Parlor tricks issue 2 final pdf may 2016

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Editor-in-Chief Story Ponvert Managing Editor Gwyneth Henke Art Editor Brianna Rettig Creative Director Krista Gelev Designer Alexandra Scarangella Web Manager Rachel Oren Editors Shubhashree Basnyat Trevin Corsiglia Charles Harrison Sumun Iyer Lylia Li Emily McDonald Eric Muscosky Samuel Reinert Jianing Tu Andrew Wallace Lisa Zhang

EDITOR'S NOTE We started Parlor Tricks one year ago as an attempt to showcase the work that writers, artists and thinkers are doing at Williams. With that goal in mind, we expanded the magazine this year in several directions. First, we started a website, wparlortricks.com, which contains all the work found in this issue, along with older content and web-exclusive items like films and videogames. We also partnered with the Williams English department and the Williams College Museum of Art, both of whom we’d like to thank for their financial support, which made it possible to print the copy you’re holding now. Most importantly, we grew the magazine itself. This year’s Parlor Tricks is nearly three times as long as last year’s, which allowed us to feature more people, a more diverse assortment of work, and several long stories and art portfolios. With these changes came changes to our design and editorial approach, and I hope you’ll agree with me that it’s all been for the better. I’m really looking forward to the continuing evolution of the magazine, and we’ll have succeeded with our second edition if you’re excited too. But until next year, please enjoy exploring these pages.

—Story Ponvert, April 2016

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TABLE of CONTENTS 3 9 17 18 19 24 25 29 34 38 47 49 51 53 54 59 63 64 67 73 75 77 79 83 85 86 92 96

Grocery Season / Gwyneth Henke Portfolio / Lisa Zhang Persephone—The Epilogue / Emma Mandel Untitled / Stephanie Sun Back Home / Harrison Gatlin Two Poems / Alex Paseltiner Excerpts from lick me / Hudson de Borba Interview: Andrea Barrett / Andrew Wallace Hakodate by Bike / Beatrix Haddock Lessons / Story Ponvert Excerpts from Limbo / Angela Sun Six Histories / Cameron Henderson Untitled (Scanner Series) / Brian Trelegan Two Poems / Tyler Tsay Search Party / Ari Basche Selected Works / Jonas Luebbers Wino / Trevin Corsiglia The Dealership Greenhouse / Brianna Rettig What We Talk About... / Story Ponvert Three Poems / Teague Morris Center Stage / Katherine Mooney Anniversary / Gwyneth Henke The Way We Weren't / Miranda Cooper Excerpts from Yemen in NY / Salma Mohammed Picnic at Daybreak / Sumun Iyer Instructions for a Ritual / Hannah Brown Each Sound You Left / Alexandra Griffin Banitza Recipe / Krista Gelev

COVER DESIGN

Front: Krista Gelev Back: Gwyneth Henke

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GWYNETH HENKE Grocery Season

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young couple, mid-twenties, appears. She wears a brown dress with a dark orange sweater, he a green cardigan and tan button-up.

“You two have great colors,” I say, smiling.

They laugh, glancing at each other. I hand them their bag: two wrapped sandwiches and a glass bottle of lemonade. They’re my last customers of the night, ten minutes before closing.

As I watch them leave, she turns her head, profile illuminated by the streetlights, and kisses his shoulder. A hand stretching backwards. He rubs her neck, then links his arm through hers.

The unhinged shell of an oyster, swaying.

There’s an older man—mid-seventies—who comes in every week or so.

The rest of the staff seems to know him. Last Monday, Jack stopped him as he entered the store. “We just got a new shipment in! I set them aside for you.”

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When he gets to my register, he buys three packages of ox tails—$18.50 each. I can see the cartilage: stiff white rings, pink blood frozen against the shrink-wrapped cellophane.

He pays with twenty-dollar bills, pulling them carefully from his pocket, loose. At the last second he adds a Sprite. He’s over by a dollar.

“Then—no soda. Yes?” he says, smiling at me. He speaks with a thick Greek accent.

I cancel the soda, bringing the total to $76.61. He hands me the three bills, takes his change, and leaves.

The next week, he comes to my line again. I ring up the ox tails, now accompanied by a stalk of wet spinach, four cans of beans, and tomatoes. He’s brought a wire shopping cart with him. After a moment of wrestling with the paper bags, I manage to fit everything into one. I walk around the register and lower it inside the cart.

“Dear—thank you,” he says. His words are choppy, but he reaches out abruptly and grabs my hand, squeezing it. His eyes are wet, his brow lined with wrinkles. “You’re too cold. Cold.” When he finally lets go he’s pressed the extra change into my palm.

Two boys, mid-twenties, are checking out. A 24-pack of beer and three bottles of wine.

“Hey, we’re having a party!” announces the bolder one, blonde.

“Oh, yeah? Can I see some ID?” I hate asking for ID. “Sure. Do you have some paper? Maybe I can write down the address, you can stop by.”

“I’m working!”

“You work all night?” He laughs, glancing at his friend.

“Yeah, straight through the night. In case of late-night grocery issues. I’m the one who gets you milk at 3 A.M.” “Oh, you’re the one! What’s your name?”

“Gwyneth.”

“Really? Gwyneth? That’s a pretty name.”

“It’s on the receipt. It’s spelled wrong there,” I say. I hand them their beers.

“See you soon, Gwyneth.”

They return a week later. Another case of PBR, two bottles of red wine.

“We’re having another party!” Again, the blonde boy does the talking.

“Another party? You guys need to hit the books.” The register is crowded, and there’s a line of people growing behind them.

“Hey, I read! You like Bukowski?” he asks.

“Sure, I like Bukowski. But I think you need some more heroin for him, right?” I’m confusing Bukowski with Burroughs.

“Bukowski didn’t do heroin! Just drank,” his friend interrupts, indignant.

The blonde boy takes the receipt, says, “You read Ham on Rye before the next time we come in, and I’ll—I’ll sign up for college.”

I laugh. “Okay, man. You’ve got a deal.”

“Bye, Gwyneth! We love you, Gwyneth!”

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A man stumbles to my register clutching a bottle of juice in one hand, the other pressing a cell phone to his ear. His white hair stands up in disheveled tufts, and his face seems gaunt. I try to make eye contact, but he looks right through me.

“I’m unsettled,” he says into the phone. “I’m not going to lie. I’m unhinged.” His breaths rattle, coming in gasps between each phrase. “I’m unhinged, Paul.”

Two girls are waiting in line behind him, and I see them look nervously at each other. I scan the juice.

“I’ve lost too many people lately,” he continues. His eyes flicker shut briefly, then snap open. “I’ve seen too many funerals. I don’t understand—” “Three fifty,” I interrupt, immediately regretting it.

He blinks, then tosses a bill on the counter. When I hand him his change, the coins slip out of my grasp and go rolling over the countertop.

“I’m scared, Paul,” he says. Abandoning the change where it fell, he lurches backwards to the exit. His voice trails behind him as he moves through the doorway. “I’ll tell you, I’m unhinged.”

“Where do you keep your bread?” a woman in her mid-sixties asks, standing impatiently before my register.

I answer this question a dozen times a day. “It’s over there, by the door,” I say, pointing.

She frowns. “You moved it. It used to be next to the milk.”

“Sorry for the confusion,” I reply. “We just changed it.” Even though we rearranged it six weeks ago, I still tell this to everyone who asks. I think it offers them some comfort, allowing them to believe that the store only exists when they inhabit it.

She walks to the bread aisle and returns empty-handed, exasperated. “I was hoping for a baguette!”

I point to the bowl of baguettes positioned next to my register. “No problem, ma’am— they’re over here. Sorry for the confusion.”

She shakes her head, laughing, and takes one. “I mean, do I look like the Wonderbread type to you?”

She’s wearing a sheer silk shirt and flaring black pants. A gold-studded clip holds her hair in a neat updo, and I’m passing her a bag of boutique hummus and chives worth $25. Five minutes ago a man and his two daughters bought a full cart of vegetables, rice, and Wonderbread with $20 of EBT. “No, ma’am. You don’t. Sorry for the confusion.”

A man walks in wearing a white tank-top and sweating in the afternoon heat. He hurries to the alcohol coolers across from the registers. After a moment, he calls out to Sue and me.

“Do you have any hard liquor? Vodka, whiskey?”

“No, sir, I’m sorry. Just beer and wine.” My response to this question is scripted by now. “But you can check at the Schnucks down the street—or there’s a gas station on Olive.”

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He grits his teeth. “It’s okay. I was just looking for something for my arms,” he says, his voice shaky. “I was in a motorbike crash a few weeks ago.”

He turns, baring his left bicep for us. The skin is mottled red and black, lustrous. Sue gasps—“Shit.”

“It was the other guy’s fault,” he explains. “I didn’t do anything. But he got out clean.”

It’s Wednesday afternoon, the slowest time of the week. I’ve dusted all the shelves and fronted the candy bars twice. The store is empty except for me and Bill, the produce manager, who’s carried a crate of mangoes out from storage and is piling them onto a wooden shelf. The muscles in his arm tighten visibly whenever he reaches for the next piece.

Bill’s music is playing over the radio. The managers take turns choosing songs; the cashiers just listen.

We are living At the deli, one of the chefs leans over the counter, her forearms flat against the metal slab. “Pork 6 for $5” is scrawled across the blackboard below her. She plays with a blue ring on her pinky, twirling it in slow circles around her knuckle.

In a material world Outside, the light hits the abandoned bus depot directly, and the old red bricks look like they’re burning. The neon words in the window of the Thai restaurant next door seem dim, conspicuously artificial. A car pulls into the parking lot and leaves without finding a space.

And I am a material girl Bukowski returns. I scan his beer before looking at him. When I do, his face is bruised and swollen. Stitches lace his right eyebrow, and his left cheek is purple.

“Hey, Gwyneth,” he murmurs, quiet.

“Hey!” I don’t know what to say.

“How’s Ham on Rye going?”

I laugh, too loud. “I’m getting there, I promise.”

He reaches for his receipt, and I fumble with the slip. “I hope so,” he says. His bony shoulders jut out against the cotton of his shirt, and sweat plasters his curly hair to his temples. “You know, I signed up for college.”

“I’m proud of you!” I reply, handing him his change. I pause. “I’m proud of you.”

It’s become dark enough outside that I’ve forgotten where we are. The rain starts slowly and then comes in great sheets, curtains of water. The atrium fills with people fleeing it. Two young men shifting on their feet. A uniformed veteran in a wheelchair asks me to plug in his phone.

I don’t see anyone in line; I can’t name a single item I’m holding. All my body’s eyes are looking at the rain. It’s so thick I think we must be underwater. I had a friend once

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who cried because he couldn’t live inside a reef.

A man asks me if I’m alright. “Sure—” I say, surprised. “But I hate storms.”

The register goes black. The lights cut out. Then everything hums back to life.

And now the looters, right? I think. They creep forward, picking over my mind.

The walk to work is a little under twenty minutes. I read my book, usually. Peripheral vision guides me through the construction and crowded streets. Today, I freeze in an intersection to the skidding of brakes. Someone tried to make a right turn into me. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I mutter, hurrying onto the sidewalk.

When I enter the store, the chill of air conditioning after St. Louis’s humidity makes my skin clammy. I shake until the sweat dries.

“Number four today,” Sue says. “It’s been busy.”

Anna is on register three, which means we’re standing back to back. It’s the easiest place to talk, and Anna is one of my closest friends at work. But, walking up, I cringe. I think of the book in my locker, the slam of a horn. As I reach to flip my sign, I know she can see the sweat stains on my shirt.

“Hey! How are you doing?” Anna smiles.

“Pretty go—ood,” I reply. I always use the same inflection. “How are you?”

I can feel my hair falling out of its bun, clinging to the nape of my neck. I cut it a few weeks ago—too short, but for days I didn’t look in a mirror to check. I start to twist a lock under the rubber band, but my hands tremble. I used to fantasize about shaving it all off, until my sister said she’d never speak to me if I did.

One man comes in every few days and buys a six-pack. He’s usually drunk and clutching wildflowers picked from the beds that line the street, the city’s latest attempt at drawing tourists into the area.

It’s early in the afternoon, and the store’s been busy because of the Fourth of July—lots of watermelon and hot dog buns. He stumbles in clutching a wilted bouquet. His shirt is open, and his bare skin is streaked with sweat.

“I’m back, I’m back!” he screams, staring at me. “And look who’s still here!”

I glance toward my register and straighten a stack of bags on the counter. He walks past and returns with a six-pack, stepping into my line.

“How old are you?” he sighs, handing me the beer.

I don’t know why I never lie. “Eighteen.”

“Are you gonna come see the fireworks with me tonight?”

I scan the beers and lower them into a paper bag. “I’m sorry, I’m working. I can’t.”

“I’ve got a question. I’ve got a question,” he says, angry. He’s pulling out crumpled dollar bills from his pocket one at a time. “I’ve got a little crush on you. You know that?

I like you.”

“Thank you, sir.” I apologize silently.

“But I guess I’m a little old for you. I’m fifty-five! Is that too old?”

I look at him. “I think so, sir.”

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He sways. I try to give him the bag and his change, but he grabs suddenly for my hand, his fingers wrapping around my palm and ending at my wrist. “Sir—” I say, wrestling backwards.

He releases his grip and careens away, staggering towards the door. “I’ll see you soon!” he calls, and vanishes into the busy street.

At my register, flowers litter the black vinyl conveyer. I stare at them for a moment, then pick each stem, one by one, into the trash.

A few hours later, Shawn is at the register with me, checking out a couple with two full carts of groceries. The man walks back in, his bouquet missing.

“Do you have some paper?” he says. “And some tape?”

“I’m sorry sir, but we’re working. We can help you after this transaction,” Shawn replies.

“People keep messing up my shrine! I built a shrine across the street and people keep messing it up. I need to put up a sign. Do you have some paper?”

“Sir, we’re working,” Shawn repeats, annoyed.

Chris, from the kitchen, is rearranging the bread by the window. “I can help you, sir,” he says, grabbing a pen from my register. “Here you go.”

“I need you to write it. I can’t spell. Can you write it?”

Chris rips some paper out of the receipt machine and scratches something onto it, then hands it over. “That good?” he asks.

“I’ve gotta protect my shrine,” the man says, clutching the paper. He turns toward me.

“Hey, you see her? I’ve got a crush on her, but she thinks I’m too old for her.She thinks I’m too old! What do you think?”

Chris shrugs, looking at me. “I don’t know, man,” he says. “Probably right.”

The man remains in the doorway, watching me. Shawn hands the customers their bags—six of them—but he stays beside me at the register.

“Okay, okay,” the man says after a minute of silence. “I gotta go. I gotta protect my shrine.” He walks out.

Chris and Shawn glance at each other. “Crazy dude,” Chris says, laughing. Shawn shakes his head. “Geez,” he sighs. “Sure was.” I shift on my feet.

Do you thank people for what they would have done?

I gotta protect my shrine, I hear. I gotta protect my shrine.

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LISA ZHANG portfolio

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EMMA MANDEL

Persephone—The Epilogue I: She returns home to earth with a knot in her throat.

This week I returned home into the shadows I had left gathering dust. This week I traced myself back in time, receded across state lines, slept in my childhood bedroom.

II: Two years ago, her mother would not have known how to get to the train station. And she would never have gotten on a train.

This week I dug up maps I had once made, but found that they now led me in circles. This week I swallowed back memories of places that used to feel full.

III: Instead of looking at the landscape, she counts rings around her mother’s eyes.

She has let someone in and her mother has let someone out.

This week I relearned how to live vertically, unfurling my spine with each stair and steeling my bones for the narrow.

The return of the return.

I tried to remember what it felt like when our words overlapped, the light shifted by the leaves falling outside the kitchen window. I studied their fall but you kept trying to talk to me as I made my notes. The return always feels like a rehearsal.

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STEPHANIE SUN Untitled

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HARRISON GATLIN Back Home

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here we were, all four of us, sitting on the edge of the pool solving the world’s problems. That’s what we called it when we got together for a round of serious drinking. I think Franco came up with it—he would’ve been the idea guy of the group, since Aldous was gone—but I can’t say for sure. The joke was that you never remembered the solution the next day.

I was on the outskirts of a mental haze, heading in. We were in our early twenties—an age when summer still meant something—back home in suburban Denver. Like really suburban, where House A and House B look like they gave birth to House C and dressed it up with a trim lawn and closecropped hedges to look just like them. It was late evening and grey clouds were mobilizing above the house next door. They looked so heavy they might come tumbling down from the sky and crash land in the Johnsons’ backyard.

“The sky looks pissed,” I said.

“Nah, that’s God,” said Randy. “The sky doesn’t have feelings. Whaddaya think we did to get him all riled up?”

“Got drunk,” said Franco.

“No way,” I said. “We haven’t even finished our second 24-pack.”

“Well, maybe he’s drunk and he’s getting all ornery,” suggested Louie.

“God doesn’t drink, ya idiot,” said Randy. “He’s straightedge.”

“Well, something’s got him of his rocker. He needs a face full of snow,” I said. That was our phrase for a cold reset. Like when you’ve been inside drinking for too long and you get to feeling claustrophobic and lonely and pissed off at the world for locking you up in a safe where the combination’s too long to figure out in one lifetime and you step outside and stick your face in the snow to erase all that.

“He needs a good woman up there with him,” said Louie. “Then we’d have some more sunshine around here.”

“I’ll drink to that,” said Franco, and we all took a swig.

Darker, soberer clouds filed in behind the first ones. We opened another

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24-pack and a raindrop clanged off the metal top of my can. In my memory the sky swirls at a reckless pace, though often memory itself is the one swirling.

“Hey Franco, why are you always late to these get-togethers?” Randy asked.

“Why are you calling them get-togethers?” Franco replied.

“Dude, Franco, he’s right,” Louie said. “You suck at time.”

“I don’t suck at time. I just feel like I should have more control over it. Everything in this indoor Internet Age is supposed to give me more control over how I spend my time. Why not how much time I have to spend? Or how long that time really lasts? Like, why’s time gotta be some kind of intractable function that operates without factoring me into the equation?”

“I thought there was an app for that…” Louie said.

Franco grinned. “But, yes, I am often late.”

“Is that an apology?” I asked him.

“More like an expression of regret,” he said.

“That counts! We got an apology out of Franco!”

“I’ll drink to that,” Randy said, and we all took a swig.

I would posit the three guys sitting by me at the pool that day as evidence that I was not self-centered. They might’ve said otherwise, but the truth is when I was around them I spent just about all my interest on their lives, which meant I never got a chance to over-examine my own, and I never felt that sensation of utter loneliness standing in front of a bathroom mirror. It was nice. I knew that anything the guys said to me was out of love, even the shit that was hardest to hear. They were my reminder of all the good, surprising things outside my window. Talking with them took me back in time.

The breeze felt damp and familiar although it seemed to have traveled a long way before getting to us. I was just about to say something when Franco opened his mouth.

“Remember Michael Clear?” he asked. “The lanky guy who didn’t say a single word in four years of high school?”

“We said some pretty mean shit to that guy,” Louie said. He kept watching the sky.

“Yeah, we thought we had it all figured out back then, but now I’m starting to think it was Michael who had the right idea,” Franco said.

“I had a locker next to him,” I said. “Never saw him put a book in his backpack, not even once. He walked around with that thing full of nothing but air.”

“Maybe he was Buddhist,” Randy offered.

“He wasn’t Buddhist,” Franco said. “But he was onto something. We wasted our breath complaining about the teachers and the classes and the idiotic kids that we saw as unworthy of our precious fucking time, and there he was, always a step ahead.” Franco watched the clouds now too. They were assembled for a full frontal assault. “We were as committed as guerrilla fighters. And to what? For what? You know? We didn’t have anything figured out.

Maybe Michael did.”

“I heard him speak once, sort of,” Louie said. “At the bus stop after class. Aldous was

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giving him some shit. Not mean shit, but like his I-want-to-reconfigure-your-life shit, telling him he could make him social and self-aware and all the other stuff Aldous thought everyone needed. And the whole time Michael stood there staring at the bus stop sign, no grin or anything, no expression, really. Until finally, Aldous came right out and asked him where he was going with his life, assuming he wouldn’t answer and he could draw up a path for him, and that motherfucker pointed straight up at the sky, without taking his eyes off the sign.”

“What’d Aldous do?” I asked.

“Nothing. He just nodded. I guess he liked that plan as much as any he could’ve thought up.”

The first rumble of thunder wandered in like a bum hopping trains. It sounded hungry. I knew the clouds were coming to consume us. I drank faster.

“Aldous said Michael saw visions,” Franco said. “Like an Oracle or something.”

“Probably just hallucinating. Who knows what kind of drugs that guy was on?” I said.

“Maybe. I don’t know how he could tell without ever getting a word out of him, but Aldous was really sure of it. And I don’t think this was one of his screwball jokes. HE was serious. I never understood how Michael made it through school without a single laugh, but Aldous said he was willing to bet Michael saw things alone in his room at night that made him laugh so hard he never needed to laugh during the day. Real things…things about the future…things that would come true one day for all of us, for all of humanity. And that’s why he never talked to anyone.”

“Well that’s some theory. Kinda makes me wanna track that Michael Clear down now— maybe he’s with the Illuminati,” Randy said.

“I wouldn’t want to know,” Louie said. “Even if he does see all that stuff, I wouldn’t want to. That’s a curse, if anything.”

“Guys, are you really believing this shit? Oracles haven’t been a thing since Ancient Greece, and even then people didn’t take them seriously,” I said.

“And look what happened to them,” Franco said.

“Yeah, in the myths. This isn’t a fucking myth, this is real life! Besides, are you forgetting how many drugs Aldous did in high school? He should’ve been paid by neuroscientists for all the acid he tested!”

“What’s got you so ornery all of a sudden?”

I was looking more at the storm than at anyone in particular. I hadn’t noticed I was shouting, and I felt displaced by my anger. I was used to such a light-hearted vibe with these guys: joke, joke, story, joke, and then, joke. I’d disrupted the pattern, and I wanted it back.

“Must’ve been Randy’s gay-ass swim trunks,” I tried.

They all just looked at me. Franco shook his head and opened his mouth to speak but stopped. I already knew what he was going to say: What would Aldous think of that? And I already knew what Aldous would’ve thought of it.

“That was stupid,” I said. Everyone nodded. “Probably the reason I’m so on edge is that I’ve been having dreams about Aldous. Really weird, fucked-up dreams, and they keep getting worse. In one I was in Aldous’s backyard, and I guess we’d been drinking because I

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really had to piss. So I went out to the tree in the back behind the longhorn statue, and as soon as I unzipped my fly Aldous was right there next to me, encouraging me, saying you can do this, Marc, like I needed help pissing or something. But I knew it wasn’t about the piss, so I said what? do what? and Aldous just pointed up at the sky.

“Then the next night I dreamed we were on a plane, all of us plus Aldous, flying godknows-where, and the plane had seats in pairs going up one narrow aisle. I was sitting next to you, Randy, and Louie and Franco, you guys were sitting together in front of us, and Aldous was alone in the very front next to some old lady. All of a sudden I notice there’s blood all over Aldous’s window seat, and I look up and see he’s bleeding from both of his ears. It’s coming out like a full-on faucet, but no one else notices it, not even the lady sitting next to him. I try and run over to him but my seatbelt locks up and I can’t do anything but watch as he presses the call flight attendant button over and over, to a beat.”

“Jesus,” said Randy. “That’s no dream. That’s a nightmare.”

There’s no such thing as true silence, but whatever this was, it was close. And it lasted long enough for me to focus in on a single raindrop as it hit the surface of the pool, stopping suspended in a bubble for a sliver of time before bursting upward in the shape of a tiny geyser.

Franco broke the trance: “Such a mysterious dude, that Aldous. Like, you’d see him with so much conviction telling people how to live their lives more fully, wake up from the dream, and all that, but when the time came for him to act on everything he’d said, you never knew what he was gonna do.”

“Yeah,” I said. “He never stood up for Michael Clear when we’d bully him. He just kinda… grimaced. I didn’t even realize they were friends.”

“There was that one time,” Louie said. “Where he held an assembly for him.”

“What?” I said.

“It was quite the standing-up-for moment. You don’t remember that?”

“I must’ve skipped that day. What happened?” I asked.

“Remember how everyone at school was so sick of Führer Bosch and his totalitarian headmaster speeches that they petitioned for students to run assemblies every once in a while?”

Louie said.

“Yeah, Old Bosch Man was floored.”

“Well, the petition got approved and Aldous signed up to put together the first assembly.

He named himself the speaker and chose human rights as the topic.”

“How did I not know this?”

“Dude, none of us knew it until the assembly,” Randy said. “Aldous kept the whole thing a secret. Even from us.”

“When I saw Aldous walk out on stage in front of the whole school I nearly lost it,” Franco said. “I half-expected Nelson Mandela to follow him out there.”

“Yeah,” Louie continued. “None of us knew what to expect. Then, when he got up to the mic he didn’t introduce himself or anything; he just went straight into a list of classic fucked-up villains of history. Hitler, Stalin, bin Laden, Hannibal Lector, Charles Manson, Idi Amin—“

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“Pol Pot,” Randy added.

“And then he goes, What do all these people have in common…? That’s right, they were bullied in high school.”

“What the hell?”

“It was crazy,” Louie said. “No one in the crowd knew how to act. We just sat there while Aldous read off this long manifesto declaring freedom from bullying to be a human right. But that wasn’t even the wildest part. After that he brought up Michael Clear. He listed off all the shitty things people have said about him over the years and called for it to stop. Demanded, really. He was making demands.”

“I can’t believe I never heard about this.”

“I never talked about it,” Louie said. “I don’t think any of us did.” Randy and Franco shook their heads. “Aldous certainly didn’t.”

I wondered how many other Aldous stories must be floating around out there. Meanwhile, the sky was really letting us have it. It was as if enormous black buckets had overflowed, spilling their contents all over the yard. I hadn’t noticed the transition, and I took a second to appreciate it, tilting my head back and feeling the rain knock against my eyelids. Franco enjoyed it the most. While we sat on the edge he got all the way into the pool and squatted in the shallow end with his eyes barely above the water, watching the raindrops form craters in its surface.

I had to ask. “Did Michael and Aldous ever talk again?”

“Man, I really doubt it,” Louie said. “I haven’t seen them together since.”

“I bet no one messed with Michael after that,” I said.

“I’ll drink to that,” said Franco, and we did.

A sudden streak of lightning split the darkness and I saw a still of the whole neighborhood— stationary, stoic, whitewashed by light and generations of monotony—with the edges ablaze like a flaming Polaroid. A few seconds later the thunder answered.

It was Randy, or maybe Louie, who said this next thing: If you count the seconds between the lightning and the thunder, you can tell how far away they are. For every five seconds that’s a mile. We slid into the pool, all of us, keeping our eyes just above the water like Franco as we counted out loud the seconds between sight and sound. Four after the second strike: 0.8 miles.

13 blocks.

Our heads were jagged rocks jutting out from the tide. Three seconds away, then two. And we kept squatting there in that godforsaken pool, holding our ground and our aluminum cans in a determined stance of resistance. A sit-in. One second—three blocks away—and even with my eyes closed I could see the lightning rip the air in half and land gracefully on Ms. Lundermeyer’s satellite dish.

God was screaming at us, and when the thunder became so deafening you could see the vibrations on the surface of the pool we screamed back, calling him a fuck-up and a sadistic cunt, until those words meant nothing, then cursing him with new, made up hate words from imaginary languages he surely recognized. That fucker knew exactly what he’d done.

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ALEX SAMUEL PASELTINER Word and Object

after Quine

To admit the wing and rotor and exclude the cormorant; to admit algae and corals, denying the lanternshark. Mosses, mushrooms, newer runes.

To paint each petal in watercolor and still forget the stamen. To appear abruptly in halflight, wearing the fog like a shroud, like a net of stars.

To revert every diamond into charcoal for drawing. To admit the blue rose and reject the hypothesis. Loving the cosine, embracing tangent, the open and the wooden associated with doors, tables, houses, arms and skies.

And what of gold, the lyre, the grain that plays sun to a small world. How east of here the mountains curve north toward the salt domes, toward the kingdom of thorns. What happens when we remember a color, reconstruct it from the usual spectra. Within my skull the word sleepy. To solve the passage of light through mist and smoke. To succeed in reading the signs, only to relinquish them.

No Houses

after Antonioni

The film was to be about the two of them, mornings and nights with no ‘narrative’ between. In each scene they sit in a provincial airport, perfecting an idle art. Cargo planes launch from the runway, red flares on the approach. In the unseen dawn the wildflowers turn towards the light like solar panels, sparrows drawing their freehand arcs. How cardboard wilts in rain. Today’s montage: I pursued myself through the vacant cinema, that clearinghouse of disabused images, where one assembles from a stranger’s detritus a bricolage of lawn chairs, lampshades, pin-ups and candelabras. Consider this a request for something, a miniature city of paint cans and Tyvek. A spring lily upon the altar of no mythology.

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HUDSON DE BORBA

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Excerpts from lick me

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PROFESSOR

ANDREA BARRETT

is currently using her reading time in two ways. The first is articles and essays on Neo-Lamarckism, a 19th- and early 20th-century branch of biology that rejected the teachings of Charles Darwin. The second is Elena Ferrante’s popular “Neapolitan Novels,” a four-part Italian series about women growing up in post-war Naples. These are disparate subjects, no doubt, but ones emblematic of Barrett’s interests and her career as a writer and teacher. A biology major in college, Barrett started writing fiction as an adult and published her first novel in 1988, when she was in her mid-thirties. Since then she’s won substantial praise, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 2001, for work that often displays her interest in the intersection of science, history, and personal relationships. In many of her stories and novels, characters exist in a network, connected to each other across time and continents. Barrett was a student and then a teacher at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference at Middlebury College, and later an instructor at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. In 2004 she joined the Williams faculty, where she’s taught a variety of courses, including fiction workshops and a class focusing on science in literature. Last fall, I took “The Art of the Long Story” with her, in which we read works of fiction longer than short stories and shorter than novellas. Professor Barrett asked us to consider the perspectives of the authors, teaching us to examine how they achieved the effects they desired. I sat down with her in January to discuss her thoughts on writing and teaching aspiring young writers.

—Andrew Wallace, April 2016

that. I’ve internalized over the years the idea that it’s really, really hard to read outside the classroom. That makes me sad, but I have to accept BARRETT that your workload is heavy. But you can think of It looks like reading all the time, and reading it this way: That you are writing at all in college is thoughtfully, with a pen, really trying to dissect kind of amazing. There didn’t use to be creative what you’re reading and understand how it’s writing courses in college, they just didn’t exist. made. And it means writing sort of all the time, So already people who are taking writing classes even if you’re not working on something particare starting really early, which is fabulous. If you ular—you don’t have to be writing a novel or a can’t read everything you wish you could, tant story—but developing your chops writing journal pis. You’re already way ahead of the game just by entries, taking stabs at writing certain kinds of starting to write now. I was much older when I descriptions or scenes. That’s a lot of it. You just started writing. do it, it’s not rocket science.

INTERVIEWER INTERVIEWER You’ve said that you didn’t love school when you A lot of students here find that it’s tough to were a student. What’s it like teaching now, findmake time to read outside of class. How should ing yourself in the position your professors were prospective writers reconcile the need to read in when you were young? constantly with the lack of time to do so?

BARRETT BARRETT It’s funny, sometimes. I think about that a lot, I don’t think I’ve ever had a student here not say especially if I have a student who is having INTERVIEWER What does working to become a writer look like?

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difficulties with school or who has gifts which aren’t expressed in the shape of school. I feel split in those moments because I know what I should be doing as a teacher, in the context of Williams, to get that student in line and help her or him go through Williams in a successful way. But I also remember how I felt, how school wasn’t a good shape for me to learn in. It’s a funny little dance because I’m such a non-traditional school person myself. I really balked at it, but I had some wonderful teachers who let me balk. So I would do very badly in some things and then meet someone who could get me through or around the hurdle and do very well in that area. I also did an awful lot of independent work. I think I took almost a third of my courses

as independent studies. That’s how I learned. Give me an idea and a library and someone to bounce things off of and that works for me. Class, not so much.

INTERVIEWER Much of your work is set in the past, and your writing often requires extensive research. Is it easy to do that research in Williamstown and North Adams?

BARRETT It’s a lot easier than it used to be. It has totally changed since I was a young woman because so much is available digitally now. And also, being attached to a college like this with great libraries on campus—there is so much here. It always shocks me, particularly in the science library. Many times I’ve gone to look for something published in 1840 or 1860 or 1880 and, when I wander over to Schow, it is there. And it’s not in the rare books section, it’s just sitting on the shelf—some of those books are quite valuable. I’ll ask the librarian, “Why is this here? Why isn’t it over in Chapin?” And they’ll tell me, “They have another copy in Chapin.”

INTERVIEWER Have you ever considered writing about Williamstown?

Photo: Barry M. Goldstein

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BARRETT I do think about it, but I’ve never written about a place until ten or twenty years after I’ve lived there.

INTERVIEWER As someone who does so much research before you even begin writing, how do you advise workshop students to write, when they are not able to do much research beforehand given the structure of school?

BARRETT I wrote four books before I ever did anything really based in research. You have to learn to write first. There are so many things that aren’t related to research, and that’s where everybody starts out. I don’t usually advise people to start working with historical material right away. There’s just this whole other layer of stuff. And school is not very conducive to that long, slow marination. But in terms of teaching, generally I think any good writing teacher does this: I’m not trying to teach you to write the way I do or emulate my process or end up with a product like what I end up with. Always with teaching writing you are trying to understand who the student writer is and who that writer wants to be.

You give guidance and make suggestions that help them be the best version of the writer they want to be, which is often very different from the writer I am.

INTERVIEWER Do you ever meet someone who is passionate about becoming a writer who you can tell is not going to succeed, and advise that person against pursuing it?

BARRETT I never have advised anyone that, but I don’t think I was lying not to do that. I say

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that partly because I was so unpromising myself as a young writer and a young student. I don’t think that we can tell with people in their teens and twenties. Writing is not like trying to be Mozart or a dancer—something where you peak early and the gifts are apparent quite young. Some writers don’t start until late. So to look at someone eighteen or twenty-one who says, “I really, really, really want to be a writer,” but their gifts at the moment are not that evident on the page, I think it would be crazy for me to say, “No, be an accountant.”

I just can’t tell. And the one thing I do know is that people can have enormous, fantastic native gifts, and they won’t become writers because they don’t want it or they aren’t willing to work hard enough or they get distracted. I’ve seen that so many times. I’ve also seen people whose native gifts seem initially very modest who want it badly and are determined and work hard and they do very well.

INTERVIEWER Are you pleased with your first attempts?

BARRETT I write horrible first drafts. Really horrible first drafts. It’s common for me to do twenty drafts of a story. Not everybody does, but that’s my process. I write appalling first drafts but I am a dogged reviser, and I keep at it until something comes out. At Williams I’ve taught a course called “The Practice of Revision.” Students revise a story five times over the course of the semester. I bring them earlier and later examples of canonical works, like an early chunk of Mrs. Dalloway, or a well-known Joyce story for which there exists an extremely early, kind of terrible version. There are also early Fitzgerald versions of The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night that look very different.

It’s neat because part of the thing that is so

discouraging as a young writer is that you look at your early drafts and then you look at published books by writers you love and there is a big gap. And if you haven’t looked at their early drafts you won’t know that they, too, write terrible first drafts.

INTERVIEWER You told my class that people, especially young students, should return to things we’ve read and not enjoyed, because it might not have been the right time in our lives to have read it. What would your advice be to people who aren’t enjoying the reading for a particular class?

BARRETT Get through it, I guess. Trust that there is something there you can’t feel right now. If you can’t feel emotional or aesthetic pleasure reading it, try to find some intellectual pleasure, something to help propel you through it. And don’t just give up on it for later. The project of getting through undergraduate school is in some ways antithetical to the project of writing or of reading like a writer. It’s nobody’s fault—it’s not school’s fault. They’re two really different paths, and for people who start writing young and are studying writing in college, those things are in conflict for a while. So there’s no sense in getting upset about it, or punishing yourself about it, thinking you’re a failure because you can’t do all the things you should be doing as a young writer along with all the things you should be doing as a college student. You just have to realize that they are absolutely orthogonal. You have to do the best you can for now, and know that it won’t always be this way. Also understand that you are learning other things that are valuable, that are feeding you. You will have plenty of time to read and write later. Do what you can now, but don’t go crazy because the project of school is keeping you from writing

to some extent. I didn’t do any of this stuff when I was in college. I didn’t even know I was going to do it.

INTERVIEWER Is one of the benefits of taking a writing workshop just being in an environment that forces you to write?

BARRETT Sure. You are around other writers, which for some people sets off that little sense of competition. You see what other people’s writing looks like. And that’s both encouraging and discouraging because some of them are going to be better than you and some are going to be worse. You have a structure that forces you to write. The people who end up being writers learn to internalize everything in the workshop, the deadlines and the desire to write every day. But when you are young, you need someone there to say, “It has to be done by Thursday.” And when you do that twelve times over the course of a semester, something inside you starts to respond, telling you, “I really need to get this done.”

INTERVIEWER You said that one of the best ways to teach someone to write is to give them a really good reading list. Why do you think that’s true?

BARRETT For any writer, no matter how gifted, there are things you do better than other things, stuff you’re naturally proficient at and stuff you’re resistant to and bad at. Some people write good dialogue and have a good ear for conversation, but may not be able to write summary or narration or cover time very well. Somebody else will write fantastic description or narration but won’t be able to write a scene. Anyone who has been

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teaching for a while will be able to suss out those proficiencies and deficiencies pretty quickly. Then you can say, “You really need to look at how to construct a party scene.

Here are five books that have fabulous party scenes.” For every writer there are certain books you need at certain stages of your development. At different times in my life different writers have mattered differently.

I’ve always read a lot of Virginia Woolf, and Rebecca West has been important to me.

I love Tolstoy, George Eliot and the Irish writer William Trevor. Some of those books I found on my own and some my friends gave me or I came across at Warren Wilson or Bread Loaf.

INTERVIEWER Were you a student at Warren Wilson?

BARRETT I wasn’t, and I wish I had been. I learned almost everything I know from teaching there, though. That’s where I got most of my education as a writer, because I didn’t go to graduate school. You learn a lot teaching, but I was very panicky my first couple years. The students are great and the other faculty are amazing. It’s a cooperative model where we all sit in on each other’s classes and teach workshops in pairs, so it was like I got my own MFA while I was teaching MFA students. I didn’t start teaching undergraduates until later. In my first couple of years doing that, I made the mistake I think most new teachers make, which is thinking that there is a big chunk of stuff you have to teach the students, and you have to get that chunk out of your head and into their heads. And that’s not what teaching is. It’s really about, if necessary, throwing huge chunks of the chunk overboard, and trying to respond to the students and their needs.

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INTERVIEWER Do you think your teaching ever seeps into your writing?

BARRETT I do find that in a broad sense I write about teaching and mentoring and the interaction between older and younger generations in a way that I didn’t as a young woman. I’m sure that comes from teaching here. The whole project of teaching, being in that relation to other human beings in a different state of their lives, interests me. l

BEATRIX HADDOCK

Hakodate by Bike: architectural sketches

Hakodate was once an international center for trade, but it is now the quiet home of an aging population. “Hakodate by Bike,” depicts Shizuko-chan’s tour of the architectural farrago left by foreigners during a past era.

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STORY PONVERT

Lessons

I

would never have studied piano if it wasn’t for an encounter my mother had in December, 1977, the first month of the first real winter I ever saw. We had moved to Ann Arbor in July, and though entering seventh grade in a new city was disorienting, I was also gradually discovering a new independence from my family. My mother, recognizing my nascent adolescence, with pride and dismay, took what opportunities she could to assert her waning authority. My piano lessons were doubly convenient for her.

Anita—I’ve always called my mother by her first name—had grown up in Jackson, an hour away from Ann Arbor, and her homesickness was one reason my father took the job at the university. (“Finally, you’re seeing real snow!” she said when the first flakes came, and my sister Clara and I walked outside and stared in awe. By February, though, the snow had lost its charm.) After we moved she started taking trips to her hometown, twice a month, to visit old friends who had never moved away. A few times she brought me with her, and I would I sit beside her at a café while she chatted with women she knew from high school.

Eventually she stopped bringing me.

One day in December she returned home later than expected. It was a Saturday, very cold outside, and I had spent the day reading in my room. I hadn’t made any close friends at my new school, and did not often leave the house in my free time. My father was out of town giving a lecture, and Clara and I had been expecting Anita for dinner, but she did not arrive until after we’d ordered a pizza and eaten it. It had been dark for hours.

“Oh, good, you ate,” she said. “Sorry I’m so late. I ended up getting dinner with someone.”

“Dinner with who?” asked my sister.

“A man named Simon,” said Anita. “We went to school together. I didn’t know he still lived in Jackson, but I ran into him on the street and recognized him.”

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“You just decided to get dinner?” asked Clara.

“He invited me to catch up,” Anita said. “He’s very interesting—I felt like I could bring up any topic and he’d know something about it. He might not have very many friends in Jackson. He was talkative in that way, you know?”

Simon taught piano for a living, visiting his students’ houses once a week. He didn’t have a piano where he lived; his parents had sold the one he played when he was younger, and he couldn’t afford to buy one for himself. Besides, his apartment was quite small. All this was relayed to me by Anita after subsequent visits to Jackson.

“Andrew, you should learn piano with my friend Simon,” she said at dinner one night in February. “You know, who lives in Jackson.”

“Do I have to?” I said.

“He already sees a student in town on Tuesdays, so he can come here after that. Someone needs to play that thing, anyway.”

“You still play it,” said my father.

“I was never any good,” said Anita. “But I bet Andrew could really learn it.”

Anita had taken piano lessons for a few years when she was younger, and we had her old piano in the house, passed down from her mother. Occasionally she would sit down to tap out a few bars of a minuet or waltz, the only times I ever heard the instrument used. She rarely made it to the end of a piece.

“I don’t really want to play piano,” I said, and my sister snorted.

“I’ve already paid for some lessons,” Anita said. “We’ll see how they go, and if you don’t like them we’ll stop when you’ve had the ones I paid for.”

“This is exciting,” said my father. “Who knows, you could be a famous pianist someday.”

I hoped the lessons wouldn’t require much time, because by a stroke of luck I had at last managed to secure a friend at school. His name was Michael and he had just moved to town, joining my class after Christmas break. Our teacher, hoping to kill two socially confounded birds with one stone, had partnered us on several projects. Michael was quiet in class, like me, but the more we talked, the more opinions he seemed to have.

“This is a stupid assignment,” he told me one day. “I bet Mrs. Thayer hates this book.

It’s shitty.” The curse word shocked me. I had never heard a book described that way.

Or: “This painting is awesome. Why does no one do art like this anymore?” Mrs. Thayer had shown us David’s Oath of the Horatii for our unit on ancient Rome. Like me, Michael enjoyed most things involving swords.

In not too long we began visiting each other’s houses. Michael’s was large and smelled like his two Rottweilers. He had no siblings and his parents both worked during the day, so we frequently had the house to ourselves. We would sit in his kitchen and devour sugary snacks from his pantry, something impossible in my house, where desserts were only purchased for special occasions. One day we were in his kitchen with a box of Milanos between us. “So,” he said. “Who do you like?”

I was startled. Just then I’d been daydreaming about a girl in our class, Emilia. She’d

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caught my eye months ago, in September, but I’d only nurtured a private infatuation and had never spoken of her to anybody. I enjoyed that she was rather unassuming. Her plain brown hair, which might have been described as mousey, to me bespoke an alluring modesty; and though she was tall, she often hunched over when talking to people shorter than her, a gesture I found magnetic. I had known about romance for years, of course, and recognizing it finally that autumn, I’d readied myself for heartbreak.

Michael was encouraging, though. “She’s a good choice,” he said. “She seems like you would like her.”

“Who do you like?” I asked.

“Thalia,” he said. “But also Maria.” Thalia and Maria were best friends at the forefront of junior high fashion. They carried out their lives in a different realm than mine, and I am sure they still do. It would never have occurred to me to fall in love with either of them.

“Both at once?” I said.

“I can’t decide,” he explained.

In time he settled on Maria, the blonder of the two. We began devising strategies for getting the girls to like us, or better yet kiss us. Michael was very practical. The blueprints in my head began with a conversation and accelerated quickly into romance under a willow tree in the rain, but his plans were based on advice from his cousins: I could act as wingman to help separate Maria from Thalia. In April, news reached us that Aidan Donaldson was having a party at his house. Parties, we both knew, were where plans like ours were put to the test.

Around the time Michael inquired after my love life, I had my first piano lesson with Simon. He arrived at 4:00 PM on a Tuesday, when only Anita and I were at home.

“Simon!” she said, opening the door. “It’s so great to have you here. This is my son, Andrew.”

“Hi, Andrew,” he said over her shoulder. “I’ve heard a lot about you. I’m looking forward to our lesson.”

I had not been prepared for the enormity of the man in front of me. He was so tall his head nearly brushed our ceiling, and his stomach sagged far over his belt, straining worrisomely against the collared shirt tucked into his pants. Next to him, Anita seemed in some early stage of development. On his face was a pair of thick glasses that matched his dark, curly hair, and his feet, three times the size of mine, wore a pair of leather loafers.

“Andrew,” said Anita. “Want to get the piano ready?” I scurried into the living room as if to prepare it, though I had no idea what that might entail.

“How are things?” I heard Simon say in the hallway. “It’s been a little since I’ve seen you.” I detected a slight lisp, but his voice carried effortlessly into the living room.

“Well, they’re okay,” said Anita. “I’ll come down soon and we can catch up. Clara and Andrew have been busy with school and friends.”

“And Richard?” More than his saying he’d heard of me, it was strange to hear Simon offer my father’s name so familiarly.

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“He’s busy,” said Anita. “You know. If he’s ever home when you come by, you’ll meet.”

“I’d be happy to introduce myself,” said Simon.

He came into the living room, where I sat at the piano, awaiting a command. Anita followed him in. “Water, Simon?” she asked. “Or anything else?”

“No, thank you,” he said, and she retreated to the kitchen, presumably anticipating music.

“May I ask why you’re interested in learning piano?” Simon said when she was gone.

It seemed unfair that he would ask that; I could hardly admit that it was involuntary.

“The music, I guess,” I said after a pause.

“The finest reason,” he replied, and I got the sense he was amused. “Well, in this lesson you’ll learn the basics of reading music. It’s not too hard. I’ll show you a few scales to work on, and we’ll talk about technique and how to use your hands.”

I glanced down at his hands. They were resting in his lap, huge, but only proportional to the rest of him. He was holding his left thumb between the fingers of his right hand.

He wore no rings.

“At first it will be awkward,” he said. “But soon you’ll get a sense of how to move on the keys. Here.” He stood up suddenly, pushing his chair backwards, and gestured for me to vacate the bench. He took my seat and I stood next to him. His body spilled over the bench in all directions.

He raised his hands to the keys. “If you would put your hand on top of mine,” he said.

“This is for students to feel how to move. Your right hand.”

I did not want to attach myself to Simon, but I lowered my hand onto his. The skin was smooth and hairless, with only a few shallow wrinkles.

“Pay attention to the wrist,” he said, and began to play. It was a graceful piece and only a minute long. When he finished, I unpeeled my hand from his and stretched it.

“There,” he said. “You just played your first piano piece.”

I was not convinced I had accomplished anything, but there was satisfaction in my fingers.

I never brought up my piano study with Michael. He would be uninterested in it, I sensed, and we had other things to talk about. Aidan’s party was approaching, and Michael and I agreed to arrive together.

“Aidan said Thalia and Maria are both going to be there,” he said that morning at school. “I don’t know about Emilia, though.”

“She told me she would,” I said. Emilia and I had talked a few times that week, something I’d already reported to Michael excitedly. She’d also cut her hair to her shoulders, but what to make of that, I did not know.

Clara, who’d just gotten her driver’s license, drove us to Aidan’s house the night of the party. “Is Anita going to pick us up?” I asked.

“No, that’ll be me again,” she said.

“Why are you taking us?” I said. On a Friday night Clara was usually out with her friends.

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“Sometimes Anita doesn’t want to drive you places,” she said, glancing at Michael.

“Haven’t you noticed her and Dad have been stressed?”

“What about?” Several nights that week my father hadn’t come home in time for dinner, but it wasn’t unusual for him to work late.

Clara sighed. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess they’re both just busy, you know?”

Inside, Michael and I descended the stairs to the basement party room. I saw people from my class chatting in circles or watching TV from the couch. A table with bowls of snacks was neglected in one corner, and Michael and I walked straight there.

“Lays,” I said, taking a handful.

“The best kind,” he agreed.

Maria and Thalia were in one corner talking to each other. Michael stared in their direction, and I watched the stairs anxiously from our redoubt at the snack table. “Do you see Emilia anywhere?” I asked.

Just then she appeared at the top of the stairs, wearing a short yellow dress I’d never seen before. She had on a pair of heels, and a stripe of blonde coursed through her newly shorn hair. I watched her walk down, trying to catch her eye, but she approached Thalia and Maria.

“Emilia!” The noise of the party was not too loud to obscure Thalia’s hoot. “I love your hair!”

I had been prepared to fulfill my duty as wingman, but the newly fashioned trinity of Maria, Thalia, Emilia seemed impenetrable by our strategies, which had relied on there only being two girls at one time. Luckily for us, they had orchestrations of their own.

Shuffling around the party, we’d come around to the snacks again with half an hour remaining, only pretzels on the table, when Maria and Emilia approached us from behind.

“Hi, Michael and Andrew,” said Maria. Until then I’d never heard her pronounce my name. “Michael, Thalia wants to talk to you,” she continued.

He looked at me for much longer than necessary. “Okay,” he said. “I guess I’ll go say hi to her.”

He left me with the two girls. I watched his back as he trod away. I had a pretzel in my hand that I did not want to eat, but I couldn’t put it back in the bowl. I slid my hands into my pockets and let go.

Michael was sleeping at my house that night. In my room, with the lights off, he recounted the experience from his mattress on the floor. At Thalia’s urging, they’d left the basement and found a corner of Aidan’s yard. There, without much ado, she confessed that she liked him.

“But I thought you liked Maria?” I interrupted.

“I do,” he said. “But I didn’t tell Thalia that.”

There had been no reason to mince words. They kissed. Michael reported that teeth featured more than he’d hoped. But during the kissing, he’d put a hand on her breast, over the shirt, a sensation he could not find the words to describe.

After a few minutes, Maria had left me and Emilia alone at the snack table. Without arranging it, I’d been presented with the opportunity to ask her out. I could feel my entire

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body constricting—but the conversation only carried on as before, until Aidan’s father was at the top of the stairs alerting me that Clara had arrived. “Bye, Andrew,” Emilia said kindly. “See you later.”

“I feel like an asshole,” I told Michael in the dark.

“Why?” he said. He was genuinely confused, but I could not think how to explain.

Instead I said goodnight and let him fall asleep triumphant. I was awake for a while, my eyes adjusting until I could see around my room. I lay on my side and watched Michael on the floor, under a blanket, smiling in his sleep.

The school year ended without drama. Michael and Thalia never resumed where they left off, and I grew less interested in Emilia. By June I had almost forgotten that I once entertained fantasies about her. She’d become close with Maria and Thalia, and perhaps I felt betrayed, like the girl I’d fallen in love with was only a skin that the new Emilia had shed.

This was Michael’s first summer in Ann Arbor. The previous summer I was busy moving into our new house and had no friends in town, and I was looking forward to a more enjoyable vacation. Michael’s family had arrived in the middle of winter and still had things to unpack, and I visited his house most days to help. Michael used this as an excuse to goof off, but I enjoyed sifting through the stacks of boxes. I felt privileged to handle another family’s treasures. There seemed to be an infinite supply of books, decorations, souvenirs, and works of art to unearth.

I also appreciated the chances to leave my house. Recently Anita and my father had been having fights, hushed arguments that they tried to hide from me and Clara but whose aftershocks were felt throughout. My sister would often volunteer to drive me to and from Michael’s. Usually we rode silently, but she sometimes probed me about my feelings. I told her I felt fine, and I did. She was sixteen, and read more into our parents’ arguments than I did.

From her I understood that the fights were often about money, though not because we were really in need of it. We lived comfortably, but nearly all our income came from my father, and Anita showed no inclination to try to get a job. This was the arrangement I had grown up with and considered natural, but now scraps of arguments floated up the stairs, my father exclaiming, “Why don’t you go to work, then? Or should I spend less time with my children?”

I asked Clara what she thought would happen.

“It’s not like they’re going to get divorced,” she said. “They’ll figure something out.”

Throughout all this Anita persisted in her visits to Jackson, and I continued my lessons with Simon. He never asked about my parents, but would often stay late to talk with Anita, or they would go out for drinks. “Andrew is progressing wonderfully,” he’d tell her when we finished, and she would smile broadly. Except for the few times my father returned early from work, he and Simon never overlapped.

I was practicing more now that school was over, and Simon said it was time to start thinking about a performance. His students were having a recital in the fall, and he want-

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ed to know if I would play in it. He posed this as a genuine inquiry, but I knew the correct answer was to say yes. A part of me actually looked forward to it, as terrifying as playing for a crowd seemed, and in July I started learning an upbeat, tuneful work by Kabalevsky.

“Andrew’s playing in a recital in September,” Anita announced at dinner one evening.

“That’s wonderful,” said my father.

“Yes, Simon said he’s doing very good work."

My father turned to me. “How are those lessons with Simon going?”

I shrugged. “Good, I think. I’m learning Kabalevsky for the recital.”

“He’s a funny guy,” my father said.

“What’s funny about him?” I asked, though I wasn’t sure he was speaking to me.

“He’s fat,” said Clara, poking at her steak with a fork.

“Well,” said my father, and he met Anita’s eyes. “He’s a homosexual, right?”

No one said anything for a moment. Then Anita sighed through her nose. “Simon and I don’t talk about his love life,” she said. “It’s rude to talk about someone when he’s not here.”

My father took a sip from his glass of wine. “I thought, since you two talk so much about what happens here, it was fine to talk about what happens at Simon’s house.”

“Dad,” said Clara. “If Simon’s gay… who cares, right?”

He cut a piece of meat with his knife. “Right, who cares. I didn’t know we couldn’t mention it. You’d want to know that about him, right, Andrew?”

“You don’t answer that, Andrew,” said Anita. “What did you do today, Clara?”

My sister opened her mouth but my father interrupted. “Okay, ignore me,” he said. “I can go eat in my office.” He started to rise from his chair but Anita stood up first.

“Richard,” she said loudly. “Just because we’re not talking about whether Simon is—” “He is, though,” I muttered, and she went quiet. I had not meant to speak, but the words were forming themselves in my mouth and spilling out. “He is, isn’t he?” I continued. “He’s homosexual.”

Anita sat down. My father was looking expectantly at her.

“From what I know,” she said, stretching each word to its fullest, “yes, he is.”

My father smiled. “That’s all I asked about,” he said, and returned to his dinner, taking careful, slow bites. Clara was staring at me.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said.

“You upset him,” I heard Anita say as I walked away. I shut myself in the bathroom and locked the door. I stood there in the dark and tried to picture Simon sitting at our piano, fat fingers on the keys. But instead, I thought of Michael.

I do not think my father’s word, homosexual, is a very useful one. Still, that night at the dinner table it taught me something. That summer, during the long days spent with my friend, I’d grown more and more unable to let go of him. Hours with him passed in a breeze, and when we were apart I floated on the knowledge that I’d see him again, be near him again soon. He’d snuck up on me without my knowing how or why, but my father, viciously and unknowingly, had unveiled him.

We were friends, I told myself in the bathroom while my family ate in silence. But in the dark I could feel his breath on my face, and I moved myself closer.

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September. With the beginning of the new school year, my final year of junior high, came the first hints of coldness and crispness in the air. I was not unhappy to start school again. Michael’s family had finished moving in, and without that project the summer days felt listless. I convinced him to read The Hobbit and we’d taken to strolling through the neighborhood as dwarves in search of the Lonely Mountain, but Ann Arbor proved disappointingly flat.

My piano recital was approaching, and I was practicing with a newfound diligence.

The prospect of messing up during the performance was awful, and Simon wanted me to play from memory. My parents both encouraged me and promised to sit in the first row. They had been fighting less often, though whether things had frozen over for good I could not tell. My sister, now a junior in high school, was out of the house more than ever. I’d spotted her once on the street with a boy, but when I mentioned this she changed the subject.

One Monday I was accompanying Michael home after school. We’d planned to meet in the usual place next to the playground but he arrived fifteen minutes late. I passed the time running through Kabalevsky in my head.

“Sorry,” he said. “I was with Aidan.”

“Are you ready to go now?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “But, do you still want to go to my house? There’s some guys going to hang at Aidan’s. Dylan, Jared.”

“Can’t we just go to your house?” I said.

“Yeah, okay,” he said. “Sure.”

Michael’s dogs greeted us with wagging tails. We took our usual spots in the kitchen, but he didn’t bring out any food.

“Are you hungry?” I asked.

“Not really,” he said. “Actually, I have to pee.”

While he was in the bathroom I paced his hallways. The house, now fully decorated, could have occupied me for a week. The living room had a fireplace, two full bookcases, a beautiful red carpet, a piano.

The night before, I had finally managed to play the entire Kabalevsky piece by memory without messing up.

It was a short song. Near the end I heard a flush and Michael emerged from the bathroom. I finished playing and stood up.

“Was that all you?” he said. “I didn’t know you played piano.”

“I only started this year,” I said. “I’m not very good. But I have a recital this weekend.

You could come, if you want.”

“A piano recital?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “I wanted to play, for you. But now you’ve heard it already, I guess.”

“It sounded nice,” he said. He walked into the kitchen. “What do you want to do!” he called.

A dog came up and licked my hand. I didn’t have an answer, but I knew Michael would think of something.

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I played in the recital that weekend without missing a note. Simon sat behind the piano while I played, and out of the corner of my eye I could see his hands tapping along to the music. Michael was not there, but my parents and sister were, in the front row.

“That was beautiful, Andrew,” Anita said afterwards. “I’m so excited to hear more of these.”

“Actually, I think I might stop the lessons,” I said. “I don’t like it as much as I used to.”

Simon stopped coming to the house, and I stopped practicing on Anita’s old piano. For a few weeks it sat unused. Then one day in October I returned from school and heard music through the door. When I opened it, Anita was sitting on the bench. She turned, startled.

“Andrew,” she said. “I was just thinking how sad it is that no one’s using this again.”

She had music in front of her that I thought I recognized. When I got closer, I saw that it was my Kabalevsky.

“I can’t play at all, though,” she said. “I tried to sight-read but I just can’t.”

She turned to face me, and I saw that her eyes were watery.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know—I forgot you’d be home so soon. I can’t believe I forgot.”

“Is something wrong?” I asked. I couldn’t remember Anita ever crying except at movies. I wondered if I should offer something, a glass of water, a hug.

“It’s nothing,” she said. “I was just remembering how beautiful your recital was.”

I peered at the music in front of her. The notes were familiar. I took off my backpack and set it down.

“Here,” I said. “I’ll see what I can remember.”

Anita stood up from the bench. “That would be wonderful,” she said. She was smiling.

“I’ll just be on the couch here, if that’s alright."

I sat down at the piano. "You know how much I loved hearing you," she said behind me.

“I know,” I said, and I began to play.

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ANGELA SUN Excerpts from Limbo: vices and devices

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CAMERON HENDERSON Six Histories: An Essay

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I ON

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Arising in the early 2020s, the Frustrationist movement blurred and confounded the boundaries between art and context. Frustrationists would hide, encrypt, and isolate their works, distancing art from both the creator and the audience. Due to the unreachability of the original artwork, the process of searching for it became the art instead. Indeed, vastly more effort and ingenuity was put into their hiding than into the works purported to be hidden. Many historians today speculate that most Frustrationist original works did not even exist. In fact, only one of some 400 documented Frustrationist works has ever been discovered. This was, of course, Diorama

by Jon Davos—a small terrarium found inside the trunk of a tree, 57 years after the artist’s death.

FUTILISM Futilism was formed largely in reaction to Frustrationism, exaggerating its themes of challenge and difficulty and bringing them to their logical conclusion: impossibility. The Futilists were enamored with the impossible, from riddles and paradoxes to blatant disregard of natural laws. Unlike traditional schools of philosophy that sought to analyze and reconcile paradoxes, Futilists used their work to display the beauty of their incongruity. The essence of the art became the unattainability of resolution. Futilist pioneer Alice Satie is perhaps best known for her piece How to Do Impossible Things – a collection of event scores detailing entirely absurd tasks.

Notable scores include #12, which instructs the performer to open a door from the other side, and #54, which instructs the performer to imagine every color at the same time.

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EPHEMERALISM A celebration of the ephemerality of art, and indeed of all things in existence. The Ephemeralists engaged in a perpetual cycle of vandalism and creation, of demolition and reconstruction. Rather than preserve their art (or anyone else’s) Ephemeralists aimed to destroy and mutilate existing works and make way for new ones. Drawing influence from Graffiti, Salvagepunk, and Guerrilla Art, Ephemeralism became enormously popular and influential towards the late 2020s. This popularity culminated in the Paris Gallery Riots of 2031, which led to the absolute decimation of the Louvre, Pompidou, and MusÊe du Gauche Nouveau. It should come as no surprise that no Ephemeralist works exist today.

NEW DECADENCE An almost cultic movement arising from the worship of decay. New Decadents believed that the most beautiful is the most deteriorated, and sought to harness or replicate natural processes of degeneration. As the movement reached its peak in the late 2030s, a market grew for tools and materials intended to expedite these phenomena, such as corrosion paint, prepared rot cultures, and crumbling agents. This allowed for unprecedented works of putrefaction to be completed in short periods of time. Into the 40s, however, the movement began to lose traction. In 2042, the New Decadence lost the last of its withering ranks to the suicide performance piece Visum Mortis, in which the artists infected themselves with a variety of necrotic diseases and were displayed publicly in glass capsules.

ALTERREALISM Alterrealism emerged shortly after the development of the first Universal Simulation Engine (USE) in 2048. Alterrealists operated entirely within imagined realities and laws of nature, while remaining absolutely precise and consistent within them. This was made possible by the USE, in which worlds could be simulated upon contrived systems of physics and cosmological axioms. A leading proponent of the movement was renowned mathematician and painter Shannon C. Conway, known for their landscapes in which light is never reflected, only refracted through bodies of matter.

NOSTALGIC THEISM By 2050, gnostic religion had all but vanished from the earth. While the political, sociological, and discursive ramifications of this were undoubtedly positive, many longed for the spiritual fulfillment promised by religions of old. Artists of the Nostalgic Theist movement sought to remediate this through hollow worship and the establishment of new religions, turning ideology itself into a medium. This resulted in a vast and rapid proliferation of micro-faiths and engineered mythologies. The most enduring of these is the Order of the Third Rail, invented by Charles Melville in 2058, whose god is an endless train. The Order retains a number of devoted followers to this day, who are likely unaware of their participation in an ongoing performance piece.l

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BRIAN TRELEGAN Untitled

(Scanner Series)

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TYLER TSAY boys’ dance you are dancing at a bar//you are waiting for a boy//this boy is dead//you are dancing for the dead//you apologize to a boy//drunk on how you apologize//you are dancing at a bar// double shot the dead//your wrists opening to god//boys are running down your arms// boys are bared against an alley//boys are dancing & still alive//you are drunk off this city// this city loves nothing//gas the city & keep dancing//you apologize to the alley//you dance horizon//unreachable

animal games to boy of drowning in a river, here are the lives you never had. when you woke each morning & built yourself from nothing. your body in the mirror as how do we fix you. you are searching in your chest for every angel he left behind as though what you touch can be undone. the games you played as a child: cracks breaking bones with every step. alive because that’s your job. the games you play now: throat as the first fire. as the riot of your lips. who can steal gravity from the noose. who can pretend to be a story, because that’s one hell of a story, boy surviving, isn’t it?

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ARI BASCHE Search Party

M

y friends and I sit in the café brainstorming ideas for party themes.

“I’ve got one: biomes,” Sam says. We’re running out of original ideas. We’ve been throwing a lot of parties lately.

I used to look forward to the weekend. I would wonder who we’d meet, where we’d end up at the end of the night, what kind of questionable decisions we’d make. Now I’m afraid I’ve met everyone there is to meet, there’s nowhere to go and every question is answerable: same as last weekend.

“What kind of drinks would we serve?” one of my friends asks.

“We always throw parties in the basement. It’s so closed off. Let’s throw one where you can wander the whole building. Change up the scenery,” I say, drawing a map of the building on the inside cover of my book.

“And?” Ryan asks.

I haven’t quite thought this through.

“Okay, picture it: Everyone is drunk. The person you walked in with is nowhere to be found. You decide to check upstairs. You miss her because she’s also looking for you, walking downstairs on stair B.” I circle the corner stairwell.

“You try to call her. Someone else answers. She’s swapped phones with someone on the second floor. That’s what you do on the second floor, because everyone is just sick of reading messages written for them; it could be part of a drinking game. On the third floor, that’s where the real party is, that’s where everyone wants to be. On the fourth floor, there’s another party, but this one is always slightly less exciting than the third floor. But only slightly, so that everyone wants to be at both. And then on the first floor, we could sit and tell everyone that their friend is looking for them. I call it: Search Party.”

“I love it,” Sam says. Sam once texted at two in the morning asking if I had any ideas for weird things we could do. She’d apparently sent that text to two other people as well. She liked my idea best though, so we drove around yelling “GORDY!” at strangers as though they were our friend Gordy. I’ve never met anyone with that name. “We all love a good search, right?” she

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asks. I appreciate her enthusiasm.

“Oh, and at the party, there could be no rules about how long you need to stay talking to someone you don’t like. You can look for someone you like better, everyone else will be looking for someone else too,” she adds.

“Good thinking, Sam.” She might be my only friend.

“You forgot about the basement,” Ryan says.

“Eh. I kind of want to leave one thing unplanned,” I explain. If this party doesn’t surprise me then I’ll have to move to a different continent or get into harder drugs.

It’s the warmest December on record. We walk around in flip-flops when we go out to buy party supplies. Global warming is unsettling, but being unsettled keeps you on your toes. My emotions used to be in sync with the calendar. Every December brought the same feelings. But this is different. And it’s not that I’m July feelings, just at the wrong time; I’m having new feelings altogether. It’s never been that particular combination of things before: bare trees, warm breeze, early dusk. Who knows how long it will last?

“It’s so warm outside. Why not make it a pool party?” Ryan asks. I don’t like Ryan.

This was a suggestion I’d already heard from him. And it sounded so innocent. It’s because when people drink by the water, they have to pretend like they aren’t sort of planning to get drunk and take off all their clothes. It has to appear spontaneous.

Though you might like to do it at every possible chance, you can’t do it too often. You shouldn’t skinny dip more than 50 times in your life. I’ve done the math. That’s it. That’s optimal. You also can’t put skinny dipping down as a hobby on your online dating profile. It’s like saying you like to dance on tables. It’s something you need to uncover about somebody.

We’d already had a pool party and almost everyone got naked. That was the best outcome we could have hoped for. It wasn’t something we needed to repeat.

I tell him I’ve been to too many pool parties. I could go the rest of my life without going to another one. You shouldn’t be able to utter the words “the rest of my life” without passing out.

But I say it and I don’t because I’m not thinking about what it means to have a whole life ahead of you. I have thought about it. All I get from it is a headache. I get nowhere. We ought to think about it more when we sign contracts and plan our weekends. “Besides,” I add, “we already sent out invitations. What’s wrong with the Search Party?”

“Some of us are trying to meet people,” Ryan says with a laugh. He places this emphasis on “meet” that makes it sound like he means “fuck.”

“I’m trying to meet people, Ryan,” I say flatly. My friends are crazy about “meeting” people, going home with them, leaving me behind. I’m always the last one at the party. They’ll see me talking to a boy and get disappointed when I have no story for them at brunch the next morning. They say things like, “Why are we surprised? You are the antisocial one.”

I’m plenty social. Besides, what better way to meet people? Sure, everyone will be disoriented from the party and the drinks, but that will make them move around. It will be like a carousel. Much more exciting than staring at people on a couch.

One of my friends asks if there could be a scavenger hunt.

I laugh at her. How could I not? A party that tells you what you’re looking for? “Cold, cold, warm, warmer, hot, colder, ON FIRE”? That wouldn’t be fun at all.

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Sam and I have known each other for three years. We’ve slowly become closer and closer.

Very slowly. I think it would be interesting to look at a graph of our closeness—the distance between us on the Y axis, time on the X. The line would be curved. It would start to approach 0, but it would never reach it. I see a distance that cannot be overcome with her. I like it, though, having someone within arm’s reach and not right by your side. I guess so that you can use that arm to push them away while you hang on tight. If the graph could project our closeness in another three years, I expect it wouldn’t change much.

Maybe there will be a sudden jump in distance. I might just leave this whole place behind. It kind of depends on how the party goes.

“Haircut’s here?” Sam looks at me, stunned.

I see him walking over. I quickly search the category in my brain “Pretty Boys in Social Circle” to find his real name. Taylor.

“Hey, Taylor.” I have a fuzzy memory of us from last year when we bumped into each other at some sort of social gathering. It’s fuzzy, but I do clearly remember this moment: We were talking about something and then Ryan, drunk, came over and started harassing us, yelling that everyone was going to the bar and asking why we weren’t coming. Taylor looked right at him and said, “Why are you asking us like that? Really.” I can’t explain why, but it was just glorious. Something about the way he said it. I burst out laughing.

We had fun together that night, walking to the bar in the back of the crowd. I never told Sam about it. I tell her mostly bullet points and I skip details like this one. I don’t like the thought of sharing every part of me with someone—especially someone who I suspect isn’t sharing every part of herself with me.

Sam knows this about me and seems to admire it. I didn’t realize any of this until the intimacy issues became a topic of conversation. Guess my breakup with Grant brought them into light. Whenever I tell her that I expect nothing and trust no one, she says I have a good head on my shoulders, like she’s jealous. I keep trying to tell her that it’s just that I’m fucked up.

She doesn’t listen. When I go on about the way I’m willing to give so-and-so a chance but just can’t, she seems to like it. She does. You can tell by looking at who she dates. Someone with an open heart is basically disqualified from being with her. It shouldn’t be a turn-on when someone tells you they’re hung up on someone else, but it is for her. She tells me that outward dysfunction is attractive because, I don’t know, she thinks it’s easier to be with someone who admits to being fucked up. That’s one way to look at it, Sam, I tell her. There’s got to be more that she’s not telling me, because that is fucking dark. I’m not saying that she’s wrong, though.

She says I should be proud that I’m the way I am. What do you mean, I asked once. Flighty?

She just said, “You loved someone. That’s great.”

I wasn’t following.

“I just mean, you’re right; you’re flighty. But it’s like you have battle scars. Own it. I wanna hear you say, ‘If you think this is bad, you should see the other guy,’ and like, plop your broken heart down on the table at a pub or some shit.”

I told her it sounded like a great way to meet men, but I was going to refrain.

So anyway, I don’t see Taylor much anymore and I wonder what he’s been up to.

“Hey, Sarah,” he says without a smile. Finally, something different.

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We’re dancing but we can’t stop talking, or talking and won’t stop dancing. I can’t hear him.

I ask if we could move to the stairwell, unsure if he’ll be willing to leave the party. He takes my hand and walks towards the door. There is a steady stream of people moving from one floor to the next and back again. Everyone is drunk. It’s exactly as I’d planned it. But it’s too noisy. We walk down three flights of stairs, down to the basement. There’s no party there. We find that we’re all alone.

We sit on the basement couch. I’m waiting for desire to kick in but it’s out of my control.

Grant’s the only person I’ve ever looked at and wanted to undress and see up close.

The first night with Grant, I felt nervous to ask, but I just wanted be naked together. Having sex with him scared me for some reason. I was used to feeling directionless and displaced desire for everyone, and I felt too much for him—all of it for just one person, right in front of me.

I didn’t just want something to happen. I wanted it to be with him.

So I asked if he could just let me take my time and he didn’t ask me what I meant or why. We took off our clothes. We kissed. I told him that I finally got what tongues are for.

Then we stopped.

From there, it wasn’t a gradual thing. I felt ready to have sex the next night. Bridging the gap had always been hard for me, but it felt good to stop wanting him and just sort of have him.

We would sometimes talk about that not-quite-sex night and how much we’d both loved it.

He’d say, “It felt like something was telling me: enjoy your last night before this changes everything.” He told me I always chose the best times to pause things; how that was truly an art.

No one’s ever complimented me on that. People usually tell me “hurry up” or “move on.” He was patient with me.

A year later, though, I was afraid he was losing interest. I said, “Hey, remember the first time we were naked together and we just kissed? Can we try that right now?” We did. I tried to focus on our lips. But then I stopped and looked at him. I started to cry. He stared up at me like it could have been a pause or an ending and it would have made no difference to him. It wasn’t patience anymore.

So I couldn’t stop crying, though then I didn’t understand why. At first, I told myself they were tears of joy, told him that I was so happy to be with him, he was everything I wanted.

Then I realized that I was crying because all that we had felt the first night had died. I felt abandoned.

After that, I knew it was over. I dumped him before he could dump me.

It had been so easy for him to do that. To fall in love. I’m afraid of people like that now.

Taylor and I talk until I hear the sound of a vacuum from upstairs. He brings up the “imagine if the stars only came out once a year” thought experiment. As he talks, I nod and hope he thinks that I understand. I think I do understand. We live in a beautiful world and we just get used to it the way we get used to the smell of paint fumes as they slowly kill brain cells. I want a world that holds nothing but fumes. I confess to him I love the smell of wet paint. Maybe that can be the theme for the next party. A Wet Paint Party.

“Shouldn’t you be on the first floor with the other hosts, making drinks for people and tell-

57

ing them the rules?” he jokes.

“You know, maybe.”

“And…aren’t we breaking the rules? I thought we weren’t supposed to stay talking for this long.”

“No, no. That’s only the rule for people you don’t like. I might actually like you.” I don’t add this, but I want him to be my best friend. It makes me wonder what I’ve been doing with Sam. Maybe two people with built-in distance are better off staying far apart. Taylor and I have gotten to a different place already and the sun hasn’t come out yet. Or maybe it has, but it hasn’t reached us here in the basement. I want to explain everything I’m thinking to him but I stop myself.

Is there a point at which honesty becomes dishonest? When you share every thought you have, don’t you stop communicating effectively? The way I understand myself is by being selective about what thoughts I choose to hang on to, which urges I choose to follow. If I listened to all of them I’d be a mess. So if I do tell him everything, does he really know me or does he know me just as poorly as I know myself? Though does distance actually help? Does closeness?

This distance between us: I know I can change it. I distrust all of my instincts—if they can even be called instincts— but even so, I have to figure out which one to follow.

I kiss him. There’s a smell that can only be made by the proper pairing of lips. It has something to do with pheromones linked to your genetics. When we kiss, it isn’t there.

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JONAS LUEBBERS Monuments and Eyes through a Car Window

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TREVIN CORSIGLIA Wino Shoot it Shoot at spontaneity now At spontaneous highs and curiosity’s breath On pressed gum streets Buskers quiet down for a thoughtful wino Who has the many fine That watch and settle Into a head of drink and smoke Ahead of everyone How tiresome his thoughts must be The pacers have their swim tonight Concrete foot laps and a garbage can For the flipped turn, he’s right to be noticed A stutterer of dodged dissonance Thelonious Monk hipster An odd hat fits him well Tighten up your jointless fingers Tap flexibility into the trumpet’s beginning blow Nod at nothing more Sleep, not ever do they sleep, or Awake with softer eyes and Restfully attempt The homeless hardened lullaby Of Saturday spontaneity Shoot it Shoot the wino down

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BRIANNA RETTIG

The Dealership Greenhouse

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What We Talk About When We Talk About M E L A N C H O LY U

STORY PONVERT

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R

obert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy is the sort of great book that is difficult to recommend, but maybe not for the reasons you’d expect.

It’s enormous (1,338 pages in my edition) and old (the first edition was published in 1621), but those are never disqualifying traits on their own: readers still happily forge through Don Quixote or War and Peace despite their age and heft. Nor should Burton’s subject matter necessarily dissuade you. The book purports to be a comprehensive examination of melancholy, “What it is, with all the kinds, causes, symptoms, prognostickes & severall cures of it,” but just a sample of Burton’s prose is enough to indicate that his tome is as much a celebration of learnedness and personality as it is a parade of miseries.

Although Burton warns the melancholic reader to “read not the symptoms or prognostics in this following tract, lest by applying that which he reads to himself … he trouble or hurt himself,” the consensus among Burton’s readers, from Samuel Johnson to Anthony Burgess, has been that The Anatomy is delightful and often very funny, thanks in large part to its author’s elusive personality.

For the reader willing to pick up the book in the first place, it doesn’t take long to realize that it’s hardly the cabinet of woes it claims to be. Burton is interested in everything, and while he does catalogue scores of maladies and misfortunes, it’s always with a sense of humor and perspective. He scrutinizes things intensely, but his writing glides, and this makes the book’s length and archaisms less daunting.

However, likely readers should be warned that The Anatomy is intimidating in a way I didn’t expect. For despite the immense

erudition on display here, despite the constant quotations, Latin phrases, and references to events fictional and historical, The Anatomy of Melancholy will in the end fail to teach you anything. In fact, if you read it too carefully, it might deal a blow to any conviction you held that reading can be an edifying task, or that it should be.

Of course, no one would read the book if this wasn't a good thing, and the point of this essay is to convince you that the havoc it creates is what makes Burton's book worth reading. First, it’s helpful to know a little about the man himself. Robert Burton was born on February 8, 1577 in Lindley, Leicestershire, England, the fourth of nine children who would survive into adulthood (one sister died in infancy).

In 1593, at the age of sixteen, he packed off to Oxford, where his older brother William had also gone. There he spent the better part of the 47 years until his death, mostly holed up in the libraries of Thomas Bodley and Christ Church college, where he was named Student—the equivalent of Fellow—in 1599. He trained in divinity but devoted most of his time to books, reading deeply in classical authors and renaissance scholarship and working on his own opus from his twenties or early thirties until his death.

A summary chronology of Burton’s life can stop there. There’s no serious dearth of information on him, but he appears to have undertaken few adventures that didn’t involve pages and ink. He never married, and though he was not antisocial, he suffered from episodes of solitude and gloom associated with the disease he would set out to anatomize. It’s this project that dominated Burton’s life and work from its beginnings to its sixth and final revision,

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published posthumously in 1652. “Seldom in fact have a life and book been identified so closely as Burton and his Anatomy of Melancholy,” writes Michael O’Connell, and while this is true, it’s difficult to draw any conclusions about the man from a work as puzzling as The Anatomy. The book is commonly introduced as a medical treatise, but while Burton does spend hundreds of pages documenting melancholy in its various forms, including sections on love-melancholy and religious-melancholy, solitariness and the benefits of “diet rectified,” he also frequently digresses to comment on such things as the force of the imagination, the nature of evil spirits, or, over and over again, the preponderance of madness and dissatisfaction in our world.

As O’Connell and the rest of Burton’s readers know, trying to talk about The Anatomy by talking about its content gets you nowhere. Partly this is because the book is about so much, and partly because it’s not really about anything at all. Burton’s relentless digressions, his cacophony of quotations and Latin phrases, and his willingness to abandon subjects on a turn makes for a disorienting reading experience, what the critic Stanley Fish calls “an all-embracing madness.” The book promises and delivers data, but the seemingly infinite variety available doesn’t result in anything coherent. Byron recommended the book for “a man who wishes to acquire the reputation of being well read, with the least trouble,” and indeed the knowledge afforded by The Anatomy is similar to the scattered education that comes from hours of browsing Wikipedia.

This is all made tolerable and even enjoyable by the author’s voice. Burton’s style, “learned but earthy,” in the words of

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Anthony Burgess, has been applauded for as long as the book has been read, and still manages the remarkable feat of propelling it for 1,400 pages without presuming too much of the reader. The sentences in The Anatomy build and build only to fold back on themselves, denying us the climax we expect but immediately thrusting some new object under our attention. See, for instance, an excerpt from one of the book’s most beautiful passages, in which Burton addresses the insignificance of fame when compared with the boundless universe: how few take notice of us! how slender a tract, as scant as Alcibiades his land in a map! And yet every many must and will be immortal, as he hopes, and extend his fame to our antipodes, whenas half, no, not a quarter, of his own province or city neither knows nor hears of him: but say they did, what’s a city to a kingdom, a kingdom to Europe, Europe to the world, the world itself that must have an end, if compared to the least visible star in the firmament, eighteen times bigger than it? and then if those stars be infinite, and every star there be a sun, as some will, and, as this sun of ours, hath his planets about him, all inhabited, what proportion bear we to them, and where’s our glory?

First he descends, from the antipodes to a fraction of a province—but when it seems he’s made his point he corrects himself with “but say they did.” Now we’re surveying kingdoms and the world, where a moment ago we seemed finished; now Burton zooms even higher, into the heavens, to distant stars and planets, only to collapse this majestic vision with a final question, “and where’s our glory?” In a quarter of a page he’s achieved a planetarium show, and we might be unable to find our feet right away.

Burton’s unceasing piling on of new subjects occurs at the level of sentences and the entire book, and this can be confusing and contradictory. He’ll sometimes abandon one topic only to return tens or hundreds of pages later with an opinion totally different from what he expressed earlier. As The Anatomy progresses, this inconsistency becomes one of its central features. Take style, which Burton addresses early in the book.

“I neglect phrases,” he writes, “and labour wholly to inform my reader’s understanding, not to please his ear; ‘tis not my study or intent to compose neatly, which an orator requires, but to express myself readily and plainly as it happens.” Already this seems insincere, given his enveloping sentences and extended analogies which verge on epic similes. And later, in his “Digression of Air,” he quotes Peter Cuneus: “Bona fide agam, nihil eorum quae scriptures sum, verum esse scitote, etc.; quae nec facta, nec future sunt, dicam, stili tantum et ingenii causa [I will be honest, and admit that nothing of what I am about to relate is true; I shall relate things which never have happened and never will happen, merely to show my literary skill].”

What are we to do with these statements?

If he is so brazenly inconsistent, how does he still come across as a benign and even trustworthy guide?

One thing is obvious: Burton is in no hurry to disguise his contradictions. And the more they accumulate, the more the nature of the book seems to demand them.

In writing of melancholy, he draws on hundreds of different sources, and there is nearly always disagreement. Addressing diet’s effect on melancholy, for instance, he notes two authors who reject fish entirely; others who disallow only those fish found in muddy waters; one who “doth immoderately

extol sea-fish, which others as much vilify”; and many who recommend against shellfish, with one excepting lobster and crab. (“Carp is a fish of which I know not what to determine,” he adds shortly, and I can’t help wondering what exactly he determined about the rest.) The deeper into The Anatomy you get, the less sure you may be of how to cure melancholy, how to recognize it, or even what it is. This is partly because the literature on melancholy in the centuries preceding Burton was divided on nearly every aspect of the condition, and he refuses to discriminate between authors. But in structuring his book so tightly, dividing it into partitions, sections, members, subsections, only to let it all collapse between the covers, he seems to be purposefully guiding his readers into oblivion.

Burton writes as if pursued, doubling back and messily hiding his own tracks until he’s ended up right back where he started. His compendium plays its sources against each other, eventually discrediting them all and asserting again and again the frailty of reason. Many times in the book he expresses skepticism that knowledge can be a boon; just as often it is unhelpful or even burdensome, and he includes a long section on the “Miseries of Scholars.” It’s difficult to tell whether this skepticism is the reason he so relentlessly swerves between subjects or the result of it, but for every topic Burton inserts himself into, there’s another for which he’s willing to jump ship. At times he simply excuses himself by declaring his own irrelevance: “…what shall become of all such immodest kisses and obscene actions, the forerunners of brutish lust, if not lust itself?

What shall become of them that often abuse their own wives? But what have I to do with this?”

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He is always quick to assert his own inappropriateness or deficiency. In the preface, titled “Democritus Junior to the Reader,” he compares himself to his namesake, writing, “parvus sum, nullus sum, altum nec spiro, nec spero [I am insignificant, a nobody, with little ambition and small prospects].”

What he does have is a good library, and the desire to spend a great deal of time in it.

This eagerness to read, observe, and learn is what makes a lifelong bachelor’s ruminations on domestic abuse valuable, and watching Burton ruffle through his books is one of the great pleasures of The Anatomy.

In the introduction to the New York Review Books edition, William H. Gass writes, “it is the width of the world that can be seen from one college window that amazes me; what a love of all life can be felt by one who has lived it sitting in a chair…” Even if we are sure of nothing, at least in the pursuit of knowledge we gain a sense of humor and an appreciation for the variety of life. The world’s trials and paradoxes seem a little less threatening, and mundane things shine under Burton’s gaze. In one of my favorite passages he treats of tobacco, and for a moment the herb describes all the world: Tobacco, divine, rare, superexcellent tobacco, which goes far beyond all the panaceas, potable gold, and philosophers’ stones, a sovereign remedy to all diseases.

A good vomit, I confess, a virtuous herb, if it be well qualified, opportunely taken, and medicinally used; but as it is commonly abused by most men, which take it as tinkers do ale, ‘tis a plague, a mischief, a violent purger of goods, lands, health; hellish, devilish, and damned tobacco, ruin and overthrow of body and soul.

To Burton, the universe itself is no greater than a book, for our minds measure even the impossible within “that astrolabe

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of phantasy.” His willingness to laugh at humanity masks a reverence for it, and he always maintains a genuine respect for the reader, whom he keeps an eye on even as his wanderings turn erratic. “Thou thyself art the subject of my discourse,” he writes in the preface, and we should recognize that just as the author has become our companion, so too are we his. I am not needed here, Burton says again and again, and he gets away with this because where he is, what he’s discussing, is less important than that he’s convinced you to follow him there. I followed him for 1,400 pages, from “Man’s Excellency” to cures of religious despair, and in not too long I found Burton following me as well. The deeper I got into The Anatomy, the more I felt the book’s presence even when I wasn’t reading it, for Burton’s is one of those infectious voices that takes hold until even your thoughts sound like him. His style, disorienting as it is, can go anywhere, and eventually seems like the only way through this massive book. “He was a madman that said it,” he writes, quoting Fabatus, on madness, “and thou peradventure as mad to read it.” For Burton, being human means being ever beset, ever overcoming, and the tracts of his book rise and fall according to this logic. We can explore The Anatomy content with knowing that while he may be leading us into madness, it’s okay, because everyone else is there already.

There is one piece of advice Burton gives at the very beginning and very end of his work. “Be not solitary, be not idle,” he decrees on the last page, as if to say: My work here is done, and now it’s your turn.

In the preface, in one of his most cited lines, Burton gives a reason for his project: “I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy.” Activity itself, not its result, is

what’s most important, and if this sounds romantic it is also very practical. If we know one thing about Burton, it’s that reading, writing and living are much the same to him, and I tried to read The Anatomy the way he appears to have lived it. I knew I was succeeding when I looked up and found that an hour had passed without my noticing. The book hardly cured my woes, but it was difficult to feel melancholy when I busied myself to open it and start reading, and impossible to be alone when its author was right there, on his way to wherever he wished to take me.

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TEAGUE MORRIS Pretending Told to pretend to be a hyena at a party, you recline & appear to sleep. I am myself pretending to be angry. I chew the carpet.

Now we are pretending to be each other. We try to imagine what it’s like. We are already there. You pretend to be concerned. You do it for so long you get a little squiggly-eyed.

I am pretending to be myself or at least who I think I am. And you are still pretending to be a hyena.

Huddling on branches you hoot & I pull up my knees and shoulders.

The moon sees only owls. Are you pretending to be the person who I thought you were pretending to be? Do you believe that I believe what I say I am only pretending to believe in? We are pretending to know each other. I am told to pretend to be a hawk. I stand on one leg and squint. And you are still pretending to be a hyena.

I am told to pretend to bite you and I really bite you. I pretend that I am sorry. Now I am pretending to be a tree. And you are still pretending to be a hyena. Now we are pretending not to be pretending. And you are still a hyena.

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Bog-Men

The Bird-Man

Paper might be made from them— illuminated as the hidden book plated with gold held from fire and thief at Kells—look, they

and he has been seen above the roof-tops changing to a bird. And this, too, is said

have turned to stone. Look, they have lost each other in the ground. As skin and bone fused. As trembling wishing

others cannot understand his squawks. Lovebird, loverless, he builds his nest alone. If

hands coupled finger-tofinger. As only five hours spent man and wife. On the cold and lonely bed lain before the firing-squad. A little cross placed there. Holding in desire until the whole body shakes— until the little egg-shell worn as skin crumbles. Swallowed by peat and made mummy. All sucked from the body & only the outside left. Only skin.

to have been foretold. He cannot eat anything but worms and the crusted molting dirt. And

the knife had been sharper—no, it was dull.

And he has been known to leap tall buildings and drift off into clouds. Then, too, he was known to meet the moth-man under the paling moon.

His bird-home built of concrete. And his arms, too, are made of wood and duct-tape. He is the angel of the supermarket. But others cannot understand when he says he flies. And this, too, has been his fate. If the building had been taller—no, he would have flown.

And he has been known to migrate on days when the mood strikes him. He’ll stamp the ground and cluck out bird sonatas. Others cannot hear the voices answering him. Now, too, he is known to be a priestly presence. Look, he is crossing the street at an odd angle. Watch as he hangs for a moment in the air.

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KATHERINE MOONEY Center Stage

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GWYNETH HENKE Anniversary (Saint Louis, 2015) Asphalt prophet brought his costume to play at the revolution is not self-organized white with the white beard down to his rope at the waist, and the pavement protestors calling calling

where did you come from spelling doom for the silent babe you can’t stop it countdown black men spilling over the pavement black men imagining horizontal black man black tar over black blood wouldn’t wash church finish could see it coming entire mile traffic at the edge of vision crawling and that prophet still on the corner saying doom is coming to those who speak boy tumbling from the roof of the SUV there was a saint first the city was named there was a saint for the name of the falling that fell and the name for the television which sainted the boy that was no naming except for the pounding which made him

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there was a center to the circle of counting there was a flat to the soles of the feet that stepped there was a walking to the prophet stood on the corner got that vision with tomorrow’s dinner there was tar on the blood and flowers on the tar and ash on the flowers there were candles on the ash and cameras in the balcony and the father at the front and everyone crying lead it there was the long silent slow burning fire there was a bullet the city still sees there was no way to fall without hitting there was an undoing there was only what would be left when they made it Lord why should a prophet tell them the end was coming alone on the corner, screaming— no one listening there was no need to say what they already knew

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MIRANDA COOPER

The Way We Weren’t

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f I had known, I probably would have told you—politely, of course— that I was perfectly content to share my table with only my quinoa salad and my earbuds, Ira Glass’s youthful voice filtering in as if he were standing right there, speaking with that maddening earnestness. But how could I have known? Your parents raised you not to talk about your feelings, you said later, and I smiled and nodded as if I could even begin to fathom what that was like, having grown up in a family where my mother had weekly therapy sessions instead of manicures and the Xanax was kept on the kitchen table right next to the Shabbos candles. You, on the other hand, were uncomplicated, and beautifully so; nothing about you suggested that you’d suffered anything worse than second-place in a regatta. If you did have skeletons in your closet, they were wearing pastel polo shirts. So, out of boredom more than anything—the podcast was another rerun, anyway—I shrugged and scooted my lunch closer to me, freeing the other half of the table. But when the sun glinted off the gold spine of that book you were clutching (who had the ingenious idea to so adorn a book about the deceptive power of beauty?) I lost my cool: “This Side of Paradise is my favorite novel of all time!”

A week later we were having what my eleventh grade English teacher, who wore long denim dresses and spoke in hushed tones about Crazy Horse, used to call “sexual congress.” I always pictured John Boehner trying to seduce Nancy Pelosi and couldn’t take seriously our discussion of Newland Archer’s scandalous weekend with the countess. I mentioned this to you once and you kissed my nose affectionately: “My little daydreamer.” (My teacher, on the other hand: “Oh, what are you smirking about this time?”

Restraint was never my strong suit, and facial expressions were no exception.) Once I found out—I should have guessed, when you laughed a little too loudly at the mildly amusing fact that my father had The Essays of Warren Buffet on his bedside table—which side of the aisle had your allegiance, there were no more conversations about politics, and there was nothing congressional about our interactions.

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A month later I met your sister at some gastropub in SoHo, and a month after that your parents, at their house in Greenwich. I smiled when your mother offered me the plate of bacon-wrapped asparagus: No, I didn’t keep kosher, and no, I wasn’t a vegetarian; I just didn’t eat pork and never had. That weekend there was lovely, though, and I left with a little more warmth inside me, having learned things about you simply by looking: you used to have awful buckteeth, you had been attached to a stuffed Winnie the Pooh until almost the end of high school, the flying saucers on your childhood bedspread betrayed early dreams of being an astronaut. During the nights we spent under that bedspread, me enveloped in you, caressing each other for hours, you became the first person ever to bring me to an orgasm that didn’t feel like a favor. I finally understood the phrase “lovemaking.”

I looked at you with amusement when, a few weeks later, we stood in front of a Matisse at the Met and you told me that I could write a better exhibit label than that, and maybe it would be the perfect job for my love of both art and writing. I made a joke: “Yeah, the people trying to tell the average museumgoer how the Impressionists used color to show the effects of light and weather really rake in the cash.” But you were serious. In your eyes, apparently, I was passionate and brilliant and vital.

One night, when we were basking in the so-called afterglow, I insisted on bringing Kerouac and Fitzgerald into bed with us, begging you to let me share with you my two favorite pages in American literature. You were the only person in the world who I could ever share this level of physical passion with, so it was only fitting that we would share these texts too. You told me a few weeks later that this was the moment you decided I was special. And from then on, you told me so all the time.

Like the day I mentioned I was thinking of applying for a job at The Strand: “Come on,” you scoffed. “Anyone can work at a bookstore. You don’t need an English degree from a top college to do that. Don’t waste your talents—you’re special.”

When I admitted that getting my nose pierced when I graduated from high school had been an act of defiance, you thought you knew what I was defying: “Yeah, I agree, nose piercings aren’t just for small button noses. It looks great. Why let the world tell you something is wrong with your nose? It makes you special.”

In my bed one night: “I don’t know any other woman who actually enjoys giving blowjobs.

You’re special, you know that?”

“You’re so special. I love you.”

You were confident, and you inspired me to be confident. So, little by little, I bit back the self-deprecating sarcasm I had learned from Grandpa Bernie and Woody Allen and Larry David, and I started to listen to you.

Nothing else mattered compared to that confidence or the joy I felt in your arms. Not Nana clutching her left forearm almost unconsciously when you drove up in your Mercedes, not my father’s face darkening when you told him you were the sixth generation in your family to go to Princeton, where his grandfather had been denied in 1925 when they had too many dark-haired boys from Brooklyn applying. My passion for you transcended these objections belonging to foregone generations for whom “Jewish” was the first and foremost identifier, yet was always said in a defensive tone or else in a whisper, because it had to be.

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I recalled a song we sang during the Passover seders of my childhood, a song almost overshadowed in my memory by the spectacle of my mother throwing plastic frogs (frogs!) and insects of varying sizes and constitutions (lice! locusts!) at us and turning on the ceiling fan that had been strategically laden with—no, not kosher—marshmallows (hail!), which I would inevitably pick off the floor and snack on when I grew tired of eating the bitterness of slavery, the tears of the Israelites, and the mortar of the Temple. Marshmallows, you see—even stale and covered with dust—were significantly more delectable than traditional Seder foods. (Meanwhile, you were doubtless eating all the pastel-colored, bunny-shaped marshmallows you could handle and skipping around happily collecting chocolate eggs; this disparity in spring holiday traditions—not the memory of slavery or the eating of the bread of affliction—was the real perennial Jewish suffering as far as I was concerned.)

Dayenu, Grandpa Bernie would sing in his lilting, trembling Ashkenazi tenor: No matter which divine miracle it was, it would have been enough. For me, when it came to my father’s and Nana’s grievances, it was the opposite: Lo dayenu. None of it was enough to convince me that you were too different to love.

But after we’d been together for about a year, a different junior analyst got the position you had set your sights on, and you threw my copy of Goodbye, Columbus across the room. And later that night, when I told you I was too tired to entertain the erection you handed me, you punched Winnie the Pooh so hard that his yellow plush muzzle went all lopsided. I slept on the couch.

I woke up the next morning with an ache in that muscle between the neck and shoulder. (I’m sure you knew exactly what it was called from your rowing days. I wasn’t about to ask you.)

I had apparently slept in the wrong contortion.

I missed the warmth of your body in the morning.

I was chewing my lip when you sauntered in from your bedroom. You cocked an eyebrow at me, demanding an answer to a question you either could not or would not ask in words. When I gave you nothing, you seemed to grow bored, and your eyes slipped downward. I didn’t have to follow your gaze. I stopped chewing my lip and snatched my tank top up over my cleavage.

You exhaled. “Oh.” “Yes,” I managed. “We need to talk.”

“It’s all good,” you said. “You know I love you no matter what. It’s okay that you didn’t want to last night. Hey, it’s fine, I jerked off like a minute after you left.”

For once, I was speechless.

After that, I couldn’t draw breath without feeling like there was a knot behind my sternum.

Yet still I fought to keep you, to keep us, to keep our wonderful trips to art museums, our penchant for choosing the same kind of sushi, those orgasms we had had together.

On the last weekend, when I felt us slipping away from each other, I suggested we get out of Manhattan and into the mountains. At an orchard near my alma mater, we wandered the narrow spaces delineated by neat rows of bushes, in search of ripe-looking raspberries. Bob Dylan’s harmonica melodies floated through the air from inside the country store, reminding me of drives through this landscape with my father eight years earlier, when my stress had

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dissipated to “Mr. Tambourine Man” and I effortlessly pictured myself reading literary criticism under the maples of every bucolic liberal arts college we visited. I had watched purple mountains rising in the distance over a verdant valley dappled with heartbreaking sunlight, promising me an education in yearning.

You, on the other hand, had never learned to yearn for anything.

After an embarrassing amount of time in bed eating raspberry pie with a spoon, I mailed you the cashmere sweater that, you loved to remind me, your biceps had outgrown when you started rowing (I didn’t tell you I kept wearing it through the raspberry pie days or that I hadn’t washed it). It was time for another trip. I visited my sister in Boston, hoping that the combination of her no-nonsense perspective and passion fruit margaritas from our favorite taquería in Somerville would somehow add up to clarity.

After two margaritas, she didn’t sugarcoat it: “Come on, stop moping around and go start fucking whatever dweeby Columbia Ph.D. student you know you’ll end up with. I’m sure Sam Goldbergstein is just waiting for you to waltz into his life. Did you really think this would ever work out? Please. I mean, you’re always talking about that old movie—what’s it called?”

I knew exactly what she was referring to: The Way We Were.

“And didn’t you once send me some thing about star-crossed lovers you wrote for your creative writing class in college? The nice progressive Jewish girl and the entitled, WASP guy?

It didn’t work out in the story and it didn’t work out for you. Big surprise.”

She was right, as far as it went: the same way Nana was right about the Mercedes. But she had only just begun to grasp, in that final indictment, the full extent of my transgression: I was not naïve but complicit. I knew how this story ended, because I had written it. I knew its ending and still let myself get involved in a real-life version of it.

But it wasn’t only a matter of cognitive dissonance: I had gotten carried away, had gone way beyond performing that story. I had not simply been complicit rather than naïve; I had been complicit in performing my own naiveté.

And I had even hoped that that instant I forsook Ira Glass for you would provide me a writer’s toolkit, something I could use to revise myself into a more sophisticated narrator with a more nuanced perspective.

For the sins I have committed… Al chet shechatanu…

I plead guilty to every single one of her crimes.

I let myself fall in love with you. …dayenu.

At least that’s how Grandpa Bernie would want me to end it.

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SALMA MOHAMMED

Excerpts from Yemen in NY

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SUMUN IYER Picnic at Daybreak I stood this morning in the way of the sunrise, painting my eyelids with the slow, grey light and the shadows of black-capped chickadees.

I should ask for a moment to watch pine needles sag with yesterday’s snow, should demand a new contract scratched into the ground— were I not too flighty to find it serrated— the scrapes on my knuckles like the bark of this oak tree.

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HANNAH BROWN Instructions for a Ritual

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ALEXANDRA GRIFFIN Each Sound You Left

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n Monday, I gather up each sound you left behind and stretch them out onto the kitchen table. Whack. Whack. Whack. The knife leaves long lines in the wood. I dice your early-morning whistles.

I cut your chuckles into thin slices. I toast bread and spread it with your left-behind sounds, and I eat until the kitchen is hollow and quiet.

My father says “Don’t you want me to mail it to you?” and I say “Mail me what?” and he says “The casserole pot. We’re talking about the casserole pot, Eva.” I hang up the phone because I spot some of your sobs gathering in a pile near where your boots always rested. Janet came by yesterday to try them on, she’s also a 10.5 and they fit like gloves, so she took them. I squish the sobs into a ball and toss them into the soup.

Everyone blamed the simple sugars. Everyone blamed the cell phone radiation. Everyone blamed the charcoal on burnt marshmallows. On Tuesday, I clean the bathroom; you left it a disaster, so filled with your sounds that I pull on a winter hat to mute the noise. I gather all your pill-plus-water gulps that are collecting around the sink. I chase after a few chuckles hiding in the bathtub with a broom. I wipe your chokes and groans of frustration off the mirror, because you groaned every time you looked at your reflection, groaned and pulled back your thinning hair, poked the dark circles under your eyes. “I hope I’m dead before December,” you told the mirror, “from my lips to God’s ear.”

“Please don’t say that,” I told your reflection.

When you writhed in pain next to me at night, you might have been miles away.

On Wednesday, I venture into the backyard. I find your soft hums of Elizabeth Cotten songs near the tiger lilies that you planted last spring. I find your whistles lingering next to the unfinished pathway, another half-assed project of yours. A brick, a bucket of mortar, and a gaping hole left in the ground. With the handle of a broom, I poke at some of your shouts in the gutter of the roof, matted in piles of wet leaves. One shout when you ripped off the bandages around your hands to keep you from scratching your skin

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raw. Two when someone finished the olives you were saving for guests, one when I told you I didn’t think I wanted children. I find Saltines in the cupboard and eat your whistles, hollers, and hums for lunch.

That evening, I gather up each breath you left behind and line them up next to my pillow.

Shallow gasps on the far right, moans of pleasure in the middle, deep-sleep sighs to the left. I pop one of your long moans into my mouth and let it dissolve under my tongue. When I drift off to sleep, I dream that someone is taking small pieces out of your body with a fork.

I drive to Goodwill to drop off your clothes on Thursday. Do you remember the time that you lost your grandmother’s shawl on a flight to Denver? You dragged me through three airports and two airlines until we found ourselves lost at the United cargo shipping facility at O’Hare. We sat in the parking lot outside the facility where pets go before boarding airplanes and you put your head between your knees.

“Dead before February, I hope,” you said, your voice muffled in your lap. “From my lips to God’s ear.”

I looked out at the planes rushing overhead and wondered how we had ended up here.

“You know that I’m dying, Eva, right?” You rolled down the window and screamed: “I am dying!” Your head rocked back and forth against the headrest. Your fingers curled around the sides of the seat. I find the heavy sounds of your head thumping against the dashboard when I clear out the car on Friday.

Everyone blamed the tiny cells, and the pills. Everyone blamed your hatred of calendars and Sharpies and making decisions. Everyone blamed my second part-time job at the bike shop and how I never came home in time for dinner. Everyone blamed your passive-aggressive bedtime comments, topped off with the click of the bedside lamp. Everyone blamed the fact that I moved onto the couch when you started tossing awake at night.

On Saturday, I put on a black dress and a rigid face and get into the car. My mother leans over and touches my face and asks if I ever got the casserole pot, my father puts a heavy hand on my shoulder, and Linda, your mother, clasps my hand against her cold, powdered cheek.

Linda has the same large front teeth you did. She says “I just can’t believe it” and I say “Mm.” She says “She had a heart the size of Texas, didn’t she?” I say “Mmm,” and we all say “Mm” like a flock of hummingbirds, or a fleet of buzzing alarm clocks.

I walk to the podium at your funeral and I feel your sounds churning in my stomach. I climb the steps of the stage and they climb up my esophagus. I clear my throat into the microphone and they spill into the back of my mouth. When I cough them up, all the sounds I gathered from the cabinets and the garden and the bedside table and ate for days, I imagine this is what you wanted. On stage, in front of the blank, bored eyes of everyone you ever knew, I sob, I whistle your favorite songs, I laugh, I moan so loud that your aunt covers your cousin Andrew’s ears.

From my mouth, a tidal wave of your sounds washes over everyone you ever touched or loved or breathed the same air with: Carlos your ex-lover from college, Fran from the laundromat, Janet the next-door neighbor, and Sean, he was there too—all of them gasping for air in this tiny room filled with you. When I cough up all the sounds you left behind onto the stage of your funeral, I think about the speech I was planning to give, the cute anecdote about the

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first time I met your parents, when you squished a raw shrimp into the palm of my hand as your father bowed his head to say grace.

I push out the back door of the building into the cool air, glancing at the sign marked “No Exit” as it swings shut behind me. My father catches me by the arm a minute later, and he is asking if I’m okay, touching my face, reaching for his phone with his other hand. “Eva? Eva, what was that? What’s going on?”

“I’m just getting it all out,” I tell him. One of your hums slips out between my teeth.

“Eva, you were screaming on the stage of her funeral.”

“Mm,” I say and cough up another one of your laughs.

“You’re making everyone very worried. Not right now, Eva, people can’t handle this right now.”

Have you seen how dry and brown your tiger lilies have become? Everyone blamed that hose we never fixed. Everyone blamed the pills. The tiny cells. Everyone blamed the way you hated small talk, and wet sponges left in the sink, and analog clocks. When you were dead before February, just like you promised, everyone blamed the cell phone radiation. Everyone blamed the nights we rolled over to the opposite sides of the bed in silence.

I walk several blocks to the lakefront. At the water’s edge, in the glowing lights of Chicago, I laugh until it hurts. I laugh, chuckle, and whistle Elizabeth Cotten songs until every sound of yours has left my body and I am so empty that the lake’s currents could carry me out, floating until sunrise or the shores of Michigan, whichever comes first.

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Banitza This recipe for banitza, a simple and delectable cheese and filo dough concoction, is from a book of Bulgarian recipes that I made in winter of 2016. Bulgarian cuisine, though uncommon in the United States, is incredibly rich. It is predominantly Mediterranean—feta cheese, tomatoes, and olive oil abound—but also features Turkish flavors like rose and saffron alongside a Central European focus on hearty stews. Banitza is one of the most archetypal Bulgarian dishes, and one of my favorites. Delicately unfolding the feathery filo, drizzling melted butter over the pan, finally tucking the feta and yogurt mixture into neat rolls—these actions have become near-ritual for me, almost as important as the delicious pastry that comes out of it.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

Melt ¼ of the butter to grease an 8×10’’ pan. In a large mixing bowl, combine eggs with yogurt. Crumble in small pieces of the block of cheese, stirring as you proceed. The resulting mixture should be pale yellow, with thick lumps.

In the meantime, melt the rest of the butter.

A RECIPE BY

KRISTA GELEV INGREDIENTS 1 tube frozen filo dough (left out to defrost for an hour or so prior) 1 lb feta cheese 4 eggs ½ cup yogurt 1 stick of butter

Carefully remove a few individual sheets of filo and place them flat onto the greased pan. Drizzle a tablespoon of melted butter atop the filo, then pour a slightly more generous amount of egg-yogurt mixture on top of that.

Now, starting at the bottom of the pan, roll the dough in on itself, creating a fat roll at the top of the pan. Neatness doesn’t matter: In Bulgarian, the expression “to make banitza of something” means to make a total mess.

Drizzle more butter on the pan. Take another few filo sheets and place them on the remaining surface area of the pan. Fill and roll, as previously. Repeat until the pan is completely filled with rolls. Drizzle any remaining butter over the rolls.

Bake for twenty minutes or until golden brown.

Pairs excellently with honey and sugar, or alternatively plain yogurt and tomato.

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Contributors ARI BASCHE is a senior from Glastonbury, CT. She can be found apologizing to her bike when she has to leave it out in the rain.

HUDSON DE BORBA is a self-proclaimed semi-amateur narcissist who’s planning on double majoring in Arts-and-Crafts and “Let-Me-Sell-My-Soul-to-Wall-Street.”

HANNAH BROWN is a senior Art History major who sometimes makes things that aren’t words.

MIRANDA COOPER is an English major and Jewish Studies concentrator. She enjoys avocados, floral prints, and waxing poetic about the Berkshires.

TREVIN CORSIGLIA is a sophomore doubling majoring in Mathematics and Philosophy, but with a strong interest in language and poetry. He grew up in New York City, and was most inspired to write after developing a passion for Hip-Hop lyricism.

HARRISON GATLIN lives in a quaint apartment above Pera with zero cats and his brutally realistic roommate Rohan.

KRISTA GELEV is a second-year Art History and French major hoping to finagle an education in typography as a liberal art. s kristagelev.com ALEXANDRA GRIFFIN is a sophomore from New York City. Recent inspirations include Anais Mitchell, Octavia Butler, vernal pools, and rhizomes.

BEATRIX HADDOCK is an off-cycle post-high school senior triple majoring in pre-med, horticulture, and ancient cultures; recent work features obsessions and an interest in triviality. s beatrixkeiko.com

CAMERON HENDERSON is a first-year who can occasionally walk through solid objects.

GWYNETH HENKE is a first-year from Saint Louis, a place she loves and struggles with daily. She appreciates walking, reading, and the constant beauty of this valley.

SUMUN IYER grew up in South Jersey. She likes grass, running, and poetry.

JONAS LUEBBERS grew up in upstate New York. He is fascinated by the beauty in details, computer interfaces, simulations, architecture, nature, and loud music.

s jonasluebbers.com

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EMMA MANDEL is a first-year from Brooklyn, New York. She plans to major in English and Theater.

SALMA MOHAMMED is a senior majoring in Studio Art. KATHERINE MOONEY was raised in Hong Kong and then Singapore until age eight when her family moved to Princeton, New Jersey. She has been a visual storyteller since she first realized the emotional effects that images could have on people. s madebymooney.wordpress.com TEAGUE MORRIS is a junior majoring in English and Philosophy. This year he is studying abroad at the University of Oxford.

ALEX PASELTINER is a senior double major in English and Computer Science from Great Neck, New York. This fall and winter he completed a creative writing thesis in poetry titled “Strange Attractor.”

STORY PONVERT is from the Elm City, CT. BRIANNA RETTIG is a photographer from South Lake Tahoe, CA. s

briannarettig.com

ANGELA SUN is a Psychology and Studio Art double major with a passion for documentary and travel photography. She is eager to travel the world after graduation and hopes to share her experience with others through art.

STEPHANIE SUN is interested in nightmarish scenes that challenge the viewer’s conventional idea of reality. s stephaniesun.carbonmade.com.

BRIAN TRELEGAN is a senior Studio Art major interested in sound art and using technology incorrectly. briantrelegan.com

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TYLER TSAY is the editor-in-chief of The Blueshift Journal (theblueshiftjournal.com).

He always burns toast, hates spiders, & thinks Trump is from Mars.

ANDREW WALLACE is a freshman from New York.

LISA ZHANG is a freshman from New York City.

Image Credit: (3) Jorge Royan, Wikimedia Commons, (85-86) Krista Gelev Printed By Qualprint in Pittsfield, MA

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