Volume XIX Issue 12

T HE Y AL E RA HE

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M OS 6 198 TD E NC ARI NG PUBLICATION SI

THE LITER

4/13/18

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FROM THE EDITORS Hey babes, Finals approach. The warm weather beckons, but alas, we must seclude ourselves within the infernal study rooms of Bass. It’s a dark, hellish, hopeless time in the semester, but don’t despair yet—Cupcakke and the Literary Issue are here to make your final days at Yale a little brighter.

To start us off, Ananya Kumar-Banerjee, TD ’21, weaves together a series of delicate vignettes in “Landscapes.”

Each one an encapsulation of a small memory, Kumar-Banerjee generously carries us through nostalgic imaginings from Vermont to Bacca and back to New York City. Elsewhere, memory and its trappings continue to loom large; Allison Primak, DC ’19, imagines the psychology of father watching his daughter come of age while remembering her childhood in “The Avon,” and Julia Leatham, MY ’21, playfully recalls her summer with the boys in “Boys Just Want to Have Fun.” For something less cerebral and more bodily, check out Jordan Cutler-Tietjen’s, JE ’20, poem full of lungs, “Listening to David Bowie on Spotify Radio on the treadmill” or Lulu Klebanoff’s hot and heavy excerpt from the delightfully queer Tybalt and Mercutio are Dead. See? Whatever type of literature you need this weekend, Harold’s got your back.

So this is it; plop down with a cup of coffee and the sound of the Friday morning rain on the windows and enjoy the last issue of the Herald before the blissful oblivion of summer break. We hope you’ve had a great semester reading our paper, because all of us sure have had a good time putting it together for you. Go forth, make good, and have a great summer.

THE HERALD MASTHEAD EDITORIAL STAFF EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Eve Sneider MANAGING EDITORS Margaret Grabar Sage,

Jack Kyono, Nicole Mo

EXECUTIVE EDITORS Emma Chanen, Tom Cusano,

Emily Ge, Marc Shkurovich,

Anna Sudderth, Oriana Tang, Rachel Strodel

SENIOR EDITORS Luke Chang, Hannah Offer FEATURES EDITORS Fiona Drenttel, Brittany Menjivar CULTURE EDITORS Allison Chen, Nurit Chinn OPINION EDITORS Lydia Buonomano, Tereza Podhajska REVIEWS EDITORS Gabe Rojas, Tricia Viveros VOICES EDITOR Carly Gove INSERTS EDITOR Zoe Ervolino AUDIO EDITOR Will Reid BULLBLOG EDITOR Marc Shkurovich

DESIGN STAFF GRAPHICS EDITOR Julia Hedges DESIGN EDITORS Audrey Huang Rasmus Schlutter Lauren Quintela

The Yale Herald is a not-for-profit, non-partisan, incorporated student publication registered with the Yale College Dean’s Office.

If you wish to subscribe to the Herald, please contact the Editor-in-Chief at eve.sneider@yale.edu. Receive the Herald for one semester for 40 dollars, or for the 20172018 academic year for 65 dollars.

The Yale Herald is published by Yale College students, and Yale University is not responsible for its contents.

All opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of The Yale Herald, Inc. or Yale University. Copyright 2018 The Yale Herald.

Love u, Carly Gove Voices Editor

VISIT THE YALE HERALD ONLINE AT YALEHERALD.COM

2 THE YALE HERALD

TABLE OF CONTENTS Ananya Kumar-Banerjee, TD ’21, reflects on the intersections of place and memory in “Landscape.”

5

Rachel Carp, MC ’19, episodically explores femininity in “Apologies for these Apologies.”

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Hath Queen Mab been with you? Lulu Klebanoff, GH ’20, queers the canon in Tybalt and Mercutio are Dead.

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In “Bird,” Nancy Walecki, GH ’20, tells the story of two sisters.

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Julia Leatham, MY ’21, recaps her summer of boys in “Boys Just Want to Have Fun.”

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Samara Angel, SY ’21, takes us on a tour of an artist’s apartment in “Ponderosa.”

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In “The Avon,” Allie Primak, DC ’19, writes of a father waiting for his daughter to return from her first date.

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Luke Stringer, SY ’18, imagines a conversation with a ghost from his past.

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In “with every sunrise,” Eric Krebs’s, JE ’21, speaker sees himself mirrored in his city.

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In Contemporaries, Erica Wachs, JE ’18, explores gender in academia through the lens of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels.

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Take a breather to read Jordan Cutler-Tietjen’s, JE ’20, invigorating poem “Listening to David Bowie on Spotify Radio on the treadmill.”

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Sonia Gadre, SY ’20, travels home to Louisville, Kentucky, and looks ahead to her ideal future in “Stories about Home.”

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In an untitled piece, Madeleine Hutchins, BR ’19, struggles with childhood in the face of grief.

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No big summer plans? Check out our summer reading list inspired by this year’s Windham-Campbell winners.

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I N S E R T S

April.27.2018

ALE CANALES, BK ’20 as i needed to be held without being bound your embrace engulfed paperclip. to love is to be afraid to feel loss even though you know you must

ZOE ERVOLINO, MC ‘21 ELLIOT CONNORS, MC ’20 YH STAFF nintendo DS stylus.

i want to blame you for the broken things inside i could never fix the smoldering sting of burning parts, of damage i cannot take back is it possible to learn to live once again succeeding the flood? my laptop, dead since last week because i spilled coffee on it. i used to be scared to reconstruct, but with you i will build my life. lego brick. i want you to show me what i want most only when i can’t have it internet cookies. what would i be if not renewed by your release and reborn again? toilet flush. i refuse to hide the markings of our passion Let the world see them. juicy sandwich that dripped onto my shirt

4 THE YALE HERALD

Top Five Things You Shouldn’t Say to Your Writer 5. ”We can’t pay you but it’ll be great exposure. Besides, eulogies for family members practically write themselves.”

4. “I accidentally dropped your book in the toilet. Can I get a new one for free?”

3. “I dropped your book in the toilet on purpose. Can I get a new one for no additional charge?”

2. “I’m proud of you, son.”

1. “Four list items isn’t enough for a top five.”

Landscape

5

ANANYA KUMAR-BANERJEE, TD ’21

She asked me me to to write writeaalandscape landscapevoid void of peoShe has has asked ple, pasted together by the color of the of people, pasted together by the color ofland. I am picturing gray grasses, the land. Itall amVermont picturinggreen tall Vermont greena big blue overhead.

An anxiety, fear of illness weighing on me. gray grasses, a big blue overhead. An anxiIety, cannot intoweighing the landscape fear oftread illness on me. without I cannotworry of what has toldwithout me. I see my of cousin, thin tread my intomother the landscape worry scooped shaft of blond hair clipped right above the what my mother has told me. I see my cousin, ears.

She has shaft no middle name. have two. thin scooped of blond hairIclipped right above the ears. She has no middle name. I -have two.

A - glow out the windows. The walls are covered with images. The floors are carpeted cream, clean.

IAam looking a brown woman’s Her body glow out theatwindows.

The wallsfigure. are covwith behind images.paint, The floors are carpeted isered reeling her thick hooped nose ring cream, clean.

I am looking at a brown womand perfect Bengali part, hair slick with coconut oil an’saffection. figure. Her body reeling paint, or I am sureis she was behind beautiful, in Dacca, her thick hooped nose ring and perfect Bengaback then. I am sure. li part, hair slick with coconut oil or affection.

-I am sure she was beautiful, in Dacca, back then. I am sure.

Standing at the 125th street station as it drizzles.

The air is humid and my feet are cold and wet. The concrete platform is a most purple tone, sky too Standing at the 125th station as it there is boy heavy above rafters forstreet me to see. Then drizzles.

The air is humid and my feet are with black umbrella and cotton red snapback.

He cold and wet.from Thebehind. concreteI realize platform a most looks pretty hisis eyes reflect purple tone, heavy above rafters me back blue onsky thetoo silver bullet bound for for White to see. Then there is boy with black umbrella Plains.

Oh. and cotton red snapback. He looks pretty from behind. I realize his eyes reflect back blue on the silver bullet bound for White Plains. Oh. I don’t speak for fear of rustling air. I hate the lighting in this building. Amber tones bring out mother in my cheeks, round, almost bulbous.

I recall I don’t speak for fear of rustling air. I hate the the moment I approached a Japanese woman at lighting inwhen this building.

Amber tones bring the Museum of Modern Art because she was sculptout mother in my cheeks, round, almost buled justI as mother from behind. bous. recall the moment when I approached

- anything else. The air is laden with grey and Thegreen, coffeeivy makes my heart beat fastofbefore tiptoeing over squares stone anyand thingsilver. else. Square The airisisbig laden with grey and green, but closed off, I swipe in ivy tiptoeing over squares of stone andthe silver. alone to sit on a bench.

I hope jitterSquare will is big but in my alone to sit a bench. wearclosed off sooff, thatI Iswipe can set head andonvision I hope the jitter off but so that I can my straight.

My will feet wear are cold it feels likesetApril. head and vision straight. My feet are cold but it feels like -April.

-

I am messy, bleeding, bloody, I am sorry, for feeling (this much). How to say it is not in the I amalcohol, messy, bleeding, ambelly, sorry,the forway feeling it is in thebloody, base of Imy I (thisam much). to to sayfind it isanother not in the built.How I have way.alcohol, He callsit is in the of my belly, thetoway I amcomplemenbuilt. I have mebase irresponsible.

I try get the taryanother color ofway. his perfect my mind. I I try to find He callsskin meoff irresponsible. wonder about his middle names, hisperfect mother.skin to get the complementary color of his Does he know they hurt off my mind.

I wonder aboutmotherland? his middle names, his mother. Does he know they hurt motherland?

I am baby. When asked for employment, my astrologer.

I do not have a I amfather baby.refuses When the asked for employment, my father star,the I say I am partI Scorpio part aLibra refuses astrologer. do not have star, but I saymy I am lunallity is almost arbitrary, is not reflected in part Scorpio part Libra but my lunallity is almost the spiny construction myspiny body.construction My thatha of arbitrary, is not reflected inofthe used the stars to guide planes home.

He fought my body. My thatha used the stars to guide planes theHe Portuguese. does not hear home. fought theHePortuguese.

He me doessing, not hear hearshears his deceased wife inwife thein colors of myof my me sing, his deceased the colors voice, my second middle name, Vijaya. voice, my second middle name, Vijaya.

-

-

We are in Vermont, by a field speckled spotWe are in Vermont, by a field speckled spotted by ted by vitiligo cows. The grass is tall and I am vitiligo cows. The grass is tall and I am thinking of thinking of Lyme Disease, my cousin Lili is Lyme Disease, Lili isblue several several feet my out,cousin her blocky eyes feet meetout, theher blocky meet amdoes calling her, but sky.blue I ameyes calling to the her,sky. butIshe notto hear she does not hear a thing. a thing.

a Japanese woman at the Museum of Modern Art because she was sculpted just as mother from behind.

The coffee makes my heart beat fast before

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April.27.2018

Apologies for These Apologies

RACHEL CARP, MC ’19

In the boiling (simmering) random In the run-ons In the confident blurts *** why do I say sorry so much what am I apologizing for In the blurts and coverups apologies for these apologies run ons through the sieve spilt on the floor washed away with chlorine outcast? the thoughtful outcast *** with the rainbow smock wild and brewing

To hold the thing you want to hold and not to care *** am I under a microscope or some distortion filter between me and the world with a goofy setting, a not-serious setting people laugh at me when i’m not trying to be funny yes I love it but sometimes, after a while

am I your anything at all when I speak to you what do you see first female? insecure? anxious? derivative sex object *** I don’t have a god people are my god my arms are wrapped around your soft, warm skin I couldn’t be closer I want to squeeze to make it real I make myself so small I squeeze my eyes to not feel like it’s just me

quick act react what’s in the pause what do you fill with air what do you fill with sweat under a microscope in the spicy sake in the smooch in the filter of filtered faces

you can’t read me but you just did

it’s all poker reading people

this firecracker sake is my shit so spicy and surprising take three reads

who are we so afraid of who are the people that induce the pantomime

i never really realized it until my friend said it he is one too, he gets it

I’d like to thank Trojan, like to thank Timothée Chalamet to thank weed, hot showers to thank fraternities to thank strawberry melatonin my sisters

***

anxious, frazzled misunderstood

I think it’s going to work out for me

To be a gooey heart To squeeze the thing you want to squeeze and not to care to grasp, to own What am I to people? a goofball, a joke, a sex toy, a woman I am moving at four time speed you say I would benefit from meditation I know my fingers are bloody I look like a psycho with all the band-aids I know this too I’m trying I can try harder sorry I don’t drain myself in a sieve *** a pantomime intentional vacancy to pantomime the vacant face a pantomime

Tybalt and Mercutio are Dead

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LULU KLEBANOFF, GH ’20

ACT I SCENE iv (There is no blackout between scene iii and scene iv. After MERCUTIO and BENVOLIO exit, TYBALT peeks out from behind the tree. Seeing them gone, he leans back against the tree, closes his eyes, and breathes heavily. We hear some of Romeo and Juliet II.i from offstage—BENVOLIO and MERCUTIO calling after ROMEO. As the scene fades out—it should become quiet partway through MERCUTIO’s first monologue, so our focus shifts to TYBALT, and after that it slowly fades to silence—TYBALT walks downstage towards to audience. He opens his mouth as if to speak, but finds he is at a loss for words. He shakes his head, frustrated, excited, and confused. He walks back to the tree and pulls the bottle of alcohol out of it. He looks at it, turns it in his hands. He puts it back in the tree.

He kicks the tree. He picks up one of the books and throws it across the stage. After a moment, he walks over, picks it up, and places it back on top of the stack. He slumps to sit against the tree. He touches his lips, feeling the post-kiss tingling sensation. He smiles. Then he laughs, at first chuckles and then big, full-body laughs.

While he’s laughing, MERCUTIO reenters.)

MERCUTIO What’s so funny?

TYBALT Us. Here. This.

MERCUTIO I’m perfectly serious about this.

TYBALT I know. And I’m perfectly unserious. (He laughs) MERCUTIO I’ll leave you with your jokes then. (He starts to exit) TYBALT Wait. (He stands. They look at each other in silence for a moment. Then TYBALT bursts out laughing) I can’t think of anything to say. Aren’t I supposed to spout a sonnet or something? Here we are in an orchard, under the moon, and I don’t have a couplet in me.

MERCUTIO Meter is performative. It doesn’t belong to us. Tell me in prose.

TYBALT I can feel my heartbeat thumping in my neck, like I’ve been running.

My skin feels like a breeze could blow it off. My lips remember yours.

And you’re just standing there, like the world isn’t ending.

TYBALT What are you scared of ?

MERCUTIO That the world isn’t ending. That I’ll wake up in the morning tomorrow and the world will be the same.

TYBALT If you don’t wish to wake up tomorrow, don’t go to sleep tonight.

(While they’ve been talking, the distance between them has closed.

TYBALT reaches out and takes MERCUTIO’s face in his hands, and kisses him) MERCUTIO (smiling) You kiss like the moon.

TYBALT Cold and virginal?

MERCUTIO Luminous.

(They kiss. It starts gentle, but starts to get more intense, hands under shirts. They’re both into it. TYBALT pulls off MERCUTIO’s belt) MERCUTIO Wait.

TYBALT I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to— MERCUTIO I can’t.

TYBALT It’s alright. We don’t need to— MERCUTIO No, I can’t. I’m sorry.

(MERCUTIO runs offstage, leaving TYBALT standing by himself, hurt and bewildered, staring after him. TYBALT drops the belt. From offstage, faintly, we hear a few lines of the balcony scene, starting from “If they do see thee, they will murder thee”)

MERCUTIO I’m absolutely, Earth-quakingly terrified. I just hide it well.

7

April.27.2018

BIRD NANCY WALECKI, GH ’20

Her body had turned indigo by the time dad dug her up again a week later. Mom had wrapped her in two big beach towels and sprinkled her with quicklime, saying no daughter of hers was gonna get eaten up by some damn coyotes. Mom had been right. The lime had kept the critters away but now my sister was coated in bubbled crust, a shell of bright blue armor.

She didn’t smell like what I’d expected. She smelled more metallic than rotten, as far as I could tell. I didn’t get too close though.

My parents told us that when my sister was born they almost named her Bird. They could see even then that she wasn’t meant to stay in one place long. They said her eyes already seemed to know what she was on this earth to do. She was quick and loving, never resting in one mood for too long and always fidgeting like she had someplace else to be. Now my parents told us that Bird had finally found the expanse she’d been looking for, though I couldn’t see what they meant. We were out in some sagebrush about 100 yards from a shack the junkies used. It wasn’t even a nice evening — we were just out in the heat of the day with the hard, flat light. I didn’t know where Bird was but I prayed to God she wasn’t still here.

They had wanted to name her Bird but they settled on Janine. She was named after a great aunt my mom never met. Janine the First had worked as a stenographer in Barstow but was remembered for her sculptures made out of anything she could get her hands on. Dad once told me that Janine the First had made a 15-foot tower out of just toilet paper rolls, chewing gum, and bottle caps that a man bought and put in his yard until the day he died. Mom thought the name Janine carried magic and saw my sister as worthy of that sort of luck.

Maybe my sister was lucky, or maybe she just had good timing. When Janine was born, Mom and Dad lived with Mamaw and Papaw out in Hemet and Janine could recall in stunning detail what it had been like to live in a real home. She remembered crawling around on the shag carpet, pulling on the pile until old ash and pocket sand came loose. She said there had been a backyard with a patch of grass and a life-sized toy pony named Silver. Janine told me that Mamaw would braid her hair for her on the front stoop while she ate oranges and watched the older kids go by on their bicycles. Mom and Dad were gone during the day but came home every night for dinner. She told me that Dad used to sing to her and that he had the most beautiful voice in the world, as far as she was concerned.

Bird’s hair was braided now like the way Mamaw used to do it. It felt right to call her Bird now. Her yellow hair looked paler, and had begun to fall away by her temples. Dad and Little Jake carried the cooler out from the motorhome, but Little Jake was so small that he dragged his side through the dirt the whole way over. Dad took Bird in his arms, looking down at her with something like defeat. Mom brought out the sage, 8 THE YALE HERALD

the kind that gave her visions and told her things she’d never so much as whisper to me. She needed to cleanse all of us, the desert, the air, the cooler, and Bird before Bird could spend another moment back in the land of the living.

Dad held Bird tightly, his eyes never leaving her, while mom guided the smoke up and down her own body, letting it wander between her legs and cling to the sweat in her armpits, weaving it through my hair until I choked. She wrapped Bird’s head in a crown of smoke, smudging down her body with the sage until the smoke was settling between my sister’s blue toenails.

That’s the way they found her. Blue toes, blue lips, blue fingernails. Even the pills had been blue. Mom and dad called them their blue heavens. Bird just took too many. I hoped she didn’t feel anything — not the day she died, not today, not wherever she was now. *** One of my first memories was upside down. Hoisted by my heels in the air, I was staring at Dad’s inverted face. His face was one big grin, spit flying out of his mouth. The veins in my forehead were heavy with blood. I was swinging like a pendulum, screaming as loud as my voice would carry me.

“You shithead!” Janine yelled.

I saw Janine’s green pants. She was spewing out every swear word she knew with a venom that made me puff up with pride. I grew giddy knowing Janine was there, slapping dad anywhere she could even after her legs disappeared from my line of sight. She started calling him names to make me laugh.

“You poopycock!” she said, tickling the nape of my neck to let me know I was in on the joke. “Dingleweed shitdonker!” She was laughing now, and I imagined her looking dad dead in the eyes with her big grin that told him he was full of shit.

I was laughing so hard I felt dizzy. “Donkey butt!” I yelled, my voice cracking at the end from excitement.

“Yeah Beattie that’s it! Say it louder!” Dad had stopped shaking me now and I hoped his eyes were fixed on Janine’s in defeat. There was silence.

“Fuck face!” I yelled.

My shout filled the room. I was glowing, basking in how good those words had felt. I was wheezing from the excitement but Janine and Dad were quiet. I could feel their eye contact. Then Dad let go of my ankles. I was in free fall before he grabbed me at the last second, flipped me over and set me on my feet. When I turned around to face him, he was laughing and closing the trailer door behind him. ***

By the time Mom finished, all I could smell was sage.

Mom kissed Bird’s cheek before Dad wrapped her back up in the towels and laid her down in the cooler.

It took a minute to fit her in, even if it was almost as big as a fridge. He poured a bag of ice over her and closed the lid. I almost told him to take it out in case it melted and Bird drowned.

We moved the cooler into the motorhome and set it on the passenger seat next to me. Mom wanted to put Bird up front so she could read the energy of the landscape around her. “She’ll tell me when we find the right spot.” Mom spoke like she and Bird had an inside joke.

We did it all wrong, Mom had said, shaking me awake three nights before. Mom in her big sleeping sweater and no pants, breathing heavy. We left Bird in the wrong spot. She told me so. Gave me a dream of wolves digging her up. We gotta go get her, move her to the right place. No goodbye would ever be good enough. Their pills, her daughter, Bird can’t be left alone out there. I moved my hand now to rest on top of the cooler so Bird knew I was there.

We called the motorhome the Green Weenie because it had pale green racing stripes on the outside and was long and thick in that way. Janine had been the one to name it, before I was born. Whenever it roared to life, the Green Weenie groaned so loud we had to yell to hear each other or talk so close together we could smell each other’s breath. Now mom was singing loud enough for us to hear her over the engine, kneeling next to me with one hand on Bird’s cooler. Her eyes were closed. She swayed out of time to the music while her underarms vibrated with the engine. I could hear her crying through the melody, not bothering to wipe her nose, but I couldn’t bring myself to get up and hug her. I needed to stay next to Bird. The windows were open and everything smelled like scorched earth and sagebrush. I watched the oranges, reds, and pale greens blur together outside, praying that Bird couldn’t feel the beach towels and the melting ice. I wanted her to smell the desert. *** “Where are we going?” I said, stumbling over a tree root. My head still hurt from Dad swinging me around, but it was calm that day with just Janine and me by the river. That was the summer I hardly ever wore shoes. The day was gentle and damp in the best way and I walked slowly so I could sink my toes into the mud. Dad’s inverted face, the Green Weenie — it all felt distant that day along the Kentucky River with Janine humming over the cicadas. Mares eat oats and goats eat oats and little lambs eat ivy, a kid’ll eat ivy too, wouldn’t you? She was always singing that that summer. She smiled at the trees and seemed to be the only fully wonderful thing in the world. I thought she was reflecting the sun.

“Did you know that when cicadas hatch, the birds go

away?” She turned to me, looking very wild and smart with her hair all frizzed from the humidity. “The more cicadas, the less birds. Isn’t that weird?”

“Why’s that?” My sister knew everything.

“Who knows. Maybe the cicadas scare away the birds.

I bet hearing cicadas all day long would drive anybody crazy, bird or not. You can only take so much noise.”

We hadn’t heard or seen a bird yet that day, so maybe she was onto something.

“How’d you get dad to put me down?” Janine was magic but even she had limits.

“I got a scary face.”

“No you don’t.”

She stuck out her tongue. “That’s what you think.

Besides, he owes me.” She grabbed my elbow. “Here, look.”

A row of squat buildings hid behind the forest thicket.

They were broken-in houses, brick, with little windows and cable TV dishes on the roofs. The sun was setting, turning the storefronts sepia, and I swear even the cicadas were quiet for a minute.

She looked at me, swollen with pride. “Welcome to Beattyville, Beattie.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” I asked, watching a group of old men go into a diner, the only populated place in town.

“I heard right after you were born, these people liked your name so much they thought they’d name their town after you. I bet they’d make you mayor if you asked nice.” She flitted her eyes over the street and turned to me expectantly. “So whatcha think?”

“You mean they named this town after me?” That couldn’t be true. Mom and Dad had left Kentucky by the time I was born. They said I’d been born on an Indian reservation in Arizona. “You’re full of it.”

“Fine, we’ll see. I bet they make you mayor by end of the day.”

Our waitress was named Daisy and she smelled like roses. Her fingernails were trimmed perfectly square, lacquered with milk white polish set against her brown skin. She called me Sugar and gave me coffee even though she told me it’d make me short the rest of my life. She was brighter than the rest of the diner. I told her I thought she could win a beauty pageant if she ever tried.

“Oh Sugar you’re sweet. What’s your name?” She cooed her words, she didn’t just speak them.

“Beattie, ma’am.”

She hooted. “Oh Suuugar!” She lingered on the “u,” pursing her lips together and savoring the sound it made. “Don’t you know you’re in Beattyville? Sugar, this is your town!”

Janine turned to her and said with a level voice, “Oh sure. Our dad told us they named this place after her when she was born. Isn’t that right?”

Daisy laughed and smiled at me. “Oh yes Sugar. No one ever told you that? Oh well that’s a damned shame ’cause we been waitin’ for you to show up quite some time now. Where you been Sugar?” She looked at me dead serious.

My palms started sweating. “Oh I don’t know, uh… here and there I guess.” She hooted again and reared her head back toward the kitchen.

9

“Earl! You hear that? We found the real Beattie and she’s sayin’ she’s been here and there but never to see us!” The doors to the kitchen swung open and a skinny guy with a bloated belly appeared, wiping his hands with a dishrag.

“I never heard of a — “ Daisy turned and faced him.

A moment later his face lit up and he said shyly, “Oh right. Beattie. Beattie we been waitin’ a long time to meet you.” He wiped his hands one last time and then took my hand in both of his, giving it a big shake. I guessed I must really be somebody.

“Am I mayor of this town or something?” I’d never met another Beattie so maybe it was really me they were talking about. Daisy didn’t skip a beat. “Oh of course Sugar. This here is your town!” She went into the kitchen and came back with two milkshakes. “On the house, for Miss Mayor.”

I turned to Janine. She was already looking right at me.

She didn’t seem surprised in the least by everything happening around her. Instead she smiled at me with one corner of her mouth. “So Beattie, how’s it feel to have your own town?”

“Good I guess,” I was swinging my legs under the table a little nervous at the way her grey eyes studied me.

“You’re pretty special, you know that? You don’t take dad’s shit ’cause you’re the mayor of Beattyville now.”

I started to say something back but she kept going.

“Not Dad’s shit, not Mom’s shit. Don’t let it eat you up. It kills me too if I don’t catch myself. Sometimes it’s too much. You’re strong though. One day we’ll live in a real house with just us and Mamaw and Papaw. I swear to God Beattie I’m gonna get us out.” Her eyes were bright and wet, looking at me with wild resolve.

That day I believed her. *** Mom and Dad had their girl back. We’d keep driving through this desert until Mom finally heard Bird speak. Until then, Dad would play the radio low and sing along to Bud and Travis with his Merle Haggard voice. Mom would cuddle Little Jake and keep asking him if it wasn’t nice having his big sister back a while.

All together in the Green Weenie.

I was certain that Bird didn’t belong out here in the desert. She’d always be Bird on her perch in the forest by the Kentucky River, talking to the cicadas. Bird running wild through Appalachia, smelling of her sugar perfume and the mud on the bottom of her feet.

Bird in Beattyville, making me mayor and telling me Dad was full of shit. We’d keep driving for some time now. I hoped she’d leave for good soon. I wanted to see her spread out through the Joshua trees bound for Kentucky, never pausing for a moment to settle down in the dirt. I hoped she wasn’t waiting for me to stop missing her. I felt her pull me to her. She was so warm and close that for a second I almost asked her to stay.

“Now mom was singing loud enough for us to hear her over the engine, kneeling next to me with one hand on Bird’s cooler.”

April.27.2018

Boys Just Want to Have Fun

JULIA LEATHAM, PM ’21

Let’s talk about boys. I find boys immensely interesting, intriguing. I thrive off boys, one could say, feed on them. Paint me a lioness sat up in a tree and dance the boys down below me like marionettes. I’m interested in boys the way I’m interested in the colors of coats on passersby or how many people wear hats. When I walk down the street I check hands for wedding rings and cigarettes because what an intimate revelation and I love to talk to boys. I picked up smoking from them, for them. So, you can tell they’ve done me nothing but good.

Maks always laughed when I’d respond to being asked if I smoke with “no—I’m smoking. I don’t smoke. It’s not habitual.” He’d say “If you smoke, you smoke. He’s asking if you want a smoke. Do you want a smoke?” He called cigarettes “smokes” and always had one on hand. He told me once, him, Edi, Gelmis, and Ernie dropped $200 on smokes in one go. He said that made that shopkeeper’s day. He said fuck off because he always says that and said the smokes were a deal because each pack only cost $5. They’d smoke that much anyway. He smoked Camels and ashed them with a tight flick of his thumb out the window when we’d drive.

More often, though, I’d drive with Cecil. Maks, Edi, Gelmis, and Ernie were my boys but Cecil was my boy and usually we’d end up together in the car. “Green Dread Dude” he’d entered in my phone when we met and this boy deserves all the words. If Maks is a marionette Camel: silky, humped, click-clack-ashing smokes with hooves on fire then Cecil is thumping words. An amorphous cluster of curses and can’t-cares melodramatically caressing tangles of gossamer nerves the way he sat all evening with me in the car writing lists of what we love, who we love, why we love when Maks said I couldn’t come on the drug run and I pouted through three Guinesses Cecil bought me though both of us were underage but my soft cheeks and your natty hair and thick frame large enough so you could buy them all without being asked your age at all. Then we locked ourselves in your truck and played every song we knew about fire so loud the bed shook and the planks you’d nailed on the back clattered.

Planks tagged with aerosol paint, a scowling rain cloud. You knew I wanted to cry so when Maks knocked on the window said want a beer, want a smoke and I said no and he said you always want

more with a smirk, you walked loops around the truck yard, stood watch so I could pee in the lot and listened to me repeat I wish I weren’t so mad.

Like only a madwoman would.

That night Cecil, my boy, stayed with me and my boys. I slept tucked between Maks and Cecil on our pallet of moving mats, dozing to the hum of the warehouse squished wall-to-wall when I was a boy and I was safe.

Earlier, I’d lounged tucked in Cecil’s arm passing a smoke, letting the vapors intoxicate my clothing so I reeked — like a boy, a smoky boy. Don’t you know all boys reek? Like infidelity and violence.

It’s true. And I was no exception. Legs spread, brow set, eyes alight I doled witticisms laced with insult. Never passed a drink or a joint without pulling and I flitted between rooms chattering with every boy so when the girls arrived, beautiful girls, sat daintily with crossed legs, timid eyes, I brought them in and asked if they’d give me their bodies. I asked if they’d give me their bodies. We girls together shed clothing and replaced it with words and figures dragging markers thick across each other’s skin, lines connecting wrists to elbows, lacing ourselves up like strings tugging taught, we were taught, ringing limbs, digits dripping ink, we oozed ribbons from our fingers then walked back to our hazy smoky hump of boys and oh how they danced.

DON’T YOU KNOW ALL BOYS REEK? LIKE INFIDELITY AND VIOLENCE. IT’S TRUE.

11

Ponderosa SAMARA ANGEL, SY ’21

When I went back to her apartment, the first thing I saw was the big, white canvas that reclined on her wall across from the door. One of those modern artists, I thought.

“What do ya think?” she asked.

“It’s a canvas,” I said.

“What do ya think it’s of ?”

SHE FIXATED ON THE PAINTING, HER TONGUE PEEKING OUT OF THE RIGHT SIDE OF HER MOUTH LIKE A CHILD FOCUSED ON LEARNING TO RIDE A BICYCLE.

“A white canvas?”

“Yeah. But it’s also a canvas with every color reflecting at once. It’s everything, and it’s nothing.”

She paused. A long pause. “Or, ya know, an albino cow in a blizzard.” And when she saw that I was laughing, her straight, deadpan face broke with mine into a smile and then a giggle, building like the steady pattering start of a rainstorm. And when she finally laughed, she snorted.

She pulled me by the hand around the small entry room of her apartment and showed me every single painting. A few were by artists I knew of, most were by her students, and some were her own.

She showed me a painting of herself that her student, Carson, painted for her. She fixated on the painting, her tongue peeking out of the right side of her mouth like a child focused on learning to ride a bicycle. “He got the proportions of a face right for the first time in this painting,” she told me. “And look,” she said, pointing to a rather unflattering, large brown spot painted on the center of her nose, “he even captured my freckle.” She turned to me and pointed to what in real life was a tiny spot. “It’s in the exact center of my nose.

I measured for him.” Each of her own paintings were signed with her first and middle initials in an orange the color of Garfield’s fur. “A.A.” Amalie, after a mathematician who was a major contributor to abstract algebra, and Amber, even though her eyes were the green of ponderosa pine needles. She smelled like ponderosas too when I breathed in the scent of her blonde hair, all vanilla and butterscotch.

I could get on board with albino cows, I thought, and pulled her in close to my chest.

11

The Avon

ALLIE PRIMAK, DC ’19 YH STAFF

As he looked at the neon sign he thought of Sophie, pressing a finger to his cheek. Her careful eye always making her do things like that. “Blow,” she would say, “Blow, Dada!” as she’d balance the crescent eyelash on her forefinger with a dexterity beyond her years. What a moment! Like on a Hallmark Card, if anyone ever sent those anymore.

How young she was, how perceptive! Spotting out her father’s tiny eyelash, resting on his face after a long day at work, probably dislodged from a furtive rubbing-of-the-eyes done as he got off the train, stirring himself from the half-sleep stupor of his corporate commute. How young! How loving! Reaching across the dinner table at her Dada, practically lurching out of her boosted seat! Grabbing her father’s eyelash between chubby Gerber fingers and letting him make a wish. My only wish is you, Sophie! He wanted to tell her. You are all my wishes come true.

But no need to get sentimental. Not now. What was that, years ago? A decade? How old had she been then, three? With slight tenseness his eyes darted away from the neon sign, the A-V-O-N spread out perpendicular to the asphalt, the beaming redness of the light glimmering down onto the just-wet street, reflecting back up at itself in the puddles. It had been raining. He hadn’t even noticed.

He turned on the wipers. No need to get all up in the brain about this. No need to get sentimental.

No need to be digging up memories from the Cute Years, circa 13 months to 6 years old (before then, she had looked like a blob—after, she started losing teeth). No—any memory of Sophie from that era was off-limits right now. He wouldn’t allow it. He wasn’t going to be like Steve Martin in Father of the Bride, treating his daughter like a baby at the dinner table when she most definitely was not one anymore. Thirteen years old! Last month! When did that get the chance to happen? Happened as fast as the rain did just now, he didn’t even get the chance to notice, and it already happened. Thirteen years old! But no. Stop. No more sentimentalizing. It was just a first date. A movie. A 7:15 p.m. showing of Tomb Raider 2.

Why had he turned on the wipers? He had been in park for what, eight minutes? Feeling silly, he twisted the key out of the ignition and the car turned off with a machine-like sigh. The droning voice on NPR went quiet. Goodnight, Mr. Ira Glass. He unbuckled his seatbelt and leaned back in the seat.

But no, it was not fine, it wasn’t just a first date, but a first-born daughter on a first date, a first exploration of humanly love, of reciprocal interest, a first encounter of attention that exists in that slightly skewed way, that way that finally makes one feel like Yes, the world finally sees me, someone wants me, and I am here. He remembered his first date, how he had felt just that very same way, also in a movie theater. Oh, how things changed, yet were still all the same! He was glad that he remembered his very first date back when he was seventeen—not as young as Sophie, but still probably just as naively perplexed and anxious and ready to throw up right at the popcorn counter at the sight of the Slurpees. He had gone with Mary Myer—that redhaired bombshell. Oh, how scary she was to him

at the time! Her décolletage, right out there in the open air for all of Bowtie Regent Cinemas to see!

And how she hadn’t wanted any Milk Duds, even though he offered twice!

It was a great first date. Robust, even. They had laughed at all the same parts, and at one point he even remembered Mary resting her red-haired head on his bony shoulder. He remembered the way she had looked at him right as the movie ended, and how between their interlocked hands there was an elixir of together-sweat, the products of their two palms intermeshing into something nervously wonderful and vulgar at the same time. It was like that poem he had read in English class a few weeks ago, what was it? The one with that skeevy seventeenth century guy, about the flea? It went like—

Mark but this flea, and mark in this, How little that which thou deniest me is; It sucked me first, and now sucks thee, And in this flea our two bloods mingled be;

—and he thought, yes, it was exactly like that! Except instead of their bloods intermingling together it was their sweats.

He was beginning to shiver. Turn the car back on, maybe? Let the heat run a little bit? Listen to some more NPR? He looked across the dashboard and noticed Sophie’s tube of lip-gloss, lying there, probably left absentmindedly before hopping out. Bye, Dad, you’ll pick me up at nine thirty-five, okay? I promise to text you—Or maybe it was Marion’s? The shade of coral seemed more like a Marion color than it did a Sophie. Marion was probably already asleep by now, her days were hard, he knew that. Through the window he saw the long strides of a theater attendant, lanky-legged, crossing the parking lot with trash bag strewn across the shoulder. He half-ran, skidding through the rain, and quickly hurled the bag into the dumpster while covering himself with a skinny arm. That arm ain’t helping you, kid! Maybe eat another steak or two, ha ha! Then he wondered how much stale popcorn they throw out each week?

How much they’re paying that lanky little guy in the theater vest?

He reached for his phone to Google minimum wage.

Hadn’t he heard it had changed, recently? He unlocked his phone. No text from Sophie. One from John—Did you see the report I just forwarded you? Bogus. with a thumbs-down emoji. He thought the use of emojis between work colleagues was unprofessional, and also sort of uncanny, in a way? He checked his email. The report was in fact bogus, and he shot John a quick reply. He opened a few of his apps—2,421 steps that day, O.K. for a Saturday. Except maybe he should get out of the car and take a little walk?

Get an extra two-hundred or so in? Well no, it was raining—Then a look at some video clips on Facebook, one standing out most of a Chihuahua refusing to leave its late owner’s grave site, a newscaster reporting on the adorable tragedy of the forlorn little dog… would his own pup be that posthumously loyal? Paul Simon, whom he loved so much? That lanky little Rhodesian Ridgeback, who looked nothing like Paul Simon in dog-form, but was given that title because why not, he just liked the name anyway?

He remembered the Paul Simon concert he took Marion to when they had just started going out. When they exited the venue he made a joke, something like, he told Marion he could be her bodyguard, and she laughed even though he knew that was the stupidest thing he could say at the time. Out of the twenty thousand people who were at that concert, did he think he was being original? The only one to make that joke to his loved one? But Marion had laughed, and that’s when he knew she was starting to fall in love with him. Hey world, thanks for seeing me, I’m still here. This is good. Maybe the sweetness of that moment is what had subconsciously informed his dog-naming choice. It was weird, he realized at that moment, that he never really made that connection.

Hadn’t he ever questioned the name he gave his own dog? Then he remembered how long ago they had gotten that dog, jeez, had it been sixteen years now? Maybe Paul Simon wouldn’t outlive him after all. So the gravesite-loyalty ordeal was kind of solved.

He was still kind of scrolling through his phone, having forgotten all about the Google thing. On his calendar, he noticed a little red notification for Monday. 2PM Meeting w/ Mrs. Stapleton. He better not forget that. He’d have to leave work early, maybe 1 p.m.? To beat traffic? The school parking lot, he knew, got crowded by 1:30 p.m. He pressed “ALERT ME ABOUT THIS EVENT,” setting the notification to “ONE HOUR BEFORE.” He was getting really worried about Charlie. And he guessed Mrs. Stapleton was on the same page. That strange little kid, nine years old and already so many problems! Complaints of nightmares, occasional bed-wetting… and then Marion, thinking herself smart, reading Moby Dick to him so he could fall asleep. “Why would you do that?” he asked her. “He’s not old enough for Moby Dick!” And Marion protesting, back at him, “It was the most boring book we had around the house!” How offended he was.

He loved Moby Dick, and all of Melville for that matter. And then he remembered feeling halfproud and half-floored, as his son came up to his chair at the dinner table, a few weeks later, hugging his leg and crying for a harpoon. A harpoon? What in the name—the kid was going to poke his eye out! But Charlie complained and complained, and cried, and it went on like that for a few days. And then he thought, I can’t be the dad from A Christmas Story, depriving my son of something he wants so dearly and desperately just because it could poke his eye out. So what, if he pokes his eye out? Is it worth the psychological damage of deprivation? So he went on Amazon and did some scrolling and found a little plastic harpoon about Charlie’s height. The look on the little boy’s face when he gave it to him!

So filled with love and gratitude! And now, how the kid carries that thing around like a staff! Like Neptune and his trident, Death and his scathe— Charlie and his harpoon. The harpoon thing has been a real pain in the neck for about a month now. And worrisome. he began to think, it could be harmful the impression it might be leaving on Isaac. Only 11 months old, and already taking after his older brother. The same nervous energy.

The same jolty movements. Neither one of

13

13

those boys as calm as Sophie—what a sweet, quiet baby she had been! He had always wanted boys, but, jeez, he had never expected these kinds of antics. He thought back to dinner last night, Isaac sitting in the same highchair that Sophie once sat in, smashing his peas with his little baby fork, which he still hadn’t learned to use right.

And Charlie, at the other end of the table, waving around his harpoon, shouting. So much shouting.

And then little Isaac, who, suddenly, saying his third-ever word, begins shouting back Ifma! Ifma!

So much shouting between his two little sons! And Marion giving him a look, like, I can’t deal with this. And him, thinking, yeah something needs to be done. But then before doing anything, sitting for a moment and thinking to himself, well this is pretty damn cute, isn’t it? Little Isaac, unable to pronounce “Ishmael”, and screaming back, almost reverentially, at his older brother: Ifma! Ifma! Ifma!

But it was not all just havoc over literary references, which, albeit annoying, made him feel like a smart and savvy parent. No. Charlie was going through a lot—maybe anger issues, or anxiety? But wait.

He stopped himself. The school guidance counselor was strict about this—she made it clear to him not to label his son’s experience, not to jump to diagnoses. But how could he not? He wanted so badly to label his son’s problem, and then fix it. Charlie cried nearly every day now. He regularly confused the words “upset” and “mad.” “I’m so mad,” he said quietly, through tears, when they buried his goldfish last month in the backyard. And how he had screamed “I’m so upset!” in the face of some mall cop who told him he couldn’t take his harpoon into the building, that day they went to the pet store to buy him a new fish. The use of upset, there, was technically all right until Charlie threw himself to the floor in the quintessential raging fashion of a public tantrum, flinging the plastic spear at the mall cop on his way down.

Sophie had handled that day well. She picked up her brother up and began stroking him on the head. “It’s okay, we can get a fish somewhere else,” she told Charlie, and that had instantly calmed him down. With another hand she picked up the plastic harpoon from the floor and apologized to the mall cop. Then, all filing back out into the parking lot, they got in the car and drove on home. Thank God she had done that.

How was Sophie doing? He looked at the dashboard. 8:20 p.m. What were they doing? Was she touching the boy? Were they kissing? He thought he saw the neon V flicker for a second on the sign above. He wondered if Sophie would tell him, if she had kissed the boy on the date. Sophie was always so close to her mother, but now with Marion being so—well, maybe Marion was still the same, he didn’t know—he couldn’t make speculations about their mother-daughter relationship, at least not right now.

Maybe he should call his own mom? There was time to kill, anyway. When was the last time they had talked? Oh right, when Dad thought he had won the lottery last week, but really the blind spot in his left eye had made him read the numbers incorrectly. He could tell, over the phone, that 14 THE YALE HERALD

Mom had been so disappointed, having had that little flutter of hope. Maybe she could’ve flown the grandkids out to come see her, with the thousand dollars they had almost just won? He felt a little awkward, not knowing how to comfort her.

He tried telling his mother that, with the whole tax thing, maybe it wouldn’t have amounted to enough to fly them all out anyway. And even so, the kids were pretty busy now, what with the whole Charlie thing, and Isaac starting to teethe, and Sophie, possibly about to get her first boyfriend. And of course, all the stuff with Marion.

He decided he’d call Mom tomorrow. 8:25 p.m. was a weird time, anyway. She could be sleeping.

And they had just talked last week, although maybe it wasn’t the happiest talk. He kind of missed his mom. He thought of how much he loved her own mother when he was younger, how much he’d idolized her and always wanted to show her. And that day! He started to laugh to himself, suddenly conjuring a memory he hadn’t thought of in a while, that day in grade school, maybe when he was ten?

A little older than Charlie, the year when his mother was just starting to learn to become a real estate agent and went away most nights to go to trainings.

How one night, when mom was out of the house, he went into her room and snuck into her medicine cabinet and took out her tube of Chanel Rouge Coco. He had seen part of a movie, a few weeks before, where a man received a letter with a big kiss of lipstick on it and it moved him right to tears.

But—tears of happiness, it appeared? Remembering that movie, that was maybe the first time he’d ever seen tears of happiness on somebody before. And how, upon seeing that man both cry and smile, he thought wanted to make somebody he loved feel that way, too. Who better than his mom?

So he found the lipstick she wore every morning, took it out of its place in the medicine cabinet, and carefully applied it onto his own two lips, leaning over the sink, looking in the mirror with vertiginous satisfaction, dizzy at the thought of how happy he was going to make his mother, making her cry and all. Then how he took out the letter he had spent all of lunch period writing to her, how he had asked Mrs. Fecchi to correct the spelling for him, and how suddenly, before the mirror, he pressed his lips so tenderly and furtively onto the paper, right beside his name, BILLY. The side of his kiss mark covering a little part of the Y. But that was O.K. His very own smooch!

Stamped onto that extra wide-ruled page of yellow paper for eternity, the creases of the Chanel Rouge Coco sticking out against the blue dotted line in the middle of the rulings.

His mom did not cry. But she smiled. And she hung up the letter on the fridge. That was good enough, he thought at the time. Was he disappointed? A little. But not as much as he was when the letter got taken down. He came home from school one day and noticed it was missing. Mom was away at real estate lessons. So he asked his father, “Dad, have you seen my letter to Mommy?”

To which his dad slapped him right on the jaw.

And then the next day. The speech from his mom—“Billy, you have to know that your dad

did that because he loves you. He loves you so, very much. He doesn’t want you to be hurt later in life. So, I guess, he felt better in hurting you now. But that’s not what the point of this is. Billy, your father loves you very much. But can you promise me, Billy, not to wear any more lipstick?

Can you promise me that, little bug?”

He had understood. Maybe not then, in that very moment, but you know, eventually he came around and got it. And now, well, he got it more than ever. What, with little Charlie, carrying that harpoon around! Wouldn’t anyone with a child going through a Queequeg phase have the homoerotic undertones of Moby Dick swimming around in the back of his head, too? Was his son gay? Could be! But, he was never going to beat him for it. He would love his son no matter what, like he loved all his kids. And they needed this love now, probably more than ever. There was a lot of emotional labor being done by him, right now, and that was O.K. He was gonna be strong for his kids.

And didn’t he remember that time with Marion? When he had been strong with the kids?

He suddenly thought to himself about that ferry ride a year and a half ago, when Marion was still pregnant with Isaac. They were on the bottom floor of the ferry going to the beach. An overcast day. It had been a twenty minute ride, but what a rocky ride it had been! Almost everyone on the thing had gotten sea sick, and the ferry crew running up and down the aisles with trash bags. How disgusting! And although he’d usually characterize himself as a sympathy vomiter, a yakker right at the smell of the stuff, he remained completely resolute on that ride. He gave a look to Marion like, Just don’t vomit. And she gave a look back at him like, I will really try not to.

And he held Charlie close to his chest, letting him breathe through the cotton of his shirt, rubbing his stomach so he’d calm down. And Sophie nuzzled herself into his armpit, doing the same. “We’re almost there!” he assured his kids, although he didn’t really know what was going to happen. For all he knew, the boat could tip over any second. But in retrospect, he was proud of himself. He had been strong. Marion had been strong, too.

Would Marion be able to do that kind of thing now? Then—no. He repeated no, no, no to himself. He had to let go of that thought. He wasn’t going to start blaming Marion again. He tried his hardest to stop these kinds of thoughts as soon as they entered. He looked at the clock: 9:30 p.m.

The credits must be rolling right about now, no?

Or was the movie already over? Was Sophie happy, he wondered? Did the date go well? Still no text from her, which worried him. He wanted to call Marion to say he was worried about Sophie not texting. But would Marion even answer? The thoughts were let back in. Would Marion___?

Would Marion___?

These days, with Marion, the question always now led to: Would Marion___? She really had changed. The Marion from before loved the kids so much, maybe even more than he did. But,

with Isaac, well, the birth of Isaac did something to her. Depression? Anxiety? PTSD? Well, he did not want to label her experience, but then again, she became obstinate whenever he suggested therapy. She did not want to get help, but she needed it. Did she seriously think he couldn’t hear her crying in the bathroom, that night Charlie asked for the harpoon? Whispering to herself, God what children? Did she not even think it was the tiniest bit funny that Isaac, barely a year old, already knew who Ishmael was? Did she not think it was important, at all, when he told her about the boy in Sophie’s class named George that was taking their daughter out on a date this Saturday, to the Avon Theater on Main Ave, to see a 7:15 p.m. showing of Tomb Raider 2?

And was it selfish? For him? To want his own wife to love his kids? To not think to herself, God what children? To want her to be awake when he came home, sitting up in bed, a book in her hands, Elizabeth Bishop poems maybe, waiting for him, to talk about Sophie? To ask how the date went?

To ask him, jokingly: did she get back in the car with lip-gloss smeared? With hair a little frizzed?

What did she seem like? Did she tell you anything? Did you catch a glimpse of the boy?

And was it fair of him, to want her to be the one who would then have to defend Sophie, as he, in his fatherly overprotective ardor, started denouncing the very same boy that sat beside her at the 7:15 p.m. showing of Tomb Raider 2? This… George, whatever the little rat’s name was? Was it fair that he wanted Marion to play that role, just for a second? Of the mother, siding with the daughter, assuaging the overprotective, yet loving dad? Was it fair? Was it fair?

Really, Marion, was any of it fair? He was raging. Was it fair that he wanted more help, that he needed more guidance, that he couldn’t be the only one figuring out Charlie, and taking the kids to the pet store, and going to parent-teacher conferences with Mrs. Stapleton, and dealing with Isaac when he teethed, and dropping off Sophie at the movies? Was any of it fair?

A knock on the car’s door-side window, so subtle. 9:40 p.m., it says on the dashboard. On the window, Sophie’s little tap tap continues, and he presses the unlock button on the door panel beside him. Getting in the car, her auburn hair a big swoop across her shoulder. He looks over at his daughter, so beautiful, so small, thin elbows at her sides, how jagged those things are! And how they used to dig into his chest when he’d pick her up! And Sophie, leaning into the rear view mirror to get a look at her own face, checking for smudged mascara crusts under her giant, almost koi-like eyes, turning over to him and suddenly, face furrowing, scrunching up those big koi eyes, starts to say, “Dad, have you been sitting in the car this whole time? Wait dad, are you crying?”

15

April.27.2018

The Intruder LUKE STRINGER, SY ’18

I thought of you golden glad you were born opened again maybe it’s the time of year or that I was in the kitchen performing and the window was open I wish they weren’t there feelings I’d just put them in the cupboard just closed the cabinet doors when I see you I want to name every man who’s come after and see what rise I can’t get out of you all it would prove how I hold them one after the other in comparison and keep looking at my keys wondering what for the life of me they are doing on the floor

with every sunrise ERIC KREBS, JE ’21 YH STAFF

with every sunrise, there’s a few more windows to reflect it, some more steel to shrug it off, a little more asphalt to smile and soak it in. My city grows and I grow with it. My arms, sturdy steel beams, cool and collected. My skin, stretched into a translucent sheet of glass. my feet trample more each day, my shadow grows longer I can see where the sky & the water greet the wind blows like hell up here it gets lonely. the air is thin.

I saw. I buckle. I, fall crumbling back into development

Contemporaries

17

ERICA WACHS, JE ’18

THOSE WHO LEAVE AND THOSE WHO STAY: 3.2 The sound of a baby crying. Merve/Enzo walks on stage rocking Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay in their arms as if it is Lila’s child, Gennaro.

MERVE/ENZO Lina!...

(Beat, waits for a response.)

LINA!

(Shocked at their volume, Merve/Enzo recoils. No response. Merve/Enzo attempts to rock the child to sleep.)

I know, you want your mamma. I want your mamma, too.

(Shifts the book to the other shoulder.)

Look at you, you’re already too big to be held, to be rocked. Yet you still find reasons to cry, to be picked up, to be angry. Just like your mamma.

(A shift.)

When I was a child, my parents often told me not to do things out of anger. Don’t speak in anger.

Don’t let your anger get the best of you. Whatever you do, don’t go to bed angry, and if you do, in your anger, do not sin.

(Beat.)

People know me as quiet. They know me as the man who lives with Lina but does not sleep with her. The Communist who is not interested in party fights, in discussions that waste time because they are not focused on the revolution. The man who paces back and forth in his room every night, praying you will suckle some sense into Lina, and she will open my door and take pity on me and sleep with me and perhaps even love me.

So I am now the man who takes refuge in his books.

(Beat.) ...did you know the world can be reduced to zeros and ones? It’s true. Your mamma, all of Italy it seems--they think the future is in their revolution.

I know that it’s actually computers. At night, after you go to sleep, your mamma and I draw diagrams, compartmentalize the world into boxes, shapes. Things make sense there. I’m taking a class on it. Perhaps it will lead to nothing. Perhaps it will lead to greatness. Your mamma believes... oh. Sleep well, Gennaro.

(The child/book has stopped crying. Merve/Enzo holds it out in front of them as they become just Merve, vulnerable, confessional.)

My parents told me not to do anything out of anger. None of this was particularly meaningful to someone with my temperament. I liked doing things out of anger. I did things well when I was angry. I was angry when I got engaged and when I got married. I was angry when I got pregnant, when I gave birth, thrashing against the medical marvel of an epidural, flailing into the contractions, like Lila. I was angry when I wanted to be a government major, but then go for a PhD in English, become an assistant professor, when I conducted research, wrote my manuscript, prostrated myself before the Holy Tenure Committee the first time around. Everything I can call mine in life I got because I was angry. And everything I’ve lost, too.

(Beat.)

Holy Tenure Committee: Round Two. Last time, I was inexperienced, my writing needed to improve, fine. But this time around, the only thing The Committee was concerned about was my recently acquired role of “mother”. They didn’t say it explicitly, more questions like “At what point in your career did you decide to have children?”

They weren’t interested in the feminist counter-history of psychoanalysis. “How prominent of a role does your child play in your life?” “Do you often prioritize your child over your writing?”

And I looked at these people with this incredulous expression--your mothers prioritized you so you could be sitting at this table, I wanted to scream,

wanted. And in the middle of this meeting, all I could think about was Elena Ferrante, and Lenù and Lila, and how they act as mothers, and as writers. There exists, in fiction and reality alike, a unequal division of labor between those who leave in the morning--usually men--and those who stay at home during the day--usually women.

What’s weird is that as I responded to question after question, I wasn’t angry. I simply thought, I am not going to be a tenured professor of English at McGill University. Finally, I can tell we’re drawing to a close, when the only woman on the committee asks me, “What’s The Slow Burn?” And I turned to her. And I turned to her and I was looking only at her and I wanted to say how can YOU sit here and perpetuate this nonsense, have you ever wanted kids, do you have one, do you, like me, live in the middle of the emotional bookends of anger and sentimentality, did you feel a crushing sense of inadequacy last night this morning when you put on your suit when you walked into this seminar room when you saw me enter with a pacifier falling out of my bag? But instead I looked at her. And calmly, very calmly, I said, “it’s a blog series I’m working on with a few friends of mine about Elena Ferrante’s novels. It’s about taking your brilliance and using it to get out of hell.”

I walked out. I wasn’t angry. I went home.

And I saw my little boy... My little boy.

And is loving him a womanly thing to do, like worrying?

And I held him like he was a promotion.

And I didn’t feel guilty, or selfish about doing so.

And he started to cry, so I held him until I started to cry myself.

I cried until I was furious.

Lights fade on Merve hugging the book to herself, as her child this time. Lights fade. End of Scene 2.

17

April.27.2018

Listening to David Bowie on Spotify Radio on the treadmill.

JORDAN CUTLER-TIETJEN, JE ’20

I’m running quickly and then I’m brushing by new lungs, the air is full of them.

They are sticky and conform to my body like my shower curtain.

Some are probably asthmatic. Some look tarry.

I am brushing by so many I am becoming covetous.

They all look appetizing, rouged, ready to breathe. I could eat them all. No one has ever run this fast.

Mine seem like two stuck limpets, but when I reach inside myself to cut around their perimeter with pocket scissors and open my mouth, they float up to join the mass around me.

This feels like a reunion, so I smile. My pair is airborne, leaking blood, but soon the sacs around me bear none of its red stains. I’m accelerating so I will never know where mine went.

There’s no air in me and suddenly I have to pinch my nose and gulp one down.

It slides right in and comes home.

I hear the first swell of air unmaking Its vacuum and believe myself witness to an epiphany. I have lungs again so I can be one lung again, parting my own masses. I am my own bower.

Soon I will open my mouth and I will sound like him. I will tell myself who he was.

18 THE YALE HERALD

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Stories About Home SONIA GADRE, SY ’20

1.

2.

3.

No matter how early I wake up, it is always a mad dash to the train as I sprint up the steps to the platform at Union Station. My black rolling carry-on bag thuds against every step behind me like a dead appendage, a paralyzed tail. By the time I step onto the train, my heart is beating so fast that I swear the woman next to me can see my left shirt pocket quiver with every pounding lub-dub. I’ve always had a hummingbird heart.

Louisville’s Lewis and Clark bridge is notable in that it doubles as a walking path for pedestrians.

It follows the precedent set by the city’s Big Four Bridge which is known to most people as The Walking Bridge, plain and simple. In terms of pedestrian experience, however, both bridges offer very different selling points. The Walking Bridge is invigorated by its proximity to Louisville’s downtown. It is the capstone of the city’s Waterfront Park, which is in itself loved by indie music nerds, public radio contributors, and drunk high schoolers alike for its series of free summer concerts. At night, the bridge’s suspenders are outlined with color-shifting lights, and in the spring, it is the launching site of the pièce de résistance of the Kentucky Derby Festival: the firework waterfall. This is exactly what it sounds like––fireworks launched off a bridge and into a river. To those who grew up in Louisville, it will always be pure magic.

In my suite, there is a game we like to play under the glowing canopy of string lights in our common room. The task is simple on face value: describe your ideal life in 10 years. No restrictions or rationalizations necessary. Just an unadulterated game of adulthood à la spitball. But even for the most seasoned player, this can be a challenge.

Over many iterations of the 10 Year Game, we have found that it usually helps start with place.

“Where do you see yourself living in 10 years?” is an easier question to answer than “What kind of person do you want to spend the rest of your life with?” or the very scary “Where do you see yourself professionally?” We play with the knowledge that all answers fall into place in time, for some more quickly than others.

The chugging of the train, slow at first then rapid in its beat, is the only sedative that calm the flightiness of my body­­. I watch rusted steel pipes and abandoned factories and yellow winter grasses, and I begin to doze. The sleep is always superficial, dreams interrupted by the perpetual anxiety that I have missed my stop––or in this case by the Jersey women two rows behind me who are talking about potato salad, bikini waxes, and hot flashes.

Sometimes I awake to find peaceful Connecticut towns with white washed houses, red brick storefronts, and scroll-like wrought iron lampposts, and in these moments, I question if I am still asleep.

Despite the disparate images that pass me by, the quality of the light is always a consistent gray.

The skyline of New York City hits my body like a surge of adrenaline. It is my cue to gather my belongings and begin moving again. As I step off the Amtrak and onto the shuttle to the airport, I condition my body. My strides become precisely three floor tiles in length, my shoulders rigid, my eyes locked in position, my face expressionless. It is like this when I arrive in Chicago and hustle to my last terminal of the journey as well. I am a pinball traveling at constant speed, bouncing from wall to wall.

But when the plane begins to descend into Louisville, Kentucky, as I begin to trace familiar roads and highways to my home, the cogs in my body begin to slow. I imagine expanses at the side of the road with nothing but trees. There are no stimuli here. No future for me, only past. Tonight I will sleep in a near-dead torpor. The sleep that every hummingbird hopes to sleep when it returns home for the night.

The Lewis and Clark Bridge is perhaps less exciting than its downtown counterpart in terms of urban activity, but this is not to say that its location in the suburbs makes it any less interesting. To cross the river from Indiana is to see Kentucky’s hills extend out to the east. It is to trace dirt path lanes that run parallel to the river and cut through spacious lots. With no city to distract you, you take in the muddy brown water of the Ohio River on overcast days. On sunny days it is greener, but still very much brown. You might notice a bald eagle nesting high in a tree or a barge hauling tons of coal, the unbeating heart of a mountain not too far away. As you get closer to the Kentucky side, you read a blue sign that says “Kentucky: Unbridled Spirit” and “Birthplace of Lincoln.”

A mere 500 feet away at the side of the walking path ramp, there is a peeling, white-washed farmhouse. Its blood red Confederate flag flies on the winds that rip through the Ohio River valley. If you are walking, you walk a little faster. If you are running you sprint past it, the irony and incongruence burning within you like cheap bourbon sipped in the absence of friends. Although the Lewis and Clark Bridge was completed almost three years after the Walking Bridge, it feels much older. It enchants you like home, wet grass and hickory trees, but it betrays you too.

But each player’s story always starts out the same way. There is always a dumbfounded stare. A moment of silence. From the way we sit in a circle and stare so intensely at one another, you’d think we were patients in a counseling group, and perhaps we are in a way. Daily minutia consume us, although no one acknowledges it. This denial makes mourners of us too––we are people trapped in the first stage of grief, struggling to accept the loss of something we didn’t know was lost.

On an overcast day in Louisville, Kentucky, I lie in bed and stare at the ceiling fan. Today I am the loose balloon. I spiral higher and higher into the endless blue sky of my mind, getting lost there. I am vaguely aware that I might pop and plummet to my doom, and I am also (mostly) ignoring this possibility. It is an uncanny feeling that comes over me on cloudy days, the same feeling that accompanies exiting the theater after a movie or leaving your dorm room for the very last time. It is the friendship bracelet that no longer fits your wrist, the one in the rubble of your closet floor. It is the vanishing of a story and the harrowing vacuum it leaves behind.

For lack of an alternate purpose, I pick up my pen and journal. For lack of a story to write, I make one up. For better or worse, I find myself playing the 10 Year Game yet again.

April.27.2018

untitled MADELEINE HUTCHINS, BR ’19

How do you explain to two eight-year-olds what happened to their mother? How do you tell them that she won’t wake them up on Saturday mornings with the smell of pancakes on the griddle and bacon sizzling on the stove? How do you tell them she won’t be at tee-ball, baseball someday? How do you tell them she won’t run her fingers through their unkempt brown hair and tell them they need a haircut? How do you tell them she won’t tell another bedtime story and chase them around the house until they are laughing so hard that it’s all too easy to wrestle them into their beds? How do you tell them she won’t take them out to the beach to watch the waves before the hurricane rolls in?

How do you tell them they weren’t worth it?

Wipers beat slowly, back and forth across the snow-spattered windshield. The outline of the skeletal winter trees blurs into the gray sky beyond and the ground below. Even in the car, the acrid smell of woodsmoke issuing from chimneys hangs thick. I lean back into the heated seat, turning my head so I can stare, unseeing, out the window at the muted landscape.

Not how I myself had been told, through nightmare after nightmare. I couldn’t describe to them her hands, the hands that once conducted my memories, weaving them into melodies faintly recognizable but somehow alien. Hands that once cooked the best Italian meatballs this side of the Atlantic. Hands that worked all day but were always perfectly manicured.

In sleep, they are still perfectly manicured. Only instead of conducting a symphony they seize me with terror. Rotting black flesh sagging, trying to cover spindly bones, takes the place of the tanned and moisturized skin I long to remember. Objects of idolatry turned instruments of torture and self-destruction, betraying their bearer by facilitating habit.

Betraying me with an unbreakable vice-grip on my mind.

“She must have loved snow.”

The voice startles me out of my stupor.

“I guess so.”

Snow.

Snow, like everything else crystalline and white, falling to cover the warped and worn ground, giving it the appearance of smoothness, of calm.

When it melts, the ground will be exposed again, just as ragged as before, its every fault emphasized by the process of thawing, coming out of that elevated state of imagined perfection.

When I was younger, on nights when I’d wake up in a cold

20

sweat, sometimes with my mouth open in a silent scream, my mother would come into my room. I don’t know how she always knew, but she did. And she’d put her hand on my back and tell me to lie down. So I would, and she’d ask me about what happened, so I’d tell her. And somewhere between her asking me what happened and my explaining, she’d start to sing. Not sing in the sense of notes, but she would weave the horror of my dreams into rhymes with such a sweet cadence that I’d find myself drifting back to sleep, her words rocking me back and forth.

Snow. Like everything crystalline and white. Falling and covering the imperfections, the bumps and ridges we don’t want to see. Making life more pleasing to the eye but just as damaged without cover.

Snow held in perfectly manicured hands. Lifted up and thrown high with a deep inhale. Relaxed into and leaned on like the only comfort in the world. Snow. Eating away at the hands, freezing pieces of life, stopping their progress. Stopping the world.

Snow hitting the windshield melts; it might never have been there. But snow doesn’t always pass unnoticed. Snow on the ground melts only to create deeper cracks as it dissolves, eroding whatever beauty lies there, shamelessly, irrevocably marring it.

My mother no longer saves me from my nightmares. I wake alone and terrified, and the dark is not enough to lull me to sleep. So now I sing for myself, weave my own dreams into rhymes, turning the black and deadened hands that rake at me in my sleep into the soft, ivory tapers tipped with red nails preserved in my memories.

I move my gaze to my feet to avoid watching the snow cover the ground.

The twins needed a story like the ones my mother sang, like the ones I now sing to myself. Something an eight-year-old could understand when adults could barely explain. They didn’t need to know the how; that would come. They needed an explanation of the unexplainable. They needed to know why.

At my grandmother’s house, in the room reserved for grandchildren, I sat at the foot of the bed and asked the twins if they’d had a bedtime story yet, knowing the answer. Bedtime stories for others are rarely the top priority of the bereaved.

They were nearly settled into their pillows when I heard them whisper. Four bleary eyes, exhausted from the first of what they didn’t know would be many long days, opened to me with the question everyone had been dodging.

The car stops. The wipers scrape to a halt along the bottom edge of the windshield. The parking lot looks icy, treacherous, but it’s a flowering meadow compared to the frigid landscape inside.

Living statues greet me as I walk through the door.

There is a stiffness to everything—the starched linens, the cold floor tiles, the clothing, the people themselves. Leaden feet, rebar bones, concrete flesh, faces of immovable stone. Only the eyes show that life lies beneath the exterior cast. Some look everywhere without seeing; others maintain a thin veneer of calm over the desperate desire to be anywhere else. Mostly they are set deep in the faces with marble smiles, coated with diamonds that barely refract light away from the agony beneath.

The warmth of embraces coming from all sides tempers the frigidity of the room until the mourners who steeled themselves for the occasion are melted down into real people, living, breathing, grieving. With gentle hands they soothe away the last bits of stiffness from their neighbors and settle each other into rows of white chairs.

As I stand before them, their gentle murmurings wash over me like waves, rocking me and soothing my own hands, which tremble with some strange mixture of fear and sadness.

I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and read the twins’ bedtime story.

A bird leaves its mother’s nest When it needs to spread its wings.

It won’t turn to say good-bye; It simply begins to sing.

A sparrow singing to the morning sun Is drinking in the day, While the caged lark will sing its same sad song And see each morning gray.

Some people are born with feet on the earth But hearts set on the sky; We don’t control when these people are born Or when it is they die.

It is not for lack of love; It’s not that she didn’t care, It’s simply that the time came That she join the world up there.

Windham-Campbell Prizes Summer Reading List

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YH STAFF

Every year since 2013, a group of writers comes to New Haven in the early days of Fall semester to receive the Windham-Campbell Prize, a $165,000 grant awarded for poetry, plays, fiction, or nonfiction. This year’s eight prizewinners—two per genre—call everywhere from the UK to Uganda home. In a few short months, they will be on campus, speaking about what inspires them, how they got to where they are, and why they write. With summer and infinite opportunities for pleasure reading almost upon us, there’s no better time to get familiar with the 2018 prizewinners’ work.

Lorna Goodison, Selected Poems

John Keene, Counternarratives

The winner of a Pulitzer Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Parks is widely regarded as one of America’s foremost contemporary playwrights. Perhaps you know her as the presenter of this year’s Maynard Mack lecture (an annual talk at Yale with a distinguished theater practitioner). Her play Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2, and 3), the first installment in her American version of Odyssey set during the Civil War, just closed a critically acclaimed run at the Yale Rep.

Goodison, the current Poet Laureate of Jamaica, splits her time between Jamaica, Canada, and Ann Arbor, where she teaches at the University of Michigan. At 70, she’s the oldest of this year’s prizewinners, with the body of work to show for it. Much of her writing revolves around where she is from; in an interview with Mosaic: Literary Arts of the Diaspora, she remarked, “I suspect that I might always write about Jamaica.” If you’re feeling particularly ambitious, check out her 622 page Collected Poems. At 152 pages, though, her Selected Poems might be more manageable.

Counternarratives is a book of short stories and novellas from American novelist, poet, professor, and translator John Keene. The collection makes use of memoir, epistolary fiction, detective stories, interview transcripts, folk tales, and more to complicate, reimagine, and fill in history from Reformation-era Brazil to pre-Renaissance Harlem.

Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: A Life of Montaigne

Lucas Hnath, The Christians

Laing, a writer and critic hailing from the UK, is known for her melding of memoir and criticism.

The Lonely City combines analysis of loneliness in the work of artists like Edward Hopper and Andy Warhol with Laing’s own account of being lonely in New York City. It was shortlisted for the 2016 Gordon Burn Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and has been translated into 14 different languages. Keep an eye out for her first novel, Crudo, which is coming out this June.

A nonfiction writer from the UK, Bakewell is known for demystifying the lives and ideas of great philosophers. How to Live: A Life of Montaigne, which was published in 2010, tells the story of the philosopher’s life through the questions he asked himself and those that others have asked about him over time. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography and the Duff Cooper Prize for Nonfiction. Bakewell also teaches creative writing at Kellogg College, University of Oxford.

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, Kintu

Cathy Park Hong, Engine Empire

Kintu, Makumbi’s debut novel published in 2014, tells twin stories of the age-old curse that befalls the Kintu clan and the formation of Uganda.

Critic Aaron Bady said the novel is about how “all families are built out of silences and fictions.” Makumbi herself is from Uganda, though she now lives in Manchester, England. She teaches creative writing at universities across the UK and has a collection of short stories, Love Made in Manchester, coming out in January 2019.

Hong is a Korean-American poet hailing from Los Angeles. She edits poetry for The New Republic, teaches at the Rutgers-Newark MFA Program in Creative Writing, and is the winner of numerous awards and prizes including a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship. Engine Empire, her most recent collection of poems, is separated into three sections, each focusing on a different time and place: the California Gold Rush, a mythic Chinese city called Shangdu, and San Francisco in the near future. Her poetry was described in Bookforum as “dark, depressing, grimly prophetic, and fun—often all at once.”

Suzan-Lori Parks, Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2, and 3)

Hnath, a playwright born in Orlando, Florida, and a professor in NYU’s Department of Dramatic Writing, is a winner of a 2017 Steinberg Playwright Award, a 2016 Obie Award for Playwriting, and a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Hnath’s 2014 play The Christians draws from his upbringing in an evangelical community to tell a story of life and leadership in a Christian megachurch.

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Write for The Herald!

EMAIL EVE.SNEIDER @YALE.EDU

THE BLACK LIST

23

THINGS WE HATE

APRIL

Oh darling, don’t be cruel...

PHILIP ROTH He’s just so male THE WESTERN CANON A total misfire MOCKUMENTARY

Actually that’s what this issue of our “newspaper” is…

KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS

WHEN MICROSOFT WORD SETS YOUR MARGINS TO 1.25 INCHES INSTEAD OF 1 I mean usually I am, but it’s a little cold in here...

AMERICAN TYPEWRITER Fade In: A Film & Media Studies major writes a bad screenplay in a font that makes him feel better about himself THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS Stop reminding me of my past

They get in the way when you least expect it

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