UNCOVER THE SHADE (II) 2

GIRL FRIEND 10

KING 11

SHE CAME TO ME AS BLOOD

AND FLUID 12

REFLECTIONS ON DEATH IN THE

QUARTER-LIFE 17

AN UNCERTAIN STILLNESS 26

DWELLER ON THE THRESHOLD 27

REFLECTIONS UNANNOUNCED 32

APOLOGIES FOR THE WAIT. WE’RE BACK IN ACTION.

COOL, LET ME KNOW.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I cornered you. Corneredlike the mouse who refused the cheese.

Cheese, you commanded a photo ofus. The us that wasn’t scratching beneath

theskin with dirty manicured nails. The you

and Iwas a Venetian mask with black feathershiding the you and you. I was an infant

struggling with words and crying. Cryingwas better than words when the snowevacuated all the leaves. I still see you,in strange women. You are the stirrups

thatstraddle my mind like an electric

bull, bull dozing my trust.

GIRL FRIENDBY MICHELLE HARRISON

KINGBY MICHELLE HARRISON

A black horse nibbles at my belt.His long, dexterous mouth makes me laugh andI forget his yellowing planks are unforgiving. I

daydreampower: a struggle for crystal chandeliers that

couldkill with their weight. I watch them fall. A

sprinkling noise like coming out of a night’ssleep; a prolonged crash as a millionaire is killed

beneath it, irony dripping off the rings like blood.

I push his mouth awaythrow a second hand saddle over hisback as he licks the post he’s tied to.

The stirrups chink like crystals.I tighten the deliquescent strap over his gasping

belly,place a metal bar through his mouth as I

pet in between his ears. I throw my weight on him. Fifteen hundred pounds withsteal feet; I’m a mosquito on his back. With a tap from my rubber soul, he moves forward.

REFLECTIONS ON DEATH IN THE QUARTER-LIFE

BY TRAVIS ROBERSON

The temperature dropped a few days ago. It feels like an eternity’s gone by since the last relief from the Florida heat. People have already begun to bundle up and I can’t understand it for the life of me. They spend all year complaining about the heat as they wipe sweat from their brows, yet when the lightest chill comes to the air they run from it.

I like the cold. I always have. I’ve never cared for wearing jackets, much to the dismay and de-mands of my elders. I love embracing that whis-per of cold, the way it slips through the skin and gently taps the bone.

The renewed cold has made me think about death quite a bit. Not as much as I did this time last year when my chest always hurt. It turned out my body didn’t like what I was feeding it. I now find myself thinking about death in a dif-ferent way. I no longer believe it to be looming around each corner, but I know it will come one day. Not just for me, but for all of us.

I take my dogs out late at night or early in the morning just before I go to bed. I never turn on the porch light, opting to relish in the cool night air and peer up at the stars, each one winking back at me with a heavenly aura.

Across the way, in a different backyard in a dif-ferent neighborhood, I’ll listen to a tree branch lightly rap against a window of an empty house. And if the wind’s just right, I’ll look up from the deep shadows of the porch and watch the faint outline of one of my mother’s wind chimes gen-tly dance as it hums out a simplistic tune.

Airplanes fly overhead all the time. The house is positioned far enough away from the airport that the planes are too high by the time they pass over to let you hear their mechanical roars. I watch them fly by in silence, muted like mem-bers of a silent film, the lights upon their bodies blinking and flashing, attempting to disguise themselves as one of the stars.

I try to imagine every occupant of these planes: the mother with the squirming baby, the old businessman that will never get comfortable, the college student somehow already asleep.

I’m terrified of flying. I’m always convinced the plane is going to crash. I weigh my odds every time I board one.

I look at the faces of the passengers I pass as I shuffle down the narrow aisle towards my seat. I absorb each distinctive feature they possess and I say to myself, “Do they look like they’d die in a plane crash?”

I picture their faces printed in black and white beneath a bold-face headline bearing grim news streamed across the front page of a newspaper. Most of the time they don’t match up. But when they seem like they do, I get nervous.

Watching these aerial behemoths above, pic-turing all those faces packed into that con-fined space, I never imagine them as those that wouldn’t make it. They’re always faces that ar-rive at their destinations.

I whistle after a while, piercing the night’s calm and calling the dogs in. One final time, as I pull the door open, I listen to the tree branch’s persistent racket and the wind chime’s song. I imagine those faces on board the planes gliding above, and I think how one day there will be no one to experience any of this.

The wind will stir to life the creations of both man and nature, only for them to play to an au-dience of deaf ears. No planes will fly overhead and all will be still and experienced by nothing.

This frightens me more than my own demise. I am but a whisper, as we all are, but whispers al-ways seem to hold the most enlightening words. It will be a tragic thing when existence can no longer be witnessed.

If there is a god, it’s that which is all around us-- every ounce of existence expanding beyond even our travelable realms, waiting to be ab-sorbed by sight and sound. The thought of the universe falling silent is terrifying.

Still, it is nearly impossible not to indulge in more personal fantasies. If I wasn’t guilty of this I doubt I’d be wholly human. I spend a large portion of my life suspended in my own thoughts. It’s fair to say a majority of them lin-ger towards death.

I manage to reflect back on a time when I was ten years old and traveled in the back of a Dodge Caravan with my mother, brother, grand-mother, and niece to a three day family reunion on the Alabama-Florida state line.

I think I find myself revisiting these moments so frequently because ten was an immensely important age for me. It was a time when I was discovering music I actually enjoyed and was identifying myself with something in one way or another, but it was also a time when I was sur-rounded by more death than ever before.

My grandmother’s maiden name is Johnson and her mother’s maiden name is Lundy and both families were quite popular in the surrounding counties, more or less due to the fact that they are the majority of each small town’s popula-tion. My great uncle Charlie even has the road he lived on named after him. When I met him he was near death. He hardly knew what was going on and was attacked by a hacking cough every few minutes. I suppose he’s dead now, buried in the big cemetery filled with Johnsons and Lundys.

I visited this cemetery, walking past the rows of gravestones, some of them well past a hundred years of age. My grandmother knew almost every story that went with each grave. There was the little Lundy baby, buried next to her mother who tried to rescue her from a snake bite, riding horseback to the nearest doctor but was too late. There was Uncle John who died young-- twenty-four. His car was hit by a truck late one night with three others in it. He laid sprawled out on the road, his eyes and bloodied face to the stars, pleading for the truck driver to just shoot him. He was taken to a hospital where they removed most of his intestines. He clung to life for another day or two and then was gone. Then there was George Willis Green Lundy, my great grandmother’s father, buried next to his wife that died early on from a sickness no one rightly understood.

And Jack Lundy, lost in a hurricane, the exact date of his death unknown.

The buried bodies of long dead relatives stretched on and on, and in my mind I see my own body resting there one day. I know that will never really happen. It’s hardly a place I’d want to be, but my mind seems to enjoy taking me there, hovering above the pointed black gate and green lawn like a ghost cherishing half-for-gotten memories.

I don’t see my coffin, nor do I ever read the epitaph inscribed upon my tombstone. The only things I ever see in this vision are two people: a young woman and her son.

She holds his hand as they walk towards the car parked at the edge of the lawn. Her face is so bright and so youthful and beautiful. She always wears a powder blue dress with a big Southern hat to match.

The boy is nearly myself at that age; young, in-nocent and confused, unaffected by the sea of graves stretching out behind him. To him, death hardly matters. It’s so far from reach.

I do not know these people. Perhaps they are distant relatives much like myself on that sum-mer day in Alabama, or maybe the young wom-an is my daughter, the boy, my grandson.

In the end, I know they are mere apparitions haunting my mind, constructs coasting through the cortex to remind me of the finality of death.

And that terrifies me, the eternity attached to life’s end. Death truly is a venture into the un-known, but not in the sense of becoming some sort of spiritual art form, but rather never being able to witness the future.

I am dead in that vision of the young woman and little boy. I will never see them get in their car. I will never see them drive off or find out where they’re going. I will never watch the sun set on that old cemetery and I will never be able to count the stars in that night’s sky.

No more thoughts will pass through my mind and no more sounds will ring in my ears. I will never learn that little boy’s name and I will never have the chance to read what he writes of my gravestone.

Contributors:

Brandon GeurtsCristina BarrosNiels Geybels (sqncs.tumblr.com)Cass Jones Russell ParkerFrank ConwayAbby JuarezLaura RestrepoTakeki IshiharaTravis RobersonMichelle HarrisonKeith Carlson

“UNCOVER THE SHADE (II)” by Niels GeybelsPhotography on 4-5 and 24-25 by Cass JonesDrawing on page 8 by Keith CarlsonCollage on page 9 by Frank ConwaDrawing on 13 by Laura RestrepoPhotography on 16 by Abby JuarezPhotography on 28-29 by Russell Parker“Reflections Unannounced” by Takeki Ishihara

Photography on 6, 14, and 32 by Brandon Geurts“Dweller on the Threshold” by Brandon Geurts“An uncertain stillness” by Brandon Geurts “She came to me as blood and fluid” by Brandon Geurts

Cool, Let Me Know is Brandon Geurts and Cristina Barros.