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Cover artwork by David GreavesInside front photo by Sam BeckmannMasthead collagraph by Erich WassilakInside back photo by William George Inspiration

John Bromell

Sisyphus Winter ’12

I am a breath, a close and silent sound.Asleep, I lie behind the eye that gleams,But you can only find me once I’m found.I am the muse, the mother of your memes.I slowly sigh into your self and fill itWith ideas murmured faintly into your soul. You must be patient, there’s no way to will it—One day, I’ll have my way and take control.

I am the man with eternally full lungs.And you are my saxophone. Through you I blowFor you to bellow out beautiful songs:The jazz of creation. Embers all aglow, My wind will fan the flames of your desire.If you can open up, I will inspire.

3 Inspiration, poetry by John Bromell4 drawing by David Greaves5 The Basement, fiction by Kevin Cahill6-10 photography by Austin Strifler11 photography by Andrew Nguyen12 photography by Austin Strifler13 Sweetness, poetry by Sam Herbig14 Thoughts of My Cold, Homeless Uncle Mike, Asperger Genius, poetry by Nathan Fox15 photograph by Austin Strifler16 Lapsed, fiction by Kieran Connolly17 Concourse, photography by Carson Monetti18 photography by Sam Beckmann21 photography by Sam Beckmann22 Atrium, photography by Carson Monetti23 Gene the Scrabble Guy, poetry by Connor Madden24 Fogged Windows, poetry by James Boeckmann photography by Ben Hilker25 To My Boater Hat On Sunday, poetry by Sam Herbig27 photography by Ben Banet28 Pretty Crier, fiction by Andrew Palisch 29-30 photography by Austin Strifler32 Mental, fiction by Kevin Cahill 33 photography by John Kissel36 maryland avenue, poetry by Tom Blood

36-37 drawing by David Greaves38 Parable of the Yeast, print by David Greaves39 Safety, fiction by Andrew Jung41 print by David Greaves43 Screen Saver, poetry by Kevin Madden artwork by Anthony Vienhage44 Mass of the Sonnet, poetry by James Boeckmann artwork by David Greaves45 Puppy Love, fiction by Peter Myers46 photography by Andrew Nguyen47 Backyard Fireplace, poetry by Nathan Fox photography by Austin Strifler48 Odyssey of the Snow, fiction by Benjamin Hilker50 photography by John Kissel53 photography by Sam Beckmann55 For William, poetry by Tom Blood56 Time Never Tires, poetry by Connor Madden photography by Daniel Meehan57 Regal, fiction by Evan Chipley59 print by Erich Wassilak61 design by Sam Herbig61 Weight of the World, poetry by Ben Luczak63 Idling, photograph by Carson Monetti64 Stuck, poetry by John Bromell65 Pictures, poetry by James Boeckmann photography by Andrew Nguyen68 Children, poetry by Sam Herbig69 Toad on Shell, print by Greg Fister What Is Life?, poetry by Matei Stefanescu71 photography by Gabe Miller72 A Marriage Sonnet, by William George

54

The BasementKevin Cahill

drawing by david greaves

No, take your shoes off !” I paused, one foot hanging in the

air above the new faux polar bear rug that sprawled on the marble foyer. I shot Tommy an exasperated look, but his face told me that this new rug, like most of the fixtures in the house, came with its own set of rules.

“My shoes aren’t even dirty,” I grumbled, already slipping out of my battered blue Nikes. Tommy shrugged uncomfortably and waved for me to follow him.

I paused for a moment, though, clench-ing my toes and feeling the texture of the new rug.

“Hey, who’s here today?” The question had almost become a ritual when I went over to Tommy’s place; he knew what I was really asking. He shook his head.

“He’s working right now.” A thump came from upstairs and Tommy shot a look at the ceiling as if he could see through the white plaster. He stared for a moment, motionless, then turned back to me and started walking down the hall to his right. “Come on, my sis-ter’s supposed to be sleeping.”

I followed him, my sock-covered feet whisking softly against first the cool white marble and then the slick tiling of the kitch-en. Tommy didn’t tell me where we were go-ing. We always went to the same place when we went inside his house: his basement.

The basement belonged in a different house. Where the rest of the house was all cool marble, stainless steel and tastefully se-lected art and furniture, the basement was rough and raw. The walls were unfinished rough rock and the stained carpet that cov-ered the floor was one of the only remnants of the previous owners. The only piece of furni-ture down here was a black bean bag that had

“

leaked stuffing until the day our impromptu duct tape surgery saved it. Up above, every piece of furniture had its own invisible set of rules we were forced to follow. Downstairs, we painted on walls. Upstairs, we walked gin-gerly hoping not to disrupt the other fam-ily members. Downstairs, we screamed our lungs out and tackled each other onto the beanbag, our noise buffered by the solid rock walls and the ceiling. Above, we were serfs; below, we were kings.

The basement had two main rooms. The first was for the usual hoarding of things

too dingy to use but too potentially valuable in some vague future circumstances to toss out. While we occasionally found the rare treasure in that room, the real value of the basement was further in. The beanbag room was as far away from the house as you could get without actually leaving the house, and it had borne the brunt of our mayhem. Two unused pipes ran across the ceiling, paint-ed a garish yellow and blue by us in a fit of team spirit for the Rams. The worn yellow rope that looped around the blue pipe was another rare remnant of the previous own-ers. We now used it as a vine to swing onto the beanbag, but it’d been everything from a noose to climbing rope. In the center of the room stood a stark metal support beam, the padding that had once coated it torn and faded away. The walls were also covered in our artistic efforts; the rough stone of the walls gave our simplistic paintings a primi-tive, savage feel, transforming us from boys into cavemen.

That day we made a beeline for the back room. We stepped in and Tommy groped for the chain that hung from the ceiling, the dim light through the tiny, grimy window creat-ing more shadows than illumination. He fi-nally found it and yanked on it, bringing the naked bulb above to flickering life. I took a couple of steps in and flopped face first into

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the beanbag. Tommy picked up one of the many tennis balls that lay scattered on the floor and tossed it up. The rhythmic sound of the ball hitting his palm filled the small room for a moment.

“What do you want to do today?” I asked, or tried to ask, my words muffled by the chair.

Tommy got the message, though, and I could almost hear his shrug. “I dunno. We could play blind man’s bluff I guess.”

Blind man’s bluff in the basement was different. In the basement you put a pillow-case over the blind man’s head, turned off the light, and then proceeded to throw as much as you could at him. After get-ting beaned in the head with a basket-ball a couple of times and running face first into the wall or the metal beam, the game became less about fun and more about vengeance. I didn’t feel like going through that today.

I turned over and stared at the concrete ceiling. “Nah, I don’t feel like that.”

“Well, we could watch T.V., but some-body broke it.”

I squirmed uncomfortably. There used to be an old wood-paneled T.V., but a few months ago a game of basement ball had got-ten a bit out of hand. I didn’t see Tommy for a month following that incident.

I shook my head, eager to change the subject, “I wouldn’t want to watch T.V. any-way,” I sat up and looked at Tommy. “Let’s paint something. We haven’t done that in forever.”

He caught the ball and looked at me ex-citedly, “Yeah, you’re right. I forgot to tell you, but a week ago I found some spray paint in the storage area. Let’s use real spray paint this time.”

“Old spray paint? Are you sure it even works now, ’cause that aerosol stuff can break down, I heard.”

He shook his head enthusiastically. “I’m positive it works. I sprayed the box it was in.” He dropped the tennis ball and headed towards the door waving for me to follow. “Here, I’ll show you.”

I followed him out into the storage room, to the back corner where all the relics

of past handi-work were buried. Be-fore Tommy was born, in their previous house, his fa-ther had been skilled at all the small odd jobs and lawn work that a house

required. Now, they had

bought automated sprinklers and hired a lawn crew for the yard, with a weekly maid service taking care of the house. This aban-doned corner in the basement stored all of the family’s obsolete equipment. Well, obso-lete to some, maybe.

In this farthest reach of the basement, the lighting was dim and the vague shapes of discarded tools seemed oddly threatening. An old industrial flashlight stood upright on the cluttered tool bench, and Tommy picked it up and flicked it on. A strong beam of light shot out, and he pointed it to the left towards a few rusting rakes and some snow shovels that sprawled against the wall.

“Here.” He handed me the light and started tugging out a box that sat next to the rakes. It was obviously heavy as he grunted slightly and shimmied it across the floor. I saw the bright red paint that covered the side of the box and realized there must actually be spray paint in there.

He finally pulled the box out into the open and leaned back. “Look at all this stuff. It’s like a gold mine.” I shined the light inside the box. It was packed and I could see why Tommy’d thought it was heavy. There were cans of spray paint, a box cutter, a couple of wrenches and two hammers. And that was only what I recognized. There would be more treasures buried deeper. This box had potential.

A thought crept into my mind. There was a reason we hadn’t found this box yet. A reason we usually didn’t go into this back corner where these tools lay. I looked up from the box to Tommy’s eager face. “Tom-my,” I started slowly, “are you sure he won’t mind? I mean, it’s his stuff, right? Maybe we should just use the other paint or—”

“No.” The eager look had vanished, re-placed by a neutral mask, and his voice was harder, rougher. He shook his head. “No,” he said again, “It’ll be fine; he won’t care. He didn’t care when we used that other paint, did he?”

I shrugged uncomfortably, looking away from his face. “Yeah, but, I mean, your dad...” I trailed off and stared at the wall. The low rumbling of the water heater in the opposite corner was the only sound.

Abruptly, Tommy broke the silence, his voice flat, “It’ll be fine. Now c’mon, help me choose what paint we should use.” I turned back to him and reluctantly started to rum-mage in the box with him. Tommy started to talk about how he’d originally found the box, but I only half listened to him, focusing instead on the vague worry that had wormed into my head and wouldn’t leave me alone.

We’d lined up three cans on the floor already, and from the way Tommy was digging into it, there were evidently more.

“Let’s just use that red paint,” I blurted out. “I mean we already know that one works and we’ve never used red paint before.”

He turned to look at me. “You sure?” he turned back to the box and dug his hand deeper. “I think I saw gold paint deeper in.” He motioned for me to come closer. “Shine the flashlight directly in the box. It’s still too dark inside.”

Reluctantly, I shuffled closer, wishing we could just pick a paint and go back to the more familiar beanbag room. “Tommy I re-ally think—”

“Found it!” He raised his hand, trium-phantly clutching an old spray can with a partially torn off label. “Actual gold spray paint! Isn’t this awesome?” The find restored his excitement, and as he stood up, his face was split by a giant grin. “Maybe we can re-paint that yellow pipe so we can have golden pipes.” He shook the can making it rattle.

I just shrugged. “Maybe. Are you sure it even works still?”

He shot me a scornful look. “Of course it works.” He shook the can in my face. “Can’t you hear that? That means it’s still got the spray stuff left, see?”

I pushed the can out of my face. “Well, test it then.” I pointed to the side of the box which had already been transformed red by his earlier testing. “Spray it right there.”

He nodded. “Okay, watch and learn.” After a few more vigorous shakes, he aimed the can and pushed his thumb down. A hiss of air came out, but no gold, no paint. He frowned. “I guess I didn’t shake it enough.” His arm pumped again, rocketing the can up and down. “It’ll work. You’ll see,” he insisted.

I shrugged again but didn’t say anything as Tommy tried again and again to get paint to come out of it. I didn’t know why the gold paint mattered so much to him, but as

photo by austin strifler

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even the noise ceased to come out he visibly slumped. “It’s okay, Tommy.” I shot a glance towards where I knew the steps lay. “It’s fine; we don’t need the gold anyway since we still have the red.” I held my hand out for the can, “Here, I’ll throw that out while you bring the red paint in.”

Tommy nodded slowly. “Yeah, yeah, you’re right. Who cares about gold paint anyway?” Despite his words, Tommy seemed reluctant to hand the can over. Finally I just grabbed the can from him and walked to the trash can near the stairs. Right as I tossed the can in, I heard it: the familiar squeak of the doorknob twisting and the soft whoosh of the door opening. I shot a glance at Tom-my. He’d obviously heard it too and was fran-tically pushing the box back to the wall.

“Thomas, come up here for a moment.” The voice descended into a series of vicious coughs, but I breathed a small sigh of relief. She hadn’t sounded angry, and it was only his mom; she never actually came down to the basement. Sure enough, she shut the door, certain Tommy had heard and would come up.

I walked out of the shadow cast by the side of the stairs and helped Tommy push the box in silence. When the box was back in its dark corner, I spoke. “What do you think she wants?”

Tommy didn’t look at me. “Dunno, may-be we woke my sister up.” The thick base-ment walls insulated most of the sound we produced.

“Yeah, maybe.”“Well, I better head up, I guess.” He

straightened himself and marched towards the stairs like a soldier marching off to war. I picked the red spray paint we’d picked out of the box and shook it once, making it rattle.

“Hey, do you want me to start painting?”I’d caught him at the foot of the steps,

and he turned his head slightly, a familiar grin ghosting his tan face. “Nah, you’d better wait

for me.” The smile widened. “I mean, I know how bad a painter you are.”

I snorted, “Yeah, and you’re a real Picas-so.” He smiled again then turned and left the basement. The shutting door seemed awfully loud in the silence. Wanting to escape the suddenly darker storage area, I headed into the back room.

Inside, I stared at the wall we had cho-sen to paint, my eyes roving over all the natu-ral dips and crevices of the crude stone. Idly I shook the can and pondered over what we’d draw. Usually Tommy came up with the ideas, most of the art on the walls was his, but I did have the occasional gem. Painting the pipes had been my idea, but this time I had nothing. I stared at the wall trying to imag-ine something fantastic emblazoned on it, but all I saw was an empty wall. Frustrated, I tossed the can onto the bean bag and picked up the tennis ball Tommy had discarded.

I was playing catch with myself when I heard a thump from above. I paused in-stantly, clutching the ball in my hand and craning my neck to the ceiling. The noise didn’t repeat itself, but I was certain I hadn’t imagined it. My mind began conjuring up scenarios for the noise, each one worse than the last. I realized Tommy had been gone a while now, and I linked the noise and Tom-my together. Had he made the noise? Or had something happened up there? Tommy’d said his dad was working, but what if that noise was him, what if he’d just— My mind skirted away from thoughts I’d avoided for years.

The anticipation grew worse with each passing moment Tommy didn’t walk back downstairs. Finally it was too much. I had to do something. Screwing up my courage, I walked slowly out of the familiar room and towards the steps. I reached them and stared up at the door. It was a mass of shadow out-lined by a halo of light that seeped through the cracks along the frame, and I paused at the foot of the staircase.

Now that I was at the steps I started thinking of how wrong I probably was. That noise was probably nothing and Tommy would come downstairs in a few moments and laugh at me. I should just go back and lie on the bean chair rather than interrupt the family. Resolved as I was to wait, I was surprised when I took the first step.

Almost immediately, the door burst open and a figure stood silhouetted by the light from above. I licked my lips. “Tommy?” The figure didn’t respond, but as it closed the door and started down the stairs I real-ized it was Tommy. I backed off the step and waited for him to walk down, waited for him to say something. He didn’t.

“Hey, Tommy, are you all right?” My mouth was dry, but I wanted to draw some response from him. He grunted and passed me, already heading to the back room. He walked stiffly, his entire body coiled in upon itself. I fell in behind him and waited for him to say something more.

We stepped into the room and I shot a look at Tommy’s face. The light cast by the bare bulb harshly illuminated his face and ex-

pression. His mouth was set in a thin line, its expression tight. His tanned cheeks held a rare color, but whether it was from emotion or something else I didn’t know. The thump came to mind and I had to know. Eyes fix-ated on the redness, I broke the silence.

“Tommy, uh...” I started but trailed off. Tommy did nothing. “Tommy, upstairs did—I mean you were gone for a long time and that noise—” I cut off abruptly still unable to voice the question that’d lurked between us for years. “I just—”

“We can’t paint down here anymore.” Tommy interrupted me, speaking for the first time. His voice was brittle but con-tained a note I couldn’t identify. “He said he doesn’t want us painting on the walls down here anymore. He’s home.”

He’s home. There were answers in those two words. I couldn’t take my eyes off of his cheek, and the thump kept replaying in my head as Tommy continued. “He said we’re too old to be drawing on walls. He said—” Tommy broke off and stared at the wall we were going to paint.

In the pause, I found myself babbling. “Was it be-cause of the box? I told you we shouldn’t have used that box if it’s his. I told you that we—”

Tommy turned to-wards me fully for the first time. His eyes met mine and I flinched at what I saw. “He doesn’t care about the box. He

photo by austin strifler

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doesn’t give a shit about that dumb box or all of the stupid, useless shit in it so don’t worry. You’re not in trouble.” He said the last scorn-fully and his eyes held accusation enough.

“I wasn’t worried—”He let out a mirthless laugh. “Of course

you’re not,” he said patronizingly. “I wasn’t.” I took a step forward an-

grily. “Don’t get pissed at me cause you got in trouble.” He clenched his fist and for a moment I was sure he was about to hit me. Instead, he turned to his left and sent a vi-cious kick to the beanbag. The kick tore the patch off, mak-ing beads trickle out, and it also launched the paint can. The can bounced off the metal pole, the metallic clang unusually loud. We both stared at the can. I glanced at Tommy and saw his expres-sion change, saw determination

mixing with his anger. I knew what he was going to do.

“Tommy, no. Don’t even think about it.” I shook my head emphatically, but he’d al-ready picked the can up and was holding it contemplatively in his hand. He looked up at the wall and his right hand began to move, shaking the can gently. “Let’s just go back outside, Tommy. We shouldn’t piss your dad off just for something stupid like painting.”

At the mention of his dad, his left hand made for his cheek before he jerkily stopped it. His expression steeled. He stepped for-ward and sprayed. It only took him a few seconds to finish, and he stepped back with a

satisfied set to his face. I stared at what he’d done. Painted in crude blockish letters: Fuck Him.

“You wanna paint something?” He held the can out to me and his voice held a joyful tone as if he was telling some great joke to me. I shook my head.

“Tommy...” I shook my head again, un-able to tear my eyes off the still wet paint and the words it formed. The red paint blared out from the wall, marring it, though our other paintings had enhanced it. Our other art hadn’t been beautiful by any stretch, but

it’d changed the rough walls from a mere basement into

something more. This was different. What Tommy had just painted was something ugly, like that highway under-pass chock full of graffiti and smelling of piss.

“Tommy, why’d you do it? When he sees

this...” I looked to Tommy but he didn’t face me, staring at the wall instead.

“My dad doesn’t—” His voice had lost the joyful tone if it’d ever been there at all, and he gestured with one hand as if trying to grasp some concept. “I mean he doesn’t—he shouldn’t care about—” He paused abruptly and turned to face me. “Why would he care about the basement?” His voice held a raw questioning note in it.

Tommy’s eyes were tearing up. He pre-tended they weren’t; I pretended not to no-tice. I opened my mouth, looked at the wall, and shut it again.

photo by andrew nguyen

“Why would he care?” Tommy repeated more softly, staring at the ground. I wanted to step forward with him, to grab the paint and spray regardless of the consequences. I wanted to tell Tommy who cares about what his dad wanted in the basement, he never came down here anyways. I wanted to

provide some kind of support for Tommy. I looked at his cheek, glanced at the wall, and remained still.

In the lurking silence, he stepped for-ward and sprayed over the words. It was against the rules to paint on the walls.

photo by austin strifler

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Switched the station fromthe roll-the-window-down-country-tractor songs tothe sweet smothered kisses of the jazz station. Rolled the window up blocking me from the thirty-two degree blast and settled into the humid warmth of my car as the oboe or whatever the hell instrument it was woke up from the background beat of hi-hat tsss’s and bassy dm’s. Climbed up and down the whatchamacallit scale to settle like a heavy feather somewhere between the black and white lines of the staff, somewhere between an A-flat and an A. It cried. It wailed, bereft, but sang the same song as the two lovers slow dancing one last time in the park under the orange streetlight moonshine. A song to dance and cry to, a song that took the tears and made the world a little happier. This was not the backbeat up and down rhuba wheeba zip zippiddy zop zop zooby dooby bippity wop wimmity wop wah wah jazz. This was not the bright smiling trumpet razz-razz-razzing away. This was the slowest of the slow, the dreariest of the dreariest, the happiest little dirge ever to be sung by a doohickey. The sad man made my world smile, if just for a little bit.

SweetnessSam Herbig

photo by austin strifler

1514In the murky light, the snow lines the sidewalk.The evening’s fog thickens on the living room window.My mother leans on the coffee table. Her face sagsWhile the eyes of the family stare at us from the walls.The chessboard in front of us suffocates, smothered by my mother’s thoughts.A breeze crawls under the glass, stinging my neck cold.

Her glasses, solid and dark, stop the coldThat breathes with the faces layered on the walls,That stumbles up the sidewalkAnd taps on the window.The wrenching quiet grips my ears and sags,Swinging on every one of my muted thoughts.

A hard smile plasters her face; “Check mate,” as pulsating thoughtsBeg me to take in the cold.Mom’s hand rests on my shoulder and sags.She doesn’t notice the footprints on the sidewalk—That trail from somewhere northwest to the window,Bringing jaded genius claiming shelter in bitter walls.

Buried in her eyes are vital, icy wallsChipped and worn on either side by hammering thoughtsOf battles past that failed to break the window.She was deafened by the blows of coldFrom outside that beckon now from the sidewalk.Tired ancestors gazing from above seem to sag.

My cold thoughts and the footprints melt into the sidewalkLeaving the walls sagging and the window empty.

Thoughts of My Cold, Homeless Uncle Mike, Asperger Genius

Nathan Fox

photo by austin strifler

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Eric Hersh awoke one day in mid-Febru-ary. He awoke in the normal sense, as

well. It was five in the morning and dark as always. He padded down the carpeted steps and flipped on the kitchen light bulb, then poured himself a bowl of cereal. He crunched blearily on his corn flakes, an eerie line from a half-remembered song echoing in his brain. “When the world falls apart, some things stay in place.”

The house was still quiet, and mid-chew he stopped. The calendar on the wall had changed. Instead of showing French cha-teaus and green countryside, the calendar showed some Impressionist artist’s water lil-ies—and it was open to February. Eric stood and walked over to the calendar, spoon in hand. No, they could have just brought it up to write in some important date, he re-assured himself, although his parents were almost never so forward-thinking. Yet the little squares were all filled with scribbled ap-pointments—the times for his sister’s ballet practices, his brother’s flute lessons were all religiously filled in. Hardly the stuff anyone would bother with ahead of time.

He pulled the calendar off the wall, tak-ing the pin with it. “Dammit!” he hissed. He flipped back to January. Again all the boxes were filled in, just as the dates had come and gone. But where was November? There was no other calendar. Why had they replaced the calendar? Eric was fully awake now. He set down spoon and calendar, and strode into the living room.

He whisked open the family laptop, which had been left charging on the coffee table, and saw in the corner of the screen, February 11. He sucked in a breath and felt very faint. This was bad. What had hap-pened? Had he been in a coma? But why

would he be at home instead of a hospital? Was he dreaming? No, that he was certain of.

Possibilities were crowding into his head. Alien abduction—that could be it. Or —his parents, couldn’t they have—he opened the Internet browser and logged into his school email account, not really certain why.

The page loaded, and he stared at the screen dumbstruck. Inbox: 7, it said. He scrolled down past the bold-faced reminders about bake sales and Mr. Sontag’s quiz and intramurals to the first read email. Feb 10, the date at the right. He scrolled down further, his mouth dry. All the emails had been read. Eric kept scrolling—February, January, Decem-ber, November. He stopped. November 18. That should be today. Yet all the emails from that day had been opened as well. Pointlessly he kept dragging the bar downwards, down-wards. Who could have done this? Someone had gotten into his email. Had someone – or something—gotten into his mind as well?

Eric hit Ctrl-T and typed in “facebook.com.” He logged on, finding that his pass-word still worked. A red “2” in the top left showed him something had changed since the last time he (or was it “he”?) had been on. The first one was from Mark and Eli, who had liked his comment. Sontag should die in a hole. Stupid chem test. Eric smiled. Seemed normal. The other update was that Eli had typed in “lol” in the comment sec-tion, three hours ago. Typical Eli—always up late, doing something.

A week earlier, Eli had posted some mu-sic video, to which Eric had responded by posting another one. Two days before that, Eric had posted that the Seattle Seahawks could go to hell, and fellow Seahawks hater Chris had given it a “Like.” Nothing was out of the ordinary, aside from his not remem-bering any of it.

Eric opened another tab and signed into the online grade tracker his school used. English was still a B, history was a high C,

and he smiled to find he’d gotten Spanish up to a 96. Geometry had sunk a little, weights wasn’t even graded, and shit, chemistry was teetering on the brink of a D. He clicked on it and found he’d made a 63 on the last test. When would Sontag realize he wasn’t teach-ing his goddamn senior AP class, if he’d just get his head—Eric’s eyes bulged. What was he thinking? He had woken up unable to re-member nearly three months of his life and all he could focus on was how his grades had fared in the meantime? Evidently, came his self-reply.

He must have been acting relatively nor-mal. Everything seemed in order. If he had been possessed somehow, would he have gotten the same grades as always? It stood to reason that he wouldn’t. It would have looked different, either for better or for worse. He left the laptop open on the cof-fee table and got a glass of water from the sink. Being February, it was chill, crisp. Yes, he must have gotten through those days, the

same way he got through all his other ones, but he had forgotten to remember them. He dumped out the glass then turned the handle and let the faucet foam into the cup again. At least he had gotten through semester ex-ams. Usually, those meant hours and hours of agonizing, cramming, and trying to decipher Mark’s handwriting from the notes. Thank god he wouldn’t need to put any effort into those now.

What other stuff had he missed? Eric finished his water and set it on the sink be-fore loping back into the living room. Yes, his parents had put their recent photos on the laptop, as usual. He’d missed Sonia’s birth-day on November 29. Yes, there she was with all her little second grade friends, who had been required to come wearing their tutus and ballet slippers. Meanwhile, her older brother had probably escaped to his room, and gotten away with—no, there he was. Eric was most definitely there, in the corner of the table with a bowl of chocolate cake. Eric

LapsedKieran Connolly

ConCourse, photo by Carson Monetti

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squinted at his picture. No memories were coming to the surface. That was someone else in the picture, wasn’t it, who also had Eric’s flopping blond hair and glasses?—but no, he knew it wasn’t. Eric missed Christmas as well—he appeared to have gotten a hat, some jeans, and—yes, his parents had gotten him Warlust 2. If he could just find that in his room, he would play that for an hour or two tonight. There were the pictures of New Year’s, and he felt a twinge of guilt at not being able to remember going out to Uncle Jack’s country place. It looked like it had been a good time.

Footsteps on the stairs—it was his dad, up to drive him to Tre-degar. His school was nearly an hour’s drive in morning traffic from the exurbs.

“Eric, would you quit leaving half-eaten cereal on the table?” his dad asked, already prickly. Eric let his dad dump the bowl into the sink and grumble a little more before he closed up the laptop and dashed up to his room, leaving his dad with a “Be ready in five minutes.”

Eric’s room was more or less the same way it had been last night, in November. His backpack and books were scattered around his work desk, his pants rumpled over his parents’ cast-off TV. He fished around and dashed on some deodorant when he found it, slipped on some socks, and before he knew it, he was heading out to his dad’s car, a somewhat aged silver Explorer with the

tendency to accumulate gum wrappers in all imaginable places.

His dad, wearing his second-hand leather jacket, walked ahead of him, down the dead, manicured lawn. They drove away down the cul-de-sac. The ride was mostly cold and qui-et, because his dad didn’t turn on the heat until well after the engine had warmed, and because Eric wasn’t feeling talkative. His

mind was rather dis-quieted.

“Did you get your homework done last night?” his dad asked. Oh no. A good question. “Yeah,” said Eric, not entirely masking his relapse into panic. “Hang on,” he mumbled and dug into his bag for his assignment book. Of course, it was a Thursday. Senora Davis just loved to give tests on Thurs-day (although he wouldn’t have writ-ten it down; Spanish tests weren’t worth the trouble of study-ing if you remem-bered the vocabu-lary), and Mr. Sontag had the unpleasant

tendency to sucker-punch students with reading quizzes the day after a test. And he had a three-month mem-ory gap. Just excellent.

“Eric? Are you lying to me?” asked his father, briefly taking his eyes from the high-way. “You know what I’ve been telling you about keeping focused on your schoolwork, and doing everything completely.”

“I know, I know!” Eric snapped. “I’m

just checking that I’ve got everything ready.” He opened his chemistry book and started the reading, just hoping that he would get enough of an understanding to get a few questions right. His dad made a noise some-where between a growl and a resigned grunt and leaned forwards in his seat.

Finally they pulled up in front of Trede-gar College Prep. Eric bailed out and joined the throng of students swarming into the warm school building. It was still before seven, but students were pouring in. A lot of juniors and seniors, but also some other sophomores, freshmen, and even a few of the middle schoolers were arriving. Maybe a third were going straight to the library with Eric, but a good portion of the rest had their own out-of-the-way spots to do homework. There was plenty of noise in the library with Eric, but he was able to concentrate enough to make progress.

Packing up and entering the flow of younger kids outside the library, he ran into Avila.

“Hey, shorter one,” said Avila. “Hey, taller one,” Eric replied. They

headed towards the sophomore hallway to-gether.

“You did a good job on Warlust last night. I died, like, seven times,” he continued.

“Well, I’m glad I could do something useful, bro,” said Eric. Little else passed be-tween them before they got to Eric’s locker.

He had put his stuff away before the warning bell. It was nearly eight. He swung open the door to his homeroom and ignored the stares of the jerks and strange kids as he picked his way over stacks of books and slid on a stray English paper before slump-ing into his desk. Before the first period bell rang, he had bothered Mike about his nerd glasses, drawn on someone else’s assignment book, and avoided the attention of the kids who fit the “antagonist” label.

He was pretty darn screwed, no matter

what. It wouldn’t be that hard for anyone to figure out there was something seriously queer about him. How would he explain it away? He sure couldn’t tell anyone. No, they wouldn’t understand him. It would be too much trouble.

The hallway outside homeroom seemed to double in length as he was swept down it. There was a Spanish test, but he wasn’t too worried about his grade. Besides, he’d crammed enough to get some of the vocab right. Before the test all the nerdy kids gath-ered by Lawrence Sayle’s desk, over Eric, and talked their usual snotty garbage—foreign policy, global warming, Salinger, the Valen-tine’s dance, and how easy the test would be. Shouldn’t have expected the people to get better overnight, he chided himself, while staring blankly at the vocab sheet he’d un-earthed. English and history made about as much sense as they always did. The drunken-ly wavering rows in Pitzer’s class had put him close enough to Eli that Eli could poke him occasionally to insert a properly sardonic comment. Eric felt that no, this wasn’t quite the moment for Eli to be bothering him, but then, how should Eli know what was going on?

He had to leave the main building and trek over to the weights room for his fourth class, a walk that he’d dreaded in November but was much worse now. The sky was a steely gray as if it were still early, and Eric yawned ferociously, even though it meant leaving the huddled pose he’d taken against the biting winds. He thought—back, he was thinking back on it—about November. Those days had particularly sucked. He had been do-ing horribly in everything—well, save Span-ish and weights—and nearly every chance he got, he was talking with some teacher or another. Yesterday—well, whenever—he had talked with Pitzer for a good fifteen minutes and spent nearly an hour in Sontag’s office, talking about the photoelectric effect and

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correcting an old test. Sontag would let you get partial credit for fixing what you missed on a test. Eric hoped he would remember to drop in on Sontag again at the end of the day. He broke into a kind of shuffling run, and slipped in on time.

An hour later he was shuffling back across the windswept general-purpose field, off to his locker to get lunch. His table was close to the bread line, as Chris liked to call it. Eric was the only person at his table who usually bought his lunch. Eli, Mark, Norm, Jake, Chris, and Avila brought good food from home, and Eric would count on them for food. Well, if they were feeling generous. Eric came though the bread line with a bas-ket of breaded meat bits that might’ve been chicken or popcorn shrimp, he wasn’t too sure, and Eli brought this up. Eric swatted the teasing aside irritably.

“What’s the deal?” asked Eli. “Don’t have to take everything so seriously. What’s been up with you these days?”

“Sorry. I guess it’s just been a bad night. Plenty of work, y’know,” he replied.

“Happens to everyone,” said Mark from the other end of the table.

What if he started acting strange? Would they suspect him? What could they even sus-pect him of, for that matter? He would have to be more inconspicuous. He dropped back, just chipping in a generic comment here and there about Norm’s Warlust abilities or yes-terday’s television.

After lunch, Eric’s first class was chemis-try. The human swarm that carried him into the formica hell of Mr. Sontag’s classroom was buzzing about how well they did on the test and how ready they were for the next round of challenge. If you could understand what molarity was, you would do well on the quiz, was Eric’s impression, and he had man-aged to do that, sort of. The last person in each row came forward with the quizzes, and as Mr. Sontag started obsessively shuffling

the half-sheet quizzes, as he usually did, he began to address the class.

“Hopefully everyone has done well on this quiz, ladies and gents, as I expect you to be able to do every day.” He kept shuf-fling. He had such huge hands. “Regardless of whether or not I make you get out your as-signment books, you always have homework in my class, forty-five minutes every night. Clearly from your test results, some of you have not been following my advice.”

Eric was incredibly nervous. Shit, he’d been studying every night as long as he could remember. What about when he couldn’t? He slicked his warm palms over the smooth desk surface. Would he be called up as an example? It hardly seemed beyond Sontag. But no, he stopped shuffling, left it at that and ordered the class to open their note-books. See Sontag, Eric wrote on the back of his hand. The class moved on, Sontag talking about things that sounded familiar from the book but going too fast for him to take it all down. Finally the bell rang and Eric was soon in his final class of the day, geometry. His grade in Mr. Petersen’s class was something around a C, but unlike in chemistry he was fairly certain he could keep it steady. Besides, he was—well, at least, he had been—having talks with Mr. Petersen occasionally.

Eric took a seat farther back. This was one of the few classes he’d taken in which the teacher just let students sit where they want-ed. If only more teachers were open to this idea, he wouldn’t have had that little inci-dent—what class was it even in?—where the seat he had taken was no longer his, thanks to some seating change.

Mr. Petersen was loud. Eric imagined few other people had the guts to talk with him. Mr. Petersen started calling names and, yes, holding up quizzes. Eric grabbed his. A zero out of ten was not desirable at all. Couldn’t he have at least gotten the satisfac-tion of knowing he’d understood it at some

point? No, no. At the bell, just as he guessed, Mr. Petersen stopped him from leaving.

“Hersh, we need to talk again, and I know you have a free period now.”

Eric set his books on his desk, having not gone three steps. He had to show sincere emotion—concern, in this case. “Look, I’m sorry about the last quiz. I just didn’t study that material hard enough the night before.”

“What are you talking about, Hersh? That was a quiz over same-day material. Your

studying was just paying attention in class. What I’m more concerned about is that we keep having these talks but you continue not to improve. Do you understand?”

Eric nodded.“I’m going to tell you again what I’ve

told you before in these talks: my class isn’t that hard. You just need to study the book and get the material down. That is all there is to getting a good grade. You should get from the book the basic material you need to do

well in this class.”All right, this

could be going better.“Now tell me,

Eric, what two parts of the triangle do we combine for the sine of an angle?”

“You... you, uhh... I don’t know.”

Which should have struck Petersen as an unusual answer. If he had checked, he would have found that two weeks ago, Eric had indeed passed the test on sines and cosines. “Eric, this shows a clear lack of care for the course. Your lack of even an es-sential understand-ing of topics we’ve gone over for weeks indicates an obvi-ous unwillingness to complete even the most minor of tasks. Now if you expect to go through the rest of the year with this attitude to work,

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you will have to adjust your expectations for passing the course.”

“Yes, sir.”“Good. I hope this talk has lit a fire un-

der you.” That would be something to deal with.

Though he couldn’t remember it, he was sure he had probably been doing the geometry work anyway—or at least, trying to. But he had to see Mr. Sontag and correct those test problems. The tests were kept in files in the science office, for some bureaucratic reason. He pushed through the thinning crowds of students and opened the door to the science office. A teacher he didn’t know greeted him by name and said that Mr. Sontag would be back in a few minutes. Eric took a seat at the counter-style windowsill. The view over the general purpose field was bleak. Dead trees swayed with the gusts, and the yellowing grass stretched out as far as the bleachers by

the soccer fields. The sky was one uniform gray, almost painted.

It had been an abnormal day, he thought. Nearly three months of his life had passed without his being conscious of them. Or was it his memory that he missed out on? He turned his attention to one of the dead trees. Leaves had fallen off the trees and would grow back in a month or two. The leaves weren’t what mattered, were they, it was just that the tree kept living. What did it mat-ter what he forgot? He would carry on. How many days, weeks, even months had gone by and that he could barely recall anyway? Would he really be a different person if he couldn’t remember anything at all from last March? Or what if everything he’d done in freshman history had just vanished? He had a chemistry test to correct now. Did it really matter what he’d missed? He would be able to make up for it in the end.

atriuM, photo by Carson Monetti

The warm stuffy air that circulates through the retirement homeis trapped behind double sets of automatic doors.Satisfaction comes, to look at the stuffed couches and see him,relaxed and eager, like a boy pulling open drawers,looking for his favorite game.We sit and draw seven letters each,and now I’m ready to impress him as I always have.I ask about the rules and he raises his black hand in a wave,as if it should go unanswered, there’s nothing to teach,at least not after Wednesdays sitting at that table listening to him rave.The usual sunlight on the board relieves stresses of the day,so squares can build a crossing patternalmost of their own accord—the words, random in a way,possess a power difficult to discern,but always there is an underlying orderliness, though I do not know why.He forms his word, then I do mine, while we talk and laughabout the Rams and the uninformed advice of a passing worker,and debate the reality of the BCS bowl getting changed to a playoff.It’s down to the nitty-gritty, I always say at the end of the second hour,but I’ll spell another word onto that coveted triple letter. Gene will shake his head and that’ll be enough.

Gene the Scrabble GuyConnor Madden

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For NickIn Memory of Tom

I found you up in the costume room, in a pile of nine or ten others like you, covered in years of dust, with the name “Danny” written inside you, encircled with a heart—enhearted.Someone loved Danny.Someone loved Danny, who’d starred in Hello Dolly or The Music Man, who’d sung and danced under the old glory of the down-home village-square old-fashioned Americana lights,Who’d kissed a girl onstage and really meant it, and never really let her know,Who’d worn you with his best Sunday suit.Someone forgot about you.

Someone left you sitting up there, left to decay and dust alongside those memories.Danny might be dead.Danny might be dead, with no one to remember his show—No one to rememberHow one man spent four months gearing up for the performance of a lifetime—getting ready for that one show that none of his friends would show up to.How one man spent four months—four years, really—chasing after her, and gave up that night. After all, how could anyone love that man who invested his time, who took care of himself, who cut his hair, who got all dressed up, who could sing and dance and act and be funny,Who dared to dream a little dream.How could one love this man?One man would never see that girl again.One man took you off that night and threw you across the room.One man went home that night, got drunk, and slept.Someone wandered into the room after hearing the crying and a thud and the slam of a door,And found you alone in the corner,Someone drew a little heart around the name she loved all along, one who ran away before she could tell him.Someone set you with the others, and,In time,Someone forgot about you.

I wore you the other day, remember?I put you on with my best Sunday suit,Bought some flowers,Practiced my scandalous jazz moves (which I learned from the libertine men, the scarlet women, and the ragtime—the shameless music—down in the pool hall),Singing to myself, “And I won’t come home until I’ve kissed a girl,”

And sat on a bench in the park, watching families picnic nearby, little girls fly kites with their

She pulled her Dodge aside and parked to watchThe day. We fogged the windows of her Neon,So nobody could peek inside at us.I drew a smiling face with shivering fingers;Its smile somehow reminded me of hersAnd I looked at her, checking for resemblance.The tent of fog kept out the cold and wind,The face cut from its wall to show us the world.The eyes presented pictures of a creekAt different points. An almost idle ebbKept ducks afloat, to wander like ourselvesIn the left eye. The fog between the eyesHeld fast, and we imagined what it shielded.The current swiftly bounced around the rightEye’s stones. The ducks were scared to swim its rapids.The window’s smile attempted matching hersIn beauty and in depth. The bank of the creekGrew long, thin shades of brown and green like her eyesThat bent with the wind. We saw the world through glass,And the fog still kept us both alone and warm.

To My Boater Hat on SundaySam Herbig

Fogged WindowsJames Boeckmann

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fathers, couples walking arm in arm, or, if they dared, hand in hand.I sat there waiting for some girl of my dreams to wander by dressed up for Sunday,With ribbons in her hair,That foofy skirt she’d always wanted to wear,With a father I would have to ask permission from to court her.And she would walk by andOur eyes would meet andWe would sing a number or two,And maybe join hands during the big dance scene,And show the Iowa-stubborn townspeople how to really dance—We’d make a scene.We’d make a scene that never ended.We’d make a scene that people would remember, and would want to come see.We’d make a scene where we had all our lines down, and knew where to go and when to smile and when to cry and when to kiss and where to stand for the spotlight to hit us just right.We’d be in the spotlight.Our scene wouldn’t end until the curtain closed on us.

You don’t work, damn it.You just sit there,Alone in the corner of my room where I threw you.And when I wear you, you make me look ridiculous.I dance like a fool.I court like an idiot.I call it “courting,” for God’s sake.You make me dream.You good-for-nothing, discarded, unloved, goddamn hat.

Someone forgot about you, Sam.Someone left you sitting up there, left to decay and dust alongside those memories.You got ready for that one show that none of your friends would show up to.

And you hope that someday,SomeoneWill find you alone in the corner,Dust you off,Put a heart around your name,Put you on,And dance aroundLike a ridiculous,old-fashioned,Iowa-stubborn,Ragtime,In love,Happy personOn a Sunday.

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The room was too quiet, as if nothing were alive. The clock above Sidney’s

bed had begun to run down its batteries: time was passing impossibly slowly. Every two or three seconds, it would remember its purpose and give the second-hand a half-hearted twitch.

Sidney stared at the floor while she cried. She wasn’t loud, either. If you didn’t know her like I did, you’d think she was sleeping. I’d seen her cry enough to figure out that she was ashamed of it. She’d told me a few times that she wasn’t a pretty crier. Now, though, she didn’t even bother to hide the tears: they gathered at the end of her nose and fell onto her thighs. Her legs were like marble in the dim room, smooth and white. I had never seen her cry like this: there was misery in every breath she took. My arm had begun to lose feeling, but I knew it was still wrapped around her shoulders. Through her hair, I watched a tear shiver as it clung to her skin. Little flecks of light danced around its surface. It slid and joined another tear, then landed with a snap on her thigh.

Sidney had finally done it, two weekends earlier. Sex, I mean. It wasn’t at a party or anything, like in the movies. It was just them. Paul and Sidney. Beyond that, I didn’t know. I didn’t have to know.

About an hour earlier, I’d gotten the second of two frantic phone calls from her: she’d used one of the tests. By the time I ar-rived at her house, all six of them were scat-tered across the floor of her bathroom. Her tears hadn’t slowed since I walked into her room.

I met Sidney early freshman year at our high school’s football game. It was my

first social event in high school, during the

time in which I was beginning to expand beyond my grade school’s social sphere. Sidney was all smiles when I was first saw her, chattering happily with everyone who would stop and listen. She had a certain way of standing and shifting when she talked, like she couldn’t decide which foot to put more weight on. When I approached her shyly, her right hand moved as quickly as a reflex and took mine. “Hi, I’m Sidney! Do you go to school here, too?” Her eyes were a captivating shade of green and had a glow of sincerity behind them.

“Yeah, yeah, I do! My name’s Jake,” I said with a smile.

“Awesome, Jake! Pleasure to meet ya.” She shifted back and forth on her feet like a wind-up toy. She had more vibrant energy crammed into that petite body than I thought possible. She did most of the talking, but we managed to discuss the usual things: school, people we both knew. Our conversation was over as suddenly as it had begun, and I was left among the bustling crowd with a tingle in my chest. I wanted to see more of Sidney.

Fortunately, I did see more of her. She happened to transfer into my biology period and took her seat two rows away from mine. I mustered up enough courage to ask her for her phone number one Friday as everyone was rushing for the exit, eager to begin their weekends.

“Hey, Sidney!” She slid a textbook into her backpack and looked up with a polite smile. “I’m Jake, if you don’t remember.”

Her smile grew. “Of course, Jake! What’s up?”

I shifted my hand into my pocket and gripped my cell phone, preparing for the critical moment. “So, I was just kind of won-dering: could I maybe get your number so we can hang out sometime? Would that be cool?”

Her hand moved for her pocket as quickly as it had before our first handshake.

“Definitely!” She laughed, although I couldn’t remember saying anything funny.

We grew gradually closer after that day. I walked her home whenever I could, nev-er letting her know that I lived about fifty yards from our school. It wasn’t until our sophomore year, though, that I became con-sciously aware of it: I had feelings for Sidney Phillips. They were there, but I never got the chance to show them.

I replayed that realization in my mind now, sitting next to her on the floor of

her room. I saw a different girl than the one who had bounced along beside me on the sidewalk three years before. She breathed like a faulty metronome,

hastening and slowing,

struggling to control a body that was losing time. “Sid-ney.” She twitched. It had been a while since either of us had spoken. I wondered why I’d said it; I had nothing to say next. Strands of perfect auburn hair swung in slow-motion in front of her face. I thought about brushing them away. Another tear snapped onto her leg.

“Yeah, Jake.” She caught me off-guard. It wasn’t her voice; she always had some-thing behind the words, a certain feeling. Now, there was nothing. I shifted closer and wrapped my arm tighter around her shoul-ders. She let her head roll toward mine.

Paul had dumped her the night after. My phone buzzed across the table, and

I had to hold it away from my ear when I

heard Sidney’s voice. She was furious; I managed to fit “I’ll be over soon” between her yells.

When I arrived, she was crouched rig-idly on her bed, glaring at the wall. The door clicked shut behind me, and she began an-other angry rant.

“Did he give you any reason?” I asked timidly.

“Hell no. Nothing true, anyway. He just said it ‘wasn’t what he wanted right now.’” She sneered and wagged finger quotations in front of my face. “What’s left to want, Jake? I gave everything to that asshole, and he threw me out like a goddamn piece of trash.”

I shook my head lightly and turned my eyes toward her floor. “I don’t know, Sid-ney. Paul’s not usually like this. Maybe he’s got a good reason.”

“Oh, you’re on his side, too?” She

threw her arms in the air. “Great. You and everybody else, Jake.”

“C’mon, Sidney.” It sounded weak: I couldn’t yell. Not at her.

She adjusted the headband around her wispy hair and stared at me. “If that’s all you have to say, then it’s worthless.”

I felt a dull burn behind my eyes; I wouldn’t allow myself to cry. Sidney’s voice had never sounded like that before. I heard hatred, and it made me nauseous. I could feel her eyes watching me as I slipped through the doorway and clicked the door shut once again.

A Pretty Crier Andrew Palisch

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Her entire body was shaking. This wasn’t just misery; this was fear. I touched

her face, giving her one of those clichéd “cheer-up” bumps. “Hey.” I could think of nothing useful to say to her.

The hair swayed in front of her face.“Hey. Plenty of people have to deal with

this.” I immediately regretted it. Her lips didn’t move when she spoke.

“Jake.” I tight-ened my grip on her shoulders; shifting any closer would put me on top of her. She breathed like a frightened animal. “I need help.”

“Yeah. Any-thing.” I turned toward her and wiped a tear off her nose. I couldn’t help my-self. “What is it?”

Her fin-gers tensed and whitened. Tears flooded her eyes again and came gliding down her cheeks. They slid along her perfect, open lips and glis-tened when they caught the light. Her breathing grew heavier, and she let out a shuddering sob. The muscles in my arm ached from clutching her so tightly, but I didn’t let go; I couldn’t. I brought my face closer and whispered to her. “Sidney. It’ll be all right. Things will work, I promise you.” It sounded small, desperate, but it was better than saying nothing.

A sudden silence hit the room: she had stopped sobbing. Her jaw muscles crawled beneath her skin as she tried to control her breath. “No, it won’t, Jake.” She spoke like she had been punched in the gut. “It won’t be all right.”

“But why? I need to know what you’re thinking.” My voice sounded invasive, too

commanding to be friendly. I watched a tear slither down her thigh and dis-appear into the frays of her denim shorts; I wanted to wipe that one off, too. I shifted my head onto her shoulder and pressed my nose against the soft skin of her neck. Her perfume seeped into my nostrils. “Just talk to me,” I breathed. “Let me in.” She tensed her shoul-ders and turned, looking in my eyes for the first time that night.

“Jake, I…” Her voice faltered, and she took an-other breath. “I think I need to get

an abortion.” The hair on my neck bristled as a cold, poison-ous chill swept through my body. I could feel her eyes watching me, begging for the reac-tion I couldn’t give. I had always seen emo-tion and life behind the green of those eyes; now, I met them and saw nothing. Her lips twitched and trembled. I tried to convince

myself she hadn’t said it. I’d expected she might need me to help her keep it quiet for a while, but this? Not this.

I took in a breath that sounded like a desperate grab for oxygen. “What am I sup-posed to say?” I tried to sound gentle, but she pulled away from me and began to sob again. Her tears were something more than liquid this time: they fell and disappeared, throwing tiny splashes onto her legs. The bed shook against my back as she shuddered, and she suddenly felt smaller beneath my arm. “Sidney, don’t do this.” She drew her knees up and pressed her forehead against them. “Don’t think like this.”

“Please, Jake.” She whispered into the space between her legs, and I felt like I was intruding on a conversation. “Help me. You’re the only one I can talk to about this. The only one who won’t hate me.”

I shook my head slowly. “I know you’re better than this.” She locked herself into a tight ball; her sobs sounded muffled and dis-tant now.

Somewhere in the house, the heater clicked softly, and we waited in silence un-til her room became warmer. I couldn’t rid myself of the chill I felt, though; the hair on my arms bristled when I remembered where I was. “I can’t do this, Sidney. It’s not right.” Her face was hidden by her hair: I had to sit on my hand to keep from touching it. I sur-veyed her room, unsure of whether or not she had chosen to hear me. The walls above her dresser were cluttered with memories of her best times; nothing like this. A pair of blue jeans snaked its way out of the pile of dirty clothes, as if planning its escape.

She trembled quietly, a frightened ani-

mal facing a big world. “Why did you call me, Sidney?” I had finally asked it. It was harsh, but I had begun to think I was just a dump where she’d brought her tough decision. “You seem pretty set. I don’t know what I can do for you, short of being the little, buried voice that tells you to keep the baby.”

“It’s not that easy, Jake,” she said through more sobs. Her voice wavered and cracked, reminding me of how someone on the other end of a two-way radio sounds. Distant. Un-certain. “Convince me not to do it.”

I chewed on my tongue, my eyes shift-ing like a guilty criminal. Reaching under her hair, I tugged her chin up and stared into her eyes. I knew I had only a little time be-fore I was lost in them. Light glinted off her tear-stained face. She was a pretty crier. “I can’t do that.” Her lips parted slightly, as if she felt surprised but was afraid to show it. “You can. I can’t.” I forced myself to hold the stare, making sure she got the message. “The only thing I can do is tell you what I think and hope you hear it, and I’ve already done that.” I was powerless to stop her, but maybe it was enough that I cared. She turned her eyes down and stared dully at my chest. She looked exhausted, but something like relief began to permeate her statue-like face. I saw a hint of the girl I wanted so badly.

I gave her chin a gentle nudge with my thumb and rose slowly. A soft click sounded throughout the house, and the heater gave a slow, final breath of warmth into the dark-ness, then sputtered to its death. The only sound as I padded through the doorway and into the bright hallway was the clock, strug-gling to keep up with time.

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That, that was just it. The final straw. You know? I mean, once that happened,

I just snapped. You know?” The heavyset bald man wrung his hands ferociously as he talked. His eyes never left the floor and his voice never rose above a conversational level, but his broad shoulders heaved as if every breath were a struggle. “I mean, I got that call, the one about Marcy, and I just couldn’t handle it all anymore. You know? I just went outside, turned on the sprinkler and stood on the lawn. I just stood there, getting wet, and doing nothing. You know?”

Nick did know. This was the fourth time Nick had been forced to listen to fat Chuck get his story off his chest, and if he had to hear the phrase You know one more time Chuck would have him on his chest beating the shit out of him. The mental image was a satisfying one, and for a moment he consid-ered doing it. Of course, he wouldn’t actually do it. That would be a violent gesture, and those were forbidden inside the circle.

“I must have stood there for hours. Get-ting absolutely drenched, you know?”

Nick would have rolled his eyes, but that was a discouraging gesture, and discouraging gestures also weren’t allowed in the circle. For the first time in half an hour, he glanced at the cracked clock that hung precariously above the doorway. Over six minutes had passed. He still had another agonizing twenty minutes left until this daily nightmare ended. He suppressed the sigh that threatened to leak out. That would interrupt the current speaker and be a discouraging gesture, two infractions in one go. Last time he’d broken one of Dr. West’s asinine West rules, he’d been confined to his room for four days with a label of “psychologically unstable.” Nick preferred when people didn’t think of him as

some nut job—well, more of a nut job —so he kept the sigh in.

Still, another twenty minutes of this? Af-ter all the times he’d heard this sob tale, Nick could probably tell it himself. First was the sprinkler and the lawn. Next, Chuck’s brief spate of arson. Of course, it was only minor things like his house and everything Marcy had ever touched. Then finally there was the brief and violent encounter with the red Hyundai. Too bad Chuck’s West tale ended with a stamp of psychotic breakdown and a ticket to Mercy Hospital rather than a happy ending. If he’d gotten a happy ending, Nick wouldn’t have to listen to this tripe.

He tuned out Chuck, who hadn’t even gotten past the sprinkler part, and looked around the small ring of men. Sitting on a circle of brown folding chairs whose pad-ding had been lost sometime in the 1950s sat some of the craziest bastards in Mercy. Not including himself, of course. Nick wasn’t really crazy, and he certainly wasn’t as crazy as these poor saps. Most of them were lis-tening with rapt attention to Chuck’s spiel, and the new guy—Joe or Jones, maybe—the new guy seemed to be actually crying. Jesus Christ, crying? At this shit? Well, he was scratching his arms a lot. Maybe he was like his neighbor for this session and was simply crazier than most. His neighbor Larry hadn’t stopped mumbling to himself the entire ses-sion; his low mutters had been almost annoy-ing as listening to Chuck talk. Almost.

Of course Larry didn’t get in trouble for that, though; apparently Dr. West only enforced the rules when Nick broke them. What a dick. Nick switched to glaring at the doctor. He was in his usual spot, planted in the chair nearest to the door, and he wore his usual billowy lab coat, which looked less than impressive on his short frame, in Nick’s opinion. As always, he carried his West note-pad with him and nodded at certain parts of Chuck’s narration, jotting down notes as if

he hadn’t heard it even more times than Nick had. What a pretentious dick. A pretentious dick that was looking straight at him.

Chuck’s tale of woe finally ended and the doctor set his pad down on his lap. “Thank you, Charles.” God, Nick hated his nasal voice. “This was a very productive session to-day for you. I’m happy you felt comfortable enough to share with us.” Chuck nodded at the ground, his hands still working furiously.

Here it comes. “Now before we end today”—he was staring at Nick over his West half lenses. Nick didn’t drop his eyes. “Nicholas, do you have any-thing you’d like to share today?” Not at all. Nick stayed silent. “A reaction to Charles’ testi-mony perhaps?” I don’t think vomiting is what you want. “Or maybe you’d finally like to share with us why you’re here?” Hell no. Now they were all star-ing at him. Well, all the lucid ones at least. Gordon was strolling over to the window hugging himself. The soft patter of his bare feet on the cool white tile was the only sound as Nick remained stoic. “No?” The doctor sighed and jotted down something on his West pad again. Nick had no idea what he actually wrote anymore, since this exchange happened every session.

“Well, we’ll talk about your hesitance in our one-on-one session.” He stood up and clapped his hand on his pad. He smiled widely in what was supposed to be a reassur-

ing way. It came off as fake, like somebody who knew what it should look like but had never actually done it. “Great session today, everybody. West by West we’re all becoming closer, and through our closeness we help heal each other.”

That was his whole shtick, “West Steps.” His main theory was that through group work and one-on-one sessions, mentally un-hinged people could help each other on the

road to recovery. It sounded exactly like every other treatment Nick had ever heard of, but the book West had written had been a bestseller and his lectures continued to sell out, so who knew? Too bad it didn’t seem to be working with this lot.

Some of the others mumbled a reply and be-gan to shuffle out of the room after him. That was one good thing about this place: as long as you didn’t try to

leave the ward or break the rules, you were pretty much left to your own devices. Except for sessions. Sessions were always mandatory. As West said, “One missed step is a step in the wrong direction.” Or some dumb shit like that. Nick had only skimmed his book and usually tried his best to ignore the man.

Nick shook his head, breaking out of his reverie. He rubbed his back and groaned. It’d only been an hour, yet he felt like he’d been sitting on that chair for days. That was odd.

Even odder, the session was finally over

MentalKevin Cahill

“

photo by John kissel

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and there he was alone in the room with Gordon, who was standing with his chest pressed against the window. Gordon seemed oblivious that Nick was still there; his eyes were closed in what looked like bliss, and he began to hum. Gordon’s hand began to snake towards the thin belt that held his robe to-gether, and that was enough to send Nick fleeing. It only took one incident of walking in on Gordon in all his natural—well, not glory. Nick remembered all the folds, all that hair and all those liver spots... He shuddered as he hurried through the door. Yes, certainly not natural glory. Behind him he heard the soft sound of cloth hitting the tile, and sud-denly Gordon was singing. His voice blared out from behind Nick, and for a shocked moment his tone-deaf warbling was the only noise.

“I want to wake up in that city that nev-er sleeps and find I’m king of the hill, top of the heap!”

Nick stood still at the sound and cocked his head like a dog hearing some pitch no one else could: he knew that song. A frayed nurse brushed past him towards Gordon. The long expression on her face made it ob-vious she knew what she was walking into; a condemned woman walking to her gallows. Nick remained still in the hallway. Around him moved the normal bustle of the ward. The constant buzz produced by the motley mix of patients and nurses trekking down the hallway filled the air, but Nick heard none of it. He stood still, straining to capture that feeling, that thread of thought that had reared its head at the off-key performance. He knew that song.

The song carried him away into his own mind. He saw that small club where, if you could get a table, you could treat yourself to the best veal cutlets on the south side. He’d been there before many times. How could he have forgotten? And that night, with strains of Sinatra—Sinatra! That was the singer’s

name. That night, with Sinatra’s ode to New York playing in the background, was the first and only time he’d taken Katie there. Ka-tie! The name burned like a firebrand in his mind, clearing away cobwebs he hadn’t even noticed were there.

Unconscious of his surroundings, he sank to the ground. His head rested in his hands and the wall supported him as the del-uge of memories continued.

He remembered the storm that had gripped the city that night, tearing into it with a fury of rain and thunder. He remem-bered all the laughter and drinks he’d shared with half-remembered acquaintances. But above all, through the sheets of rain and the alcohol-induced haze, he remembered her. That one instant in the night when she’d smiled at him alone. The dim candle light had granted her soft blue eyes a twinkle and such depth that he almost feared he could have drowned in them. And her smile…Her ivory teeth were stained slightly by the crim-son lipstick she so loved, but it didn’t detract from her radiance at all—not that night, not to Nick. That smile had suggested and con-veyed so much more than any words could have hoped to. Her smile expressed every-thing Nick had wanted so desperately to tell her. Faced with that smile, that face, Nick’s tongue had felt swollen, too big to possibly say anything. He’d looked away and the mo-ment had passed.

“Katie.” The name came out in a hoarse whisper, and for the first time he became aware of the tears tracing lines on his face. Somebody from the hospital had stopped and was saying something to him, but he didn’t hear a single word. Unbidden, the memories continued to pour in.

He remembered the first time he’d met Katie, the first time they’d gone out, their first kiss. So many firsts, and every memory a new wonder. What if was a dangerous game, but Nick couldn’t help but wonder. What if

he had screwed up his courage that one per-fect moment? What if he’d been bold enough to trust himself to Katie, to say what was lurking in his mind?

That image of Katie smiling, her auburn hair tossed carelessly over her shoulder, was his last memory of her. No matter how hard he strained, nothing came. It was like press-ing against an invisible wall; he knew it was there, but he couldn’t see it and couldn’t break it. But he needed to remember, needed to know. About himself, about Katie, about what had happened and why he was here at Mercy. The need to know was like an ache to Nick. Yet his mind refused to yield the knowledge, however desperately he tried.

West. That was it, that was how he could learn what he needed. If anybody would know, it’d be the doctor in charge. He surged to his feet, or tried to, at least. His knees ached with arthritic pain and his back seemed sorer than he’d ever remembered. God, how old was he? A date started to swim to the surface of his mind, but he ignored it and any pain he might have been experienc-ing. He was on a mission to see Dr. West.

The person who’d bent over in concern was clinging to his elbow and asking him something. He mumbled a response that must have been satisfying enough, since the nurse dropped her hand and let him walk away. By now West should be in his office; he wouldn’t be in a private session so soon af-ter the public one ended. Nick set off deter-minedly down the hall. As he walked, he re-peated Katie’s name, reveling in the warmth that surged through him every time he said the name. Along with the warmth it brought, he felt more complete than he had in a long while, as if a final piece had been added.

Halfway down the hall, his mind lurched; the litany was broken. He almost stumbled to a halt before catching himself. Katie, her name is Katie and I—his thought broke off as he realized he couldn’t remember how he’d

met her. He racked his brain for the memory. She was important, so he should remember meeting her shouldn’t he? She was important right? Yes, of course she was. Nick let out a wordless growl of frustration and focused on that image of her face in that one timeless moment. He picked up his pace, brushing through any nurses, doctors or patients that got in his way.

He had forgotten her favorite color. “No, no, no! This cannot be happening.”

He broke into a lurching run while inside his mind crumbled.

He had forgotten the sound of her laugh.Nick shook his head as if brushing off a

physical assault. It was like watching a sand-castle be destroyed by waves. Try as he might to protect it, every surge of the tide ripped away more. Katie. Her name is Katie. With every step he took, his memories eroded. He desperately held onto the image of her in the club, the subtle message conveyed through her expression and all that it entailed. There, at the end of the hall talking with the hulking form of Charlie, was Doctor West. The two turned the corner and Nick, his breath com-ing in wheezing gasps, continued.

Katie. Her name is Katie.West had helped others like Charlie. He

could help Nick. All Nick had to do was re-member.

Katie!All that was left was that one single

night, that one stunning instant. It was enough, though: that moment said it all.

Katie…Finally, he caught up to the doctor and

big Chuck. The doctor had halted his con-versation with the other man and was asking Nick a question. To Nick, though, the only sounds were the pounding of blood in his ears, and the frantic gulps coming from his throat. But he’d be recovered in a moment, and then he could talk with Doctor West. That dick.

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maryland avenue, you are the type of place i want to beyou and i both love kempt grass fingers or ivy lawns that look like they can hide all of our secretsthey’re everywhere upon you, maryland avenue, and they’re all beautiful, and i’ve never once disliked a stroll along the rows of sideways-parked carsi want to be as popular as youno matter what time of day, you always have something happeninga limo of slow-moving, stupid, bumbling bridesmaids,a band of confused, stoned college kids standing outside coffee cartel,someone smoking but never fuming,there’s that guy with his girlfriend,and him and her and him and her and him and him (and him) and her and her and him and her and me and her and him and her and how many people are over there why is someone always crossing the street?you don’t care what they do when they walk and stop and look to see who’s watching because in your eyes they’re all the samethough some will amble eastwardly toward some personal mecca,some will do the same and stop and talk about the leaves by the streetlights and poetry i like your sweater thanks your hair is nice tonight,some will do the same and shut the fuck up and passionately kiss before the cathedral and the presence of god because with you they’re all freemaryland avenue, i feel that you are my salvationyou don’t care that you’re not in new york or paris or something bigger, better, dirtieryou are here and now and that’s what mattersyou don’t pretend to be something you’re notthe visitors who come and go will always bring their hellos and goodbyes and intelligent sniffles and ha-has and laptopsbut you’re not an excuse for them, maryland avenueyou are a saintyou too are the son of a virginyou too are a churchwe gather and pray in your holy namewe congregate at the designated hours and offer libations and sacrifices of edy’s and culpepper’s and consume it in your name, your spiritdon’t you ever worry, maryland avenueattendance will always be high at your weekend servicesbecause you are the eternal good, maryland avenueart, culture, fashion, straub’smore abstract than the people you feed and more concrete than the sidewalks we dance on

maryland avenueTom Blood

drawing by david greaves

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The first step I took in my neighbor Danny’s house landed in a pile of mud-

dy shoes. It wasn’t just the place where the Gibson family took their shoes off once they got home; it was where every single pair of shoes in the household lived. High heels sat next to hiking boots, but it was difficult to find two shoes that matched, since the footwear was all thrown together in a colorful pile about two feet tall. It was a compost pile of shoes. Pairs of shoes at the bottom probably had not seen light in years.

“Just put your shoes anywhere,” Danny told me.

I didn’t bother to untie the laces on my tennis shoes. Instead, I placed the toe of one shoe on the heel of the other and lifted my foot out. I made sure not to place my shoes in the pile; I would need them again. As I bent over to put my shoes down next to the pile, I cringed and tried not to breathe. But I inhaled. I recognized the scent almost im-mediately. Febreeze. Someone in the Gib-son household had actually taken the time to make sure the pile of footwear would not smell, but they were too lazy to put the shoes away, or to at least throw them in the gar-bage. Once the rubber soles of my shoes hit the tile floor, the Gibsons’ golden retriever Indy came running over and started chew-ing and slobbering on my shoes. Instead of telling the dog to “shoo,” or “heel,” Danny lifted his leg and kicked the dog in its side. It sounded like a hand hitting a drum. The dog did not make a sound, but she understood the message and limped away.

“Danny,” I said, pushing him backwards with my palms, “You hurt her. Look, she’s limping.”

SafetyAndrew Jung

Danny smiled a bit and said, “She’s not limping because I kicked her. She’s limping because my brother shot her in the butt with a pellet gun.” Danny saw the look on my face and spoke again, “Well, not in the butt. More like in the upper part of her back leg. And it was an accident. I swear.”

As we walked into the family room, I saw Danny’s dad lying on the couch, watching a movie on the largest television screen I had ever seen. He was eating pork rinds, stuffing three or four into his mouth at a time. Indy sat next to the couch, waiting for anything to fall her way. Mr. Gibson wore a Hawaiian shirt and boxers and looked as if he had not shaved in a week. I said hello to Mr. Gibson. Without taking his eyes off the screen, Mr. Gibson put a handful of pork rinds in his mouth and motioned for us to come over by waving the remote. He asked Danny and me if we’d like to watch the movie with him.

“I think we wanted to play Legos, Dad,” Danny said.

“Well, I can bring your new Lego table up from the basement if you want to watch this, too,” Mr. Gibson replied.

Danny looked at me for a decision, and I said, “That would be nice.”

While Mr. Gibson was in the basement getting the table, I asked Danny what movie we were watching. From the few minutes that I had watched, I could tell it was a war movie. I saw blood and heard swear words. I had never watched anything so graphic. But I recognized the language spoken because at the Gibsons’ there was always some yell-ing going on. Right then I could even hear Mr. Gibson in the basement, cursing himself while trying to bring the Lego table up the stairs.

Danny said, “It’s Saving Private Ryan. It’s rated R. But my dad lets me watch whatever I want.”

I quickly looked over my shoulder, feel-parable of the yeast, print by david greaves

4140

ing guilty; I knew my parents did not ap-prove of me watching anything with over a PG rating. I was breaking the rules. I was shaking with excitement. At the Gibson house, I could watch anything.

Mr. Gibson finally made it out of the basement with the Lego table. I could see the sweat stains through his shirt. He was panting, and he asked Danny to go outside and fetch him a beer. Pork rinds still lingered in his breath. As Mr. Gibson sat back down on the couch, he noticed Indy still begging for crumbs. Mr. Gibson made a grunting noise and smacked the dog on the ear. Indy slowly got up and walked outside with her head down through the backdoor that was always left open.

Danny came back with the beer mo-ments later, and then we began to build with the Legos. The table was amazing. It was about four feet by four feet, and it had a drop-down net in the middle that was filled to the top with Lego blocks. Every piece I picked up out of the pile was misshapen. At first I thought that the dog had gotten into the bricks and chewed on them, but with further inspection I noticed they were human bite marks on the Legos. The boys had been pull-ing the bricks apart with their mouths and not with their hands. I was disgusted, and I had a hard time overcoming the thoughts of the Gibson boys separating the Legos with their teeth. I started to use only my finger-tips to hold the blocks, trying to avoid any bite marks. Whenever I would reach into the net for a new piece, I could feel the indents and torn pieces rub against my wrist and forearm. Later, when I was done building, I washed my hands for a good two minutes.

Danny and I decided that by the time the movie was over we would both have something made of Legos. Danny’s dad would decide which was better. I ended up making a racecar, but the front wheels were smaller than the back wheels, so it didn’t go

very far. Danny made a gun that shot rub-ber bands. When we went over to Mr. Gib-son to have him judge our final products, he was asleep. The orange color of the pork rind crumbs dotted the gray of his beard. Every time he exhaled, the remnants of the chips would crawl through the coarse hair on his face. And when he inhaled, the crumbs would be sucked back up towards his nos-trils, like a vacuum.

We stood over Mr. Gibson’s body for a minute or two, quietly deciding if it was a good idea to wake the man. I nudged Danny with my elbow and turned away, indicating that we should let Mr. Gibson sleep.

As I made my way across the family room and into the kitchen, I sensed that Danny was not following me. I spun around and saw him gently placing his Lego creation on the coffee table, making sure no piece would fall off once it made contact with the wood surface.

“You wanna put some pizza rolls in the oven?” I said quietly, making sure that I didn’t wake Danny’s dad. Danny turned to his right, and looked his dad over for a second.

“In a minute,” he replied. “I want to show you something downstairs.”

The basement of the Gibson house was cut into two sections: one side a theater room, the other a workshop. The Gibson boys spent most of their time in the work-shop. The room was filled with BB guns, and enough machinery and lumber to build a small house. Danny and his brothers con-stantly worked on Pinewood Derby cars for Boy Scouts, or birdhouses for their mother and other relatives. Occasionally, Mr. Gibson would take the boys out into the woods be-hind the house and let them shoot the BB ri-fles at targets he had set up against the trees. Danny told me a story about one time when he was out shooting his BB gun and a wood-pecker landed next to one of his targets.

“I had one pellet left,” he told me in a

deep voice. “I knew that the bird would fly away before the bullet reached him. Birds can sense things coming at them, like a force field, or something. But the woodpecker didn’t even flinch. I nailed it in the back of its skull. I ran over to where it fell, and the bird’s head was gone. Just like that.”

As we walked into the workshop, I could tell that Danny was searching for something. I stood in the doorway, playing with my thumbs.

“Help me out,” he said.“What’s the magic word?” I asked, want-

ing Danny to say “please.”Danny didn’t respond. After a few min-

utes, Danny told me to look for a key.“It’s probably up high somewhere,” I

suggested.

Danny picked up a chair and walked it over to where I was standing in the doorway. He got up onto the chair and felt along the top of the white doorframe until a small gold key fell onto my head.

“Got it,” he said.“Now we just need to find which drawer

has the right keyhole,” Danny told me. The right wall of the workshop was covered in wooden cabinets, most of them locked. The only ones not fixed with a lock had hard-ware inside them: nails, washers, hammers, and other non-electric tools. I had seen Mr. Gibson get down on one knee and unlock a cabinet once. I had heard his hands shift-ing things around in there, trying to create enough space to pull something out from

print by david greaves

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the back. Mr. Gibson had finally shuffled his feet to back up, still in a squatting posi-tion, and pulled out an electric saw. He was breathing heavily, but he kept his lips close together, not wanting to lose the wet cigar he had been chewing on. When he plugged the saw’s cord into an outlet, we found out the saw was busted. So Mr. Gibson had taken the saw outside and tossed it by the side of the house.

Danny found the correct keyhole on his second try. The entire house was quiet. The only sounds came from the drawer opening, and the scratching noise that came from me nervously sliding my socks along the cement floor.

“I’ve never held a real one before,” Dan-ny said, eyes still fixed on whatever was in the drawer. He set the key down on the counter above the row of cabinets and reached into the drawer. The pistol that he pulled out was black. The metal was shiny, and it appeared new. The barrel of the gun reminded me of Mona Lisa’s eyes in the painting in my house. The barrel followed my every move. It didn’t look like anything I had seen in the movies, or on television. It was bigger, and it seemed bulky and out of place in Danny’s grip.

“It’s kinda heavy,” Danny told me. I didn’t know how to respond.

“What are we going to do with it?” I asked.

“I’m not sure. Do you want to touch it?”“Uh, no, not yet.”“What, are you chicken or something?”

As Danny said this, he whirled around on his heels and pointed the gun at me. It seemed to happen in slow motion. I looked down the barrel of the gun. It wasn’t orange like the air soft guns I had been shot with before. This was real. If Danny moved his finger a centimeter, a real bullet would hit me, not just a piece of plastic that would bounce off and sting for an hour. I watched as Danny

closed his left eye, aiming the barrel some-where on my body. I could tell that his arms were struggling with the weight of the pistol. It was starting to shake up and down slightly in his grip. I could feel myself sweating in places that I didn’t even know could sweat.

“Wait, what are you doing?” I asked.“I’m going to shoot you.”I waited, staring at Danny, pleading with

my eyes for him to put the pistol down. Then Danny giggled. And it turned into a full-on laugh.

“The safety’s on, stupid! I got you good. You were totally about to pee your pants.” I ran forward and pushed him with my hands.

“I knew you were kidding. I could see the safety from here,” I lied.

“No, you were scared.”“Whatever,” I said. “I’m going home.

I have a baseball game today, so I have to eat lunch early.” I didn’t want to act like a baby, but I was scared. I wanted to get out of the Gibsons’ house. It did not mat-ter to me that Danny had kept the safety on—he had still pointed a gun at my face.

I went over to Danny’s house the next day. I rang the doorbell and considered

going back home right before Mr. Gibson opened the door. Mr. Gibson had pants on this time, and he had shaved. I hardly recognized the man. Mr. Gibson stepped to the side and pointed to the stairs that led to the basement. I understood, took off my shoes and threw them in the pile, and headed downstairs. As I walked down the stairs, I decided not to talk about the gun with Danny. He was only kidding, anyway. I did not expect an apology or any kind of explanation from him, but that was the way that I wanted it to be.

We played cops and robbers in the back-yard, the same as we always did, using our hands as guns.

Screen SaverKevin Madden

Polluted marks smear a black veil of stars,Which dart across my sleeping eyes, that cannotSee but dream this ancient lullaby.

I scan the words that shoot across my face. The monitor hisses quietly, it shiversGently, rolling its pupils round and round,To catch its master falling fast asleep. Trying to wake itself but failing to

Remove the fishes from their habitatOf watery depths and plumbers’ promised dreamsOf pipes that twist and turn and never end.The harmless child’s ball, multicolored patch,Which turns into a weapon of ill intent,With spikes protruding and then retreating, I break;To dry my sweating forehead on this page.

print by anthony vienhage

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I tell my mom I’m off to nine o’clock.But she’s not ready, I can go alone.I’m out of gas, so I just take the truck.My dad would not allow it had he known.I hustle into church and right back out,To grab a bulletin and note the priest.I speed across the town and find my Spot,And on the way I hear Ben Harper preach.I settle in, Corona gives me sips.The dragonflies, a soulful humming choir.Beside the pond, some ants are building crypts.I greet the turtles I’ve seen here before.I feed the ducks a bunch of stale bread crumbs,And talk with them about hope, peace, and love.

Mass of the SonnetJames Boeckmann

print by david greaves

That day I could barely think at all. Our time together had been brief, but real.

At least I thought so. And now I was stuck at school, with nothing to distract me from the inevitable. She was going to dump me.

It was Friday. At recess I sat alone on the swings. My friends all came and talked to me, trying to cheer me up, but it was no use. Meanwhile, her friends didn’t seem to leave her alone: I couldn’t make her out from my position on the swing-set, but she seemed to be huddled in the middle of them. Whether they were giving her pointers on how to do it or trying to talk her out of it, I had no idea. Probably the former.

I knew it was coming today. That whole week had been rocky with us. Our best mo-ment together had probably been when I had asked her out on the monkey bars last Mon-day. I had been so smooth. We were sitting on the top of them, talking, and occasionally I would grab the handles and flip forwards and backwards, just to show off. I think she blushed a bit, probably because her soon-to-be boyfriend looked so strong in front of the whole grade. I was kind of tired of everyone shooting us glances, though. The tetherball players even stopped their game at one point to eavesdrop, at which point I told them to “mind their own beeswax.” That got a laugh out of her. Finally, right before the bell rang for lunch, I did it. It was the most beautiful sight ever when she smiled and nodded her head. After that, I thought it was all smooth sailing. We sat next to each other at lunch and shared our food. We walked as far home as we could until we had to part. On Thurs-day, we even held hands, but that only lasted

Puppy LovePeter Meyers

for about three seconds, and it only started because she had nearly tripped on the side-walk and I was trying to help her regain her balance. She had even met my mom at the entrance to school. I had told Mom about the new woman in my life the night before, and when I pointed her out, my mom called to her and waved. I knew my face must have been glowing red as I stepped out of the car onto the gravel. It was so embarrassing. May-be that’s why she’s ending it.

I sighed. No, that wasn’t it. I knew the real reason. It all had to do with what I said to her this Tuesday while we were in the lunch line. We were bad-talking our religion teacher, Mr. Jefferson, when I told her that the only person I liked less than him was Mrs. Henderson. I’ll never forget the look on her face when I slandered her favorite math teacher of all time. We sat in silence that day, and the next thing I knew, rumor had it that she was going to dump me because, as one of her friends, Ditzy, put it so elegantly:

“How could she ever be with someone who doesn’t like Mrs. Henderson?”

I had traded my cookie with Tommy yesterday at lunch in exchange for some more information about the dilemma. He said that, when eavesdropping on the girl’s bathroom after science, he heard her crying to some of her friends, saying that she need-ed to end it was soon as possible. Her friends consoled her, telling her that she deserved someone better, and, besides, I had laughed at her folder with the puppies on it. I thought it looked cute, but apparently she had taken offense to my laughter. They decided that tomorrow was good, because we would have the weekend to distract us from one another. She would do it after school, before the walk home. My heart sunk at the news: it was concrete evidence. I couldn’t deny her red-stained eyes all day, either. I couldn’t pretend that it was all made up anymore. A perfectly good Friday down the drain.

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A school day had never taken longer. The last three periods seemed to last hours. Social studies was the worst, since we sat next to each other. I kept trying to talk to her: about the new Nickelodeon show, about how the corn dogs in the cafeteria were cold today, about how I was considering helping Mrs. Henderson with her lawn work that weekend. But nothing worked. By the time the last bell rang, part of me was just glad to get this over with. I met her at the bike rack alone, feeling so hopeless.

She took a deep breath and looked at me. “We need to talk.”

I frowned at her, as if confused. But in my head, my thoughts were racing. It couldn’t

end. Not now. After almost the two greatest weeks of my life. A surge of life entered me, and I felt like I was on autopilot, aware of my actions but having no control over them.

“I gotta go,” I said. I actually sort of yelled it. Without a glance back, I hitched my backpack higher on my back and took off, sprinting towards home.

The weight of my books caused me to hobble my way home until I was completely out of breath. I knew it was probably irratio-nal, but I had made the right decision. As I slowed to a walk, I couldn’t help but smile.

I’m not gonna let her ruin my weekend. Our talk can wait till Monday.

photo by andrew nguyen

The silver ash awaits below the net Of wiry mesh poked through by tangled clumpsOf bursting branches stuffed within the pit.The season ripe, my frigid hands now grasp and scrape the match against the withered gates;I hurl it toward the tinder locked within.A flicker crawls into the cradled massand churning blazes grip the waking limbs.But scores of smiling eyes and melding chantscannot be captured in the winter walls.They dance and swirl into the smold’ring skiesAnd leap into the smoke of memories.The flames erupt and lick the raw night air;They snap the moonlight bending over me.

Backyard FireplaceNathan Fox

photo by austin strifler

4948Hey James, can we talk?” James

couldn’t see Alex’s face. The fire was behind Alex and he had his hood up. All

James could see was a black void where a face should have been. It was kind of creepy.

“Sure. What’s up?” “Just…is it okay if we talk somewhere

else?” “Uhh…” James glanced over Alex’s shoulder.

The only other person at the fire was Drew. Drew glanced over at them, then back at the fire, with his hands in his pockets. His flick-ering shadow spread across the front yard towards the house where everyone else was still engaged in the end of an extremely in-tense game of Risk. Alex, Drew, and James had come out to light the fire. The entire time they were spreading used motor oil over the massive pile of branches Alex didn’t say a word to Drew.

“Yeah. We can do that. Give me a sec-ond.”

James quickly pulled his bare hands away from the fire and pulled gloves out of his pockets. Usually he could guess Alex’s prob-lems, but they hadn’t seen each other for a few months. Most of the time it was Drew who would talk with Alex. Drew had been friends with Alex a lot longer than James. They did everything together in high school, especially theater. Most plays had them in the lead roles. They’d pushed each other hard to become theater majors. They had even gotten into Elon and dormed together for the past semester. James finished putting on his gloves, turned away from the fire and started walking out towards the far side of

Odyssey of the SnowBenjamin Hilker

the vast front yard. Alex followed James. Everybody else

had started walking out from the door. Alex and James were on the far side of the fire, though. No one noticed them walking away. They started crunching through the snow the fire hadn’t melted. The thin sheet of ice that covered the snow popped and cracked as their feet punched through into the soft powder beneath. They walked along the tree line on the western edge of the yard. The fire highlighted the trees so that one half of each tree was bathed in a gray-red glow and the other half was left in shadow.

It was beautiful. This was the first time James had really relaxed since leaving Purdue for Christmas break. There was a little bit of snow falling but nowhere near what he had driven home in. The snow had been so thick that his wipers were jamming. He almost lost control when getting off the highway, but the real terror occurred when he’d opened the front door. About eight people jumped him. His parents had invited some of his old friends over, including Sarah, his old girl-friend. Together, James was being crushed by about a thousand pounds of Sarah, Brian, Connor, Greg, Tom, Sam, Drew, and Alex. They all started to laugh as they attempted to disentangle. James would have joined in if he had any breath to laugh with. James didn’t know what his parents were thinking, invit-ing everyone over. He loved the company, but the snow was still coming down. They’d all have to stay the night. He was sure their parents would be fine with it, but James just hoped his sister, Carrie, had cleaned her room so Sarah had a place to sleep.

It was good that Sarah and Carrie were such good friends. James and Sarah had a clean split, but James didn’t want to remind her why they’d split in the first place. Nope. Not getting into that. He was through with the ups and downs of that relationship. James was having pretty good luck with girls

at Purdue. Oddly enough, what constituted as geeky humor in Illinois was cute charm in Indiana. Somehow when he left for col-lege he lost all the tendencies that had ru-ined his relationships before. His best friend at Purdue, Amanda, had really shown him how to deal with girls. Gone was the awk-ward, cynical boy; present was a fun, quick-witted, thoughtful guy. James would never tell his parents this, but his high school years had been pretty crappy or, at least, crappy in a girl sense. Jamie. Molly. Melissa. All of them had played him in some way or anoth-er. One needed to get help with homework. One wanted to make her boyfriend jealous. One wanted to…never mind. He hadn’t even thought about them since he left for Purdue.

James turned towards Alex. “So how’s Elon?”

The hooded figure looked straight ahead. “It’s…fine…”

James shook his head. He hated it when Alex was dramatic. James had hoped that Alex going to Elon would make him more professional about using his drama, but it looked like theater could only contain so much of his moodiness. James glanced over his shoulder at the fire. “Okay. I don’t think they can hear us. Let’s talk.”

“Well…”“Take your hood off, Alex.”The black void turned towards James.

“What?”“Your hood. I can’t see your face.”“I’ll freeze out here!”“Don’t complain, you wimp. Here.”

James stopped walking and pulled off his crocheted cap. He could feel the static pass from his hat into his hair as it fuzzed out in all directions. James handed Alex the hat, Alex pulled back the hood with his gloved hands and slid the cap on. In the dim light James could just see the blank expression on Alex’s face. He almost wished he hadn’t got-ten Alex to take the hood off. He could feel

wind begin to whip his unprotected ears as Alex started talking.

“Can you keep this private? I really don’t want anyone to hear about this. Especially them.” Alex glanced back over his shoulder at the fire. They were far enough away that they couldn’t make anyone out; just their shadows that stretched across the lawn and onto the road.

James nodded. “Don’t worry Alex. I won’t tell anybody. Let’s keep walking.”

They continued moving. The wind had blown the snow into little crests all over the yard. It looked as if someone had frozen the surface of the sea and then glazed it over with ice and powder. They tried to stick between the crests of snow. They were both wearing boots, but if their feet went too far under, the snow would stick to their jeans. James’s ears were already stinging without the pro-tection of his hat. A primordial dislike of the extremes drove him to work fast.

Alex kept his gaze on the snow ahead. “I don’t know what to do, James.”

“Neither do I. You haven’t told me what’s wrong.”

Alex’s head dropped slightly into his chest. “Oh. Right.”

James turned to look at Alex. Alex had his head down, looking at the snow. He wasn’t even bothering to pick his feet up. He was just cutting two little trenches into the flowing curves.

“If you need to say something, you should get it out, man.”

Alex stopped walking and turned to James. His cheeks looked pale and eerie in the low light: like he wasn’t all there. It re-minded James of the description of Achilles when Odysseus saw him in the underworld: pale, downtrodden, shut off from life.

Alex finally opened his mouth. “You remember that part in the play Drew and I tried out for at the beginning of the semes-ter?”

“

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photo by John kissel

“Yep. I remember you telling me about it.”

“Well, we both got it. The same role. I’m his understudy.”

Ouch. Alex was a great actor. He could portray anyone or anything, but Drew had a charisma about him that screamed “I was born for this part.” At high school they had been neck and neck for most leads in the plays. Sometimes Drew won and sometimes Alex won. Alex didn’t lose well.

“I’m sorry, man.”Alex turned to look down at the snow.

“It’s okay.”Alex didn’t say anything after that. James

started to walk toward the road that bor-dered the far side of the yard. He was thank-ful that his front yard was so big. Alex was going to need some time. James didn’t check to see if Alex was following him, but he heard a steady crunch that was not his own. They just walked for a while sweeping around all the peaks of snow.

James glanced back over his shoulder. “Is that all that’s bothering you?”

Alex still had his head looking at the

ground. “Nope. That just started it.”“Well, get a move on then! Shit, Alex.

Are you going to wait till we freeze to get this out?”

“No.”“Then say something!”“There’s this girl. She’s got the lead role

opposite Drew.”Dammit. Not another girl. Alex was

like a picky kid in an ice cream store when it came to girls. He’d spend forever trying to pick something out and then was never sat-isfied when he finally got it. That’s why his longest relationship lasted only about twenty minutes. James really felt sorry for Maggie that day by the pond. Alex broke that girl’s heart. If Alex was having girl troubles, James would be dealing with a lot of drama, espe-cially if Alex started crying.

“Well, tell me about her.”A small but almost drunken smile flashed

on Alex’s face. “Oh, she’s great! She’s a really good actress and funny too. We take a lot of classes together and I help her study a lot.”

James nodded. “So you spend a good amount of time together.”

“Tons. I usually rehearse her lines with her when Drew is busy with the rest of the play.”

James shrugged. “So what’s the prob-lem?”

The smile that had slowly been building on Alex’s face disappeared altogether.

“I think she likes me.”“What makes you say that?”“Well, one time we were practicing a

scene where she has to kiss Drew’s character. We were supposed to stop right before that part but she kissed me anyway. And she kept kissing me. I didn’t know what to do. When she pulled away, she was smiling. Every time she sees me she smiles. Ever since then I haven’t been able to stop thinking about her. I think I like her.”

“So what’s the problem?”“I think she likes Drew too.”It was just like Alex to overdramatize

something like that. He had to leave the twist until the end of the story. James looked at Alex’s blank face for a few seconds as a gust of wind blasted his unprotected ears. He shivered. “You could have told me that earlier.”

“Maybe.”James looked away from Alex for a mo-

ment. He could only stand staring at that emotionless void for so long. He watched as a swarm of snowflakes sped along the crests across the yard. He shook his head. “I can see that being a problem.”

“No shit.”Mouth agape, James turned back to Alex.

Alex never swore. Never. What was going on with this girl? “Okay, Alex. Maybe you’re just a little paranoid. Does Drew like her?”

Alex gave a quick nod. “I think so. May-be even more than likes.”

“Okay…”“She did the same thing with Drew that

she did with me. I was on the catwalk above the stage helping run some cable. They were

doing the same scene. They weren’t supposed to kiss that time either. She kissed him a lot longer than me.”

James shook his head. “Come on, it was a stage kiss, Alex. Don’t worry about it. She was probably just in character, or whatever it is you guys do.”

“No!” Now Alex was in his whiny voice. James hated the whiny voice. “She started hanging around with him as much as me af-ter that. She even invited him to our study dates. I’d see her glancing at both of us, one after another, like she was looking for some-thing!”

“So what! She must know you guys are friends. You guys dorm together for Pete’s sake! She was probably just working with that.”

“No!”The shout echoed. James looked over

his shoulder at the fire. None of the black figures or their shadows had shifted to the sound. Alex had stopped moving again. His shoulders were shaking and his head was down.

“Dammit, Alex. If you start crying, I’m leaving.”

Alex looked up at James. His chin was trembling as he spoke.

“She came to talk to me last week. Cry-ing! She thought she was pregnant!”

James didn’t really know what to say at that. What does somebody say in that situa-tion anyway? He thought of a few questions. If he asks the first, it gets awkward. If he asks the second, Alex won’t stop crying. If he asks the third, Alex might try to kill him. So he didn’t ask a question.

“Wow... uhh... okay...”“I’ve never been more scared in my life.”Question number one: “Why were you

scared?”Alex’s body tightened up. His face final-

ly showed emotion, but it definitely wasn’t what James was looking for. “It wasn’t me,

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photo by saM beCkMannthat’s for sure!”“It doesn’t mean it was Drew!”“Who else could it have been!” James

was surprised that the people around the fire weren’t able to hear them. They were pretty far away, but the wind was starting to die down. James softened his voice. “Okay. Okay. Tell me what happened.”

Alex sniffled. “Well... I was offstage or-ganizing props when she tapped me on my shoulder. She looked scared. She took me into the dressing room and broke down...she broke down...”

Alex had started sobbing. James didn’t need tears, he needed a story. “Come on, Alex. Keep going.”

Alex sobbed again, still looking at the ground. “She... She told me that she had missed her period. She’d taken a pregnancy test but hadn’t looked at it yet. She had it in her pocket. She gave it to me to read it. Damn it, why did she give it to me!”

“Calm down...calm down...”“I looked down at it. I’ve never been

more scared in my life. It was negative. Thank God it was negative.”

James sighed. “So she wasn’t pregnant. No problem then.”

Alex looked up to James, his mouth wide and trembling. “What do you mean no prob-lem! If she was worried she was pregnant then she’d kinda have to have done some-thing to get pregnant! Don’t you think!”

James had to raise his voice. “Calm down! All right. So maybe Drew and her did it. Okay? Just take it easy.”

Alex was breathing pretty heavily. James could barely see his face through the fog from his breath. James shook his head. Only Alex could end up in a situation like this, and James had to be the one to get him out. Alex was a lot like James’s sister: both let their emotions get the better of them. Alex sobbed. James sighed. Just like his sister.

“You okay, Alex?”

“Sure.” Alex sniffled a little as he spoke.“Stop crying.”“I’m not crying. It’s the cold. I swear.”James nodded. “Sure it is. I want you to

pull yourself together and listen to me. Can you do that?”

Alex wiped his nose with his sleeve. James cringed. That was his coat. “I could have done without that.”

Alex looked down at the now glazed sleeve. “Sorry. Forgot.”

“You ready to listen?”For once, Alex looked at James head on.

“Go ahead...”James pulled his hands out of his pock-

ets. It was his turn to say a thing or two. He may not have been an actor, but he knew how to give a speech. He’d won first place with his high school speech team two times for extemporaneous. Gestures were key. “I know the situation you’re in. I’ve seen tons of friends in it.” He pointed to his chest with his gloved hands. “I’ve been in it. You want to be with this girl and she kinda wants to be with you. She’s confused...” he put his left hand out off to his side. “... and you’re confused.” James put out his other hand and raised his eyebrows. “Am I right?”

“So far.”James shivered as a stray gust of wind

beat his chapped ears. “Jesus… well, anyway, I’m figuring you’re pretty lost on what to do. Have you done anything since she talked to you?”

Alex shook his head. “I’ve been avoiding her ever since we talked. I’ve almost called her a dozen times. I don’t know what to do…”

James watched Alex as he started to stare back into the snow. He prayed that what he planned to say would help. “Okay. Now I’m going to give you some advice that you are not going to like.”

Alex nodded slowly and took a deep breath. “I’ll take it.”

James let his hands slide back into his

pockets. The air was almost still. He could just barely hear the crack of branches roast-ing in the fire. “Right. This is the best ad-vice I’ve got, and it’s gonna suck. My mom told me this when I was dealing with Jamie. Ready?”

Alex nodded. “Ready.”“You’ll just have to let her go.”Alex squinted at him and let his head

turn slightly sideways, like a puzzled dog. “What? I… I don’t think I can do that…”

James shook his head. “Of course you don’t. With that attitude, I don’t know if you can or not. But you’ve got to try any-way, man. If you really want to get out of this mess, then you have got to try. It actu-ally might be easier than you think. I mean, she’s not finalized anything with you yet. If you don’t do anything drastic, maybe noth-ing will happen.”

Alex stood there staring at the snow near James’s boots. With the wind gone, James could tell that Alex wasn’t crying. He hoped that meant something.

“What do you want me to do, James?”James smiled. “Well, my first idea would

be to stop seeing her so much, but with as much as you guys have to do together...” He had to be really careful about this. The last thing he wanted was for Alex and Drew to hate each other or for that girl to get hurt. “...I guess your best bet is to just ignore it when she does anything. Just smile and wave. That way you stay out of it and you don’t hurt her.”

Alex nodded. “What about her and Drew, and what if he finds out about her and me?”

“Drew and you have been best friends for years. Don’t tell me that you guys can’t

5554

In the distant whirl of resurrecting all forgotten things, You leap from the blur just before my sealed eyes,And on one particular stroll around three blocks of Flora’s uneven sidewalk,Both of us that night lusting for some divine parallel,We walked together and noted that our stupid brains would not recall more than one in one hundred moments from a whole year together,How each conversation would blend into a slew of irrelevant ramblings,Like when we cackled together in armchairs and filled the room with diaphragmatic blasts, When we walked beneath fiery balloons and beckoning city lights,Or a shorter ambling when your longing for sincerity and seething disgust with symbols of unrelenting deadness urged me to drive winter away by crushing the patchy melting snow beneath my tearing scuffed shoes— Now, I won’t claim to remember everything,But as I walk that bumpy path with you again in pursuit of those moments more distant,Here in the present,The past does not do as much winding—Whenever I encounter any joys or grandeurs,I still chuckle and your chest erupts from mine because my laugh is yours, And I crafted this clear indicator accidentally and unknowingly since my stubborn memory took the task to render both you and me lovingly mistaken. Of all our time together, I remember more than one percent,An arbitrary calculation.

For WilliamTom Blood

photo by thoMas williaMs

work through this.”“What if they keep doing what they’re

doing and she gets hurt? What do I do then, James?”

Alex ended that phrase with almost an accusatory tone. James didn’t falter. “Just let it go. I think you’ve been hurt enough by this girl. Just stay out of it. You just need to think ‘What do I care? It’s their business.’ Can you do that?”

“I don’t think…”James let a puff of air escape from his

mouth, releasing a cloud of fog between them highlighted by the distant glow of the fire. “Think? I don’t want you to think. You think way too much! You get so wrapped up in your own damn head that you get into sit-uations like this. Don’t think about it. Just go with it. Okay?”

Alex’s jaw was tight, but his head was still up. He looked intently at James. At least he was considering it. “…I can try that. I’m not making any promises though.”

James smiled. “Good enough...but you’ve got to keep something in mind Alex. Person-ally, I thought college was going to suck. Big time. I thought I’d be the cynical kid I was back here, but after a while, I figured out that wasn’t me. That grade school crap that I could be what I wanted to be made a lot more sense this side of high school. You’re still on the other side, Alex. You and Drew are still doing the same things you did in high school. You’re still as dramatic and whiny as ever...”

Alex nodded slowly. “You’ve got that right.”

“...and self-degrading as ever. You’re still the same Alex. You don’t have to be that closed off. Take it from me: open your eyes every once in awhile. You might see some-thing that surprises you.”

Alex nodded. “I hope so.”James put his hand on Alex’s shoulder

and pulled him closer. “You will. Trust me.”They started walking back towards the

fire, James keeping his arm on Alex. They walked straight through the snow, not caring about the deep plunges into the crests. They could start to pick out the individual scarves and hats that clothed their friends.

“Hey, James?”James turned to him. “What?”Alex looked over at James. “Thanks.”James smiled and patted Alex’s back.

“No problem. If one doesn’t get wisdom from years of failures with girls, then he did something wrong. Plus I couldn’t really call myself a friend if I didn’t pass it on.” They kept walking.

“Alex?”“Yeah?”“Can I have my hat back?”“Oh! Of course!” Alex pulled off the cap and handed it

back to James. James looked into the hat. “You don’t have lice, do you?”

Alex shrugged. “Don’t think so.”James raised his eyebrows. “Think?”Alex smiled and shook his head. “I

don’t.”James smiled and put the hat on. “Good.

Looks like you learned something.”As they walked towards the fire their

shadows lengthened further and further across the yard. The wind picked up and the snow started falling again. It swirled around the two boys as they trudged over the terrain to rejoin their friends in a semicircle around the fire.

Drew turned to them.

“Where were you guys?”

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The timer clicks, warning that the lamp will go dark.The boy’s hands tremble as ink from his pen dripson the creased skin over his knuckles as if they’d crackedand bled and needed balm or other treatment.The chandelier’s light resets his internal clock.He dreams of his flannel covers but keeps awake.

The father snores and coughs and is awakeso that he can shuffle to the toilet seat in the dark.The boy’s leg bounces twice for every tick of the clock,or five times for every moment the faucet drips,after the father has washed; the boy hopes for the silent treatment.The father disappoints, sniffs at his son, his voice cracked.

Why try now? Time has not cracked,so why labor to stay awake?the father asks, promoting kind treatmentof one’s own body. But the lamp won’t go darkand light stretches the boy’s pupils and dripslike wax onto the green paper, until he cannot see the clock.

Time Never TiresConnor Madden

No one noticed him pull up except for me. As my soccer team and I dribbled

balls about and took practice shots in our lime green uniforms, I felt a bristling in the hairs on my neck. I glanced behind me and saw my dad’s F-250 crunch onto the gravel parking lot. The grinding roar of the engine was barely audible from across the field, melding in with the sounds of refer-ees’ whistles, other engines, and clapping, cheering parents. I fell back in with my teammates and kept warming up for our game, but I remained aware of the vehicle slowing to a stop.

Our referee blew his whistle, signaling the teams to stop practicing and return to their benches. My teammates and I gath-ered around our coach, and he began his pre-game pep talk, which to 7th graders was to do our best and have fun. I ignored him and watched my father walk toward the bleach-ers. His black shoes padded down the path-way. He wore black suit pants, and a pressed, cool blue oxford, the top two buttons un-done. He looked different. Since the divorce, he had become more liberal with his hair. His sharp buzz cut had grown out, and his bangs were flipped up in the front. He had let his beard grow out as well, a dark muzzle now covering his jaws. He squinted into the wind, his blue eyes seeming more intelligent and awake than I had seen in a long time.

I glanced at my mother. She sat on one end of the small set of moss green bleach-ers, clutching her jacket closed in the cool fall wind. She was the second one to see my father. I didn’t know when they had seen each other last, since they sporadically met for lunch now and again. It could have been

days, or it could have been weeks. She did not look at him but instead faced forward as if making an effort not to. As she talked to other parents, she looked from face to face, perhaps wondering if any of them had no-ticed my father’s arrival. He walked with his head cocked up, his eyes on the soccer field. Like a new employee on his first day, he knew he was being watched. This was the only soc-cer game of mine he had attended since I was in first grade. He had always asked me how games had gone, how many goals I had scored, how much playing time I had gotten, as if checking the newspaper’s stock market quotes. My mother had always tried to get him to attend, but he had somehow avoided going without even bothering to respond.

But now, sure enough, he strode up, knowing he was in foreign territory but feeling entitled to passage anyway. He ap-proached my mom sitting at one end of the bleachers. I could see his eyes were calm, but I knew the intellect behind them was working furiously. He noticed her hair now hung about her shoulders instead of up in a ponytail. He noticed that she wore heels and her gray wool cardigan rather than her ten-nis shoes and drab soccer hoodie. He espe-cially noticed that the leather-banded ivory watch he had gotten her for their fifteenth anniversary had been replaced by an obnox-ious silver watch with a face larger than a silver dollar. His ears turned slightly red at the sight of it, but his face was still stone. My mother continued her conversation with the woman next to her, sure that my father’s gaze was on her. She fought the urge to meet his. I watched as my father passed in front of her without so much as a turn of his head or pivot in his step, to my mother’s outrage. She thought that she was in the clear, that surely now she could look at him and be safe from his knowing it. She chanced a look. Imme-diately she met his lightning eyes, glancing sideways through the black jowls of his beard

RegalEvan Chipley

photo by daniel Meehan

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and bangs as he walked. They bore into her without malice, making her naked and weak before him, helpless as the day they had met. She summoned her deepest will and looked away, returning to her conversation with the woman next to her. Her breathing was heavy now.

As my dad passed more parents he rec-ognized, he gave them polite nods, meeting each in the eye, daring them to contest his presence at the field. He marched up the four rows of bleachers and perched himself at the top, the bench bending slightly under his weight. Then his head turned to the field, and I looked away before he could place me. I had seen him only twice since he had moved out, and I didn’t want to be caught by his stormy eyes, trapped in the secluded tunnel of his gaze. I hadn’t the foggiest idea what I could say or how to look back if he saw me. My coach announced our positions, and I jogged onto the field, my head down.

I played well. Though it was the playoffs, the other team was two divisions below

my team, and we had no trouble with them. Our defense stopped them easily, and our offense shredded their defense as if it were an old cloth. For the first ten minutes, I was the spearhead of that offense. With a cou-ple of precise passes from my teammates, I lofted two goals into the back of the net, the sound like a spray of rain hitting a roof. My father caused this. Feeling his stare on my back made my feet light, my touch fluid, and my shots accurate. I never once met his eyes. After scoring a goal or miss-ing a shot, when I knew that not just he but most of the crowd would be looking at me, I purposely looked at my teammates’ faces. I pretended to take great care in listening to my coach’s shouts from the bench, which I normally ignored. Occasionally, when I crouched down to tie my shoe or adjust my shin guard, I would peek through my arms

to see if my dad was still watching. Often he was watching the ball, but sometimes he still watched me, though I was unsure if he saw me looking back.

After the first ten minutes of the game, my coach pulled me out of the game. We were up by three, and he told me to take a seat on the bench to let the other forwards get some playing time. I plopped onto the grass-green wooden bench, my weight bow-ing it just a little. I looked down at my feet. Wet grass clung to my cleats like static, and my feet were soaked through the socks from the dewy field. I could feel my toes pruning. And so I sat, watching the rest of the game unfold without me. Now that my veins were not throbbing, my adrenaline not pumping, I felt very cold. The cool wind blew against my cheeks and sweaty hair. My green jersey clung to my back from the sweat.

Periodically, I would look up from the game and see my mother watching the ac-tion or talking with her friends. She seemed lighter, more at ease now that my dad sat in the next bleacher over. I sympathized with her. When my father was around, he exert-ed a pressure on everyone there: the weight of his presence bore down onto everyone else. His tone was nearly always gentle, his words never harsh, but his look seemed to be relentlessly scrutinizing. His analytic de-meanor gave the feeling that everything in his sight was being appraised, weighed for its pros and cons. And, unsurprisingly, you never felt as if you were being judged favor-ably, as if the bar you were to meet hovered inches over your head. Being only thirteen, I had just become aware of this feeling within the past year, but my mother had evidently always felt it. In their early years, my father had offset this effect with compliments. It had been an adequate fix, at least for a while.

My father knew his effect on people, and he had never denied that it was purposeful. I had seen him at the office. He remained dis-

tant, brief, and stern to his coworkers, most of them subordinates. I often pictured him as a king in his realm, his throne the corner of-fice with two large windows for walls, where I could look down and see the sidewalk newspaper vender now as small as an ant. He did not make his own copies; his coffee was brewed and on his desk when he arrived. If you asked him how to do something a first time, he would calmly explain once in detail. Asking a second time was not met amicably. He would reprimand through gritted teeth while cracking each hand’s knuckles with his thumbs. But I had never seen my dad do something unfair. The pressure he exerted was purely imagined though still very real. It was nothing more than a feeling, but one felt by anyone and everyone.

The compliments only carried so far. The pressure had built on my mom like a great river on a dam. Every day it mounted. Every day, my father walked in the door af-ter work, his pants still pleated, his vest lint-free, and his tie still perfectly knotted. My mom, after a day of running me around, cleaning the house, or working from home, would have her hair in a messy bun, dinner half ready on the stove. She would look up at him and cringe, an unmistakable inferior-ity in her eyes. She imagined the confidence and sense of entitlement she had first fallen in love with now standing opposite her, he the duke and she the maid.

My father argued with her vehemently when she suggested divorce. They had stood in the kitchen while I watched from the hall-way, peering into the sliver of light between the door and its frame, beneath the hinge. They fought for over an hour, trying to stay quiet but not succeeding. They thought I was asleep. I didn’t understand what they were talking about, only noticing when my name was mentioned now and again. My dad barked at her like a wolf, and she fell back. He dismantled her argument methodically,

vainly trying to get mom to see her error, and she fell apart with it. She was reduced to a weeping heap in her chair, a tissue clenched in her fist as she buried her head in her arms trying to hide from those hawk eyes standing over her.

The ball flew at my face. I caught it inches from my nose and tossed it non-

chalantly to the player waiting to throw it in. My focus turned to the game once more, and I stretched my legs, feeling the sticky, tingling warmth of soreness starting to set into my thighs. The other team had scored. They were bringing it to us now, dominating the field, keeping the ball in their offensive half. I glanced at Dad every now and again. His gaze flitted between the game and me. They scored again. The other team had tied my two goals from the first half, and we were beginning to fall apart. My finger-nails digging into the bench at my sides, I watched the final minutes elapse, accompa-nied by another goal from the other team.

The ref blew his whistle, and I was off the bench, fuming, pacing. I had exceeded the expectations of my coach quicker than he had anticipated, and my reward was a seat

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on the bench for the last thirty-five minutes. The team’s reward was a loss. I cursed at my coach under my breath with any curse words I knew, as well as any words I guessed might be curses, glancing over at him as I did so. He was a mammoth of a man, clearly of Irish descent. He resembled some discolored bear, standing nearly six and a half feet tall with a curly red head of hair and beard. His gut stuck out much farther than his chest, and after looking at him, people often thought he must not know the sport very well. I did not think that—I knew it.

But I was the seventh grader. Speaking up to my coach, I would appear to be only a whining child, even if another ten min-utes with me on the field would have won us the game. I pulled down my socks, and be-gan walking across the field into the crowd of parents coming to greet their players. I looked in the distance at the lone bleacher to the left, searching vainly for my dad. No one was there. The lightness left my feet, and they felt like rocks once more. I had failed the appraisal, had not met his bar—the bar I could almost feel hovering in the air over my head. My eyes fell to my feet.

Then the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. My shoulders tensed. I looked up, and there was my father, stomping in my direction. His eyes were no longer calm; the icy blue overcame his shrinking pupils as they developed a predatory fixation. He was bristling, his teeth almost gritted behind his beard. I dropped my water bottle. But as he neared me, his fixation remained ahead, and he did not so much as slow down when he stalked past me. I could hear him crack-ing his knuckles at his sides as he passed. I turned to watch him, feeling sorry for what-ever poor thing he was marching towards.

He stopped in front of my coach, who was hoisting his bag of soccer balls up onto his shoulder. Before he could walk away, my father grabbed his elbow and turned the man

to face him.“Jack!” my coach said, looking very sur-

prised to see him, especially this close. He dwarfed my father, standing several inches taller than him, and more than a few inches thicker. His gut was pressed up against my dad’s pressed shirt just from my father hav-ing grabbed his arm. My dad didn’t even seem to notice, though. Coach had his back to the green wooden bench, and my father was up on him like a dog cornering cattle. My dad leaned his head in close to my coach’s, and I couldn’t hear a word he said. His hand was still firmly locked on Coach’s forearm.

My coach followed suit and whispered as well, both men’s words muffled by their beards. After a minute or two, coach straight-ened up and took a half step back, but my father followed. I could hear their voices gradually getting louder, but because of the wind and people around, I still couldn’t make out any words or meaning. They kept getting louder, and my coach dropped the net full of soccer balls at his feet. It became yelling.

“I’m just here to teach them the sport!” my coach yelled defensively, stepping back again. My father took an emphatic step to-wards him.

“You are teaching him how to watch and how to lose!”

There it was—that gravelly, firm tone I had heard only on a couple occasions. An image of a baseball lying at the foot of our broken foyer window flashed into my mind. Coach tried to take another step back, but his calf immediately hit the short green bench, and he toppled over it like a fallen tree. He lay on his back with my father staring down at him as if he were nothing more than a hairy beached whale. My father stood there breathing heavily, his shirt untucked now, like a haggard animal after a hunt. Coach didn’t dare move. My coach lay transfixed, as if any twitch or hair’s movement would re-ward him with a bloody nose. He gulped.

Dad turned away from him, a great storm diverted. He made only passing glanc-es to the parents and players around him, his eyes moving from one to the other as if none of them were even worth scrutiny. Any-one and everyone shrunk at his look. He let out one gravelly breath and marched back in my direction. Again, he didn’t stop for a mo-ment. He cuffed me lightly on the side of the head as he passed, and I just barely heard his words through the wind.

“Good job.”I just stood, my spilled water bottle still

at my feet, watching him go like every other

soul on that field, unwilling and incapable of stopping him. The wind blew and the grass rippled in his wake, and he disappeared into the parking lot. I looked around and found my mother, her feet close together and her shoulders slumped like a lost child. Like the rest of us, she watched him go with an awe-struck stare. Her fingers touched the silver watch on her wrist. I walked over to her and touched her arm, and she jerked towards me, as if coming out of a trance. She looked at me with dewy eyes as a grinding roar erupted from the parking lot and slowly, deliberately moved into the distance.

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6362You feel it as you wait in the wings for your hour to strut and fret about the stage, for your moment to shine, for your moment to make it, for your moment to impress those officials who could decide your future for you with a single checked boxyou feel it when Santa Claus turns out to be a lieyou feel it when the week becomes an infinite countdown to a two-and-a-half day weekend in which we are supposed to cram all of the necessary enjoyment in order to begin it againyou feel it on your first Friday unwillingly spent at home, when you can’t find a date, when you think you might be content to hide in your cage and watch reruns of Friendsyou feel it when you realize you’re conditioned to take in, digest, spit back outyou feel it when you speed down the highway, wreathed in cigarette smoke and Led Zeppelin and try and chase what was rightfully yoursyou feel it when she tells you that nice guys finish lastyou feel it when you form a first-name basis with Worry and He begins to call you at home at odd hours of the nightyou feel it when you suffer for your art for the first timeyou feel it when you finally give in to Cynicism and he claps you on the back, teaches you the handshake, and introduces you to his friends Irony and Irreverence you feel it when you don’t have the courage to wink back, flirt back, call backyou feel it when cynicism becomes more than the slouch and the look starts to resemble a crutch that you might not be able to do withoutyou feel it when the routine becomes the grind, when the schedule becomes the terrain, and when the only thing that keeps you going is the tiny gem of rebellion that, at any time, you can get up and walk outyou feel it when you know what you want but can’t ask for it, when you know what you need but don’t want it, and when you settle for what you neither want nor needyou feel it when you stand in a crowd of sweaty, gyrating, happy people and feel completely and utterly alone

But you feel it liftedwhen she tells you she loves youwhen the grades come back and you have the courage to throw them in the garbage without opening them

when she calls backwhen you realize if you’re suffering it might as well be for your artwhen you let fly the fourth-quarter buzzer beater and before it drops through the basket with a final swish you already know it’s in when the hard work pays off, when the pay check comes, and when someone pays it forward when you laugh, a simple light-hearted, joy-filled laughwhen you skip to class, work, and uncertaintywhen you play frisbee during your 5th period free period when the sun is shining and November remembers what June was likewhen you make her face light up with a smile like an exploding neon fruit supermarketwhen somebody gives you the smile in the hallway, the finger salute, the head nod, the acknowledgementwhen you realize that despite popular opinion, circumstantial fact, general witness, and existential literature, you are not alone

The Weight of the World

Ben Luczak

idling, photo by Carson Monetti

6564You and I are, for all practical purposes, stuck.

We are stuck to the ground; every time we try to jump away, some invisible tie pulls us down without fail.

We are stuck, not only by gravity, but also by the alienating and staggeringly unconquerable stretches of space that surrounds us on all sides.

We are stuck to this planet, which is, for all practical purposes, just a tiny speck of dust in a vast, unexperienced universe.

We are stuck to a map, wrapped around a tiny dust-sphere that swims dissolved in an enormous sea of nothing.

We are stuck in one such world, and the sea of nothing is not just nothing but is punctuated by similar worlds, as well as very different worlds, all of which are forbidden.

We are stuck. We play out our whole lives stuck to this sticky, messy, dusty, puny planet, never going anywhere else, for better or for worse, experientially of the vast majority of existence.

But if we are stuck, why not stick around?

Why not seize the day? So what if a day is an arbitrary and terrestrial measure of time? Why not seize it anyway?

Why not cling closely to the planet that is, for all practical purposes, just as vast as the far vaster sea? Why not embrace with love that which similarly clutches at us so tightly?

Why not cross the spaces between our worlds and those of others, so we know each other, together, in this strange small world?

Why not work? Why not play? Why not learn? Why not love? Why not play out our whole lives on this speck of dust, the very ground of our being, before we are ground back into dust?

Why not live a stuck life, rather than wait an unlived lifetime to be unstuck?

StuckJohn Brommell

Have you heard the one about the boy who painted pictures?He glorified his house’s walls, his parents tried to stop him.In class he couldn’t focus, dreamt of painting on the blackboard.After he failed senior high, his parents couldn’t stand him.Thrown out from his house, he graduated to a spray can:Left messages for all to see, but nobody could hear them.They all looked at him strange, too familiar a reaction.

No one knew what happened, all the roads and walls were freshened.They pinched themselves and didn’t understand what had transpired.Rainbow-colored water tower and roads that looked like rivers;The man was walking happily in forests of skyscrapers.His messages were powerful, he sprayed them over billboards:What can we do? Why are we here? How far will we go?

PicturesJames Boeckmann

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The elderly man (who lies on his bed)is lifeless. The elderly man (who slumps in his bed)’schart says he has two months left. The elderly man (who’s napping in his room)appears dead occasionally, buthe’s not as much trouble as the lady who strips nude in the hallway. The elderly man (who sits in the chair)’sname is Michael, although most of the workers frequently forget.They rarely use his name;he wouldn’t understand anyways. The elderly man (who stares at his crumbling ceiling)’srare form of Parkinson’s tragically disallows him fromwalking freely, speaking clearly, feeding himself,and showing emotion or any reaction when his wife,Jessica, strolls into his solemn room for herdaily visit. The elderly man (whose head tilts sideways as he sits in his inclined chair)always fully supported and defendedhis only daughterin her artistic and theatrical ventureseven though it means she now cannot affordthe plane ticket to visit him. The elderly man (whose food trickles down his face) longs to proclaim:“Nurse, you’re scrubbing too violently.”“No, I do not want finely ground pork and corn mush. I want a greasy slice of pepperoni pizza from The Tower of Pizza on the corner of Broadway and 15th.”“Yes! Yes! I recognize you. I know you.”“I’m still here.”“Jess, I remember.”

The elderly man (whose family just arrived)’sclosest friends are himself and Godbecause they remain the only twohe can have complex, fluent, and comprehensibleconversations with. The elderly man (who scored three touchdowns and kicked two field goals for the Tenefly Tigers in the 1951 New Jersey state final to defeat the unbeaten Mackay Eagles) can no longer sprint and juke past the Mackay football playersor remember winning that gameeven with his framed news article andsons’ constant retelling of his triumphant tale. The elderly man who is a husband, father, brother, grandpa, cousin, coach, and teacher,yearns to be embraced or looked upon with loving eyes. The elderly man who lies on his bedwants to be Michael.

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At the Nursing HomeStephen Nelson

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Choirs coming closer,“Halelujah,” holding hands,Smiling, singing songs. But will there be you?And will you be the you you see yourself asOr the you I see you as?Is it all about you in heaven?Is there a you in heaven? Forget the grand assumptionThat you’ll hold my hand if you saw me.Forget hugging,Forget kissing,Forget smiling.

Will I see you there? If I cannot find you,I will tell God to His faceThat I’m leaving to look for you.I will find you. Will we be children.

ChildrenSam Herbig

Life is getting out of bed tired this morning, snailing to the bathroom, and finding out that my sister has left the top of the toothpaste dirty. Life is drinking orange juice with the toothpaste taste still in my mouth.Life is driving to school and missing the correct ramp to get off the highway. It is cussing loudly in an empty car.Life is coasting down the highway in between two huge, Moses-parting-the-Red-Sea, concrete walls.Life is reminiscing about magnificent popsicles from the ice cream man. Life is realizing how dirty the ice cream man’s van really was. Life is being that one kid whose dad bought him a pink bike at a garage sale which he had to use till he turned seven.Life is losing the reader before the poem even began.Life is “Santa Claus is real but not in the way you thought he was.”Life is always being too obvious or being inscrutable.Life must be the emerald plate in a parlor in a furniture magazine. Or the good-sounding grandfather clock, the great-looking food, and the nice-smelling mahogany floor. Then again life could be that emerald plate full of cherry pits in a parlor in another furniture magazine.

What is Life?Matei Stefanescu

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Life is always ending up writing too much or too little on school essays.Life is a deleted sentence in a journal.Life is having a correct answer on a test then changing it.I look out the window and see the night sky—millions of blinking glass shards on black pavement.Life is craving to drive on that endless milky road instead of the road you are driving on to get to your school at three o’clock in the morning.Life is driving an extra ten minutes because you missed the exit on the highway.Life is the high school cafeteria.Life is your best friend who stabs you in the back.Sometimes, life is like not having any best friend in the first place but telling your parents you do.Life is arriving at school and entering through a pre-opened window in the dark then climbing through the vents in order to break into the math office to steal the semester exam answers.Life is stopping at the last minute and driving home to probably fail the test and class the next day.Life is the divorce rate in America.Life is the same boring start of a line over and over again.Life is people politely nodding and saying “Yeah” even if they couldn’t understand what you said.Life is kids throwing handfuls of coins at each other’s (parents’) cars for fun at the stop light before getting on to the highway.Life is the beggar watching them from the side of the street in the cold. Life is not noticing that there are a lot of cars on the highway at this time of night.Life is driving home at four o’clock in the morning.Life is imagining your warm bed while you drive.Life is breathing more slowly.Life is the mellow rhythm of the highway humming underneath your wheels.The music rocks on “Life is life, na na na na na.” Life is soul-stirring music making you tired.Life is a small brook bubbling silently through some far away woods.Life is closing your eyes for only three seconds.Life is the solacing moon.I jerk my eyes open just as sheets of heat from the air conditioning cover my body.Life is the confidence that you can stay awake with your eyes shut for longer this time.It is closing your eyes for six seconds. Then another six seconds. Life is the reader knowing that you will close your eyes for six seconds a third time. And reading on excitedly.Life is splattered all over the side of the highway.Then life is the traffic flying past the spotless side of the highway the next day.“What is life?” you ask me again.Life is a disappointing last line of a poem.

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for Anne and Jason Some crumble at the knees while others fallto their bellies, elbowing as they crawluntil their chins dangle at the cliff ’s edgeof something monumental like a pledgeto love an other until time ends.Still others stand like these two wind-whipped friendsprepared to leap, it seems, into the wailof surging seas with hope their only sail.

If marriage were a meadow, we’d find blissin breezes with our bellies to the sun.Even before the tang of this feast is goneyou know that marriage is a daunting mistinto which two loving people leapto dance upon its fortunes to love’s beat.

16 July 2011

A Marriage SonnetWilliam George