Volume 17 issue 2 fall 2005 by Yale Literary Magazine

YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE

Yale Literary Magazine Fall 2005 •Volume xvij • Number ij

Cover art by James Lee 2

Digitalis I by Elizabeth Gumport

Whitfield I by Adam Eaker

This Afternoon I by Abigail Deutsch

Twilight I by Peter Aronoff

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Black Kites I by Carolynn Molleur-Hinteregger

Eulogy for Delia I by Carina del Valle Schorske

Sharks I by Ani Katz

Dialectic I by Hannah Frank

Route 7, Redding, Connecticut byAdda Birnir

Untitled by Julia Hickey

Horse-Barn Hill, Storrs CT by Julia Hickey

Journey to Shelley Beach, Lamu by Alexandra Suich

Untitled by Alex DelVecchio

Kuandika Kiswahili by Alexandra Suich

Mail-Order Skinhead Impostor by Peter Feigenbaum

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Route 7, Redding, Connecticut by Adda Birnir

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Digitalis J by Elizabeth Gumport

After dinner, you make us gin and tonics on the porch. You fall asleep before dark.The sky is gray and furrowed and the raspberries are beginning to blush in the bushes. It's only June.You've talked of buying a boat this summer. The first time we went canoeing, we stopped in a shallow pond; brown fish, fleeting over pebbles. As a child, you told me, you and your sisters caught minnows with your hands and used them as bait when you fished in the bay for sea bass and bluefish. When we got home, I looked up 'fish' in the encyclopedia. In the summer, the page said, the waters off Cape Cod are home to many fish: bonito, Spanish mackerel, false albacore. Imagining a sly and deceitful fish, I called to you from the deck, but you couldn't hear me in the kitchen, where you were annotating our cookbook. The sky was that long blue, the tired end of a warm day. On the next page, the book told me that fish don't sleep. They rest, hidden in logs or reefs, not like you, sleeping outside the sheets with the windows open. I could go into the bedroom but I don't. In the garden, the air smells like foxgloves, another flower I didn't know, whose English name comes from a legend about fairies, not its Latin name, which tells only of the poison inside. This is the good dictionary, this history of names, of words I didn't know and will forget, remembering only a green canoe, glass bottles on shelves, staying in the bathroom a few moments longer on cold, white mornings, so the return to our bed is that much warmer, your hand turning the pages of an encyclopedia,

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Whitfield I by Adam Eaker

At six years old, I ruined my life. Strange to discover this at twenty, sprawled on the bathroom floor. Strange how little I learned from injury, when it began. The doctor gave me four shots in the foot. The doctor heard my heart miss a beat. On the bus I sang myself to sleep. The trees closed in on me like a hand. Through the window,I saw a dog lift its leg in a dark corner of the park. I got drunk, I went for a walk. It was the first frost of the season. I slipped a little as I went uphill. Soon I reached a great height. We were in my room again. We were playing a children's game. I wore a crown, you held a plastic sword. I kissed you. Oh,I kissed you.

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This Afternoon I by Abigail Deutsch

A man comes home to find his wife In bed with daisies. Petals leak Like yellow blood from under sheets. Surprised, he says:'But all your life you liked gardenias.' Floorboards creak as he walks forward, and repeats: 'Gardenias, right? 'I did,' she says, 'And then I didn't.' Oh.' He walks Into the bathroom, scrubs his hands And face.This could just be a phase. Recall her thing for spotted socks Or (worse) for old-style concert bands? But those she said she liked, he thinks â&#x20AC;&#x201D; She's never mentioned daisies, nor Confessed that she has come to spurn Gardenias. Secrets, then? He blinks, Then slowly eases toward the door. His shock is less. She's just confirmed How little he can ever know Of her, himself, and why they've got Each other, no one else. He thinks He'll have to stay, then that he'll go: He knows too much. He squints.The pot Of flowers by their window grows, and shrinks.

Untitled by Julia Hickey 5 I Fall 2005

Twilight I by Peter Aronoff

Unimaginable — that was our thought, the thought echoing across cities, continents, minds. No one could have believed it, really, not even the astronomers who first detected a slight but unquestionable — and growing — decrease in the brightness of the night sky. The rate was so slow at first that, while ordinary people carried on their daily lives, the astronomy community underwent a collective schizophrenic episode. Caffeine-mad graduate students were staring at the same flickering computer glows of data from all over the world — Beijing, Capetown, Auckland,Tuscon, Reykjavik, Lima.A thousand hungry pairs of spectacled eyes turned, shaking, from their phosphorescent screens and sought open windows. On the roof, out the front door, peering up from the third story, embraced by the night breeze, wondering, searching, refusing to believe.This was not Galileo's heretical divination, no Newton's apple; this was all madness and no genius. How could the stars be going out? By the time the first academic papers were published, the first interviews given, amateur stargazers had begun to notice on their own. Data from apartment balcony telescopes slowly collected on the backs of envelopes and in tattered notebooks. Though nobody read Nature,. everyone had a crazy uncle or a paranoid friend. It was easy to pass over the tentative and puzzled New York Times headlines, but it was harder to brush away the ten, then hundred, then thousand or more time-lapse photographs that began circling offices and schools all over the globe. All with the same eerie emptiness. 'Here's last year, this time,' they'd say,'and here's the past week,' and a penciled circle around each dark blank patch would mutely mourn where, last year, a tiny speckle had connected us to the universe.

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First the scientists and then the rest of us tried to pretend, of course, that we knew what was going on. Cosmic dust had drifted between Earth and Andromeda, or our own planet's atmosphere was finally darkening from all our dirt. Dark Energy Seeping from Cygnus Black Hole! blared tabloids and basement websites. But stars were dimming across the entire sky, and satellites registered the same reading as earth-based telescopes — and tabloids were still tabloids. And yet — because it seemed faint stars were fading first, and because the vast majority of stars had always been barely visible anyway, it was — at least for a while — easy to ignore. While CNN experts yammered away on after-dinner television sets, incredulous families wandered into September backyards, onto porches, driveways, and turned their eyes skyward. It was invisible, a cancer: somewhere way up there the sky was dying, its life draining away; and yet nothing looked wrong. We shook our heads. It wasn't easy to believe. In cities, the change in the night sky was as imperceptible as the night itself. Talk show hosts joked that New York would never know the difference. In Tokyo the stars had always been so hard to see that residents were astounded by the beauty of artificial constellations local corporations began to animate on their neon signboards and windows. Buried in its eternal haze, Mexico City hardly seemed to stir at the news. But in small towns, away from bustle and artificial light, people could not ignore the dwindling stars. Against the modern order, the countryside was first,

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the city second. As the dark rays of a new moon threw the dimming night into relief, people gathered across the world's plains and forests under the same shadow, quiet faces asking questions no one had thought to ask for centuries. The photographs we had seen were there, a nightmare creeping patiently out of dusk into reality. As October blew into November and November frosted into December, suburbia began to see the rural vision. Brooding adolescents and wrinkled grandparents searched the weakening heavens. In a silent, desperate offering, new mothers and fathers named babies Aldebaran, Orion, Cassiopeia,Vega, and Rigel. Poets lamented the dark winter solstice. A Nobel laureate in physics drove his car off a cliff; his colleagues did not wonder why. Hoping to foil nature's trickery with his own, one Danish mathematician jokingly suggested a mass exodus to the eternal and frigid daylight of Antarctica, at least until the equinox. He was shocked when a flurry of emails and phone calls asked where to sign up and how much it would cost. It was Apollo upside down.'A man on the moon?' we had all said, eyebrows raised. 'Not in my lifetime.' A billion people taking the same breath had seen their conception of reality melt into the lunar dust under Neil Armstrong's televised boot, the edge of inconceivability pushed back another step. But now the impossible was coming to us. Unbidden, the heavens we had seemingly conquered were marching us back to the dark ages. It was late January before the zodiac began to waver. Even the President cried when, one February night, the Big Dipper rose without a bowl. As end-of-the-world cults multiplied and religious attendance exploded, teenagers promised love as lasting as they could hope to make it. Estranged husbands desperately sought forgotten wives and children, and in Jerusalem, warring factions granted their broken land a moment's respite. The sober announcement that Polaris could no longer be detected hardly seemed important. Most people appeared to look outward — to find old friends, make apologies to old enemies, visit the graves of loved ones. But we were all secretly looking inward. What have I done, we all wondered, what have I done to bring

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this upon the world? Each one of us had a separate theory, some terrible cosmology by which a selfish thought, a spurned duty, or a spiteful word might have drawn the still-growing shroud tighter over our doomed world. Yet this isolation could not stand, because we knew everyone else felt the same. For all the talk of the panhuman scale, still the United Nations, the World Cup, AIDS, the Internet, even the seasons had failed to touch everyone at once. Here finally was something we all shared. Scared, confused, but unable to deny what we all saw each time we went to sleep: the same emptying ether overhead. And yet — Sirius held out. The AP story reminded us that Sirius was the 'brightest star in the sky,' but nobody was fooled, because Sirius was also the only star in the sky. Still, these were not days for worrying about lousy journalism, and who knew, maybe it was a joke. And for three days, and then a week, and then two weeks, Sirius still held out strong, a lone warrior returning each night to traverse the field on which so many of his companions had fallen. We slept during the day and awoke at dusk to cheer on brave Sirius. Optimism and pessimism mixed curiously: shorter nights and warmer days in the northern hemisphere could portend truth or irony, while the coming winter in the south either meant the real end was near or just lengthened the odds to set up a more heroic finish. Nobody knew what would happen if Sirius too vanished. Some thought the planets and then the sun itself would follow, and we'd all freeze to death soon enough, so that we were pinning our survival on the fiery blue back of that distant point of light. But most of us had stopped seeing even that far forward. We were just rooting for the underdog, still hoping against hope. Maybe it was always a foolish hope, a half-trillion shot in the dark, but we kept at it. And when Sirius did finally fade: slowly at first, dimming at midnight over Morocco, and then gently

Horse-Barn Hill, Storrs CT by Julia Hickey

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bleeding away its light in a farewell trail across the Earth one March night, barely visible over Taipei, gone by the time midnight had come again. We wept, we promised to do better, to be better. That black dome above us didn't answer. No one had the strength to look at the moon or the meekly glimmering planets. Daylight itself seemed a poorly made mask hiding nothing. The axe would fall, we all knew; it was only a matter of time. So we waited, and we waited, and when simultaneous tornadoes swept through the outskirts of St. Louis and Harare and Calcutta, we knew that it was either the next sign of the apocalypse or a change in the weather patterns caused by so many people holding their breath at the same time. But as the nights washed into days into nights, we were not dead. Every day we have looked, incredulous, to the tenuous sun; every night we have, doubting, kept careful watch of the fragile moon.Yet each brings neither new loss nor new answers. Astrophysicists remain as baffled as astrologers. Perhaps it was the lesson of a benevolent god, or perhaps it was a ripple in chaos. Perhaps we will simply never know what happened, or why, or perhaps there isn't even a why. But as long as we are alive — and we are — we can keep living. To anyone who knew them, the stars make a strange history lesson: how can we teach our children something so basic that every human once knew it? But we aren't alone in the dark. For now, at least, we all remember those days when the stars faded.Sometimes when it rains, you can walk outside and stare up into the inexplicable sky and feel the heavens above and around you, and it seems as though you might just fall _ in. But if you lower your hushed gaze and look to the side, you might see someone else out in the rain with you, someone staring into that same sky, and you might think: It must be mining everywhere right now.

Black Kites I by Carolynn Molleur-Hinteregger

I give her something to talk about, something to talk about so she doesn't go crazy. Walking beside her, I say: look at those birds. And for a few blocks her eyes and mouth and mind make black kites of them. When she exhausts the wind and it drops itself tired at her feet, I point again and say, aren't they strange? From the slate roofs, dipping power lines, the brick chimneys, and sharp steeple, she chooses the trees. They are, she agrees, so many arms always reaching but only ever dropping things, great heads balding again and again, wide women dressing and undressing so slowly. Her black kites have tangled their strings in the boughs. I wonder which street we will reach when her world, bound tightly together metaphor upon metaphor so that no thing is without companion, begins willy-nilly unspirming into miserable pieces. Kissing cannot keep her whole and high but if I left her something new each morning on the dresser â&#x20AC;&#x201D; a scrap of the morning paper, an open pair of scissors â&#x20AC;&#x201D; she might make a mystery of each one and love day by day.

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Eulogy for Delia I Carina delValle Schorske

And Nadia, who can kill a chicken by hand. Who is that other cousin burdened by snow, by some idea of self? Delia was certain: our names, our instinct towards migration. Urchin spines lodged in my heel, the scars of one island on another. What if anthropologists examine each spine and see nothing but inheritance? Not the wild exception of my luck, my sweet political sighs. Only our collective grip (generations of knuckles) on the tube of her respirator, tight as a chicken neck, that old dream of between and both.

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Sharks I by Ani Katz

The sand shark washed up on the beach two weeks before Labor Day. Matty and Josh weren't too surprised when I found it. Back in July, I had come to them with a shark's tooth: smooth, mocha, and delicately curved,like someone had sculpted a nail clipping.They were off duty, eating bag lunches of roast beef sandwiches and fruit punch Gatorade under their makeshift blue tarp tent when I ran over, breathless, my eleven-year-old's paunch jiggling in rolls over my bikini bottom. 'Look!' I squealed, holding the tooth between my fat thumb and forefinger, waving it in front of them.'Look! What is it?' I hadn't known it was a shark's tooth; my first thought when it sifted out of the warm sand into my palm was that it was the skeleton of a fish anatomically confined to a cartoonish, curved figure. I had caressed the tooth's dark, bulbous root with its rough, pebbled surface, thinking it was a skull. 'Here, show me,' said Matty. His arms were covered with white blond fuzz. He studied the tooth as Josh looked on through mirrored sunglasses under brown curls, still eating his sandwich, bits of deli lettuce falling onto his Stony Brook Lacrosse T-shirt. 'It's a shark's tooth,' announced Matty after a moment's thought. 'Looks like from a brown shark, maybe,' added Josh, taking a swig of Gatorade. 'People thought they saw one around Memorial Day' 'Are they dangerous?' I asked, glancing off over the ocean,a blue mirror on the windless day. 'Only if you bother it,' answered Josh. I screwed up my face into a frown.

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Matty examined the tooth for a little longer, turning it over in his big, callused hand, his light, layered hair falling over his face and hiding his acne. 'Cool,' he announced, and handed it back, squinting up at me,his full lips a bright red from his Gatorade. I had hurried back home,thighs slapping against each other, bare feet burned on the scorching sand and baked boardwalk. Throwing my towel over the wooden railing, I washed the tops of my feet with the hose and raced into the cool, dark house, slamming the screen door behind me.When I got to Mom's room I slowed down and knocked lightly on the door. 'Yah?'she called out. 'It's me,'I answered. 'Come in, doll.' The heavy woven shades had been pulled down in front of the glass doors, and the big fan on the bureau whirred hypnotically. I could just barely see Mom in bed, lying on her back, the tall white garbage can glowing like a marble column beside her. She turned her head to look at me, but I couldn't make out much of her face. 'I found a shark tooth,' I whispered. 'Let's see,' Mom said, and I padded over and sat down beside her. 'Is your tush wet?' she asked, gently running a finger along the waistband of my swimsuit. 'No,' I said. She opened her palm and I placed the tooth in it. Mom examined it without turning on the bedside lamp; I couldn't read her expression; I watched her hands moving in the darkness, listened to her thick breath, and smelled her sour scent of sleep.

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'That's a great find, sweetie,' she said finally, still stroking the tooth.'What are you going to do with it?' 'It's a present for you,' I replied, looking at the wooden floor, where I'd managed to track in some sand. 'Oh. Thank you, doll,' Mom said absently. 'Are you sure you don't want to keep it yourself?' I shook my head. One of her thin hands reached over and laid the tooth on the bedside table. A small city of medicine bottles and pill jars had grown there, seemingly overnight. Mom reached up and stroked my cheek and hair. 'I'm going to take a rest now,' she yawned.'You can wake me up before dinner.' 'Are you going to eat with us?' I asked. 'I'll see how I feel,' sighed Mom.She patted my chubby hand with her bony one.'Can I have a kiss?' I bent down to kiss her cheek. It was sunken and soft, like a bruised peach.

I came upon the sand shark in the late afternoon, my search for pieces of blue and green burnished glass bringing me.about a mile away from the swimming area. My plump, sandied rump in the air, a stiff neck from walking hunched over like I had a bad stomachache, I almost missed the shark. It seemed so natural where it lay, a few feet away from the water's edge in a cluster of broken shells, flat on its stomach. It was the length of my arm and the color of coffee ice cream; one sky-colored eye remained, crusted with sand and pebbles. The other eye had been torn out, leaving a ragged hole big enough to stick your thumb in. Its ribs jutted out from another gash in its side. The dorsal fin, delicately ragged at the edges, stuck straight up in the air, like the flag on a mailbox. Without thinking, I reached out and touched the fin; it was at once coarse and supple, something I had felt in a drowning dream. The summer I was five, Mom had taken me for a bike ride one evening and we had found a dead woodpecker in the tall grass by the side of the road. Bright red and black and perfectly small, the texture of its crushed wings accentuated by the deep yellow light of the hour, the bird

had intrigued me so much that I wanted to take it home with us. Mom had refused, saying it would make me sick. From my perch in the baby seat on the back of Mom's bike, I had whined all the way home, threatening to throw myself out onto the sidewalk. Now, six years later, I suddenly realized that despite what Mom had told me about sickness and disease and what kinds of things happen when you handle dead and unclean things, I was going to take the shark back with me. 'Okay,' I said to no one. I bent down and picked up the shark, my hands cradling its smooth, blissfully intact belly. As I lifted it, seawater poured out of the gash in its side, splashing onto my foot. The shark was the same weight as my stuffed raccoon, Roxanne, but it gave off a stench that was nauseatingly sweet. I grimaced. Holding the shark out at arms length like a sacrificial offering, I started my trudge down the beach. My jaunt with the dead required some kind of special ceremony, so I began to sing a kind of chant under my breath, keeping time with the rhythm of my footsteps. 'I found the shark shark shark, I found the shark shark shark.' Throughout my pilgrimage, a handful of people saw me with the shark.They would gasp and point from their beach chairs, then ask me a question: 'Is that dead?' 'Are you sure you should be touching that, dear?' 'Did you find that yourself?' 'Where are your parents?' I'd nod, or shrug, and keep walking. No one tried to stop me; they knew better than to bother with other people's kids, especially other people's kids who liked to spend their time carting dead sharks around. By the time I reached the lifeguard stand my flabby arms had begun to ache, my hands were coated in slime, and my eyes watered from the stench of the body. Ruining Matty and Josh's lunch, I set the shark down in the sand a few feet in front of their tent, then ran off to wash myselfin the surf while they stared at my find. 'Yo,' called out Josh after I scrambled back up the beach from the water.'Where'd you find this?' I pointed offto my left.

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'Over a while that way,' I clarified. I put my hands on my hips, breathing heavily. Josh shook his head. 'You've got too much free time,' he said. I shrugged. Matty eyed the shark, but wouldn't touch it. With a grunt, he picked himself up from the sand and sauntered over to the white, wooden storage bin under the lifeguard stand to grab a shovel. Wordlessly, Matty scooped up the shark with the shovel and held it aloft, examining it from another angle. 'Dead,' said Matty. 'Duh,'said Josh. 'What did it die of?' I asked, squinting up at the shark, now silhouetted against the sinking afternoon sun. 'Dunno,' said Matty, finally letting the body drop from the hilt of the shovel. The shark landed perfectly on its stomach, and Matty stuck the shovel upright into the sand, leaning gracefully on the handle, as if it were the bar in a ballet studio and he was about to do an arabesque. 'Maybe the big hole in the side,' called Josh, having retreated to the tent. 'Nah,' said Matty. 'That probably happened after it died, someone wanted an easy meal. This guy probably went of natural causes.' 'The eye is gone,' I said. Matty surveyed the shark once more, lowering himself to a push up position in front of the body and wrinkling his nose. 'Yup,' he said.'One eye left.' Josh came out of the tent and stood over the shark, nudging it with his toe. 'Check out the ribs,' he said.'Looks just like Steph.' Steph coached the swim team. She had stick straight blond hair and wore purple TYR racing suits; at six feet tall, she probably weighed as much as I did. There was a rumor going around the kids on the team that she smoked. One day, in the middle of an individual medley during practice, Chris had asked her outright. 'Steph, do you smoke?' he asked, flipping his wet mushroom-cut hair away from his forehead, his voice husky, boisterous.

Overleaf: Journey to Shelley Beach, Lamu by Alexandra Suich

'Shut up, Chris,' snapped Steph, dark circles under her eyes. Over the course of the summer, I had seen Steph watching the sunset with both Matty and Josh on separate occasions. The couple would be perched on the lifeguard stand, their feet sliding up and down each others' dangling, bare legs, as if they couldn't get a grip on something. The mention of Steph seemed to uncork something uncontrollable in Matty and Josh. They laughed hysterically for a good minute or so, voices girlish in pitch; they fell to the ground, kicking sand at each other. I sat quietly and waited for them to finish. 'Next time you see Steph,' said Matty, pausing and gasping for breath,'tell her you found a one-eyed monster â&#x20AC;&#x201D;' 'And that you hear she really likes one-eyed monsters,' finished Josh, bringing his heavy fist down into the sand. Matty and Josh erupted into laughter again, this time flat on their stomachs,like the shark.They gave each other high fives. 'Okay,'I said blankly. I looked down at my bulging belly. They were still laughing when I asked them to keep an eye on the shark before I ran home to find Mom and Dad.

Mom taught me how to look for beach glass. We used to beach comb together, butts in the air, crawling down the beach. She told me never to take my eyes off the sand, because as soon as I did, I would miss a piece. Whether tiptoeing through a massively populous and diverse spread of shells, or traipsing over an almost bare patch of beach, you could never let up your guard. Mom had high standards; she would never take a piece of glass with a slightly sharp edge, and she insisted that I did the same. 'That's not beach glass,' she'd say, chucking the offending find back into the surf, 'just normal glass.' I'd watch it twirl, bop, and hop as the tide pulled it in with a great whoosh, hoping it would wash up again next year as real beach glass. Dad was less enthusiastic, less taken in. Once, on a walk with Mom and me, he fished a square of coral pink tile out of the sand and held it up triumphantly.

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'Look,' he said.'Rare tilestone.' 'Cool!'I chirped.'Where did it come from?' 'Someone's bathroom,' Mom muttered, swatting at Dad, who laughed. 'Just think,' he said, winking at me.'An entire bathroom washed away.' The week before school began, the summer before I stumbled upon the shark, I found the entire bottleneck from a blue wine bottle in the surf. Long and slender, flaring out at the bottom where the rest of the bottle should have been, it looked like some kind of marvelous trumpet. But the edges were jagged, not real beach glass. I tried to pretend. 'Mom,it's fine,' I said.'It's fine.' 'No it's not,' she insisted, taking it from me.'You're going to cut yourself on it.' 'Don't throw it away!' I wailed, grabbing her arm. 'Let me keep it!' 'You can't keep it,' she said firmly, holding the bottleneck by the pouring end,almost menacingly. I sulked the whole way back home. Mom had decided not to throw the glass back into the water; a piece that big was a danger to swimmers. Instead, the glorious treasure would meet an ignominious end in our trash. I wanted to weep. When we reached our gate, Mom a few strides ahead of me, weary of my tantrum,I made one last plea. 'Mom,'I blubbered. 'Stop it,' she snapped. 'Mom,' I said again,'can we bury it in the sand, so over the winter it will turn into beach glass? It won't hurt anyone.' Mom looked at me and sighed. 'Fine,' she muttered.'But that's the last I hear ofthis.' I buried the bottleneck in the mound of sand beside the gate, humming to myself, making sure the blue glass was completely hidden before leaving it to undergo its metamorphosis. When we returned to the beach the following May, Mom was sick, and the bottleneck was gone.

Dad was sitting out on the second floor deck that faced the ocean, reading the Times and drinking a Corona. 'So?' he said in response to my news about the shark. 'What do you want me to do about it?' I shrugged. 'I thought you might be interested,' I mumbled. Dad kept reading. 'Where's Mom?'I asked. 'Asleep. Don't wake her up.' 'I wasn't going to,' I snapped.'Do you think I'm an idiot?' Dad whistled, shaking his head, and exhaled pointedly, signaling he was losing patience. I couldn't think of anything else to say. Face burning, my extraneous flesh quivering, I stomped back into the house, wrenching the screen door open, nearly knocking it off its hinges. 'Watch the door!' Dad shouted after me. 'I know!'I shouted back. Annoyingly and inexplicably, tears had welled up in my squinted eyes by the time I reached the gate. I turned around to look up at Dad, and saw him pass his hand over his forehead before going back to his reading. It was nearing five thirty when I got back to the beach. Stuck with clean-up duty, Matty and Josh were the only lifeguards left, packing up the equipment, tossing the rescue tubes, megaphone, spineboard, shovel, and first aid kit into the storage bin with an odd bravado, overly casual and careless.Josh sang under his breath: 'My giant breasts are killing meâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;' 'And I-ce' joined Matty, in a piercing falsetto. 'I must confess, they're make believe.' 'Make believe!'

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They stopped abruptly when they noticed me standing there. I giggled nervously. 'Sorry,' said Matty, blushing almost imperceptibly. 'That's okay,' I said nonchalantly: 'I hate Britney anyway:There was an awkward beat ofsilence. 'You gonna get rid of that thing?' called out Josh, slam dunking the rolled up tarp into the bin. 'Yeah,' I said.The shark was where I left it, kept company by a small swarm offlies. 'Good,'said Josh.'That shit â&#x20AC;&#x201D; I mean, that shark stinks.' There were three flies holding vigil in the shark's empty eye socket. I watched as they buzzed in and out, around and around, a googly eye come to life. 'Do you need help?' asked Matty, shouldering his backpack.Josh rolled his eyes. 'Dude,come on,'Josh groaned. 'Chill out,' said Matty.'Dinner's not till six thirty.' 'No,I'm okay,' I said.'I'll figure something out.' 'Sure?' asked Many. 'Yeah,' I said, surveying the body. 'All right. See ya tomorrow then.' 'Later,' shouted Josh, already at the entrance. 'Bye.' Matty ran to catch up with Josh, kicking up geysers of sand. I watched them retreat; putting on their flip flops once they set foot on the hot sidewalk, shaking the sand and salt out of their shaggy hair, opening fresh bottles of Gatorade,joking and jostling. I chewed on my lip. Grasping the shark by the tail, I dragged it over the sand, its body bouncing over the dips and hills of a landscape carved out by innumerable footprints. When I reached the crooked, sun-bleached snow fence that marked off where the beach ended and where the mac-

cessible dunes swelled up in grass-covered mounds, I set the shark down and began to dig. The hole reached my knees and was wide enough for me to sit down with my ample butt nestled in the cool, wet sand. I could have buried myself. Catching my breath, I sat in the grave for a while, my legs splayed out over the top, knees bent. Leaning my head back against the wall off the hole, I noticed I was at eye level with the shark. Our staring contest was short-lived, and I lost. I laid the shark down into its grave, flat on its belly, the way I'd found it resting by the surf Without refreshments or a headstone, and no mourners besides a growing contingent of flies, I decided to delay the proper ceremony until later. In hopes of deterring the flies, I threw a few handfuls of sand onto the shark, so that it looked dusted with ash. 'Stay put,' I said. Then, looking back at the gravesite more than once,I started home to make preparations. Mom slept through dinner. Dad made spaghetti, garlic bread, and salad while I set the table for two. By the time we sat down to eat, careful not to scrape the wooden floor with our chairs, the sun had dripped down into the bay, the sky through the west-facing glass doors growing pink, then purple. Our main source of light came from the Tiffany-style hanging lamp directly above the round dining room table. The lamp illuminated only the tabletop, and as the rest of the room darkened, it seemed as though nothing existed beyond the small circle where we sat and ate, silent. At some point during Mom's illness, it had become acceptable to read during dinner.When Mom was up and about, bringing your book to the table was forbidden;

10 I Fall 2003

she figured we were anti-social enough as it was. But now, Dad and I had an unspoken agreement that reading at dinner was perfectly normal, even necessary. We'd keep our places with our elbows as we cut our meat, speckle the pages with sauce, and gradually fill the spines with breadcrumbs.Tonight Dad mulled over Nobody's Fool while I muddled through some A.S. Byatt stories that Mom had recommended. Dad set down his book to serve himself salad. I folded over my page and watched him spoon out some extra peppers and cucumbers from the bottom of the bowl before opening my mouth. 'I'm going to have a funeral for the shark later,' I said. Dad looked up,startled. 'What?' he bleated, eyes wild, forehead creased. His chin was flecked with prickly, steel stubble. 'I'm having a funeral later,' I repeated, exasperated. 'For the shark.' 'No you're not,' he said, pouring dressing over his salad. 'Why?' I whined, reaching for my fifth piece of garlic bread. 'I talked to Mom earlier and she said you're going to make yourself sick touching it,' Dad said, gesturing with his fork.'She wants you to leave it alone. And stop eating bread.' 'Why did Mom talk to you and not to me?'I asked. 'You were in the shower. She was only up for half an hour.' He wasn't looking at me anymore, concentrating on his salad. 'Well why didn't she wait to talk to me?'I demanded, my voice shrill. 'I don't know!' Dad bellowed, dropping his fork with a clatter.'The world doesn't revolve around you.'

Untitled by Alex DelVecchio

'I know,' I spat.'I just wanted to talk to her.' Dad let out one of his exasperated whistles and shook his head. 'Quit while you're ahead,' he advised wearily. Whimpering with frustration, I pushed away from the table, my chair groaning loudly against the floor. I dumped my dishes in the sink and pounded down the stairs, nearly tripping over my fat feet. 'Keep quiet!' Dad hissed in a death whisper. Most of our dinners ended this way. Cloistered in my room, I alternated between A.S. Byatt and my stack of old Mad Magazines until around ten thirty, when I heard Dad descend the staircase and softly click closed the door to the master bedroom at the other end of the hallway. I sat upright in bed, body still, surveying the silence with every one of my senses. After about fifteen minutes, I swung my legs over the side of the bed, kicked off my boxy, khaki shorts, and pulled on a pair of jeans.

20 I Yale Literary Magarine

Out in the hallway, I yanked a navy blue hoodie off a hook and slipped it over my head before realizing it was Mom's Barnard sweatshirt. Hardly breathing, muscles tensed, I tiptoed upstairs to the kitchen, where, without turning on any lights, I sequestered a package of Oreos and a bottle of Juicy Juice. Before leaving, I gazed out through the heavy glass doors at the ink-colored ocean, its rolling rises and falls flickering with moonlight. I'd always thought it was a little scary how, upstairs, at night, with all the lights out, the glass doors seemed to disappear, erasing the barrier that separated where I stood from everything outside. Down on the sidewalk, I stared up at the tall, wooden husks of houses, dark except for one or two windows glowing from within. The night was clear, the lofty moon offering enough light to render a flashlight redundant, not that I had remembered to bring one. Garbage cans cast tall shadows. Caught under my bare heels, the frayed cuffs of my jeans made a scratching sound on the pavement as I walked. At the beach, the wind blew in from the south, salty and damp. I could feel my hair growing sticky with it as I trudged down the boardwalk to the cool sand. The lifeguard stand sat erect in its usual place, a No Swimming sign tacked to its back until the morning. Despite the placid lull of the waves and the way the moonlight built an inviting, celestial road out to the horizon, I suffered a nightmarish fear of swimming in the ocean after dark, even on clear nights like this, when a midnight dip would be feasible for the mildly adventurous. In my mind, once the sun set, a menacing menagerie of enormous silver bullet fish, swift man-eating sharks, and mythical sea monsters all came to frolic just off shore. Shivering with a delicious dread, I imagined myself tumbled in the surf and sucked out screaming into the black waves, and wondered if I'd be devoured before or after I drowned. The scariest fate in the world, I thought often, would be to fall off a ship somewhere far out in the deep, in the dead of night.There would definitely be sharks out there, not to mention the fiery explosions and other horrors of warfare that I habitually included in such a scenario. A chunk of driftwood wouldn't save you; your only hope was to be beautiful enough for someone, friend or foe,

21 I Fall 2005

to notice you and pull you out of the water, either to be a beloved bride, if you were lucky, or a sex slave, if you were slightly less so. Stars scattered themselves into a lavaliere that fell almost to the horizon line. The grave emerged ahead of me, a dim wound in the sand. Part of it had caved in, collapsing into a soft obtuse angle, and there were heavy drag marks trailing off into the dunes. I'd seen marks like that before, when I used to hide a Tupperware of candy in a cavity I dug under the house. One day the Tupperware disappeared, those same drag marks sprouting out from the hiding spot like the sun's rays. Raccoons, my parents said. It was still a wild island, to some extent: ants in the kitchen, deer on the bike paths, raccoons in the garbage. I didn't even have to look into the hole to know that the shark was gone. 'Shit,' I said.'Fuck.' So much for a proper funeral. I plunked down in the sand and started eating the Oreos, unable to see any other recourse. On my third cookie I choked, snot dripping onto my fingers, my teeth grimy with chocolate. I couldn't swallow my last bite so I spit it out onto the sand, a thick length of brown drool falling after it from my lips. My insides gurgled in a high-pitched whinny as I wiped my nose with my sleeve. 'Hey. Can I have some?' I spun around, my heart lurching out of my chest, lungs deflated, hands and feet trembling, and saw Josh standing there, looking down at me, his meaty hands tucked into the waistband of his jeans. 'It's me, Josh,' he explained, grinning nervously, toeing the sand. 'You scared me,'I squeaked. 'Sorry,' he said,'I noticed you sitting alone over here â&#x20AC;&#x201D; whutcha doing?' I signed and brushed some sand off my pants. 'I was going to bury the shark, but something got to it before me.'I didn't meet his eye. Josh shrugged. 'Oh well,' he said. 'At least someone will get a nice dinner.' I shrugged back. 'Do you still want some Oreos?'I asked.

'Sure.' He plopped down next to me and crushed a stack offour cookies into his mouth at once. 'What are you doing here?' I asked as he crunched away. Josh held up his hand, signaling me to wait, then swallowed hard before answering. 'Me and Matty came with Steph and one of her friends. The friend decided I wasn't her scene and split. Matty and Steph are somewhere over there.' He waved his arm to the left, where the lights of the oceanfront houses were all extinguished, and where a second staircase cast impenetrable shadows onto the dunes. I stared at Josh incredulously. 'On the dunes?' I exclaimed in disgust. Josh shrugged and laughed half-heartedly. 'I don't think they're all there right now, if you know what I mean.' I didn't know what he meant. Josh burped, like the burbling roar ofa monster. It smelled like beer. "Scuse me,' he mumbled, stretching out on his back to gaze up at the stars. I kept glancing over to that dark, mysterious area of the beach, envisioning drag marks in the sand, legs intertwined, bodies moving together. Steph was so thin, Matty would crush her. Unless â&#x20AC;&#x201D; 'Pervert,' said Josh, noticing me looking. I whirled on him. 'No,' I spat, my face burning.'No.' 'Pervert,' he repeated.'Do you like Matty?' he asked, sitting up again, grinning maniacally, teasingly.'Do you?' 'No,' I said, squirming in his stare. 'Yes you do,' he said, 'I see you. You think he's so nice, and s0000 sexy' 'No!'I whined. 'He likes you,'said Josh. 'No he doesn't.' 'He told me.He thinks you're hot.' 'He didn't! Shut up.' 'Do you like Steph?' Josh persisted, trying a different tack.'Is that more your style?' 'No!'I shouted at him.'No!' Josh whistled. 'Man,' he said, still grinning 'And you're only what, eleven?'

22 Yale Literary Magazine

Kuandika Kiswahili by Alexandra Suich

23 I Fall 2005

'Shut up!' 'What were you going to do with that shark, anyway, sicko?' I reared up and pushed him, digging my palms into his pecs, throwing all my weight into the shove, half moaning, half grunting,feeling the bone of his shoulders rock back, smelling his sweat under his deodorant and cologne. Josh hardly budged. He grabbed me by the upper arms and stared into my face with bloodshot eyes. 'You're going in the water,' he growled. 'No!'I wailed.'No, please! Don't!' 'Too late.' Josh sprang up to a standing position and caught me by the wrists before I could scramble away, locking my hands behind my head as I screamed. He began to drag me to the water; I bounced along on my back, head lolling, arms almost pulled from their sockets. Panicked, I watched the dunes retreat. 'Stop!'I screamed.'You're hurting me!' Wordlessly, Josh dropped my wrists. I lunged forward, digging my hands into the sand, squealing, a desperate animal, but Josh grabbed me by the backs of my knees,squeezing my flesh, holding me down. 'No!'I cried.'Stop!' He flipped me over onto my back again, then knelt down in front of me.Still silent. 'Please,' I whined. Wrapping his thick arms around my thick waist, Josh slung me over his shoulder, my stomach crushed against his collarbone, the air gone out of my body. Somehow he managed to stand up and stride down the beach with me flailing against him. My upper body swung back and

24 I Yale Literary Maga/tar

forth, my head crashing into Josh's tailbone again and again. Screaming was impossible; inhuman gurgles and shrieks escaped my mouth. I saw the white lace of water under Josh's feet, and then I was flipped up, falling through blackness into more blackness. Underwater it was warm and quiet. I heard the muffled hum of the current and a mysterious, delicate pinging sound, like someone dropping pebbles onto glass. Opening my eyes, I saw the murky darkness of nightmare.I was screaming before I shot up to the surface. My head hit air. Gasping, heaving, I kept screaming, thrashing, trying to swim the short distance to shore but weighed down by my jeans and sweatshirt. Josh stood at the water's edge, Matty beside him. 'Help!'I shrieked.'Help!' Matty pointed next to me. Something grabbed me around my thighs. It was a shark: a brown shark or a blue shark or a hammerhead shark or a great white shark, definitely not a sand shark. My hysterical screams approached castrato range as I kicked at whatever monster was holding on to me, waiting for the searing chomp of.teeth, the plume of blood billowing red through the water. My foot met flesh. 'Help! Help me!' Steph surfaced in front of me, a pale torpedo tip of hair and water. I stared at her, shocked into shutting up. With a quick twist of the neck, she whipped her wet mane out of her face and regarded me scornfully. 'I was trying to help you,' she snarled. 'Sorry,' I mumbled. 'Grab my arm,' Steph instructed, holding out a javelin limb. It glowed white underwater. I closed my hand

around it, slicing it in two. Steph began to swim to shore, grunting with each stroke as she dragged my weight behind her. I paddled along, quiet. 'I was afraid of sharks,' I said finally, my voice strangled as soft ripples lapped against my face and into my open mouth.'I found one washed up today. I was afraid of being eaten.' Steph didn't turn around, didn't stop swimming. 'There are...a lot of things...that are scarier..,than sharks,' she said haltingly, her strokes fragmenting the sentence into a series ofinflected grunts. She pulled me in as far as the breakers, then left me, long legs bounding out of the water, back up the beach to Josh and Matty, her short white skirt plastered against her underwear, translucent. At home, Mom slept in a white nightgown flecked with pale stains, faded browns and reds; the fabric cascaded in waves around her shrinking body as her breath rasped in and out,in and out. 'Come on,' Matty shouted to me.'You can stand now Get out.' I pretended not to hear him. Limp, I let the waves wash me onto shore, their whispered breath gradually bearing my body up the surf. For a while, the water tugged at me gently, rolling me in and out of the tide, until my bulk finally beached itself on a dense, shimmering spread of stones, shells, maybe beach glass. I didn't check. My hair and skin were crusted with sand and seaweed; salt water dribbled slowly out of my clothes. The three teenagers gathered around me, snickering, murmuring. Lying on my stomach, I closed my eyes and pretended I was dead.

25 I Fall 2005

Dialectic I by Hannah Frank

IV.

'The lights light.The, the light light lit lightly.' 'Thunder thunders.Thunders thunder.' 'Say that you say that, that says that you say that that —"Mm — ?' 'Hmm. Had that had to have that, that'd have had —' 'Anyone left left anyone anyone left.' 'Let light light light.'

'Why'd you choose dog as an example?' 'I'm dyslexic?' 'You, uh, you son of a bitch.'

'Canine.' 'Feline.' 'Porcine.' 'Equine.' 'Gamine.' 'You mispronounced it, but that's fine.' 'Anserine.' 'Asinine.' 'Sanguine?' 'No.' 'Nein?' 'Yes, nein.' 'Supine.' 'Opine.' 'Bovine.' 'Mine.'

26 I Yale Literary Magazine

'When you say, you know, out loud, in linguistic discourse, i.e., it sounds like a cry of desperation — aiyee!' 'Should I start saying id est instead?' 'How about just, you know, that is?' 'I will have nothing to do with the English language.' 'Hence the reversion to, to cries of exasperation?' 'I mean, I guess. I'm all about the primeval, uh, primordial linguistic discourse, uh, conversation, as it were.' 'And, and it was.' 'Maybe I'll just say, This is mine, you know, all the time.' V. 'What time is it?' 'That's it.' 'What?' 'That.' 'That? What?' 'Why don't they rhyme, those two?' VI. 'Dash 'em,em dash!' 'Mm — ?' 'Chagrined,or bluely pissed / The helm of an ecstatic cry's / Flourish dying, its point whisked / Away,its meaning so belied' 'Bluebluely pissed? What does that even mean? That's gross.You went too far, man.' 'I say how far I go.' 'I say what I want about what you say' 'Anyway, anyway —'

'Away!' 'Aguirre's raft before the horde / Of monkeys and phantasms / A diving board, an ironing board / Punctuation's resistentialism.' VII. 'I say what I want about what you say' 'You say whatever you want'bout what I say, but I'll keep on saying what I say' 'Say what?' 'I mean what I say.' 'And say what you mean?' VIII. 'Ahem.' 'What?' 'Ahem. 'In linguistic discourse —' 'I.e., in conversation?' 'Ahem.' 'In linguistic discourse we all become Alice, at least as she is midway through her befuddling excursion in Wonderland —' 'Her adventures in Wonderland?' 'Ahem. 'While in attendance at an already suspicious tea party, we have just been reprimanded by the March Hare: he scolds us for being unsure as to whether we are meaning what we say or saying what we mean —or both, or neither. He tells us that the distinction between the two is as wide as the distinction between I eat what I see and I see what I eat, but this explanation merely leaves us (sorry-sack Alice that we are) all the more

27 I 11011 2005

bewildered. If only there were someone to tell us that the distinction is as follows: 'Saying what we mean entails that there is no possibility for confusion in the audience's interpretation of our words.We speak clearly, emphatically, and concisely, delivering our point without risk of deceiving our audience. Meaning what we say, on the other hand, is lodged solely in our —the speaker's —intent. Our words might somehow obfuscate that which we want to convey; nonetheless, there is an intended meaning there, albeit latent or obscured.What we said is what we meant, what we intended to say, even if the audience does not interpret it as such.' 'What?' 'Ahem.' IX. 'Amen.' 'History' 'Malevolence?' X. 'I mean.' XI. 'He said I was like a circle-man.' 'What's a circle-man?' 'You know, don't you?' 'Oh, right. In the, the —' 'Yeah, that.The 'Right, right. And, and how are you like one?' 'Well, not me, my name.'

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Mail-Order Skinhead Impostor by Peter Feigenbaum

XII. 'Fuck this shit.' This shit —that's almost a palindrome.' 'It's also an acrostic, a, a, an acronym.' 'Antonym.' 'Anagram.' XIII. 'I always get loose and lose confused.' 'Confoosed?' 'Mm?' 'To let loose.To let lose.' XIV. 'You lost your chance.' 'The chance was yours to lose.' XV. 'You know.' XVI. 'I see.' XVII. 'That's totally nautical.' 'And, and ... maritime?' 'No, no.' 'What?' 'I was using nautical as a proxy, a, a standin for radical.' XVIII. 'You don't see. You hear.' 'No, no. To see means to grasp.' 'Ah. Synaesthesia?' 'No, dead metaphor.' 'You can be such a prick sometimes, you know that?' 'Dead synecdoche.' XIX. 'Verbal tic.' 'What about it?' 'Tick tock.' 28 I Fall 2005

'Yeah, and?' 'Are they?' 'No, it comes from French: twitch.' 'W-T-H.' 'What the hell?' "zactly!' XX. 'Would the abbreviation, the, the rad equivalent, would it be naught?' 'Not?' 'No, naught.' 'I do not follow.' 'It's the difference between a sigh of relief and a sigh of, of, of exasperation.' 'Oh.' 'Besides —' 'Seaside?' 'Quit your navel-gazing.' XXI. 'It's best when you use a, a malleable word,one with many homonyms or homophones, and, and, and/or one that is a good component word, a part of a whole. Ate, for instance —that's good. Ate. Eight. Stinight. Gait.' 'I get it now. Lactate. Undulate. Permeate. Fellate: 'Great!' 'And the order, it's —one-two-three-four-five-six, then six-one-five-four —I mean, five-two-four-three, then?' 'Think of each stanza as, as an autonomous being, so the latter order you just recited, it, it repeats for the next five, four stanzas.' 'I don't think you know what autonomous means.' 'I also recommend words that can function as nouns and verbs simultaneously. My personal favorite is baby, because it can also be used as in an apostrophe, a la, like, R and B songs.' 'Baby —that's autonomous.' 'I'm —I'm not your baby.' 'Well, now.Time will tell.' 'Time? Time,Yeah, that's a good one. Like, like... Springtime. Maritime. Party time.' 'The seasoning.'

'The magazine.' 'The father.' 'Mm 'Hmm?' 'Yes.' 'Yes?' 'First fellate, then baby, now father,, is, is, is your biological clock ticking, or what?' 'What.' 'Tick tock: XXII. 'I hate this game.' 'This isn't a game.' 'You're, like, going to say it's a word, or something, i.e., this isn't a game, it's a word. This is a word. Get it? You know?' 'Yes. Darn it.' 'I called a friend once, you know, and I, I asked her what she was up to, and she, she goes, I'm busy, and I asked her what she was doing, you know, specifically, and she replied, I'm knitting. So I go —' 'Darn it?' 'I mean, take my wife. Please.' XXIII. 'I tried to write one where one of the words was disdissertation! 'Yeah?' 'Yeah.' 'Huh.' 'Anyway, I tried to turn it into other words, you know,like: Dis her tat ion.' 'What's a tat ion? I might've heard of a tit ion, or a teat ion, or, or, or a tote ion, but a tat i —?' 'Yeah, yeah. No,I know.' 'Huh.' 'I guess, I guess' 'How about: Dessert? Taste one.' 'That, that could work. But, anyway, the point is —' 'Yeah?' 'The point is that, a dissertation is hard to write —' 'But dissertation is even harder?' 'Yeah.'

'What were your other words?' 'Yeah.' 'What?' 'Yeah.' xxiv. 'What?' 'What.' XXV. 'What about reduplication?' 'Dupduplication?' XXVI. 'A story, of sorts.' 'Do go on.' 'The Tin Woodman,it is true, would not hurt a fly; he would not hurt a fly even in the land of Oz, where man can be pieced back together with meat glue, where phonographs scamper to their favorite ragtime hits. He searches for a heart that is always there: he thinks he is nothing without it but it, instead, is nothing without him. Remember that the Tin Woodman is, first, foremost —meaningless: 'Ahem.' 'Man is cast against wood is cast against tin: animal-is-mineralis-vegetable, hawks are handsaws.And then there is the indomitable rust, the tears that are the proof of his humanity even as they slowly dismantle it, drop by incandescent drop. He is made of tin because he lost his heart to love.The space between paradoxes is the emptiness in his chest.' 'I didn't understand a word of what you just said.' 'He can't love because he does love.' 'And so, and so he self-destructs?' 'He is a paradox. He is beyond, beyond thought.' 'He is forgotten?' 'He rusts.' 'I remember him.' 'I re-member him.' XXVII.

The disenchantment of the world is the extirpation of animism.' 'So says who?' 'They do.' 'Who's they?' 'Are, you mean: Who are they?'

30 I Yale Literary Magazine

AIMEE=

'No, no. I was, I was asking, asking about the content of the they, not the' 'Never mind. I mean,I mean: There is said to be no difference between the totemic animal, the dreams of the ghost-seer, and the absolute Idea. On the road to modern science, men renounce any claim to meaning.' 'Shut the fuck up.' xxviii. '1 om here, is that an a priori truth?' 'Mm?' 'I am here, I said, is that an a pri?' 'No, I heard you. I was just, I was just thinking about Hamlet.' 'The person or the, the play?' 'The small village. No, the person. The rest is silence. I never got that before.' 'What, what's there to get?' 'The pun on rest, you know? Rest as in remainder, which is what I always took it to mean, or rest as in sleep, you know.' 'Oh,I thought you meant the assonance. Reh. Leh — you know,sileh.' 'There is also sibilance.' 'Incidentally, not an a priori truth —if we're talking there, that is.' 'Not a truth at all, in fact.' XXIX. 'Allow me to, to continue. 'Ahem. 'I want to explain robots metaphysically, metaphorically: a standin for myself. Remember the Tin Woodman. Remember when he finally meets his flesh head,long since excised from a body, having wasted years locked in a forgotten cupboard. Are you happy? he asks.The Head cannot answer. It does not know what happiness is: I haven't the faintest idea whether it's round or square,it replies, or black or white, or what it is. And, if you will pardon my lack of interest in it, I will say that I don't care.' 'Pop culture detritus.' 'Pop culture poop.' 'Poop culture poop?' 'You went too far, man.'

31 I Fall 2005

xxX. '1 11 know it when I see it.' 'But can you believe your eyes?' XXXI. 'Remember when you used to think that me was capitalized?' 'Mm?' 'Not all the letters, I mean,just the first one. M.You know.' 'I did? I thought you thought —I thought I thought that, that I had to capitalize a.' 'Mm?' 'Like, like, a dog, you know, I see a dog.' 'No,I'm pretty sure it was me. And you, too.' XXXII. 'This is the last word on the subject.' 'No, no — zyxt is.' 'What?' 'Zyxt.' 'What?' 'Z-Y-X-T. Zyxt.' 'Zyxt?' 'Zyxt.' 'Huh.' 'Huh?' 'I mean,I mean...I see.' 'Yes, you see.'

Staff Editor-in-Chief I Alexander Nemser Senior Publisher I Jonathan L.Sherman-Presser Designer I James Lee

The editors would like to thank Ruben Roma in the English Department, the Branford College Master's Office and theYale Elizabethan Society. The designers would like to thank George Guman at MS. The winner of the Frances Bergen Prize for Poetry is: This Afternoon by Abigail Deutsch.

Managing Editors I Abigail Deutsch & Laura Schewel Literary Editor I Jeremy Kessler Senior Editors I Paul Gleason, Helen Vera & Julia Wallace Online Media Relations Managers I David Chernicoff &. Gordon Jenkins

The winner of the Frances Bergen Prize for Fiction is: TWilight by Peter Aronoff. The winner of theYale Literary Magazine Art Prize is: Untitled Photograph by Alex Delvecchio. Poetry and fiction were judged by Jonas Zdanys and art was judged by Timothy Barringer.

Public Relations Manager I Erich Matthes Events Coordinators I Chloe Kitzinger, Dayo Olopade & Joanna Zdanys

The text face is Joanna, with numerals and titles in Clarendon. Initial letters are set in CG Davidson Americana.

Circulation and Distribution I Russell Brandom (Manager) & Nadia Kanagawa

Associate Publisher I Alexandre Lessard-Pilon

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32 I Yale Literary Magazine