Issue No. 9, 2015-2016

nyu creative writing program college of arts & science

2015–2016

West 10th publishes poetry, prose, and art by New York University’s undergraduate students. It is edited and produced annually by a studentrun editorial board and the NYU Creative Writing Program. The ideas expressed in West 10th do not necessarily reflect those of NYU. The NYU Creative Writing Program faculty includes Anne Carson, Nathan Englander, Jonathan Safran Foer, Yusef Komunyakaa, Rick Moody, Sharon Olds, and Zadie Smith. The program director is Deborah Landau. The Creative Writing Program has distinguished itself for more than three decades as a leading national center for the study of literature and writing.

West 10th NYU Creative Writing Program Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House 58 West 10th Street New York, NY 10011 west10th.org Copyright © 2016 West 10th NYU Creative Writing Program’s Undergraduate Literary Journal ISSN: 1941-4374 Printed in the United States of America

Editor-in-Chief

Alyssa Matesic

Managing Editor

Anzhe Zhang

Prose Editors

Allen Fulghum Su Young Lee

Assistant Prose Editor

Cindy Li

Poetry Editors

Colin Drohan Abby Kosisko Justin Hong

Assistant Poetry Editors

Juliette MaignĂŠ Shannagh Rowland

Art Editor

Jenny Cronin

Web Editor

Judy Ziyi Gu

Copy Editor

Audrey Deng

Executive Editors

Matthew Rohrer Darin Strauss Joanna Yas

Staff Advisor

Joanna Yas

TABLE OF CONTENTS Editor’s Note 7 Poems by Kimiko Hahn, Guest Contributor 22 An Interview with Mira Jacob 66 Contributors’ Notes 85

Poetry Ying-Ying Zhang

10

There’s No Place Like

E Yeon Chang

13

시나브로: Sinabro

David Zumwalt

27

Childhood Sketch

Sydney Miller

28

8 times I got to know you

Jordana Weiner Editors’ Award Winner

40

When Life Gives You Lemons, Find the Grove

E Yeon Chang

42

An Elegy for Nathan

Tia Leilani Ramos

45

Memorial Day, 2015

Maya LeBeau

64

TV pitch for an “oh shit!”

Jae Lee

83

Persephone in Limbo

Camille Renaud

14

The Savage Garden

Kit Zauhar Editors’ Award Winner

32

We Are Here 24/7

Rosalyn Lin

48

The Art of the Nuclear Family

Matt Frost

74

I Am Panopticon

Prose

ART Alex Bollington

9

Soumyajit Ray

12

City that Never Sleeps

Cynthia Lee

21

Supernatural

Cynthia Lee

26

Disbelief

Amy Tiong

31

’50s

Sharon Attia

39

Seattle Public Market

Soumyajit Ray

44

Ghostly

Shilpa Kunnappillil

47

In the Shadow of Men

Soumyajit Ray

63

360° Earth

Monica Albornoz

65

Women, 2014

Jennifer Chu

73

The Hedonist

David R. Stapleton

82

The Desert

Cover

Dia Beacon

Sharon Attia

Lost in Thought

Editor’s Note

It’s an incredibly difficult and daunting task to select only several submissions for publication out of hundreds, but my time on the board of West 10th has taught me that it’s also an incredibly rewarding one.

Bound in these pages are voices I have never heard before—voices that will ring and reverberate in my ears even when the year 2016 seems a distant time and place. Bound in these pages are transporting pieces of art full of energy, attention, and atmosphere. But most importantly for me, bound in these pages are stories—in whatever shapes, sizes, and forms stories can take. The conversation they’ve created here is full of both affirmations and provocations; it strikes not one harmonious chord but many dissonant ones.

Being able to hold these stories in my hands is a thrill and a great privilege. Every time I turn back to these pieces I feel a wonderful sense of recognition and admiration: Ah, yes. This. I hope you will too. We selected the pieces that stirred something within us. Oftentimes, they pleased us; other times they deliberately pushed us out of our comfort zones. I have the pleasure of acknowledging two as our Editors’ Award recipients: Jordana Weiner’s “When Life Gives You Lemons, Find the Grove” in poetry and Kit Zauhar’s “We Are Here 24/7” in prose.

This issue would not be possible without the generosity and support of the Creative Writing Program faculty. Joanna Yas had all of the answers when I came to her with lists of questions and followed up with eight-paragraph emails. Matthew Rohrer and Darin Strauss took on the challenge of recognizing our Editors’ Award recipients.

We have Aaron Petrovich to thank for the beautiful layout of these pages. All those involved behind-the-scenes in making this issue come to life deserve much more appreciation than I can give here.

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A huge thank you to Kimiko Hahn for allowing us to print two of her incredible poems, and to Mira Jacob for so thoughtfully conversing with us about the worlds of writing, rewriting, and publishing.

My fellow editors are some of the most attentive and talented writers and readers I know; I am indebted to them for having seen things I was blind to. Lastly, thank you to all who attended our workshops and reading events over the past year, to all those who submitted, and to all those reading.

I invite you now to turn the page—read, absorb, and enjoy.

Alyssa Matesic

8

Alex Bollington, Lost in Thought

9

Ying-Ying Zhang

There’s No Place Like

A Home: fixed point address committed in sing-song so a four-year-old mind would forget to forget.

Home phone: number eternal her oldest memory has a rotary dial.

B World without change. My mother burning dinner while on the phone. Dad’s hard hat and sweater vests. Grandma’s peach trees, my sister’s piano lessons, a Toyota gently rusting in the garage.

A Home is affixed: star pointing low towards Appalachia. she loses her old house, keeps street name for a security question. she loses her old number, keeps boys yelling chink; calling sodas “pop.”

C On her last day my mother forgot her name. Responded only to “Mom.” 10

Ying-Ying Zhang

Years later I visited. Grandma’s trees are taller. Everything else is in the Earth.

A Home: pointless idea unfixed but its memories are hell on the shoulders.

11

Soumyajit Ray, City that Never Sleeps

12

E Yeon Chang

시나브로: Sinabro

(adverb) little by little, unwittingly my tongue is a war child of forgotten crossfire, a tea-stained tablecloth pulled at the edges, by the edges from the edges; I write despicably, infected by English: like pale skin and soft hands, Poppa admires the indulgence of my poetry; forgets he once had to beat a pickpocket— pillager with a stick, until men learned to stop visiting at rude hours; once, twice, a hundred times, I’ve dreamt of peach -bottomed babes as cannonades: recessive nightmares painted over with pretty colors; I’ve never craved the acidic raindrops of this haunted promised land but Seoul is the only city I’ll ever know.

13

Camille Renaud

The Savage Garden

T

here was a town on the west coast of a tiny banana republic called Concepción. In the town lived a young man named Téolindo. His mother, who had recently moved several miles inland to be with her new husband, had always called him Téo, and so everyone else called him Téo, too. For twelve thousand colones an hour he taught tourists with pinky-red skin how to stand up on a surfboard in the water. He lived in an apartamiento above Dos Pájaros, a restaurantbar in the middle of town. But he wanted to buy a place by the ocean, where he could build a life with his woman and where loud merengue music wouldn’t drift up through the floorboards and disturb him at night.

Téo’s mamá was called María Paula. She had had high hopes for her son when he was born, when María Paula was just sixteen years old. She would look down at him as he suckled her breast and sigh with relief at the thought that it was he, not she, who was destined for las grandes cosas.

The thought of great things had troubled María Paula ever since she had learned about them, reading sticky plastic-covered libros from the local library as a child. How could she ascend the mountain? How could she find her pot of gold? She prayed not for God to grant her what she desired, but for Him to relieve her of the terrible pain of desiring it. And when Téo arrived—the product of a tryst with a slick ciudadano who disappeared as soon as he came—María didn’t despair at the thunderclap of doors being shut to her one by one. She cried tears of joy at the knowledge that there was nothing, really, she could do—that God had agreed to scoop her up and carry her towards the horizon of her fate.

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Camille Renaud

María Paula’s love for Téo was sweet and fresh and pure. She walked in languid bliss to the market each day, baby slung across her chest, all but deaf to the stinging insults of her neighbors, thrown at her like sun-hot coins as she passed. She turned the other cheek because she knew that they shamed her not out of hate, but out of duty.

A yearning, book-obsessed girl induced fear; an unwed mother they could love.

The final act of grace was Téo himself. In the eyes of the townspeople, the wrongs of the mother had no transference onto the child, who proved to be a charming and humble boy. With midnight-black curls and skin that shone like bronze, Téo earned the nickname el Príncipe after his classic good looks, cherubic in youth and growing ever more handsome in adolescence. Like his mother, he was sparing of word but wise of speech, leaping into full sentences when he first began to talk and earning full marks at school. But despite his enviable strengths, Téo was determined to be seen as one of la puebla. He spent his teenage years out dancing with his peers instead of studying and refused to apply to university. This caused great pain to María Paula, who never truly forgave him.

María Paula married Téo’s stepfather when Téo was sixteen years old, the same age she had been when Téo was born. They moved further inland once they were married, because the town of Concepción had swollen with tourism in recent years and prices were going up. Téo took a job at the local surf shop with a friend he’d known at school and leased an apartment in town, hanging a picture of María Paula by his dresser. He also kept an old metal cigar-box underneath one of the floorboards by his bed, filled with flattened-out bills to fund the purchase of his house by the sea. On weekends he went out with Josefina, his woman—his nóvia since forever—a girl of his age from a neighboring town.

A house with the ocean at its feet, a wife to care for him, children he could call his own: this was what Téo had decided to want from early on. Unlike his mother, Téo knew that you could choose your dreams, that you could tend to them and prune them like a shrub. So 15

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when the blooms of his desire grew fast and heavy, he cut them before they could overwhelm the bush. Breathing in his mother’s sadness, the tender gloom behind her smile, Téo sensed that she had let her life’s force run rampant, its wanton plantlife creeping wide. He had resolved, then, to never inherit his mother’s heart, savage garden that it was, flush with birthings and decay.

He saved his money little by little and told Josefina, who grew more impatient with each passing day, “just a little longer, mi amor.”

She kissed him wildly before returning to her parents at night, grinding her body against his as if to fuse them together.

“Pero cuándo?” Josefina whined, the warm heat of her body making Téo feel weak. She was hopelessly beautiful, and Téo ached to have her. But he breathed through it every time, knowing that pain was only a bitter kind of joy.

After he dropped Josefina off at her house on his motocicleta one night, Téo headed to the beach and walked into the ocean, stripping off his clothes and diving under the waves. The water cooled his senses and the moonlight shone in his upturned eyes. He was a man in the fully charged and desperate throttle of his life.

It was then that he saw a figure on the shore. Walking along the beach was a girl alone. She was the only person on that section of beach, which led Téo to the strange and passing thought that he and the girl were perhaps, for that moment, the only people on the Earth.

The girl moved gracefully, as if she were gliding. Téo had ducked down at the sight of her, and now only his head and shoulders stuck out above the water. He did not know why he did this. Perhaps because he was naked, and had felt suddenly ashamed.

Then the girl turned, and Téo wished himself a shadow on the sea. The moonlight was shining on the girl’s skin like mother-of-pearl.

That night, Téo turned so often in his bed that in the morning he woke up and found himself entangled in the sheets.

The girl from the beach appeared at the surf shop the next day. Téo was waxing one of the renter boards when she appeared in the open doorway, the hem of her dress fluttering as the fan rotated her way.

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Camille Renaud

Her name was something that sounded lyrical and elegant in her language but horribly off-key en español. She was slender; perhaps the same age as Josefina but in no way rivaling the latter’s formidable curves. Téo put down his waxing rag as she talked, her voice lilting like music. He found himself mesmerized, unable to understand a word.

They began the lesson on the sand, Téo miming the paddling and the jump one had to accomplish in order to stand up in the water. The girl managed the task with strange gracefulness, her slender muscles gripping and relaxing underneath the translucent skin.

“Like this?” she asked, breathless.

“Yes,” Téo said. “Like that.”

They went into the water. It was noon, which made it too hot for a surf lesson, but the girl had insisted. When she slid the plane of her body on top of the board, Téo felt sweat trickle into his eyes, stinging.

He wiped his face on his arm, and when she turned her head to look back at him—like this?—he met her gaze and smiled. Like that.

She wasn’t able to stand up on her first try—or her second, or third. The girl was self-deprecating about this, and laughed as Téo gripped her arms to pull her off the ocean floor.

“I’m awful,” she said.

“You can do it, cariña,” Téo said. He could see the outline of her breasts underneath the thin fabric of her suit.

When she finally was able to stand—a triumphant five seconds— there was a whooping and shouting from the shore. The girls’ parents, two outlines against the blinding-hot sand, were cheering the girl on.

Pulling the board along the water with her, the girl approached Téo, rolling her eyes as if the two of them shared a secret.

“Family vacation,” she said, and Téo smiled weakly in response.

At the arrival of the girl’s parents he had felt something like a pull in his stomach, as if he had eaten something rotten sometime before. He averted his eyes as the girl cocked a hip and looked at him, raising a hand to shade her eyes.

“I’m dying for a night out,” she said.

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Téo felt the sun beating down on his face as she spoke. The heat had become unbearable, and suddenly he felt very light, as if the past lay infinitely behind him, at the point where the sky touches the sea.

They met at ten o’clock that night at Dos Pájaros. The girl wore a dress whose skirt fell from her waist like the petals of a rose. When she greeted Téo it was with an embrace, and as she pulled away he smelled something dark and musky on her skin.

Téo ordered drinks; the girl laughed at his suggestion of margaritas and insisted on wine.

“Although they probably don’t have anything good,” she said.

As the girl drank she became louder. She had gotten a day’s sun; the tops of her shoulders, the bridge of her nose and her smooth, wide forehead all seemed to grow redder as the night went on.

Towards midnight Téo couldn’t stand it—the thudding of his pulse in his ears. A feeling like fire was creeping up his chest, and whether it was anger or desire, he didn’t know. When she asked to see his apartment, he consented. He felt the eyes of the other patrons follow him as he led the girl to the door, and the sensation was as sharp and sweet as knives.

Téo took the girl’s hand before they ascended the creaking wooden steps. When he opened the door to his apartment, the girl entered, then looked back at him.

“Come on,” she said, shaking her head, amused by something that Téo couldn’t guess.

At first the girl seemed bored. Téo stood a little ways away from her in the room, watching her touch the books he had on his dresser, and then his statue of the Virgin. Then she paused.

“Who’s this?” the girl asked. She was looking at the picture of María Paula hung above the dresser.

“Mi mamá,” Téo responded.

The girl stood studying the photograph. It was of María Paula at sixteen years old, her dark hair around her shoulders, standing against the trunk of a moss-covered tree. Téo had found it in the bottom of 18

Camille Renaud

a box in a crowded closet in his childhood home. He had kept it not because of who was pictured—there were many other photos of his mother—but because of who had taken it. He had never asked María Paula about it, but he didn’t have to. He knew.

Téo walked towards the girl, who was still looking at the photograph. Reaching out his hand, the first place he touched was her shoulder, still red from its burn. She flinched at his touch, and then, with a slowness that seemed eternal, she turned herself to face him.

In the morning, Téo woke up alone. The girl had mentioned that her flight was the next day, so she had left in the early morning. He pulled on his clothes from the previous night, which were strewn by the bedside, and walked out of his apartment and towards the beach.

After giving lessons all day, Téo returned to his apartment to shower and change his clothes. He was supposed to pick up Josefina that night to go dancing. Upon entering the apartment, he froze. There was a pale rectangle on the wall where his mother’s picture had been.

Téo cursed. He began to search the apartment, even though he knew he wouldn’t find the picture there. Panicking, he pried open the floorboard under the bed. His cashbox was still there. Kneeling before the bed, he pulled the box out from its place under the floor and held it in his hands.

Téo opened the box. The bills were all there, decompressed and rising, bursting from their stronghold like an all-consuming weed.

Suddenly, Téo slammed the lid of the metal box and threw it across the room with a shout. The box made a loud, dull noise as it hit the wall and clattered to the floor.

Téo felt something like nausea rise within him. He sprang to his feet and fled the room.

That night, sitting alone in a dark corner of Dos Pájaros, he got drunk on cheap wine. It was dark, blood-red and bitter. It helped to dull the ache inside him, which was beating like a drum. He picked up his phone near midnight, after hours of calls from Josefina.

As soon as he answered, he was met with a slew of curses.

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“Why didn’t you call?” Josefina yelled. “You worthless . . . I know, don’t you know? I know what you did with that puta gringa.”

“What are you talking about?” Téo slurred.

“I know, Téo. Todo el mundo sabe. And everyone says, leave him, the hijo de puta, and I say no. Because I love you. Because I thought you loved me, too.” There was a noise like a hiccup. “But you don’t care! You don’t care about anything, Téolindo. You think you’re better than all of us.”

The call ended.

Téo exploded, letting out an angry shout. He shoved his phone in the pocket of his jeans and stalked across the bar to the outside, over to his motocicleta on the curb. He got on, slammed the helmet on his head and revved the engine. He sped up the street and turned onto the road that curved around the mountains.

Todo el mundo sabe. Everyone knows.

He thought of his mother’s picture on the wall of an American bedroom.

The bike’s engine roared. Téo thought his heart would burst from his chest.

There was a flash of blinding headlights, and a truck’s sounding horn. Téo swerved and just missed the collision, turning sharply towards the edge. The sleeping jungle bristled at the touch, and unhinged her putrid jaw.

The songs of night birds were ringing as Téo fell to her embrace.

20

Cynthia Lee, Supernatural

21

Poems by Kimiko Hahn, Guest Contributor Kimiko Hahn, author of nine books, finds that disparate sources have given way to her poetry—whether black lung disease in Volatile, Flaubert’s sex tour in The Unbearable Heart, an exhumation in The Artist’s Daughter, or classical Japanese forms in The Narrow Road to the Interior. Rarified fields of science prompted her latest collections Toxic Flora and Brain Fever. A passionate advocate of chapbooks, her latest is The Cryptic Chamber. She enjoys her occasional teaching at NYU and is a distinguished professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College, City University of New York.

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Kimiko Hahn

Things that Give a Feeling of Homesick Wrigley Spearmint gum Mothballs “A certain Slant of light”: yellow rays through black leaves and branches A whale breaching—although that is Mother’s Antidote: coffee with Miya and/or Rei Antidote: coffee with Tomie and e-mails from Nicole, Meena, Marilyn, Jo— Mildew Antidote: well vodka Princess Sissy coffee cup from Vienna Turpentine from those large orange and black cans. (But do these things convey home or homesick? I cannot tell the difference, it seems.)

Hearing a mother speak Japanese to a baby: tabenasai Not only mildew, but also mulch. (But do these convey home or homesick? Can I tell the difference—?)

And poster paint.

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Antidote: Raisinettes Cigarette smoke swirling in a small room reminds me of grad school.

My boyfriend. His cigarettes. Our new electric typewriter. Typewriter ribbon.

An enormous elm in Prospect Park. Someone hung himself on a bough and at the time I thought, I would choose the woods behind our house.

Our Bodies, Ourselves Geta Oh, yes, and carbon paper

24

Kimiko Hahn

Seasonal Zuihitsu after Sei Shonagon In spring it is slates of ice floating on a pond. Or, more towards summer, the pond steaming in the cool morning. Then, too the sudden buds turning the air green.

In summer it is the light. And the fenced-in area of the beach where the terns nest in dune grass. A month later the chicks cross the borders and we chase them back in. They are sand-colored and scurry into the shallow shadows. Also on the beach: beached-horseshoe crabs that need to be turned upright, large fish picked at by the gulls, comb fish in August, raspberry-picking at a country stand. Obon dance with the girls.

In fall, the cooling light. The red. The leave-taking. And everyone is back to all-business which can include a Gala.

In winter, the vineyards are mere fences of twigs and wires. The snow clumps across the corn or cabbage furrows. The city is black or blackand-white. The streets do not smell so rank. Holiday lights. New Year’s Day poetry readings. Feet that are cold until the thaw.

25

Cynthia Lee, Disbelief

26

David Zumwalt

Childhood Sketch

Two bicycles, one twisted and its back wheel spinning crazily; one boy limps, the right half of his body supported by the other’s hip; we grow up separately and unavoidably flawed, in the way a tomato plant will bend in the rain until the main stalk snaps and small black ants emerge from the ground to consume its mess.

The limping boy’s knees are torn to bits.

Scraps of gravel cling to the insides of his cuts.

The other boy (and he is “other”) spots a hose lying unmanned on a nearby lawn. By tracing the hose to its source, he cleans the gravel off. This is what love is.

Cleaning up after other people. Neither of the boys knows this yet, or would find it particularly interesting.

It’s summer. The bicycle is smashed. One boy will implode without the other.

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Sydney Miller

8 times I got to know you

1 When we walked under the bridge on our way to your favorite cupcake place, I told you that it was the first time I had ever seen barbed wire in real life.

You told me you grew up with it— The lace border to playgrounds, threading over walls so high that no one would ever think to climb them in the first place.

Background noise, static against the sky.

2 I bought you lunch.

I told you not to pay me back.

Later, you gave me a five, two ones, a dime and three pennies.

You said you never wanted to owe anything to anyone.

3 When my parents visited, my father asked what your father does for a living and you quietly quietly cried, while my mother held her breath and her tongue.

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Sydney Miller

4 You tell me you’re excited, that you’d rather spend Christmas in New York than in the southern heat.

I know that it’s really because you don’t want to hear your relatives say how proud of you he would be.

5 You say it’s not that God isn’t real, it’s just that God isn’t right (or at least this one isn’t).

You tell me you can’t have faith in a Savior that doesn’t save.

Our Father cannot replace yours.

We hold hands on the walk back home, imagining all the people walking with us.

6 Two years later, when they needled his Jeep Grand Cherokee onto the back of your left shoulder, it didn’t feel as permanent as the crumpled metal, or as final as the etched granite on the grass that Friday.

You still can’t talk to anyone with the same name as him.

7 By the next time we go to get cupcakes, we have stopped keeping track of our debts.

We take turns paying for desserts and 29

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lunches, holding hands beneath the bridge, where the barbed wire still weaves like shoelaces through the curling metal of the railing.

When we fall asleep that night, it is not too dark for me to trace the lines on your shoulder of the car that you will never drive.

8 Tonight when you grin I know that your smiles are reserved, fit only for moments like these, when darkness is held off by a strong outstretched arm, shaking with the effort of being (happy).

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Amy Tiong, ’50s

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Kit Zauhar

We Are Here 24/7 Winner of the 2016 Editors’ Award in Prose

A

t the CVS I stand in line behind an old woman trying to pick up a film camera: “What is it?”

“It was a Nikon, I think—” “So you dropped off a whole camera?”

“That’s right.”

The woman is very old, late eighties maybe. Her spine carries the weight of mistakes made by children and then grandchildren. Her breasts swing like dull pendulums under her loose wool coat. Her whole body looks as though it has been sucked dry. She has a large brown mole on her cheek that reminds me of dried-up tapioca and a blue hat that I immediately assume she knit herself because who else could’ve bothered. Her hair glows white gold in the fluorescent light and suddenly the CVS is humming a single tone. The plastic pills in prescription bottles start rattling.

I remember watching airborne hairs of my grandmother’s float like dust particles in sunlight. I’d sit on her lap and reach upwards towards white light, letting my fingers hover underneath the individual strands, which rippled like translucent tentacles in deep sea water. A game my younger self would play with gravity.

“When did you drop it off?”

“Last year, November, I think—” “Hold up. You dropped off this camera last year?”

“That’s right.”

Maybe in the old days, when I was nothing but particles of other people and the air between them, you could just drop off a whole camera and pick it up whenever. They’d wait for you. You’d drop it

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Kit Zauhar

off and they would say, Don’t worry. We’ll keep it. Sealed away till you’re ready to pick up the memories too painful to collect. We’ll hold the burden ourselves, us CVS employees. We’ll witness the dead sister and the rude grandchild, the husband you divorced and the best meal you’ll ever have eaten, so you don’t have to.

“Well, miss, I don’t know what to tell you. We throw away film after six months.”

“But it was a whole camera . . . can I speak to someone who worked here then?”

“None of us worked here last year.”

Well how did you all get here, you random congregation of red-vested pharmacists and salespeople, who have decided to spend your time selling nicotine patches and discount candy? What will you all be doing if you were not here last year and will not be here the next?

“So, you don’t have it?”

“No, ma’am.”

No apology. The old woman didn’t pick it up in time. This CVS has rules. The old woman walks away, patting her knit cap tighter over her head like she’s trying to empty her skull of coins. I can almost hear her whispering, where could it be? maybe I did pick it up? Why can’t I remember? I trail behind her looking for the loose change so she isn’t short-handed at the laundromat, and she turns around, crying, or perhaps it’s the perpetual under-eye wet of the elderly, either way it makes my body quiver, go sore with a sudden exhaustion. I watch the woman’s body deflate like a punctured sandbag. I lick my finger and put it to the knubbly grey carpet to pick up the sediment. I put it to my lips. It tastes like the heated copper of a burnt-out bulb.

When I look up, the old woman is walking away, each step the slow timpani beat of a mourner’s song.

The security guard at the front shakes his head when I try to follow: “I don’t know where you’re going with that. You’ve gotta pay, miss.”

I don’t know where I’m going either. I want to run to a river, swim across the river, through that river, into another state, change 33

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my name, start a new life, try to forget the old woman with the tapioca skin.

I walk up to the register, where the cashier tries to continue the conversation: “That woman was really trying to pick up a camera that she dropped off a year ago. Hmph.”

Shut up. Shut up shut up shut up.

She rings up my tampons and gum. I pay and leave to go home though I don’t want to. Outside it’s dark and lonely. I look for the old woman, to do what, I don’t know: apologize for everyone young and red-vested, walk her home, buy her another camera. But she is gone, perhaps having disappeared into a nearby taxi or street lamp.

“Hello?” I call out, teasing at the silence. No response. It’s strange how so many people around me seem to vanish, like particles zapped up into telephone poles.

I wonder what was on that roll of film. Last year, November.

Thanksgiving dinner maybe? Her family has come to see her and she had had the neighbors help her prepare a feast. She is wearing a dress she could only fit in as a twenty-something; she’s gotten that thin. She watches her grandchildren snatch piecrust off each other’s plates and thinks, this is happiness. She gets a picture just as the kids cackle, snot running down their noses, whipped cream smeared on their cheeks.

She thinks, this is family. She sees her daughter, now elegant and tired and middle-aged, playing with the gold necklace her husband gave her on their tenth anniversary. She takes a picture, knowing the flash will make the necklace glow and sing. She thinks, this is what it is to love.

Now that camera is in a trash heap, buried under used condoms and tissues, soy sauce–glazed take-out containers and expired ketchup bottles. Excavators thousands of years from now will find it. One of them will take it gingerly in gloved hands and show it like a newborn bird to his intern and say, They used to take pictures with this. There are little paintings made with light and chemicals stored in a capsule inside. They’ll open it carefully, to find that the film was never wound.

Sunlight destroys memories as quickly as your local CVS. 34

Kit Zauhar

I walk home quickly. It is a cold and stern night and I don’t want it to catch up to me. I feel like I am being scolded by the gravel bits getting stuck in the soles of my shoes and the homeless man who barks at me for change. The world is out to get me tonight, but I’ll take it. Better me than the old woman.

The doorman is talking dirty on the phone when I get back. He has two apple cores lined up like little soldiers on the front desk and is sucking on the skin of a third. Every day I joke that I need to introduce him to some better fruits. Has he ever had a persimmon, an Asian pear? I could pick one up from Chinatown for him. One time I told him I didn’t like apples very much, they got stuck in my inner retainer. I opened my mouth and tilted my head down so he was a giant explorer in my miniature membranous cave. I let him run his apple-sticky index finger along the metal track stuck with plasticine glue to the back of my bottom teeth. He smiled and said, Cute.

“Baby, you sound real sexy but I’m at work. Uh huh. Yeah, you know I like that.”

I place a peach on his desk. He fondles it and smiles at me. Winks.

I wink back.

“I get off work at three. Yeah, I know you can stay wet for me.”

Cute.

I run my tongue along the metal track and walk through the gate.

He doesn’t make me swipe in anymore. I’m a regular among regulars.

Upstairs I sit heavy on my bed and turn off all my lights. When I was younger I used to be terrified of the dark. An indigo-mute childhood bedroom was death to me. Now it feels safe. I’d rather death sneak up on me than say, Hi how are you doing? and give me the chance to see all the wrinkles and moles on her face.

I look out the window into the abandoned office building across the street. Sometimes when it’s late I trick myself into thinking that there are dance parties, secret cult meetings, late-night infomercials being filmed in there. The 90’s Macbooks and broken paper shredders are just a ruse, a cover-up. Someone said: how can we make this look like the most ordinary office space ever? But they can’t fool me.

35

WEST 10TH

A light turns on and my heart glitches. I watch eagerly for two lovers to meet, a porn film crew to enter and put up the sexy accountant set. Instead, a maid, plump and nondescript with a tight bun and yellow gloves comes in and starts picking up half-full trash bags.

Disappointed that the world will never be as exciting as I want it to be, I close my eyes and tally up the costs of setting up my own porn studio in my bedroom.

When I wake up the dark is still angry with me, so I don’t go out.

I stay looking across to the office building again, letting my eyes go static, stretching the windows into small parallel lines of yellow light.

Then it slants back to normal as I spot a small figure next to my bamboo plant. This time it’s not the maid. It is a man, dressed in a green suit with a grass pattern all over it. He is looking at me. He smiles like we’ve been reunited in a crowded airport terminal. He waves big so I can find him. It’s been years! Look how much you’ve changed! Still beautiful as ever! I wave back. He keeps waving so I keep waving, I run like I’m on a treadmill so at least it feels like I’m getting closer, like I’m trying to reach him. I jump on my bed and wave at him. I dance to a song we are both hearing and wave to him. He jumps back, beckoning like a man on an island who’s just spotted a helicopter overhead. I turn my arms into propellers but cannot fly over to him. I can’t reach you! But we’re still connecting! I still feel like I’m touching your cheeks, hugging you tight! I call the boy I sometimes I have sex with. I tell him a man in the office building is waving at me! He needs to come over now now now.

By the time he gets here the man is gone. A light particle evaporated into the swinging overhead beams as soon as I look up from my phone. The boy laughs at how crazy I am and kisses me. In between kisses he tells me everything he likes about me in alphabetical order: starting with my abnormal behavior. Now that the man across the street isn’t watching I’m not sure if I want this boy here. But it’s too late. He strips me down, pulling at my tight pants vigorously. Whenever a boy pulls off my pants I feel like I’m getting a diaper changed and I feel an urge to wail, Daddy Daddy. Call it an Oedipal complex, 36

Kit Zauhar

I call it make-believe. The air smells like the strawberry lubricant he insists on using because he’s always afraid I’m not wet enough (Daddy wants to make sure I’m wet enough). He pulses inside me. I am an ocean and he is a throbbing jellyfish. He turns me around and starts from the back. Our rhythms are out of sync. He is fast rap and I am white noise, a static moan of muted satisfaction. He feels the dull vibration in my bones and wants me to short-circuit, so he spits on me.

Mucous trails slowly and deliberately into the baby hairs of my lower back. He rubs them in and tells me how beautiful my body is.

When I was in third grade I was riding the school bus home and a boy had tried to spit on his friend long distance but it had landed on my scalp, a comet exploding, dinosaurs disintegrating; a river formed on the topography of my hair in an instant. It was cold and wet and I was alone, no friend to offer me a used napkin from lunch or even a rolled down sleeve. I wiped my head on the back of the faux-cowhide seat and stared straight ahead while the boys at the back laughed in the uncomfortable space between with me and at me. I went home and shaved the bit of my saliva-covered hair off, putting it in an old sandwich bag. The next day I threw it in the boy’s face, my breath a gust of wind blowing a hairy tsunami, vicious and vengeful.

But I can’t shave my back and have no sandwich bag and pity him too much to spit in his face so I just stare straight ahead, wondering if the man in the grass green suit is back, watching us. I wonder if it looks like I’m being raped. Would he call the authorities? What would he say? Hello! I’m the man in the green suit that is nothing more than a light particle existing in the office building next door. I think a girl who I waved to and danced with is getting raped across the street. Come save her!

Obviously not.

I am on my own. I close my eyes. The darkness projected on the backs of my eyelids must be what death looks like as I wait for him to come. Dying is waiting for other people to come. Then he does, the jellyfish goes limp like the ones I eat at Chinese New Year and it extracts itself. I wonder if it needs to hold its breath when it’s inside me.

I kiss him salty and warm and wet. It’s time for him to go.

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WEST 10TH

He throws the condom in the trashcan. How funny would it be if I took them out every time he left and tacked them on the wall?

Or hung them out the window like sheets drying. I’d say I was using them to collect rainwater for my bamboo plant and I would laugh and laugh and I’d ask him if he still thought I was beautiful when I was acting so crazy.

He lies back down in bed, cradling my head and playing the gravity game with a curl that has escaped from my ponytail. He tells me he loves me. I still feel the wet in my baby hairs and wonder if it’s anything like that under the woman’s eyes.

I tell him to go, that I don’t love him and that he can’t spit on me and he needs to say sorry now now now.

I push him out the door as he still tries to apologize for doing nothing wrong. It sounds like a child reciting the alphabet slowly and stupidly. I walk into the bathroom to pee, wipe, flush, face myself in the mirror. I touch my cheek, delicately, the swirls in my fingertips like the spine of a feather, where a large whitehead is forming like an inverted bulls-eye in the middle of my skin. It stings tender like a womb about to burst. I wet it with warm water and pop it in one swift squeeze, the sebum exploding like a mini cellular firework. A bubble of blood follows and I smile. I look uglier now, but in a different and satisfactory way. I switch off the light.

I walk back to my room and look out into the office building again. Maybe the boy will be there. If he can’t have me at least he can always see me.

But, there is the green man, a disco ball spinning above him, slow dancing close like a wedding song with the old woman, her blue coat now shining and her hair yellow gold like it’s just come back from the jeweler’s. I want to wave, but they look so perfect and far away from me and my bloody face that I don’t want to disturb them. This night’s for the green man and the old woman. So I sway by myself instead. I can hear the cooing of the melody, soft and simple. I close my eyes and think of the dark like a womb. It is warm and lonely and I am happy.

We spend the rest of the night dancing to a song we’re all hearing.

38

Sharon Attia, Seattle Public Market

39

Jordana Weiner

When Life Gives You Lemons, Find the Grove Winner of the 2016 Editors’ Award in Poetry

there is a basket of meyer lemons in my kitchen bought out of fear of the season passing. i have stripped them all of peels & packed the peels into small jars of clear vodka. i have squeezed the juice & ground the pulp my fingertips burned this is all in the freezer now what a process. i lick sour from my fingers shake zest from my hair & i am green and the grove, and the bats nesting in the grove, and the grove itself as lemons thud down, to the dirt, the bats flying, erratic in the dark, with their strange and echo heads, their membrane arms wrapped up

40

Jordana Weiner

as the thinnest blankets, how has nothing punctured? i hang upside down by my knees on a branch, & think of all the places i might sink my teeth.

41

E Yeon Chang

An Elegy for Nathan The yellow ribbon, a prominent emblem for suicide awareness, is also used to commemorate the sinking of Sewol, a South Korean ferry that carried 325 high school students.

Truth is, you asked me to homecoming and I never gave you a dance In April, I was tying yellow ribbons thinking about high school kids on a sunken ship and I wondered about what difference I could have made smoking in empty streets and screaming with you In April, we could have been teasing traffic lights and walking bare feet around falling ashes Instead, I made a metaphor out of leaving soft things in open waters, tried to warn people against presenting shoes to loved ones Now, I am nipping at disappointing cherry tomatoes, high off a drug father would disown me for Maybe I will cancel and resend the friend request, like I did the April you died 42

E Yeon Chang

but when I wake up you’ll still be gone and all I will see is a tattoo of an origami boat And again, I will resent being young yet not young enough

43

Soumyajit Ray, Ghostly

44

Tia Leilani Ramos

Memorial Day, 2015

“Welcome to the West” my aunt said when I came home from college as we were standing in a cemetery in Industrial Denver.

Black clouds were seeping into the blue sky, pulled by cowboys on horses I’m told.

This is the hope?

Three Japanese sisters looking down at the gravestone of their grandparents.

Grandma came to the US and died of pneumonia leaving grandpa with eight little ones, loneliness, and alcoholism.

In the oldest cemetery of Denver, sometimes you can’t leave because the only entrance is blocked by a railroad track and you have a view of tall skinny factories that look like remnants of a plastic polly pocket mold and the cemetery now doesn’t have any money and you wonder when some contractors will come down and plow over it to build some new hip condominium with awkward windows and some other cemetery will now be the oldest (on condition) and my great-grandparents will now really die with hundreds of other great-grandparents who have probably already died based on the weeds and dried flowers around the grave.

So this is the West they all boasted about. An old white guy on a tractor with a large teepee like the Native Americans on his property. A storm coming in from the north with hail that dents cars and rain that creates deep puddles in the oldest cemetery in Denver.

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WEST 10TH

Three Japanese-American sisters who only pull out their culture and incense on days when they should, only remember on days that they should. A juiced-out lighter and incense that won’t burn.

46

Shilpa Kunnappillil, In the Shadow of Men

47

Rosalyn Lin

The Art of the Nuclear Family

1. The Best Things in Life here’s a perfect family out there somewhere. Mama and baba still together after more than thirty years. Two girls and one boy all born with ten fingers and ten toes, nails like pink petals. Dinner as a family every night with soft laughter and softer voices. A lovely Mediterranean-style home along the coast with curving arches and windows like stained glass when the sun rises and sets.

When guests visit, they’re shown the living room with its cream glinen chesterfields and lovely French doors that open up onto a balcony. They’re shown the pool outside that glitters blue on breezy afternoons, the foyer where a dangling crystal chandelier hangs from a cavernous ceiling, casting dappled shadows like doilies on the walls, the breakfast nook where sunlight floods the open space and warms the veiny, marble floors.

“You’ve a beautiful family. What I’d give to live in a place like this,” they tell us, and I want to tell them about how I want out, about the bedrooms they never see on the grand tour—one for mama and baba, one for Laura, one for Joey, and one for me. We keep those doors shut when guests come by because behind each stately, shining, wooden door is just dead space, a vacuum that sucks you in, so you can’t ever get away no matter what. I want to warn them about how the bestest, most beautiful things will try to swallow you whole and expect you to be thankful for it.

But maybe in another universe all those things are mine just the way they are—the dinners and watercolor windows, the blue pool and lacey shadows—pretty and easy and perfect, the doors always open.

T

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Rosalyn Lin

2. Hotel California When I’m old enough, mama asks me to bring the tea set out to our guests. “Rachel,” she says, “do you want to help serve the tea?”

Out I go with the tea to the living room with the spotless sofas and elegant, plump pillows. One saucer for each teacup, delicate china the color of bone and eggshell thin to the point of translucency. It’s a family heirloom that’s been passed down for centuries, and under mama’s watchful eye and careful packaging, it’s made its way over from Singapore to the golden beaches of California, sits clean and pristine and protected behind glass-paned, oak cabinets in the kitchen.

Laura is younger and sweeter than I am, offering sugar, cream, and biscuits with a white smile. Joey, still in elementary school at the time, is laser-focused on his Nintendo DS. “Rachel’s so grown-up now,” says my aunt. “Almost sixteen!”

“Time to think of suitors?” teases my uncle.

I sink into the doughy cushions, listen to the adults laugh and to the cups clinking against saucers like wind chimes. The ivory piping of the French doors frames the ocean like a painting, the frozen expanse of it blue and glittering just like the pool in our backyard.

I stand up to refill the emptied teacups. I think about what would it be like to have the waves rock me to sleep, how nice to drift for a long while and float far, far away.

3. Glutton for Punishment Joey’s maybe a little chubby, but he’s not actually fat by any means, even if he does refuse to participate in any sort of physical exercise.

He’s in sixth grade now, so he gets embarrassed when I hug him in public, but I like how he fits in my arms—solid and there—on the rare occasions that he lets me.

Mama gets concerned though. “Honey,” she says, “you need to exercise.” She squeezes his arm. “So much meat on your bones.”

She takes him to the local high school track to run laps. I know she means well, but one night I go to get an extra blanket from the closet in the hall, and I hear him crying when I tiptoe past his closed door.

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I don’t go in because I’m a coward.

Instead, I bury my head under layers and layers of blankets when I get back into bed, try to convince myself I’m doing the right thing because he’s in sixth grade and starting to go through puberty and I’m at least sparing him his dignity.

He starts eating real slow during dinner. I never catch him, but I think he balls up some of his food in napkins and tosses it out. Once, he excuses himself from the table to use the restroom, stuffing his mouth full before he actually gets up.

Baba laughs. Mama smiles like, Oh man, does our Joey just love his food or what.

When I go into the bathroom later, I find the Or What—an oddly flat layer of toilet paper in the trashcan. I don’t check because I already know what’s under there. My stomach twists in on itself.

“Do you think Joey hasn’t been eating on purpose?” I ask Laura later that night. She’s sweeping mascara on her lashes, getting ready to go to the movies.

She blinks at me in the mirror and quirks an eyebrow. “What are you talking about?”

I shake my head, suck the words back into my mouth. “Nevermind.” I’m afraid to say “anorexic” outright because we don’t say things like that in our house, aren’t allowed to joke about adverse hypotheticals or what-ifs because it’s bad luck; saying it out loud makes it a curse.

Joey’s weight drops slowly until one day, mama asks him, “Why do you have so much money left on your meal card?”

“I don’t like school food,” he says.

She ruffles his hair. “You’re getting too skinny.”

When I’m finally able to drive passengers without supervision, I take him to restaurants and cafés after school. “I’m hungry,” I always say. “Do you mind if we stop somewhere? Wherever you want.”

He’s so thin now. When it’s just the two of us, I eat less than I usually do and nudge my plate over to his side.

50

Rosalyn Lin

4. Family Jewels Caroline’s been my best friend since the seventh grade. She says her grandpa goes to the bank every Monday and Thursday. He likes to open up all his safes and pore over the contents, running thick, meaty, ring-decked fingers over gold watches and diamond-encrusted cufflinks, polishing and polishing and polishing his dead wife’s emerald earrings and limited edition Chanel pearl necklace.

He’s old money, a Rockefeller-esque, twentieth-century trust fund baby. “It’s all from the oil boom of the 1900s,” Caroline tells me. “His wife used to take impromptu flights to Paris and buy dresses straight off the runway. So basically, he’s elitist as fuck and completely psycho.”

In the car on the way home from school, I tell baba, “He keeps trying to set Caroline up with Ivy League graduates. How ridiculous is that? We’re only sophomores.”

“Never too early to start looking,” he says. “Later you choose, less you can choose from.”

“Well, I think it’s because he completely disapproved of his daughter marrying Caroline’s dad,” I say.

“Why’s that?” baba asks.

I snort. “Because he didn’t have enough money for the grandpa’s standards.”

“See?” baba says. “It’s not just us. You kids—and all your cousins also—think all rich people are crazy, that all us parents are crazy, but you see? White people are like this, too—think just the same as us.

We’re not crazy.”

I don’t tell him that Caroline’s parents and brother all hate their grandpa. I don’t say anything because I’m out of things to say. We’ve had this conversation a million times—over breakfast, lunch, dinner, in the car when it’s going sixty-five miles an hour on the freeway, when we’re up ten thousand feet in the air in a plane, when we’re in the middle of the grocery store’s cereal aisle.

He flicks on the turn signal and it tick-tick-ticks. “The Wang family has values. Just love cannot make a successful marriage. Maybe 51

WEST 10TH

you’re all too young to understand right now, but when you’re older, maybe then you understand.”

5. Kids Like Us In eleventh grade, Lucas Stanley, who’s apparently never been told “no” once in his life, convinces himself that he’s in love with me. He’s Chill, a real Cool Kid. I used to think that’s what I liked best about him because it meant I could be cutting and terrible, and he would just laugh along.

But then everything gets ruined because he wants and I don’t.

To my friend, he says, “I don’t even want her anymore. I’d rather have a car.”

To me, he says, “You’re supposed to at least let me try.”

And he says, “Why do you always have to make things so difficult?”

He says, “You knew where this was headed. Everyone knew!

You’re not stupid. Stop pretending to be.”

He says, “Whatever, I thought you were chill. Like me.”

Now I know what he really meant: everybody else is spineless and over-sensitive, caring too much about what others think of them and feeling too many things. But not him. No, Lucas is better and smarter and stronger because he’s forever unaffected and indifferent.

Lucas with sandy hair tousled from soccer, who thinks he’s special because he’s athletic and an intellectual. Lucas who knows exactly what drinks I get when the weather is hot or cold, who stops sitting next to me in Chemistry, who tells me he likes me and gets angry because I don’t know what else to say but “Thank you? I think?” Lucas who used to say he would never ever in a million and one years ever let anybody get under his skin because that doesn’t happen to cool kids—only to weak people.

At the end of the year, he marks up three whole pages of my yearbook, aggressively scribbling over other signings and leaving crude, stick-figure drawings. I don’t say anything because I get it, because I used to be a cool kid, too.

52

Rosalyn Lin

6. Lukewarm Island I catch the tail end of mama’s conversation when I walk into the kitchen. The setting sun bathes the room in a haze of orange and pink, and the patio doors are open to let in the summer breeze. Mama’s sticking the chicken into the oven for dinner, the phone clamped between her ear and shoulder.

“It doesn’t matter if she wants to go or not,” she’s saying, Mandarin flowing with an ease that her English doesn’t despite her having lived here in Southern California for the last thirty years. She shuts the oven door. “Take her to the doctor again. Yes, thank you. I’ll call back tomorrow.” She hangs up and rummages through the cabinets to make herself a cup of tea.

“Who was that?” I ask.

“Your aunt,” she says, switching into English. With a heavy sigh, she takes a seat at the marble island and stirs a dollop of honey into her cup. “Your grandpa needs to see doctor, but won’t go.”

I sit down next to her. “What’s wrong? Why does he need to see a doctor?”

“He has not been feeling good, cannot eat very much.” She rests her forearms on the countertop, hands circling the cup.

“Why won’t he go? He has to,” I say.

The corners of mama’s mouth lift in a tired smile. “One day you will say same thing to me. I am lucky to have good children. I did not a bad job with kids, huh?”

I think how Joey didn’t eat much for a while either and feel a semi-hysterical laugh bubbling up. But then I look at mama—and I mean really look—and for the first time, I notice the fine lines around her eyes, the weary set to her brows, the few strands of gray that her black hair dye didn’t quite catch. I think of how hard she tries, and I decide that for this moment, she needs her kids more than she needs to be a mom. I place an arm around her and lean my head against her shoulder. “Well,” I say, “Grandpa’s lucky that you’re a good daughter, too.”

My head shifts a little when she shrugs her shoulders. “Sometimes I think I am the least. My brother and sister are in Singapore, help him 53

WEST 10TH

and take care of him, but I am here. All I can do is call. I do not do enough. They take care everything and never complain.”

“Do you ever wish you and baba had stayed there?” I ask, gentle and softer than I would’ve thought myself capable of.

Mama’s envelops my hand with hers, warm from the heat of the tea. “No,” she says. “Baba and me, we are glad you grow up here. We wait to go back after you all in college.”

“Well, I’ll be in college this fall, so one down and two to go!”

She laughs and rests her head on top of mine. “We want to go back, but we do not want empty nest too fast. How about not go to college and stay with mama instead?”

“Don’t joke,” I say, but I’m smiling. I give her hand a quick squeeze. “That’s what breaks are for. You’ll never be rid of me.”

And so we sit, my mama and me, holding hands in the kitchen, our backs facing the open doors, the red sun dipping below the horizon behind us.

7. Eat a Cheeseburger The week before most of us start leaving for college, I sit through a late dinner with friends who try to warn me about myself. We eat greasy burgers and crispy fries, lick the salt from our fingertips and pretend we’re not scared to leave this little pocket in the world that we call ours.

“You’re kind of proud that you said no to Lucas, aren’t you?”

Clarissa asks, but she won’t ask it like a question. She’ll state it like some indisputable fact.

“Well, yes,” I say. “Kind of. But something like that would’ve happened to him sooner or later.”

“Yeah, but you’re proud that you were the first.”

“I guess so. Wouldn’t you be?”

Clarissa takes a sip of her Coke and peers at me over the rim of her glass. “The first time you fall in love with someone,” she says, “you’re going to get torn apart. Don’t laugh; I’m not kidding. I’ve seen it happen.”

“Oh, c’mon.”

54

Rosalyn Lin

“I’m serious. People like you? They never think shit like heartbreak will get to them. And then they end up experiencing the worst of it. I’m just giving you a heads up.”

I laugh. “You can choose to not be sad over someone.”

“Trust me, if you’re not sad, you’re angry. Either way, it’s not something you have control over.” She stirs at the ice with her straw and slurps up the last of her Coke.

“So what are you supposed to do then?”

“Nothing,” she shrugs. “Just let it happen, and yeah, it’ll suck balls, but one day you’ll forget to feel upset about it, and then you move on.”

8. The Most Wonderful Time of the Year I come home for Thanksgiving break part way through my first year of college. I’m picked up from the airport and spend the next hour wishing I’d stayed at my dorm instead.

“Just let her try for whatever college she wants,” I say, rubbing a hand over my face in the backseat of the car.

“Her SAT score not high enough,” says mama.

“Her score is perfectly fine. Her grades are great; she has good extra-curriculars and leadership. Stop freaking out. She’s going to get into a good school.”

“But what if she doesn’t?” mama asks.

“She will,” I say.

“You don’t know that definitely,” says baba. “She’s upset because she thinks we forbid her from going where she wants. But we’re not.

We’re helping her not waste time on schools she has no chance with.

We’re making sure she’s guarantee a good school.”

“Oh my god,” I groan. “You’re completely missing the point.”

“What?” asks mama, twisting in her seat to look at me. “What’s the point? Why she doesn’t listen?”

I close my eyes, feeling a headache coming on. “She’s upset because she thinks you think she’s not good enough!”

Mama’s face scrunches up. “Why would she think that?”

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“Obviously we are not saying that,” says baba. “Her reading comprehension is a problem. When we ever say she’s not good enough?

We never say that!”

“I didn’t say you said that about her,” I say. “You asked why she’s not listening to you, and I’m trying to tell you why.”

“We always say you go where you’re meant to be,” says mama, turning to face forward again. “We are very realistic. We are not demand Ivy League.”

I sigh. “I know. I’ll talk to her. Just. For the love of god, stop telling her she’s only going to get into one school out of her entire list.”

“Did Joey tell you he join varsity basketball?” baba asks after a tense beat.

“He grow so tall since you were gone,” mama chimes in. “Has to eat so much more now.”

“Asks for double dinner,” laughs baba.

Something in my chest loosens. “Yeah, I’ve seen pictures. It’s great,” I say. “Really, really great. I’m glad.”

The rest of the ride home is quiet.

Laura greets me at the door with over-bright eyes, shiny with unshed tears, her normally fair complexion blotchy and red. She follows me into my room, sits on my bed to watch me unpack.

“They don’t think I can get into the schools I want,” she chokes out once I’ve shut the door. Her lower lip trembles. “And they’re saying they won’t pay for my tuition unless I apply early decision for the school they want, but I don’t want to go there.”

“I heard,” I say.

She bursts into tears.

I let her lean into me and pat her shoulder awkwardly. Crying is supposed to be a very private thing in our family.

“You know they just want you to go to a good school,” I say.

“They’re trying to play it safe for you.”

She pushes away from me, nose trailing snot. “Why are you always on their side? You’re my sister. You’re supposed to be on my side!”

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Rosalyn Lin

I unzip my suitcase and start putting items on hangers. “I’m not on anyone’s side. I’m just trying to explain to you what they’re thinking.”

“I already know what they think!” she says, wiping aggressively at her cheeks. “They think I just like to flirt around, that the only thing I’m good for is being a pretty face and getting married off to someone rich.”

I stop what I’m doing and furrow my eyebrows at her. “That’s not true, Laura. They know you’re smart and independent and will have a great career.”

“No,” she says, bitter and acidic. “That’s what they think about you. And even then, they don’t think that’s a great thing because they think you’re going to have a hard time finding a husband. They’re always contradicting themselves, like they have no fucking clue what they want from us.”

“They don’t want anything from us,” I say, taking a seat next to her. “They just want for us to have a good, worry-free life.”

“Yeah, because I’m just having the best time right now. No stress or worrying at all.” Laura lets out a dry, wobbly laugh and stands up, shaking her head. “You know, just once, it’d be nice if you’d just listen and say, ‘Yeah, our parents can really suck,’ instead of trying to explain and justify everyone all the goddamn time.”

I take a deep breath. “Okay, fine, so it sucks. I’m listening.” She sits back down.

I wonder if she ever noticed how thin Joey got. I wonder if she’s noticed that he finally looks healthy again. But I know she probably hasn’t. Some days, I think all Laura knows is how to take. And I hate that I get upset and jealous of her for that—that she’s brave enough to take, whereas I’m just not.

Laura is lucky because she’s pretty and popular and loved, but sometimes I think she’s not like us, that she tries extra hard not to be the kind of person that comes from a family like ours. Out of the three of us—me, Joey, and her—she’s the only who wants wings so badly, she’d cut us loose for the room to spread them. And I don’t always blame her, especially on bad days like this one. On bad days, I’m glad for her.

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9. What It Is and Isn’t About “It’s okay if you don’t get married or have kids,” mama says.

“But we just worry, understand?” says baba. “We want you to be happy.”

“I can support myself,” I say.

“It’s not just about money,” he says. “Character is important, too. We don’t want you to one day wake up and feel alone. Or look at other parents’ kids and regret.”

“I have you and Laura and Joey,” I say. “I can get a dog. I’m okay with it.”

Mama puts her arm around me, pulls me close. “But one day we won’t be here. We love you how you are, of course we do, but we want you to have best. Will you try for us? So parents don’t worry?”

I think she means for me to try to be softer, to smooth off my rough edges and sharp corners. I know sometimes she talks to Laura, asks her if boys are scared of me, if they’re intimidated by the metal hardware on my leather jackets, if they’re wary of trying to handle someone like me—“Do you think she’s too authoritative?”

I don’t like seeing mama or baba anxious, so I nod okay. Okay, I’ll try harder to be the kind of person someone would want, the kind of person a nice, well-bred boy could fall in love with. I’ll try harder to be the kind of person who wants things like that, who wants to find The One and be with him till death do us apart.

Sometimes I wish I were more like Laura, sweet like cupcake frosting and universally endearing.

10. Bottomless Ours is a family of giving and giving and giving until all of us are nothing but baby-bird bones and hollow cavities—mama who loves so much and so hard that she would have her children resent her if it meant they would one day have the best of the bestest best there is; baba who works and works and thinks bank accounts are bubbles and if he could somehow fill those bubbles up to the brim, we would 58

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be kept safe from everything wrong in the world; Joey who still sometimes associates both eating and not-eating with shame and once felt like a bundle of sharp angles in my arms; Laura who wants to just give us up completely.

And me who wishes she might one day not have to keep putting out fires, who wishes Band-Aids could somehow bridge chasms deep as canyons, who wants to scoop everyone up, rock them back and forth like babies, say “It’s all going to be okay,” and know she is telling the truth.

11. Of John Hancock Proportions Spring break found myself spending most of my waking hours in a lawyer’s office. When all the paperwork is finally signed and filed away, every ‘t’ crossed and every ‘i’ dotted, I make my way out of the imposing office and over to the gleaming elevator bank in a daze. Baba takes his time bidding farewell to the receptionist before joining me.

“Wait,” I say, when an elevator door dings open. “So in order to leave the house for us, you and mama can’t go back for another five years after we’ve all left for college? The law requires you to physically live in the house, so you have to stay here?”

“Yes,” says baba, stepping into the elevator. “It mean we just have to wait a little longer than we plan before.”

“Five years is not ‘a little longer,’” I sputter, following after him.

“Five years very short,” he says with a smile. “We rather stay than worry you do not have enough.”

I pull a face. “It’s not worth it. You don’t have to worry about us.”

“No ‘have to’ or ‘don’t have to,’” he says dismissively as the doors slide shut. “We just do it. We already sign, so no more to say. What do you want for lunch?”

12. The Genetic Lottery Except for Caroline, most of my friends don’t really understand the way my family functions. I’ve been friends with Sophie for almost ten 59

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years, and she still says things like, “Who cares if your parents don’t want you to travel? Just go anyway. You’re almost done with sophomore year of college; you’re almost twenty-one; you’re an adult!”

“Yeah, that’s not how it works in my family,” I say, shifting in my seat. We’re having breakfast at The Blue Kettle, a local café that used to be a high school favorite. The cracked, orange-brown leather of the booth squeaks a little.

“Just lie then.”

“We don’t lie to our parents. It just—we don’t do that, okay? We can’t.”

“That’s so dumb,” Sophie says. “I get that your parents pay for almost everything, but I’d rather not have any money and do whatever I want than live the way you do. Don’t you hate it?”

“I wouldn’t put it that way,” I say, concentrating hard on cutting into my omelet. “I get frustrated, sure.”

“You know, it’s really not uncommon to feel hatred toward your own family,” she says. She spears a potato with her fork and gestures at me with it, point of her elbow resting on the yellow tablecloth.

“Especially when they try to threaten and control you with money.”

“It’s not about money,” I say, dropping my silverware with a clatter.

“And they’re not trying to control me.” She’s white and middle class, so she doesn’t get it. And I don’t even mean that as a dig; it’s just fact.

“It’s okay to say you hate your family.”

I frown. “No, I love my family. I just don’t like them all the time.”

She laughs. “I mean, we don’t exactly have a choice in the family we’re born into. Fuck what they want. You don’t owe them shit, especially not your parents. They chose to have you. You didn’t choose to have them.”

“You’re wrong,” I say, cutting and sharp, visceral in my defensiveness. “I do choose my family.”

I don’t how to explain to her that I choose them because of my childhood, because of acceptance, the guarantee of unconditional love, values so deeply ingrained in me that sometimes I can’t even tell if they’re organic or not. I choose because of blood, lineage, expecta60

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tions. I choose to do whatever it takes to let my parents worry less, to prove to them that coming to this country was worth the risk, was worth their living so far out of their comfort zone. I choose out of respect, gratefulness, duty, out of so many things sometimes it doesn’t even feel like a choice anymore. Sometimes it feels like a goddamn obligation to love them. But it’s still my choice. I choose them. Every day.

“Okay,” she says, voice slow and drawn out like warm molasses, sticky with barely repressed judgment.

“I didn’t mean to—I just—” I cut myself off, flustered, cheeks heating up, angry with Sophie for making me feel flustered and angry with myself for letting her make me feel flustered. I let out a frustrated breath. “Fuck, I don’t hate my family, okay?”

Sophie takes a delicate sip of her coffee. “Okay, fine, whatever you say.”

13. And On and On and On Instead of being home the week of Christmas, I’m stuck in traffic in the back of a taxicab on the other side of the country, stress like metal pliers picking at my very seams until I feel like I might just fly apart, have my guts plaster the windows and leather seats.

On the phone, mama’s telling me, “We love you, we love you, we love you.” Her voice is soft in my ear, and if I close my eyes, I can pretend I’m five again, think back to when mama and baba were my whole world, were the only things I knew.

Inexplicably, I feel my throat tighten, pressure pushing behind my eyes. “I know,” I say, letting my head thunk back against the headrest.

They love us, of course they do; of course I know.

“Okay?” she asks.

I swallow hard, blow out a breath. “Yeah,” I say when I’m certain my voice won’t come out shaky. “Yeah, love you, too.”

I used to imagine what our home could’ve been—maybe one of those red-yellow-blue bouncy castles, so we wouldn’t ever have to worry about things breaking when they fall. Buoyancy on land, everything soft rubber and rounded edges. No fine china or hard crystal.

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No pool that looks like a sheet of glass when the air is still. No marble floors like ice in winter. No doors, only open archways that flow to the next room and the next and the next and the next. No windowpanes, so the breeze could come and go as it pleases, the sunlight unfiltered and pouring in by the bucketful.

But on nights like this one, home is a phone-call in the back of a taxicab. And it doesn’t feel like trying to escape quicksand or walking in wet cement. It feels like enough.

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Soumyajit Ray, 360째 Earth

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Maya LeBeau

TV pitch for an “oh shit!”

The plot twist is that they start making out Who is “they” oh they are the women This is 2015 television and there is always An ex-girlfriend and some kind of lover These women are crazy bitches they will try anything This is what strong looks like who gives a flying Fuck about the main boys I mean enough Of that we can’t even show ass so what is the next Best thing to show how they get down this is called Acting does she have experience who even knows just watch They are going to fuck yeah they can’t help themselves And this is going to get everyone running to the fields And by the fields I mean the Internet and yes Everyone is running and they are all saying These women they are all bisexual who The fuck knew this is world news She is down to fuck she is gay no she is queer Whatever she is down for the pussy and that Is television and that is the plot twist This is coming out this is the surprise They are kinky this is about sex let us Always make it about sex forever and ever and Let us herald the community we the writers are Knocking so we are saying let us in hey we Thought of you and they say thanks and we say This is great this is representation because All of these strong women are partly gay obviously This is turning everyone on look at how confident They are and I mean what other kinky shit Do we have up our sleeve this season?

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Monica Albornoz, Women, 2014

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An Interview with Mira Jacob Mira Jacob is the author of the critically acclaimed novel, The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing, which was shortlisted for India’s Tata First Literature Award, honored by the APALA, and named one of the best books of 2014 by Kirkus Reviews, the Boston Globe, Goodreads, Bustle, and The Millions. She is the co-founder of much-loved Pete’s Reading Series in Brooklyn, where she spent thirteen years bringing literary fiction, nonfiction, and poetry to the stage. Her recent writing and short stories have appeared in Guernica, Vogue, the Telegraph, and Bookanista, and earlier work has appeared in various magazines (RED, Redbook, i-D, Metropolis, STEP), books (Footnotes with Kenneth Cole, Simon & Schuster; Adios Barbie, Seal Press), on television (VH-1’s Pop-Up Video), and across the web. She has appeared on national and local television and radio, and has taught writing to students of all ages in New York, New Mexico, and Barcelona. She currently teaches fiction at NYU. In September 2014, Mira was named the Emerging Novelist Honoree at Hudson Valley Writer’s Center, where she received a commendation from the United States Congress.

She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, documentary filmmaker Jed Rothstein, and their son.

WEST 10TH: You wrote your debut novel, The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing, over the course of ten years. How did the novel change for you as you faced trials and tribulations in your own life, and how were you able to maintain commitment and enthusiasm for the project over so long a period?

MIRA JACOB: When I started The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing, I intended to write a book about a man developing a rapidly accelerating form of Alzheimer’s. Then, a few years in, my own father was diagnosed with cancer. I stopped writing completely when that hap66

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pened—I really just couldn’t put a fictional father into peril when I was losing my own. Three years later, shortly after my dad died, I went back to the book and was embarrassed to find that whenever I’d tried to write about the fictional father, my own father’s characteristics would creep in. I was in mourning, I guess, and just needed to see him somewhere. It took me another four years after that to finish the book, but I can say for sure that my “enthusiasm” was more like getting used to a world without my father without drinking myself to sleep every night.

WEST 10TH: What advice do you have for other writers who also feel that they inevitably and unwillingly keep drawing on their own biography within the genre of fiction?

JACOB: Well, it helps if the people from your real life are dead. Ha— terrible but true. Here’s the thing—I didn’t start the book with a father like mine, nor would I have never written a father like mine if my dad hadn’t passed, and not because I’m a good daughter or have anything as dubious as strong morals, but because doing so would have killed the book. It’s hard to let characters take the turns they need to when you are beholden to a living person. Whether or not you are aware of it, you think “but she/he wouldn’t do that” and you cut off so many potential outcomes. But by the time my dad entered the book, it was over half done. The life wasn’t his, the family around him wasn’t ours, and so I found myself in a weird moment of watching a man who had died live another life, albeit fictionally. I get notes from readers telling me he is their favorite character, but in my mind, he is the thinnest.

That again works for a story about a man who is on his way out of the world. You can never really see him fully.

WEST 10TH: Your novel is rooted in multiple locations: Seattle, New Mexico, and India, and is read in countries across the globe. As a writer, how do you weigh establishing a strong sense of place against rendering themes that transcend cultures and locales?

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JACOB: Oh, I wish I had a better answer to this, but the truth is, I don’t weigh that at all. I write the story that needs to be written and go wherever it asks me to go.

WEST 10TH: The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing also moves across decades and manages to maintain balance between all of its distinct threads. What challenges came up for you when using this technique of time-jumping, and how did you address them? For example, did you find yourself wanting to privilege one of the narratives over another?

JACOB: I only came up with that structure when my agent told me that no one would buy the book as I had written it. She was right—I’d done the kind of structure that works better for a short story in the initial draft (present/past/back to present for the climax), so I needed something more complex to hold up all the jumps in place and time.

My husband is a documentary filmmaker and he mentioned story boarding to me, which never in life believed in until went to his office and saw how he did it. That night I went home and restructured the entire novel with post-its. I also cut two hundred pages right then and there to keep the engine running. It was harrowing but also liberating.

WEST 10TH: Being asked to restructure a story you’ve pored over must be incredibly daunting. I’m wondering about your approach to editing. How do you keep your own vision alive amidst all the other opinionated voices around you (your agent, your editor, perhaps your family and friends)?

JACOB: I was just talking about this with another writer—the conflict between addressing the flaws in your work and protecting it from endless doctoring. We’ve all heard about things that have been “workshopped to death” and I think that can easily happen. At this point, I have a few very trusted readers and I just know when I get their feed68

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back I’m going to want to deck them, especially if they say something that I’ve been taking pains to overlook to just get the work done.

But that feeling—the anger—is a good sign to me because it means that I know this is a weak point in the story, too. Getting hit in it by someone who cares gives me the opportunity to strengthen it. I’ve also walked away from plenty of advice because it just doesn’t feel like a direction I want to go in, and at the end of the day, it’s my name, my work, my vision.

WEST 10TH: In an article for the Telegraph, you wrote about how you were “raised to believe in ghosts” by your parents. Ghosts also figure in your novel in both figurative and more literal ways. Are ghosts—in whatever form they may take—something you often find yourself confronting in everyday life, and how do you translate that experience into prose?

JACOB: My parents believed wholeheartedly in ghosts, and often talked about the ones they ran into the way you’d talk about some weird neighbor. I saw a see-through lavender man standing beside my bed last night—that kind of thing. They believed in good ghosts and bad ghosts and on the occasions that I just lost my mind about it—what do you mean there are ghosts?—they would shrug and tell me not to get hysterical. And avoid the bad ghosts. Because that’s a totally doable thing. As a result, there’s an element of the supernatural in everything I write, but always in the most straightforward way possible. Here is a tree, here is a house, here is a sink full of dirty dishes and the ghost of your mother not washing them.

WEST 10TH: You gave the keynote speech at a Publisher’s Weekly event and spoke about the problems that writers of color face in publishing, but no one seemed to listen. Could you talk a bit about the representation issues you see in the publishing world, and how you managed to navigate the industry yourself?

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JACOB: We talk a lot about the statistics facing writers of color, the lack of representation, but I’ve had numbers about diversity quoted to me my whole life and I’ve seen the faces of my white friends glaze over when that happens. They have no idea what people of color are up against and a statistic does absolutely nothing to change that. So when I wrote that speech, I wanted to provide anecdotes that people in the industry would have a context for and then be able to realize, perhaps even in a small way, what it is like to be one of the “chosen few” who is allowed into the room just long enough to satisfy white curiosity.

And that place, that so-called privilege, is absolutely maddening. How do I navigate it? With a lot of fury and disbelief and sadness and deep breathing exercises and hope.

WEST 10TH: What changes do you think need to be made in the publishing industry to combat the silencing and underrepresentation it seems to perpetuate?

JACOB: There’s really just one solution in my head with this, which is to have diversity within the positions of power. We can talk all day about nuanced points of view and education and understanding but until the power to move money lands in the hands of people who dlive in the populations underrepresented, who know what that audience wants to see and read and consume, the business model is failing us.

WEST 10TH: Has your experience of being misread as Native American in New Mexico impacted your perception of the function and identities of your characters? How do you conceive the broader role of literary characterization—and fiction in general—in defying racial misconceptions, mystification, and bias in America?

JACOB: I grew up with the great conundrum of seeing my family welcomed to America while the other “Indians” were cordoned off to the least inhabitable plots of land and left very few ways to thrive. I remember thinking when I was little that I was part of the lucky Indi70

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ans, a thought which came with a certain kind of greasy shame. Why were we lucky? At whose expense were we lucky?

In terms of the role of fiction in defying racial misconceptions and shaking the foundations of bias, I’ve got to paraphrase John Waters here and say that it’s our job as thinking humans to read the kinds of books that tell us something we didn’t know or haven’t experienced and doing that is inherently uncomfortable and should be. The corollary for fiction writers is that it is our job to keep writing about the worlds we know others can’t imagine, no matter how uncomfortable or disconcerting the writing of that can be because (and now I will directly quote John Waters), “Fiction is the truth, fool!”

WEST 10TH: What other projects are on the horizon for you? Do you plan to write another novel, or are you looking to dip into other genres?

JACOB: I’m drawing my next book. It’s a graphic memoir called Good Talk: Conversations I’m Still Confused About (Penguin Random House, 2017).

WEST 10TH: What led you to create a graphic memoir? Has art always been a part of your life?

JACOB: I draw constantly and have since I was little. In my twenties, when I would travel, I spent a lot of time painting these tiny leather journals, and whenever I see them, I get the same feeling I had making them, which was just this endless sense of possibility. All that paper, all those colors. Anyway, last year I was sitting in India with my grandmother who regularly knifes me in casual conversation—your face is too dark to ever be pretty—that kind of thing, and partly as an act of self-preservation, I started drawing us and writing our conversation in bubbles. My grandmother has lived through a lot, including fighting for India’s independence while the British jailed her brother, and our conversations will bounce between that and my failures as a 71

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woman (other faults include having only one child and “thinking all the time”). Something about drawing the conversation, and letting it just be what it was felt really good to get down, really easy and true and cathartic. Not so tangled up in backstory. From there, it was pretty easy to imagine a book. Now that I’m teaching myself to draw on a computer for the first time, it’s much less easy, but I’m psyched every day to try to figure this thing out, and I think that’s really the best an artist can hope for.

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Jennifer Chu, The Hedonist

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Matt Frost

I Am Panopticon

A

t 23:05 I pour myself another cup of coffee and watch as the trembling man collapses and begins to die. What’s left of his clothes are torn and soiled by overuse, and his skin is grey and dotted with weeping sores. He is a Low City transient. He is not my concern.

He falls backward and hits the wall before landing face-up on a pile of garbage. He lays there a moment, limbs twitching and jerking, then slides part way down the pile. A thin rope of saliva clings between the corner of his mouth and the grey stubble that covers his chin. The trembling slows. In the corner of the screen, I see a bodega with a red and blue neon sign of a coiled Lóng Dragon in the window.

The dragon is smoking a cigarette. As the lights on the sign shift the dragon raises the cigarette, then lowers it and blows out smoke from its nostrils. Then it repeats. I tap some powdered milk into my cup and swirl it around as the transient vomits and begins to choke on it. This is known as aspirating. Many transients die like this.

At 23:09 he is dead. His glassy eyes are turned upward toward the camera, reflecting the streetlamp above in two tiny droplets of light. I consider notifying the authorities and giving them his body’s coordinates, but the paperwork is already piling up and they wouldn’t collect him tonight anyway. The people in the bodega will find him, I think. They will take care of it. If they don’t, at least the street cleaners will. The dragon raises its cigarette, and I switch the feed. The next camera shows two gentlemen getting acquainted with each other’s bodies in a High City alleyway. Their suits are clean and white, and they seem to be enjoying themselves. It feels inappropriate to watch, but perhaps that’s what they want.

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I switch the feed anyway.

If you asked, I would say that I believe in love. I have a wife and two beautiful daughters, and I love them all very much. The girls are ten and twelve; my wife and I are divorced. She left me after I was arrested for trafficking drugs on the waterfront. We both knew it was coming long before that, though; it just seemed like the right time. I did not hate her for leaving. I still don’t. I would have done the same.

The court awarded her custody—I don’t blame them—so I do not get to see my daughters often. I spend most of my time at work, and send them all the money I can so they can live comfortably. I always put a note in the envelope that says Love, Papá. I do not know if their mother gives the notes to them.

At 23:30 the camera feeds shows me six gang members beating another man by the docks, two Low City bacchanalians passed out in the doorstep of a housing complex with nine more revelers trashing a car nearby, four teenagers playing on the street with a makeshift ball made of cloth and twine. I send the first two feeds through to Upper Management and mark them for Further Review and Possible Action.

The teenagers continue to pass the ball across the screen, running and laughing silently as I catch up on all the necessary forms I need to submit. I always try to be precise when I fill them out. My father always said that a job well done is the best thing a man can own. If you asked, I’d say I agree.

I finish typing the reports. I grab myself another cup of coffee, send up the forms and switch the feed.

At 00:00 my shift ends. I finish my last form and remove my ID from the terminal. My replacement—Roberto, I think, or maybe his name is Rodrigo—is waiting outside the door as I exit. We say hello and he asks me how my day was. Oh, I say. The Usual. I make a quick stop at the bathroom, and then take the elevator down to the lobby. I stand and wait until the front door is open, then I say goodnight to my commanding officer and exit the building. The company’s logo shines brilliant and white up on the roof of the building, so pure and bright that you can see it for miles. If you ever get lost in the city—especially 75

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in the Low City—the company’s sign is a good landmark to use; it draws your eye up to it like a beacon. In the High City, the buildings are much taller, and the company building stays hidden most of the time, appearing only in snatches like the sun coming through a window. I still rely on it as much as I can, though. I like to see the logo. It makes me feel safe.

It takes me, on average, one hour and twenty-two minutes to walk home. It would be faster to take the train, but I prefer to walk.

After spending time in prison, you learn to appreciate the freedom to walk wherever you want. You appreciate being able to look at things that are far away. You appreciate so many things.

I walk, and I listen, and I watch.

I look at the lights, and the buildings, and the people, but more than anything else I look at the cameras. When I walk I try to count them all, but I always lose count. They are everywhere. The company has them in every streetlamp, but there are many more besides those.

Some are visible; most are not. I heard someone say once that there are over 250,000 cameras in operation throughout the city. I think that is a conservative estimate.

The brain takes thirteen milliseconds to register what you see.

Your body’s response time is slower, but not by much. If you don’t see anything noteworthy, you can cycle through an average of nine feeds in a minute; my personal best is fifteen. You can type up a report in under a minute, if you are quick. I take longer, but only because I care.

Even with my slower pace, I can watch a lot of feeds in eight hours.

There are over three thousand Curators employed by the company, including me. At any given moment, there are well over seven hundred people watching the feeds. I’ve done the math.

There are cameras everywhere.

I walk home under their watchful eyes, and outside my building I turn and wave to the nearest street lamp. I never know if anyone sees it, but I like to think someone does. It’s my way of saying goodnight. I go upstairs and heat up some rice and beans on the hotplate, and then I go to bed. As I fall asleep, I listen to my neighbor—Mr. Wan, a nice 76

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old Chinese man—talk to his wife. She’s been dead for years, but he still talks to her out of habit. I think it keeps him going. I like listening to him talk to her; I don’t speak much Cantonese, but I like the way it sounds. After a while, he stops talking and turns on his radio, and tunes it to something classical. Mozart, maybe. Or Bach. I never had much of an ear for music.

At 08:00 I get up and get dressed. I eat some breakfast and listen to Mr. Wan talk to his wife. I do the dishes and take out the trash. As I come back up, Mr. Wan is leaving his apartment. I smile at him as I walk past, and he smiles back at me. I go inside and finish the rest of my chores. At 12:00 I leave the apartment and go for a walk. The streets are much busier in the daytime: there are vendor carts and children playing, there are families getting water and food. There are buskers and panhandlers. I watch them all as I walk.

At 16:00 I insert my ID into the terminal and begin to Curate.

The day is uneventful: two Muggings, three Accidental Injuries, six Domestic Disputes that spilled out into the street. Couples walking, holding hands. Children playing Piko. Old men playing Mahjongg. I watch them all, through a thousand unseen eyes.

My father hated the cameras. He said it made him want to keep secrets, to hide things away. I asked him if he had anything to hide.

He said no, but that’s not the Point Of It All. I asked him what the Point Of It All was, but he never gave me the answer. I don’t know if he knew what it was. I just think he didn’t like being watched. He and my mother would always go into the bedroom and close the door when they needed to discuss anything serious; I used to spy on them, first out of curiosity, and then out of habit. Maybe I wanted to see if I could discover any of his secrets. Maybe I just wanted to be included. I don’t know. I only got caught spying once; I sneezed, he beat me. I still spied on them after that, but I was more careful. They talked about money, mostly. Sometimes it was about me. Sometimes it was about work. My father didn’t have any real secrets.

My father was a company man who worked with steel, and that’s what I was taught to be. But times got tight, and there were no more 77

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steel jobs left, so I got work as a street cleaner. When they automated the cleaning, I worked as a builder. When we got laid off, I found a job unloading crates down at the docks. I did not know the crates were full of heroin. I do now. We were tried as a group—the workers and the foreman—and during the trial, the judge called us a menace to society. Many of the workers’ families were there. Mine weren’t. The dock workers all got ten years in the correctional facility; the foreman was sent to a labor camp for the rest of his life. I remember watching as the foreman cried. I felt sorry for him. Then I got divorced and went to prison.

In prison, the cells are eight by twelve, and everything is white.

Each cell contains a pull-out bed and a toilet, a screen and a camera.

The camera watches you. The screen lets you watch others. There is not much to do in the cells. You eat the government-rationed nutriblocks that are dispensed through the door twice a day, and you drink the water that comes from the dispenser at the top of the toilet. At first, you are alone; each cell is isolated and remote. You do not hear any voices. You do not see any people. After a while, you get bored.

A little while longer, and you get desperate. Some people go crazy. I didn’t. I looked at the screen instead. The screen is set into the wall, and has a white button underneath that says Report. The screen itself is hooked up to the company’s camera feeds. The company takes time off your sentence if you correctly report a Criminal Activity. Once you report a few, the guards start to speak to you. They wear helmets that hide their faces, and use modulators that change their voices; still, it’s a relief to talk to another person. It makes you want more.

If you report a few more, they switch off the modulators so you can hear their real voice. A few more, and they replace your nutriblocks with real food. Keep reporting, and you’re eventually allowed out of your cell for a bit. If an inmate shows talent for Curating the feeds, they’re offered a job when their sentence is done. They’re given a second chance.

I was given a second chance.

At 00:00 my shift ends and I say my usual goodbyes. I walk home 78

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on my usual route. As I walk, I count the cameras. I count up to 130 when a young man passes me from behind. He stops and turns to face me. I smile at him, but he doesn’t smile back. He seems uncertain. He gives me an odd look, and then asks if I know the time. 00:42, I say.

Okay, he says. Thanks. He walks away quickly with his hand stuffed in his pocket.

I continue walking but only count another six cameras when I am interrupted by a scream from a nearby street. I look around to see if there is anyone else around, but I am alone. I hesitate, unsure of what to do. I hear the scream again. I hear a struggle; I hear what sounds like a gunshot. I hope it isn’t one. I round the corner and duck behind a pile of trash.

I crouch, and I hide, and I watch.

A young girl with dark red hair and a dark red dress is lying in a puddle of dark red water beneath a streetlamp. She has a hole in her chest. I think she’s dying. The young man who asked me the time is standing over her with a small gun in his hand. Oh my god, he says.

He keeps saying it over and over again. Oh my god. He stands there for a moment, and then grabs her white purse splattered in dark red spots and runs past me into the street, and is gone.

I sit in shock. There’s nothing I could have done to stop this, I tell myself. If I had tried to stop him, I would be like her. I would be dead. There’s no way I could have known he would do this, I tell myself. He looked so young; he didn’t seem like he was a threat. Oh my god, I say. Oh my god. I get up and go over to her. Her eyes are wide open, reflecting the streetlight in two round pools of gold. I look up and wave frantically at the camera, hoping to get its attention. I don’t know if anyone’s watching.

I hope they are.

I stand there, watching the street lamp as it watches us. I wait for sirens. They don’t come. A lizard runs over the girl’s foot, and I expect her to twitch, to sit up, to shake it off. She doesn’t move. I ask myself if this is my fault; I don’t have an answer. I do not know what time it is when I finally leave.

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I walk the rest of the way home, and count all the cameras I can see. I get up to three hundred, and then the tears are flowing too hard and I can’t keep track anymore.

At 04:00 I lie in bed and listen to Mr. Wan talk to his wife. Maybe it helps, I think. To talk to the dead. I try to talk to the girl, but I don’t even know her name. I’ve never been good at conversation anyway.

Mr. Wan puts on his classical music—Bach or Mozart, I’m not sure which. I can’t help but listen. I can’t help but cry.

At 07:00 I get up and leave the house. I go to the spot where the girl died, but she isn’t there anymore. The blood is gone too, leaving behind a brown stain on the concrete. The street lamp remains.

I wander through the city, but I don’t look at anything; I just think and walk. When I check my watch, it’s 16:00 and I’m late for work.

I run all the way there. The commanding officer is waiting for me.

You’re late, he says. I know, I say. Why, he asks; I don’t have a good answer. Don’t let it happen again, he says.

At 16:45 I put my ID into the terminal and begin to Curate. I find it hard to keep my focus. I stare at the people through a thousand different eyes, and I keep wondering if any of them have hidden behind garbage piles in fear. If any of them have been assaulted beneath the watchful eyes of a street lamp. If anyone was there to help them. If anyone saw it at all. I send them all through to Upper Management, marked for Further Review and Possible Action.

My commanding officer stops by and asks me if I’m feeling all right. He tells me that I haven’t filed any reports for all the feeds I sent through. Oh, I say. You’re right. He smiles and asks me if I had a late night. Yes. Yes I did. He laughs. He tells me he didn’t think I was the type for that. The type for what, I ask. Never mind, he says. Just get the reports in.

As he turns to leave, I stop him and ask if any Curators sent a Homicide through to Upper Management last night. I tell him it would be in the area. I tell him it would be a young girl in a red dress. He gives me a strange look and says he’ll check.

At 21:00 he comes back and says that no one reported anything.

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Oh, I say. All right then. He gives me another strange look as he leaves.

He does not come back. I finish my shift.

At 00:00 I remove my ID and go outside. I stare at all the cameras. I don’t know if any of them stare back. I go to the spot again; it’s hard to find because the automated street cleaner must have come through while I was away. I stand there for a long time, and I stare at the spot where the blood had been, and I stare at the street lamp, and then I begin to walk. I head away from my apartment. I head away from Headquarters. I head into the Low City. I walk down a thousand different streets, under a canopy of a thousand different cameras. I walk for hours; the night sky slowly lightens from asphalt to concrete.

At 06:33 I find the bodega with the smoking dragon in the window. Next to a streetlamp with a cracked cover I find a small alley, packed high with garbage. As I watch, a man comes out from the back door of the bodega with two black bags in his hands and tosses them onto the pile. He repeats this trip several times. He seems very tired. I stop him and ask him when the garbage was last collected. Three days ago, he says. Oh, I say. Okay then. I ask him if he found anything in the pile; he asks me if I’ve lost something. I tell him I don’t know.

He gives me a strange look and goes back inside. I watch him go and then wander over to the streetlamp and stare at the pile for a moment.

Then I begin to dig.

I find the transient beneath several bags stuffed with empty bottles and old food. I look up at the lamp, and then go inside the Bodega and ask to use their phone. I contact the authorities and tell them that I’ve found a body, and yes I can give them the coordinates, and yes I can wait. I buy myself a cup of coffee and go outside to keep the transient company. All around us, I hear the sounds of the city waking up: vendors shouting, dogs barking, monks chanting, babies crying. A train rumbles along in the distance, and somewhere nearby a radio switches on and begins to play something classical. The light flickers dimly from red to blue to red as the dragon raises and lowers its cigarette, and I see, in the distance, the faint silver glow of the company’s logo, pierced through and stained with the gold of the rising sun.

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Persephone in Limbo

I. In the distance, the Verrazano blinks, reminds me of my mother.

I wonder if she would agree: fingers interlocked in the metal strands of a fence is a promise the way Brooklyn dogs barking means silence. I listen closely.

I can’t remember the last time we were two women home alone.

I find her inside the grocery bags, but the distance never closes.

II. More and more I am feeling like a dog by your side, these days I look out the kitchen window and see the silent lake you always dreamed about without the desire to get beyond it. As it pools at my ankles, I take the knife and cut my chest open, feed my pulse the pomegranates with my fingers.

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III. In our house in Monterey bay, my father would garden and watch deer eat his tulips from the window, and my mother taught me how to read the weather, how to open clams and blue mussels. She told me this was marriage. I believe her.

You keep dreaming about the lake.

I spread too thin, too comfortable.

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Contributors’ Notes MONICA ALBORNOZ is a sophomore studying studio art. She grew up in Colombia and likes to use photography as a tool to explore light, water, and reflection, which she later addresses conceptually in her sculptural work. She currently works as a monitor in the NYU Steinhardt woodshop.

SHARON ATTIA is a junior in Gallatin studying photojournalism and gender studies. She enjoys shooting in both digital and film. Keeping in line with her SoCal roots, she has decided to skip winter all together and is studying abroad in Buenos Aires, Argentina this semester.

ALEX BOLLINGTON is a freshman at CAS studying sustainable fashion. His passion for photography began about two years ago and since then his projects have included black and white work, portraiture, and landscapes. Some of his biggest inspirations include Donslens and Dash Grey. He is honored to have his work showcased in West 10th.

E YEON CHANG is a freshman at NYU from Seoul, Korea. She has attended workshops at the University of Virginia, Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English, Kenyon College, and University of Iowa. The National YoungArts Foundation named E Yeon a 2015 Finalist in Writing and ultimately a Semi-finalist for the U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts. She wastes poems on Facebook captions and wants to be the kind of girl Childish raps about.

JENNIFER CHU is a first-year student at NYU pursuing a BFA in studio art in Steinhardt. She enjoys making art because it helps her create the illusion that she is not merely an oxygen-consuming-meat-bag coasting through life with neither purpose nor joy. The majority of her 85

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art is concerned with perception and disclosure. After graduation, she hopes to get a dog.

MATT FROST is a writer, director, and editor—both of film and of prose—who has just wrapped up his final semester at NYU. He currently works for the Public Theater as a videographer and livestream operator, and spends the rest of his time writing and working as the cinematographer for an artists’ collective. His first memory is of telling a story, and his favorite image is the tangled silhouettes of telephone lines.

SHILPA KUNNAPPILLIL grew up in the suburbs of Washington D.C., and is currently a freshman at NYU. She loves to tell stories in any way she can.

MAYA LEBEAU is a senior majoring in film and television at Tisch School of the Arts. She spends a lot of her energy analyzing her feelings and discussing the lack of diversity in almost everything.

CYNTHIA LEE is a student currently studying at NYU, majoring in photography. She grew up in California, Bellevue, Beijing, and Taiwan. Previously, her photos have been published in Blueshift Journal, among other magazines. In December 2014, she had her very first solo exhibition at a clinic in Taipei. She had begun taking photos at a very young age but started taking photography seriously in her freshman year of high school.

JAE LEE is a budding cat lady and a dog-walker in the West Village area. She enjoys doing homework on Brooklyn-bound trains, writing to-do lists, and lunch specials at Thai restaurants.

ROSALYN LIN is a California native studying business at NYU. She is an avid watcher of crime shows and should really be less sedentary.

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Contributors’ Notes

SYDNEY MILLER is a current freshman at Gallatin who enjoys writing poetry and prose. In her free time, you can find her attending concerts, exploring NYC with her friends, or participating in Jewish Life and community service on campus.

SOUMYAJIT RAY was born in India and joined NYU Tandon School of Engineering in fall 2015. He is a graduate student in electrical engineering. During his spare time, Soumyajit travels within or around the Big Apple with his trusty companion, a D7100. He tries to learn and improve himself by observing every detail, and also by researching various subjects online. Apart from photography, he also loves to sketch.

TIA LEILANI RAMOS is a second-year student in CAS studying comparative literature. She spends her free time working a job, editing for Washington Square News’s Under the Arch blog, and contemplating the differing ways to pet dogs without their owners noticing. Originally from Denver, Colorado, she dreams of the mountains, the stars, and her beautiful dog, Moose.

CAMILLE RENAUD is a senior studying politics in CAS. Her poetry and short fiction have been published previously in West 10th, as well as in the Australian literary magazine Overland. She grew up in Weston, Connecticut.

DAVID R. STAPLETON is a freshman in the studio art program at Steinhardt. He is a National YoungArts merit winner and is currently pursuing a career in the arts that combines his passion for painting, photography, literature, and film.

AMY TIONG is a Westover School alumna majoring in film and television and minoring in psychology and entertainment business. Inspired by her immigrant Singaporean parents, and overcoming her hearing impairment, Amy has pursued her education with herculean efforts, 87

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becoming a Gates Millennium and Tisch Dean’s Scholar. An accomplished photographer and writer, her creative works have earned her an NYU Expository Writing Award and a Scholastic Arts Gold Key Award. Amy is a sister and music coordinator of Alpha Sigma Tau, a site­leader at Strive for College and alumni relations officer for Fusion Film Festival. She aspires to be a filmmaker.

JORDANA WEINER is a senior in Gallatin studying poetry and survival. She likes tea and flowers and astrophysics, and hopes to one day live in the woods and teach high school English.

KIT ZAUHAR is a filmmaker, writer, actress, and person-in-training studying at Tisch School of the Arts. In her spare time she enjoys eating tacos, karaoke, and Photobooth photography. You can find out more about her life and work at kitzauhar.com.

YING-YING ZHANG is an NYU senior/grad student. In her spare time, she is a writer/programmer/musician/engineer. It’s okay, she’s got this. Sort of.

DAVID ZUMWALT grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he enjoyed playing miniature golf and trespassing on private property.

David is a senior majoring in journalism and English and a member of the NYU tennis team (Go Violets). His other interests include Netflix, Kraft macaroni and cheese, and people who will buy him whiskey.

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