffle bag carrying a twenty pound, wooden-framed statue of the Buddha on his back. vi.

I was too young to understand the intensity with which my father held onto his sacrifice. I believed his obsession with education to stem from the traditional ideas of his culture, but as I grew older his lectures about my performance lengthened. His speeches no longer of rhetorical questions about his intentions for immigrating, but of detailed stories of the Vietnam school system. My father entered school after the Vietnam War, while the curriculum was changing. Local teachers in the South were replaced by government workers, who implicated communist ideas and hailed Ho Chi Minh as the savior of their ravished country. For a short period, education remained free but families would soon need to pay for their children’s schooling, beginning with elementary education. My father did not have the option of attending college, it was a privilege reserved for the children of the Vietcong veterans. With a hatred for the communists, my father left school in his ninth year. My father’s stories often follow my own complaints of schoolwork and classmates. He tells me that education is the passage of freedom. In the States, the ability we have to question what we’re taught, to choose what books we read, to pursue the subjects we enjoy is an opportunity my father never knew.

vii.

“You know your father’s habits.”

viii. I have one clear memory of the Philippines. I was running up a hill of tall grass in the evening, just outside our cement home. As I raced upward, I heard Ngoc calling after me. I gazed at the dry blades of grass beneath my dress as they made their delicate etchings across my legs. After I reached the top, I watched the braided ribbon in my hair as it flapped in the wind. I remember my chest heaving up and down as I smiled at my sister. My father’s memory of the camp is not as tender as my own. He speaks of the Philippines as a sort of purgatory country between the hopeless Vietnam he left behind and the promising America he was yet able to experience. The camp’s basic regulations have been described to me: -The camp had ten districts -Each district had a governor -Each district had ten buildings -The buildings were divided into five living quarters -Each quarter was shared by two families -Refugees were not allowed to wander outside their district -Competent emigrants had to attend a daily “How to Live in America” class -Electricity ran from 6:00 A.M. to 9:00 P.M. -Water was turned on twice a day, but needed to be fetched and carried back in buckets -One bathroom was shared by three families -Families were to obtain a ration of rice, sugar and oil each month -Each morning, a member of the emigrant families had to report to a provision center to obtain:

A small bundle of wilted vegetables

Monday:

a small portion of beef

Tuesday:

2 cans of fish

Wednesday:

1 fresh fish

Thursday:

Lady Fishes

Friday:

a bundle of dried fish

The seven months my family spent in that camp seems like a moment in a past life. Though the conditions are oppressive to me, my father speaks of it as a mere lapse in his journey to freedom. He does not talk about the Philippines with as much pain as when he tries to remember Vietnam. I suppose we have a tendency to lament over the joys and losses of our past, ponder over our fearful and uncertain future while the present remains overlooked. ix.

There is a linear scar in the middle of my left knee. Faded into a dull white, only an inch in length and a sliver of a pen’s mark in width, it will never be the same color as the rest of my leg. Carved by the collision of my knee against a metal bar dividing the carpet and tile floor of a dining room, I have carried it for fourteen years. It is partitioned into many uneven segments, complements to the wrinkles of my knee. There is no promise of leg hair on this faint scar. And unless examined for a minute or two, it is unnoticeably elevated. The prominence of the scar went unnoticed upon my first inspection of the mark. Only angst was felt when I saw its resemblance to the six inch long, surgical scar on my father’s right leg. I feared that my new wound would be as deep and severe as my father’s. x.

“Children without a father are like homes without roofs.”

xi.

The stuffy bus transporting restless Vietnamese families comes to a slow halt as you stare at the tree-covered island of Palawan. The driver climbs out of the bus to talk with a man dressed in a government uniform. You note the gray clouds that move slowly across the sky, the motionless palm trees around the island. You see a number of concrete buildings in the distance and grasp your wife’s arm. “Look over there,” you say to her. The child in your lap begins to squirm. “We will be living there,” you continue. “It looks lonely,” your wife says.

You place your head against the sticky back of your seat; the seven hour ride from Manila to the camp has made you weary. The bus driver comes back and motions everyone off. As the families descend, you notice a Vietnamese man that you had not seen before. He begins to read off of a stack of papers, they are aged and wrinkled. You listen closely while the little girl in your arm creates a head-shaped stain of sweat on your shoulder. You look at your wife. She is carrying your other daughter in her right arm and rubbing her bulging stomach with the other. She is tired and quiet. You notice fine wrinkles on her soft, pale cheek. Three months has passed since you’ve arrived at the camp. You are walking on dry ground to the quarter your family has been assigned to. The room you walk into is dark and hot. Your wife is feeding your newborn child on a straw mat above a wooden platform. Your eldest daughter begs to feed the baby. She holds onto a dull bottle of baby formula that you had traded a ration of fish for. Your wife combs through her mangled hair with thinning arms. The infant begins to cry dry shrills as your daughter pokes at its fragile ribs. Your wife sighs and shoos the little girl out of the room. You watch your wife as she tries to calm the baby. “Have you cooked the rice?” you ask. “No, can you go get some water from the tanks?” your wife says. You walk to the back of the apartment and pick up two cracking buckets. You can see your daughters playing around the water tanks. You watch them for a moment. Today is a quiet day. The sky is barren and the living quarters are silent. You recall the three families that have left for America and wonder how long you will have to stay here. xii.

A Vietnamese proverb: The shirt never lies above the head.

xiii. My father grew up in Đà Lạt, Vietnam. It is a six hour drive from Saigon, 100 miles north of the former southern capital. Upon entering the perimeter of the Đà Lạt, there is a rotting wooden sign that reads: “Welcome to the City of Flowers.” The winding roads reaching the city cling onto pine-covered mountains and streams of water, gliding against aged rocks. As the roads

approach the center of the city, stacks of green and brown rice terraces clot together to make a motley quilt of grain. Greenhouses, painted with moss begin to scale the tips of Đà Lạt’s curving mountains. The sides of city’s dirt roads become littered with pastel-colored homes. Within the city, Đà Lạt’s many trees and vines hide between low clouds, forming an ever lingering fog over the land. A veil of moist air covers the rich hues of hydrangeas and periwinkles. The landscape surrounding Đà Lạt is serene, only the sound of an occasional canary disrupts its still air. Of the handful of times my family has travelled back to Vietnam, my father has always taken me for rides around the city. On a small vespa, we would drive through populated allies of tall homes, doubling as small shops and breakfast cafés. We’d pass lines of glittering scooters parked on the streets of Đà Lạt, stores of knock-off Nikes that advertised Vietnamese women running on nonexistent tracks and weeded through fancy, villa hotels that appeared on every block. One early morning, as the sun just stroked the bottom of the pine trees of our countryside home, my father woke me for a ride. He climbed onto an old scooter and slammed his left foot against a dirtied pedal. I grabbed his waist for leverage as the engine growled, the seat trembling beneath me. We maneuvered through the dirt road outside our Vietnam home. The vespa leaned as my father avoided the bigger rocks on the road. I held on to the handle in the back of the scooter with my right hand and clutched on to an oversized helmet with my left. The helmet flopped from side to side as my father sped faster. We soon left the quiet outskirts of Đà Lạt and entered the city. As my father drove through the streets, I caught glimpses of sounds from the locals. Drivers in small trucks honked short beeps at tiny scooters carrying students and families. Women yelled fading commands at their children and adolescent boys called out inaudible orders to street vendors. The scooter swayed dangerously between automobiles and semi trucks but moved delicately through congested alleys. Most times we were only inches away from other drivers. The wind from the vespa numbed my face and muffled any noise I tried to utter. “I’m taking you to Hồ Tuyền Lâm,” my father shouted. “What is it?” I asked. We had driven out of the city’s marketplace and into a more open road. “It’s in center of the city. I used to walk around it with your mother. There were a lot less people here. We would walk around the lake and never hear a

single motor.” I saw a motionless lake in the distance; the water was a deep blue-green. There were few trees but a small border of lawn wrapped itself around the lake. Bikes and vespas rested on the edge of the water. Men selling animal balloons and kites stood against wooden carts, toyed with passing locals. There was a restaurant, flashing a neon sign and a small group of pedal swan boats parked in front of a rundown shack. “We used to buy flan from a woman who knew your grandmother,” he continued. “She sat on a rock, calling out ‘Flan! Flan! Flan!’ but right now I’m going to take you to the spot where your mother and I always sat, underneath a blossom tree.” We rode slowly as my father searched for his tree. I tried to count the piles of plastic bottles and cigarette butts as we drove, but they became blurs of neutral color. I felt the vespa slow into a stop. A decaying tree stood next to a dismantled trashcan. Three men were fighting over their fishing net while plastic poles and buoys floated in the water. The wind from passing scooters gushed through my hair. “Is this it?” I said. “Yes,” he said. “It is not as it once was.”

“Burial on the Presidio Banks” by Mark Farag

he’s a philosopher— throwing dirt on a casket is like finding meaning in cracks of swamp oak leaves: the beauty crumbles before it is understood. Her father has been dead for three days. She has desperately sewn the tears of a German handkerchief—the unfurling thread knew him better than she. This morning, the earth is not doleful. The wind is not earnest. The few clouds that remain are apocalyptically beautiful. Tonight, his topsoil will harden, she will bring a match against a wick, and let the Florida air burn.

She will let the wax drip onto her fingertip for a moment—its scar as loving as any ash inherited—as smooth as fresh obsidian buried—as impermanent as the will to ask

the next question.

She’s a philosopher— forgetting is like breathing—the wind does not know how to stop.

Recovery in 9 Steps by Jason lee Saffels

Step 1 – Admitting.

y father became an alcoholic at the age of 43. The previous twenty years he spent as a drunken asshole. He got sober after I set fire to his 1965 Chevy Stepside truck. That rusted out piece of shit that sat, all four tires rotted and deflated, in the faded paint-chipped garage behind our house. He would spend every evening back there with the radio on to some God awful oldies stations, drinking glass after glass of whiskey. So, one night after he passed out on the couch I stole his lighter, soaked a sock in gasoline, lit it on fire, and dropped into the cab of the truck. The sirens of the fire rescue woke him up. It didn’t take long for the fire investigators to determine that it was arson. I had no reservations about confessing to the crime either. Actually, I was rather proud. I was proud, too, that my confession led to the insurance denying his claim. I spent the next three months in juvenile detention. He spent the next three months going to AA meetings and getting sober. While I was locked up those three months I could only think about one thing -- my mom. I daydreamed about how things would have been different if she hadn’t died when I was two years old. I imagined her leaving my father, taking me with her, and remarrying a great guy. Maybe he would be an athlete or lawyer or doctor. We would be rich, and I would have a bright future. I would go to college and come home at Thanksgiving, and they would be waiting for me at the door. I would drop my bags and run to them, and we would embrace lovingly as a family. I would call him “Dad,” and he would tell me that he was proud that I was following in his footsteps. When I was released, my father picked me up and didn’t say a word the

entire hour long trip back to the house. Nothing. I didn’t have anything to add to the silence; the only sound was the flick of his lighter as he lit his cigarettes. As we pulled into the driveway he broke the stalemate. “Son, I want you to help me do something.” “Burn the rest of the house?” “Nah, I want you to help me throw away all the alcohol bottles in the house.” That’s how he broke the news to me. I didn’t want to help. I wasn’t interested in him or his struggle with sobriety. He could drink himself to death, I didn’t care. I helped him because it was a good opportunity for destruction. I must have thrown and broke twenty bottles that day. He asked me to stop after I broke the first one, but I told him to “fuck off,” and he did. Step 2 – The Power Greater Than Ourselves. There is a parrot in the house. My father won him in a bet when I was five. All this bird does is yell at me. For some reason the bird, Big Eddie, picked up all the awful shit my father said to me over the last twelve years. I go into the kitchen to make a sandwich and what do I hear? “Awwk…You’re a piece of shit, Tommy.” I go to living room to watch television. What do I hear? “Awwk…you fucked up, Tommy.” I cannot escape Big Eddie. My father has started going to church, he is there every Wednesday night and twice on Sunday. Every time he comes home he tries to tell me about God. Today is no different. “Tommy, the pastor had a great message tonight.” “Jerry, I don’t care.” “I wish you’d go with me. There are a lot of kids there your age.” “Jerry, I don’t care.” “Awwk…goddamn it, Tommy.”

Step 3 – The God We Understand. When Jerry is not at church, he spends his evening at AA meetings. Apparently, they reinforce his idea that God will help rid him of his problem. He comes in and starts more of his bullshit with me. “Tommy, God can help us heal this relationship.” “Jerry, what relationship would that be?” “Our relationship.” “Jerry, what relationship would that be?” “The one I want to have with you.” “Seventeen years and now you want a relationship?” I can see tears pooling in his eyes. “I’m trying to make things better,” he tells me. “I think we both know it’s too late for that bullshit. Besides, what the hell does God care about our relationship?” “He cares about his children, Tommy.” “So, he’s my real dad? I was hoping mom was smart enough to cheat on you, but I think she could have done better.” Tears begin to roll down his cheek. He surrenders and retires to his bedroom. Step 4 – The Inventory. I don’t have any friends. Not at school, not in the neighborhood, not on the Internet. I spend my time reading books locked in my room. I like to read books on traveling. I like to imagine myself as a Depression Era hobo riding the trains, looking for odd jobs in flat dry Midwestern towns. I am dependent on no one, especially not Jerry. No one would know my real name. They wouldn’t know where I came from or where I am going. The only thing they would know is that I was there but for a brief second, just long enough to make enough money to eat. Then in the whistle of the train I would disappear to the next city and to the next odd job. I keep a duffle bag of clothes, a toothbrush, three tubes of toothpaste, two pairs of sneakers, a large knife for protection, a map of the United States,

and $100 just in case I ever work up the balls to leave. I added two bottles of whiskey to the bag when I helped Jerry throw out all the alcohol. I took them when he went on a bathroom break. I don’t know why. I have never had a drink. I take the bottles out the bag. I hold in my hands and stand in front of my mirror. I stare at myself. I examine the muscles in my chest and arms. I can see the sit-ups and push-ups beginning to pay off. I notice the acne that has plagued me since thirteen is clearing. My hair is thick and black. I no longer look like the weak kid that will take shit from the other kids, but I know that no matter how good I look, I will always be a loner. I wonder what inside this bottle holds so much power over men. Weak men, strong men, powerful men, men down and out, good luck men, no luck men, they have all run to the bottle. Is it that good? I unscrew the top and take a whiff. It doesn’t smell that good. I put the lid back on and tuck it back into the duffle bag under the clothes. Step 5 – The Nature of Wrong. It is a Tuesday night, and Jerry comes in from his AA meeting. I can imagine him there sitting in the back, drinking black coffee, his bald head reflecting the florescent lights, his gut hanging over his belt, his paint stained pants he didn’t bother to change after work, and smoking cigarette after cigarette talking to anyone who will listen. I can see him telling others about his home life, how his son is a piece of shit, how I set fire to his pride and joy, and now he’ll never get a chance to fix it up. They nod their heads in sympathy. “Oh, you poor man,” they say. “Really got a piece of trash for a son. No wonder you drunk your life away. I’m surprised you haven’t pulled a murder-suicide yet.” “Tommy, can we talk in the kitchen?” he asks. “I’m not really interested. Seinfeld is on.” He walks over and turns off the television. I give him a cross look, sigh, and walk into the kitchen. “I don’t know where to start,” he says. I say nothing. “You see, kids don’t come with instruction books. Hell, your mother died. That was hard on me. I didn’t have any help around the house.”

“Losing my mom was a pleasure for me,” I say. “I would appreciate it if you would just shut up and listen. I don’t need the lip tonight.” I sigh and nod. “I messed up real bad, got all caught up in the bottle. I didn’t pay you no mind and let the devil rule over my life.” “Was it the devil that forced that whiskey down your throat? Was it the devil who lost me in a bet to Uncle Al?” “I didn’t have God to guide me in my life back then. I’m trying to tell you the nature of my wrongs, Tommy.” “I’m not interested, Jerry.” I walk away and go back to my room. I think about the time Jerry and the devil lost me on that bet. Jerry and the devil all out of money in a poker game with Jerry’s bother, Al. The devil’s got a pair of kings; Jerry thought it was a sure thing. Al raised $100. The devil has to fold, but Jerry convinced Al and the devil otherwise. He wagered my services to my Al for the entire summer on that hand. When the cards turned, Al had three 7’s. The devil poured another shot for Jerry before he came home and told me. I spent that whole summer enslaved to Al. He bought a washboard and made me wash his and his whore of a girlfriend’s dirty underwear on it. He made a fourteen year old boy walk to the store to buy tampons and yeast infection medication. I had to plunge his toilets every time his fat ass clogged one. I spent a week tearing the shingles off of his roof. But the most embarrassing thing I had to do was help him apply his hemorrhoid cream to his swollen, festering asshole. Every day as I was leaving he would laugh and say, “Tell your dad he’s a shitty poker player.” Step 6 – The Defects of Character. Jerry comes home from morning service, and his hair is wet. We meet in the kitchen and as I open the refrigerator door Big Eddie opens this beak. “Awwk…You’re worthless, Tommy.” “Ignore that,” Jerry says. I’ve been trying to ignore it for seventeen years.

“I’ve got big news to share with you,” he says. I go on pulling sliced meat out of the refrigerator drawer. “I got baptized today, Tommy.” “You didn’t swallow any of the water did you?” “Did I swallow any water? I don’t understand.” “It is a known fact that people piss in public pools. I’m just concerned for your well-being is all.” “Awwk…Get the fuck out.” “Why do you have to be so disrespectful? I’m talking about God here, about my soul.” “I don’t care about you swimming in church, Jerry.” I finish making my sandwich, walk upstairs to my room and shut the door. Step 7 – Letting Go and Letting God. I’m watching television again when he comes in from his Wednesday night prayer group. “Tommy, I’m putting our relationship in God’s hands.” “You’re putting our relationship in the hands of a god that killed his only son? That’s fitting.” “Say what you will, Tommy, but God is going to work this out.” “Was he working it out when Jesus begged him bleeding on the cross?” “Jesus died for everyone’s sins.” “I didn’t ask him to do that for me.” “You didn’t need to ask.” “What kind of god watches and listens as his son cries out in pain? What kind of god puts his son in that kind of situation knowing full well what was going to happen? God couldn’t just say, ‘Hey, all is forgiven.’ Did he have to put his son through all that torture? I assume that’s your favorite part of the Bible, Jerry.” He turns his head, I hear him sobbing as he walks out the front door and lights a cigarette.

Step 8 – He’s Making a List. I wake up at three in the morning. I go downstairs to get a drink of water. The only light on in the entire house is the one over the dining room table. I get a glass of water and sit down at the table. I put down my glass and discover a note written in Jerry’s handwriting. It reads, “People I’ve harmed and have to make amends to: Tommy.” Step 9 – Injuring and Harming Others It is a Sunday. I’m home alone, and Jerry is at church again. I am in my room thinking about Jerry’s note on the dining room table, wondering if I should forgive him. I pick up my duffle bag and unzip it. I take out one of the bottles of whiskey. I stare at it. I contemplate what it is about this brown liquid that Jerry loves more than he loves me. I unscrew the cap, smell it, and put its mouth to mine. I take a drink. It burns as it goes down, and I choke a little. I hold it up in front of my desk lamp and watch the light dance through the bottle. I take another drink. It goes down easier this time. I pick up my cup from the bedside table and pour a good amount into my half-drank soda. I gulp it down as fast as I can. I go downstairs, fill the cup up with ice, and grab another soda. I go to my room and pour another drink and then another. I feel the head rush as the liquor slaps my brain. I can feel the floor becoming uneven under my feet and can sense the movement of earth as it spins around its preordained orbit. The temperature of the room seems to rise, and I begin to sweat. That is when I hear the swoosh of Big Eddie’s wings. I can feel the evil as he flies into my room. “Awwk…You’re a fuck up, Tommy,” he squawks. I feel all the pain of seventeen years of frustration, unspeakable horrors to my well-being, and fifteen years of a motherless childhood all at once. All at once, these things are embodied in that green bird. Without thinking I grab the whiskey bottle like a hammer and before he can say, “You fucked up, Tommy,” I come down on him like a nail. The first hit sends feathers jetting through the air. I hit Big Eddie again, and blood splatters across my face. I hit him again and again. Feathers, blood, and bits of beak go everywhere as I yell out, “I don’t forgive you,” with tears streaming down my face. The bottle shatters, and my hand is cut. I stop.

I am on my hands and knees, my eyes closed, hovering over what used to be Big Eddie. I hesitate to open my eyes and survey the damage. I feel nauseous and the whiskey feels like it is eating a hole through my stomach. I open my eyes, and as I raise my head toward my bedroom door, I hear a gasp of horror. I see the shoes of my father. I see the blood, bits of beak, and all that once was, soaking his Sundayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s best.

Board Games

a screenplay by Neil Pepi

EXT. HIGH SCHOOL COURTYARD Two boys, BOBBY and DEREK, walk through a grassy courtyard between classes. BOBBY is wearing a clean polo shirt while DEREK is wearing a dirty, white t-shirt. DEREK (irritated) It’s nonstop man, just nag nag nag nag nag nag nag. Even my dad does it. It’s driving me crazy. BOBBY That sucks, dude. My parents chilled out years ago. DEREK Do you remember when you’d have to do vocab homework? BOBBY Yeah. DEREK Like first grade, you’d have to write sentences like five times each before dinner. BOBBY Well, I just had to do it before TV, but I know what you mean.

DEREK That’s how I feel all the time. My mom won’t stop yelling about dishes. Then my dad starts yelling about the TV not working. Then my mom tells my dad to shut up about the TV and gets me to do the dishes. But then my dad yells at me to quit it with the dishes and fix the god damn TV. BOBBY And they do this every night? DEREK I dunno, it depends. My dad is usually out on weekends. DEREK’s voice trails off and he turns away. BOBBY (naive, seeming like a sheltered child) You know what I really hate? When they say stuff like “because I told you so” or “do what I say, not what I do.” DEREK (distracted) What? Oh, yeah. BOBBY So, football on Saturday? DEREK Um, I dunno yet. But yeah, probably. BOBBY What do you mean, probably? We do this every week. DEREK I’m not saying no, I’m just saying I don’t know yet. BOBBY Come on man, you can’t girl out on us now. You know I can’t tackle. God knows David and Ben can’t tackle.

DEREK Yeah, I know. BOBBY What could you possibly be doing? (sarcastic) Homework? DEREK (defensive) It’s just personal. Leave it the fuck alone. BOBBY What’s personal? You tell me your jerk off stories--what’s more personal than that? DEREK Ok, I just like helping my mom on Saturdays. It’s not a big fucking deal. BOBBY The same mom who won’t stop nagging? DEREK Yeah, the same mom. (speaking honestly) I dunno, it’s different on the weekends. My dad goes out drinking and my mom and I actually get along for once. (back to being angry and defensive) But it shouldn’t even matter, we always used to do Fridays. What the fuck happened to that? BOBBY (looking forwards, away from DEREK) Nah, my parents started doing this family game night thing. In jealousy, DEREK turns and stares at BOBBY. BOBBY (CONT’D) We just get pizza and play board games and shit.

(he laughs) But it sounds really lame when I say it out loud. DEREK So skip it. I mean, if it is that lame. BOBBY I dunno, it is kinda fun though. We actually play some good games like Connect Four and Monopoly, nothing dumb and kiddie like Candy Land or something. JULIET enters and sits on a bench by herself. BOBBY loses track of the conversation and stares at her instead. DEREK notices BOBBY staring and follows his line of vision to JULIET. DEREK Juliet. BOBBY Yeah, Juliet. DEREK She is pretty smokin’, not gonna lie. BOBBY She’s a prude though. I think the most she’s done is kissed a guy in 7th grade. DEREK What, like one kiss? That’s it? BOBBY Yeah, like a truth or dare type of thing on the bus. And I don’t even think she was the one being dared. DEREK I don’t even understand, you two have been close since forever, longer than we’ve even been friends. How have you not hit that yet?

BOBBY I dunno, man. DEREK Haven’t you been in her room before? BOBBY We have sleep overs like all the time. DEREK Jesus. You need to step up your game. BOBBY sighs and looks back at DEREK. BOBBY The thing is, I might not want to just hook up, you know? I think she might be something more special than that. Beat. DEREK Hey man, don’t look at me, I’m no more of a pussy genius than you are. BOBBY But you’ve at least seen one, you might as well be a pussy genius. DEREK (satisfied, laughs and grins) Yeah. BOBBY Have you ever met a girl you just wanted to hang out with? DEREK That’s not how it works, you’re supposed to hook up with her first, then you hang out with her. That’s how you know if the girl’s worth spending time on. BOBBY I guess so.

BOBBY looks back to JULIET. BOBBY (CONT’D) You think she’d like family game night? DEREK turns away. DEREK Yeah, I dunno, maybe. BOBBY I feel like girls get into that kind of shit, just hanging out with my parents and my sister playing board games. Like they find it cute or something. Plus, she’d feel like I’m not embarrassed of her if I bring her home to mom, right? As long as she doesn’t like Candy Land, I really hate that game. DEREK turns to BOBBY, seeming indignant, aggressive, and snide. DEREK You know what, I’m pretty sure she does. I’m pretty sure it’s like her favorite game. BOBBY turns to DEREK. BOBBY Says who? DEREK It was, uh, Shelby and Sara. I overhead them in study hall. BOBBY (gullible) Shelby and Sara? DEREK Yeah. Yeah, they’re in my study hall every week. They literally never shut up.

BOBBY (dismayed) Shit, man. DEREK I mean it’s not a bad game, it’s just kind of lame for high school kids. Silence for a moment as BOBBY seems disappointed. DEREK takes control of the conversation. DEREK (CONT’D) You know what else I overheard though? BOBBY What? DEREK I heard she has a fetish. BOBBY A fetish? Like what, like a foot fetish? DEREK No, even better. She likes guys who are aggressive. BOBBY Well, no shit, dude. That’s like normal sex. DEREK No, I mean really aggressive. The way Shelby and Sara said it, she has a rape fetish. BOBBY A...a what? How does that work? DEREK Hell if I know, dude. But think about it. She’s never hooked up with anyone before. What high school girl do you know that’s still a virgin? It’s because she has a fantasy about being raped. And no one’s ever tried to go that far with her.

BOBBY That doesn’t even make sense. It’s not rape, or...I mean, if she wants it to happen it’s not... DEREK Hey, it’s not my fetish, some girls are just fucking weird like that. BOBBY (turning away) Whatever, dude. DEREK But Bobby, this is your chance. DEREK pats BOBBY on the shoulder like a pep talk. DEREK (CONT’D) This is your only shot to have sex with this girl. Beat. DEREK (CONT’D) And, and it’s not actually rape, because this is what she wants. She’ll enjoy it, she just gets off on thinking it’s rape. Here’s what you do. You set up another gay little sleep over. Then, when you’re both getting in bed, you just...play a little bit rough. She’ll say no at first, but you just have to play even rougher. BOBBY is silent in thought. DEREK (CONT’D) Then after that, you can do whatever you want. You can even date her if you really, really want to. After a while, BOBBY breaks the silence and turns to DEREK. BOBBY You think... You think I should bring a condom? FADE TO BLACK.

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INT. JULIET’S BEDROOM JULIET is already in the room in her pajamas. BOBBY enters with his hands tight on his backpack shoulder straps. JULIET Hey, you’re here! BOBBY Hi, Juliet. Your mother let me up. JULIET Yeah, she’s good like that. BOBBY (through a forced laugh) Yeah, my mom’s totally the same. Beat. BOBBY (CONT’D) So, how’s uh...or I mean, how’s school and stuff ? JULIET laughs at the awkward question. JULIET How’s school and stuff ? Pretty much normal, I guess. BOBBY (nodding his head) Oh yeah, me too...me too. JULIET Are you okay, Bobby? You’re acting like we haven’t known each other since kindergarten. BOBBY lowers his shoulders and lets go of his backpack shoulder straps.

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BOBBY Right. JULIET Come on, we have some serious catching up to do. JULIET jumps on the bed playfully and criss-crosses her legs. JULIET (CONT’D) I heard from a reliable source that you asked Samantha to homecoming? BOBBY Juliet... JULIET What? I have a right to know! Beat. JULIET (CONT’D) So is it true? BOBBY Yeah, Juliet, it’s true. But, that was like ages ago. I don’t even like her, I just didn’t want to be the only guy without a date. JULIET You’re just saying that ‘cause you got de-nied. BOBBY No! She’s totally retarded. Like, literally, really dumb. Dumb as rocks. JULIET (laughs) Yeah? BOBBY Who even told you?

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JULIET Shelby and Sara. BOBBY Jesus, they really don’t shut up. JULIET No, they really don’t. They’re surprisingly accurate with their gossip, though. It’s kind of scary. BOBBY (quiet and monotone) Yeah. I hadn’t really thought of it. JULIET Bobby, you need to learn about nerd code. Us nerds don’t go to homecoming and prom. We sit at home and drink Mountain Dew and play videos games. BOBBY (not in a playful mood) You’re not even a nerd. JULIET What, I have video games! JULIET grabs a video game controller. BOBBY I’ve known you like forever, Jules. You’re not a nerd. JULIET Well, I can kick your butt. BOBBY Hey now. JULIET Or are you just too scared to get spanked by a girl?

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BOBBY (out of his funk again) Alright, let’s do this. BOBBY grabs his own controller and sits on the bed. The two turn their eyes to the TV. BOBBY (CONT’D) (casually, more focused on the TV) You really need to work on your trash talking. JULIET What, I’m making progress. BOBBY Ehh... JULIET Eh? Intent on winning, JULIET focuses and tilts her controller sideways. JULIET (CONT’D) How...about...this! BOBBY You know that’s cheating, right? JULIET What, winning is cheating now? BOBBY No, looking at my screen is cheating. JULIET Well, you’re looking at mine. BOBBY The screen’s like thirteen inches, bite me.

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JULIET The hostility... Beat. JULIET (CONT’D) (subtly sarcastic) Just so you know, Robert, the next time you’re down on your luck and absolutely no girl will go near you, I’ll go to homecoming with you. But just so you don’t look like the biggest loser in the world. BOBBY releases his grip on the controller slightly and stares off, somewhere past the TV screen. JULIET (CONT’D) Because when they asked who went to homecoming in home room and you were like the only guy who didn’t raise his hand, it was embarrassing, man. I almost felt embarrassed even being friends with you. Beat. JULIET (CONT’D) (louder, at the TV screen) Aaaaaaaand, boom! Take that! JULIET turns, throws the controller on the bed, and does a victory dance. BOBBY Hey, can I use your bathroom? Thanks. BOBBY walks off before JULIET has a chance to respond. JULIET Oh yeah, go ahead. BOBBY starts pacing around the bathroom. After a while, JULIET continues talking through the bathroom door.

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JULIET (CONT’D) You know, I can be your body guard too. (laughs) Like beat up all your bullies. It’d save your parents a lot of money on underwear. (laughs harder) I can be your protection, Bobby. I can be your Prince Charming and you’ll be my damsel in distress. At hearing the word “protection,” BOBBY pulls out his wallet and pulls out a condom. JULIET (CONT’D) You need someone to be there to dry your hair after you get a swirly. BOBBY Hey, Juliet? JULIET Yeah? Wait, before you say anything, I don’t want to know what you’re doing in there. I’m not one of your guy friends, Bobby. BOBBY No, I know. Have you ever... done anything? BOBBY stares at the condom. JULIET Done anything? Could you be more vague? BOBBY You know, have you ever done stuff ? JULIET Oh, like done stuff. Um, no, not...really. Have you? BOBBY No. Why haven’t you?

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JULIET Jeez, I dunno, Bobby. Why do you want to know? BOBBY I’ve just been thinking about it lately. JULIET I guess I haven’t because I just haven’t found the right guy yet. I almost did with that kid Richard, the junior, but he was super clingy and stuff. Plus, he was kind of...weak, honestly. Is that mean? BOBBY No, it’s just... how you feel. BOBBY drops his arm and the condom to his side and paces some more. BOBBY (CONT’D) You can’t control how you feel. Beat. BOBBY (CONT’D) But you’ve wanted to, right? JULIET Are we really talking about this? And through the bathroom door? No response. JULIET (CONT’D) Bobby? BOBBY I’m still here, and I didn’t mean to weird you out. I was just curious. Sorry. JULIET Why wouldn’t I want to? We’re both humans. Just because I’m a girl doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to think about it too. I just don’t talk about it all the

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time like you perverts. And I don’t want to do it with just anyone; I’m not stupid. It has to be special and with someone I care about. BOBBY lifts his head in hope. JULIET (CONT’D) Someone who makes me feel warm and safe. Someone who listens to me when I have something to say. And honestly, (sounding somewhat sensual) someone who can take control when the time is right. JULIET lays back on the bed, swooning over the thought of the perfect man. BOBBY turns towards the door and unwraps the condom slowly. He brings the condom up to eye level, arm shaking. BOBBY (scared) Hey, Juliet? JULIET Bobby? BOBBY Do you... JULIET Yeah? BOBBY Do you like Candy Land? FADE TO BLACK.

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thanks for reading!

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