Underground Pool 2013

Underground Pool Issue Three :

Spring 2013

F ic t io n E d it o r :

Nichole Celauro

P o e t r y E d it o r :

Veronica Zabczynski

D e s ig n e r : Readers :

F a c u lt y A d v is o r : Il l u s t ra t io n C o o r d in a t o r :

Benjamin Brotman Caitlyn Averett Marie DiLeva Wes Greene David Miller Bill Morse Ian Newton Chris Panico Carlos Rios Alex Stanilla Joel Vernile Elise Juska Matt Curtius

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Pa ssi ng on the Burden : Anne Meier

About Underground Pool They boarded up the old pool. The one in the basement that wasn’t so much an actual pool as it was a dumping ground for the things nobody had any use for anymore, old desks with broken chairs and the like. Going down there and taking in its perverse, eerie majesty was like a rite of passage for the students, throwing in old coffee cups or halfsmoked cigarettes a way to leave your mark, to add on to the pile. Now, though, they’ve nailed shut the doors and blocked off the stairways. The elevator doesn’t even go down to the basement anymore. Condemned. However, there must still be a way to leave a mark, perhaps more constructive than a trash pile, but something still tangible, still permanent. What they have condemned, we will embrace. This is our pile.

Thanks For their enthusiasm and support for this project: College of Art, Media and Design faculty Tim Bower, Tom Leonard, Chris Myers, Jon Reinfurt and Jon Twingley; College of Art, Media and Design Dean Christopher Sharrock; Liberal Arts Dean Catherine Kodat; Vice President for Advancement Lucie Hughes; Associate Vice President of University Communications Paul Healy; Assistant Vice President of Development Mira Zergani; Web Content Manager Dana Rodriguez; The University of the Arts Alumni Association; and Provost Kirk Pillow.

Un d e r g r o u n d P ool : The Uni v ersi ty of the A rts : P hi l adelphia, PA www.ua rts.edu/undergroundpool undergroundpool @ ua rts.edu

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Fiction 8 :

Stolen Car : El i za beth D a v a s I llu s tra ted by L i ssy Ma rl i n

18 :

Say Something Else : Ni chol e Cel a uro I llu s tra ted by A nne Mei er

24 :

Blood Money : Ca rl os R i os I llu s tra ted by D ev i n A ntra m

38 :

The Bus For Lonely Kids : Ma x Ma ti a sh I llu s tra ted by S a m S chechter

44 :

Back With Mirth : Wes G reene I llu s tra ted by A i da n Nem a th

54 :

Anonymous : Megha n L oeb I llu s tra ted by G ra ce O’Nei l l

60 :

Combat : Veroni ca Za bczynsk i I llu s tra ted by D a v i d Curti s

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Poetry 7 : 16 : 23 : 35 : 43 : 51 : 58 : 69 : 72 :

Water : M a r ie D i L ev a The Sweetest Place On Earth : A l ex S ta ni l l a Phonetic Etiquette : Ca m i l l e S a ssa no The Perfect Fit : R ebecca Buck l ey At Twelve I Daydream of Touching Caroline’s Neck : Rory Marinich Look : A ly C a stl e Rock and Roll : Ma rtel Bi rd Monica and the Sunfish : R ory Ma ri ni ch Everything : Ta yl or Pa v a v i ch

Text & Image 14–1 5 : 36– 3 7 : 52– 5 3 : 70– 7 1 :

The Cryptographer : J oe G ra na to Separate : K yl e Tel m a n Drift : K ay G ehsha n Gregory : C l i nt S orenson

Artwork

2 : 6 : 22 : 34 : 41 : 42 : 59 : 73 : 74 : 80 :

Passing on the Burden : A nne Mei er Merrie : K a te O’Ha ra Target : K a t e O’Ha ra Glass Frog : Ka te O’Ha ra I Only Dream When I’m Awake : J ohn F reem a n Demented Beauty : R a chel Ma ri e S m i th I Only Dream When I’m Awake II : J ohn F reem an Ghosts : B e ck y S i orek The Pen With The Bent Wrist Crooked King : P hi l ip Mastrippolito Transitioning to Bigger Turtles : A nne Mei er

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Merrie : Kate O’H ara

Water :

M ar ie D iL ev a

There is something about the way that condensation curls Around the inside of my glass, that makes me ambitious.

The way that it slithers about In the pearlescent crystal, too heavy to escape its prison.

I imagine the air mocking it, as it hovers lightly beyond the water’s threshold.

Cooing sweet encouragements then pulling away on a cool current, Tittering snidely, As the condensation is held securely In gravity’s descending embrace.

And faintly the water whispers to itself, wishing to seize air, To know its freedom.

But then I take the cup of water and pour it into a pot, And boil it until there is nothing left.

The vapor rises, coiling around my head, Then spirals away on a wisp of breath.

I smile.

I never did like how arrogant the air is.

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S tory I llustrated by Lissy Marlin

Stolen Car

: El i za beth D a v a s

I hear the baby screaming in the next room over, her cries echoing through the hall and into the bedroom. Anita groans, rolls over and pulls the sheet over her head, saying it’s my turn. I stumble in the dark, guiding myself against the walls. The house is new and unfamiliar. Anita’s daddy bought it for us after the wedding. Said we needed to live in town, that the ranch was no place for newlyweds and a child. The baby cries harder when I open the door and turn on the light. She beats her fists against my shoulder as I pick her up. I close my eyes and whisper a song into her ear. I can’t remember her favorite lullaby.

I mumble Hank Williams and the baby screams louder. Anita stands in the doorway, her slip falling off her shoulders. She glares at me through the dark and I hold the wailing bundle out to her, praying that she’ll take her. With a sigh, she perches the baby on her hip.

“You’re gonna have to learn sometime,” she says.

“I’m trying. I ain’t got a clue how something can keep making this much noise.”

“There’s a little more to it than just trying.”

I try and think of something to reply with, but it’s no use and I’m too tired for another argument. Anita flicks the light switch off. The house shakes when the bedroom door slams and I stand alone in the baby’s room, the newfound silence louder than any cry.

The moon shines through the picture window in the living room, casting shadows onto the carpet. That buck I shot last year leans against the fireplace. It kept falling off the mantel. Anita says her father can come hang it. I say it doesn’t matter anymore. The refrigerator hums as I grab a Lone Star. We bought the fridge in Alpine, at the appliance

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store my cousin works at. Anita wanted something modern; I wanted something cheap.

I catch my reflection in the chrome handle and for a second I don’t recognize the figure staring back.

I stand at the window. My beer’s flat, the taste metallic but I keep drinking it. I think about going and getting some new ones but nothing except for the Mexican bar down on the other side of the highway’s open this time a night. I think about the girl I met there the other night. Rosa or something like that. The way her hair fell in her face, how she laughed. She kept pulling at the lapels of my denim jacket, tugging at them like I would disappear if she let go. I told her I had a wife across town. She said she didn’t care. I said it was a small town and followed her to her door. I watched her fumble with the gate lock.

The house was adobe, out on the edge of a field. I could see the lights of the water tower and I thought about how Anita was lying in bed, waiting on me. I thought about the baby in her crib. I looked at Rosa, turned around and started walking with my fists clenched, my knuckles turning white. It was a long walk home.

The pickup’s out of gas. I spent the last two dimes on a gallon a day ago. I set the empty bottle down and it topples off the window ledge. I look out to the street. It’s as quiet as the house. A dust cloud moves down the sidewalk, the bare trees bending in the wind. Christmas will be here soon. We’ll go out to the ranch with Anita’s family. Her mother will smile and say how I get more handsome every year. They’ll ask where my daddy is and I’ll make up a lie about how he’s up in Odessa, working on a rig in one of the new oil fields. Her father will nod approvingly, ask if I’m thinking about going up there and I’ll smile. The baby will gnaw on her doll’s head. Anita will put her hand on my thigh and maybe for once, we’ll be okay.

I put my hands in my pocket and I consider walking back to the fridge for another flat beer. I look at Mrs. Jones’ house across the way, the windows black. Her son came home for a visit the other week. He was two years ahead of me, graduated and never looked back. We stood in the yard, talking about the Longhorns. He said he remembered when I could throw the ball that far. I said I did too. He asked if I was still with the Anderson girl. I told him we’d gotten married down at the City Hall. He said I was a lucky man. A cloud passes over the moon and the street darkens. Her car sits out front, a ’61 Buick. Mr. Jones bought it a week before he passed. Two years later, it’s still new.

The blue paint gleams in the streetlight. The clouds move and the moon floods the sky.

I pull the front door closed, flinching at the click of the lock. The Smiths’ dog barks and I find myself crossing the asphalt of the wide street. My face is a shadow in the Buick’s windshield and I’m surprised at myself when I reach down for the door handle.

It’s unlocked and for a second, I pause. I don’t know what I’m going to do. When I slide onto the leather, my lungs close up and my throat tightens. I shut my eyes. The sharp smell of new leather still lingers in the car. The wind rattles the glass and I open my eyes wide and glance back at the house. The living room is vacant behind the picture window, our bedroom dark. My hands shake. I pop the box under the steering wheel. In high

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school, some kid from Valentine taught me how. Red against brown, I tell myself, a setting sun on the desert. The wires spark and the engine sputters. I try again and the engine roars. I leave the headlights off.

I’m on Columbia Street, at the stop sign. I don’t know why I stopped; no one’s coming. A cat rushes in front of the car and I jump. I’m not scared, I say out loud. I’m not scared. My hand sweats against the steering wheel and I make a right on Highland. I drive around the county courthouse, keeping my head down. The sheriff knows my father. They were in D-Day together. I remember him carrying my father back from the bar, telling me that Kraut shrapnel was getting to my daddy. But it was the whiskey and the loss, the all-consuming emptiness of this place.

A woman stands outside the Hotel Pasiano and when I pass, her eyes meet mine. I hope she doesn’t know me. My face doesn’t seem to register with her; she looks right past me. The car clatters over the train tracks. I worked at the grain gin when I was in junior high, trying to pass the summer. I cut myself pretty bad and the scar still follows the line of my arm.

I turn past the tracks, driving down the street I grew up on. The house is abandoned now, the door kicked in. Mesquite covers the front yard. I put the car in park, lean my head against the steering wheel. I swear I hear my mother’s voice, faint and lonely. I shake it off. She’s been dead for years. What would she think now, her only son, sitting in a stolen car on a big black night? I start the car again and make the block back to Highland.

The woman is gone.

The only stoplight in town blinks endlessly. A car comes down Highway 90, heading toward El Paso. I sit at the intersection, listening to the car idling, looking up at that little red light. The Dairy Queen’s closed; Anita worked there after school, before the baby.

I remember going there with the boys, pulling at her skirt. She said it would never work.

I remember her friends’ nervous giggles, her annoyed smile and the fast walk to the back of the place. The life we had.

I go straight on Highway 67 toward the border. Jose sits outside the Mobil station, the white of the florescent lights harsh against the window. He squints when I pass and I know he sees me. I speed up, going ninety into the night. The land is overwhelming once the houses fade out. I tell myself I’ll only go for another couple miles, turn around, park the car out front and slip in next to Anita. But out here, the horizon is endless. It’s impossible to measure distance. A mile seems like twenty and twenty seems like a million. The grasslands start to fade into mountains and the highway is a straight line in the headlights.

I look over to the east. The moon’s fallen behind the peak of La Cienga. The Mexicans say when the devil came to earth, he landed at the top of La Cienga. Maybe that’s what’s gotten into me, some demon stirring at the bottom of my soul. I haven’t been to church since my mother’s funeral and I was a boy then.

I drive past the ranch, thinking about turning around and going to see what Anita’s brother Sonny’s doing. He’s probably drunk, sitting on the porch, chain-smoking. I think about how his eyes would widen if I drove up in this car. He’d ask where Anita was and

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when I told him home, he’d know how I walked out across the street, opened the door, hotwired the ignition. How I drove out of town. How I don’t know what I’m really doing.

He’d ask if Anita and me are doing all right and the catch in my voice would answer for me. He’d hand me a wad of tens, say it’s for the fence we finished the other week. We’d both know it’s emergency money, something to send Anita in apology. I’d mumble, take it, say something about going home. He’d nod and tell me to be careful. I’d pull the car up that long dusty road and find myself back at the highway.

I fumble with the radio, but out here all I can get is static and the ranchero stations.

There are no stars tonight, the glow of the moon barely filling the horizon. I pass the old ghost town with its empty church and shuttered houses. I think about how Anita and me drove through here once, bored and looking for something to do. She pressed herself against me in the pickup. I put my arm around her and told her not to be scared. I think about the other night, when I swung my fist at her. I promised her I wouldn’t. Stood on an altar and said through sickness and health. I think about the sharp sound of my palm on her face. Her silence and the way I stood at the bedroom door later, telling her not to be scared.

Another car goes by, heading north, back toward town. I wonder who would be out here so late and I let the thought go. I push the car, accelerating at the reflection of my eyes in the rearview mirror. I’m far past a couple miles outside town and I slow a bit, feeling the car stall at the steepness of the road. I’ve hit the mountains and the highway here is all twists and turns through the dark mesas. I’m only thirty miles from the border and I don’t know how far I’ll go.

The road comes to a crest atop Chianti Peak and I look out into the distance. I can see the faint lights of Presidio. If I squeeze my eyes tight, I can see the lights of the skyscrapers in the city. They came down from up north, right before graduation, telling me they needed my arm. Telling me I could be somebody. I sat on the plane and watched Texas fade out of view. The city was loud and full. I remember the booze-filled dinner, the girl with smeared lipstick. The phone call in the cold hotel, Anita’s voice so far away.

A baby, Jack. A baby. The way she kept saying it over and over. The way I said nothing, my heart in my throat. I asked if she was sure. Yes. She sounded small. The way I said I was coming home, a baby was better than any scholarship. The lie stuck to my teeth. Her smile at the bus depot. The slight curve of her stomach under her cheerleading uniform at my last game. The way the city was like a dream that ended too soon.

I speed up on the downward slope of the road. Presidio is empty and behind Main Street, there’s the faint line of sunlight materializing in the distance. Anita would be waking up in an hour, yawning and stretching her arms to the ceiling. She would put her left foot down first, stand and pause. Put her grandmother’s bracelet on, slip her ring on her finger. She wouldn’t notice the empty space in the sheets. I run the light on the edge of town and head south.

The sky is grey, shadows of night lingering. I can see the border checkpoint and feel my lungs tighten again. I pull over to the side of the road and let the engine cut out. I see

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Anita making coffee. She pauses, listens for me on the couch. My absence makes her call her father, ask him if I’m already out at the ranch. He’ll tell her he ain’t seen me yet. She’ll slam the receiver down. Get the baby up. Go about her business. She won’t wonder where I am until the day fades. I think about what she’ll say when I pull up in Mrs. Jones’ Buick.

The anger scrunching up her pretty little face. I think about how it’s almost Christmas.

How Thanksgiving at the new house never really happened. We crowded around the TV set, watching the funeral. Anita’s mother, crying, despite claiming she didn’t ever support a Democrat. Sonny, on the front porch, clutching his beer and the look on his face, that knowing look, when he asked where the country was going. I told him I didn’t know. I think about the magazine on the kitchen table, his family’s smiling faces. How there are no pictures of us with the baby. Only empty frames. And I think about his wife, so beautiful in her widow’s black, clutching his son’s hand. Would Anita mourn me like that? Stand at the edge of my grave, full of grief, or would she only mourn the youth I stole from her?

The sun rises and I shift into drive. I’m nineteen years old and I’m driving a stolen car on a lonely highway. I feel like my heart’s going to burst and I push down on the gas.

I hear Anita’s silence and the baby’s scream. My mother’s ghostly voice. Sonny telling me to be careful. That dead man on stage asking me what I can do. Nothing, I say. I can do nothing. His widow’s grace. I hear the roar of the desert, the shout of emptiness on the horizon. I look in the rearview mirror and I see an empty gravesite, my name etched on the stone. I see that man’s smiling face and the blank picture frames in the living room.

I go further. I go faster. I leave it behind. At the border crossing they ask my destination.

I say I don’t know. I’ll drive this car until I give up, until someone sees me. The guard stops, scans the plates, and there’s a hitch in my breath. He waves me forward.

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14

The Cryptographer :

J oe G ra na to

He took a breath and pressed his damp calloused hands against his face. The air of the bathroom hung heavy as my father washed his tired tan face over a small porcelain sink. The mirror was nearly opaque with moisture that sat as still as dew on the grasses.

It settled on his bare chest and it settled on his stiff back. The war overseas had left not a mark on his olive skin. Not in the few short months he was stationed. Down the hall a pressed tan uniform wrapped in plastic had slept tucked away in coat closets for some forty-five years. It had followed him from the dusty closets of South Philadelphia rowhomes, through apartment complexes and into high-ceilinged suburban houses.

It had followed him with a level of loyalty that made him feel only guilt. And once every year when the temperature dropped the uniform found him while sifting through winter clothes. Beneath the plastic, small medals hung in formal attention, pinned to the fabric. Unaware of their neglect, they patiently waited. Remembering the time they spent with my father in Vietnam. Remembering the lining of the suitcase they returned home in just a few short months thereafter. Never knowing about the things his mother did to bring him home. Never sharing the weight of that decision with him. He looked into the bathroom mirror, only for a moment, and made note of his unshaven face. His hands moved steadily over the spigot and with fingers swollen with the rings of friends passed, he dried each off, never hesitating for regret, never letting sorrow find him in his morning routine. A small gold crest of Saint Peter hung close to his neck. As the water was wiped from his face, so was the sweat of forty years of factory work, the love of two women and a war he had left before he arrived.

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The Sweetest Place On Earth :

Alex Stanilla

In row one we have the smart ass, probably thirteen and doesn’t need his safety belt.

Not for the one-hundred-fifteen-foot drop at forty-five miles per hour.

I’ll tell him about it. I’ll tell them all about it.

Row three we have the jocks, my age, stale faces.

They don’t like me tugging near their waist.

By row six, I hear their snickers and I’m pulling a little too hard on the chubby kid’s belt.

I know the tan couple in row eight.

Concerned, they ask, “What happened?” and point to the bandage on my calf.

I tell them about the new policy on visible tattoos.

Nine: two middle-aged women, flirting and catty.

Their belts were the loosest.

Row twelve, we have the two girls that will be cute in a few years, but for now I shouldn’t think of them that way.

Still, Jim notes that the back of the coaster “is the bumpiest.”

He’s only a year younger than me.

It’s only slightly more okay.

Roller coasters are a sort of escape for these sort of entrapped people.

Locked in and surrounded by chain link fences garnished with barbed wires that nicely juxtapose the merry-go-rounds and spinning cups, where the snot-nosed and baby fat whale pitches somewhere between “Look at me!” and jubilation.

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The smell of fresh chocolate lingers.

Though the factory is in Mexico, chocolate still covers the faces of the teens and tweens.

The ones standing in line while I look for anyone that’s too short so I can belittle them with my thirty-six inch stick, a blunt sickle at a right angle.

And there’s one! He’s clinging to his mommy’s leg.

He knows better. She knows better.

I know the most.

Admission is at a record high.

I let it slip.

And as their train meanders in, I’m looking for his smile but I get a call from entry.

“You put his life in danger,” the red tag says.

The same way the kid put my job in danger.

I pass by the pictures on my way up and see the little brat was crying.

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Story I llustrated by Anne Meier

Say Something Else

: Nichole Celauro

The couple stared at the single portrait on the white wall of the gallery. The photograph was as tall as he was: two skeletons, half-buried in brown dirt, their bones so mangled and so broken they could not be untangled. The lovers had died in the fetal position, arms and legs curled around each other, skulls only a breath apart while they, as she would say, “gazed lovingly into each other’s eyes.”

He coughed. “Art?”

“It’s romantic.”

“It’s grotesque.”

She looked up at him, frowning, arms crossed over her chest.

He grinned. “I’ve been reading your—”

“Keep your voice down.”

“Why? Think I’ll wake ’em?”

She raised one finely manicured eyebrow, and he gestured to the portrait. She clicked her tongue in that way she always meant to sound disapproving, but he always thought was cute. Like a baby chipmunk or something.

“Don’t be disrespectful.”

“They can’t hear me—”

“The artist is here.”

“Oh.”

She nodded at the woman on the far side of the room wearing a knit cap in June and

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holding an electric cigarette.

“‘Artist’ is a strong word.” He watched her blink, and he shrugged. “Anybody can take a photo.”

She shifted her weight from foot to foot, unconsciously swaying her hips as she pulled a tube of lipstick from her purse. “It’s a statement,” she said, as she reapplied. The pink goo smeared her teeth and she licked it away. It impressed him.

“Of?” “Love.”

The lipstick cap snapped shut and she tossed the tube back into her purse. Her dress was rumpled, trapped between the flesh of her thigh and of the leather bag. She hardly noticed the breezy fabric crawling up her leg, threatening to reveal golden tan lines she pretended to be embarrassed about.

The temptation could be resisted no longer. He wrapped an arm around her waist, tugging the hem of her dress free, brushing his pinky against the pumpkin-shaped birthmark on the back of her thigh, eventually resting his hand in its usual spot on her hip. “That’s stupid.”

“I think it’s romantic.” She shrugged out of his grip. “They chose to die together, so completed by each other’s love that living without it wasn’t an option.”

He snorted. “Pretentious.”

She shook her head and sighed, studying the picture with that “I-appreciate-high-art” look she had been trying to perfect: one brow raised, the other furrowed (another impressive feat), her pink mouth making that not-quite-Mona Lisa smile. Then she got an envious gleam in her eye, just for a second. The same glint she denied having for shoe-shopping and her cousin’s save-the-date magnet on their fridge door. “It’s beautiful, that kinda thing.”

“You can’t know what they were thinking.”

A hair had gotten stuck in her fresh lipstick. He plucked it off, sweeping it behind her ear, letting his fingers graze the curve of her lobe.

“I can see it,” she said, swatting at his hand, scratching the spot from which he had just retreated.

He shoved his hands in the warmth of his pockets. It was too hot to keep them there—the denim would chafe his sweaty knuckles—but he didn’t know what else to do with them.

He looked at the photo again. Tried to imitate her Mona Lisa look, waiting for that chipmunk noise to tell him he was doing it wrong. It didn’t come, and for a second he imagined those were her bones yellowing in a ditch. He shuddered, but she didn’t notice.

“Who are they?”

Her eyes rolled. “You’re not supposed to know. That’s the beauty of it.”

He nodded. This was a game he could play.

“She was a coward.”

“What?”

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“She could have lived.” He studied the photograph one more time, for what he vowed would be the last time. “Looks like he had a nasty head wound or—I don’t know, but she probably could’ve survived. She just didn’t fight for it.”

“Love means everything to her. He was her soul. What life could she have had?”

“Old lady in Titanic did it.”

She chewed her lip. He fiddled with the box in his pocket.

“Doesn’t mean she didn’t love DiCaprio or anything. But her life was, like, awesome afterward. You see all those pictures in the end? I mean, he basically told her to kick ass and take names for the rest of her life. And she told everybody about Leo. In the end. She shared it with everybody. Even got a movie deal.”

Normally she would have cracked a smile at that. He shrugged at the portrait.

“Unless these guys are Romeo and Juliet . . . ”

A silence rooted, sprouted and bloomed between them. He couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“My grandmother died three days after my grandfather,” she said. “She was perfectly healthy. You don’t think that’s sweet?”

He pulled the little black box from his pocket. He held it out to her, in his palm, having forgotten to open it first.

“If it makes you feel better,” he said, “I don’t plan on dying any time soon.”

She blinked. She chewed on her lip—a tic she had picked up from her mother—one usually reserved for when she was trying very hard not to yell at him for not replacing the toilet paper roll or forgetting she was allergic to shellfish. He suddenly felt very stupid, a conditioned response.

“I think we want different things,” she said.

His palms were sweating. The box could have slid right off his hand.

“Do you want me to say something else? You complete me?”

She shook her head. He wondered if she’d swat his hand away if he stuck a finger into the corner of her hopeless frown, trying to tug it upright. Probably.

She hiked her purse higher onto her shoulder, looking everywhere but at the box.

“I’ll tell them we have to leave early.”

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Targ et : Kate O’H ara

Phonetic Etiquette :

Ca m i l l e S a ssa no

I’ll begin my foreword as I move forward, fix my bow and take a bow, as I can recall a time before I knew the word “word” or a difference between “then” and “now.”

I can re-collect recreations of recollected recreation— a time before my imagination could label “differentiation.”

So excuse me for a minute while I make minute excuses about why I choose my words wisely to describe their many uses.

For a word is worth a thousand words—with them I realize how I finally have grown out of my groans and can realize I realize now.

How can language be so useful when it’s so often misread and misused?

Has its misinterpretation or our interpretation been abused?

For if we could mean what we say by saying what we mean, would it be read the same way as we meant it to read?

And is the meaning always right if I write the words correctly or would their meanings skip a beat if I wrote out “beet” imperfectly?

And if one word alone could loan to other meanings, would those meanings loan meaning to the meaning of “meaning”?

We can be ignorant of our ignorance about how to make use of our instruments, learning-by-ear without instructions to use words as implements.

Though we can’t all pair a perfect pitch or pitch a perfect strike, and can’t all strike a perfect match or match a perfect pair alike We can compliment words’ complements to access excess preconceptions, except to expect to accept they affect words’ effects and their varying deceptions.

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S tory I llustrated by Devin Antram

Blood Money

: Ca rl os R i os

Wi n n e r of t h e 2 0 1 2 Un iv e rsi ty of the A rts S hort S tory Awa rd

Penelope watched the powder-blue Mercedes convertible winding its way along the immaculate suburban road. She waited, sitting on the edge of a curb, in a floral-patterned baby doll dress that fell halfway down her thighs, wearing a black puffer coat overtop it.

Her long, alabaster legs stretched out onto the smooth asphalt. The car seemed as though it wanted to be going faster, restrained as it was by recurring stop signs and the neighborhood’s strict speed limit. It was still far off.

An unusually gentle mid-December morning breeze combed through Penelope’s dyed and re-dyed auburn hair, disturbing her asymmetrical braided undercut as she flicked a speck of dirt off her tan Timberlands. She shrugged off her coat and used a sleeve to wipe both boots. On her left bicep, stretching from shoulder to elbow, was tattooed a list of commandments, still red around the edges. Another tattoo on her neck, just barely visible behind a lopsided cascade of hair, read 215 in large, stylized numbers.

By degrees, the convertible meandered past the puritanically maintained front yards.

Some of the unlit Christmas lights draped over the houses reflected the struggling sunlight, giving the impression that the strings were imperfect and only a handful of lights were functioning. As the car neared, Penelope could hear music, and it grew louder until she was able to identify the song. It was a Christmas classic she had heard every year since birth, one she despised but could not help singing along with in her head. Finally, the car crept to a stop in front of Penelope. The teenage driver wore the same salmon-colored fleece pullover as his friend riding shotgun.

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“Hey!” the driver called out. He dropped the volume. “Have I seen you at a party recently?” Penelope still hadn’t looked up at the car, instead gazing off down the road.

“Maybe I just wish I did, with a face like that,” the driver added. “Were you at Katie Peterson’s house last week? Her mom’s house, not her dad’s.”

Penelope brushed off her boot.

The driver’s friend bumped the horn. “Hey!”

Penelope turned to them, cerulean eyes staring from behind her fake lashes. “Nigga, get the fuck on!”

“Excuse me?”

“Did she just . . . ”

Penelope shot up onto her feet. “Step up or step off, bitch!” she shouted.

They looked her over, horrified. “Who are you?” the driver asked, bewildered. Then he and his friend sped off, the passenger turning back for one last glimpse.

“As I thought, faggot-ass pussy!” Penelope called, cupping her hands around her mouth. The Christmas song faded as the Mercedes rounded a bend.

Penelope brushed the corset tattoos on the back of each thigh, then sat down again with the coat underneath her.

“Yerp!”

Penelope whipped her head toward the shout, smiling upon spotting two ghost-pale girls in tight jeans and baggy hoodies in the middle of the empty road, half a long development block from where she sat. Becky’s bleach-blonde, coon-striped hair was poking out from under her raised hood, and one hand clutched a family-size bag of salt & vinegar potato chips. Her sleeves were bunched up to the elbows, but both wrists were obscured by dozens of colorful plastic bracelets, bangles, and rubber bands. Sarah wore a tasseled beanie, ice-blue lipstick, and heel sneakers. Penelope stood up as they neared.

“What’s good, Money?” Becky greeted.

Penelope gave her a nod. “Fuck took y’all ugly-ass bitches so long?” She grinned.

“Sike naw. What’s goin on?”

“What was up with that Benz?” Becky asked, handing Penelope the bag of chips.

Penelope sucked her teeth, rolled her eyes. “Man, a couple bitch-ass muhfuckas talkin bout some ‘where I seen you before’.”

“Oh, word?”

“Tryna hit,” Sarah laughed.

“Prolly,” Penelope agreed, mouth full of chips. “He know Kat Peterson, though.”

Becky furrowed her brow. “The bitch from Springside? Man, she get on my nerves, for real.”

“Matter fact, though,” Sarah started, looking Penelope over, “you lookin a little bit like her in that dress.”

“True that,” added Becky, with a disdainful snort. “Fuck is you wearin?”

“Man, my mom took all my clothes and shit when she saw this jawn,” Penelope

26

sighed, twisting so the girls could see her arm tattoo. “Left me this dress ’cause she know how much I hate it.”

“Damn, she drawlin.”

“Real talk,” nodded Penelope. “But what we really need to be talkin about is them nut-ass off-brand boots you wearin right now. Them jawns is hella suspect.”

“Shit, you know my dad cut my allowance,” Becky complained. “And he ain’t about to buy me no Tims.”

Sarah poked Penelope’s large circle earring. “Your mom left you them hoops, at least.”

“True.” Penelope sniffled, then spit through her teeth. She had spent the morning trying to figure when her parents would forgive her for the most recent tattoo, and calculating when she’d have money for the next one. Straight B’s could net her fifty dollars total, provided that’s what the report card looked like. With any luck, the holiday season would pay out the rest. Her parents liked to complain, but they still gave her cash each Christmas.

Becky pulled out a pack of menthols. “You got the twenty?” she asked Penelope, before lighting up.

“The who?”

“The twenty dollars. Wasn’t we tryna go in on an eighth tonight?”

Sarah’s eyes were trained on the cigarette between Becky’s lips. “Ayo, lemme bum one of them jawns.”

“Sike,” Becky squawked.

“Damn, you on some parsimonious shit,” Sarah complained, pursing her lips.

Penelope nodded. “Yeah, we still on that plan. Skitchy Steve owe me twenty from before, though, so remind his ass when you go pick up from him.” Becky and Sarah exchanged knowing glances, then looked back at Penelope. “What?” Penelope said.

Becky took a hard drag before speaking up. “Ayo, Ionno how to tell you this, but . . .”

“Man, Skitch chumped you,” Sarah finished.

“Fuck you mean? When?”

“Last night,” Sarah replied.

“Yeah, the jawn at Rafiq’s house,” added Becky.

Penelope hadn’t heard about it. “Oh, that corny-ass party?”

“Muhfucka said you gave him bop last week, though, at Dennis house. Told damn near everybody at the party.”

“Ooh, that nigga wish I did. He just mad I embarrassed his knock-off-Adida-wearin ass last Saturday.”

“He was comin at you hard,” Becky continued. “Nigga said your clothes weak as shit.

And your sneaks.”

Penelope raised an eyebrow. “My sneaks, though? Young bull comin at my sneaks, though? This nigga must’ve lost his muhfuckin mind.”

“He started on some other shit, too, though. I’m not about to repeat it, but, you know.”

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“Yeah, I do know,” Penelope fumed. “I know this faggot need to get put in check right the fuck now.”

“Oh shit, we rollin on him?” Sarah beamed.

Penelope poured the chip crumbs into her mouth and licked her vinegary fingers.

“Lemme holla at my Boo real quick, though.”

“Shit, you might as well pick up from him while you down there then.”

“Bitch, you know my Boo don’t sell trees.”

“You right, you right.”

“Ima link up with y’all tonight, though.”

“Aight, bet.” Becky curb-stomped her butt.

“And keep this to y’allselves so Skitch don’t hear nothin.”

“Second Commandment,” winked Sarah, tapping her own bicep with two fingers.

“We gotchu, Money. He ain’t gonna be talkin shit when he got that nina up in his face.”

“Faggot-ass Skitch,” Penelope muttered as the two other girls walked back the way they came.

The problem was getting down into the heart of the city. A train and three buses each way wasn’t cheap. Penelope had taken the trip to 9th & Huntingdon several times since her first escape—two years prior on a visit to her grandmother’s house—from a parental overreaction to a three-day suspension. The last few visits, though, Penelope had dropped all pretense of visiting Grandma, and the days were spent on stoops or leaning against corner store walls with slingers Penelope had chatted up on visits prior and left an impression on. Down there, she was some exotic creature—a novelty, a tangible curio from a realm that existed far away from theirs. They regarded her enthusiasm with amusement, and she found their lifestyle alluring, perhaps even more potent than the wet and the heroin they sold down there where the sky was always some shade of grey without rain. It was a symbiotic relationship.

Penelope’s Boo was a half-black, half-Puerto-Rican twenty-six-year-old with a fading fauxhawk, and she had pursued him unabashedly from the moment she met him. She had eyes for no one else around the way. Boo took it all with smiles and headshakes, but never gave in to her flirtations, although Penelope suspected his shifts on the corner were much easier to pass with her around.

Penelope plucked the last couple dollars from inside a pristine copy of The Great Gatsby on her computer desk at home. She stuffed the cash into a coat pocket.

“You going out today?” Her father was standing in her bedroom doorway in sweats, holding a Gatorade bottle. “You know, that’s my favorite novel.”

Penelope scowled. “Never read it.” She shoved past him into the hall.

“Penny . . .” he started.

“I’m going to Nanna’s house,” she exhaled.

“You can’t just go down there every time you’re angry with your mom and me.”

“Well, I want to now, so . . .”

28

Her father sighed a note of exasperation. “Let me drive you. I’m going to the gym anyway.”

“That’s out of your way.”

“I’d rather you be safe. Nanna’s too stubborn to move out of her old neighborhood, but just look at—”

“I’m taking SEPTA.”

“Why? I’m offering to drive you.”

“Ionno, I like the bus. Ionno.” She turned and continued down the hall toward the stairs, wondering how her father would counter.

“Do you have money?” he called after her. Penelope held a few crumpled bills in the air. “That enough for food?”

Penelope stopped on the top step, hand gripping the banister, annoyed at herself for not having thought of this, and even more annoyed that pausing like she did would telegraph that fact to her father. “I’m not hungry,” she decided.

“Here,” he relented, digging into his pocket and extracting a twenty. Penelope grabbed it, mumbling a thanks on her way down.

The walk from the bus stop on 7th to Boo’s corner on 9th was a short one, but never brief. Even the very first time she went down on her own, after getting off the third and final bus, Penelope had slow-rolled the trip from bus stop to front stoop so that she could soak in the neighborhood through osmosis. Bedraggled sparrows pecked at discarded chicken wing bones on the sidewalk. A weave and an earring in the middle of an empty intersection marked a scuffle. Unseen dogs blocks apart called and answered one another.

A walk like this was a reverie. This time, she passed a curbside memorial—dirt-cloaked stuffed animals and deflating balloons marking the spot where a seven-year-old boy had caught a stray bullet coming home one afternoon from early dismissal, or so the picture at the center of the shrine seemed to betoken. Penelope wished she had known someone with a sidewalk shrine. The only dead person she knew was in a well-manicured plot with a white tombstone atop it, an aunt who had smoked herself into it slowly.

“Yerp!”

Penelope looked up from the cracked, dandelion-strangled sidewalk. Behind a sagging chain-link fence, in the rubble of a torn-down vacant home, crouched a pudgy, dark-skinned kid about twenty years old.

“Aaayyyy!” danced Penelope.

“What up, Blood Money?” he shouted.

“What’s good, Skunk?”

He held a stick in one hand, scraping dirt where he knelt. “Man, my parakeet just killed Tasha muhfuckin cat. I’m buryin that shit.”

“How the fuck he do that?”

“Cat was chasin him like cats be doin. I guess it tried to jump over the sink or some shit, ’cause that jawn knocked the toaster in the water and tripped right in.”

“Word?”

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“I’m sayin, my boy don’t play. You gon chase his ass, you best watch out. Told Tasha that the first time.”

“Man, fuck cats anyway,” Penelope epilogued.

“I heard that,” Skunk nodded, piling dirt. He brushed off a speck of mud from his leather jacket.

“Where Boo at?” the girl asked, walking onward.

“Steady slingin, shawty,” he called back. “Steady slingin.”

Same corner as always. The grassy lot where two rowhomes once presided, across the street from the liquor store and diagonal from Hermanos Cruz corner grocery. A kid about Penelope’s age in a white tee and Phillies snapback hovered at the very corner of the curb, looking restless. There were three plastic lawn chairs in the patchy grass, two of them empty, Boo lounging in the other with his coat hood up and hands hidden in pockets.

Penelope was all straight pearly whites when she saw him from afar. “Ay, Boooo!” she sang as she crossed the narrow street to the chairs, switching her hips with more emphasis than her usual gait demanded.

“What up, Penny Money?” he smiled, removing his hood as Penelope plopped onto a chair.

Penelope sucked her teeth. “You stay callin me that.” She leaned forward to wipe her Timberlands.

Boo swiveled his head toward a twelve-year-old idling on the stoop of a house partway down the block. “Yerp!” The boy hopped up and walked over to where the two sat.

“Ayo, boss, get my girl a bag of salt & vinegar.”

“And a blue hug,” she added.

“And a blue hug.”

“The fifty-cent ones,” she added again. The boy looked at Boo for confirmation.

Boo nodded. “Here, get yourself something,” he added, handing the boy another dollar. He turned back to Penelope as the kid crossed the street. “You never seen James Bond?”

“Huh?”

“Moneypenny off of James Bond. She the bitch that was like . . . a secretary or some shit.”

“Nigga, I ain’t nobody secretary.”

“Oh, no doubt. But you got the name for it.” He slipped a hand partway out of his coat pocket for long enough to glimpse at his gold watch. “Shit, we got the two-fifteen comin in soon. You needa bounce, girl. No offense.”

“You heard what happened with Skunk?”

“Yeah, the cat? Shit had me rollin. I got customers comin in, though. So. . .”

“So. . .”

“So you need to step. Fuck it gon look like to them if you sittin here?”

“It’s gonna look like none of they damn business. I just got here. Fuck you tryna say?”

30

“Wutchu down here for anyway? You ain’t called.”

“I needa cop me some chrome.” She met Boo’s gaze. “That’s why I came down.”

He recoiled in his chair. “Chrome?”

“This boy Skitch needa get popped,” Penelope continued.

Boo just stared at her.

“Yo, I’m tellin you this nigga chumped my sneaks. My muhfuckin sneaks. You remember them turquoise jawns I was wearin last time?”

“You really serious, though.”

The girl in the dress grinned.

“Damn, you can’t be killin niggas over some bull!” Boo reprimanded. “Fuck is you thinkin?”

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The smile faded. “He owe me money, too, though,” Penelope reasoned, feeling warm and taking off her coat. “Lemme borrow some muscle then and get that back at least.”

“Borrow some muscle? Fuck you think this is? And what happen when a youngbull in the suburbs get jumped?” Boo spit through his teeth. “Naw. Where we from? Two different places. Shit don’t play the same.” Penelope felt the sting of her fresh tattoo. She rubbed it gently.

The stoop boy jogged over to them with a bag. “They ain’t had the blue hugs, so I got a red,” he squeaked. Boo gave the kid a nod, sending him running back to the stoop.

“So, what, you tryna be a gangsta now?” Boo asked.

“Naw, it ain’t that. But I’m real and that faggot Skitch need to know that,” Penelope replied, pulling a lash out of her eye.

A small huddle of a dozen or so people rounded the corner a block away. “Oh shit, here come the herd,” Boo said. “That’s you, youngbull!” he called to the kid standing at the corner.

The kid nodded. “Mistletoe! Got that Mistletoe! Wetter than wet! Two-for-one Christmas special, right here, right here! Whatcu need! Got that mistletoe!”

The customers shambled across the street, past the corner kid, and formed a line by Boo. One by one, they handed him money, then formed a new line farther down at the stoop, Boo holding up fingers after each transaction for the stoop boy to count. One of them, a nearly toothless man who looked to be in his sixties, greeted Boo with a smile and a nod.

“Where all this come from, Web?” Boo asked, glancing around the dead intersection before smoothing out and counting the man’s wrinkled money.

“Schoolin these pups,” he replied, jerking his head toward a trio of nervous young hipsters behind him. “Don’t even know how to cop for theyselves.”

Boo looked them over. “Where y’all from?”

“Umm, like North Broad?” one of them answered eventually, shifting anxiously.

“‘Umm like North Broad’? I know alotta niggas that live on ‘umm like North Broad,’” he teased. Penelope snickered.

Boo turned back to the old man. “Aight, Web, you good.” Boo held up five fingers.

The rest of the line filed past, paying their money without words, until the last one, another old man, his ragged fedora concealing part of a patchy grey head. He stared at Penelope. “You lost, little girl?” he chuckled.

“Sike,” she cawed right back.

Boo looked up at the man. “Oh, you don’t know her? This my sister.” Penelope scrunched her face up, but Boo gave her a playful wink.

“Huh?” the oldhead harangued, baffled.

“Huh?” Boo mocked. “Muhfucka, you know what to do.” Boo held up two fingers as the skeleton of a man drifted toward the kid on the stoop. A cable truck sped by nervously. “Ain’t today a school day?” Boo wondered.

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“Man, fuck school!” Penelope bellowed, opening her bag of chips and digging in.

“I’m on Christmas break,” she added, after a mouthful.

“And you come down here?”

“For nothin, too.”

“Girl, you ain’t getting no fuckin gun. You shoulda hit me up first. I know you live up in them burbs. That’s a long trip.”

“I’m fine with just a visit,” she pouted.

“A visit? Here? This your vacation, though. Shit, even I’m tryna get up on outta here,” Boo admitted.

“You done your shift already?”

“Naw, not just today. I mean . . . you know,” Boo said. Penelope didn’t know. “This ain’t even my career right here.” He hesitated. “I’m an actor.”

Penelope rose from her chair. “Actor?” she repeated incredulously.

“Yeah. I stay slingin to pay for them classes at CCP. I’m tryna find me a part in some shit. Blow up. But for now . . .” He looked around the intersection.

“What you mean, like you movin to Hollywood ’n shit?”

“Naw, they makin movies up in New York now, too.”

“Fuck New York. I can’t catch SEPTA to New York.”

Boo snorted, shaking his head and smiling.

The worry on Penelope’s face dissolved into anger.

“So you an actor?” Penelope asked again, her voice tinged with sarcasm this time.

“What I seen you in?”

“I mean, nothin yet.”

“Then, nigga, you just a drug dealer!” Penelope concluded. Reassured, she retook her seat on the plastic chair.

She watched a stray cat cross the road a few blocks down. Sniffled, spit through her teeth, then gazed up at the shrouded sky and at the two-story neighborhood around her.

The customers were scattering.

“Somethin bout the light down here,” she mused. “Always be lookin a certain way.”

“Yeah.”

Penelope downed a handful of chips and wiped her salty fingers on her dress. Tossed the bag onto the grass. Up the block was a tree that hadn’t lost its leaves. It offered shade to another sidewalk shrine set up against the brick wall of a rowhome tightly squeezed by the homes on either side of it. The tree swayed. Penelope breathed it all in. The December breeze was warmer here.

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34

Glass Frog : Kate O’H ara

The Perfect Fit :

R ebecca Buck l ey

When I am old, I will remember it.

The way there was time for a man to sniff a melon in the supermarket, just four hours before the hurricane.

The feeling of what I thought it would feel like to live in this place, with this time.

I will remember a certain clumsiness and too-rough handling of myself or not remember at all why my eyes are so wrinkled.

Perhaps, I will think it was from smiling, not dragging tired hands under tired eyes.

Remembering, as I will, will I think of how I traded my blessing for a bowl of soup?

I am afraid that when I am old all I will remember is the feeling of the perfect fit that nothing ever gave me again.

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36

Separate :

K y le Tel m a n

Bass rattles the scenery in every mirror. There is a certain distance, a turn of the volume dial, that will take the reflection and bend the moon until it is no longer recognizable. It’s almost hypnotic but memory serves: I can account for every bow of the backroads, where anonymity is a mode of transport. The context of the nights always escapes me, though. Earlier conversations start in the back of my mind but fade into slurred melodies, repeating like the hook of an old pop song you can’t fully resolve. I find myself in the same (unnamable) discourse with the road every time I leave her cul-de-sac. Patterns shift in the encompassing darkness. Even though I am lost in thought, an awareness survives: There is a bend three miles up where the tree cover separates and the bridge breaks over the reservoir; and there is a way you can feel the sky expand right before the peak of the bridge, that way it swells in one flash of a cleared canopy and leaves a moment later.

The reservoir is three breaths from here but cannot be seen. Only a glimpse of light perforates the hidden contours ahead. Ensnared in the high beams, two blue orbs flicker, fading to putrid. The deer ramps up the hood. The impact of its neck punctuates the radio.

Evacuating the pane as if on autopilot, I catch a final glance. Her skull is strung by sinew, acutely to the restless body, nearly separate yet relaying indeterminately.

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38

S tory I llustrated by Sam Schechter

The Bus For Lonely Kids

: Ma x Matiash

Andrew was sitting in his room drawing pictures when his pen ran out. He rifled through all of his drawers in search of another pen but couldn’t find one. Andrew liked to draw pictures, so he went through pens quickly. He liked to draw pictures of all kinds of things— ninjas and skeletons and dinosaurs and helicopters and octopi and famous inventors and penguins. Andrew liked to draw because he didn’t have very many friends, or even people to talk to. He had Kevin, who lived three blocks away on Dandelion Road, but Kevin was a lot to handle sometimes, and didn’t quite get it, if that makes any sense.

Andrew had a pet rabbit that lived in his room and could talk, but it wasn’t a very friendly rabbit, and didn’t like talking much. When it did it mostly just asked Andrew to steal it some cigarettes from his older sister, which Andrew did sometimes because even though the rabbit wasn’t very friendly, he still liked to talk to it every now and again.

Andrew’s sister wasn’t very good to talk to either, because she was usually out with her friends, and probably on drugs, and when she was home, he was pretty sure she was still on drugs. Andrew’s mom liked to drink an impressive amount of sherry and watch talk shows, which Andrew thought was kind of funny in a way that wasn’t actually very funny, because she didn’t like talking all too much, either. And Andrew’s dad usually came home from work very late, and then usually argued loudly with Andrew’s mom, and by the time they were done arguing he wasn’t much in the mood for talking anymore, but was in the mood for ripping paper into strips and letting them fall to the floor. Andrew was fairly certain his dad was having an affair, a notion he had gleaned from watching unfaithful

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couples on his mother’s talk shows and comparing their behavior to his father’s, and that the two should probably get a divorce, and that even if his dad wasn’t cheating they should probably get a divorce because they argued all the time, but Andrew didn’t think that was his place to say, so mostly he just stayed in his room drawing pictures of bullfighters and astronauts and turtles and submarines.

But now Andrew’s pen had run out, and he couldn’t find a replacement, so he went downstairs to ask his mom if she could buy him some more pens. When Andrew got downstairs, his mom and dad were loudly discussing the family’s dissatisfactory finances, his dad standing directly in front of the television and blocking the talk show his mom had been watching as he bemoaned being the only one who seemed to “give a shit about this family.” Andrew didn’t want to get in the middle of their argument, so he went over to his sister’s room to see if she could drive him to buy pens, only to notice a rather succinct note on her door that simply read “out.” It was written in pen, but Andrew’s cursory search of his sister’s bedroom did not bring him to the instrument she had used to write her note. It did, however, bring him to an illegally obtained bottle of oxycontin, but he felt that was best left alone. So Andrew decided he would go outside, and maybe go buy some pens himself. He was pretty sure his parents didn’t notice as he opened the front door and walked out into the darkness, leaving their arguments and striking lack of pens behind.

It was a cold night, and rather windy, but Andrew had a thick sweatshirt on so it wasn’t that bad. He didn’t think the strip mall he could ride his bike to would be open, so he would have to go elsewhere to acquire a pen. There was a bus stop on Dandelion Road near Kevin’s house, so Andrew resolved to walk there and try the bus.

As Andrew sat on the bench at the bus stop he thought about a book he had read recently that he had liked an awful lot about a bus for all the lonely kids. It would arrive to pick up lonely children wherever they lived if they would only close their eyes and wish not to be lonely. The bus would pull up, and the kids would get on, and it would be filled with other lonely kids, and they would all become friends and wouldn’t be lonely any longer. The bus would take all the kids to a mystical land where they would have all sorts of adventures together. The boy who was the protagonist of the story even met a girl on the bus who he would eventually marry when they were both grown up. Andrew thought the prose was pretty flimsy, but he liked the illustrations, so in the end it was one of Andrew’s favorite books.

A bus pulled up and Andrew stepped on. He looked down the length of it, illuminated by dingy fluorescent lights, took note of the lack of other passengers, and asked the bus driver: “Is this the bus for lonely kids?” to which the bus driver replied, “No, this is the Number 14.” It wasn’t the bus that Andrew had hoped for, but he found a seat, anyway.

40

I O n l y D r e am W h e n I ’ m Awa k e : J ohn F reem a n

41

42

D em ented Beauty : Rachel Marie Smith

At Twelve I Daydream of Touching Caroline’s Neck :

Rory Marinich

Wi n n e r of t h e 2 0 1 2 Un iv e rsi ty of the A rts Poetry Awa rd

I spent my childhood with my hand on the necks of imaginary girls who looked and talked like the girls I knew in real life.

This was before I was old enough to learn that boys ought to like tits and ass, before I got told that the best part of a swimsuit was what it covered. Life before breasts. I miss it.

Still, there were girls, whose clothes I memorized.

Emily, whose blue-and-brown aquarium dress’s ugliness I forgave for the tight black shirt she matched it with, because its neckline rested so nicely on her throat that it looked like a second skin. Or her red frilly thing, which fit loosely enough that the shirt hung open at her neck, very slightly, like a mouth murmuring secrets.

Caroline’s cute turtleneck with a zipper on the righthand side— “How perfect,” I thought, “for a lefty”— which just about beckons your hand to the proper place.

You know the position: One arm behind her back, left palm gently on her right cheek, pointer and middle fingers tucking her hair back behind her ear.

Ring and pinky wrapped at the neck’s bend, partly to pull her closer, but more to feel the movements behind her breath, her voice, the upward pull of her smile.

Those were my daydreams of these girls who kissed boys and danced so tight it made me go weird.

The girl who’d follow cute boys into the bathroom . . . how would her curls react to a brush of a finger?

Then two years passed, my voice dropped, and I realized I was missing something, so I spent five years thinking maybe I was a loser for not kissing girls in middle school or getting them into anal, for not knowing what “anal” meant.

But now I remember Caroline, her nervous ice blue eyed smile, her lips that looked like a frosting so sweet it would hurt the teeth, and I think: They never touched you in the place I’d have touched you, the cheek neck you lost when you grew older.

They touched the wrong places.

They missed the place that counts.

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44

S tor y I llustrated by Aidan Nemath

Back With Mirth

: Wes Greene

It was around midday when he rode into the town with the wagon rattling and clanging behind him, the spokes on the wheels decrepit and noisy and being held together by something beyond any man. The copious sweat on his face dripped down to the darkened ring around his collar and yet he did not wipe any of it away nor did he look at the faces staring at him. He passed by the church where a congregation was letting out, but if some chose not to pray that day they did so once the wagon passed before them. He found the hotel and pulled on the reins of his mule of similar age and features as he and the wagon lurched to a stop. This tinker of either rejected or forgotten effects stepped down from the wagon, sounding as if it would collapse under the weight of its products or maybe its history. The tinker walked into the hotel never once looking at his surroundings.

Several young boys began circling around the wagon, this derelict museum to something only their fathers could reckon, created by man but now existing in a state above them. Indigenous and exotic flowers and plants were tied to the corners along with skeletons of creatures long dead and since long dead that seemed to laugh at them for they knew their fate would be the same. Scalps and bones of human men and women hung among them, and when one of these boys had touched and mistaken a lock of human hair for a hide off some wild beast of the plains he stood holding his hand before running back crying. In a bag could be seen fossils and meteorites and petrified organisms, these solitary remnants burdened with the weight of their history before they too were carried off into the annals of nothingness. But it was the weapons that the boys took to, the makeshift

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spears and arrows and crude rock axes that they took off the walls of the wagon. One boy had taken a colonial firearm and filled it with the pouch of saltpeter hanging from the butt and had fired it into the air, causing the townspeople to duck with the loud crack of the antique shot and a plume of smoke to appear on earth and disappear higher than it. It was here the boys noticed a set of bars running down a small opening because the shrill cries of some creature forsaken from divinity began wildly calling from the inside, the wagon shaking mildly amidst the shrieking and howling of this bizarre consequence. The boys had all but gone, the one still carrying the old rifle, and the calls from the wagon had died within time. The tinker did not leave the hotel until it was assured the sweat would not come as easily.

The moonlight lit the town where the lanterns could not. The deputy walked along these deserted alleys toward the townsfolk scattered around a small and tattered tent of unknown origins, a crude handmade sign posted out front offering a free show of god knows what. The deputy reached the tent and looked about. The tinker’s mule was lying down and thought dead if not for the slight twitch of his ears to ward off parasites, the wagon nowhere to be seen. The deputy spat a long brown stream at the base of the signpost and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and walked past the oncoming people and inside the tent.

An unholy stench transcendent of all senses smacked the face of the deputy like the hand of an unforgiving parent and he doubled back clasping his nose and mouth. Through the thick haze of the putrid air he saw the other onlookers doing the same although their eyes had since well adjusted and they stood staring at the scene in front of them. A young couple had vacated a spot, looking at each other and shaking their heads in either horror or apathy. It was to this spot that the deputy walked up and approached the cage.

Small and narrow and constraining, hay and gruel and excrement spread out on the floor like some crude cultural tapestry, an imbecile pacing back and forth within its confines, naked and draped in its own blood and feces and disfigured bulletwound scars that dotted its body like badges, looking into the eyes of its audience whether taunting them or crying for help remained unknown. The crushing quietness was punctuated by the cries of this beast, and in one such instance the startled deputy looked up and into the imbecile’s fleeting stare. He withdrew his look within an instant and closed his eyes. When the deputy opened them again he saw the tinker sitting serenely in the corner of the tent looking at him.

He made his way toward the sweating tinker as the discontented left and the curious entered. The tinker sat crosslegged with an open sketchbook in front of him, sketching what he saw with an old charcoal utensil worked down to a stub. As the deputy approached he saw the tinker had drawn the exhibition in front of him, with several faces of its spectators sketched with notes.

What do you think? said the tinker.

It stinks like a durn hellfire.

46

Yes it does.

What is that thing?

The tinker drew.

Is that thing a man? said the deputy.

What the hell else would it be?

Okay. Regardless ye caint be pitchin no tent and puttin on some kinda show like you’re doin now without no special permit. You’re on private property.

Well.

I’m gonna have to ast ye to pack everthing up and ride on.

Where do I get this permit?

Too late now ye done pitched your tent already.

Okay.

And clean up this mess while you’re at it. Aint right for anyone to be walkin around like that.

Then whose right is it.

What?

The deputy looked down and saw the tinker was finishing sketching a portrait of him though the tinker had never looked up at the deputy. What are ye doin? the deputy said.

Nothing in this world exists without my knowledge.

Hm. Well now.

Do you take that for a joke?

I dont know what the hell I take it for.

Tell me. Do you see an artifact or a prognosis in front of you?

I see someone who should take a bath.

Tell me.

I dont know what ye mean.

You have a right to see an evolution. It is the only right you have. The right to see what you amount to before you are gutted from the memory of this earth.

Well. You got a tongue of a different sort. That aint what god says.

Yet these are his words. And that’s all you have of him. He left when that limitless sun rose on a war that was not of his making and therefore was not of his concern.

What war is that?

Yours. The war of man. War existed before you and will endure longer than you. Like everything you try to own it. But there is no permit for war.

I dont like your attitude.

The tinker closed his sketchbook and folded his hands and sat watching like some progenitor.

The deputy stared at him. I dont think it’s possible for one man to know everthing there is about creation.

Believing in secrets and hidden phenomena gives way to fear and the fools who live

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this way are invariably consumed by irrationality and crumble under their own adulation.

And there aint no secrets for ye.

If there is it exists without my compromise.

Is that why you’re wheelin around that cart or yourn?

The tinker nodded toward the imbecile. The cart is here the same way it is here, he said. It is the last vestige of civilization. I have seen more than you could possibly imagine and have saved the only commodity worth seeing before you or it is gone by my hand.

You’re crazy. You ort to be in that cage.

Good. You can come in there with me. If I had my way everything would be in that cage. Everything. There is already no disparity. Why not prove it.

Only thing you proved was you a rude little sneak.

What did you see?

What did I see?

What did you see when he looked in your eyes?

The deputy turned to the tinker, who sat back with his eyes closed and the sweat on his face glistening in some rarefied light that came elsewhere.

Did you see your mother? Your father? Your brother? Your son, grandson, descendants, ascendants, lover, master, enemy, brethren, apprentice, ghost? Me or you? What did you see?

The deputy watched the imbecile. It had begun banging its head on the metal bars of the cage and screaming with every hit. On the last one it bit its tongue and spit the blood on a young woman’s white eveningdress. She yelled and appeared as if she almost fainted but was carried out of the room by the arms. The indifferent imbecile moved on pacing back and forth within the cage.

Is that thing your kin? said the deputy, but the tinker was not in the tent and had withdrawn without a sound.

The deputy walked out the next morning to find a woman barely dressed in the street with several men surrounding her. It was only after he approached them that he saw the woman was crying and clutching her stomach. She had apparently been given alcohol, said a man, and in that state was violated and beaten until sunrise. The deputy asked where the marks were on her face but no one answered, a silence extended with each tear wiped from the woman’s face.

As the deputy walked he discovered another story of such similarity that he did not investigate further, and a third that warranted no inquiry whatsoever. Walking toward the church he saw the tinker’s wagon and mule, the mule watching him like some destitute vagrant that did not deserve the luxury of death. Looking at the wagonseat the deputy saw an old rifle leaning against the back and in the shadow cast by the sun a crystalline jar containing two small and curled hands in water that still shimmered in its absent light.

He found it in the courtyard of the church, still naked and rank but hogtied and bound to a post, bloodied and shot several times yet it was still breathing a labored and

48

asthmatic wheeze. A pool of dried blood covered the immediate ground like a personal adornment and was surrounded by men sporting pistols and knives and cat onine tails. As the deputy approached he saw deep cuts running through its body and as he stood over the imbecile it seemed to treat this incident as if it were on display once more. The imbecile spat blood at the foot of the deputy but the deputy did not move nor did he even flinch.

Mercy is irrelevant. You know that and it knows that.

The deputy looked up to see the tinker standing just to the side of the church, either having been there the entire time or having just arrived.

It aint gonna live, said the deputy.

What do you know about it.

The deputy drew his pistol and put it to the imbecile’s forehead, an open cicatrix staining the otherwise pristine metal.

Do not do it, man.

It aint gonna live. It aint right.

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You kill that boy you better be prepared.

But the deputy had looked down at the imbecile to see its head slowly rise and their eyes met once more but briefly since the trigger snapped and the white façade of the church was sprayed with whatever the imbecile knew or saw in that red gore that slowly dripped toward the ground.

The deputy had raised the pistol up to the tinker.

Do it, the tinker said. Do it.

The crowd with the deputy had dispersed and the tinker was left alone dragging the imbecile’s crumpled body to the wagon, a trail of blood that disappeared by the end of the day.

The twister came within the month, an immense cyclone of proportions lost on most men that came and touched down and disappeared in a matter of minutes but the destruction had already been doled out. Among the ruins, the battered or impaled bodies or parts thereof were strewn, the dust and grain whipping from the winds into the lungs of the living. The shards of broken businesses and homes reached into the sky like hands calling to any god that would show any mercy and the somnambulate on these trails, their eyes white with the preference of blindness, were kneeling or squatting until finally moving on to drift through the other wreckage.

The deputy was amidst the debris, looking up at a dustveiled sun, not moving except for the opening and closing of his eyes like some ritualistic acolyte. It was only later walking through a broken building all but unfamiliar that he found a serrated knife still clean enough to see his reflection, but he wiped it on his trouserleg nonetheless. The deputy brought the blade to his hand and closed his hand and drew the knife down slowly, his palm filling and finally staining the tarnished earth with the dark and heavy blood.

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Look :

A ly C as t le

I’ll look for you everywhere: in spray-painted rooms, in Joe Strummer’s voice, in stupid cartoons.

I’ll look for you in my bed sheets, between the strings of guitars, in sockless feet, and in cell phone alarms.

If I have to, I’ll look in the backseat of the car.

I’ll look for you in the sweat from another boy’s arms.

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52

Drift :

Kay Gehshan

Your feet lead you to the shoreline. The water is welcoming as it meets your next step.

Innocent splashes of saltwater taste of what is to come. You dive in. You have never experienced water so calm. So warm for the month of November. Months and months at sea, sunny or overcast, the water blue and sometimes silver from the sun’s reflection. You are simply floating, waves sailing your whole being to the middle of the ocean, something vast and never ending. You close your eyes, the wind and water music to your ears. You feel water land on your cheek, scattered at first, then you hear a sound. It has been so long since you heard a sound like this. Thunder. Clouds amplifying rumbles of thunder. After weeks without precipitation. It doesn’t faze you; there is nothing to be frightened about. Rain is rain.

This isn’t rain. This isn’t anything close to a storm. A derecho. Lightning and wind hit the surface of the sea creating instant wave pools. Raindrops like falling daggers. Learn how to swim or sink with no time to spare. The calm sea under a sunny sky has diminished, feels like it never happened. Fighting with every stroke, you swim, wanting to escape, find safety. Find land.

It lasts five weeks. Five weeks of fighting, yelling and relentless reevaluation of how you got to where you are right now.

The sea is calm, but grey and ruined. Floating and unsure where to go. You were in a battle with yourself. You knew what was right, but you didn’t know what you truly wanted.

Wait for something or make a move. The untrusting sea appears to have a low tide. It begins to fall shorter and shorter. You’re puzzled, but indifferent. Let it happen. The sea is nowhere to be found, as if a drain were unplugged somewhere at the bottom. Ground everywhere.

Your feet guide you to green grass. What was once sea is now acres of land in every direction. Dirt, tall grass and trees. The trees had color. It was Autumn. You wandered and pondered; a year must have passed. It’s been so long since you walked, one foot then the other. You were in love with the ocean; land didn’t stand a chance.

The more you learn, the more you find yourself at home in this place. You look up at a clear sky. Silent, still and peaceful. Your eyes skim the horizon and you squint at something. A golden peony, swaying on a windless day. You laugh. You laugh because you are that small flower. Surviving the storm. Standing tall, full of life in a stagnant surrounding.

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54

S to ry I llustrated by Grace O’Neill

Anonymous

: Megha n L oeb

I hate my job. I really do. I’m one of those people who had big plans for themselves, thought they were gonna get somewhere, be someone. I’m one of those people who said: “Hell yeah, I’m gonna make it big and everyone will know my name!”

That little sentiment sure gets shot to hell when your so-called television career somehow turns into teaching pipsqueak brats how to act instead of acting yourself.

I’m not a teacher. And small children are the worst. Seriously, where do they get all that energy? Two shots of espresso and I’m still struggling to keep up with them. My only break is snack time. Face-plant to desk in the teacher’s lounge for twenty minutes, casually drooling on a script.

“It’s only temporary, baby,” Ricky said, trying his best to console me after my first three days. I’d been complaining already. “It’s a good thing for the kids and their parents.

It’ll also give you something to put on your résumé. Just think of it as a stepping stone.”

A stepping stone, he says. I love the man, but I am not a patient person. Still, I guess it’s better than nothing. I should be grateful. Ricky is my number one fan. He lets me take up space in his apartment, takes me out, spoils me. He went through the trouble of helping me land the job. He’s the fifth-grade teacher here at Cherrygrove Elementary. They were trying to put together a play for the kids—a bright and happy rendition of Noah’s Ark, wholesome and educational—and Ricky told everybody that his girlfriend happened to have a Bachelor’s degree in Theatre with a minor in Education.

Sure, I minored in Education, but only because my parents didn’t believe in me. They

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said I needed a fallback plan in case my acting career didn’t play out. Every time they call, I tell them I have an audition, or that I’m waiting to hear back from somebody.

I feel a tugging on my shirtsleeve.

“Excuse me,” one of the kindergarten boys—Jimmy, I think his name is—says.

“Everybody’s done eating. Can we go play now?”

Just because we have a short snack break doesn’t automatically mean recess follows.

I stifle my frustration to make my voice sound soothing. “I’m sorry, honey, but we don’t play after snack time. After break we go back to practice.”

He pouts. “I don’t wanna practice anymore. My costume is hot and itchy.”

“It’s only a few more hours. You’ll be fine.”

He squirms in his off-white, fleecy sheep outfit and gives me a look, but joins his friends to bear the bad news. Poor things must dread having me as the Assistant Director.

I would, too.

I’m about to head back onstage when I spot a girl sitting in the farthest corner of the gym, all alone save for her fuzzy brown teddy bear. A pair of orange cat ears is clipped to the blonde curls that frame her small, round face. The rest of her tiny body is engulfed in a slouchy orange suit that looks like a recycled Tigger costume. She plays the Girl Tabby Cat, a character who is supposed to be playful and curious.

“Emma?” I say. I remember her name is Emma because I remember writing “teddy” next to her name on the attendance sheet. Emma, the girl with the teddy. “Shouldn’t you be joining the other kids onstage?”

Emma shoots me a sideways glance, but says nothing. I walk over and crouch by her side. “Emma? You okay?”

“I’m fine,” she says, nuzzling the bear with chubby flushed cheeks. “I will stay right here with Teddy.”

C’mon, kid. Just go onstage so I can get this over with, I don’t say. Instead I reply with a gentle, “But I don’t want you to be alone all the way over here.”

“I don’t want to be in the play,” the girl says. “I like to be by myself.”

“But you don’t want to be the anonymous girl in the background! You should go up there, make friends, have fun!”

She looks up at me. Those blue eyes couldn’t possibly get any bigger. “What does anomnus mean?”

“A-non-y-mous,” I pronounce for her. “It means that no one knows who you are.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

I blink. “Well, it’s lonely, for one thing! Nobody knows your name. Everyone overlooks you.”

“You remind me of Teddy,” Emma says, looking back down at her bear with a smile.

“He always wants attention. It’s why I can never leave him by himself.”

I stiffen a little. Did she just call me an attention-seeker? What could this five-yearold brat possibly know about that? Absolutely nothing, that’s what.

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When I get back to Ricky’s apartment after practice, I tell him about my conversation with Emma. “I never did get her to go onstage,” I say. “All she wanted to do was sit in the corner with her silly bear. I just don’t get it.”

“She’s obviously content to be by herself for now,” Ricky says. “Maybe she’s too shy to get up in front of a bunch of people. She’ll make friends when she’s ready.”

“And she said I want attention.”

Ricky laughs. “You do want attention! So of course someone like you wouldn’t understand the joys of living humbly once in a while.”

I spin on him. “What is that supposed to mean?”

He steps forward and wraps his arms around me, nuzzles my face playfully.

“Hey, hey! Watch the makeup.”

“You don’t need it—you have starlet beauty naturally,” he says, giving me the grin that never fails to soften a blow. “All I’m saying is, sometimes it’s nice when the world doesn’t know all about you.”

In the shower, I think the whole thing over. Hot water trickles down my skin, soothing my tense muscles, seeping deep into my pores. I was never a popular girl. I always wished to be noticed, in some way. Still do. “Attention-seeker” sounds so needy, though. I just want to be acknowledged for my spirit, talent, and good looks. Who doesn’t? Is that such a bad thing?

Face it, a five-year-old got to you. A five-year-old knows shit you can’t even begin to fathom.

I step out of the shower, into the steam. Maybe I could live a quiet life with Ricky and continue to be an Assistant Director, or take a job as an Acting professor at some snazzy university. I could tell the kids that being anonymous is a blissful thing; just floating around, not caring what you look like, what people think you look like, what people think.

Wrapping a towel around myself, I sit in front of the mirror and pull out my makeup bag. After moisturizing, I slather on my foundation.

I could tell them about letting everything go, and just focusing on the little things.

Blush.

The little things might end up being the big things, and you don’t wanna miss out on a single moment because you were busy gossiping up a storm on a hit talk show.

Eyeshadow. Mascara.

You hide behind barriers to give yourself a false sense of confidence. No one ever sees your true face ’cause it’s caked with a plaster mask, a pretense to keep up with appearances.

Maybe I could be anonymous?

I apply my favorite ruby red lipstick, smack my lips, and smile. “Nahhhh.”

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Rock and Roll :

Ma rtel Bi rd

They sent a technician out to tell us there’d be no second set.

I would hear later the venue was beyond capacity and the fire marshal found the band smoking pot backstage.

I saw a single folding chair fly out of the audience and cream the guy in the face, before a myriad of beer bottles launched into the air.

Now, that’s what I call Rock and Roll.

The hotel room was bombed out and depleted.

Irresponsible alcohol consumption, illicit drug use and reckless disregard for human decency had been this tribe’s credo.

Centerfolds from pornographic magazines of the most indecent nature decorated the walls once hung with cheap generic landscapes.

The only apology they could make was a hefty tip for the maid.

That’s what I call Rock and Roll.

Some say Rock is dead and they’ll remind you Jerry is dead and The Dead are gone.

But don’t think for a second we’re not out there anymore.

The Heathens.

We’re your parents’ worst nightmare, bringing madness and laughing gas to your town, still listening for that resounding whale call and watching for the rising wave to bring us to the next peak ’cause that’s what we live for.

It’s what we call Rock and Roll.

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I O n l y Dr e a m W h e n I ’ m Awa k e II : J ohn F reem a n

59

60

S tory I llustrated by David Curtis

Combat

: Veroni ca Za bczynsk i

Daddy looked like he had just won a fight with a lion. Don’t let that statement fool you.

Even winning, you’d still look like hell if you fought a lion.

I muscled a smile for his sake. The nurse told me that he’d been drifting between lucidity and incoherence for the past day and that his insides were almost worse off than his Jaguar. He had hit his head pretty hard, which I’d hoped would smack some common sense into him, but apparently it had had the opposite effect. They had drained the fluid in the cranial cavity when he was brought in, but now they were tracking for more fluid and possibly brain damage. He had broken three ribs, so I was surprised he was even able to sit up the way he did. The morphine must have been doing its job.

“What happened to me?”

He was calmer than he had been the last six times he asked today. I told him that he had crashed his car. I left out the part about the minivan, the pregnant mother and daughter he had killed, the father who was in the ICU and the other daughter who was barely scratched. I felt sorriest of all for her. She’d probably carry around the guilt of being fine for the rest of her life.

“Your mother told me not to buy a Mustang,” he chuckled.

“No, it was the . . . yeah, Mom told you.”

“Why aren’t you in school?”

“You’re in the hospital, Daddy.” It was impressive how good I was getting at this.

“We can’t risk you not getting into Harvard.”

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Harvard still haunted me. Daddy had taught literature there for thirty years. That’s where he met Mom. She was a student in his Advanced Fiction class. He used to say she was the only person he’d ever met who could write better than he could so he simply had to marry her. I didn’t doubt any of this–that she wrote better or that his sinister competitiveness motivated the marriage.

“Where’s Mom?”

“She’s getting a snack,” I lied, because it had worked before.

“Listen, Daisley. There are a few things I should tell you.”

“Daddy, don’t. You’re going to be fine. A few cuts and bruises, that’s all.” He’d bought that the last six times I sold it to him but not now. He was determined to leave me a ghost, a group of words that would follow me around.

“I want you to know that you don’t have to go to Harvard. Sure, it has some sentimental value to your mom and me, but you can go wherever you want. Community College will be okay, as long as you’re happy.”

I laughed at his lie. He wouldn’t be satisfied if I wasn’t cheering on John Harvard, the pilgrim. Finally, he laughed too but it morphed into a coughing fit that shook his body for a minute. It shook the whole bed for a minute. It shook me for longer.

“But don’t go to Community College, okay? I won a Pulitzer for God’s sake. I can’t have offspring matriculating with the future working class.”

And that was Daddy, even on a hospital bed.

“Don’t marry Pete. I know you like him. He’s probably all of the things a girl your age looks for in a man. He’s charismatic, has a fake ID and an easy time getting pot. Don’t settle for him. You should be with someone who’s as flawless as you, which is impossible.

Let me edit that. You should be with someone who knows how perfect you are and tells you that every single day. Marry someone who stares at you from across the room.”

He was talking about him and Mom, a thirty-two-year-old him and a twenty-yearold her. She wrote a poem about the way he used to look at her, keep at least one eye on her, no matter where she was. It was published in The Paris Review and later, Hestia’s Seat, her collection of poetry. He didn’t even want me to have my own version of love.

Daddy closed his eyes for a moment, long enough so that I could get a peek at his vein-covered eyelids.

“When you find that man, and he better be a man, don’t marry some little boy. A little boy will break your heart. A man, a true man, will open doors and pull out chairs.

And don’t get married on a beach. It’s becoming cliché.”

“Is wearing white cliché?” I asked.

“No, it’s classic. Learn the difference between cliché and classic. It will change your life, and your writing. Make sure you have at least one girl and one boy. You need to have both, like we have you and Holden. Where is Holden?”

“In Lon—at school. He had a midterm.”

“Make sure Holden becomes a man. He’s a little boy. Your mom is too soft on him.”

62

I laughed because he was right. Holden was still Mom’s little boy. She even ran him baths until he was sixteen.

“Your mom, she’s only so hard on you because she sees your potential. Don’t let her get to you. You’ll grow out of the baby fat. You’ll see, you’ll have a growth spurt, shoot right up and thin right out.”

I looked at the flab of sweater that stuck out over my jeans; under it was a gut of flesh. I stood and walked to Daddy’s side. I pushed his damp, gray hair off his face. There were eggplant bags under his eyes.

“I’m hard on you too because I love you. Make sure to become a writer sometime during your very busy life. I know you have all of these wild goals, like climbing Everest and meeting Madonna, but make sure you become a writer. The greatest joy I ever had was having my thoughts, my feelings, read and felt by another human being. It was the greatest form of intimacy and human connection that I have ever encountered.”

More than sex? More than your children being born? More than watching Mom across the room?

“I want you to feel that feeling. You are an excellent writer. Don’t roll your eyes. I know I tell you exactly what I think about your stories. I’m sorry. I should be gentler. But you have thoughts that should be heard. Don’t ever doubt that you should be heard.”

I nodded and thought of all the times someone had told me to shut up and I listened, of all the fights I had lost to listening.

The next time he came to, he believed me when I told him that he’d be fine, so I spared myself another speech.

There are certain things that you don’t tell a dying man. You don’t tell a dying man that he has had Alzheimer’s disease for the past seven years. You don’t tell him that he hasn’t been able to write for five years and that it was killing him faster than the Alzheimer’s. You don’t tell him that he hasn’t been legally allowed to drive since he ran a red light and left an eight-year-old wheelchair-bound. You don’t tell him that he is eighty-five years old and that you’re forty-eight. You let him think that you’re a junior in high school. You let him think that you’re seventeen and that his pearls of wisdom will be put to good use.

I didn’t go to Community College. I didn’t go to Harvard. I didn’t get in to Harvard.

Talk about a letdown for Dad. He fought that as hard as he could, almost lost his job over it. His second choice was BU. After a summer of arguing and silence, I went to California State University, solely because it was on the other coast.

Father disagreed with my choice and began disagreeing with every other choice I made.

Green beans instead of peas were apparently wrong. The blue blouse instead of the teal dress was, again, wrong. Mom didn’t side with Dad or me. She wasn’t very interested in fights of such miniscule matter. My freshman year of college, she was interested in glassblowing; the next year, astrology. When it came to Mother, the only consistency was her interest in her poetry.

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I worked as a waitress to get me through Cal State. Dad refused to pay for anything of which he didn’t approve. It was then that I found respect for the “working class” that my father had so looked down on.

I didn’t go to school for English or anything remotely close. The only English classes I took in college were my required freshman composition classes, which I, of course, got A’s in. Dad had plotted out a rigorous schedule of four years of English and literature and writing classes for me at Harvard. Thankfully, Holden would fulfill his dream six years later.

I didn’t marry Pete. My father was right: he was charismatic, had a fake ID and an easy time getting pot. We had a high school relationship. I went to prom with him and lost my virginity to him, not in that order. We had awful sex that I considered good because I lacked the experience to tell the difference.

In California, I had a string of month-long boyfriends. I’d have sex with them and try to justify it by dipping my toes into a relationship. My dad would have hated them all but he was probably just like them when he was in college. They were mostly pretentious stoners who thought that they were going to be artists of some sort.

Jared was the exception. He was a pretentious stoner who thought he was going to be an artist but he was the exception due to his talent and my feelings. Our relationship existed somewhere between opponents and lovers. We didn’t agree on anything while we were standing up—whether Meg Ryan was attractive, which was Bergman’s masterpiece, or if vampires were real. Horizontally, we never disagreed.

64

Eventually, there were things that we laughed about together so we began officially dating; before we had only been officially having sex. We fought less, but harder. Soon there was a purple stain on his kitchen wall from when I threw an unopened bottle of Pinot Noir at his head.

I still can’t decide if we loved each other or were just addicted to the adrenaline. He constantly told me that I made him good. Without me, he was “bad news”—his words, not mine. The thing about making someone good is that they will leave you for someone who makes them even better. Her name was Jenna.

Dad never met Jared. By that point, I had stopped coming home for holidays and vacations all together. I might have kept drifting farther and farther into the West Coast and away from home had Mom not died.

Mom was uncontrollable. She would go on rants about religion and history and feminism that nobody understood. She forced her ideas on me, even more heavily than Father did.

Or perhaps she didn’t force anything on me; it was just that her ideas were much heavier than Father’s. Father’s novels were mostly statements about society–a utopia, a corrupt royal dynasty, a nuclear family in the 1950s. His magnum opus was a coming-ofage novel about a boy who learns the truth about his senator father’s dirty politics. The son kills his father and becomes a politician himself. Mother’s poetry had themes of religion, Greek mythology, Freudian theories, and misogyny.

God, God, leave me in my bloody seat, I will birth defeat.

Hera ate your heart and labored that too.

Father, Daddy, women do this for you.

When Grammy came down with Alzheimer’s, she told me that during Mom’s teenage years, she had tried to kill herself on several different occasions. After almost succeeding with sleeping pills, Grammy had her committed. Mom never told Grammy what they did to her in the hospital.

If she tried to kill herself at all during my childhood, Dad hid it. I remember that she spent nights in the hospital but Dad told us that she had low blood sugar. When she returned home, I’d fix her up some tea with about ten spoonfuls of sugar in it. She never drank it and I would cry myself to sleep.

My junior year of college, she slit her wrists.

Holden was spending the night at one of his friend’s houses. She bled out an entire night before Dad found her the next morning. Dad was probably at one of his students’ apartments discussing the metaphors she used in a midterm story while she gave him

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head. Mom probably wanted him to find her before she was dead. I couldn’t blame him for her suicide. Mom married a dog, how could she blame him for being a dog? Their love was unhealthy in its control over them both. It was their religion but Mom was the zealot and Dad was the holiday believer.

When I was in elementary school, Mom would greet Holden and I with grilled cheese sandwiches. Holden sat on the couch and I spread out on the carpet. Mom sat in the armchair, crossed her legs and placed her hands in her lap. She looked like a queen.

“How was school?” she would ask.

Holden usually shrugged but I made sure to tell her everything, always especially about English class. I gulped down my last mouthful of cheese and took a heavy sip of milk before sitting next to my brother. I crossed my legs and mimicked Mom’s posture.

Sometimes, Mom asked questions about my stories; sometimes, she’d tell a story of her own; other times she nodded and, eventually, fell asleep in her queen-like position.

Dad came home a few hours later if he came home at all. Mom flung herself into his arms before he could even get his jacket off and asked him specific details about his day. During dinner, she glared at me if I interrupted one of his stories. Always after dinner, we were told to watch TV as Mom and Dad continued their talk. Sometimes, they would talk upstairs for an hour and come back down in their bathrobes.

In the morning, Mom would beg him to take the day off and pout when he left for work. Holden and I knew not to speak after Dad rushed out the door. His absences gave her headaches for which she had to take medicine.

A woman with a great need will make a man grin and leave.

After the funeral, I returned to college and I took a step back from being social. I didn’t have the energy for parties, working doubles for rent and mourning Mother. I didn’t know that this would be what they call “settling down.”

I met Justin, a film major from UCLA. We formed habits quickly. He folded my clothes after sex so they wouldn’t wrinkle. He made me breakfast and I ate it in the bathroom while he showered. We competed over which one of us could brush our teeth cleaner. We kissed to judge the results.

Since I was on speaking terms with my family again, I took him home to meet everyone. Holden was fourteen so he didn’t care much. He thought Justin was cool based on the fact that Justin was an older male who had had sex, never mind that it was with his sister.

My father hated him, which was to be expected. Not only was Justin dating his daughter, Justin was a film major. My father thought that film was a form of entertainment that paraded itself around as art. Justin cared more about Dad hating him than I did.

After graduation, Justin and I moved to Hollywood. I went to nursing school and Justin tried his hand at the film industry. He worked at a restaurant to help make

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ends meet so we didn’t see much of each other. Four years later, he finally sold a script.

Goodbye, working two jobs. Goodbye, shitty apartment with erratic electricity. Goodbye, car with no passenger side mirror.

He proposed. I said yes, not because of the way he looked at me, or because of volatile fights and explosive sex, but because of the way he made me feel. He didn’t make me feel like there was a specific point that I just wasn’t measuring up to. Dad never approved of him even though he opened doors and pulled out chairs.

I wore white when I got married in the Church that Mom had dragged us to all those Sunday mornings. Dad walked me down the aisle. Holden took Oxycodone and slept with one of the bridesmaids.

I didn’t have children until I was thirty-two. Danny is fifteen now. Sylvia is twelve.

I had Kaitlin four years ago. She is going to have a field day with throwing around the “I was a mistake” line when she is in her angst-ridden teenage years.

Holden is forty-two but still a boy. He went to Harvard, as Father intended. He became a writer, as Father intended. His first book was published when he was twenty-five.

It was critically acclaimed but Dad didn’t acclaim it. In fact, he criticized it to no end. Dad hadn’t published his first novel until he was twenty-eight. Something told me that Holden being published at a younger age than Dad wasn’t what Dad had planned.

Holden lives in London, Belfast and sometimes Paris now and only comes back to the States on Mom’s birthday to visit her grave, which is always decorated with flowers or letters from her cult-like fans. I visit Holden from time to time but Dad never has.

Holden still writes: novels, short stories, poems, essays. He’s published and acclaimed and his name is actually known by some of the general public. The public wouldn’t know his face. Nobody knows what writers look like, at least not while they’re still alive.

He’s doing well except that he cannot commit. He cannot wake up early. He has a maid come over to make his bed. Maybe Holden will get some British model, Irish milk maiden or Parisian chain-smoker pregnant after a shag, buy a flat and settle down and be happy. Maybe not.

I didn’t climb Mount Everest, though I do like hiking. I didn’t meet Madonna but I’ve been to twelve of her concerts. I didn’t become a writer.

When a seven-year-old shows you a short story, you’re not supposed to correct the grammar with a long speech about semi-colons. When a ten-year-old shows you a poem, don’t compare it to Plath or Sexton, especially because no ten-year-old should be reading Plath or Sexton, which is exactly what I did when Dad told me I’d never have the ear for rhythm they had. When a fifteen-year-old shows you her first one-act play, don’t tell her it’s impossible to stage because bunnies are hard to handle. Writing became a joyless task that I only did when necessary.

The only thing I write now is a weekly food-shopping list. I make breakfast for my children, coffee for my husband and bacon for Corky, our Bassett Hound. I work at the hospital, make dinner, cart my children off to their extracurriculars. Sometimes Justin and

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I have sex while the eleven o’clock news is on because we know Danny is too busy getting stoned in the garage and Sylvia too busy talking to her boyfriend to interrupt.

I might have told Dad about Jared if I had the chance. I kept tabs on Jared like any good ex-girlfriend; the invention of social networking made it easy. He actually sold his paintings for quite large sums of money. I suspect he married Bee Donnelly, the willowy fashion photographer, for her connections. I made him good, but she made him successful. Being successful is much more desirable than being good, at least to some.

His most well-known painting is called Combat. It’s an expressionistic piece depicting a girl painted in different hues of purple and red. Her head is in the shape of a wine glass.

When I saw that painting on my laptop in all its pixelated glory, I wanted to slit my wrists.

The thing I most wanted to tell Dad on that bed wasn’t any of this. Not that he’s a grandfather, or his wife killed herself, or his son is successful, or his daughter is fine.

I wanted to tell him that he didn’t crash the Mustang. He crashed a Jaguar that he didn’t even remember buying. I wanted to tell him how two days after Mom’s funeral, he made me come with him to the car dealership. He needed a “pick-me-up.” My eyes were still swollen from crying the night before. He was looking for something fast and sleek.

I was almost positive that he was buying a car to drive off a cliff. I wanted to tell him how in the middle of the car dealership that was too bright, too white, too clean, and too much like the hospital that Mom died in, I started to cry. He hushed me and hugged me.

I wanted to tell him how, finally, he put his hands on my shoulders and said: “Calm down, sweetheart. You’ll never be like her.” I know he intended these to be some sort of kind words but they were the heaviest kind words that I ever had to carry.

If Dad read this, I’m sure he’d find endless grammatical mistakes that aren’t really mistakes but just veer from his grammatical preferences. He’d critique what I think is my clever use of “Daddy” in the first half and “Dad” in the second. He’d tell me that the only likable character was the father who died on the hospital bed. He’d tell me to make the dad the protagonist.

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Monica and the Sunfish :

R ory Ma ri nich

I see Monica standing in the lake with her shirt off and a sunfish gasping in her hand.

And I saw the spidereggs in the bushes waiting to hatch, where the rocky forest river opens up to the lake where Monica made her catch.

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Gregory :

C lin t S orenson

I survey the room, pacing from door to window and back. A swarm of nurses hovers over my son’s pallid frame. I look to my wife; I see her swollen eyes. Holding in tears, holding his hand. She’s equally distressed, but conceals her emotion. She’s always had that ability over me. I stand surrounded by mural-covered walls, with midday sun coating the room in warm light. A façade of color, vibrant with deceit. This place is cold, sterile. Unfamiliar faces enter and exit. I beg them for answers. I raise my voice.

I’m told to sit. I realize my jaw is clenched, my open palms pressed against my temples. I approach a man who seems to be in charge. He wears a pale blue button-down, a colorful tie, clean-shaven head. He projects the same motif as this miserable place.

Who does he even think he is? I raise my voice, I raise my hands. Heartache no longer contained, I watch tears quietly stream down her flushed cheek. She clutches his small fingers, praying through a tender breath. Their eyes meet, reciprocating uncertainty.

An exchange never meant for mother and child. I shrug a nurse’s hand from my shoulder; the smell of latex pervades the air. I’m forcibly placed near the window, where I can feel the sun on my face. I listen to the nurse’s voice, attempting to console me. She speaks clearly, in a matter-of-fact tone. I know what she’s saying, but I choose not to listen. I withdraw, helpless. Seated in a purple chair. Absorbing inaudible chatter, letting the buzz of foreign machinery course through me. Hanging my head, face to the floor, fingers laced. Feeling the sweat across the nape of my neck. Exhaling through a hollow chest, an empty stomach. Vision blurred, contacts dry. Standing again, I feel the weight of the air. I feel the weight of my being, the weight of my child’s burden.

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Everything :

Ta yl or P a v a v i ch

Sprawled out like lifeless dolls on the floor of an old creaky wasteland and we’re talking but all I can hear is this deafening silence that has replaced the stomping and the laughter of souls just passing through.

The floorboards have stopped breathing and everything is still.

One hundred unanswered questions and one hundred children’s graves was all I could give you.

I’ll meet you somewhere between now and never.

No wall to separate my dreams from my reality.

Both run like water and bleed into each other, mixing brilliant colors with bright lights.

The house is simply magic, where time ceases to exist and the days are long and hazy and the night brings on the dancing and the heat wakes us in the morning and I open an eye just enough to glance at the significant year tattooed on your thigh.

The floor is sticky, the air is humid and the staircases are swollen like our hearts.

I wanted to write my words all over your body in black marker until you were covered and wearing a delicate suit of my thoughts.

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Gh o s t s : B e c k y S io r e k

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The P en Wi th The Bent Wri st Crooked King : Philip Mastrippolito

Bios

Devin Antram is a talented draftsman who hopes to find a way of making

illustrations that balance his descriptive pencil drawings and expressive painting technique.

And then he hopes to get a job.

(Il l u s t ra tio n ` 1 3 )

Martel Bird is a 26-year-old male human being. Poetry fascinates Bird, in

his attempt to convey meaning to his fellow earth companion travelers through space and time. He hopes you enjoy rock and roll, the future of music, as much as he does.

(Wri t i n g f o r F ilm & Te le v is ion ` 1 3 )

Benjamin Brotman once was a Turkish pirate who found a magical

monkey paw that granted him immortality. But after the British Navy caught up to his ship, he lost his ship, his whole crew and his beloved Beatrice. From there on out his life was devoted to vengeance. That was back in 1628; now he is working on this book.

(Gra p h i c D e s ig n ` 1 3 )

Rebecca Buckley is an intrepid seeker of knowledge. She writes

science, folk and fantasy fiction, as well as writing for screen and stage. She hopes to write comedy and to never write soap operas.

(Ac t i n g ` 1 4 )

Aly Castle likes to think that she is a runaway, seeking artistic freedom and

remarkable people to share it with. She may or may not spend the majority of her life as a rainbow-haired vagabond.

(Il l u s t ra tio n ` 1 6 )

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Nichole Celauro would like to use this space to say something witty, but she won’t think of anything till later. Nichole enjoys her role as Fiction Editor for Underground Pool, long walks on the beach and Mexican food. ( Wr it in g f o r F ilm & Tel ev i si on ` 1 4 )

David Curtis plans to move to New York City to pursue a career in free-

lance illustration. He has been drawing since he can remember and will continue to do so until he dies, or at least until McDonald’s calls him back. ( I llu s t r a t io n ` 1 3 )

Elizabeth Davas spent almost seven years studying photography in

high school and college before figuring out that writing was what she really wanted to do. She graduated in December and plans to move back to London in the fall to pursue a career in journalism. ( P h o t o g r ap h y ` 1 2 )

Marie DiLeva is a native Philadelphian with a deep fascination with both

written word and visual image. She believes that each can create and sculpt a momentary reality to be given from person to person like a carefully crafted gift. ( I llu s t r a t io n ` 1 3 )

John Freeman In 2011, these pieces were created through hopes and

dreams to move from Jupiter, Florida to Philadelphia one day. Dreams can turn into reality if you follow them. ( I llu s t r a t io n ` 1 6 )

Kay Gehshan is a petite lady who enjoys the world of design. She has a

steady relationship with the outdoors and enjoys black coffee or tea. She plans to teach herself the mandolin and to have a wood shop in her basement. ( G r a p h ic D e s ig n ` 1 3 )

Joe Granato is most inspired by storytelling, a good cup of coffee and fishing for the big ideas. ( G r a p h ic D e s ig n ` 1 3 )

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Wes Greene That mangy rim-timber polecat this side of the Writers for

Moving Pictures may haunt past the 2014 raisins in time for Ramadan, but I wouldn’t horsehog a pickled tink Toronto atheist on some rinky dink Hoover potboiler, grandson.

(Wri t i n g f o r F ilm & Te le v is ion ` 1 4 )

Meghan Loeb’s goal is to work at Pixar someday, alongside the talented

artists who collaborate so well to make one beautiful product. She’d like to be a writer on the side, and hopefully publish some books in the future.

(An i m a t i o n ` 1 5 )

Rory Marinich built tree forts in the New Jersey mountainside as a boy.

When he turned older, he accidentally decided to like poetry. He writes about one poem a year, and spends the rest of his time frivolously.

(Co mmu n ic at io n ` 1 2 )

Lissy Marlin is from the Dominican Republic. Her main purpose is to find out how to express the world she lives in through her illustrations in a way only she is able to do.

(Il l u s t ra tio n ` 1 4 )

Philip Mastrippolito This piece was painted flat on a table

using only tubes of oil paint and a plastic palette knife. It took almost six months to dry.

(Dra w i n g / P a in t in g o r “ M o s t L i k el y To Be Unem pl oyed” ` 1 5 )

Max Matiash wrote this story about a lonely, bummed-out kid and a bus.

Max enjoys writing stories about people who are bummed out about things, and stories about buses, too (for some reason). He also enjoys making sand castles and knocking down sand castles made by others.

(An i m a t i o n ` 1 4 )

Anne Meier loves to listen to audiobooks while she draws pictures. Currently she is listening to The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern which is very good, maybe even as good as The Book of Lost Things by John Connelly or Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman.

(Il l u s t ra tio n ` 1 4 )

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Aidan Nemath hopes to pursue a career in the video game industry as a Character Design Artist. Or as a squid farmer. Whichever comes first. ( I llu s t r a t io n ` 1 4 )

Kate O’Hara is from Reno, Nevada. She likes to make art with intricate design that is inspired by nature and uses a variety of mediums. ( I llu s t r a t io n ` 1 4 )

Grace O’Neill Post-graduation this May, I plan on moving to New York to pursue a career in editorial illustration. ( I llu s t r a t io n ` 1 3 )

Taylor Pavavich is a small girl in a big city who is simply forever moving, forever growing, and forever loving. ( G r a p h ic D e s ig n ` 1 4 )

Carlos Rios is a North Philadelphian whose writing is influenced by family, images, music, Russians, extraterrestrials, and the city in which he lives. ( Wr it in g f o r F ilm & Tel ev i si on ` 1 4 )

Camille Sassano “Phonetic Etiquette” utilizes the complex nature of language as a means of understanding the complex nature of language. ( M u lt id is c ip lin ar y Fi ne A rts ` 1 3 )

Sam Schechter hails from the infamous Jersey Shore. Much like her

ancestor, the three-toed sloth, she makes her nest in warm climates, leaving the burrow only to forage for an occasional pencil sharpener or a burrito. ( I llu s t r a t io n ` 1 3 )

Becky Siorek is a 19-year-old from New Egypt, New Jersey. “Ghosts” was shot in 35mm film. ( P h o t o g r ap h y ` 1 6 )

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Rachel Marie Smith loves to look at the world through the lens.

The things around her and people in her life are inspirations for her work. She loves films with heart-stopping cinematography and is a science fiction junkie. Her web site is rachel-marie-smith.com.

(Fi l m/ Vid e o ` 1 5 )

Clint Sorenson is currently in his twenties.

(Gra p h i c D e s ig n ` 1 3 )

Alex Stanilla is a boy hailing from the “sweetest town on earth.” He enjoys UFO-hunting and cooking pasta but has yet to figure out how to do both simultaneously.

(Wri t i n g f o r F ilm & Te le v is ion ` 1 4 )

Kyle Telman is a 21-year-old from Central New Jersey. His print-oriented

work embraces the residues of design process with the intent of imbuing history in a static piece.

(Gra p h i c D e s ig n ` 1 3 )

Veronica Zabczynski hopes to be a modern-day Sylvia Plath, without the whole suicide thing.

(Wri t i n g f o r F ilm & Te le v isi on ` 1 4 )

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Tra nsi ti oni ng to Big g er Turtles : Anne Meier