The Torrent 2018 - A Collection of Short Stories

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THE TORRENT

2018 • Cal Poly • Fiction Short Stories

EDITORS Bryce Aston Naba Ahmed LAYOUT DESIGN Zack Spanier ILLUSTRATOR Matt Hansen PRINT ADVISOR Aaron Matsuda SUBMISSION JUDGES Bryce Aston Daniel Kammerer Farah Sallam Matt Hansen Naba Ahmed Ubi Kim Zack Spanier

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INTRODUCTION

By Zack Spanier

As college students, we are constantly pressed for time. We attempt to balance classes, studying, work, Netflix, hygiene, basic food necessities, some sort of social life, and it’s just too much.

This is why I, unfortunately as a lover of literature, fell out of a habit of reading lengthy books and novels. Which is a bummer, but the reality is when it comes down to studying for a midterm, watching Bojack Horseman with the roommates, or reading a novel… 9-out-of-10-times I’m grabbing a cold one and watching Bojack with the roommates. Engaging in hobbies like reading is truly a time commitment I struggle to maintain. However, my love for lit has not gone unfed as I started replacing big books with podcasts and short stories. These are perfect.

With speed and quality in mind, my partner/illustrator/ gentleman-scholar Matt Hansen and I decided to take on this project—a collection of Cal Poly fictional short stories—as kind of our last “hurrah!” as senior designers. The ten stories included are written by Cal Poly students across all majors.

So, without further ado, hello and welcome to The Torrent.

A torrent is a sudden, violent, and copious outpouring of something—words, feelings, emotions. You will find these attributes inescapable as you dive into The Torrent.

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CONTENTS NEW TIMES 9 Sonja Daebelliehn FUNCTIONAL 21 Erin Wells DEAD AIR 31 Amir Hashemizad UNDER MY SKIN 39 Conor Walsh EVENT HORIZON 63 Kendra Coburn SALE WITH THE DEVIL 69 Alejandra Robinson HER REALITY 91 Martica Oreglia POPSICLES ARE FOR PEOPLE... 99 Peyton Cherry HERBIVORE 139 Sierra Scolaro AFTER 151 Bryce Aston

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SONJA DAEBELLIEHN Biomedical Engineering Major

H

e can hear a tap dripping. He stops in the middle of what may have been a living room, dust settling over his boots, and listens. Yes. There it is. Like a ghost from the time before. He shakes his head and follows it, leading the way with the cold tip of his knife.

The kitchen is not much more than the sink now. Shattered tile covers more shattered tile. The doors have been ripped from their cabinets, the cabinets ripped from the walls. Some of them lay on the tile with somber knob eyes turned up, watching him.

The tap drips. He reaches it and drops his knife on the counter, shoving his hands beneath the persistent drip. The water streams black from his fingers. A well, maybe? he thinks. Yes. A well. He tries the handle. Nothing changes. It’s just the reserve in the tank, through leaky connections. But that’s a small miracle in itself.

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There’s a window directly in front of him or at least the space where a window used to be. He stares out it, hands still thrust under the tap. A tree still stands in the yard, though most of its branches are bare bones licked by fire. The grass all burned away. Pieces of something or someone litter the yard, but he refuses to look at them long enough to know which. He doesn’t see a well, but he doesn’t know what to look for anyway. Well was just a word from a dictionary, maybe a syllable out of an old friend’s mouth. He never knew anything but cold filtered water from apartment pipes. Pipes that came from nowhere and went nowhere. He knew where to find everything, but he never knew where anything came from.

Now he just knows nothing.

The water isn’t clear but it isn’t ever going to be. And what he’s looking for isn’t here. He grabs his knife and turns back the way he came. Dust and ash has already settled in his footsteps.

He knows by the time he is on the street the ash will fill them. It covers everything now. Somewhere in the darkness, it covers the inside of his father’s lungs. He glances at his bare wrist as he steps onto the asphalt and sighs. Then he shrugs his backpack by the one good strap back on his shoulder and sets off, following the darkening sky.

He is suffocated by black when he reaches the diner. He flips open a lighter a few times, but it’s risky, and maybe he can afford to be risky, but his father can’t. He knows the way besides. His shoulder hits the cold glass of the front of the building, and he slides along it, knife always leading the way. His other hand runs

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lower along the glass, searching. When he finds it he eases the door open, holds his breath, and eases it shut again. The diner is somehow blacker.

He wishes his father would turn on a light.

He knocks on the doors to the kitchens. Three sharp knocks, each softer than the last. He needs to teach his father a new knock soon, he thinks. Before his hearing gets too bad. There is some shuffling and then a cough, thick and wet. When his father coughs, he coughs out lungs. The door gives in with a groan.

“Dad.” The word falls less like a greeting and more like a curse.

He pushes his father from the door and bars it again, himself. His father does not protest. He just stares at his son’s wrist, the halfmoons beneath his eyes sinking. His son’s brow knots in anger.

“Not today,” the son says. Low and cold. His father looks away but the droop in his shoulders deepens, the tremor in his hands picks up pace. His son curses him then, silent curses with no spellings that thud dully against his bones. Old man, he thinks, as he pushes past him. But he knows that is not true. Old is not the same as it once was. Old was once wrinkles and sun-tanned liver spots and the sucking sound of gums. Now old is wind-chapped tiredness and thin thin arms and thick wet coughs. Old is grey and feathered with ash and does not care what number he slaps on his shaking bony chest. The new old is quick. Old for a second, and dead the next.

His father is new old.

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He leaves in the morning without saying anything to his father. Greetings that carried anything more than the dead weight of a name they dropped long ago. Sometimes still thuds of names in the darkness—only in darkness. But this morning he gives his father nothing. The diner drags on behind him, a big red streak in the curtain of ash that parts before and after him. Somewhere to his right there is a buzzing, but it’s still far enough. He does not like to think too much about the buzzing. In front of him stretches big black concrete, some of it broken and buckled on top of itself. The skeletons of cars leer at him with broken headlights.

He remembers the headlights on his father’s truck, big yellow things that burned wires into his retinas when he stared at them.

His father kicked and yelled that truck to life, both of them coughing and lurching until the engine gave up fighting and his father was red in the face. He was never old enough to reach the pedals in that truck. Sometimes his father would hoist him up into his lap and let him steer while his father tapped the gas, and he would steer straight towards the big oak, to test him. They both laughed at Death, then, and that was alright.

It’s harder to laugh at Death when he’s staring at you.

He skirts around the skeletons, some of them real bones, with red shirts and blue jeans fading in the sun. He never looks very long at them. Maybe he is scared who he might find. At least there aren’t a lot of flies. They have ash in their lungs too. His head snaps up. The knife appears in his hand like a card trick. His grip is too tight and too stiff, but it’s a knife, it’s something. The buzzing turns into a dull roar. He dives off the road, sliding down broken

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asphalt into the side of a skeleton car. His breath flings up ash underneath the car but he can’t help it, his lungs can’t stop heaving, his fingers shake over his lips. The roar breaks through the curtain of the ash.

Maybe it was once a Cadillac, but he never knew cars and there is no use knowing them now. It careens over the tops of broken asphalt. The people in it are silent and stone-faced but the car roars and roars, screaming as its body scrapes over metal corpses.

Not red ones, he thinks. His chest starts settling, curling back in towards his spine. Not red ones, with their blank eyes and sagging mouths. But he still does not move. People are not good anymore.

There are only bad ones and worse ones.

The red ones are the worst of all.

He waits until the curtain of ash closes behind them, walling off their roars and hiding their stick-straight backs and granite brows. It is only then that he sees them again in his head, fully formed, and the silence lets him pick the memory apart and spread out the pieces. Blue shirt, buttons, white, or were once white, were once blue. Black bandanas looped around two faces. Cold half-blind eyes. The color doesn’t matter. Somehow they seem sad, not angry, or dead, and that’s something. The red ones always look dead.

But the thing that matters is the thing on the wrist of the man, the thing that he was hoping and not hoping was there. In his memory it’s mostly a smudge of grey and a round thing of white but he knows that it’s the thing he’s been looking for, been running from. He almost cries, then, almost cries when the world

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has imploded already and his voice has been stolen and the words are tokens left in the ash for a new world to wonder at, and almost cries at that, at that thing. And then he wrenches himself to his feet, swaying, and his head is thudding again with hammer-blow wordless curses. The buzzing peppers off his eardrums and he curses it too, curses it more. His fist balls up around the knife and he raises it up above his head and lingers there, blood pulsing through his neck. And then he lets it drop, his useless hand falling with that useless knife against his side. The buzzing careens around his head but outside it comes from just one direction and he looks towards it, straining to see through the ash, but he can’t see anything. He doesn’t expect to. He just shifts the broken backpack up on to his shoulder and starts off after it.

For a long while there is nothing but a buzzing that sometimes grows into a growl before skittering off again into the ash.

But it stays in front of him, more or less. He is lucky that the car has stayed on the highway, straight on, because he knows if he strays too far off that straight path the diner will never materialize out of the grey again. He coughs but his lungs stay in his chest. For now, he thinks. He can’t remember why he stopped covering his face. He can’t remember when either. It just happened, and now it’s what happens. His hopes for the future are new hopes, and they don’t taste anything like the old ones.

The shadows around him cling longer and longer to the asphalt and the ash. It takes him a while to realize the roar has stopped and when he does he slams to a standstill, hands shaking.

He hears nothing, not right away, and creeps forward only when the softest murmur feels it ways through the ash to his ears. There is still enough light to see outlines but he knows he doesn’t have

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long now. He keeps his hand outstretched, this time with the knife clutched in the other, the pads of his fingertips edging along. He finds the car first. Or a car. It’s empty as far as he can tell but the hood is still warm under his hands, and he decides it’s the car, because it can’t be anything else. He tries the door and somehow old surprise still flickers across his lips when it opens. He palms the seat and the dash and the glove compartment but the thing has disappeared with the man. He knew that, but it’s easier sometimes to pretend he knows nothing.

He takes a deep breath and then empties his lungs until there is nothing in his bony chest to make a noise. Then he listens. There, to the right, in front of him, there is the brush of something or the fall of a voice or the scuff of a boot, and more importantly there is something in the grey. A flicker, a warmth, and he imagines the click it makes. He feels the lighter in his pocket, rubbing it with his thumb. Risky, he thinks. But he understands.

When he was younger, he was terrified of talking to strangers.

Any strangers. His parents would sit there in silence and make him ask the waiter for a box, and sometimes they left without the leftovers. At the grocery store his mother would point him in the direction of the man with the carts and he begged and pleaded but he went, tears streaming down his face, to ask the orange man for his cart. And when the bombs first fell, years ago, he was glad he didn’t like strangers. Being scared of everyone stopped him from being stupid.

But now everyone is a stranger, him most of all. And that makes it easier. Old stupid is new old, and new stupid has rules that change with the light and the thickness of the ash and the hunger gnawing under his ribs. People are not good anymore, he

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reminds himself. But it doesn’t matter. He clenches his knife and walks towards the blue-yellow flame. A yard or so away he forces a cough, loud and wet and weak. It does what he wants.

“Who’s there? I’ll shoot, I swear, god damn it. I’ve got it pointed right at you.” The voice is male, and shakes, and he can feel the gun shaking, and he coughs again. He waits. The flame dances closer and then it’s right there, in front of his nose with a pair of bloodshot sad eyes dancing above it. It takes him a moment to realize there is a gun poking the sagging flesh under his ribs.

“What do you want?” The gun jabs him with the last word.

He takes a deep breath, and then another. Blank space stretches between them before he is able to muster up an answer.

“Your watch.” It’s simple, so he says it simply. But the confusion and slight hint of anger and fear that crest in bloodshot eyes are not simple, and his voice breaks after the last word. He fumbles for it but that gun is already receding.

“My watch.” The voice is flat and hard. He rushes to fill in the spaces.

“My father… he used to run the trains.” His hands are nervous birds at his sides. “He was famous for never being late. My mother… my mother said someone so loyal to time would never cheat on her. He loved her for that.” The man’s red eyes swim in front of him. The girl has come now, to take a look at the man shaking under the barrel of a gun. He panics.

“He’s dying.” The admission comes quiet and desperate but it slams him back, and his hands shake like his father’s. “He’s dying.” He can’t see the man’s face anymore. Just the flicker of the lighter flame.

“Adam.” It’s the girl now. She sounds young but her voice has

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a threat behind it, a warning. “Just give him the watch.”

“You know what it means to me.” The man’s voice is heavier. It scares him. He takes a step back but the light shifts and he realizes that the man can still see him even though his own eyes are failing in the darkness.

“Yea, and so?” Her voice softens. “It’s not our time yet.” There is something he doesn’t like about what isn’t said, but he’s breathing hard again because the light is thrust back into his face with those blood-red eyes above it.

“Here.” Something else jabs him in the ribs. “Make sure it gets to him.” His hand reaches up and closes around it and it is so real, so cold. He shivers and his hand trembles, grasping the chain of the watch. “Now leave.” The voice has become low and flat again and he scrambles away from the flame until the back of his thigh hits the car. The flame moves away from him, tinier and tinier in the darkness. His eyes are too bad to keep track of it but it doesn’t matter because night has come, and he cannot see anything anymore. He fingers his way around the perimeter of the car and then he feels the asphalt under his feet and he starts walking. He keeps a hand outstretched for the rough edges of metal frames.

The other hand holds the watch.

The day comes grey and cold and his eyes stick together when he tries to open them. He reaches up and rubs them until he sees spots in his vision, but at least they open. He coughs, and he tries not to think about how that cough sounded like a lung, and then he’s looking around and forgets all about coughing out lungs. He whips his head around and his chest is throwing up gasps of air

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but it’s no use, there’s nothing. The asphalt is nowhere to be seen.

No red streak of diner. It’s one of those days when the ash thins out momentarily but there is nothing all around him. Just red dirt and grey sky and the scuffed grey leather of his boots.

He cries then, wet and hard and coughing.

The watch shakes in his palm as he holds it up in the light.

“Dad.” The name breaks on his lips, shattering past the nothing he had left at the diner. “I’m sorry, Dad. I’m sorry.” He brings the watch face up to his lips and he kisses it. Right on the big thick crack. He turns it over and the crack turns over with him and he turns it over again and again but the crack keeps stretching on. His hands start to tremble and another cough builds in his lungs. The metal reflects a strange red face back at him and he stares, his toes curling in his boots. He holds it up to his ear but there’s nothing.

Nothing. He stares at it and stares but the face doesn’t change, the hands don’t move. They mark out 2:32 and 2:32 it stays.

A laugh falls from his cracked lips. Old time is dead, he thinks. Now it’s new time.

And he laughs again.

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ERIN WELLS English Major

I

bought a truck.

No, no. This isn’t just any truck. As of two seconds ago, this is my truck. It was just traded in this morning, waiting for me. This is the piece of shit, mint green, older-than-dirt beauty that I will drag ruthlessly to god-knows-where on a mission to search for god-knows-what. And if it breaks down, then my journey is done, and I’ll lay back and gradually decompose in seven hundred dollars well spent (I’ve been saving up since I was ten.) I just need to get out of this dealership first.

I’m having one of those mom moments. I should probably name him. Yes, him. I’ve birthed a boy! I wish my minty fresh ride subject to torture by my lead foot had a conscience. I have burning questions to ask him, like if he is as repulsed by his pastel snot complexion as I am or if he has a burning desire to run things over.

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Anyway, this mean mint green machine and I will one day meet the devil together, and I’ll tell him all about the adventures I’ll have had with the sweet green tea automotive version of me, Mindy Lee. “You did all that?” the devil would ask, “Even the thing with the giraffes and the pineapple?”

“Well, I am in hell, aren’t I?” Then I would drive off to meet Shakespeare and find out what herbs he used for inspiration.

Wait, I was onto something. I’ll name my truck Prince Phillip, which makes me Sleeping Beauty. It’s perfect considering I am a tragically mediocre female with unforgiving insomnia, standard young adult repression, and a vague memory of a truck like mine in some ancient picture my mom’s in. But who needs sleep when Prince Phillip is your husband? We’d have so many life-draining babies to hide our dissipating love of each other. That’s why they invented jobs and nannies. Parents say they have to work to feed their children, but really, it’s an excuse to get away from them.

Then you have the real crazies like stay-at-home mothers.

I’m just saying, they must have been dropped on the head as children. Why else would they choose to suffer like that? Of course, none can forget the poor stay-at-home fathers who weren’t smart enough to keep a job that makes more money than their wives.

I can only imagine the brave fool who stands up to his dominant, radical feminist wife: “No,” they would say, “I don’t want to stay home every day to watch the kids.”

“And why not?” their wives would reply.

“Because I’d like to live a little longer, and make some of

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my own money, so I can pay for all the alcohol that I need to make all of you disappear—.”

Damn, I forgot to take my medication this morning. I jingle my backpack for some indication of a pill bottle until I pull out the familiar orange and white cylinder, like a prison uniform.

One pill, blue pill. Take two for the morning dew, I repeat in my head.

I’m running away from home, if it matters. Home is a flat desert wasteland where the only exciting prospect is what’s beyond the surrounding mountains. Home is the collection of little orbs encapsulated into blue pills which keeps my head from cluttering like those hoarders on TV. Home is mom—a wayward battle between alcohol and a lap dog. Some pieces of home can’t be escaped, I suppose. I gulp and feel the pills dance down my esophagus. Then I begin to take the wheel again.

Shit, I’m out of my medication. I knew it was inevitable, but I didn’t think it’d be this soon. Has it been a month already?

Yeah, and that thing about independence is there’s no luxuries for a homeless, eighteen-year-old girl who’s never had a real job before. Pills are luxuries. I shake the sensation of paranoia from my head and fixate on the crunch of footsteps nearing me.

“So little lady,” says the dealer who sold me Phil, “you happy with your purchase?” Yeah, that’s right! I own a truck now.

I have yet to leave the dealership lot, but now I wish I had. I’m in the mood to plan, not chit chat. Such a spontaneous journey needs some meditative foundation.

“I simply adore it!” I say. I beam at him, but say no more.

Sometimes I like to bask in the glorious rays of awkwardness un-

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til I’m left alone to retreat into Mindy World. The truck dealer is watching me again, and I fear he’ll see the little girl whose head is buried in dirt. I decide to stare back, and then I start to count the wrinkles on his face. I think he is probably darn close to death at this point, but the thought doesn’t stop the counting.

“One seventy-eight,” I say, breaking the silence. Admittedly, I started skipping numbers some two seconds in, so really I probably found ten. And he’s probably barely fifty years old.

“Pardon?”

“Listen close, gramps. Whether you’ve got days, hours, or even minutes, you don’t have much. Go! Do fun things. Be interesting for god’s sakes!” I don’t add the part about leaving me alone, hoping he’d take the hint.

His mouth starts to open for a response, but closes again as a young couple walks into the dealership. I don’t mind them and wonder if this truck dealer knows what’s out there in the real world. Imagine growing up in this wretched town where the movie theatre is your sole source of entertainment. I wonder if his childhood consisted of playing doctor using tumbleweeds for heads. Then there is this sad dealership offering hope in hopeless things. Everything here is used and dying, just like their dealer.

“Prince Phillip!” I say, as I sit in the front seat of my green bean transportation, “It is time to begin our adventure. We’ve got nothing else to lose, but our determination.” I start looking around for my keys, but struggle to remember where I put them. After four minutes of digging, I pull them out of the key hole to the door. I go ahead and adjust my seat, fiddle with the mirrors, notice I need something to add color to the interior,

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put the key in the ignition, and turn.

The trouble with buying used vehicles is like buying a used hooker: you don’t know where it’s been, or what kind of condition it’s in under the hood. Phil—Prince Phillip was becoming a mouthful—offers a spurt and a hiccup before going back into hibernation.

So, I bought a dysfunctional truck.

I stick my head out the window to see the truck dealer’s quizzical face from across the parking lot. Bastard. I get out and start kicking the tires because people seem to do that a lot in movies. I assume it’s like smacking your home computer when it freezes in hopes of an inner misalignment to right itself by the force of the smack.

I don’t mind how ridiculous I might look going around and kicking Phil in every spot that won’t break a toe-bone. Oh, what’s in a bone when the mind is crippled?

I decide to begin the decomposing process early and lay down in the bed of seven hundred dollars wasted.

“You alright there?” the truck dealer asks, approaching once more. I don’t move. My body is completely absent of free will, and I fall deeper into the sensations of cold metal against my skin. I am the truck. We are a minty green dying machine.

How much time has passed, I can’t be sure. I begin to savor the taste of all-encompassing metal when the old shmuck of a truck dealer bangs the side of Phil violently.

“What the hell, man?” I say, “I was converging with the elements here!”

“Had to make sure you weren’t dead. Been trying to talk to you for a few minutes now.” I make note of Mr. Truck Dealer

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becoming number one on my hit list, and think about how I’d kill him.

Rope, twenty remote-controlled trucks, shards of glass, duct tape… The murder is starting to come together beautifully.

“Hello?” the truck dealer says, “Anyone in there?” He taps me on the head as if I was some doorway to Candy Land. God, I haven’t had candy in at least two days. The last thing I had was— “That’s it! I’m calling the cops,” the truck dealer says as he pulls out his fancy smart phone.

“Wait, whoa. Let’s calm down here. No need to do anything drastic.” He looks more annoyed than concerned, so I am going to be quick about this. “I will be out of your hair in no time. Just give me something that runs besides my legs.”

The truck dealer raises his eyebrows and looks at me as if he was about to tell me that Santa Claus is a fairytale invented by white people to train their children to behave well, so the elder white man can fuel their materialistic desires. Then he’d get into how kids are raised to think the only way to get what you want out of life is to submit to the elder white men of society.

Preach, but do it on your own time.

“Look,” he starts, “the guy drove it in today. I would have normally done a thorough check-up, but you did say ‘I don’t care. It’s fine. Just give me the keys.’ And it’s the only thing you can affor—.” I stop listening to him because I know what he’s going to say. I start thinking about my mom and her blue eyes, brimmed with tears last night after her usual alcohol binge.

Her and I have the same eyes, same height, same nose, same impulses, and on and on. I always wanted green eyes. I wanted to grow an inch or two more. Now, I want an artist to drag his

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thumb across my face, distorting the features that characterize me with her. I imagine being my own clay mold: something I can bend and form different from everything I’m afraid to admit, the desires that sit antsy at the back of my head. I wish they would shut up— “—and a new paint job would be ideal,” the truck dealer says, “But anyway, did you want me to fix the truck or not?”

“Fix it? You can do that?”

He sighed. “For now, yeah. Like I said, I’ll give you a discount since I sold you a broken vehicle. You know, it does have an unusual ignition. Did you try—” I don’t have much more money to offer him at this point, and I prepare myself to argue the cost considering the faulty advertisement. I gather the pieces to begin my argument. Then I feel as they flutter away. I had them right there, but there’s that gas station on 23rd and Jackson St. with the little old Mexican man who always says I look like his little sister who lives in Tijuana. An awful place to live, he says, but his sister is all about the thrills and that place that only sells pozole on Sundays.

Anyway, I want to stop by before the adventure starts to purchase the most stereotypical car item I can think to own: fuzzy dice. I see them there all the time, but never had a reason to buy a pair… with money. Cash. Back pocket…

I squint my eyes as if to locate an object in the distance. I push hard on my brain to function a correlation. I want to say something. Why won’t the words come to me? I know I was just thinking about buying fuzzy dice from the sweet old Mexican man. I should ask him where the best place to get pozole is. I can’t until my truck is fixed. Goddamn it, my truck is broken.

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That’s Phil for you! Man, I could use a drink right now. Do you think they have purple fuzzy dice?

I pause and focus on my breathing.

I need my medication, but the backup is somewhere at home. One pill, blue pill—time for a refill. The rush of complex ideas, observations, and feelings begin to boil in my head. At the top, my mom is on the bedroom floor surrounded by a halo of vodka bottles. That was five years ago. I wonder why she gave up. Was it inevitable?

“I’m sorry,” I tell the truck dealer, whose name I now recall, “I’m so sorry, Rick. Thank you for the truck, but I have to go now.”

“Go where? What about the truck?” he says. I’m stupid for thinking I could have survived outside this little town.

“I’ll come back for it. I need to get something from home.”

I turn to walk away, when Rick’s voice calls my attention back.

“Hey, Mindy, you almost forgot your keys!” he says, “They were in the door of the truck. Have to be careful next time.”

Next time, I will be careful. Next time, I’ll have it figured out.

I take the bus home, which is an hour-long stop and go ride full of curious people, service dogs you can’t pet, creepy men with eye twitches, and old ladies taking seats from people who have bad deeds to make up for. Then I see my house, but I won’t admit defeat. Adventure still awaits! Hopefully it will wait for me.

I walk into the small blue shack I’ve labeled as home.

Sprawled half on and half off the couch is a man I don’t know— another one of mom’s new prescriptions. He hardly acknowledges me, clearly embracing the father-figure ideal. I don’t hov-

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er too long. You never know where his other kinks lie and how long it’s been since he’s had his fix.

My mom had a fling with the truck dealer once—Rick— but that fizzled out. He stayed a bit, and then he left.

“Your mom doesn’t think it’s working out,” he said to tenyear-old me. Rick doesn’t know that the ten-year-old girl with big dreams and small feet is now truck-buying me. I guess my mom isn’t the only one he didn’t help.

I make it to my room and force myself to focus on one thought, so I can concentrate on searching for my back-up medication. It’s been 4 hours since I last took it. I’m in the steady decline when my brain reaches out to grasp the remnants of my last pill like a kid catching butterflies. Maybe I am still a caterpillar. That truck is supposed to be my cocoon. I giggle as I say it: I bought a truck. His name is Phil. I bought a truck. I swallow a pill.

31

AMIR HASHEMIZAD Electrical Engineering

K

urt kicked against the chipping concrete to put feeling back into his feet. It was freezing outside, the central heating hadn’t worked since the Ford administration (a time no one could remember the details of), and they were running out of odds and ends to burn. Lou had just finished reducing a sad art-deco chair to extremely well-lacquered toxic splinters, and gingerly placed each piece of kitschy pine into the stove, an eye to the geometry of burning fuel... there was only so much heat you could get out of a makeshift-makeshift, recycled metal built into the secondhand burner, now masticating on spare parts... but they tried, and it had to be enough.

The day had ended like all days they had spent up in the tower, the mostly abandoned residential nightmare overlooking decaying cityscape the two - along with a few other vague shadows – now called home. They had foraged for parts, settled in the least

32 AMIR HASHEMIZAD

poorly-stocked and bare floor, and set up camp, after being forced by demolition from their previous tenement a while back.

A wire mesh wastebasket that lay tipped over a power strip cast deep red fishnet shadows across the floor and littered throughout the stained studio hardwood was every piece of ancient and long-lost media paraphernalia, from Betamax to Polaroid, Compact Disk to Kodachrome.

In the corner just outside the shattered door to the freezing balcony lay Kurt’s greatest creation. Mead.

Honey’d fermentations of godly ichor, a concoction spent simmering near-two months away from the elements by the stove, deep exotic musk seeping through the close space... He had two jugs outside, exposed to the frost, busy freezing down to a condensed ephemera. Kurt sloughed off the ice and put both jugs over the sheet metal precariously balancing on the stove.

Lou gave him a disgusted look before taking the jugs off the hot metal, pouring them into watered-off cans, and placed them back, rotating to optimal real-estate. Shaking his head, he went back to breaking off wood.

The stove creaked, and the metal announced tik tik tik... from rivets through conjoined sheets warping in the chill, deflecting the symphony of temperature gradients down the deep and infinite roots of cracks, buckles, and seams, before an imperceptible shift suddenly suffocated the sound.

Kurt opened his mouth to speak but the false-start caught in his throat with a light gurgle. Coughing, he tried again.

“Bud was on the news today.” Lou stuffed his hands into a susurrus of clothing layers. He raised an eyebrow.

“Did he bite it?” For all his gruffness, Lou seemed concerned.

DEAD AIR 33

“No, cops were called on him a dozen times in one night... he kept going somewhere else... and they kept coming.” Kurt shrugged, or shivered. “They said that he ‘escaped from police custody’ and ran off.” Lou raised the other eyebrow.

“Code for ‘walked away before we realized we could charge him’.”

“He’ll pop up on the skid, or maybe around City Station, we should...” Something loud fragmented against the stoves hearth, ringing off a scattering harmonic buzz. The two cans and their precious contents precariously wobbled. “...probably go see him.”

“Bud’ll be fine.” Lou repositioned the cans to a more secure perch. “He’s tough and slippery.”

“It helps to have the lowest profile imaginable.”

“We know him, everyone’s probably seen him.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I do.”

Suddenly everything flashed to bright purple. A billboard facing them, bluer than any ocean (and brighter than any day), mediated the electric red haze into the harsher tone of a gentler color.

Lou walked to the opposite end of the now maroon and equally dilapidated hovel-on-high, shutting away the exposed crack of the tarpaulin they used to seal everything away. The unholy undulating aura was extinguished, leaving to their unadjusted eyes only the memory of purple along with a miasma of greens and reds flittering into epicycles in the dark.

Lou turned with visible confusion.

“Since when do you watch the news.” Kurt cleared his throat again.

“I try to keep up.” To this Lou took affront.

34 AMIR HASHEMIZAD

“Keep up with what? ‘So and so did this and that and here’s a dozen people paid to not know anything talk about it for three hours’.”

“Well...” “’We bombed such and such country, and people on the street can’t even find it on a map!’.” Lou made sure to layer on the condescension. “... more of an indictment of the...” “’Here’s ten experts who can find it on a map, and here’s why they all agree with the bombing!’.” Kurt felt the admonishment as he hadn’t in a long time. Lou might be a hopeless cynic (they were all hopeless) but he had a point.

Turning his gaze towards the tarpaulin, Kurt made it transparent to draw the harsh light into his minds-eye, taking survey of the metal scape below. Rusting gears of ancient machinery, frame well maintained, pruned and well-tuned... but the vast invisible turning of the dynamo degraded all the little cogs and spindles, crankshafts and flywheels, grinding them apart as the great whole spun...

“The screens make a good distraction you know, walking in the cold, bored staring at the glass.” Kurt made sure to add a small note of defiance into that last clause.

“You’ve got me there.” Lou walked over to check on the stove, and Kurt decided to beam at his little victory, ignoring how easily it was won.

Kurt felt the low growl of his stomach, wake-up call dulled from too few pickups. He reached through layers of cloth and nylon and produced a three-inch-long cable of spaghetti dowels, ten or fifteen held together by a rubber band. They had a stove, but

DEAD AIR 35

Kurt liked to chew. He offered some to Lou, who politely accepted and motioned to the brew.

“I think it’s done. And it’s time too.” Lou and Kurt poured the portions of warm liquid back into the jugs, placing the hot metal onto the floor, the universal pantry. They walked over to the balcony, taking turns pushing aside the thick tarpaulin from the empty doorframe with a free hand, using the other to pull the jugs close to their chests.

Everything telescoped down to getting warm.

A leftover city blinked nervously below, weak lights stuttering between smog and dense vapor. Take in the fire-lit billboards, advent marquees, angry helicopter eyes... they counted blackout window clusters as they moved the debris into a more comfortable configuration. Kurt brought out the radio from his second-to-top coat and perched it on a shattered flowerpot. They sat down exhaling two final vapor trails of exhaustion. Lou waited for Kurt to finish setting up the radio before they clinked glass and took long swigs. It had come out better than their last batch, thanks to some miracle canned peaches they came across, which added a strange but pleasant minty-citrus note (‘Metallic Zest’, they coined).

Suddenly from the radio the screeching of a slowing subway car filled their warming faces. To them it was music. Just as suddenly, the roaring stopped, dead air interpolating hushed voices rushing the background...

SHZ...Z...elcome to the Subway, bringing you the best of the underground...SHZ........................................................................

The radio sparked forth a whine, pitch winding down to nor-

36 AMIR HASHEMIZAD

mal from the pirate transmission.

Sorry ‘bout that folks, old operator, new equipment.....................

Yeah Hank gets all confused by the blinking lights.....................

You try figurSHSHSHSHSH what thSHSHSHSHSHSHSHSHSHS Their custom radio automatically switched frequencies, evading the hungry jamming signal that was always booming down from the heavens. ow... that was fast, some you dirty folks out there gettin’ W their thirty pieces from the feds, huh?..........................................

Imagine spending your day huddled over a speaker, some shitty RDF fiddling with knobs and buttons, trying to stop a couple of idiots from yelling into a microphone........................

S’alright... when the FCC finally puts us up against the wall, I got some choice words they can bleep out...................................

Neon arclight softly pulsed through the wispy air, brandishing a liquid spectrum through the multitudinous night. News conglomerates flashed logos that flickered in the dark, and far, far down below billboards advertised the latest nostalgia flick, coming soon.

Well, our guest today needs no introduction... you’ve seen him moaning on the side of the road, collecting trash till dawn, and being eccentric... here’s... what did you want your fake name to be?...................................................................

DEAD AIR 37

Bud, said a dim voice, faint out of the sonorous crackle. ere’s Bud, and he’s gonna educate you all on some of the best H dives, from the post office to the pier. Bud?.................................

“To Bud!” Kurt raised a jug, steam lingering in air.

“To Bud!” They warmed themselves with the thick ambrosia. The wind dulled into a slow chill without a whisper, and little shards of light speckling dark glass and steel continued to blink out without anyone noticing.

39

CONOR WALSH English Major

“I

mean really, Will—when are you going to find yourself a wife?”

William Bellstein, Jr. brought his napkin to his mouth, making a show of wiping it to hide his irritation. His teeth glinted in what he hoped was a winning smile as he put the napkin down. “Oh, Ma, I’m just waiting for the right girl, that’s all.”

Something contorted in his gut as the words left his mouth, but he funneled the grimace of pain into an even wider smile.

Fanny Bellstein was a stout woman with a perpetual look of agitation and crocodilian sorrow, as if she thought the entire world was trying, at every waking moment, to ruin her life and her life alone. Her small eyes, her most notable feature, were buried in her face. Even now the skin around them crinkled, as if preparing for her to burst into tears. “You said that last month, and you said it the month before. At this rate we’re never going

40 CONOR WALSH

to have any grandchildren. William, can’t you talk some sense into your son?” Her eyes bored into her husband.

“Eh. He’s a busy man,” said William Sr., looking down at his plate. He was nearly twice the size of his wife, though only a couple inches taller. Despite the size difference and the husky nature of his speech, his entire body quaked whenever her eyes were upon him. Both he and his son were fully aware that beneath Fanny’s pathetic demeanor lurked a fanged beast. “The factory takes up a lot of time he’d have for family. Doesn’t it, son?”

Will nodded vigorously. “Yes.” It didn’t; there usually wasn’t much work for him to do as a technician. The threshers worked swimmingly four days out of five, the generators only went out for a few minutes every month, and to his knowledge, no one had ever had to replace any of the pistons on the automatic wire cutter. But it wasn’t as if he could tell his mother the truth. “I’m swamped, Ma, from seven in the morning to… ten in the evening.” The pause, though a lie, wasn’t brought on by guilt. Will placed a hand on his side.

“I can’t believe you’d have the gall to lie right to my face! Don’t you care about your own mother?” Fanny’s thin lips dipped into an exaggerated pout. “Daisy Fellerson and Myra Burnham both heard from their sons that you go home every day right at five.

And the few times any of my other girlfriends have seen you around town, you’re always by yourself. Never with a girl.” Her crinkled eyes suddenly widened, and she leaned in closer. “William… you aren’t… gay, are you?”

Will snorted. “No, Ma.” That was true, although it didn’t much matter. “Just so we’re clear though, I wouldn’t have pulled the strings to get those boys their jobs if I knew they were just

UNDER MY SKIN 41

gonna spy on me.”

“They aren’t spying, they’re—” Will suddenly spasmed and bent double in the same motion, slamming a fist down on the table. A burst of clattering silverware and clinking plates echoed through the room.

His mother froze in shocked surprise. He could feel the eyes of the other restaurant patrons upon him.

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah. Think I might have a kidney stone.” He tried to sit up and grimaced, doubling back over.

“Tough it out, son. Don’t be a pussy,” said his father.

“I’m going to head to the bathroom. Be back soon.” His parents and most of the restaurant stared at him as he stumbled out of his chair and hobbled toward the lobby.

His mother’s words echoed bitterly in his head, cutting through the pain like a laser. Why don’t you have a wife?

Both she and his father had moved to Cleveland only a couple of days after he left home. That was six years ago and he’d seen them every Sunday since. He’d endured their questions every Sunday since. When are you going to find a job? Then, when are you going to move out of that filthy apartment? Why didn’t you get a promotion? Don’t you have any friends? Did you buy a gun yet?

Will ran directly into a waitress, who he hadn’t seen around the corner, knocking the tray from her hands and spilling cheap whiskey and wine all over both of them.

“Oh, shit!” she hissed, staring at him with a moment of unbridled hatred before it was again absorbed by the facade of hospitality. “Apologies, sir.”

42 CONOR WALSH

He opened his mouth to offer to help and felt a fresh burst of agony like electric tendrils snaking through his body. Without another word he darted away, leaving the woman to pick up the broken glass.

The bathroom was across the lobby. He entered without hesitation, passing an old man at the sink who gave him a rather strange look as he pushed into the mercifully unlocked handicapped stall. He turned the bolt and unbuttoned his jacket and blouse while the agony worsened. He pressed against the far wall, away from the door, and felt the sweat beading on his brow.

The door to the bathroom slammed, announcing the departure of the old man.

Will looked down at his now-bare chest, craning his neck to seek the source of his billowing agony.

As he watched, the flesh of his abdomen pushed out a little to the right of his belly button. It looked as if a finger, maybe twice as large as a thumb, was pressing through his skin like a child might probe a cake.

And then the flesh opened, like a flower, and he was looking at a red, worm-like creature. Its body was smooth and damp, soaked with blood and severed muscle ligaments. The worm bore no features aside from a single black eye in the center of its face, which was slitted like a cat’s. Below this, a gash-like mouth was lined with razor-sharp teeth.

“Can you give it a rest?” Will asked, frowning at the worm.

“Dinner’s difficult enough without your interference, thanks.”

He heard its response in his head: TEAR THE FLESH YOU HATE THEM KILL THEM TEAR THEM TO BITS

UNDER MY SKIN 43

“I don’t hate them. They’re family,” Will articulated, calmly.

As per usual, the grating voice—or whatever it was—tried his patience. “And I’m not particularly interested in killing anything, except maybe a liter of scotch after this.”

THEY DEMAND EVERYTHING THEY GIVE LITTLE THEY ARE— “That’s about enough of that.” Will grabbed the worm’s rounded face with two fingers, being careful to avoid the spiked mouth, and shoved it back into his body. The pain, which had abated slightly during their conference, flourished anew.

As he reached down to button his shirt back up, another spot of skin pillowed out. Will prepared to shove the red worm back in—he really needed a better system for this—but as the skin opened he was not met by a single eye and razor teeth. It was a worm, but this one was black as night, glistening without color, and bore a wicked, serrated blade upon its end.

Before he could do anything it spoke. Its voice was almost a squeal: Ignore that one. Your way of doing is fine. Continue your feeding.

Will opened his mouth to respond but the door to the men’s room opened again. Will waited patiently for the new entry to urinate, wash his hands, and leave. The instant the door slammed shut, his eyes slitted, and his lips twitched into a grimace. “If you’re trying to get into my good graces, you’re about six years too late, bud.”

You should stop coming to these events, blood-bag. You should stop going to the metal house. Stay at your own. Never move. Your body is so much more… agreeable, when it is inert.

44 CONOR WALSH

“That sounds more familiar,” Will grumbled, shoving the other worm back in as forcefully as he could without slicing his hand on the blade.

For a moment he frowned down at his bloodied abdomen, at the somehow-unbroken flesh where the creatures had surfaced moments before. Before either could surface elsewhere he hastily wiped the blood away with toilet paper and re-buttoned his shirt and blouse. Ideally, it wouldn’t stain.

Will left the men’s room and managed a single step before the pain became unbearable. They weren’t worth it. He turned on his heel and made for the front door, fishing his phone out of his pocket as he walked.

“Yes—hi, Ma. Everything’s fine, yeah, I’m just headed home.

Not feeling too well. No, it’s not because of you guys! I just — no, Ma, honest. I’m sick. Barfed everywhere. I’m not a pussy, Dad, I just don’t think throwing up on everyone around me is a great idea. Yeah, you too. Bye.” By the time he reached his sedan the pain was hardly a pinprick.

“Bellstein. You’re needed.”

Will sat up a little straighter on his toolbox. The Associate Foreman, whose name he had never learned, stood in the doorway. The Foreman was a giant of a man, his head nearly brushing the ceiling whenever Will saw him walking through the factory, which wasn’t often. Usually, he haunted the corporate offices that sat suspended above the factory like the nests of some great, rectangular bird. His voice had always reminded Will of the sounds electric pencil sharpeners make when jammed.

UNDER MY SKIN 45

“What’s the situation?” Will asked.

“It’s McMann’s office. Again. Her intercom’s on the fritz.”

“I guess that explains why she didn’t just call me.”

“You’re a real card, Bellstein.” The Associate Foreman left Will’s supply closet.

Will darted up, toolbox in hand. As he crossed the dirty, gray, concrete hallways of Ashland Pipe Cleaners, Inc., he felt the telltale pricks in his stomach, and fought to ignore them.

Not today.

He was the only one in the freight elevator this afternoon, and as the hulking contraption of steel girders and metal chainlinks shuddered, he whistled a show-tune from the movie Guano. An animated children’s movie about singing bats, the film was awful and the songs were even worse, but the worms seemed to hate it, which made putting up with “It’s Better Upside-Down” for the hundredth time worth it.

The hallways on the ground level were just as unadorned and dirty as the ones beneath the factory, but they were at least tiled and wallpapered. Will picked up the pace as the worms, sensing the chemical fumes of dyes and melting fat, began to stir.

With the worms more on his mind than the path before him, Will failed to see a cart laden with pipe cleaners swing into the T-junction before him. He adjusted course at only the last moment, narrowly avoiding upsetting the precariously balanced cargo.

“Watch it, asshole,” barked the man pushing the cart, a thin fellow with patchy hair and a pair of goggles strapped to his head.

With a flash of anger, Will realized that the man was Brian Fellerson—a man he’d recommended to the company at his moth-

46 CONOR WALSH

er’s behest who was, apparently, only here to spy on him. Will nodded to him and darted around, feeling a stab of pain on the right side of his abdomen.

KILL HIM. “First good idea you’ve had in months,” Will murmured.

“What’d you say?” Fellerson spat, whipping around. His cart, continuing to roll, struck a wall and instantly overturned. Hundreds of pipe cleaners rolled in every direction.

“Oh, fuck me.” Fellerson turned again, his eyes on the cart and the hundreds of stark-white cleaners littering the hallway.

Before he could re-focus on him, Will darted into the main elevator and hit the button for the 8th floor.

“Hey, where—” The doors closed.

Will felt the small smile on his face dip away. He looked down at his abdomen and saw a spot of blood, and that the side of his shirt was extending out. He frowned. “I told you bastards not to bother me when other people are around. That was a bad spot back there.”

THE BLOODBAG SCORNS YOU HE MUST DIE HE MUSTWill punched himself in the stomach just as the elevator stopped. Sixth floor. McMann’s office was on the eighth. That was fine, he could— The doors slid open and, for the first time in memory, he felt the worm push out against his hand. Because standing between the open doors was Eileen McMann.

Eileen was very pretty.

She looked almost as shocked to see him as he was to see her, but recovered in hardly a second. “Oh, hi Bellstein. You’re pretty

UNDER MY SKIN 47

quick on your toes — I only put out that request about an hour ago.” She stepped into the elevator as she spoke, stopping beside him. She was well-dressed in a cotton turtleneck and matching jacket; her hair was drawn back in a tight ponytail, and her dark eyes seemed to see a little too much into him. Will couldn’t help but notice that she smelled wonderful.

Though neither the pain nor the worms’ attempts to force their way into open air abated, Will forced a small smile. His eyes flicked away from Eileen’s bare ankles. “I like to be prompt.”

“Yeah? Bullman told me it took you three days to fix the leak in his office.” Her soft, dark eyes probed him. Teeth sank into his hand. The elevator began to rise again.

“I… uh… I mean,” Will sputtered, trying to gain some kind of handle on the dozen different thoughts spinning through his head. “Who’s… Bullman?” he managed to sputter.

“The Assistant Foreman.”

“Oh.” He had already forgotten the name. “Yeah, I’m not — not the biggest fan of that guy.” Shit, that was too honest. Hopefully she won’t tell the Foreman.

“So you’re only prompt with people you like. Got it.” Was she smiling? He fought the urge to turn to look at her, lest she see that his now-bleeding hand was desperately pressed to his still-bleeding side.

The elevator dinged, momentarily saving him from one of the dozen awkward facets of the situation and he darted into yet another hallway.

The top floor was nicer than the bottom floors, but still bore the appearance of a factory. He knew without asking that McMann’s office was at the end of the hallway and made a beeline

48 CONOR WALSH

for it. Blood was dripping down his chest.

“Hang on, I’ve got it.” McMann arrived beside him, pushed a key into the lock and entered without a word. Will, relieved that she hadn’t focused on him, zipped his jacket shut and followed.

Her office was as he remembered it: cleanly kept but cluttered. One wall was taken up by a vast bookcase filled with a hundred different, well-loved volumes on economics and materials engineering and sales. Her oaken desk carried a modern-looking computer with a screen hardly thicker than a piece of paper, a score of files stacked in a neat pile, and an archaic black intercom machine. The A/C unit in the corner whirred roughly; something clattered within it.

“Air conditioning’s broke too, huh?” Will said. Focusing on a practical problem drove some of the fuzzy thoughts from his head and quieted the worms. “Should be an easy enough fix.”

“I hope so. It gets pretty hot in here.”

“I’d bet it does,” Will muttered, and felt one of the worms push against his stomach.

He unplugged the unit and removed the cover without much trouble. It only took him a few moments to find the issue: a thrashed ballpoint pen was wedged between the fan blade and the grill.

Will glanced over his shoulder and saw McMann’s eyes shift to the book in her hands. His face burning, he plucked the pen out and replaced the cover. Once he plugged the machine back in, it returned to its silent whirring.

“Pretty handy, Bellstein.”

“Truly. Taking pens out of electronics is the pinnacle of what one can hope to attend as an engineer,” Will quipped, though he

UNDER MY SKIN 49

avoided looking at her. “The intercom’s busted, too?”

“Totally.”

She stepped back from the desk as he knelt down by it. As he leaned forward his pulse quickened, and the abdominal pain bloomed. The intercom wasn’t broken; the power cord wasn’t plugged in.

“McMann, this thing’s unplugged.”

“Eileen. My friends call me Eileen.”

Will swallowed as he plugged the intercom back in. It wasn’t that he couldn’t take the hint, and he’d felt the click with Eileen since the first time he met her. But letting her in would be dangerous. He opened his mouth to decline, but the words that came out seemed as if they’d sprung from a hidden well in his mind: “Now that I think about it, Eileen, I just can’t make heads or tails of what’s wrong with this. Tell you what — there’s this hardware store on 4th and Maine. We could go there after work.

You could help me pick out a new model. And there’s this little Italian restaurant down the block from it. If you’re not doing anything, maybe we could—” “Can’t say I’ve ever heard a hardware-store-based pickup line before. Here.”

He turned to see Eileen hand him a sticky note. On it was scrawled an address: 44022 Westminster Street.

“I’m free any time after seven.”

His stomach was ablaze in fresh pain. His throat was dry. He crawled out from beneath the desk and straightened to his full height, trying to put on a confident figure. “How’s eight sound?”

Her eyes were focused on her computer, but she was smiling a thin-lipped, knowing smile, as if he’d let her in on some vast

50 CONOR WALSH

secret. If only she knew what she was walking into. He wanted to tell her, to give her some kind of warning, but the words wouldn’t come.

“Sounds good, Bellstein.”

“Will. If I had any friends, that’s what they’d call me.”

Her laughter was surprisingly full and loud, as if loaded with hidden meaning. “All right, Will. I’ll see you in a few hours.

Be sure to wash the blood off before you pick me up.”

She’d noticed. The light feelings in Will’s chest vanished in an instant, absorbed by a flurry of dread and familiar stabbing sensations. “Right,” he said simply. He gave her a nod, forced a smile, and left the office.

Don’t go out, blood-bag. Once this one knows you for what you really are— “Shut up,” Will muttered, swatting himself on the side. He could already feel fresh blood soaking through his shirt.

An alarm roared in the darkness. Will, who had not been asleep in his armchair, leaned over and silenced his phone.

He had been sitting in his apartment ever since he left work, the blinds drawn, the lights off. Don’t get up, whispered the black one.

Without a word of response Will rose to his feet and slowly entered the bathroom. His fingers twitched and the lights flicked on, momentarily blinding him. When he opened his eyes he saw himself standing in the mirror, pale and shirtless. It was amazing to see, aside from his sordid expression, how normal he looked.

No one would ever guess at the unwanted passengers within his abdomen.

UNDER MY SKIN 51

As he stared at himself in the mirror, the black one burst forth.

She will see your shame and flee in horror.

He peered at its reflection in the mirror, at the worm’s narrow, glistening form. If he saw something like this come out of another person’s abdomen, what would he do? How would he respond? How could anyone be expected to cultivate a relationship with him?

Will’s phone shrieked an alarm from the next room over, but he ignored it.

That’s it. Let that one go. She would never love you.

“Enough!” Will shouted, slamming his fist into his gut so hard that he doubled over. “You.. little fuckers don’t control me!”

He straightened and yanked the medicine cabinet open so forcefully that the mirror shattered against the opposite wall.

Shards of glass rained against his bare side. Rifling through the bottles of painkillers and ointments and antidepressants, he tore out an ancient first aid kid and smashed it open. There wasn’t much in it — a roll of gauze, a few wool pads, the trash from a dozen used Band-Aids.

With uncertain, awkward hands, he wrapped each of the pads around his stomach, rolling layer after layer of gauze around it. By the time he was done he looked like he’d been set upon by a truck-full of drunken paramedics. But hopefully it would hold them back.

He left his bathroom and struggled into a dress shirt and a pair of slacks. It was probably a little on the nicer side for a shitty hole-in-the-wall Italian joint, but it was something. Aside from a few wayward lines perpendicular to his waist, it wasn’t obvious

52 CONOR WALSH

that he was wearing anything under his shirt.

The worms were anything but quiet as he left his apartment and took the elevator to the garage, as he took his truck onto Main and maneuvered through the crowded end-of-work traffic jams. Will pulled up to the address that Eileen had given him a few minutes past eight. Her house, though located in a quiet neighborhood a few miles from town, was surprisingly small and rustic for a woman of her stature. If asked, Will would have guessed she made something in the vicinity of a couple hundred thousand a year. Maybe pipe cleaners weren’t raking it in quite as much as they used to.

As his truck ambled to a stop, the front door to the house opened and Eileen stepped out into the cool evening. She was wearing a dress that matched his suit’s formality. It wasn’t just an evening dress, but a full-on gown. The top, which was sleeveless but clung to her neck and shoulders, was a sharp crimson, but everything below her waist was white. The fabric of her skirt looked soft and fragile.

She waved as she approached the pickup, opened the side, and stepped in. For some time she fought to shove her skirt into the passenger seat. It was an uncomfortable silence, punctuated by the fluttering of fabric.

After some time she managed to push her dress down and slam the door shut. Will turned away from the curb.

Break the silence, you idiot, his mind spat. Say something.

“You’re looking… I, uh, like your dress,” he sputtered. Something writhed.

“Yeah?” Though his eyes were glued to the road ahead, he saw her looking at him. “It was my mother’s. I haven’t broken it

UNDER MY SKIN 53

out in a long, long while.”

“That’s a surprise. I’d think you’d go on a lot of dates.” He was hardly aware of the words as they left his mouth, but once they had they seemed to hang in the air as if they had been burned there. He coughed. “I mean, it’s not because—like, you really carry yourself well, and I think—” Eileen jerked up and grabbed the steering wheel.

The truck jerked hard to the right and Will reflexively slammed the brakes, nearly dashing them both into the dashboard. Someone honked. As the truck slowed down, he caught sight of what they had almost hit through the passenger window; traffic had backed up on the intersection that turned on to 4th Street. And he hadn’t even noticed it.

“I’m sorry,” he said after a few moments, as he turned off 4th and into the restaurant’s parking lot. As the truck lurched to a stop, he fought the urge to double over in his seat. It wasn’t just out of embarrassment. The worms were loving this. “I didn’t—” “It’s all right, Will.” Eileen sounded earnest, though a little shaken. “But next time, I’m driving.”

Will stepped out of the car and skirted around the side, hoping to help Eileen out. But she was already on her feet, smoothing her skirts. As he came closer, she straightened, and put on a wide smile. “We heading in?” He watched her lips as they moved; she was wearing a lot of makeup.

“Sure.”

They were only at the restaurant an hour. Will was distantly aware through the entire meal that the two of them were egregiously overdressed, that he should have picked a restaurant that

54 CONOR WALSH

didn’t have a gigantic mural of a man in a carnivale mask on every wall, that he probably shouldn’t have powered through three glasses of wine in the first twenty minutes.

But between the booze and Eileen’s attention, the worms went from positively thrashing to dead silent in a matter of minutes. By thirty minutes in he was able to forget, for the first time in those long six years, that there was anything but the two of them at the table.

They spoke little and ate quickly; Will hardly tasted his food.

A blind kind of excitement burned in his guts where there was normally only pain. Somehow, he knew that she felt it too.

“You know, I think I’ve been here before,” Eileen said, after the waiter came with the bill.

“Yeah?”

“Ex-boyfriend took me here. For my birthday.”

Will reddened. Shit.

She saw his expression and smiled. “It’s all right. Long time ago, and he didn’t stay long. Besides, there aren’t many places this side of Cleveland that don’t have rat shit in the food. And maybe it’s the wine talking, but you’re looking a lot better than he ever did.” She winked at him. “Maybe we should just pay with cash, get back to my place quicker. Wouldn’t want to let a girl’s excitement cool, right?”

Will would have felt the color rise in his cheeks if they hadn’t already been reddened by the drink. “I’ve never really had the opportunity to learn that sort of thing.”

A strange, sad smile darkened Eileen’s face. “I’ve never had the opportunity to teach anyone.”

“Well, if you haven’t cooled off completely, maybe we could

UNDER MY SKIN 55

go back to your place. I’m a pretty quick learner.”

Where was this bravado coming from? He should drink more often.

To his surprise he saw her smile fall away, becoming a thin narrow line that was harder to read than any technical manual.

Had he overstepped? It didn’t seem possible. And her words that followed only muddled things further: “I sure hope that’s true.”

They hailed a cab back to the house on Westminster Street.

The twenty-minute drive was dead silent, and queerly solemn. Whenever Will tried to catch Eileen’s eye she would glance away, out the window. The comfortable, loaded silence that had filled the restaurant had transformed into what he couldn’t help but think was an impending storm that would burst the moment they arrived at Eileen’s house.

Through it all he could feel the worms, which were all the more active after their long silence. Their voices—or whatever they were—were sufficiently muffled by the layers of gauze and cotton pads. But the realization of what was to come loomed alongside the storm on the horizon. Could he convince her to let him keep his shirt on? No. He shook his head viciously at the thought, and was momentarily relieved that Eileen only had eyes for the window.

No, he couldn’t form a relationship based on lies. He’d have to tell her the truth, even if that meant that no relationship would ever form.

The cab arrived at the small house; Eileen paid the man before Will could offer and stepped out. Will saw her motion for

56 CONOR WALSH

him to follow and enter the house.

He entered soon after.

It was just as simple and plain inside as it had been out; the front door led directly into a merged living room/kitchen. He saw that the living room bore a single armchair and a TV on a stand; the kitchen had a fridge and a stove and a sink. Everything was remarkably clean, which only accentuated the stark emptiness of it all.

“Eileen?” Will called, his voice a choked murmur between the thrashing of the worms and his own uncertainty.

“In the back.”

The voice came from behind the refrigerator; Will stepped into the living room and saw a small rectangular doorway, hardly any wider than he was.

He crossed into a hallway that veered hard to the right. At the end of it he could see a door, slightly ajar; yellow light, soft and inviting, poured through the crack.

He stepped toward it, and let his hand hover over the doorknob. Once he pressed onward, there would be no turning back.

There’s already no turning back, blood-bag. You’ve already decided to make a fool of yourself.

Will let himself in.

It was a small room, with some other pieces of furniture in it. Will paid it all no mind; he only had eyes for the woman who sat, still clad in the same red dress, on the edge of an impeccably-made bed.

“Hey, so, uh...” he started, his throat constricting, his heart beating faster in his chest — here he went. “Before we… get up to anything, I figure there’s something I should probably… let

UNDER MY SKIN 57

you in on.”

Her eyes, clear and green, flashed toward him. His fingers, which hovered over the top button of his shirt, began to tremble. But they still did what needed to be done, unbuttoning each of the small white discs that kept his dress shirt together. The worms churned. He felt like he might vomit, or pass out.

But eventually it was open, and he threw it off his shoulders.

Her brow furrowed. Will considered picking up the shirt, throwing it over his shoulders, and bursting out the door.

“Did you… have a surgery, or something?”

Or something, he thought. “No.” Before she could ask anything else his fingers dug beneath the gauze and he pulled.

Both his sides burst open the instant the pressure was off, hurling the gauze and pads to the floor in twin geysers of blood.

The worms wriggled in the open air, twisting like severed limbs.

For once, they were silent. For once, the silence made it a thousand times worse.

Eileen paled. Her eyes traveled from one worm to the other.

Then, after a moment, she turned her head away as if to cough and shuddered vigorously. At one point she opened her eyes, glanced back, slitted them, glanced away, and shook her head all the harder.

Through the pounding in his head Will knew that the worms were silent and wondered at it. Were they embarrassed, perhaps? Stage fright? Struck dumb by the sight of another person, or perhaps by her disgust?

“I can just go,” he said, his voice quaking. “This is pretty… weird, I know...”

58 CONOR WALSH

To his immense surprise, Eileen gave a sharp shake of her head. “Come here,” she whispered, her voice soft.

“What?”

“Unzip me.”

“I… really?”

“It’s not what you think. Not yet, anyway.” Her voice sounded more stable than his, as if she had recovered from the shock, but was rich with gravity. A note of dread sang in his mind, and he followed her orders.

Something told him that the worms wouldn’t try to do anything to Eileen, but he kept his distance anyhow as he sat beside her on the bed. His fingers shook as he reached forward to grab the narrow strip of metal that was her zipper. He hesitated.

“It’s ok.”

He pulled. The dress split open, and in the light of the room he saw that it wasn’t red after all. It was sheer. It was translucent, just like Eileen’s skin.

He could see the blood pumping through her veins, could see the subtle contractions and movements of her muscles and ligaments as she breathed. He could see the bones of her shoulder-blades as they crept up her back and disappeared into normal skin just at the edge of her torso.

Will stared, too shocked to comprehend.

She leaned forward, touching her head to the bed as if in prayer, allowing the sleeves and ruffles of her dress to slip off.

Her skin was just as invisible all down the rest of her back. It was gone down to her elbows, down to her hips; it was looking at a diagram of the human muscular system, except most of the time you didn’t see the browns and the yellows and the reds of the

UNDER MY SKIN 59

body so clearly, and definitely not in their horrid, gristly motion.

Will fought the urge to vomit.

“You see?” Eileen said, turning, and Will saw that her face was intact but everything from her neck to her waist was bright red and white and yellow.

“I… see,” Will murmured, his head throbbing. The shock had worn off, though the horror persisted. He watched the blood flow inside Eileen’s body, and opened his mouth to ask questions.

How had this happened? How long had she dealt with it? Why was it just her torso, her neck? Could it change, could it worsen, like it did for him, when she was nervous? She hadn’t seemed so earlier, but maybe she had been all evening.

His mouth snapped shut before he could say anything. She wouldn’t have any answers, just as he had none.

“So what do you think?”

Will shrugged. “What did you think about the worms?”

There was a long pause. “They’re pretty horrifying, to be honest.”

“Deal-breaker?”

Eileen smiled. “No, I don’t think so.” But her eyes were focused on his bloody midsection, and the smile didn’t last long.

“What if you didn’t have your own horrible disfigurement?

Deal-breaker then?”

Her silence told him all he needed to know. Part of him wanted to be mad, but the rest of him knew that it would be much the same for him. He watched the bulging vein of her jugular pulse, watched the blood run like corn syrup through a puny tube, and felt his stomach lurch again.

He forced himself to look away. “So. What do we do?”

60 CONOR WALSH

Eileen thought for a moment. “I have an idea.” She stood and crossed the room, her dress slipping off her body. Will watched her as she walked, watched the movements of her muscles — literally. But only until the light in the room winked out.

He felt her come nearer, heard the rustle of the sheets as she felt toward him on the bed. In the darkness he felt her heat and felt the worms recede into him. There was pain, but not much.

Not as much as usual.

“Is it better this way?”

“Not sure. But it’s worth a try.”

Her lips pressed to his and her body followed. In that moment he was only aware of the two of them.

61

63

KENDRA COBURN English Major

T

e n minutes.

Time was running out.

Ten minutes until they kicked in the door and dragged him out of his home.

Or someone’s home, anyway.

Ten minutes.

Blair opened the fridge. Whiskey was his drink of choice, but at this point he’d settle for anything with a buzz. There were two cans of Mello Yello, a quart of muculent skim milk and a children’s carton of apple juice. Blair took both cans. He drank one immediately, finishing it in three long gulps. The other slid into the inside breast pocket of his coat. He didn’t bother with bringing the first Mello Yello to the bin. The empty can clattered to the floor with no one to care about it at all.

His stomach was still turning, so he went over to the sink.

64 KENDRA COBURN

Yellow sludge came up from his throat in thick, viscous ribbons. Vomiting didn’t help him feel much better, but it didn’t make him feel any worse, either. He took pleasure in examining his display in the sink. Slimy fingers of yellow reached towards the drain, racing each other into the empty void. Their acid stench was beginning to make him feel nauseous again, so he turned away.

The TV was already on when Blair came in. The voices inside hummed at a pastel volume. He disliked what was playing, but not enough to change the channel. Instead he laid across the corduroy couch, letting his legs dangle off the end. The other can of Mello Yello sloshed in his coat pocket.

He had placed himself with his back to the door—the one that they were going to kick in. It didn’t matter, or he didn’t care if it mattered, which was just the same.

As he lay there, Blair forgot that he wasn’t supposed to think. It was an honest mistake. His thoughts were like ribbons set carelessly into the wind, flittering away before he could catch them. He thought about all the good he had done in his life. There wasn’t much of it. Klara Bentley was about the only person he could think of who he had ever cared about more than himself. She didn’t know him too well—in fact, she didn’t know him—and besides that, she didn’t have a very nice set of tits. She reminded him of his sister in that way. But Blair had saved her all the same. Three years of walking down the same street and he had never so much as said a word to her until today. There wasn’t any good reason to do it. Maybe he just felt sorry for her was all, Klara Bentley and her small tits.

His eyelashes fluttered as he stared up at the ceiling. They

EVENT HORIZON 65

were particularly long and sometimes caught mist in them when it rained. No one had ever told Blair that he had beautiful eyelashes. He might not ever get the chance to know it. Or maybe it was one of those secret things that one knows but can never admit out loud. Drowsiness tugged gently at the edges of his vision. A moment of clarity passed over Blair, in which he understood the universe as a man understands the individual rhythm of his heart. It was nice. As his breathing slowed, he half-wondered whether Klara Bentley was feeling pleasant tonight too, wherever she was. The TV cut to commercial just as his eyelashes closed.

But Blair couldn’t have fallen asleep just then, even if he wanted. His mind was turning almost as fast as his stomach. He couldn’t shake the thought of Klara Bentley, who was too ugly to be a prostitute and too pretty to be a whore.

Shooting Damien had been the right thing to do. That much was true. Any man who hits his woman deserves to die.

Damien deserved to die painfully. Behind his eyelashes, Blair could see every moment of Damien’s death as if time had become an ouroboros, repeating itself endlessly. He remembered every particle of the moment so perfectly that he could relive it a hundred times in the minutes he had left if he so wished.

It was beautiful in a way that they could never take away from him. That much was true.

Commercials pleaded loudly for Blair’s attention. He rolled onto his side obediently, giving in to their command. It was all he had left of himself to give away. The Mello Yello had him feeling pretty good, so he hummed along to the Zest jingle.

Whoever made bar soap seem so fun deserved a raise, Blair

66 KENDRA COBURN

thought. People ought to care about inconsequential things from time to time.

Noises came from outside. Voices that he recognized. Blair took his time getting to his feet. There was no rush. Besides, he didn’t want to risk vomiting again. That would be pretty embarrassing if they came in to find him hunched over, vomiting onto his shoes, yellow bile seeping into his socks.

The only light in the room came from the TV. It made all the furniture transfigure into sloping blue creatures who watched him with contemptuous eyes. He turned it off, plunging the room into a grey darkness. Blair always thought that there was something kind of lonely about leaving the TV on when no one was going to watch it.

Outside, the voices fell silent. Blair turned to face the door, knowing just what was coming next.

He wondered whether Klara Bentley knew that saving her life was the only good thing he had ever done. He wondered if it mattered if she knew, or if she even cared. He couldn’t tell which was worse.

Seconds evaporated into moments. They kicked in the door, just like they said they would. Thousands of wooden splinters exploded towards Blair. He could see each of them individually, like looking at cells in a microscope.

They didn’t hesitate. No, they were too professional for that.

The can of Mello Yello in Blair’s breast pocket erupted in a carbonated hiss of color. Some of the aluminum collapsed inward, sinking through the cotton threads of Blair’s shirt and into the soft flesh of his chest.

The bullet stopped his heart instantly.

EVENT HORIZON 67

Blair collapsed to the floor in a sticky puddle of yellow and red.

69

ALEJANDRA ROBINSON Liberal Arts and Engineering Major

“L

adies and gentleman. Children of all ages,” In the middle of the square, heads turned to see a young girl, maybe no older than twelve or thirteen, standing with both hands raised high in the air. “You may be asking yourself what your life has led you to. You may be thinking that your life is meaningless, but I am here to tell you just how wrong you are.”

The girl spread her lips into a confident smile as she scrambled onto the planter box, her satchel showing a gleam of blue as she swung her leg on top.

A crowd gathered closer to her as murmurs of intrigue grew louder. A few women tore their eyes away from the set of diamond earrings on display while men quieted their chatter about business deals gone awry and the unusual heat they were feeling in Cincinnati. In the back of the crowd, a plain-looking boy of about fifteen watched in silence, spinning a pocket watch between

70 ALEJANDRA ROBINSON

his fingers. For a short moment, his eyes locked with the girl speaking, but he broke the connection just as fast as he made it.

As people came closer to the girl on the planter, she emptied her satchel, pulling out a small vial of blue liquid that seemed to be iridescent in the midday sun. She rolled it in between the palms of her hands before she extended the vial out towards the crowd.

“You see before you the key to all your problems. You, sir!” The girl nodded to a man standing in the back, whose hands were shoved so deep into the pockets of his pea coat that a hunch had formed near the top of his back. “What ails you?”

The man yelped as several pairs of eyes turned to look at him.

Underneath his wide brimmed hat, the girl could see his cheeks take on a shade of scarlet. “Um, well. My wife went back to her folks in Marietta. Took the kids and everything with her.” His clipped voice stuttered at every change in inflection as he dug the toes of his boot into the dirt. Noticing that some of the women glanced at him in pity, he off his hat and waved it in a fury, fanning his face.

The girl on the planter box snapped her fingers to pull back the onlookers’ attention. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re living in a divided world. Just three hundred miles south of us, you can own a person. President Pierce ain’t doing nothing to help us. But,” the girl uncorked the vial as a wisp of smoke rose from the lip. A small collective gasp emerged from the crowd and they stepped closer. In the back, the boy with the pocket watch circled the stragglers, getting just close enough that those standing on the outside of the crowd crept inward, but not enough that they turned to stare. “Just one drop of this, and your troubles will be forgotten.

You think your wife ain’t coming back, sir? One taste of the Felices

SALE WITH THE DEVIL 71

Fortuna and she’ll be begging to come back.”

One woman straightened her bonnet in confusion, glancing around at the others in the crowd. “Um, the what?”

“I’m glad you asked.” The girl cleared her throat and pressed her finger against the lip, pushing back up to reveal a silver-blue droplet on her finger. “The Felices Fortuna is a cure-all that with just one drop can grant you abundant luck to achieve your wildest dreams. President Washington used it to win the war. Jesus used it to rise from the dead. And of course, it caused a certain little girl named Eliza to be healed from cholera, when only our Lord could save her.”

The girl stuck her finger in her mouth, careful not to gag at the hint of acidity that now coated her tongue. As she pulled it back out, she gave another confident grin and corked the bottle back up. “And that little girl is here now, ready to give you just a taste of what the Felices Fortuna can do for you.” Whispers arose from the people below her, most accompanied by concerned faces and clicking tongues.

Behind the crowd, the boy with the pocket watch lifted his chin and cupped his hands to his mouth. “How much does it cost?”

Taking a beat, Eliza leaned in as the onlookers did the same, and she put a curved palm to her mouth. “Just five cents. Just the same amount you’d give at Sunday collection. But, instead of helping one soul, you can help thousands by spreading Felices Fortuna.”

The people below exchanged glances as their hands inched towards their pocketbooks, trading whispers amongst each other.

Within five minutes, nineteen offers had been made as Eliza stuck out her coin purse — a dirty, mud-caked thing that seemed to have suffered one too many drops in a puddle — to allow buyers

72 ALEJANDRA ROBINSON

to empty their pockets. As vials of Felices Fortuna left her satchel, they were soon replaced by silver coins, all spilled over each other like a well-earned feast. Within this one day, it was almost more money than she had seen in her life.

Through the corner of her eye, behind the rows of crowding people, the girl saw a flash of blue uniform and a long black stick attached to a hip. Standing a few feet behind the crowd stood a tall man flanked by two others, one with a clean-shaven face and long silver hair tied at the base of his neck, and the other with a patchy beard and an overgrown mustache. The man in the middle stood in front of the two, head held high and back straight. His face held a neutral expression, calm and authoritative, but as he came closer, she could see that his dark eyes were cold and unfeeling and, above all, determined. It didn’t take too long of living in Cincinnati to know that it was Inspector Jacob Mills, strong on the prowl against the backdrop of day.

Before she could react, there was the sound of shattering glass and a boyish, high-pitched cry of “Fire!”, before pandemonium broke out. The girl slammed the coin purse shut and shoved it back into her satchel before taking off, slipping under men who were scrambling for each other. She made it about a hundred feet before something grabbed at her wrist and pulled her back, eliciting an angry yelp from her.

“Let go of me!”

She tried to wrestle her arm away, but the grip was too strong.

Turning around, she raised her free hand to hit the stranger, stopping only when she saw a familiar face. “Jesus - Henry you dolt, don’t scare me like that.” Henry stuffed his pocket watch into his identical knapsack and gave a weak smile as an apology. Keeping

SALE WITH THE DEVIL 73

silent, he pulled her along, ducking and weaving between the flailing mess of people and away from Mills.

As they raced further away from the town square, the screaming quieted down, most likely after the crowd realized there was no fire anywhere in the city. “I feel a little bad breaking the tavern’s windows, but some poor bastard would have broken it sooner or later,” Henry told her as they left the square, turning down every street corner they could find. When it looked as though they had lost Inspector Mills, Henry took a deep breath and sighed, reaching for Eliza’s hand as they continued walking. He was a little older than she was, though not much taller. They could have been mistaken for twins—it delighted Eliza to be seen as fifteen and frustrated her older brother to no end, but it was Henry’s more cautious posture and quiet demeanor that set them apart.

They continued out of the city in silence, taking a moment every so often to turn a wary head to make sure they weren’t being followed. Within fifteen minutes or so, they had reached a towering, decrepit lumber mill, out of place amidst the rest of the modern architecture of the city and looking as if one good lightning strike or spark would send it toppling to the ground. It had been built within five years of Ohio becoming a state, but when it couldn’t compete with the expanding hub of Cincinnati, it was abandoned and left to rot for forty years. With no one to inspect or give a care about it, it had become Henry and Eliza’s home — the perfect place for equally abandoned children.

Eliza broke off from Henry’s grasp and pushed forward, sliding away a metal frame that leaned against the outside wall and revealed a hole just big enough for someone of their size to fit through. Crouching down, she slipped through the hole and into

74 ALEJANDRA ROBINSON

the open space of the mill. Henry followed after her before reaching out to draw the metal plate back over the space in the wall.

Against the opposite wall, a small pile of books, fruits, and maps sat on a dusty table. Henry slid his bag onto the table and emptied its contents. A handful of apples toppled onto the table along with a pear. Digging further into the bag, he pulled out a fistful of coins and, to Eliza’s surprise, an actual dollar bill.

“Where’d you get that?”

Henry pushed the pile of coins into her open bag, waiting for the clinking of metal to subside before speaking. “There was a fancy lady and with her baby by the dress shop. I just knocked its toy out of its hands and went into her bag when it started crying.” He shrugged as Eliza closed the bag, a slight frown on her face. She watched as he grabbed a pear and walked over to the other side of the room where a single dirtied blanket lay next to a pile of dull clothes. Groaning, he sat down against the wall and took a few bites of a pear before asking, “So how much did we get?”

Eliza shook her coin purse as she sifted through the piles of coins and the dollar bill. “Um, well, we got ninety-five cents from the oil thing—still tastes awful, by the way, even with the lemon in it—you got a dollar and fifty, so two dollars and forty-five cents.”

Henry pressed his head against the wall and sighed as he closed his eyes. “Great. We have maybe a month here at most, and we don’t even got enough to make it to San Diego.”

“We could freight hop,” Eliza offered, sitting down beside him.

“If I could make a couple more sales, we don’t even got to pay for a ticket. I’m good at running and jumping.”

With a hard laugh, Henry opened his eyes to stare at her.

“Maybe so, but I wouldn’t last a mile. Besides, I won’t let you. Pa

SALE WITH THE DEVIL 75

said I had to take care of you, and I can’t take care of you if you go off jumping on every train you see.”

The conversation drifted into silence after the mention of their father. Eliza knew that if Henry ever wanted to shut her up, all he had to do was mention their parents. During her speech about the wonders of the Felices Fortuna, the inkling of truth she gave was her experience with cholera. At eight years old, she spent the entire winter in bed near death, only being allowed to be seen by her parents while Henry had to stay as far away as he could.

Henry had to watch as his baby sister curled up in pain, sweating and delusional. By some miracle, Eliza got better, but at a cost. Just as she was getting better, her parents contracted her cholera. With just Henry to take care of both them and Eliza, they died within the year, leaving the two of them on their own.

Eliza didn’t like thinking about them all that much. She also knew that both her and Henry blamed themselves for their parents’ deaths, whether they ever mentioned it or not. The only time Henry said anything about it was when Alexander and Charlotte McIntire were being lowered into the ground in front of their children, while the doctor placed a hand on each of their shoulders.

“I should have taken better care of them,” she heard him whisper through teary eyes as his fingers clenched around their father’s pocket watch. “I should have done better.” Eliza never mentioned anything about it, because she knew that Henry could have done a better job taking care of their parents if she wasn’t around. It was an unspoken agreement never to talk about it.

When neither spoke for a couple of minutes, Eliza took another bite of her apple and slid closer to her brother, resting her head on his shoulder. “It didn’t take long for him to find us this

76 ALEJANDRA ROBINSON

time.” She felt Henry flinch under her cheek before leaning his head onto hers. After another moment of silence, he nodded and took a shaky breath.

“It’s why we have to leave soon.” His eyes drifted towards the table that held the maps and the few books of their parents they had left. “He knows we’re still in Ohio. I don’t know if he knows we’re heading for San Diego, but who knows what that slimy bastard knows about us?”

Throughout their time alone, Eliza and Henry had two constants. First, that wherever one went, the other wasn’t far behind.

Second, wherever they went, Inspector Jacob C. Mills trailed after them, bringing his crew of detectives—ones that specifically dealt in what Henry called “the orphan trade.” As factories sprang up across the United States, so did a need for workers, and there was no better place to look than where children whose nimble fingers could reach into machines where an adult’s hands couldn’t. It was Inspector Mills’ job to put the newly orphaned on orphan trains to factories in Boston, New York, and other cities along the coast. Of course, it meant that Eliza and Henry would be separated, which they both swore to each other would never happen. They ran away, and no matter what they did, Inspector Mills was always right behind them.

Eliza closed her eyes and hummed, letting her full weight be brought to the floor. “One more run, here. We can try the apothecary. They’ll usually buy any ointment or medicine you sell them, even if it’s a fake. They’ll just sell it right back at a higher price.”

She felt Henry nod beside her. “We sell to her, and then we’re gone. Don’t stop ‘til San Diego.”

“Don’t stop ‘til San Diego,” she repeated, another sentiment

SALE WITH THE DEVIL 77

leftover from her father’s gold rush fantasies. “We have twenty dollars total. We can get tickets west and see how far that takes us.

The less amount of time I have to put that vile thing in my mouth, the happier I feel—still a stupid name, by the way.”

Henry snorted as he flicked her on the forehead. “I ain’t the one telling you to do shit. Felices Fortuna just sounds something mystical. Like something stupid people would buy. You just ain’t stupid. Now go to sleep. I don’t want to hear your voice no more.”

“Shut up, idiot,” she responded just before she fell asleep.

The local apothecary was run by a woman who called herself Madame Susanna Lynch. She had no actual title or claim to any heritage, but everyone in Cincinnati didn’t seem to mind calling her Madame Susanna. She had just enough matronly charm to entice anyone to visit her whether they had the measles or the flu, but there was always a little piece of her that seemed saccharine and calculating, like her exterior was the honey laid to entrap flies. It was what made Eliza and Henry cautious to visit her, but as they glanced into their coin purse, they knew that their lack of funds outweighed their fear of her.

Eliza took only their money and two apples, along with a few extra vials of Felices Fortuna. Travelling heavy always made it difficult to run if anything went south, and it was just a day trip anyway. She slipped out through the hole in the wall as Henry covered it back up with the metal plate. Making sure she had all her things, she gestured towards town and asked, “Shall we?”

Henry nodded. “Let’s go.”

Within ten minutes they had reached Madame Susanna’s Apothecary, its gilded sign hanging upon the door, pristine but

78 ALEJANDRA ROBINSON

out of place with the rest of the street. Henry let out a puff of air before opening the door, letting Eliza walk in front of him. As they entered, they caught sight of a woman behind a counter with straight, pinned-back brown hair and a tall, almost skeletal frame.

Her cheeks seemed to be painted on with rouge, and her thin lips held the ghost of a smile. “Oh, you must be the ones selling the Felix Fortune?”

“Felices Fortuna, ma’am,” Henry said with the hint of a frown, keeping a hand clenched around his pocket watch.

The woman clasped her hands together and grinned. “Oh yes, my mistake. I was actually watching you from the crowd. You gave quite a performance, dear. Even I was impressed.” She extended a bony hand to the two of them, who shook it with slight hesitation.

“Oh, please forgive my manners. I’m Madame Susanna. I run the apothecary, so when I saw of your new medicine—especially one with such a rich history—I knew I had to have it in my stocks.”

Eliza’s mouth slipped into a soft smile, bowing her head as she smoothed her dress. “That’s awful nice of you, ma’am. We came here hoping you’d be interested in our wares as well. Now, given that you’d be selling the coveted Felices Fortuna to the masses, we hoped that you’d understand we’d be selling it at a price a bit higher than yesterday.” Bit was a perhaps an understatement. If the deal went right, Eliza would be walking out with two dollars more to her name.

“Yes, yes, of course. Oh, um, Charlie? The children I told you about yesterday are here. They want to sell us their medicine,” Susanna shouted behind her to a back room shrouded by a curtain.

A grunt sounded as a man stepped out, a bit shorter and stouter than Susanna was. His slicked back silver hair was tied at the base

SALE WITH THE DEVIL 79

of his neck with a ribbon and tumbled over his shoulder. Despite the state of his hair, his face was clean-shaven with just a slight sheen of shaved grey hair. As he stepped out, Henry reached forward for Eliza and grabbed her hand as his nails dug into her skin.

Eliza flinched but made no other outward reaction. She instead looked at Charlie with a blank stare, making no sign that she recognized him from yesterday, standing like a loyal dog behind Mills. Susanna pressed her thin lips together and smiled. “This is my assistant, Charlie. He handles all the transactions. I just make the medicines.”

Eliza swallowed down her terror and forced herself to grin.

“Nice to meet you, sir. I don’t believe we’ve had the pleasure.”

Charlie nodded and crossed his arm. “No, I don’t believe we have.”

Susanna shifted her eyes sideways at Charlie and cleared her throat. “Charlie, could you bring me their money please? Let’s see what else- oh, yes, of course.” She opened a drawer at her desk and frowned before opening two more adjacent ones. “Well that’s strange.”

Henry and Eliza shared a wary glance. “Strange, ma’am?”

Henry asked.

“Usually I leave my magnifying glass here. I always like to take a deep look at anything I purchase. My knees aren’t what they’re used to, but you look like you have young, healthy knees,” She pointed a bony finger towards Eliza who stammered and smoothed her dress, trying to hide her knees. “Do you mind going into my workshop and getting a spare magnifying glass? Your associate can wait here while Charlie gets your money.”

Eliza curled her fingers back into Henry’s, whose nails were

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still pressed into her hand. “He can’t come with me?”

“My workshop is rather small, dear. It’s not big enough for two people. It won’t take long, I promise.”

“I’ll be here,” Henry said, stepping back against the wall next to the door, as far away from Charlie as he could make himself.

“Don’t take too long, or I might get bored.”

Eliza forced a laugh. “I don’t plan on getting lost. And you two will stay here?” She turned to Susanna and Charlie.

“Yes, it shouldn’t take too long. It should be in one of the first drawers.”

“I’ll be here,” Henry repeated, this time sounding unsure. Eliza nodded again, giving a weak smile to her brother, and descended the staircase.

The workshop of the apothecary was grander than anything than Eliza had seen, with rows upon rows of vials and bottles. She didn’t recognize much, save for a couple bottles labeled ‘Arsenic’ and a couple sage plants. For a moment, she considered taking the bottles of arsenic to resell later. If they were really planning on leaving soon, there was so much here that Susanna couldn’t possibly realize a little vial of arsenic was missing until she took stock again. Eliza pushed the thought of her mind and changed direction to a side table which held a pestle and mortar, a large bottle of formaldehyde, and, like Susanna said, a bronze magnifying glass. She reached out to grab the glass when she heard the staircase creak.

“Do you have a moment to talk?” Eliza whipped around to see Susanna, standing at the doorframe with a vial of Felices Fortuna in her hand. There was no sign of Henry behind her, and with Charlie in the other room, her mouth ran dry. Looks like your

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knees work fine after all.

“Oh, um, of course ma’am. Are you curious about our product? If you direct your questions to my colleague, I’m sure he can answer any question you have.”

Susanna smiled as she continued deeper into the inventory room, a soft and motherly look that was just the slightest snakelike on her face. “Eliza, dear, you don’t have to pretend with me.”

Eliza gulped as her gentle expression began to slip but forced it back on with a smile. “Pretending? Ma’am, you may call me plenty of things but never in my life I have never pretended.” She waved her hand with a small laugh. “Unless you are referring to what I said about the Felices Fortuna making Washington win the war. That might have been a bit of an exaggeration. It simply aided him.”

“Eliza, I know what you and Henry are trying to do.” The room went silent. Eliza was used to giving her name out—there were plenty of Elizabeths around and so many ways to mess it up—but they always agreed they would never give Henry’s out as one last safety net. “Look, I’m here to help you, dear.”

“Like shit you are. I recognized Mills’ lap dog up there.” Eliza folded her arms, now aware of the tiny gap between Susanna and the doorway. “How do you know me? Where is Henry?”

“Don’t you worry. He’s safe up there. Me and Charlie didn’t touch him. As for Jacob, all I was told from him was that you two might try to sell me that snake oil and that we were supposed to take you in.” Susanna tried to offer a hand, but Eliza swatted it away with a growl, her hands shaking.

“What else did Mills tell you? Did he tell you that he was going to separate us? Shove us on a train headed to God knows

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where just so he can get a bit of pay?” Susanna tried to interject, making a small sound of protest, but Eliza continued on like a wildfire. “Did he tell you that if he gets his way, Henry will work for the rest of his life in a mine while I have to play nice and pretty as a maid for a mayor in New York? Or did he just tell you what you needed to hear?” Eliza rubbed her fingers against her thumb and watched as Susanna flushed.

“Eliza, listen.” Susanna pinched the bridge of her nose and took a deep breath, releasing with a loud groan. “I can tell you and your brother are smart children. You wouldn’t have lasted this long on your own if you weren’t. So please be smart about this.”

“No.” “Child, if you keep making thing’s hard for Jacob, he’s just going to shoot you.” That shut Eliza up. Her chest rose and fell in fast successions as she stumbled back. Several thoughts ran through her head, overtaking each other just as they came, one never sticking like she wanted it to. Only one clear though seemed to stay, so she spat it out as if one second more and her thought would be stolen from her.

“You’re lying.”

Susanna’s brows fell, and for once Eliza could see the worry lines on her forehead, tracing down to her eyes like lonely railroad tracks. “Darling, I’m not saying this to scare you. I don’t pretend to know what you and your brother have gone through. But that is why I am telling you this. Just give up.” Eliza froze, feeling an icicle of terror run through her chest. She backed up, giving a small whine when she hit a wall. A moment passed and Susanna stepped forward as she spread her arms out in front of her. “Just give up, my dear. I know that you don’t want to be separated, but

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you’ll have a better chance of living.”

Eliza broke from her trance, curling her hands into fists. “I don’t care. I’m not living without Henry. I don’t care what Mills told you or what his dirty money paid you, but we’re together ‘til the end.” She propelled herself off the wall and towards Susanna, elbowing her in the stomach as she passed and slipped under her. As she sprinted up the stairs, she could hear Susanna calling for her, but ignored it and continued back into the main foyer.

Henry rushed towards her, taking her hand as he looked for a sign of Susanna.

“We have to leave now. Susanna knows Mills is looking for us,” she said, reaching for the vial of Felices Fortuna on the table. She scooped it into her satchel and headed for the door.

Henry sighed as he curled his fingers around the door handle.

“That assistant—Charlie—he’s part of Mills’ group.”

“I know. Where is he?”

“He left while you were down there. He’s probably on his way to Mills right now.” He looked as if he wanted to continue, but he stopped as Susanna appeared at the top of the staircase.

“Children, please. This is your final warning.” Susanna took a step towards them, but Eliza and Henry were already out the door before she could get another word in.

As soon as they stepped outside, Eliza could smell the fire. A thick haze of black smoke filled the sky, covering the blueness of day with a devil’s hot breath. Eliza and Henry took off, not bothering to listen to whatever futile message Susanna was screaming behind them. They ran until they reached the lumber mill, further solidifying their suspicions as the stench of smoke grew the closer they got towards it. As the mill came into view, Henry stuck out an

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arm to stop Eliza from getting any closer.

The mill was enveloped in fire, a mile high with thick orange flames lapping at the ground. Every few seconds, another part of the building would collapse with a belch, spreading smoke and ash in a dark cloud. Eliza screamed out, her voice barely audible above the sound of burning wood crashing against the ground.

She pushed Henry’s arm away and charged forward, trying to find any way inside, but he grabbed her wrist and pulled her back away from the burning building. “Henry, let go of me.”

“Liza, we have to go.”

Eliza tried to break free, clawing at his hand as she left red gashes across the back of his hand. “All our stuff is in there.”

“I know.”

“Henry, that’s all we have left of them.”

“I know.” Henry yanked her back again with a grunt, and this time she allowed herself to be pulled, falling into him, numb and silent. “Liza, I know that was all we had, but it doesn’t matter now.

We have to go.” Within an instant his expression shifted as his gaze left her. Eliza turned her head around, and through the heat waves, the figure of Inspector Mills appeared, followed by Charlie and the mustached man. In each of their hands were a flintlock pistol, already raised to shoot. For the first time, Henry gave out a cry of terror and pushed Eliza behind him before turning around and sprinted towards the section of trees that lined the edge of town.

Through the spaces between the branches, Eliza could see the outline of the midmorning train rushing through, already on its way down to the gulf.

The pair broke through the trees, jumping at the sound of a gunshot that echoed behind them as a patch of dirt flew up

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a couple feet away. Eliza picked up her speed, overtaking her brother with ease as they ran, coming upon an overgrown wheat field that separated the edge of town and the train tracks. “We can make it,” Eliza said with gasping breaths, not sure whether Henry heard her at all. Behind her, another shot rang out as Eliza covered her head with her hands. Henry appeared behind her panting, his face red, and struggling to keep up with his knapsack bumping against his thigh.

“We won’t make it,” he said with a soft voice, his voice straining as his eyes switched between the train and Eliza.

Eliza took another breath and pressed forward, nodding her head with a wild smile. “We can make it. Look, we’re almost there. Just keep going.” Henry’s face crumpled into something pleading and broken as he looked at his sister, almost as if he were studying it.

“I won’t make it,” he said after a few seconds of silence. Henry swiveled his head behind him as Inspector Mills emerged from the trees, his pistol raised to shoot. “Don’t stop running,” He shook off his knapsack and pushed it into Eliza’s arms, his pocket watch resting on top. Eliza stared down at it with a blank stare, as if the sight of Henry not keeping the watch close was enough to end all rational thought.

“What?” She slung his bad over her other shoulder, forcing his pocket watch inside. “Why?” “Whatever you do, don’t look back. Don’t stop ‘til San Diego. I love you.” Eliza gaped in confusion, taking a moment to process, but it wasn’t enough as Henry shoved her into running again and her focus was diverted to the train, which was screeching at full speed, already on its way to Louisiana. The wheat in the field tick-

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led her legs as she raced towards the train car, cutting through her thin tights and getting caught in the holes of her boots. As she neared the open train car door, the wind seemed to pick up, pushing her back. With another moan of frustration, she shoved herself forward.

Nothing could be hear over the drowning roar of the train, sending thick tendrils of black smoke down on her as Eliza readied herself to leap towards the open car. With a grunt, she threw herself over and gave a cry as she landed with a thud on the wooden floor, her legs still dangling outside. She swung her legs over as she pushed herself up and gave a release of breath Eliza threw her satchel deeper into the train car before turning around to give Henry a hand.

He wasn’t there.

“Henry?” Eliza gripped the side of the train car and looked over to see if he was following her. In the distance she could see Mills and his men continuing on their pillage, Susanna right behind them, calling out something that Eliza couldn’t hear. Despite their presence, she still couldn’t see her brother, not since he pushed his bag into her arms and told her to run. “Henry!”

The last thing she could see before the field disappeared from view was a puff of black smoke, a murder of crows taking flight, and Inspector Mills in his dark blue uniform, staring back at her.

The train gave a piercing scream and she was alone.

The population of Monroe, Louisiana was quieter than Cincinnati was, but it was their intensity that made them heard above the crashing waves of the gulf. Rather than home, where people mixed amongst each other as they pleased — cautious perhaps, but with

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an air of familiarity—the people of Monroe eyed each other with suspicion and scorn, puffing their chests out with disdain towards anybody who wasn’t like them. Instead of nurses pushing children on prams while women with flushed faces attempted to barter with shopkeepers, children in white dresses walked in identical straight lines behind a too thin woman in nuns’ outfit. Here, there was too many people, all crowding in like ants on a carcass.

Eliza did nothing. Standing in the midst of freezing heat, while towering men in golden trim suits were trailed by huddled, bedraggled servants, her heart pounded against her chest and she could only do the one thing she promised herself she would never do: nothing.

Her hand ached against Henry’s pocket watch as the metal button carved itself into her palm. As her eyes drifted downward, she noticed that her shoes were beginning to unstitch, a little sliver of toe peeking out from the leather. Another thing to fix. With money she didn’t have.

Another beat passed and Eliza let go a puff of air. An empty crate lay discarded near a fruit peddler, looking just sturdy enough to handle her weight. Eliza slipped through the bodies of passersby until she reached the stand, taking a moment to make sure the fruit seller’s attention was on rearranging the peaches on the cart before reaching down and grabbing the crate. The wood scratched at her hand as she lifted it up, but she made no expression as she carried it to the middle of the square, placing it down with a thud.

Just before she stepped on it, her mind echoed the words that she and Henry said to each other each night—the last words that he said to her. ‘Don’t stop ‘til San Diego.’ She dug out the vial of Felices Fortuna, took a breath, and climbed onto the crate.

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“Ladies and gentleman. Children of all ages,” Eliza stuck her chest out towards the people in the square, keeping one hand clenched around the vial of Felices Fortuna and the other around Henry’s pocket watch. As the crowd began to swarm around her, she felt a warm, wet streak slip down her face. “You may be asking yourself what your life has led you to. You may be thinking that your life—everything you’ve ever worked for—is meaningless, but I am here to tell you just how wrong you are.”

89

91

MARTICA OREGLIA Biomedical Engineering Major

A

s she walked out of the Dean’s office she felt light. Lighter than air. Lighter than she had ever felt before. She had a thought that if she didn’t concentrate on keeping her feet fully planted on the ground that she might float away, up up up, into the abyss of space. Each step she took down the stairs carried the threat of letting her drift off, up into the air.

But she didn’t care. She had spent the past months feeling heavy. Oh so heavy. It had felt as if her bones had longed to be one with the earth. They had pulled and tugged and tried to drag her down. Each breath had been a struggle. Each step a fight.

But she had made it. She was here. And now, finally, it was done.

She had once been a beautiful girl. She had possessed the kind of beauty that only came with being young and alive and free. Her hair flowed freely in any breeze that may have brushed

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past her soft and luminous skin. Her bright eyes sparked with life. You could see the intelligence and bravery and passion in them, zapping and sparking like electricity overflowing from her soul.

It had been so many days. Too many days since she remembered being that girl. Over those days, her hair and skin and face had remained unchanged. But her eyes, her soul, they had lost everything.

There was no more life, no more passion, no more freedom. Her soul had been drained of its vitality. Her eyes had lost their spark.

But now, walking down those steps away from that meeting, she felt a drop of her electricity coming back.

A tear came down her cheek. One of relief and hope that the future would be better. That yesterday would be the last day that she had to fear feeling empty and powerless forever.

She felt the ground beneath her feet. She felt the breeze go through her hair. She could breathe. Finally, she could breathe.

Over the next weeks her nightmares did not go away. Her strength, her sense of self, did not suddenly come flooding back, filling her bones and her soul. She was not magically restored to her former self.

No. She still had those dreams. In the dark, when she was alone, she was transported back to that place. Back to that night.

She had been with her friends. Her girls. The ones that she trusted and loved above all else. They were not looking for anything. They wanted nothing more than to laugh and have fun and be together. She just wanted to dance. And dance she did.

HER REALITY 93

She danced and danced with her friends, her sisters. She had never felt more free and alive. She practically thrummed with life energy.

Her heart pounded in perfect time with the pounding base she could feel down to her bones. There was nothing else. It was just her and the music. Nothing else existed but this. She was the center of the universe, her universe. She was the sun and everything around her was wrapped up in her orbit. It was just her and the music.

Until it wasn’t.

All of a sudden she left her heightened state, her personal universe. She was once again on solid ground. The sun reclaimed its rightful place as center of the milky way.

Something was wrong. She looked left and right and did not see a single familiar face around her. She had been so lost in herself that she had lost her friends. Her heart began to pound.

Bum bum.

She turned to find her friends.

Bum bum.

Her eyes searched the throng of people. Frantically darting from face to face, searching for familiar eyes.

Bum bum.

The hairs stood up on her arms. Something was wrong.

Something was wrong.

Bum bum.

A hand clamped down on her waist. Strong. Possessive.

Her heart stopped beating.

A voice made its way into her ear. She could feel the moist breath tickling her ear canal. She could feel the scratched, dry

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lips just barely caressing her ear lobe.

“Hey baby. Why don’t you and me get out of here,” The voice was low and gravely. It sent a chill down her spine and made the hair on the back of her neck stand tall. Some part of her, the ancient and animalistic part of her, screamed, Predator.

Run. And she tried. She did. But this man, he was a predator. And she was his prey. He knew. He could feel her muscles tense, could feel her breathe catch. And just as she was about to break away, escape the danger...

His arms clamped down on her body. He became a cage.

She was trapped by bars of iron and steel. No matter how hard she pushed and struggled, that cold metal remained strong and unbreakable.

And she just froze.

She didn’t know what to do.

She couldn’t think any more.

The memory came in flashes now. Just fragments of a complete picture. Sights. Sounds. Smells. And worst of all, touch.

She saw the scar across his cheek. A small white mountain range on the map of his face.

She heard the rest of the party. The music, damped through the walls of the small room. She heard herself through her tears, “No,” she said. Again and again. “No”.

She smelled his musky cologne. It choked her with its thick, noxious smell. She could smell the alcohol on his breath.

And she felt his hands.

They grabbed her face. They left purple fingerprints on her arms. They tore at her clothes. They roved all over her body.

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Touching her body. Her body that was not his to touch.

She could taste the saltiness of her tears as she said it again.

“No” No. The meeting with the Dean had not taken away the memories that haunted her in her sleep. She still saw, heard, smelled, felt, that night. But it had given her something valuable.

It had given her back her power.

That man had not just taken her body that night. He had stolen her power. And now, she had finally taken some of it back.

She hadn’t wanted to go to the Dean at first. She had felt so many things. Shame, embarrassment, fear. She hadn’t wanted to tell anyone. She just wanted to be okay again. But then she remembered exactly what happened to her. She remembered how seemingly random it had been that she had been selected as prey.

And she realized that she had just been unlucky. That her horrific night, that still haunted her dreams, could have been her best friend’s, or her little sister’s, or any other girl’s instead.

And that was why she decided to go to the Dean. She did it because all of her power had been robbed from her. And she was going to take it back by making sure that the monster who did this to her would never do it to one of her friends.

So she went to the Dean. They set up a formal meeting. They made her promises.

She was promised that he would be kicked out of his fraternity.

She was promised that he would be expelled from the school.

She was promised that she would never have to see or hear or be near him again.

And so when she walked out of that meeting she had felt

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light. She had felt relieved. She had finally taken back some of her power. She had made sure that no other girl would have to suffer at the hands of that poor excuse of a human being.

But that was months ago now.

She was promised that he would be kicked out of his fraternity.

Two weeks later she saw him in pictures at a frat event.

She was promised that he would be expelled from the school.

A month later she saw him walking across campus with his friends. Laughing.

She was promised that she would never have to see or hear or be near him again.

The next semester she had a class with him. She had to learn near him. She had to present in front of him.

She did not feel light anymore. She did not feel powerful.

Every day that passed when he was still there added a new stone to her soul. There were so many stones inside her now. She was so heavy. She felt as if she might just melt down, and become one with the earth.

They had made promises. Promises that whether they intended to or not, were not kept.

The girl she became that night returned. She was trying to be strong. She was fighting for it with every breath, every step, every minute. She was trying to be okay.

But at the end of the day, she heard the message loud and clear.

You are not strong. You are not powerful. You have no voice.

You do not matter.

Her name is Kate.

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Her name is Hailey.

Her name is Paige, and Carly, and Emily.

Her name is Sarah, Patricia, Rachel, Kelley, Sophia, Maddie, Katelyn, Lauren, Isabella, Mckenna.

Her name is the name of someone you love.

She is not one girl.

She is every girl.

It shouldn’t be lucky if a girl avoids being sexually assaulted in her lifetime.

It should be reality.

But this story? This is her reality.

99

PEYTON CHERRY Anthropology and Geography Major

I

t was melting fast. The seething summer sun beating down on the cold treat mercilessly, drips of sweet citrus collecting on the stick quicker than her absentminded licking could keep up. Mari turned the popsicle to the side, trying to gauge what angle was best to take the next bite. There wasn’t much left, so she had to make it count— “Are you gonna eat it or just stare at it?”

She jumped ever so slightly and turned her head to see the usual judgement plastered across her brother’s face. And in that moment, when his comment warranted her sticking out her tongue at him, the popsicle finally heaved its last breaths, submitting to the combined attacks of Mari’s appetite and the sun’s rays.

Juice ran down the stick to her fingers and she caught sight of the last bit of the treat slipping off to land on the ground. She

100 PEYTON CHERRY

stared at it in dismay for a moment, before bending down to scoop it up and whirling on her brother.

“It would have been fine if not for you, Mako!” She jabbed the popsicle stick at him, the other hand clutching the melting piece of popsicle.

Mako shrugged, his own popsicle stick jutting out from the side of his mouth.

“Not my fault.”

Mari paused for a moment and was considering whether the sweet in her hand belonged on his shirt or smeared on his face when there was a soft ‘meow’ at her feet.

A gray striped cat was winding around her legs and when she glanced down it looked up imploringly at her, green eyes practically sparkling with feline hope.

And who am I to crush that hope? Mari made up her mind, dropped into a crouch, and held out her sticky hand towards the stray. It began to sniff at her hand tentatively.

Mako realized what she was doing at the last instant.

“Mari, don’t—!”

Before he could even finish his sentence, the cat took the piece of popsicle in its teeth, darted a fair distance away from them, and began chowing down on the orange-flavored ice. Mari glanced up at Mako and grinned impishly.

“Too late, it’s done.”

He groaned and put his hand on his face. “Popsicles are for people, not cats. The poor animal is going to get sick.”

She glanced over at the animal in question. It was finished eating and beginning to wash its face with a little white paw. A pang of guilt shot through her stomach, but at least the stray had

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enjoyed the snack and chances were that tiny piece didn’t contain enough artificial sugar to do anything bad.

Mari wiped any of that fleeting concern from her face and gave Mako her own shrug.

“Next time, I’m not buying your popsicle for you,” he promised. His words sounded stern, but Mari couldn’t help the laugh that slipped from her lips. Mako wasn’t serious. He could never keep those types of silly, little promises to himself or to her. And Mari had already counted on that.

“Okayyyy. No treats for me!” she sung, beginning to walk further down the wharf, away from her brother and towards the preening cat.

She bent down once more and held out her hand, still sticky and sweet-smelling from the popsicle. The cat afforded her one glance and then walked off with its tail waving jauntily in the air.

“Hey!” Mari shouted and jumped to her feet.

The feline shot forward—only to seek shelter beyond the legs of someone new.

“Awww, you two got popsicles without me?” a new, somewhat husky voice complained.

Mari’s spirits soared once more when she recognized the long-legged boy who stood before her. “Keresh! You made it!”

The boy’s mouth turned down in a sour pout and he muttered, “Not in time though apparently…”

“Hey, don’t be cross, Keresh. It doesn’t suit you.” Mako’s voice sounded and he materialized behind Mari in that eerily silent way he always did.

Keresh rolled his eyes and the stray meowed, pawing insistently at his legs. He obliged the cat and lifted it up into his arms

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where it promptly began rubbing its head all over his face, purring like a speedboat motor.

“You traitor…” Mari muttered, eyes narrowing at both Keresh and the cat. She had even given it the last of her popsicle, yet this was the thanks she got?

A familiar hand landed on her shoulder. “You too, Mari.

You know that it’s only acting that way because Keresh smells like fish.”

Mako said it so matter-of-factly that Mari couldn’t help the amused chuckle that escaped from her lips.

Keresh’s poisonous glare was made funnier as the grey cat in his arms tried biting stray locks of his hair. She may have kept laughing at his expense, but Mako’s hand on her shoulder tightened and he began pulling her to the side.

“Okay, enough playing around, you two. We gotta bring in the traps and set up the bait before the tide changes.”

They muttered in agreement and the cat yowled in protest as Keresh detached it from his face.

Mako began dragging the traps in one by one as he crouched on an outcropping of rocks. He checked them each quickly, his keen eye easily discerning the ones that had reached their capacity of crabs, crayfish, and shellfish before putting those to the side. Some of the empty ones he sunk back below the waves, while others he also placed on the rocks—probably because the traps were damaged, or the bait was no longer fresh and tempting enough.

Mari watched her brother for a little while. She would never admit it to him but… she found his routine actions oddly calm-

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ing and admired the skills which he’d honed over the years. He didn’t do this for their main source of income, mainly to bring a little extra fresh seafood to the dinner table and then to sell the rest off to a proper fish vendor. Or, so he explained.

But Mari knew better. She could see the way his eyes glittered whenever they walked the beaches of their home, plundering the sea for her bounties, and hear the excited, rising intonation of his voice as he discussed even the most menial of fishing activities.

She shook her head and went back to focusing on her task— setting wriggling bait worms on hooks.

They moved slick and wet under her touch, but her fingers were sure and practiced. Not a single worm would survive her ministrations.

She wished she could say the same for Keresh.

Unfortunately, his baiting of the hooks was clumsy at best, dreadful at worst. It seemed that every other worm was dropped on the sand before it was finally set upon the hook. Mari grimaced as the boy dropped yet another bait worm making a bid for escape. There was no way she was letting him near the small bait fish swimming in the bucket beside her anytime soon.

But she knew she couldn’t lose her patience with him.

Keresh had only arrived in their town a couple of months or so prior and, by his jerky, uncertain actions, Mari guessed he had never engaged in even the most basic fishing activities before.

He fumbled over the hook in his hand and groaned, “Why can’t we be eating popsicles instead?”

“You’re still going on about those?” Mari shot back. “Here.

Give me that, I’ll do it before you hurt yourself.”

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Keresh fell back into the sand with a dramatic sigh as Mari wrestled the remaining hooks away from him. “I don’t understand why you go through all this effort to catch fish. It seems so…excessive.”

He began unraveling the tangled fishing wire and Mari fought back a scoff as she arranged the baited hooks along the rim of another bucket.

“It’s not excessive, it’s necessary. How do you suggest we catch them then? With ice cream cones and rainbow pops?”

Mari shot him a quizzical glance with the beginnings of a smirk. But he didn’t even look up, shrugging and replying, “I dunno. With your teeth. And your hands too if it’s a big one.”

“You’re kidding. No one can do that or would even want to if they could!” She sat back on her haunches and gestured to Keresh. “What? Can you?”

Keresh finally looked up and his turquoise eyes shone with absolute earnestness.

“Yes. My teeth are very good for catching fish.”

Mari laughed. She couldn’t help such a natural reaction. The image of Keresh swimming under the waves, snapping his mouth open and closed to snag any passing fish, was too hilarious.

She clutched her stomach from the continuing guffaws, managing to force out in between giggles, “What are you, then?

A shark?”

“No! How dare you!” Keresh jumped to his feet and glowered down at her, looking impossibly, unreasonably offended.

Mari’s laughter reached a new pitch and she was struggling for breath when Mako rejoined them.

Through the tears in her eyes, she saw him standing, a trap

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writhing with crabs and such grasped in each hand, and a third trap slung around his neck by a rope. His pants were rolled up to the knees, and his hair was wet from the waves.

“Is there time for you two to be rolling around in the sand?” he asked, though he looked more perplexed than upset. His head swung towards Keresh as it became apparent Mari was still trying to regain her ability to speak, much less find any composure.

“Is she making fun of your baiting again?”

“No…” Keresh began reluctantly, shooting a glare at Mari.

Then, he seemed to change his mind midway. “Yes…in a sense.”

Mako switched one of the traps over to his other hand to give Keresh a friendly pat on the back. “Don’t worry about her.

Come on, I’ll buy you a popsicle.”

Keresh lit up immediately. “Really?”

“Really. Geez, calm down.” Mako gestured at Mari to get up and gather the equipment, and she grudgingly obliged. Sometimes, he really seemed to think he could order her around…

She trailed behind a few steps, weighted down by the buckets and the bag strapped across her chest, while Mako tried, unsuccessfully, to stop Keresh from jumping up and down in excitement.

“I’m just getting you one, okay?! You really eat too many of them.”

“You can’t eat too many popsicles. They’re practically air!”

Keresh protested, quite seriously.

Mari could tell Mako was getting flustered, the left corner of his mouth rising in frustration. “That’s not how it works. They’re like any other food, if you eat too much of it you’ll—!”

His explanation was cut off as Keresh suddenly came to a

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stop and looked straight up at the sky.

A few beats of silence other than the cries of seagulls and the crash of waves, and then: “There’s gonna be a storm soon.”

“Huh? Really?” Mari also looked overhead, seeing only the wispiest of clouds, the sun’s brute power reigning supreme even in the late afternoon and early evening.

Keresh merely nodded while Mako stared at him with a strange expression on his face.

He glanced at Mari, but she couldn’t think of anything to say before Keresh began prancing ahead of them—acting like an overgrown child once again.

Mari and Mako knew better than to take the true nature of the weather at heart from a moment’s glance. They shrugged off the comment for later introspection and chased after their friend before he devastated the nearest tourist shop’s dessert cooler.

Keresh’s prediction came true. Although a bit delayed, a sizable summer storm rolled along the coast of the peninsula several days later, their small town also getting caught up in the sudden rise in the height of the waves and the increased pull of the winds.

Mari watched from the kitchen window inside their house as the dark masses of clouds continued to gather, pregnant with rain. The house was cramped and old, but these qualities were more than made up for by the warm coziness which suffused the rooms.

Mako chopped fragrant herbs on the wooden table behind her, the fresh leaves releasing a heady scent which mingled with the roasted scent of mackerel and mussels on the stove, crackling

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and sizzling amid a thick sauce. She could hear the soft voices of their mother and grandmother in the back room--probably Mom trying to convince her to leave her beloved dramas for long enough to have dinner.

It all made for the perfect combination of familiar sights, smells, and sounds which wrapped Mari’s body in a comforting blanket and made her never want to leave. Yet, as thunder rumbled in the distance and the pitter-patter of rain on corrugated metal and worn wood began anew, other concerns scraped at the back of her mind.

And her thoughts fell like papery butterfly wings from her mind to the kitchen air: “Keresh was right. It really is pouring outside…”

Mako’s reply floated above the sure chopping sound of a keenly sharp knife slicing into fresh vegetables. “Yup…looks like his skills at reading the skies are a cut above his fishing ones.”

There was a pause and Mari knew the jab her brother had made at Keresh was meant to make her laugh or reply with wit of her own. But the humor of it didn’t bubble up like usual and she could feel sharp eyes on her back as she continued to stare out the window.

“I wonder if he’s doing all right… That he didn’t get caught in the storm.”

“He’s staying at his aunt’s place, right? I’m sure he’s fine.” The sure rhythm of Mako’s meal preparations resumed from its slight disruption earlier. “Pull out some plates, will ya? The food will be ready soon.”

But his words sounded pale and meaningless as Mari’s thoughts led her to an idea and she was suddenly seized by that

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resolution. She spun away from the window and dashed towards the front door.

“I forgot to get sugar and milk earlier! I’m gonna run to the shop to get some!” She grabbed a raincoat off the hook by the door and reached for an umbrella.

“Eh?! Weren’t we just talking about how bad it’s out there?”

Mako exclaimed. “And aren’t you gonna eat?”

Mari took a single glance back at her brother as she opened the door to the howling wind and rain outside. His expression was confused, and, if she wasn’t imagining it, more than a little miffed. “Sorry, Mako! I’ll be back soon!”

And she dove outside before she could receive an irate reply.

Mari struggled against the growing force of the storm, the wind nearly tearing the umbrella from her hands three different times. On the third she gave up and kept it closed before it was torn to shreds. She ran down the path winding through the small woods where several houses squatted, keeping low to the ground, and covering her head with her arms even though she still had her hood on.

The rain pelted her face mercilessly and she struggled to see more than a few arm’s lengths ahead of her. A more reasonable voice at the back of her mind began to urge her to turn back before the storm could further increase in intensity. But, luckily, a house rose up out of the grasping trees and gloom, its walls rambling and appearing just as dark and droll as the weather.

This was hopefully the right house. She jumped up the steps to the front door and rapped firmly.

No answer.

She knocked a little harder, this time calling out: “Keresh!

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Auntie!”

Her eyes flicked to either side of the front door. The windows of the house were dark, no light from inside illuminating their rotting, wooden frames. That state of disrepair…the whole building radiated it and something uncomfortable squirmed inside Mari’s chest. It wasn’t an abandoned feeling, more that the home had undergone only intermittent use or that the owner was simply neglectful on top of the building’s age.

She had the sense that someone—or something, her mind whispered, was there. This was a sense that was ten times more unwelcome than the earlier notion, but, despite it, Mari swallowed her knotting fear and tried the doorknob.

It turned under her palm easily, uttering not a single squeak as the door was pushed inward.

“Hello?” Mari called, softly, cautiously, not wishing to disturb whatever may be inside.

No answer again. That was good, in a way. Mari entered, seeking shelter from the rain if nothing else now.

It was as dimly-lit inside as it had appeared from the outside, only shadows upon shadows as outlines of indistinguishable furniture blurred and blended into one another.

There was the distinctive rumble of thunder in the distance and Mari scuttled further inside, taking a left when she realized that side of the house was a little lighter. And her eyes were gradually adjusting to the lack of reliable lighting.

Tha-dum! Crack!

Lightening lit up Mari’s surroundings suddenly and she was able to make out a narrow hallway with several doors, one door at the end was open just a crack. And, to her surprise, faint light

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that did not come from the raging storm outside spilled from the small opening.

She approached the door briskly, limbs stiff and muscles tight as thunder built up and the pounding of rain on roof tiles increased in tempo. That was a concern on its own as Mari wasn’t sure how much abuse this old house could take.

“Keresh?” she asked, just outside the door.

Unfortunately, the skies decided to bellow their own reply at that moment, and any confirmation of her friend’s presence would have been obscured by the ferocious, natural call. So…she was going to have to go inside to find out.

She pressed on the door and took several steps inside the room. The first thing she noticed was a faintly glowing, naked lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, so weak that it flickered as the door hit the opposing wall with a dull thud. As a result, the rest of the room was difficult to make out, but she could see what looked to be a counter, with an indent that may have been a sink in the far most side, a set of shelves above that, and perhaps some racks on the ground leaning against the wall.

Her eyes strained as she tried to identify everything around her and she swung her gaze around the contents of the room ever so gradually when a flash of blue-white—jagged and bright, put the shadows in striking contrast and Mari’s curious gaze stopped roaming.

She stared ahead at a tiled, connecting portion of the room where a large bath tub was set into the tile floor, shining white in the flashes of lightening. But the tub was not empty, excess water trickling over the sides from the body that was inside.

An oddly familiar person who was half-naked, moving their

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arms surely with a brush in hand as they washed a sleek, scaly fish tail that caught the light of the storm even more than the reflection off the porcelain bath tub.

And it certainly held Mari’s attention even as that person realized they were no longer alone and turned their head to face her.

Keresh’s face turned slack with shock as he paused in the act of bathing, eyes blank and mouth slightly agape. He was rendered as frozen by this encounter as Mari.

At least she found her tongue, but all that could come out was: “You’re…half-fish?”

The boy’s form was starkly silhouetted against the rain splattered window behind him, the play of lighting in the rapidly moving clouds setting an unmistakable--and unforgettable, scene. Keresh’s damp hair stuck to the sides of his face, rivulets of water tracing down to his chin, and his turquoise eyes unblinking and bright.

His paralysis only ended several heartbeats after Mari’s question. He looked down at the throughly incriminating evidence that was his tail and tried to cover it, unsuccessfully, with his hands.

“Don’t stare!” Keresh hissed, though the cracks in his voice made it far from threatening.

Mari shook her head and blinked rapidly as Keresh moved in the tub, splashing water over the sides. He tried to shrink down deeper into the tub, but merely submerged a small portion of his tail. He only succeeded in looking twice as uncomfortable.

His shoulders were scrunched tight against the sides of the confining tub and the fin at the end of his tail flopped over the edge.

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The tub was too small for him to begin with, and, while the boy struggled to reposition himself, Mari couldn’t help but be reminded of a freshly caught tuna flopping wildly on the deck of a fishing boat.

Mari held up a hand over her eyes and tried to turn her head away. “Ah, I’m sorry! I just wanted to check that you were okay-!”

Her hastily thrown together apology was interrupted by a pained grunt. She opened her eyes to see that Keresh had tried to heft himself out of the water by clutching the window sill, but was still stuck half-in, half-out with his body lying diagonally across the bathtub.

“What are you doing?!” Mari exclaimed and closed the remaining distance between them without a single thought.

She grabbed him by his right arm and helped ease him back into the tub despite the noises of protest that came from his mouth. He settled back inside with a huff and folded his arms.

Mari took a couple steps back. “Were you trying to escape?

Out the window?”

Keresh glowered back at her. “No…” She offered him her own specialty of a barbed glare and his attitude quickly changed. “…Yes…It was worth a shot.”

At an ordinary time, Mari may have chuckled a little at the expectedly embarrassed admission of guilt and the boy’s darkening face. But… Keresh was lying in a bathtub with the entire lower half of his body that of a fish. Nope, not ordinary at all.

Mari’s heart was beating frantically even though she wasn’t in danger…or didn’t think she was, and she couldn’t stop her eyes from wandering to that tail despite Keresh’s earlier demand

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not to stare. There was no way her mind and eyes could get used to this concept so quickly, yet, she had to make an effort to control her own shock and skepticism for her friend’s sake. However, the irritating inklings of betrayal nestling in her breast would be more difficult to root out.

Though Mako and her had only befriended Keresh months prior, Mari couldn’t help feeling that him having a tail should have been something worth mentioning.

Did the boy not trust them enough with such an important detail? And if he didn’t…could Mari offer him her own faith wholeheartedly?

She took a deep breath, staving off her darker emotions best she could. Then closed her eyes and opened them again to see that, indeed, Keresh was sitting in a bathtub in a nearly empty house, that, yes, he did have the tail of a fish, and, finally, that he seemed to be looking at her with as much tentative appraisal as she was him.

“Keresh, I…” “Mermaid.”

Mari was jerked out of her thoughts and away from her words by Keresh’s voice—no longer cracking as it had before.

“What?”

“Mermaid. Not “half-fish,”’ he continued, appearing surprisingly calm, though his tightly crossed arms and stony expression said otherwise. “I know you’re thinking it. Though…mer-folk is a more common term than either mermaid or merman—oh, and just ‘mer’ is easiest to say.”

Mari was beginning to feel like she was losing her faculty to speak again as Keresh kept talking but managed to wrest control

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away from her mind’s attempt to reject this new reality.

“Mer…person? You’re saying that you’re…not human.”

Keresh looked away from her, perhaps trying to hide his own expression, and just nodded.

“Well…” She tried to read Keresh best she could while he refused to glance her way, but suddenly her friend had become more of a stranger than anything else.

Ah, screw it. That doesn’t matter here, she scolded herself and her fingers tightened into fists.

“Then, as I was trying to say before, whether you’re a mermaid, merman or whatever, it’s fine. I’m not going to tell anyone about it, about you.”

Keresh visibly started a little. “That’s…thank you. But that’s not what I was…”

Suddenly, Mari gathered her courage and lunged forward, grabbing the edge of the porcelain tub, and bending down so she was eye level with Keresh’s bewildered face.

“You’re still you, Keresh. No matter what. This is a surprise, sure, but… You’re my friend.”

Their eyes met, and they stayed that way for what seemed like years, or perhaps decades, only a few centimeters apart--one determined, and one taken aback.

Finally, one of them breathed.

“Thank you, Mari.”

Keresh’s voice came in a whisper, soft and fragile as a downy and still flightless chick.

She released a sigh of her own, much of the tension that had been hanging in the room--even worse than the electricity of the storm, dissipating as she leaned back into a crouch.

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Keresh similarly began to unwind, water spilling over the edges once more as he twisted in the tub. He rested his arms on top of the side of the tub, so his elbows hung over along with his long tail.

Once again, he seemed at ease, and more like the Keresh she had begun to know over these past couple of months. Mari was content to let that sit for a bit while they both took a respite despite the wind that still roared outside.

However, her eyes gradually drifted to the boy’s tail, droplets of water streaming off the shiny scales which weren’t submerged in water.

Mari didn’t say anything and probably wouldn’t have been able to even if given sufficient time. Yet, Keresh surprised her once again and murmured: “Go ahead.”

She looked at him with dubious eyes, but his gaze was once more fixed straight ahead. Very pointedly looking at nothing, if she did say so herself.

For the moment, she didn’t question how Keresh seemed to know what she was thinking, chalking it up to the obvious direction her gaze was traveling.

With a little shuffling, she positioned herself more to the right and raised a hesitant hand.

“Can I?” Mari found herself asking for permission, so consumed was she by the feeling that if she took one wrong step or moved a little too fast Keresh would reject her just as a wild, unknown animal would.

Keresh shifted and his lips twitched. “Yes…don’t make it awkward.”

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A slight flush lined his cheekbones and a small smirk made its way to Mari’s face. Was he embarrassed? And was his embarrassment, dare she even think it, kind of endearing?

Armed with Keresh’s permission and more than a little satisfied by his juvenile discomfort, Mari faced the object of her attentions once more--Keresh’s tail.

It was a sleek, almost otherworldly thing--despite Mari having grown up around the creatures of the sea. These scales were silvery with an iridescent sheen that was rarely seen on ordinary fish, made all the slicker by the water droplets clinging to them.

Mari wondered if they were as smooth and cool to touch as they looked, and she finally reached out and placed her hand on Keresh’s tail, a little way above the thin, translucent fin.

She could feel Keresh react ever so slightly under her fingers and palm, but she ignored it in favor of the realization that the scales were smooth, diamond-shaped, and overlapped each other almost seamlessly. They were wet, but not slimy, cool, but not clammy­—fish-like, but also radiating a level of internal warmth that was distinctly unlike the cold-blooded inhabitants of the ocean.

Her breath rushed out in a small gasp of wonder.

“It’s…beautiful.”

If Mari had glanced up from her awe of Keresh’s tail, she would have seen that the blush on his face had only darkened upon her comment.

But, then the moment was interrupted by the sound of fast approaching footsteps.

The two craned their heads towards the source and Mari immediately recognized her brother.

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“What’s beautiful?” Mako asked, casting his phone’s flashlight around until it landed on them. Mari watched as his eyes proceeded to bug out comically upon seeing Keresh’s unusual appearance. Whatever may have usually come out of his mouth was abruptly dethroned.

“Holy…shit.”

“Oh. Hi, Mako.” Mari offered a sheepish grin. Keresh gave a half-hearted wave, his tail also sweeping into the air in greeting.

The sun was out with a dash of petty vengeance after the storm swept up and around the coast, punishing every living thing that had dared to rejoice in its absence with nearly blindingly bright rays. Only a few clouds and the dependable ocean breeze wafting inland gave some relief amid the searing heat.

“Ugh, my scales are gonna dry out…” Keresh mumbled around a mouthful of Strawberry Ice Delight.

Mari scooted forward at the edge of the rocky outcropping and bent towards him.

“Really? Does that happen? Even when you have legs?” A barrage of questions began to flow from her lips, but the corners of Keresh’s mouth quirked into a smile.

Mako, on the other hand, rolled his eyes at his sister and then gave Keresh an appraising glance. “Are you sure you should be saying stuff like that out in the open? If someone else hears…”

He trailed off warningly, but the other boy’s easygoing expression did not falter. He stuck the tip of his tongue out at Mako, an “unfortunate” habit he’d picked up from Mari.

“It’s fineeee, they’ll just think it’s a joke. Besides, didn’t you say people barely come to this cove anymore? Just some older

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fishermen?”

Mako made a small, noncommittal sound and shrugged, returning his attention to the small drag nets he was repairing with new twine. A pile of the netting was at his side, bleeding into his lap as he sat on the edge of the old, rotting dock which jutted out from the shore, only long enough to allow decades-old, cramped boats to be tied to the posts.

Only he was on the dock, Mari and Keresh remaining perched on the barnacle and limpet-studded rocks. Mari knew it was so his work remained uninterrupted and uninvolved with whatever mischief the two of them might get up to. A more logical person may have suggested that her brother work in a quiet place away from them altogether, but, despite his exasperated air, Mari could easily read that Mako enjoyed the company.

She dangled her feet in the water, toes dipping into the cool sea as the tide lapped at the rocks. Keresh did the same, his feet already completely submerged, kicking up droplets every now and then. His entirely human feet.

Mari opened her mouth again, a little miffed that Mako had to interrupt and make a disparaging remark. But, Keresh turned to her with a big grin as he bit off the last chunk of his popsicle.

“They can dry out, yeah.” He kept the wooden stick in his mouth as he talked. “More likely when it’s my fully formed tail.

But, I have ta’ get my scales underwater pretty often or it can get bad. We have to keep our scales healthy just like humans have to take care of their skin.”

“Oooh.” Mari’s eyes widened with growing wonder. Keresh had been an interesting guy before, but now that they knew he was a mermaid—er, merman, it seemed that every day, every

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moment spent in his company, she was learning something knew. And, him being a ‘mer’ did explain some of his…eccentricities…

Mako shuffled on the dock but spoke without looking up from the deft movements of his hands: “Hence, the overflowing bath tub.”

He referenced how they’d—well, particularly, Mari, had discovered Keresh’s true form while he was submerged and washing his tail in the tub of the house he claimed he lived in with his aunt. They had found out not long after that the aunt part was a lie, though the fact he occupied the mostly forgotten and isolated home was not.

A flush of heat touched Mari’s cheeks and she saw that Keresh had a similar reaction before they both looked away. Remembering that reveal was at best mortifying for Keresh, shocking for Mari, and a bit of an embarrassing memory for them both.

Mako, the culprit who had brought it up again, seemed to be the only one of them who was unaffected—despite the state of disarray he had been in when also discovering the truth. Mari narrowed her eyes at her usually blasé sibling…she suspected he was just masking his own discomfort, trying to hide the fact that it most definitely had left its mark on him. After all, he had almost fainted, fallen to his knees when realizing that the tail wasn’t some strange hallucination or prank in poor taste.

A smirk rose to Mari’s face at the thought, imagining Mako’s embarrassment and remembering his reaction distracted her from her own. Mako twitched as if sensing the way, he was being analyzed and used by Mari.

There was a cough, breaking the wallowing pause in previ-

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ously easy conversation.

Keresh cleared his throat again. “Ah, yeah, the bath. As I explained before, that was a temporary solution! I just didn’t have many options…”

“Yeah, yeah, we know.” Mari waved her hand flippantly.

“But, now, you don’t have to worry about it. You have this cove where you can swim, bath, do whatever you want!”

The boy met Mari’s buoyant grin with a bit of an uneasy smile. “Yes, if I’m not seen by anyone…”

Her grin began to turn into a frustrated pout. Not this again!

They’d already had this conversation half a dozen times. Keresh would seem relatively relaxed and unworried about the other townsfolk for awhile, before that hesitancy would creep into his speech and movements once more…

“You won’t.”

Mako had jumped in even before Mari could and she looked back to him while emanating approval. Sometimes siblings really did understand each other.

“How can you be so sure?” Keresh pinned Mako with a turquoise stare, an edge of accusal worming into his voice.

This time, Mako did lift his head from tying a final knot and Mari too could feel the intensity of the stare he returned.

“Because you’re smart and we won’t let it happen.”

For a heavy moment, they could only hear the rush of the waves and the raucous cries of the gulls. Mari even imagined that she could feel the steady thrum of blood gushing through her veins.

And Keresh looked absolutely stunned…before rubbing the back of his neck and averting his gaze. “Oh, well, uh… Thanks?

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I…appreciate it.”

The combined power of the offhand compliment and the pact of protection was apparently very effective. Mari felt for him as she watched his jerky movements while opening the small cooler next to them and removing another sweet treat.

It was probably made all the worse coming from Mako, who rarely said such things and when he did it was usually sarcastic rather than deathly serious. Yup…Mari did not envy Keresh’s position.

“You’re welcome.” That was the extent of Mako’s response, before he reached into the separate cooler next to him—filled mainly with whitebait and such, Mari had learned that the red striped cooler always had more food for the fish than for people and pulled out a chilled orange soda.

He popped off the cap and took a large swig. Mari sighed and shook her head. There were many reasons why Mako had never been popular with kids his age at school, always the sharptongued loner, and this was one of them.

But, Mako she already knew more about than she’d like to, and she turned her attention back to Keresh with full, crushing force. He probably should’ve been warier of her than Mako.

“So, your scales do dry out…got it! What else can you tell me about merfolk? Are there a bunch of different types? Do others live among humans like you do? What about kids? Can they have children with humans-?”

Keresh had just gotten his popsicle out of its wrapper, but nearly dropped it, his fingers fumbling as Mari’s fresh wave of questions evidently caught him off guard.

He licked some juice off his fingers before halting the in-

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coming tide.

“Hey, hey, wait a minute! You’ve been asking me about mers every time I see you! Can’t we talk about something else?”

“You’re the one who brought up your scales…” Mari grumbled.

“And I regret that. Completely.”

Mari crossed her arms over her chest, unable to quell her frustration—she had never been very good at hiding her true emotions, they tended to remain near the surface—a fact Mako had always mercilessly teased her about. But, considering what Keresh had said a little more carefully, she couldn’t deny that what he said was correct. It had been about two weeks since they found out about Keresh’s secret, and, whereas, Mako had been mostly, almost somberly silent about things to do with the existence of merfolk, Mari had been grilling the boy with questions at nearly every turn.

Perhaps, she could kinda see why he wanted to change the topic…

She uncrossed her arms, placed her hands in her lap, and faced Keresh with as neutral an expression she could muster.

“Fine. What do you want to talk about?”

“Hmm…” Keresh glanced up and tapped his chin. “How about…humans.”

“Humans?” Mari repeated, a tad incredulously.

Keresh shot her a look. “Sure, why not? We’ve been talking about mers for so long, it’s only fair.”

Mari inhaled and exhaled to stop herself from making another unseemly outburst. “Okay… humans… Then…what do merfolk think about—no, sorry, what do you think about humans?”

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“Isn’t that a little vague?” Keresh smirked.

Mari’s brow furrowed, she could tell he was toying with her now, but it was exceedingly difficult not to respond. “Just… answer it or don’t. You can pick something else if you want-!”

“No, no, it’s okay. Let me think a bit first.”

He was both silent and still for several heartbeats, gazing out into the cradle of waves as if they were to swallow him into a salty, welcoming embrace.

“Humans are like popsicles.”

“Popsicles?!” Mari said incredulously. She spun around to meet eyes with Mako, seeking answers. He was also listening to Keresh, now lending a little more than an ear to the conversation, but only gave Mari an expression which said: I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about either.

“Yes. People are like popsicles,” the mer boy repeated.

He held out his pale blue popsicle—either blue raspberry, soda or one of those “mystery” flavors, and looked at it as beads of water and juice slowly dripped down its length.

“Cause they come in many shapes and flavors.”

“Yeah…” Mari agreed, looking at Keresh strangely. “But that’s not just popsicles or humans, right?”

Keresh’s brow furrowed and he gestured at the slowly melting dessert somewhat impatiently, as if struggling with putting his thoughts into words. “They’re mostly water, with some sweet stuff added in afterwards!”

There was a choking sound off to the side, and they both glanced at Mako who tried to disguise the laughter that had slipped out.

“Uh, sorry. Go on.”

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The frustration that was beginning to accumulate in Keresh’s shoulders relaxed and Mari watched his expression become almost solemn. “They’re fragile, they need something to support them like this stick or other people… See? It’s already melting.”

Was that sadness Mari saw flickering in the depths of his unusual eyes? He was barely even registering the popsicle clasped in his fingers, the blue liquid now pooling at the base of the stick before dripping onto the skin of his thighs.

“And adding more water can’t repair people like it does with mer folk. Because you can’t replace the sweetness, the flavor that was lost.”

He said something else, but the whisper was caught on the sea breeze before Mari could pick it out. When she asked Mako later, she would learn that he hadn’t heard the words later, but… both of them would find out what it was and what it meant— sooner than they would’ve liked.

Keresh snapped out of his thoughts and suddenly bit off the entirety of the popsicle. He tossed the blue stained wooden stick on the rock beside him and stretched his arms over his head.

“Anyways, people are like popsicles and mers aren’t!”

His face broke into a familiar grin. Then he hooked his hands underneath his shirt and pulled it over his head in one smooth motion.

Mari tried to shake her head of Keresh’s words and was only partly successful. “Hm, wait… If people are popsicles, what are mers?”

Keresh rose to his feet, his toes hanging over the edge of the rock he stood on.

“Like fish of course!”

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He lifted onto the balls of his feet, pushed his shoulders back and out and then dove into the water. Cold water splashed onto Mari’s face and shirt and she let out a little cry of surprise.

Keresh had disappeared below the waves and she searched for any movement or shadow with an eye practiced from years of fishing.

The boy eluded her, and Mako also jumped to his feet, beginning to remove his own t-shirt when Keresh emerged with a flamboyant splash.

His hair was plastered to his forehead and his eyes sparkling with glee. He waved at Mako and Mari as they stood on shore, flipped onto his back and his tail also flicked into the air. The scales caught the light reflecting on the gentle waves, glinting unmistakably even from a distance.

“Really, Keresh?” Mari yelled. “You’re not invincible, you know!” She clambered onto the dock and aimed a glare at the frolicking mer.

Mako finished pulling off his shirt and kicked off his sandals. “I take back what I said about you being smart…” He growled only loud enough for Mari to hear.

Keresh ducked in and out of the water, waving his tail, not trying to hide its sinuous, graceful length in the slightest. He threw his head back and pushed the hair out of his eyes.

“Well, I might as well be invincible with you around!” Keresh shouted back, his voice as bubbly as his radiant expression. “Now, want me to show you how to catch fish the right way?”

Mari grinned, excitement rising at that note of challenge.

Her spirit soared in anticipation and she dove into the sea after Keresh. She heard a second splash of Mako following suit, and

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brother and sister joined the mer boy in dancing amid the waves as the sun beat down overhead in a perfect snapshot of carefree youth.

A month later and another summer storm was about to roll in— even larger than the previous ones and expected to tear up the coast and disrupt all fishing activities. According to the older sea-wise people of town, it was also likely to be the last of the season. The queen of all storms, ready to call checkmate.

Everyone could feel the oppressive heaviness increase day by day, affecting each person in different ways.

For Mari, it had always been the anticipation, the rising expectation which led her to bursts of energy or swings of depression. When she was younger, she used to make a game of it—of counting down and trying to predict the exact day, sometimes even the exact hour, when the storm which had been bearing down on them for so long would finally strike. It had been a way to control her frustration. But, when the storm kept waiting and waiting, it would often only exacerbate her irritation. A tendency which Mako had first tried to help her amend, and then just did his best to avoid her during such swings.

Speaking of Mako… He became a force of nature himself both before and after a giant storm. He also experienced surges of energy, verging on paranoia, but all of this he channeled into furious action. Before a storm’s landing—even the small ones and especially the big ones, he would launch into preparations and precautions, fussing over the fishing gear, checking they had enough food and basic supplies, and storm-proofing windows, doors…sometimes even the roof if he deemed it weak enough

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to allow leaking. In all honesty, he had no right to scold Mari for not being calmer when he himself was a literal, writhing mass of nerves.

But, she wasn’t sure what to expect from Keresh. He had been acting restless, although he often had trouble staying put to begin with. Lately, he would also space out, completely lost in thought and unable to register what others were saying. When that happened, Mari occasionally paused before shaking his shoulder and bringing him back to reality. She stared at his face for a few moments, trying to see what he was seeing, or maybe something beyond.

But, Keresh’s face was unreadable—the nature of his day dreams or hidden thoughts eluding her.

Mari had closed her eyes, ready to welcome sleep and meaningless dreams, only to have them open again. Open and staring out at a familiar beach. She blinked, rubbed her eyes, and tried to pinch herself awake.

She was outside, under an angry, quickly moving sky with no idea how she had gotten there. The sand was slightly warm under her bare toes and the once calm waves now roared and thrashed at the shore like a legendary beast caught on a mighty god’s spear.

And, right before the frothing, churning sea, almost dangerously close to the waves which snapped instead of lapped, was a familiar boy.

“Keresh!” Mari forgot her bewilderment and ran towards him at full pelt.

She stopped by his side just as suddenly. “What are you do-

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ing out here?”

He didn’t respond, standing unnaturally still. Now that she was before him, Mari could see that the boy was drenched, his thin t-shirt clinging to his skin, stray droplets still trailing down his face. Something akin to fear clenched Mari’s heart, tearing at it from the inside out.

“How long have you been outside?” She asked, more softly than before. That concern from before had returned, the sense that she couldn’t do anything to scare or push him away. I have to be careful.

Keresh’s gaze was still fixed on the sea, but his lips moved: “Long enough.”

“Ah…okay.” Mari nodded. There was only light rain coming down now, barely enough to even be called rain, so it made sense that he had gotten so wet by spending an unreasonable amount of time out in the elements. “Come on, let’s get away from here before the storm hits. You can come home with us, have some of Mako’s cooking, stay the night…”

“This is my last chance.”

“What…?” Mari looked up at Keresh and his face was a little more visible.

This time she could read his expression.

It was longing. Plain and simple. Every aspect of his face was filled with it as he stared out at the vast ocean.

Mari swallowed. “Keresh… What do you mean?”

Her voice trembled as she spoke, something she normally would’ve been embarrassed by, but now was too consumed by other, much more important emotions.

Keresh finally faced her.

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“Mari. I’m sorry but… All mer folk must return to the sea.”

She stared, unable to process what he said and the weight those words held. She searched Keresh’s face desperately, trying to find some indication that this was all just an elaborate, hurtful lie—a way of telling her that he no longer wanted to be in her company. Even that would be better than the alternative. But, it was too much to hope.

The sorrow swimming in Keresh’s warm sea green eyes was deep, dark, and real. So was the longing that still flickered in the back like that sad little light bulb from when she stumbled upon Keresh in the bathtub.

Mari could have drowned in those depths.

“You can’t,” she said dully. The fire had leaked out of her all of a sudden, like the air out of a popped balloon. Maybe if she didn’t react, if she thought before she acted like usual Keresh wouldn’t“I’m sorry. I-I don’t have a choice.” Cracks had formed in the boy’s husky voice, almost breaking.

He lifted his hand and reached out towards Mari, as if to touch her, perhaps even hug her. That hand stopped before it could even graze her sleeve.

Keresh let it drop and pulled away.

He tore his gaze from Mari and began to walk into the water.

Mari watched, unable to move, as his back turned from her and he waded deeper and deeper.

“Don’t go.”

It was too soft, he couldn’t hear her. The water was already up to mid-thigh level. Why, now, of all times, did the strength of her voice and her heart fail her?!

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She was going to lose him. She was going to lose their dear friend. She couldn’t let this happen, she couldn’t, she couldn’t-!

“Don’t go! DON’T GO!” The waves were at Keresh’s waist and the ones before him were taller than ever. But, miraculously, he heard and twisted his torso towards her.

“Thank you! For everything! I-!”

The tumultuous crash of a series of large waves drowned out the rest of Keresh’s words. Mari shouted again, but Keresh plunged ahead. The spell which had kept her body frozen suddenly broke and she surged forward, chasing after the boy, splashing through the shallows.

Her eyes widened, and she ground to a stop when a massive wave reared its head above Keresh, only his head and shoulders above the water. Her mouth opened in a last, soundless cry and the wall of seawater crashed down.

The wave nibbled at her ankles and Mari’s breath caught in her throat. There, just on the other side of that breaker-- the unmistakable shine of silvery scales and translucent fin.

Keresh’s tail sunk underneath the waves and he became one with the sea foam.

She awoke with a gasp, an ache in her heart, and her back sticky with sweat.

Mari wasn’t sure if that last meeting with Keresh had been a dream or not, it seemed so real—the coolness of the sea spray on her skin, the sand moving under her feet, the expression on Keresh’s face…

She had immediately needed to check, ready to head down

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to the beach despite the worsening weather. But, the storm had touched down and Mako caught her before she could even make it to the bottom of the narrow staircase.

They were forced to wait it out. Mako pressing her to see “reason” even after the details of her “dream” rushed out of her like a series of rapids.

Three days and two nights later, when it was deemed safe enough by the community association and her brother’s innate cautiousness to begin going about their daily business and approach the shoreline, they were finally able to confirm.

At the beach was no Keresh, which, Mako had assured her, was a good thing, meaning he had taken shelter from the storm—probably back in that old house again.

But…that positivity was fleeting when Mari discovered a pair of shoes atop a neatly folded jacket tucked away in some beach brush—clothes that she knew had belonged to Keresh.

Maybe it had been a dream, but their friend being gone was the truth.

A truth they would now have to learn to live with.

Mari rummaged in the freezer, bending over so her entire head was almost enveloped in its cool recesses. Her hands roved around between rows of ice cream sandwiches and miniature tubs of sherbet until she zeroed in on what she was looking for and tossed another popsicle in her basket. With a grunt of satisfaction, she righted herself and weaved through the aisles of the mom and pop shop until she reached the register.

She glanced around at first, but Mako was nowhere to be seen. Likely still in the fish and tackle shop, losing all sense of

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time and restraint upon seeing the newest gear… So…she sighed and pulled out her own stash of money.

Her mind was still wandering and her fingers folding through the meager selection of bills when she plopped the basket on the counter with a thud. Upon seeing the basket filled to the brim, practically overflowing, with popsicles, the man at the counter’s eyes bulged.

His head craned to Mari inquisitively, but he took the basket in hand and began ringing up the contents one by one.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

The girl’s eyebrows furrowed as she finished counting her money. It was probably enough, but Mako would owe her. She shook her head and glanced out the open door at the dock and the shimmering sea which lay beyond. “’Ey there, Mari, where’s your brother?” The man started casually as the endless parade of icy desserts continued. Like most in the small town, the shop owner, often called Old Man Nero by the local children--although he was only forty-something and his name wasn’t Nero, knew everyone by name and sometimes by a bit more.

Therefore, Mari was certainly not surprised that he had begun his usual over-the-counter small talk.

“Buying some new fishing tack,” she groaned, causing Nero to smirk through his stubble. “Though he’ll probably come home with a set of hooks and paring knives too…”

Old Man Nero chuckled. “Sounds like Mako. More like your pops every day.” He ran another popsicle across the bar scan, probably about two-thirds through the stash now. “Hey, what about that friend of yours? What was his name…”

POPSICLES ARE FOR PEOPLE... 133

“Keresh.” Mari said automatically.

“Yeah, that’s the one! I haven’t seen him around lately, what’s he gotten up to?”

Mari was staring at the mound of popsicles and her mind began to revisit the recent past.

“He’s gone.”

“He left town then, huh? Pretty common, not many outsiders stay on here- “ “No,” Mari found herself interrupting the perfectly reasonable conclusion. “He returned to the sea. He was a mer- “ Suddenly Mari felt something hard and bony dig into her side, enough to make her wince and she let out a small yelp.

“Yes, he was a real mariner,” Mako continued smoothly, having appeared suddenly in front of Mari and Nero. “Went back to join some cousins on their sailing vessel, maybe he’ll come by when the winds are nice.”

Mako offered Old Man Nero a grin and the shop owner ate it up, chuckling again. “Now that’s the kind of youthful zeal I like to see!”

He took a last handful of popsicles and added them to the second bulging plastic bag. “Well... it looks like you’ve cleared me of my entire stock, Mari. I hope you use them well to beat the summer heat!”

“We will, Nero!” Mako replied, all chipper grin and boundless energy. He grabbed the bags, handing one to Mari, then he slid his own wad of bills onto the counter, slipping Mari’s into his back pocket.

“Thanks!”

Mako’s hand clasped around Mari’s, and she had little choice

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but to follow as he led them out of the shop.

The two of them walked along the section of the dock headed towards their usual fishing beach. Though, unfortunately, it wasn’t a quiet nor serene stroll on a nice day with hardly a cloud in the sky.

“What were you thinking?” Mako bemoaned, now throwing up his hands. “Are you planning on telling the entire town that Keresh is a freaking merman?!”

Her fingers clenched around the handle of her popsicle-laden bag. “No! I wasn’t going to-!”

“Keresh trusted us with his secret and this is how it’s gonna be revealed? I know he’s gone but…”

Mari stopped abruptly and whirled on her brother, eyes flaring. “I’m sorry! Okay? I just… I just miss him…”

And just like that, the flames of her indignation were extinguished, and she could no longer meet Mako’s gaze for fear he would see the tears collecting at the corners of her eyes.

That action seemed to be enough.

“I know.” A familiar, somewhat comforting hand landed on her shoulder. “I know but come on. We’ve still got a job to do, right? Together.”

They arrived at the beach and headed straight towards the western edge with its collections of rocks, tidal pools, and crevices just large enough to stow things in. Mari and Mako clambered over the sea grass and limpet coated rocks in sandaled feet with a sureness born of years of practiced comfort.

Then they reached their goal, Mari the first to spot a blue and white cooler stuffed in between a trio of rocks, the waves

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cradling it ever so gently.

Excitement consumed her, and she rushed forward, prying off the lid, and revealing a bounty of freshly caught, sleek, shining fish.

A squeal of delight burst forth from her lips and she exclaimed: “He was here!”

Mako came closer, peered over her shoulder at the contents of the cooler and let out a low whistle.

“Damn, he was. And he sure has a good eye for fish. Look, there’s cod, mackerel, sardine, rockfish, even a spiny sturgeon!”

Mari scoffed and began emptying her bag of popsicles.

“Okay, fish nerd, move over and get out the other cooler.”

As Mari stocked the red and white cooler Mako handed her, her brother examined each of the fish, wrapping some of them in butcher paper or placing them in a plastic bag.

She had just finished filling the new cooler with popsicles and was pouring some ice on top, when there was a sharp intake of breath behind her.

“Mako?”

He looked at her, wearing a strange expression. “He was here.”

“Yeah? We already know that…”

“No, I mean, he was just here. Look.” Mako held out a fish lying inside a plastic bag. It was a particularly beautiful specimen of mackerel and its tail was still twitching feebly.

So fresh it was still alive.

“Keresh…” Mari’s head jerked towards the ocean, half-expecting to see the boy hovering at the edge of the rocks, waving his fin frivolously in the air.

Of course, that wasn’t the case, but… Was it that far-fetched

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a hope?

Mari shut the lid of the popsicle cooler and began helping Mako organize the rest of the fish into the bags and into the other cooler, now more than a little deflated.

They were walking along the beach, wading through the surf to stave off the grip of the sun, when she spoke up again.

“Mako, did you mean what you said before?”

He glanced at her, eyebrow half-raised. “What I said before?”

“About Keresh coming back with the good winds.”

Mako paused, as if thinking and considering what to say, before he offered a small smile. “Yes, I did. After all, just this exchange of fish and popsicles can’t satisfy him, right? The true experience comes from eating it with your people and he’s one of us.”

A splash sounded behind them, much too loud to belong to the average fish, but Mari resisted the urge to turn around. She would have to be content with the image her mind conjured up.

Uncharacteristically, Mako threw his arm around her shoulder, giving her a small hug, and she smiled.

Yes…they would just have to wait for their friend to return with the next summer storm.

Fin.

137

139

SIERRA SCOLARO Business Administration Major

I

look up from my book to glare at the boys, the reckless pigs squealing across Lincoln Elementary’s dilapidated playground. They’re screaming and running and chasing each other with sticks, so my concentration is broken, if not completely shattered. The largest stick—I hope—will pierce one in the eye and leave a monstrous gash. The injured fool will run to the nurse, wet with tears and snot and a little bit of blood. No, a lot of blood. I would laugh at that, I think. Am I that cruel? My classmates are nasty boys, anyway. Nasty, stupid boys.

Rolling my eyes, I try yet again to finish another page. I prop my book up high so that the title faces out.

Maybe a teacher will walk by and say, “Wow, Jane. You sure are mature. I’ve never seen a sixth grader read Pride and Prejudice. You must be really smart.”

“Oh, this is easy. I just like to be fastidious when I read,” I

140 SIERRA SCOLARO

would reply, because Mr. Bingley says words like fastidious and vex somewhere in these pages.

The boys are still screaming. They vex me.

I’m a creature of oddity here because I prefer long perplexing words to big sticks and tetherballs. My skin turns pale by the shade of my reading tree, while the others bake brown from tag in the sun. I’m also reading a book about meat production. My recent lack of appetite for the stuff has earned me the nickname “herb,” as if “herbivore” was a few too many syllables and not worth the breath. As if I needed another nickname.

The bell chimes, ending another glorious autumn recess.

I sit in my desk and nonchalantly—but secretly feeling very chalant, is that a word?—plop down my book. I make sure the other kids hear the thud. I make sure the title is facing upwards.

“Sit, sit. Quiet down.” I listen to my teacher beg for our attention. “Before we continue, I want to remind you all of our upcoming field trip. It’s next Thursday, and I need your parents to sign…” My eyes are drawn to a smudge on the whiteboard. “…a great experience for you to learn how dairy and meat is produced.” I want to run to the front and erase it. “The trip is highly encouraged and will give you substantial insight as to how our society...” In another world, I have telekinetic powers and erase the smudge with my mind.

“Does the herb have to go?” a boy snickers, his outstretched arm pointing my way.

I use my powers to make him urinate his shorts. I laugh. I wish I had telekinetic powers.

I sit for dinner with Dad and Gregory. Dad’s hand is an F-18, flying

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loops and drunken turns until it finally lands its peachy-sludgecargo into the mouth of poor Gregory. Pulverized fruit dribbles down his chin and he cries—probably because his name is Gregory. Most likely because he’s sitting in his own poop. No, excrement.

Mom waltzes in, an acrobatic ballerina balancing hot porcelain plates filled with food I’ll probably refuse.

“Mom,” I start.

“Jane,” Dad responds, even though he’s clearly not Mom. Imbecile.

“Mom,” I ignore him, “I can’t eat that.”

“Asparagus?” she asks. She is sweet and naïve. I love her, regardless.

“Meat.”

“But it’s the tender kind.”

“I don’t eat meat anymore.”

“Since when?”

“Since that book. And since Will.”

Will.

Of all the boys—all the harebrained, vile, prepubescent nimrods in my class—Will is the exception to his kind.

In the hot days of freedom, just before school buses roamed streets again, I’d retreat to a paradise called Donny’s Bookstore.

My chair was in the back—an old leather thing with a seat so sunken it practically raised my knees above my head. On a random Tuesday that’s not so random anymore, I saw him. Lord of the Flies clutched under my damp armpit, I spied through the M’s and N’s of nonfiction before walking over. That was my chair, I said. Sorry, he said. He just moved here, he said. Just him and his dad. I asked about his mom. He changed the subject. He

142 SIERRA SCOLARO

asked about the Lord of the Flies gathering sweat under my arm.

I told him about Piggy. I asked about Meat in America: How It’s Made. He said he’d lend it to me when he finished. We spent the rest of that afternoon together in the slumped leather chair, sinking further and further between the tattered arms that hugged a new friendship.

Gregory is still crying.

“You’ll eat the meat or you’ll go to bed hungry,” says Dad. “Fine, I’ll be hungry.”

“Good, I’ll be Dad.” He thinks he’s funny, but he’s just a bully. Or rather, a tyrant.

No, too dignified. He’s just like the boys at school. He’s a dick.

It’s particularly hot today and I’m grateful that my reading tree’s lush foliage hasn’t fled to the ground yet. I’m half-reading a book, half-watching Will walk towards me, and fully-ignoring the butterflies that are taking refuge in my tummy.

“Hey, Jane.”

“Hmm?” I casually look up. “Oh, hi Will. Fancy seeing you on this side of the playground.”

“I brought the book you gave me.”

“Good, because I’ve already started yours.”

“Mind if I sit?”

Of course I don’t mind. In fact, I’d mind if he didn’t sit after all this chit chat. A girl’s hopes can only rise so high. I’m on the last chapter of Will’s Meat in America book and he’s just started Lord of the Flies. Boy, he was a slow read. Not like it was a contest. If it was, I’d be winning. But it wasn’t. Anyways.

“Hey, we’re losing shade. I have an idea,” Will proclaims as

HERBIVORE 143

he tugs my reading blanket out from underneath me. He plops down beside me and drapes the thin cloth over our heads. His face glows with excitement and a red tint from our fabric shelter.

“A fort!”

We continue to spend every recess like this—it’s our tradition. We lay on the grass, under the blanket, beneath the walnut tree, in the sweltering sun. Our constant giggles and anxious breaths heat the air under our fort, defeating the sole purpose of having a shade blanket. But I don’t mind. I don’t think he minds either. We lay on our bellies, and, despite the heat, I grow goosebumps each time his arm brushes mine. He laughs at Ralph or Piggy. I gasp at the descriptive horrors of meat factories. We make eye contact for the zillionth time and burst into another fit of giggles. And his eyes… I can’t stop staring at them. Rather, into them. They’re emerald reflections of all that is good in the world, flecked with gold that would shame even the brightest of sunsets. Our faces turn a deep red—from the blanket, or from something else—and I relish in the perfection of this moment.

“Hey Piggy,” I tease, “I have a question.”

“Shoot.”

“Are your parents forcing you on the field trip too?” I say.

“My dad.”

“Huh?” “It’s just my dad. My mom’s gone.”

“Oh, right.” Oops. “Anyways, your dad forcing you to go?

My dad is. But my dad is a tyrant,” I say. I wonder if Will finds my extensive vocabulary attractive. I hope so. Normal girls don’t use words like tyrant and vex and fastidious. Normal boys don’t have intelligent golden-green eyes.

144 SIERRA SCOLARO

“No. Dad won’t let me go, actually. He says meat and dairy production is a tangible representation of American greed and cruelty to those deemed undeserving of a fair chance. Or something like that.”

“Oh.” “He wasn’t always like this.”

“Oh?” “Mom left—had to leave, or something—and Dad’s been this way since.”

“Oh. Well, I’m sorry I can’t sit next to you on the bus,” I offer.

“Thanks.”

I really am sorry Will isn’t next to me on the bus. The day has been absent of giggles and goosebumps and emerald eyes.

And it’s nice to talk to someone every once in awhile. The boys stop calling me names if I talk to someone not composed entirely of leather and paper and ink. The girls might not snicker at me. But it’s okay, I’ll just listen to Fitzgerald tell me how lascivious everyone is in the 1920s. I dream of champagne and dresses and dancing and hor d’oeuvres. The 20th century author barely finishes rambling on about Eggs when our teacher stumbles to the front of the bus, gripping tightly to the metal rods to keep from an embarrassing face-to-floor blunder.

“We’ll be arriving soon, so I want you all to put away your phones and ready your field trip packets. Remember a pencil.

Leave your belongings on the bus, they’ll be here when we get back. All clear?” he shouts over distracted ears.

The bus responds in a less-than-enthusiastic “Uh-huh” and the poor excuse for an authoritative figure slumps back down. I

HERBIVORE 145

feel bad. He tries. Kids my age just suck.

We jump, one by one, off the wheeled yellow prison. We crowd around our teacher as he introduces a man in a goofy apron and big yellow hard hat.

“Welcome! Wow, they didn’t tell me I’d be giving a tour to the smartest kids in Oklahoma,” the man lies through the fakest smile I’ve ever seen. I almost puke. We follow Modern Moses through parting steel gates.

We enter the first facility—the infancy room—and I gape at the high ceilings and silver walls littered with tubes and vents and wires. It smells weird in here—a combination of sweat and soap and sorrow. The Hard Hat man is rambling on about lactation.

“If you look to your left, you’ll see a mother feeding her young.”

“But that one is brown,” a kid remarks.

“Well, yes. It’s not the mother’s young, per say, but she has milk and the baby needs to drink. Don’t worry, though. We’ll take the baby in a few days, and then the mother will be milked so that you can enjoy a nice bowl of cereal! Or ice cream!”

“Why is she in here?”

“Well, you see, when you behave poorly and the city deems you a threat—” “What does that mean?”

“Say, for example, you rob a store, or you speak out against the government, or—” “What happens to the baby?”

“Why, that’s our next stop! Follow me,” Hard Hat booms as he spins on his heel and marches toward the next set of heavy

146 SIERRA SCOLARO

double doors. We follow like blind sheep.

In the next room are monstrous steel machines with conveyor belt tongues and cold metal claws. Their language is a symphony of deafening beeps and buzzes and whirs. Fleshy, hairless livestock are herded into a stall, their ankles linked together by chains and cuffs. One-by-one they’re lifted, flipped upside-down, and their hanging bodies are wheeled along pulleys and chains until their fragile necks meet a spinning saw-toothed blade at the end of the ride.

They drip and wiggle and drip some more, until I finally look away and can’t stare at the bodies anymore but fixate on pools of burgundy painting the cold cement floor.

Through the last door are more tubes and more stalls and more females. They’re secured in place by suction cups and the knowledge that there is no escape. Hard Hat drones on about standard milking procedures. Boys in front of me snicker at the sight of women’s breasts. The caged females sit in helplessness and embarrassment as they’re drained of milk and all sense of dignity. Most glance down or to the side in desperate attempts to pretend they’re not being ogled. I lock gazes with one. Her eyes are tired and hurt—emerald reflections of all that is wrong with the world, flecked with gold that would shame even the brightest of sunsets.

I realize.

Days blur together now. The air bites and my reading tree is nothing more than a standing pile of naked twigs. I haven’t seen Will since before our field trip. I’m always alone. No, isolated.

Detached? Solitary? I don’t know anymore. I don’t care.

HERBIVORE 147

And why should I care? Why should I care for a boy who just leaves? Why should I care for a boy who deserts a town he knows is wrong? Why should I care when he couldn’t open his goddamn mouth to say I’m an herbivore too so that the teasing and taunting would stop at least just a little? Just a little.

Why should I care for a boy with golden green eyes when he didn’t even have the heart to say goodbye?

The boys have a new nickname for me, and in a halfhearted and pitiful response, my teacher pulled me aside to say: Sticks and stones may break my bones…

But words will never hurt me.

And it’s true. It’s not the words—but the lack of words—that have hurt me. The shortage of intelligent conversation, the absence of giggles under a red blanket, the unlikeliness that I’ll ever find another friend like Will—these all hurt me. Words have been my only solace, and while these tightly-bound pages never make me laugh until I’m blue, rouse goosebumps up my arms, or draw me closer and closer until I’m lost in a sea of green and gold, words have never hurt me—not in the way his leaving has.

And c’mon, Jane the lame? That nickname doesn’t even make sense, it’s just lazy.

“Dinner!” Mom sings from the kitchen, beckoning us to the dining table. She sets the steaming dishes on cloth coasters and peels back the foil. I can feel Dad’s glare, waiting for one of my many quips about why I can’t eat the meat in front of me.

It’s inhumane.

It’s unethical.

It might be his mother.

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I grasp my fork and stab a thick crimson piece. I slap it on my plate. I pin it down and saw through the dense, succulent fibers. I open wide, allowing the juices to sear my tongue and redden my teeth.

His book crackles in the fireplace.

I chew.

Mmm, tastes like chicken.

No, pork?

Ah, that’s it.

It tastes like revenge.

149

151

BRYCE ASTON Journalism Major

W

hen I think of tomorrow, I still think of you. You and your vanilla words halfway to meaning something, your voice and leather jackets that narrated forever. You used to promise me this: a just-add-water future in New York penthouses with modern art on the walls and an elevator attendant who only knew you as sir. But when do these things ever work out the way you planned? After all, it wasn’t part of the agenda for you to skip out before we reached the finish line. You were only two blocks from our tin box apartment when all your tomorrows smashed into today like a badly tuned accordion and the semi smashed you into oblivion, and that was never part of the plan, was it?

So now I do my best to live these tomorrows for you, and the elevator attendant calls me sir. I go to cocktail parties and wear the suit that you said made me look like a gentleman and

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make small talk about today and tomorrow and all those yesterdays I’ve accumulated since you’ve been gone, but we never talk about you. The Before has been crushed under the weight of the After, and this was never part of your plan, but you are inexorably forgotten by the world you pretended to be unafraid of. It’s as though being dead has erased your existence entirely.

You exist in days that are no longer the present, in a whole heap of yesterdays but not a single today, and so it seems that maybe you never existed at all. After all, memories are only as good as their keepers, and everyone else’s concern is still with tomorrow, not all those yesterdays you never seemed to care about. Maybe they have the right idea, because remembering is no picnic. But letting go seems blasphemous, and though there is no one else to be hurt by my forgetting, I still pretend that I keep these memories for everyone but myself.

But sometimes I wonder if I’m going about it all wrong.

Because when you were still around, sometimes forgetting about the past seemed to be the only way forward. One minute it would be eleven at night and you would be throwing darts at my need for you where it was pinned to my face, telling me to “give you space” and calling me names that used to be terms of endearment before you got your new brand of sarcasm. But then you would go out and I would cry myself to sleep and when you came back at six in the morning we would put yesterday in our back pockets to be forgotten and put through the wash.

You would wake me up and pull me out into the street in pajama pants and the scarf you brought me from France. We would run down the sidewalks, you in front – you were always in front – and ask bleary-eyed coffee vendors for two coffees, one with

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extra cream and sugar (I think it bothered you that I drank mine black; after all, you were always the fearless one). And as we walked in the park and fed pigeons little bits of our paper dry croissants, it was as if we were whole. Yesterday would no longer have definition in the steam of mixed coffee and breath and the sunlight that drizzled on your hair. We would forget about why our eyes were puffed and red and not speak of the lipstick marks only half-hidden under your collar, because in our world – in your world – yesterday had no place in today.

The first time I knew you were cheating on me, it became exponentially harder to pretend I didn’t care. She had a pretty name to match her pretty face, and I only met her once at a party you took me to – you told me later who she was, and I wished that I had paid closer attention, that I had maybe knocked her off her five inch stilettos, maybe spilled my drink all over her little dress. But then you kissed me, and what could I do but believe you when you said she was nothing? You called her a yesterday, and I had to take that as comfort.

But just because you forgot about one girl, didn’t mean you stopped. It was about two months before we fell back into that insidious yesterday: you would come home late smelling of perfume and booze and cigarettes, and something much more shameful and private, a smell I associated with pulled curtains and the days when I was still trying to convince my dad that I was “normal.” I didn’t understand why you did it: your parents had disowned you for dating me, you had been called names I couldn’t repeat without putting a bad taste in my mouth, you had been the one to tell me that the people who stared at the two pretty boys kissing on the train were really just jealous. And

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yet here you were. Fucking some girl named Selena or Keira or something else appropriately sexy while I burned down candle after candle, waiting for you to come home to a dinner I spent four hours making.

Because somehow I thought that if I proved that I could cook better than them, that I could set the table nicely, that if I got you up at midnight to go to a diner because I was craving hashbrowns, that if I was spontaneous and unpredictable and fast-paced and alive, just like you, I thought that maybe you would see how stupid your little flings were. But the problem was that half of that version of me was fake, and the other half you already knew too well.

And so you came home later and later, and left earlier and earlier, and your disregard ate up the night till finally you just didn’t come home at all. When I first woke up in the apartment that was too still to contain you, I was angry beyond all belief. That you would just forget about me – no call, no note, no drunken whispers and sloppy caresses in the middle of the night. For about ten minutes, it gave me the strength to pull out my suitcase and throw in clothes haphazardly – it felt so damn good to just throw them in without folding, not caring about the wrinkles that I would regret later. But it also took ten minutes to realize that the reason it felt good was because it was something you would do. I wasn’t being rebellious, I was only mirroring the pounding of fists and half-zipped bags that you would use to wound me when we got in a “serious” fight. And once I realized this, I came unglued and all that resolve poured out my seams.

I was crying on the floor when they came to tell me. The knock sounded like you. It’s staccato was machine gun fire to my

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heart, and I pulled myself up with the intention of being calm and collected. I let you wait, taking my time washing my face in the bathroom, brushing back my hair. You knocked four more times, and every beat made me more confident.

But it wasn’t you.

I knew the moment I saw them, because uniforms at our door meant either I had been very very stupid, or you had. It was like in movies, when the bad news is broken and everything becomes muffled and buzzing. I couldn’t hear, could only notice that one cop had powdered sugar on his sleeve and I thought about all the comments you would have made, low whispers in my ear with your hand at the small of my back about how he really needs to beware of fulfilling clichés. I thought about how everything you said sounded like poetry, even when you were drunk – especially when you were drunk. I thought about everything but this: You were crossing the street at five in the morning (you had been three hours dead. Three hours. Were you cold by now? Or does it take longer for vitality to drain?). The first snow of the year – and yes, I looked out the window with blinding white and thought about how this was your favorite day – had sent the semi into a skid. You had been wearing your favorite calf-length black coat, the one with the rip in it, and a scarf I had gotten from a cheap French boutique and told you was real cashmere. You had been carrying a dozen red roses with a card to a girl named Mia, and when your neck snapped on the cement, they had fallen all around you, a halo of blood in the snow. As if to throw away the misapprehension that you might be sleeping. A stamp of ownership by yesterday, and you were gone.

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We buried you three days later. Your mom and dad came up from Georgia, and when I offered to let them stay in our apartment, which suddenly seemed too big, there was a long silence in which your mom gave your dad a pleading look and he avoided my eyes. Finally, in a stiff voice, he said no thank you, that they had a nice room at a hotel.

Your sister did end up staying with me. At first it was awkward, long silences punctuated only by her sniffs and comments on the art, none of which I could explain to her because they were all yours. But by midnight we were both drunk and winestained, and I kissed a girl for the first time in a long time. We tangled and collapsed into each other and perhaps it the wrong way to go about this whole thing called ‘moving on.’ Maybe it was wrong, but everyone has to grieve in their own way, and her and I both know what yesterday meant to you, so we knew that tomorrow we wouldn’t have to remember it. And it helped. You hadn’t spoken to her in fourteen months after a fight about her abusive boyfriend, but she was still you. She still shared at least some of that DNA, still had spun gold hair like yours, still tilted her head in the same way you used to when you were trying to get your way.

That was the last time I touched someone. I’ve started going to the gym a lot. I go on dates some nights and go to bars most nights but I never bring anyone home.

So I sleep alone in a bed that stopped smelling like you six months ago. The elevator attendant calls me sir. I got a promotion at work that would have made you jealous and used the extra money to buy a ticket to France next month. Every once in a while I pull down my big suitcase and pretend it’s that last day

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again, throwing in suits as though I can still smell your absence, going faster and faster because maybe if I leave before they can knock on the door you will stop being dead. But history repeats more often than not and finally I collapse to the floor with sobs.

Later, I get up and iron the suits, put on your favorite Norah Jones album and drink wine until it feels like yesterday again. I imagine just going one of these days. Finishing the packing and leaving my key under the mat to our apartment, getting into the Corvette you bought me for my 23rd birthday and driving until I find a town where you can actually see the horizon and I can maybe find some quiet.

But I never do.

Instead I think about it until it makes me tired, and then I get in bed with Norah Jones still crooning in the background.

She’s still waiting for you to come home, I think to myself but really to you, because I hate admitting even to the empty space shaped like you that I miss us. I turn off the lights and lay on my back, staring at the plastic glow-in-the-dark stars we super-glued to the ceiling so that everyone who lived here would have their own unpolluted night sky. And eventually I start to fall asleep. I dream of red roses and a girl named Mia and running down the street in my plaid pajama bottoms. And in the moment when I slip into sleep you are still alive and warm next to me, and we are okay.

When I wake up, I have a hangover and Norah Jones is skipping on your favorite song, scratched from so many times played. I turn off the CD and wrap myself up in the scarf from France, the scarf I saw an exact replica of in the cheap boutique where I bought yours. I walk to the coffee stand, shuffling my

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feet to get warm.

I still buy two coffees. One with four packets of sugar and three milk creamers. Sometimes I gag them both down, sometimes I give the extra to a homeless man who always walks down our block. He grimaces but takes it, and sometimes I smile.

I will forget you eventually. Yesterday has no place in today after all. We are the champions of tomorrow, you always used to say. I never quite understood what you meant, and at this point I don’t think it matters. But when I think of tomorrow, I still think of you, and I suppose that counts for something.

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SPECIAL THANKS TO Charmaine Martinez Our advisor and mentor for the last four years.

Glenn Johnson For incredible insight on bookmaking and the print industry.

The Writers Collective Thank you for welcoming me into your club and working so closely with us.

All who submitted stories We had a wonderful time reading all submissions, and were blown away by the concepts and worlds you had to offer us.