DOWNLOAD: Spring 2010 Sisyphus - St. Louis University High School

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Si s y p h u s Spring ’10
Outside Cover artwork by Sonny Hagar
Outside Cover design by Joseph Wright
Inside Front Cover: watercolor by Conor Gearin
Inside Back Cover Artwork (from left to right, top to bottom) by Eric Mueth, Joseph Wright,
Greg Fister, and Sonny Hagar
Inside Back Cover Design by Joseph Wright and Patrick O’Leary
Masthead photograph by Patrick Zarrick
3 Bad Cartography, poetry by Ben Minden-
Birkenmaier
4 drawing by Greg Fister
5 Top Ten Ways I Blew It with Lori, fiction
by Adam Cruz
6 drawing by Sonny Hagar
11 drawing by Evan Orf
12 drawing by Perry May
15 watercolor by David Stankoven
16 watercolor by Nicholas Dooling
17 Striped Couch, poetry by James Fister
18 Oleander Garden, fiction by Eric Lewis
19 watercolor by Joseph Wright
20 watercolor by Will Linhares
23 Original Flight, poetry by Ben Minden-
Birkenmaier
watercolor by Conor Gearin
24 etching by Joseph Quinlan
25 Summer Skin, fiction by Brian Faron
26 print by Joseph Quinlan
28 Creative Writing, poetry by Daniel Hart
L’Ecuyer
29 The Last Chapter, fiction by Joseph
Quinlan
31 watercolor by Dave Stankoven
32 watercolor by Will Linhares
33 “No.” poetry by Sam Herbig
34-5 Glittering Industry, poetry by James
Fister
painting by Joseph Quinlan
36 drawing by Phil Nahlik
37 The Columbia Sun, fiction by Conor
Gearin
39 watercolor by Kevin Kickham
42 Man from the Desert, poetry by Daniel
Hart L’Ecuyer
43 print by Sonny Hagar
44 The Operation, prose by Conor Fellin
45 watercolor by Joseph Wright
46 drawing by Clayton Petras
48 Good Morning, poetry by Mike Lumetta
50 What If, anonymous prose
52 watercolor by Joseph Wright
53 Odysseus’ End, poetry by Greg Fister
watercolor by Kevin Kickham
54 The Red Pen, fiction by Joseph Quinlan
55 Comme Il Faut, prose by Michael Tynan
photograph by Sam McCabe
58 Prodigal Song, by James Fister
self-portrait by Greg Fister
59 Nothing, prose by Collin McCabe
61 drawing by Perry May
62 design by Eric Mueth
65 Angel Maintenance, poetry by Ben
Minden-Birkenmaier
charcoal by Evan Orf
66 Deep Blue Sea, prose poetry by Steven
Dyke
pastel by Greg Fister
67 The Axis of Existence, poetry by Daniel
Hart L’Ecuyer
68 Easter Risings, poetry by Bill George

Ba d Ca rt o g r a p h y
Ben Minden-Birkenmaier
I’ve never followed a coastline,
never turned rocky crags and dusty scrubland
into drawings on a page.
I’ve never captured the story of a man’s life
in 700 sheets of paper, or put
the history of a nation into
four manageable volumes for the coffee table.
I’ve never frozen a moment
in oil on canvas, or etched screams
and moans onto a vinyl disc.
But I do know there’s something lost in the translation,
some essence that can’t be drawn or written or etched,
and instead falls into that nebulous gap
between creation and recording, forever drifting.
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And yet, like stone replacing bone
in a fossilizing skeleton,
something is added until at last
the recorder replaces the creator
as master of the creation.
And if that conglomeration of creator and recorder,
that mixing of thought and feel and soul,
is somewhat imperfect,
what of it?

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Gr e g Fi s t e r

To p Te n Way s I
Bl e w It Wi t h Lo r i
Adam Cruz
#10—Th e Ni g h t I Me t He r: Ju ly ,
b e t w e e n f r e s h m a n a n d s o p h o m o r e
y e a r
I don’t buy the cliché that when you
meet the love of your life, the world stops
and you just know. I don’t, just to make that
clear.
It was the summer after freshman year,
and me and Craig walked in late to the surprise
pool party. Most of freshman year, we’d
hung around with my grade school friends,
but, with most of their summer breaks
starting two weeks after ours, we’d hooked
up with some nice girls my neighbor Marta
played soccer with. Two girls in particular,
Carrie and Rachel. Craig and Carrie would
date for two years, but Rachel I didn’t talk
to very much after this surprise party, which
was for her, by the way.
Being mysterious was really cool. Most
of the guys were from our school anyway, and
had been hanging with these girls all year, but
we were new to their parties, and that made
the party that much more fun, for them and
for us—already they were getting bored of
the same old group. And to the girls, Craig
and I were a hot commodity: new, single
guys. Craig was the good-looking one, sure,
but I was the funny one; I had that going for
me.
We walked through the gate and around
Elisa’s pool to drop off our presents on the
table under the deck. Already people were
calling out our names to come join them for
a game of Chicken, but we figured we should
at least meet this Elisa girl before jumping in
her pool. Well, at least I figured that; Craig
flipped me his cell phone and jumped into
the pool, shirt, towel, present, and all.
Now alone and not near as confident, I
put my gift card on the table and bent down
to fill up a drink. A few guys said hi, and I
was about to jump into a conversation about
summer baseball when I felt a tap on my
shoulder.
“Is your name Eric?”
I turned around and surveyed the scene
in front of me, and quietly thanked God.
Three smokin’ hot girls, in bikinis, asking
if I was Eric, which I was. The tall brunette
with the blue-and-white-dotted bikini was
the one who had done the asking, and wore
a proud and confident smile. I put on a fake
scowl and said, “Who wants to know?”
They all three busted out laughing at
that.
“Rachel talks about you all the time, seriously.
She says you are the funniest guy!”
said the blonde in the green swimsuit. Of
the three, she had the best body for sure, but
something about how excited she was to talk
turned me off.
The tan, black-haired girl with green,
snake-like eyes, who was standing at the
edge of the group and wore the red and by far
most revealing swimsuit, held out her hand.
“Thanks for coming to my party. I’m
Elisa. Rachel really talked you up.” I took it
all in. I had a tiny crush on Rachel, yeah, but
now she had opened up a new world for me.
I took a glance at Craig over in the pool, Carrie
draped at his side. Life was good.
I don’t know why Lori joined the group
at that moment: she’s not really friends with
those three girls—she’s much too interesting.
But when I turned around to show off
my “ghetto booty” to the girls, I saw her for
the first time. She was laughing with the rest
of them, hard too, so I got to check out her
profile a bit before it became awkward. Her
hair was blonde, which got me right off the
bat. Her body had a cute petiteness to it in
comparison to the other three. Her smile was
toothy and genuine. Her eyes were bright
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blue, the kind that look at you and you can
tell they see right through whoever you’re
trying to be at the moment. They could be
no other color.
She did catch me staring, and gave me
that knowing look with the arched eyebrows.
When everyone stopped laughing, she extended
her hand.
“I’m Lori.”
“And I ... gotta go
talk to Craig.” Everyone
laughed at the joke as I
scurried away, especially
Lori. Before I got to
Craig, Mrs. Sims came
outside and said Rachel
was here and to get ready
to surprise her, so before
I could even talk to him
we huddled under the
deck. I tried to catch another
glance at Lori, but
I couldn’t pick her out in
the crowd.
As I said, I don’t believe
in love at first sight,
and I never will. But I
kept scanning the group
for Lori. I wanted to talk
to her, even for a bit, before
Rachel got there.
“SURPRISE!!!!!”
And I had to go talk to Craig …
#9—Di b s: Im m e d i a t e ly a f t e r
When Craig’s mom’s Volvo pulled up and
we had finished toweling off, Craig and I gave
our good-bye hugs and headed for the fence.
After I had slipped my shirt on, Kurt asked
for a ride home. I don’t know why, because
he lives at least ten minutes out of the way,
but I said yes.
We got into the car, the lingering dampness
bleeding through our shirts and towels
wrapped around our waists—Craig riding
shotgun, me and Kurt in the back.
Mrs. Hack asked how the party was, and
we each gave her our one-line answers, then
settled into a quiet late night mood, listening
to the Fray on Craig’s iPod. Craig lay his
head against the window in front of me, and
I followed suit. My eyes started to flutter a
So n n y Ha g a r
bit to “Cable Car” when
my phone buzzed in my
lap.
“HEY Eric! I totally
creeped and got
your number from Jason.
When are we going
to rendezvous again?” It
was the first text I ever
got from Lori James. I
started to fashion my
response, but my phone
buzzed in my hand
again. Text from Kurt.
“There were sho
some prettttty women
there!” I looked over at
Kurt, but he was facing
forward, a smile creeping
at the side of his
lips.
“Yeah, I thought
so too.”
“Any in particular?”
I started to get a little nervous and debated
whether or not to text Craig to tell
him to start up a quick conversation.
“A few, u?”
“Just one. Have you met Lori James?” I
got that horrible feeling in my stomach, a
mix between needing to poop and getting
kicked.
I debated my response, and cunningly
retorted, “Yep.”
Kurt’s text came back less than ten seconds
later.
“Dibs.”

I shut my phone and tried to go back
to sleep, but I felt Kurt staring at me, so I
shrugged my shoulders and nodded. He
smiled and patted me on the shoulder.
As for Lori’s text, I didn’t respond.
#8—Tw o f o r Th r e e : Se p t e m b e r,
s o p h o m o r e y e a r
The flashing mixer lights broke up the
darkness in the gym as I sifted through the
crowd, looking for Lori. I bumped a grinding
senior in a purple basketball jersey and aviators,
and almost knocked over the tiny girl in
pink, but I didn’t care too much. I was a man
on a mission. Three in a row.
Getting to know each other was an adventure,
her favorite time in our relationship—we
didn’t fight much then. We didn’t
fight at all, actually.
We’d stay up late every night, on instant
messenger and texting at the same time, trying
to guess tiny facts about one another. It
seems dumb now, but all day I’d look forward
to it. Back then, I didn’t know her middle
name was Dana, or that she hadn’t kissed a
boy, or that she wanted to go to the University
of Arizona. I applied there earlier this year,
even though I hadn’t visited or anything. Got
$9,000, too.
I had been on a really hot streak of
guesses in the past week, guessing her favorite
food (pizza, easy to guess) and the state
she was born in (Connecticut, not so much).
And now, if I got three in a row, I would get
a prize. I wasn’t sure of the question, or what
the prize was, but I knew I’d guess it right,
and I knew I wanted it. I wiped some sweat
off from my NBA headband and fought
through the crowd.
“Craig! You seen Lori around?” Craig,
dressed as a monk, looked up from Carrie,
who was dancing close to his body wearing
some sort of ’80s spandex. I felt bad for interrupting,
but, like I said, I was on a mission.
He grinned and gave me the one-second finger.
I stood there awkwardly as he said goodbye
to Carrie (God forbid he be apart from
her for one second) and reviewed potential
questions while they passed around his piece
of Juicy Fruit for a bit.
Favorite color is too easy; she wouldn’t
ask that unless she wanted me to get it. Dad’s
name? Jack, Carl, Dave …
Craig grabbed me by the shoulder, his
sweaty palm clamping down a bit too hard.
He obviously wasn’t pleased.
“Eric, I haven’t seen you dancing all
night. Will you just forget about her, man?”
Craig’s hand surveyed the crowd. “We have
over 1,000 beautiful young fish for your taking.
Will you give up on that Lori thing for
awhile?”
I had lost him around “fish,” because
while I followed his hand’s path I spotted
Lori on the outskirts of the crowd talking
with her friend Heather. Her bright neon
outfit kept with the theme, but she wasn’t
like the other girls; her outfit wasn’t revealing
or flashy. She wasn’t asking to be looked
at, but it was at the same time impossible to
avert your eyes. I loved that.
I waved off Craig and started heading
over. He began to protest, but something,
probably one of “those” looks from Carrie,
stopped him.
Lori spotted me about halfway before
I got there and waved excitedly, ending
her conversation with Heather. She nearly
knocked me over with her hug. I tried to talk
but couldn’t manage to wipe off that dumbstruck
smile that she sometimes gave me. She
gave me a wink, and we danced to the rest of
the song. She moved easily, guiding my clumsy
arms. I stepped on her feet a few times,
but she squeezed me hard at the end of the
song. We were still on the outskirts, apart
from the massive mixer crowd, and I didn’t
see the flashing lights, or the eyes of Kurt or
Craig resting upon me. I only replayed that
wink in my mind again and again.
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Lori snapped me out of it when she left
my arms.
“Okay!” she said very professionally,
pursing her lips and rubbing her hands together
like my English teacher. “Here’s the
big one, the one for the grand prize: What’s
my favorite color?”
I started to answer when Heather came
back over and tried to yank Lori back on the
dance floor. Lori shrugged her off and looked
at me intently, expectantly.
“Red.”
Lori’s face fell, and her smile faltered
a bit. God dammit. She recovered quickly
though, and so did I, falling to my knees in
fake devastation.
“Nope! WRONG! No prize for you!”
Before I could intercede, or argue, or even
stand up, Heather was yanking her back into
the fast-paced mob. I tried to grab Lori’s
hand, but missed.
“Wait, what was the prize?” I called after
her.
Lori smiled and blew me a kiss. “It’s a
shame. You coulda been the first!”
Lori entered the crowd, dancing with
Heather towards my group of friends. But
I stayed on my knees for a while, my hands
rubbing my face, my eyes closed.
I tried to convince myself that my first
thought had been blue, that I should’ve gone
with my instincts. But no—I had been sure it
was red.
Lori’s dad’s name is Rodger. Her first
kiss would be Kurt. But to this day, I have no
idea what her favorite color is.
#7—No t My Ty p e: Nov e m b e r,
s e n i o r y e a r
My phone buzzed on the table for the
second time in five minutes, but again I ignored
it and kept making out with Vicky.
We sank deeper into the couch, and my
hand started to slide up to unstrap her bra,
but then the phone vibrated again. I felt her
tongue leave my mouth.
“Will you just get it?” It was more a statement
than a question; before I could answer,
Vicky was fixing her mussed-up red hair into
a ponytail. I grabbed the phone and immediately
popped off the couch, knocking off the
blanket we’d pulled over ourselves, but Vicky
didn’t even look up to comment on my “atattention
soldier,” as she liked to call it.
I excused myself and locked the bathroom
door behind me, but I doubt Vicky
looked up from the mirror.
I hadn’t talked to Lori in a month, maybe
more. She began talking as soon as I answered.
“You’re dating Farr?! I know you said
somebody on the baseball team had a crush
on her, but you didn’t tell me it was you.”
“What do you need, Lori?” I wasn’t in the
mood, hadn’t been in a long time. Although
it was over the phone, I could feel the smile
fade from her face.
“Nothing, I just heard about you and
her, and I thought it was funny …”
“Why do you even care?”
“Because she is SO not your type. She’s
the kinda girl YOU date, but she shouldn’t
be.” Lori really knew how to press my buttons.
I sat down on the toilet seat and tried
to calm myself and keep my voice down.
“Oh, and what kinda girl is that?”
Lori gave a short laugh on the other side
of the phone, the kind where nothing’s actually
that funny. “You know, she’s a ditz. Selfabsorbed,
loves to hear herself talk ...”
“And what exactly is my type?” My voice
had started to rise, and I turned on the sink
to try and muffle it. I was standing now.
Lori’s voice was quiet now on the other
side of the phone. “I don’t know, Eric. Just
not that.” There was a sort of plea to her
voice, as if asking me, begging me, not to
badger any further. But that only made me
angrier—how dare SHE try to make ME the
bad guy here?

“You know what, Lori, do me a favor.
When you find that girl who IS my type, and
it’s NOT you, give me a call. Until then, leave
me the hell alone.” And I don’t know why—I
easily could’ve just hung up—but I tore the
battery out of my phone and threw it to the
ground. It bounced under the counter and
out of sight, and the screen of my phone
went black, leaving me with just the sound of
the running water.
#6—Va l e n t i n e s : Fe b r u a ry , j u n i o r
y e a r
We lay on the hood of my car, me in my
red and black formal attire and her in gray
sweatpants. I was pretty spiffed up, and I
doubt she had on make-up. I loved it when
she didn’t wear make-up.
“And … it’s over. Valentine’s Day, 2009,
has officially come to a close.” Lori closed
her phone and moved a bit closer to me, almost
touching. If I had known it would be
one of the last times we’d be alone together,
I’d have touched her. I continued to look up
at the stars and gave a fist pump at the end of
her countdown.
“How was the dance? I bet Linda looked
REALLY pretty.”
I shrugged. “Eh, it was fine. It was something
to do. She’s not much of a dancer, but
maybe I’m spoiled.” I leaned over to look at
Lori, but now she was looking up into sky.
She was smiling, though, and I smiled too,
glad she got the reference.
“How was your date with Kurt? Where’d
he take you?” I asked out of obligation, immediately
regretting it. I knew I would get
one of two answers—a complaint about how
crummy Kurt was or a drawn out exaggeration
of his romancing. I was in the mood for
neither. I got the former.
I listened and nodded, realizing this was
the moment I had been waiting for since she
had called me to come over an hour before.
“It’s like he doesn’t care at all. Or he
doesn’t want to.” Lori finished and sighed,
looking at her phone. “I gotta go in before
my mom shits herself, but thanks for coming.
I needed you tonight.” I got down from
the hood and we looked at each other the
same way we had for months—like we didn’t
really know how we should appropriately say
good-bye. Before she could come in for the
awkward hug or brief kiss on the cheek, I
reached into my pocket and pulled out the
black velvet box.
“Look, I know you said no gifts, and I
agree, but I had some money left over from
Linda’s present, and I just figured … well
here.” I handed her the box that held the
ring I had gotten her with her ruby birthstone
in it. Lori opened the box and closed
it almost immediately, and her expression
didn’t change.
“Eric …”
Whoa, she was near tears. That wasn’t
the reaction I was expecting. She looked towards
the ground and didn’t meet me in the
eye like she usually did.
“What? It wasn’t that big of a deal, I had
just bought Linda …”
“You bought Linda a teddy bear and
chocolates, Eric!”
It was my turn to look at the ground.
She put the box back in my hand. “I love
it, but I can’t. We obviously can’t do this anymore.
You can’t keep doing this to me.”
I threw the box down angrily. “Keep doing
what?”
Lori, the hint of tears no longer in her
eyes, calmly picked up the box and put it in
my hand, and closed my fingers around it.
“Make me regret dating Kurt.” Lori started
to walk back towards her house. I called
out after her, trying to sound confident and
caring, though I’m sure my voice came out
more like that of a wounded puppy.
“Will you at least keep the ring?”
Lori shook her head and didn’t turn
around. She closed the door after herself.
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#5—Qu i t Pl ay i n g Ar o u n d : Ma rc h,
s o p h o m o r e y e a r
I threw my backpack on the ground and
collapsed on the couch. It had been a long
day.
I flipped through the channels, and
somewhere between Sportscenter and That ’70s
Show, I decided to do it. I dialed the number
without a thought. The only number besides
Lori’s I have memorized is my mom’s.
She picked up on the last ring; she always
did that for some damn reason even if
she was right by the phone. It was as if she
considered each and every call completely
before she picked up.
“Hey good lookin’!” She had established
early on that she didn’t answer the phone
with a simple hello, but I still blushed.
“Hey, we gotta talk about something.”
I then proceeded to tell her about the confrontation
with Kurt while I was doing my
homework in study hall. “He wasn’t mad or
anything, he just wanted to know what he
needs to do for you to be his girlfriend,” I
said. After a long pause, “He said he knew we
were close and I could help him out.”
“Well, isn’t that just typical Kurt shit.
I—”
“Why don’t you just stop messing around
and date him?” There was a long pause on the
phone after that, so I repeated it. And still
Lori didn’t say anything, so I spoke up again.
“I mean seriously, he likes you, you like
him. There should be nothing in the way
of you just becoming his girlfriend. Maybe
it would be better for you, and me, and especially
Kurt if you would just stop playing
around and just go out with him.”
Five second pause.
“Okay, Eric.”
Three days later Kurt and Lori officially
became boyfriend and girlfriend.
#4—Th e La s t Bi r t h d ay Pr e s e n t:
Lat e Fe b r u a ry , s e n i o r y e a r.
I found it in my mailbox, after Vicky and
me had finished in her car. She had to work
at six, on my birthday. Some girlfriend.
The CD was pink and simply read
“Birthday CD.” Lori’s name wasn’t on it, but
the goofy curl at the bottom of the “y” was a
dead giveaway. A piece of paper was taped on
its underside.
“Eric: Shouldn’t let a little fighting get
in the way of tradition. I miss you. I know
that it isn’t fair for me to say that, but I do.
Happy birthday. Love, Lori.” I put the CD in
my pocket; maybe I’d listen to it later. I was
tempted to text her when I pulled out my
phone, but I picked the next best way to get
rid of the heaviness now forming in my chest.
Instead of texting Lori, I texted Mark.
I rarely drank too much, or at all, but
when I did, watch out.
I was a mess that night of my 18th birthday.
Mark, my ever-loyal college dropout
chum, chauffeured me around and provided
the alcohol as we cruised St. Louis. I wish I
could describe in detail the events that led
me to Lori’s doorstep around one that night,
but in my memory the activities and movements
of the night are broken and fragmented,
like a shattered CD.
Mark offered to help me up the driveway—I’d
need help in the rain, he said—but
I refused and stumbled my way up it the best
I could. I thought I had gotten there pretty
swiftly and silently, but that must not have
been the case since Lori was waiting for me
at the door when I got there.
I had an entire speech planned out, beginning
with “I love you” and ending with
“screw you,” but when she opened the door
in her pajama pants and a Fillmore North
High T-shirt, I forgot what it was. I had given
her that shirt, too.

She studied me for a long time, and I
stared right back, the rain lightly drizzling
around me.
Finally, she sighed. “Eric King, you are a
mess. Get in here.” She reached to grab my
arm, but I yanked back violently and took
another step back, now on the grass of her
lawn.
I tried to say something, I did, but the
words didn’t come out. The words that would
explain why I was there. Why I was going to
do what I was going to do. But, for the life
of me, I couldn’t
force them out.
Instead, I
pulled the pink
CD out of my
pocket and broke
it in half. The
noise was duller
than I expected,
and the break
wasn’t clean down
the middle like I
had intended it
to be. I took the
two pieces and
split them again,
then threw them
in front of her on
her porch.
Lori looked
at me with her
eyes big, empty,
and sad. She closed the door slowly in front
of her, her eyes never leaving mine until
I couldn’t take it anymore and started to
sob into my hands. When I looked up, the
door was closed and the porch light was off.
I might have stayed there all night if Mark
hadn’t forced me to get in the car.
I left the pieces on the porch, but the
accompanying note was still in my pocket.
#3—Ch o o s e Me: Ap r i l, j u n i o r y e a r
I parked Craig’s car on the edge of her
curb and let loose a massive sigh as I flipped
out the lights.
I had stolen my slumbering buddy’s
Mazda and driven at three a.m. to Lori’s, but
the most nerve-racking part of the night had
yet to begin.
I had never been in Lori’s backyard.
From the sliver of light from the streetlamp
reflecting around the house, I saw a worn
swingset, a patio table, and a grill as dark
Eva n Or f
as the night. I also
saw a porch swing.
As I texted her to
tell her I’d arrived,
I tried not to think
of how many times
she and Kurt had
swung on it.
The sliding glass
door opened three
seconds later; she’d
been waiting in the
kitchen. Lori put
her finger to her
lips and grabbed
my hand, guiding
me down towards
her basement. We
walked quietly but
swiftly, her in pink
pajama pants and a
baggy sweatshirt,
me still in my baseball uniform from the
game that had ended hours before. I tried
without much luck to recall what the game’s
score had been as we descended down the
carpeted steps, the only light the bluish beam
guiding us from Lori’s open cell phone.
“Sit on the couch next to the computer
room. If my dad comes down the stairs, jump
behind the couch and crawl into there. Hide
behind the desk,” Lori ordered, her first
words of the night to me whispered hastily
11

12
and business-like. I had never heard her talk
like that, but then again I’d never put her in
a position where she had to. Now I had.
Lori turned on a dim light from the fan
overhead and flipped on the television. She
played with the channels, stealing glances at
me each time before she flipped the button,
finally settling on some old movie on TNT, or
some channel like that. I didn’t take my eyes
off her. She turned
down the volume
so it was barely audible
and looked at
me, her electric eyes
seemingly enormous
in the dim lighting.
I handed her
the letter before I
said anything, wishing
I had remembered
to rip off the
torn edges of the
notebook paper.
“Don’t read
that until I leave.”
She nodded and
tucked it in her elastic
waistband.
We sat in silence
for a little
while longer. “You
played good tonight,”
Lori said, her
tone conversational
but her voice shaky as she broke the dialogue
between the two women on the television.
“That other pitcher—”
“I don’t want to talk about the damn
game, Lori.” Something about my own tone
surprised even me. I had never spoken with
such harshness and coldness, not towards her
anyway. Lori seemed taken aback too, but
only for a second before she fired back.
“Then maybe you can tell me what the
hell that was all about after the game.”
“What do you mean?”
Lori stood up and flipped off the television.
“If you’re going to play stupid and be an
asshole, I’m not wasting my time. I’m going
to bed.”
“Sit down.” Lori gave me a hard glare,
her eyebrows forming a V over her eyes that
seemed to have lost their softness. But she
sat.
Pe r ry May
“Maybe, Lori, I
just can’t wait any
longer. Maybe I am
just sick of being
second place.”
“I don’t even know
what the hell you’re
talking about, Eric.
Second place in
what?”
“I love you, Lori.”
It was the first time
I had said it to her
face-to-face, and I
wish I could’ve taken
it back. It didn’t
come out caring
or sweet like I had
imagined, but rather
forceful and accusatory.
“And yet I always
lose.”
“Lose what? I’m
not some baseball
game, Eric. You
don’t win and lose me.”
“Why are you dating Kurt? He’s an asshole,
and he doesn’t love you.”
“How do you know? He tells me he
does.”
“He doesn’t mean it.”
“Do you?”
Nobody talked for a while after that. Lori
flipped back on the television. Some kind of
car chase was going on, the main character
on the run. I watched for a bit, then de-

cided to quit. I was done. She wanted Kurt,
she could have him. I stood up and started
to walk back up the stairs when I heard her
voice behind me.
“What do you want me to do? I can’t
lose you, Eric. I just can’t.”
I fought back tears the best I could, but
just in case, I kept my back turned to her.
“Choose me. Be with me. I will make
you happy, I’ll do whatever I can to make you
happy. Let me.”
She walked closer and I turned around.
She had stopped near the bottom of the
steps.
“I can’t do that to Kurt. I just can’t. He
doesn’t deserve it.” I started to wheel back
around, but she grabbed my right arm. Held
on firmly, too.
“And I don’t deserve you. How you ever
got to love me, I’ll never know. How a great
guy like you could ever—”
“Let’s not go into that.” For the first
time in the night, my voice had lost its edge.
Instead though, it came out weak, tired. “I
can tell you how beautiful you are, and how
great you are, but you’ll never believe me.
And I don’t know what else I can do.”
I stepped to the last step; we were almost
touching now, but I kept my gaze past
her, towards the television. I tried to focus
on the conversation going on in the movie,
but I couldn’t really register much.
“I’m sorry about tonight, I am so sorry.
But I don’t know what to do. I’ve tried to get
past you, I’ve tried. But no girl can live up to
you.”
“To this insane false image you have of
me.”
“No, to you, Lori James.”
I met her square in the eyes now. They
were beautiful. She was beautiful.
I leaned to kiss her, and our lips touched,
slightly grazing, but still touching. Her lips
felt soft and welcoming, and I leaned in even
closer. I don’t know how long we kissed, but
I know she was the one who pulled away.
She touched her lips and looked at the
ground.
“Get out, Eric. Get out right now.”
I don’t know how I managed to find my
way out blindly, but soon I was stepping out
of the glass door, still without the aid of any
light.
#2—Bu r n it: Au g u s t, b e f o r e s e n i o r
y e a r
I teetered the salt and pepper shakers
then set them back down and checked my
watch again. When I looked up, Lori’s silver
Corolla was backing into a parking spot
next to the Applebee’s sign. Late, but not too
bad.
I fiddled with the lighter in my pocket
and pretended to look at the menu. I took a
sip of my water. No, there would be no need
to order food.
I felt two cold hands fold across my face
and cover my eyes.
“Guess who.”
I didn’t want to, but I felt myself grin,
and I played along.
“Well, considering the chubbiness of the
fingers, I’d have to say it’s a very, very fat—”
The hands lifted and smacked me softly
on the cheek, and Lori and I laughed together
as she sat down across from me in the
booth. I reached in my pocket for my phone,
but instead felt the plastic lighter I had just
bought at the Shell. I stopped laughing. I remembered
why we were there.
Lori gave me a warm smile from across
the table, and I loosened my grip on the
lighter. “How was Bridget’s? Lots of people
there?”
“Yeah, well about that ...”
“Kurt says there was a lot of people
there, but then again he was drinking so he
could have totally been off base …”
“Lori.”
“I’m actually glad I had to baby-sit, I
13

14
can’t stand being around him when he’s in
one of those moods. You know, those …”
“Lori.” I clapped my hands together this
time when I said it this time, and she stopped
and started laughing.
“Ha, I’m sorry, I just didn’t talk to you
last night. You didn’t text me or anything.”
Her tone wasn’t accusatory, but I could
tell she was a bit hurt. “So, why did you want
to meet me here?” She put her chin in her
hands and made the face I loved, where she
pursed her lips and raised her eyebrows. I
was on now, it seemed.
“I had a long talk with Kurt last night,
Lori.” Her smile faded slowly, through realization
or confusion I didn’t know.
I delivered what I had to say exactly how
I had rehearsed it; I was as cold and professional
as possible and did my best to avoid
looking at her eyes. I told her how Kurt
knew everything; how I had decided to confess.
And then, I told her that I found out he
already knew. She had told him it all. He had
even read the letter.
“But you know all that,” I finished quietly,
eyes still fixed on the Applebee’s Wall of
Fame. After a few seconds of silence, I finally
looked up. She had been staring at me the
whole time.
“So, what do you want me here for?” I
felt the anger bubble inside me, her calm and
apparently uncaring demeanor adding to a
fury only being held back by the tight grip I
had on the lighter.
“That’s it? That’s all you have to say?” I
controlled my voice the best I could, but the
look I gave her was enough.
Lori continued calmly though, her eyes
never leaving mine. “I could tell you what really
happened, how I had to show him the
first page of your letter so he wouldn’t try to
steal the entire thing. I could tell you about
my guilt after the kiss, and how I told him in
hopes that maybe he’d finally end it. I could
tell you how many times I’ve chosen you over
him. But you don’t want to hear that. You just
want me to be the bad guy. You wanna blame
me.”
Before I could answer or respond, she
reached into her purse and placed the crumbled
and weathered pages of my letter on the
table. I wondered how many times she’d read
it.
“You asked me to bring this here.
Why?”
I cleared my throat, and placed the lighter
on the table.
“Burn it.” Her eyes shifted from me to
the lighter. They widened with surprise but
still showed no sign of sadness, of remorse.
I tried to say something else but couldn’t, so
instead we sat there in dead silence, the letter,
the lighter, and two waters in between
us.
“If I burn it, things will never be the
same between us again. You know that?”
I nodded, tried to talk, then just kept
nodding.
She moved quickly, grabbing the letter
and the lighter and placing them in her purse
in one quick movement. She got up and left
the table without a word, leaving me sitting
there, watching her.
I toyed with the straw of my drink and
pretended to text, waiting for the appropriate
amount of time to pass. Five or so minutes
later, I was pulling out of the parking
lot. I looked left to see if I could turn onto
the main road when I saw her.
She was sitting in the driver’s seat of her
car, the car running and her hands on the
wheel. I tried to tear my eyes away from her
and back to the road, but I sat and studied
her.
I had never seen Lori cry before, I’d
heard her cry only once, and even then
it wasn’t certain. But there she was, in the
parking lot of Applebee’s, her head laid back
on the headrest, her face red and puffy, tears
falling freely as her hands stayed gripped on

Dav id Sta n k o v e n
15
the wheel. She looked beautiful when she
cried.
The car behind me blared its horn. I
snapped back to attention and pulled out
onto Big Bend, narrowly avoiding an oncoming
red SUV, whose driver promptly flipped
me the bird. I didn’t cry.
And things were never the same between
me and Lori.
#1—I’m in l o v e w i t h y o u : Ju n e ,
p o s t-s o p h o m o r e y e a r
I almost hung up after the first ring, but
I didn’t. I was going to go through with it.
The second ring I experienced similar
panic, but I remembered my perfect plan,
and it calmed me.
The plan was this: I would fake drunktalking
on the phone with Lori, so then I
could basically say whatever I wanted.
I should’ve hung up.
Lori picked up, her voice in a barely
audible whisper. I could tell she had been
awake, though.
“Eric King, it is almost 2 o’clock in the
morning. You better have a good reason for
this.” And with that, I broke into my drunken
banter, and she bought it. Completely.
She asked where I was and who I was
with and why I had been drinking. At first,
she sounded concerned, but I did my best to
calm her nerves and soon she was laughing at
my slurred dialogue. I sang to her, and I went
on a rant about the rainy weather, and she
laughed and laughed. And then, in a moment
of silence, I said it.
“I have to tell you something REALLY
important.”
She laughed. “Oh and what’s that?”
“No, no, no, it’s REALLLLLLY important.”
I kept up the drunken demeanor, but
she could tell from my tone it was serious,
and her laughing ceased.
“Go on.”
And like a hose suddenly unkinked, I
spouted off, forgetting to sound drunk and
instead talking without thinking or stopping.
“I’m in love with you, Lori.” Before she
could answer, I went on. When I’m nervous,
I rant.
“I am so in love with you. I can’t stop
thinking about you, or dreaming about you.
Well, not really dreaming, but wanting to
dream about you, which is even better. God,
I love you. I’ve loved you for … ever. A long
time. Since the day I met you, I think. And I
don’t know what to do. I love you.”
She never told me if she was crying at
that moment, but I know she was. And I

16
know it because her voice cracked when she
answered, softer than it had been before.
“Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you
ever tell me?”
I tried to talk, but I couldn’t. I was
choked up myself.
“All you had to do was tell me, Eric. It’s
all you had to do. You had months to, you
had opportunities to. Why didn’t you? God
dammit, Eric. Jesus.”
“I was so scared, Lori. I was scared.”
“Scared of what? Me?”
“No, no. Just what if you didn’t love me
back or that maybe…”
I heard a deep sigh. “I waited for months
and months. You never said anything. Why
didn’t you say something? God, Eric, you are
so stupid.”
“I love you.” There was a longer break
this time after I said it. I heard her heavy
breathing in the phone and did my best to
control mine. I stopped pacing across my
basement floor and sat down when she finally
spoke up again.
“Why now? Now I’m with Kurt. We
can’t be together now. You could have told
me for months. How could you not tell me?”
I figured the question was rhetorical,
and let it sit.
“I wish I could see you.” With that I
popped up off the couch and started running
up the stairs two at a time, headed towards
the key rack.
“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
Lori laughed on the phone, one short,
barky laugh. “Eric, you are drunk as a dog.
There’s no way you can drive to see me tonight.”
I had forgotten.
I tried to recover, and, returning to my
slurring accent, I said, “What about tomorrow?
I could come over and we could talk
about it tomorrow.”
Lori continued to laugh, and her voice,
which had slowly been getting louder as we
had gone on, returned to a whisper. “No, by
tomorrow, you’ll have forgotten all about
this. Things will be back to normal, and you’ll
never even know what we talked about.”
“No,” I said. I wanted to tell her I was
sober, and that I needed to see her. That I
loved her more than anything, and I didn’t
need to hide it anymore.
But I didn’t.
“No,” I repeated. “I’ll remember everything.”
Ni c h o l a s Do o l i n g

St r i p e d Co u c h
James Fister
So long you have softened the falls
of children jumping up and down,
of Grandma weary after the evening meal,
of my bandaged arm, still there,
two weeks after the football game.
Still you haven’t lost your fluff
or your willingness to support us.
The countless people who have rested
on your stripes run together
like your colors once bold.
Red and white, now pink.
17
Last night some friends were over,
and you did not object to their impressions,
not like Samantha, the tabby that shares your shade.
You do not hiss or hide.
You rest there, waiting warmly for company.
You know, I cannot spend all my time
on a couch.
I have other furniture I am committed to.
Around dinner time, the chairs get antsy.
As the night grows near, the mattress squeaks in anticipation.
The high chair in the kitchen nods its tray at me as I pass
though it knows I can no longer sit in it.
But you! You know that there is always a time
for sitting. To each his own purpose.
You rest there, waiting warmly for company.

18
Ol e a n d e r Ga r d e n
Eric Lewis
The address was 12 East Battery Street,
and the three-story, single-room house
stood on a palmetto-lined boulevard behind
the sheltering flood wall bordering Charleston
Harbor. Single-room is a native Charleston
term for a house that has only a hallway
and a single room facing the street but
pushes deeper into a block than most city
dwellers imagine.
The house wore a coat of pastel green,
one of the seventy-two colors approved by
the Charleston Historical Society. It appeared
to be made of stone but was most
likely, like other homes built during that period
in Charleston, plaster-covered cypress
wood.
A rod iron fence encased the large garden
that ran the full length of the house’s
northern face. To the aware observer, the
fence was obviously a relatively new addition
because it was only waist-high and did
not feature a crown of thorns, the decorative
antebellum equivalent of barbed wire that
became immensely popular in the aftermath
of Nat Turner’s slave rebellion. Eventually, as
fears began to subside, the crown of thorns
became a status symbol, an embellishment
that proved the owner had someone to fear
because he had something to lose. The fence
was a disgusting shade of black known as
Union Green, the result of the city’s defiant
mixing of the paint sent south during Reconstruction.
Andrew Billie Strawhun had learned
that and much more about his grandmother’s
home during his first month there. He
had not, however, made any progress on his
honors thesis, his parents’ purpose in sticking
him there for the summer.
“Come on, Andy,” his mother had pleaded.
“She’s all alone there now, and you want
to research secession, right? Where better
than where secession began?”
Andrew now sat on the bottom level of
the breezeway that ran along the south face
of each of the house’s three stories. He was
bare-chested and in shorts beside his closed
laptop. The breezeway squeezed into the
tight gap between houses ten and twelve to
prevent nineteenth-century peeping Toms
from catching a glimpse of the lady of the
house in her petticoats. Andrew possessed
no such modesty.
Finding himself unwilling to work, Andrew
rose, walked through the dining room,
and emerged onto a wooden semicircular
porch in his grandmother’s garden. Whiteblossomed,
chest-high bushes guarded the
perimeter, and a row of Japanese cherry saplings
in little plastic sleeves ran parallel to the
house in the garden’s center. Andrew’s grandmother
knelt at the base of a tree and wore
work clothes and an immaculate white hat,
digging holes for bulbs.
“Good morning, Amelia,” he said from
the patio. His grandmother smiled but did
not lift her eyes from the garden spade in her
hand.
“Good morning to you, Billie,” she said
as she continued her work. “It makes a body
wonder. Had you stayed up in bed too much
longer, it would have been afternoon already.”
Andrew did not respond and began to
walk a lap around the garden’s perfect rectangle
of gravel.
“When will you be less busy?” she asked
as Andrew neared her after turning the corner.
“I was wondering when you’d come back
to our room.”
Andrew sighed and knelt down beside
her. “Grandma—” he started.
“What do you mean ‘Grandma’?” she
scolded, lifting her eyes. “And why are you
dressed so indecently, you fool of a husband.
What will the neighbors think?”

“I mean you, Grandma,” he said gently,
taking her hand in his. “Remember me? Andrew.
Your grandson?”
Realization, like age, fell across her face
and left her mouth wrinkled in a frown as it
sapped her strength.
“I’m so sorry, Andrew, dear,” she said,
patting his cheek. She surveyed the garden
about her and then rose to a single knee. She
shook too violently to make it all the way up,
and Andrew had to take her arm to help her
the rest of the way.
Once on her feet,
she padded into
the house without
a word.
Andrew recalled
the way he
had first arrived in
Charleston. Tropical
Storm Louie
had struck three
weeks earlier, and
scaffolding then
surrounded most
of the houses
along the battery,
and workers
scrambled over
their surfaces like
worker bees, removing
the waterlogged
plaster to
reveal the cypress
wood or perhaps
brick underneath
before covering it with plaster once again.
The city had dumpsters placed in the streets
that were filled with the shattered glass
of windows, the trunks of felled trees, and
whatever flotsam the waves had washed up.
Twelve East Battery was the exception
to the rule. She still wore the same plaster,
though it hung from her frame in tatters.
Two palmetto trees lay in the garden, one
Joseph Wr i g h t
broken over the rod iron fence. The soil was
upturned, and the gravel washed away, leaving
a loamy scent in the air.
Amelia Strawhun had lived alone in the
house for the past seven months. Her husband,
Billie, died at the age of 49, when Andrew’s
father was 17. The deed to the house
had been a wedding gift, and thus the widow,
Amelia, and her son could stay. Billie’s brother,
who then took over the lucrative family
shipping business, generously offered Amelia
an annuity and
even continued to
pay the wages of
her longtime servant,
Sara. Seven
months ago, however,
Sara had died
of a heart attack,
and Amelia had
withdrawn from
her activities and
usual self. Andrew’s
father noted
especially how
she had allowed
her garden, once
her pride and joy,
to fall first to desiccation
and later,
more violently, to
the storm.
When Andrew
first came to live
with her, she had
taken to a quiet
life in an easy chair. She was nothing like the
vivacious, often domineering woman Andrew
remembered from annual childhood
visits. He had to bathe and feed her as well as
organize the repairs to the house. Each night
when he went to the old guestroom that Billie
had used after late-night meetings during
business rushes, Andrew fell asleep within a
page of where he had left off in his research.
19

20
Wi
One morning, he awoke to the sounds
and smells of sizzling meat. He leaped down
the stairs two at a time, and at the bottom,
his grandmother was whistling and setting
the table for a Southern Sunday morning
feast, complete with grits, biscuits and gravy,
and homemade jam from the cupboard.
“Good morning, Billie,” she crooned
from the stove. She handed him a spoon and
gestured for him
to mind the skillet
until she got
back. Andrew was
spooning scrambled
eggs into a
serving bowl when
Amelia entered
the house through
the French doors
leading to the garden.
Her hands
were black with
dirt.
“Sorry, dear,”
she said, running
her hands under
the faucet he
switched on for
her. “I wanted to
take stock of the
garden after the
storm. Thank God the oleander survived.
Those little white flowers are the apple of
mine eye.”
Ever since that morning, Andrew had
tried his best to remain Billie when possible
to please Amelia and to lighten his burden of
caring for her.
But as afternoon quickly progressed,
Andrew followed his grandmother into the
house to shower and get dressed. Finally beginning
to feel guilt because of his recent laziness,
Andrew had resolved to work on his
thesis in earnest.
“Amelia, I’m going out,” Andrew called
as he grabbed his car keys from the rack by
the door. “I won’t be back until late.”
Andrew drove inland to Meeting Street
to give himself a chance to walk through the
city’s tourist center. It had become his daily
custom to peruse the wares of the Slave Market.
Slaves had never been sold there, but
had gathered there to sell what little they
could scrape together. It had not changed
l l Li n h a r e s
much in Andrew’s
opinion,
now full of the
dry riverbed faces
of black women—
who looked
old enough to
have been slaves
themselves—and
the sweet grass
baskets they
wove.
When his watch
read 1:47, Andrew
completed
his circuit of
the market and
emerged once
again on Meeting.
He turned
left, and when
he saw the pink
stucco of the Mills House Hotel two blocks
later, Andrew turned right onto Queen
Street. Haphazard concrete tiles lifted by the
rebellious roots of a weeping willow forced
Andrew to walk more carefully as he neared
the safety of the haint-blue ceiling of Poogan’s
Porch restaurant. Haint blue was a sky
blue that was meant to convince ghosts that
it was daytime and scare them away whenever
they attempted to enter a house. As he
told a waiter that he had a reservation for
two under the name Rollock, Andrew wondered
if the original occupants of the houseturned-restaurant
had genuinely believed the

paint protected them.
Toussaint Rollock worked at the College
of Charleston. In what capacity, Andrew
did not know, because as a child he had first
known Toussaint as Miss Sara’s cousin. Every
year during Andrew’s childhood, when he
and his parents would stay at Amelia’s house
for a week, Toussaint, a professional storyteller,
would stop by the house at least once.
Toussaint’s stories had first drawn Andrew to
history, and Andrew had contacted the family
friend soon after arriving in Charleston to
tap his knowledge of Southern oral history
for his thesis paper.
“Andrew, my boy,” the elderly black man
greeted him warmly, his smooth voice contrasting
with his pockmarked face.
“Hello, Toussaint,” Andrew said with a
touch of exasperation as he endured comments
about how much he had grown, which
parent he resembled, and how mature he
must be now.
Soon, however, they were talking about
the past over steaming bowls of soup—gumbo
for Toussaint and she-crab for Andrew—
with Andrew’s voice recorder sitting on the
table between them. They had long since
finished eating and the setting sun had made
the rectangle of the window red by the time
Andrew switched off his recorder.
“You have no idea how much of a help
you’ve been,” Andrew said, as he returned
the recorder to his pocket.
“If you’re so grateful, you could have paid
the check,” Toussaint said, with a humorous
expression that soon became more serious.
“How is your grandmother?”
“She’s doing all right,” Andrew said, taking
a sip from his glass of ice water. “She has
her good days and her bad days.”
“Your grandmother—Amelia—is a very
patient and generous woman, Andrew,”
Toussaint said, looking Andrew in the eyes.
Andrew cocked his head to the side questioningly,
and Toussaint continued haltingly.
“Well, as you know, Sara and I were close
cousins, closer to brother and sister, really.
How many people know their servant’s cousin,
after all—”
“Toussaint,” Andrew interrupted, leaning
forward. “What is it that you’re trying to
say?”
“Well, I don’t have any proof—only what
Sara said and little things I saw back while
Billie was still alive—but I think he had an
affair with Sara, Andrew.”
Andrew leaned on his elbow, his hand to
his temple. He chuckled softly and shook his
head.
“You know,” Andrew said. “I never knew
my granddad, so part of me doesn’t care. But
why’d you say what you did about patience
and generosity? Did she know?”
“I don’t know,” Toussaint said from behind
wide eyes. He opened his mouth to
continue, but Andrew stood and offered his
hand.
“Thanks for everything, Toussaint,” he
said, his mind already on Amelia’s nickname
for him
Soon after, Andrew walked down a street
in the dark. He had not paid attention to direction
or street names after leaving the restaurant.
Flames that leapt up simultaneously
in the street gas lamps made him shiver. The
knowledge that it was simply Charleston’s
timed public gas line, another effort to preserve
Charleston’s historic image, failed to
comfort Andrew.
Andrew ended up at Southend Brewery,
Charleston’s only haunted bar. The three-story
bar and micro-brewery had once been an
office building belonging to a shipping mogul
and business competitor of the Strawhuns.
The man hanged himself in his top-floor
corner office after watching his last three
ships catch alight and sink to the bottom of
Charleston Harbor. He was now known as
one of the more violent of Charleston’s many
supposed ghosts, having flung around furni-
21

22
ture and harmed bar hands on more than one
occasion.
Waking up the next morning, Andrew
felt as though the Southend Brewery
ghost had taken up residence inside his skull
for the past several hours. He flopped out of
bed and stumbled down the stairs to find
Amelia sitting waiting in the dining room
with a steaming tea pot and an already filled
cup at the ready.
“I heard you come in last night, and you
sounded pretty far gone,” she said, offering
him the cup. “So I prepared you an old family
remedy for the morning after.”
Grateful, Andrew slid into the seat
and slurped the floral-scented tea greedily.
Amelia quickly refilled the cup when he set
it down. The pangs in his head already felt
duller, so Andrew gulped another mouthful
before learning, with tears in his eyes, to
blow on the tea to cool it first. As he downed
the rest of the cup, Amelia brought a freshly
sliced pineapple from the kitchen in the next
room and set it before Andrew. Andrew ate
ravenously as Amelia watched.
“Thanks,” Andrew murmured, taking
the cup in both hands to drink his fourth
cupful.
He settled back in his chair with a sigh,
and Amelia waited for his approving nod before
refilling the cup. Andrew reached for the
cup once again, but his left hand had trouble
closing around it. His finger hooked the handle
and pulled the cup towards him. Amelia
relieved him of the cup before it reached the
table’s edge and gingerly poured its contents
down Andrew’s throat, as a parent might administer
cold medicine to a fussy child.
Instinctively, Andrew resisted. He
ducked his head to the left, causing painfully
hot liquid to splash across his face and neck.
His open mouth spewed tea as he fell forward
towards the French doors and the garden.
He managed to put one foot in front of
the other until he reached the edge of the
patio outside and careened into a facedown
sprawl in the gravel.
“I thought getting rid of Sara would stop
you, you incorrigible man, or the first time
I gave you this tea, but look at what you
made me do.” Amelia’s voice rose hysterically
as she continued her invective. “I saw
Toussaint, that prattling fool, bring you in
last night, drunk. Which girl of his had you
just finished with when he brought you here?
The white flowers—oleander—they’ll kill
you. A heart attack. It killed you once, and
Sara, too. I was so patient, too. I let her live
for years. No one suspected a thing, I was so
patient. It will work again. You’re dead for
good this time, Billie.”
Ph i l Na h l i k

Original Fl i g h t
Ben Minden-Birkenmaier
It is difficult not to pity Adam and Eve,
trapped in their garden, coddled and swaddled.
There is little pleasure in being a pet, even a pampered one,
and if they sought release, who can blame them?
Ignorance the lock, and knowledge the key.
And if death entered the world, so did life.
Sin, but also virtue. Yes, they toiled
to build their life outside, but in doing so, gave it value.
Eve bore children in sweat and blood,
creating life, a privilege formerly reserved
for their benevolent jailer.
And maybe He learned something too,
learned that to cage a bird, you have to cripple it,
and maybe it’s better to let it fly free, to live or die on its own.
23
Co n o r Ge a r i n

24
Joseph Qu i n l a n

Su m m e r Sk i n
Brian Faron
It was probably the hottest day that week,
and that’s saying a lot during June in St.
Louis. Me and Jo were panting in the shade
of the basketball hoop as Dubs and Jay were
playing one-on-one. Jo’s phone rang just as
Jay raised the ball and released a distant
jumper. His face turned to a frown midshot.
In one fluid motion, Jo reached into
his pocket, snatched the phone, and pressed
it to his ear.
“What’s up?” The ball banged off the
backboard and didn’t even glance the rim.
“Brick,” I added. Jay flung his arms up in protest.
“Yeah, sure. We’ll be over in a minute.”
Jo hung up the phone. “We’re goin’ over to
Cassie’s.” I looked quickly at Jo. Jay put his
arms down, his frown faded instantly.
Two miles on a bike isn’t so bad when
you’re fourteen, you’ve got two fourteen-yearold
legs, and you’re racing to a girl’s house.
The heat seemed to evaporate. A household
is a different domain in the summer days.
With parents at work, kids will play, and play
the way they’re not supposed to. We threw
our bikes on the front yard and stepped up to
the front door. Jo knocked on the door, and
it swung wide open. Cassie stood holding the
door, wearing a yellow bikini with pink dots.
The yellow stood out against her sun-tanned
skin.
“Hey, boys!” she shouted in that suburban
teenage girl way. “’Sup, Cass,” said
Jo as he leaned on the door frame. “Come
on in, guys.” Jo turned and slid through the
doorway. Jay pushed towards the door, “Hey,
Cassie.” They embraced, and I was quick to
follow his lead. But Jay threw his arm over
Cassie’s shoulder as he turned, and pulled
her through with him. I gave Dubs a look
like, “What the hell?” and stepped in.
Cassie’s friends were sitting on the floor,
all four of them in bathing suits. Their skin
blended with the thick white carpet. Cassie
spun around, “So we were just layin’ out by
the pool, gonna jump in for a little bit. You
guys wanna join us?”
“Hell yes! I’m dyin’ in this frickin’ heat,”
barked Jay. The girls laughed and covered
their mouths. Cassie stood still in the center
of us all and let out a brief giggle while her
head wagged slightly.
The girls sprang from the carpet and
headed towards the sliding glass door leading
to the above-ground pool in the back. Jay
and the boys were at their heels as I followed
slowly. Cassie hung back to usher everyone
out.
The heavily painted red deck radiated
like a broiler under us so that whether we
looked up or down, our faces stung. I sat on
a lawn chair and began to unlace my Nikes.
The rest of the guys popped off their Nikes
with two quick, well-practiced foot-flicks
and carefully lined them up by the chairs.
Mine were just white with a grey swoosh and
a little grey trim, which seemed unusual next
to the fluorescent color-coordinated copies
all in a row. Everyone pulled their shirts off
and gazed at the pool while Jay struggled to
pull his v-neck over his arms. He stood at
least six inches above the rest of us and had a
lot more hair, even a little patch on his chest.
I wished I were that hairy. It gave Jay some
texture, a slight ruggedness. He looked like
he would know how to remove a tree stump.
But he also had a shirt tan and clusters of
freckles. I felt a twinge of pity. I tanned like a
cowhide, and the bent-back work in my dad’s
garden had toasted my skin. By June I could
have passed as a young Mexican boy except
for my light hair. Along with “Patty,” Jay also
enjoyed labeling me “Pedro” or “Paco.”
My bare feet stuck to the deck as Jay and
Dubs sprang, one after the other, from the
diving board screaming, “Cannonball!” The
25

26
girls shrieked as they got the one-two punch
of the waves, and spat the water dripping
down their faces as they pushed their sopping
hair away. The girls splashed back at Jay
and Dubs as they rose to the surface. Dubs
let out a dumb chuckle. Jay let out an even
dumber chuckle. When Jay laughed he always
scrunched up his cheeks and let his jaw
hang open so that what came out was more
of a throaty grunt than a laugh.
Jo slipped in from the step ladder on the
side, taking his time on each step, getting a
feel for the water. I flopped in over the side
and rested my back on the edge, letting my
feet dangle in front of me. Cassie followed
my example and clung to the edge right next
to me. Her bangs flowed over her forehead
and covered the eye on my side. The reflections
from the pool danced on her blonde
hair. The glare of the sun and the shape-shifting
patterns made her hair look like a golden
sheet flowing over her ears and around her
neck.
“Hey, who wants to play chicken? Come
on, Cass,” Jay yelled while hanging under the
diving board.
“I’ll play,” I blurted out. It was a chance.
I wanted Cassie’s thighs on top of my shoulders.
I wanted to press her legs against my
chest to give her balance, support. I wanted
to be the one holding her above the water.
“All right, grab a partner, Patty. Cass,
jump on my shoulders.” He waved her over.
“Ooh, I wanna play!” shouted one of the
carpet-white girls.
“There you go, we got a game. Come on,
Cass.” He kept motioning her over.
The carpet-girl was at my side now, and
Cassie moved slowly through the water to
Jay. I shook my head as I dropped into the
water to allow her creamy thighs to slide so
excitedly over my shoulders
I emerged and saw Jay standing with
Cassie perched on his wide frame.
“All right, let’s go!” Jay charged forward
with Cassie struggling to keep her balance. I
locked my legs and braced myself against the
impact. The girls grabbed onto each other
and screamed in high-pitched yelps. My girl
was giggling and started to pull Cassie down. I
took a step back. The bind weakened and my
girl lunged forward, losing her balance. Her
thighs slid off my shoulders as she made one
last grab for Cassie. Her hand failed to grab
hold of Cassie’s shoulders or torso or arm,
but did tear down the yellow bikini top with
pink dots. Cassie’s breasts faced the open
sunlight, and she let out a deafening scream.
The top dropped to the surface and floated
listlessly like a fallen flag. She wrapped her
arms around her chest and screamed more.
Jay snatched the top and held it under
water. “Give me it, Jay!” Her voice cracked
higher and the veins in her necks bulged out.
It looked painful. “Give it! Give it!” Jay just
laughed. She struggled to fall into the water
as Jay held her legs tight against his chest
and stifled her struggle for cover. The girls
yelled at Jay but just stood in the water and
pointed. The boys loved the scene. They just
pointed while bending over with laughter.
I tried to run, but in the water I could
only go in slow-motion. Jay pulled the top
behind his back, putting himself between it
and me. But I didn’t even really care about
the top anymore. Jay scrunched up his face
in that dumb grin. Seeing that face between
Cassie’s bronze thighs made me sick. I
cocked my fist back and punched Jay right
in the chest. My knuckles hit with a “thud”
that seemed to quiet even the splashing of
the water. Jay fell backwards, pulling Cassie
down with him. She flung her arms out while
falling, and her breasts were bare right before
me. Jay rose and spit water from his lips. I
saw Cassie retrieve the yellow top with pink
dots behind him and discretely slip back into
it. Her mouth hung open, and her cheeks
were stained red. Suddenly my view was obstructed
by Jay’s incoming fist.

It hit me right in the nose, and immediately
a stream of red flowed into the pool.
My tear ducts exploded. Cassie shrieked
and cursed. It was the same crackling, painful
tone as before, only hoarser, exhausted.
My head throbbed as I staggered to the side
of the pool and grabbed hold of the ledge.
Through tears I saw the fluorescent Nikes
being slipped back on in an equally wellpracticed
manner. Cassie slammed the sliding
glass door behind them all. I felt the water
move and knew she held onto the ledge
next to me. I couldn’t raise my eyes to face
her. She slid closer so that our arms pressed
against each other.
“Don’t worry. They’re gone.”
“I’m not cryin’, it’s just he just hit me in
the nose.” I raised my head but didn’t look at
Cassie’s eyes.
“Thanks, Patrick.” I turned and noticed
that she was staring at the deck’s paint. Her
hair was completely wet and pushed back
over her ears. Her bangs no longer hid her
face, and I could see that she was avoiding
my eyes. The skin on my forearms stuck to
the heavily painted deck, and my face burned
in proximity to the deck’s heat. Cassie’s arm
began to perspire, and her bronze skin melted
into mine.
27
Joseph Qu i n l a n

28
“Cr e at i v e Writing”
Daniel Hart L’Ecuyer
I wanted to write a story that day
About the man who dances on the Embarcadero
He was poor and gold and mute
And we were tourists watching.
My mother said to pray for him
My father said “No eye contact”
My teacher said it wouldn’t do
He danced, he doesn’t dance
And besides, she said, I’d missed the point
Since vagrants are not heroes
So I wrote about Father instead.
Mi c h a e l Ro s e

Th e La s t Ch a p t e r
Joseph Quinlan
J
“ oe, Joe looks like he need a puff,” Doug
smiled—a cigarette stretched out in his
fingers, “It’s on me.” I froze. It had nothing
to do with the cigarette.
I had smoked before; it did not bother
me much.
But the cigarette from Doug did not at all
resemble my eighteenth-birthday cigarette.
I mean, tobacco is tobacco and it seemed so
simple: yes or no. But I was caught between
decisions—I felt unsettled. I heard the voice
of a manager calling me back from the alley:
“The dining room is in shambles.”
worked at Stanley’s—a local burger joint.
I I was paid to clean tables, but I hated
the dining room, and I tried to find jobs in
the alley that kept me as far away from the
unpredictability of guests. Occasionally, I
would get Phil to sneak me a fry fill to eat in
secrecy in the alley ten minutes before every
shift. A warm fry fill from Stanley’s is all you
need to sustain you for dinner, but you have
to include the ranch dressing, of course.
In the alley I only had to dispose of trash,
sweep, and break down boxes for recycling.
Because I had just turned eighteen, I was legal
to take out the trash—it’s against the law
for minors to use the trash compactor. Doug
told me this crazy story about some fifteenyear-old
kid trying to hold it up to show his
friends how strong he was. He was crushed.
I never wanted to believe that story because
it was too horrible to be true. I mean, come
on. He got crushed while his friends just sat
there and watched? Not likely.
The alley was defined by the far side of
the building and a brick wall that divided
it from the parking lot. A chain-link fence
above the alley prevented others from throwing
trash in the company dumpster. When I
was scheduled to open on summer mornings,
something about the alley was beautiful; the
sun cast shadows of the fence above and
fell on the boxes in a pattern that mesmerized.
Now and then a bird would fly out of
the dumpster with an onion ring in its beak
and try to fly up through the chain links. The
morning was the best time of day to just sit
in the alley and wait for something. But I was
on a short leash and would eventually return
inside to keep the dining room clean and under
control.
Like everything else, though, it would
eventually fall into entropy.
Though most of the customers enter,
eat, and leave, a few can throw off your balance.
Those customers you remember. That
Thursday night, Kelsi, a server, was an unlikely
victim. She was quiet and had received
numerous awards for her customer service.
Kelsi served a group of elderly couples at table
ninety-four, and at first it seemed like any
other table. But Kelsi has a habit of keeping
to herself when distressed, and it wasn’t
until I visited the table myself that I knew
what kind of people she was dealing with. I
brought a fry fill to the table and heard the
lady addressing Kelsi, “Everything on this
menu must be a thousand calories!”
“No wonder you work here!” The whole
table erupted in laughter and Kelsi left immediately
as to not make a scene in front of
other guests, squeezing between barstools
and booster seats to get to the kitchen.
Kelsi lives alone in an apartment, and
serving at Stanley’s is second to her management
job at Torrid, a plus size clothing shop
in the mall. I saw her there once as I passed
the shop, waving through the glass at her very
large figure. I had forgotten my glasses.
That summer, it seemed like Kelsi was
slowly reaching her breaking point. And
when I saw her from a distance turn around,
ready to break down after ninety-four said
something about her jeans, I realized there
29

30
was nothing I could do. Kelsi is one of those
few people who keep getting the short end
of the stick, and the worst part of it: she had
grown used to it. I wanted to help her somehow,
but the managers had said that because
of last time, I was not to communicate with
disruptive guests.
Last time I had to escort a drunk woman
out of the restaurant. I can still picture her at
table forty-four, with her twenty-something
son across from her. He slouched over the
table in his black Spider-Man t-shirt, and
took every abuse thrown from his mother.
“You’re not here to talk at me, Chuck.
You’re here to buy me drinks and drive me
home.”
“Mom, I think it’s time to…”
“Fuck off, Chuck!” She interrupted and
the whole family establishment heard. “You
wanna go home? Then buy your own fucking
house!” She tried to stand up quickly to walk
toward the bar, but she instantly lost her balance
and pulled an entire drink tray on her
way down. That is usually the part where the
other party member escorts the guest out,
but her son just sat in embarrassment and
rearranged his silverware.
I was the only male on the clock, and
somewhere in Stanley’s handbook, it stated
that only able-bodied males were to deal
with intoxicated guests … at least that’s what
the manager told me. I helped her up and
brought her to a bench beside the arcade
room and tried to find her son, but he had
vanished.
“Ma’am, can you tell me where you
live?”
Without hesitation, she brought her fist
to my face in one sloppy motion. The manager
took care of the rest. Now only managers
may deal with intoxicated guests.
But Kelsi’s table was sober. She had another
waitress take over table ninetyfour
while she cried in the alley for the rest
of her shift.
As I left later that night, I noticed that
Kelsi and I were both scheduled to close the
next evening. I didn’t like closing. Wait until
all guests leave, break down tables, put up
chairs, sweep, take out all the trash. You’re
the last to clock out at around one-thirty in
the morning.
I don’t know. There is something about
staying in the same place until the end that
depresses the hell out of me.
I came into work the next evening as
scheduled. We got slammed with a standing
line of customers out to the parking lot.
Luckily the new managers over-scheduled
and we had more bussers than we needed.
Someone needed to break down boxes, and
I did not want to buss so many tables. I volunteered
immediately, though aware of the
mountain of boxes piling in the alley.
The bulb had blown out leaving half the
alley dark. I launched into my project as the
sky darkened. Not long after I had started,
Christina came out and pulled up a crate.
She had long dark hair that she would release
from her ponytail prison whenever she came
out to smoke. I never understood why she
did this, because when she was done, she had
to put it back up again and she came out a
lot. She lit up, and sighed.
“I’m beginning to enjoy these more
and more.” She looked at me but I showed
no response. She chuckled and filled in the
blanks.
“I’m pregnant. Soon I’ll have to get off
‘em.” Again, no response. It was not my place,
and anyway, I wouldn’t have known what to
say. She changed gears.
“I don’t know. Every time I come out
here, I feel trapped.” Looking up, “It must
be the fence. I mean, who puts a fence over
an alley? Some retards, I guess.”
As she said this, a young family walked
past the window and towards the front entrance
and I dragged my fingers through my

hair. “There are so many boxes!”
She gave me a short look and agreed;
flicking the filter into the broken glass
bucket, she retreated back to her tables. The
mountain was half the size it had been.
Brett, another server, came out later.
When I first met Brett, I knew he would
come out to the alley a lot. He was constantly
smoking. In fact, he smelled like he even
smoked in the shower. He surprised me when
he came out and immediately apologized.
“Sorry, I haven’t had one in an hour.” His
voice reminded me of sandpaper.
“That’s fine. I don’t mind,” I responded.
I really didn’t
mind.
“No. It’s not
fine. How old
are you?”
“Seventeen,”
I lied. I didn’t
want him to
ask me. I
didn’t want to
say no.
“Seventeen?
I thought you
were younger.
Don’t ever
smoke, pal. It’s
hell on earth,
and it’s going
to kill me.”
Something in Brett’s voice wavered when he
said this. He squinted and dropped his head
clumsily into a more fetal slouch. He wasn’t
finished yet. I waited.
“And I’ll tell you what,” he looked straight
into my eyes, “there is nothing more terrifying
than knowing where you will be at the
end.” He was about to say more, but paused
with his mouth open. Brett would pause for
up to ten seconds between ideas. It annoyed
the shit out of me. Sometimes I just wanted
to yell at him, “Finish your fuckin’ sentences,
Brett!” and I had that line rehearsed for the
right time. But now was not the right time.
“I don’t mean to be a downer. Don’t let
it get you.” It got colder the darker the sky
became. I watched him take a drag. With his
eyes cast down, it seemed he had temporarily
resented the taste; he too disposed of the
Camel filter at the bottom of the bucket and
retreated back inside.
Soon I was done, not with the boxes,
but with the cold. I went back inside and
decided to bring ice to the bar station where
Kelsi was working the bar. I wanted to check
up on her. It was warm inside, especially as
Dav id Sta n k o v e n
I brought the
buckets of ice
past the hot
side of the
cooking line.
I could
tell that Kelsi
was having a
bad night. She
slumped at the
bar, sporadically
sorting
her cardboard
coasters in her
apron pocket,
and her mind
was clearly
somewhere
else.
I loved it when she was happy. She would
talk about how she couldn’t wait to get home
and put on some fluffy slippers she bought
herself for Christmas and fall asleep on the
couch to her favorites on TiVo. Her eyes
would trail off towards the ceiling and she
shook as if just thinking about the slippers
made her feel warm. I loved it when she was
happy.
But she was not having a good night. I
found her racing between the bar and her
tables trying to account for every kid’s choc-
31

32
olate milkshake. She closed her eyes, which
disappeared under a cloak of heavy, black eye
shadow.
I took it upon myself to help her with
the ice receptacles.
“I’m sorry, Joe, you don’t have to do
that,” Kelsi said. “I haven’t really been paying
attention. My feet are killing me and I’m
tired.” Kelsi was always tired, but I thought
she deserved to complain. There was a tensecond
pause. While I dumped the buckets
in the receptacles, she again broke the silence.
“Joe, what are you going to do in your
life, like, in the future?” She parted her hair
and dragged it behind her ear.
Everything surrounding me was in full
motion; children sent macaroni flying, a spill
at seventy-two, hot food waiting, birthday
cheers erupting, chairs screeching, change
falling to the floor. I paused.
“Well, I love to write music, I love to
paint, I love to create, I can’t wait to go to
college, and I can’t wait to have a family.”
She nodded. It was getting late.
“What about you?”
She paused,
expecting
the question,
“Some people
can’t wait to
go to college,
some people
can’t wait to
travel abroad,
some people
can’t wait to
get married
and have kids.
I can’t wait
until I get to
bed, because
I work tomorrow
morning.”
Part of me
wanted to cry, part of me wanted to give her
my night’s tips, but most of me wanted to finish
with the ice. I was becoming aware of the
chaos in the dining room and I wanted to get
back to the quiet of the alley. I passed countless
dirty tables and wondered where all the
other bussers had gone. I figured Doug was
probably smoking in the alley. As I came out,
Doug and Zach, another busser, were hiding
in the dark half of the alley, though I could
see the orange glow of ash.
That is when Doug offered me the cigarette.
“It’s on me.”
I had to make a decision. Why had Kelsi
asked me, of all people, what future I wanted?
What world did she face? Who would help
Christina break her addiction? My Grandpa
always said that it is never too late to change
your future. But Brett would say otherwise:
how can you change your future when you’ve
already written the last chapter? These people
believed in me.
Why? I declined the cigarette. I don’t
know why. But I did, and it felt all right.
Wi l l Li n h a r e s

“No.”
Sam Herbig
Then I’ll spend the time
Between our visits
Preparing for the end.
The end of that strawberry-flavored,
Green-apple euphoria.
You know,
The purple, green, blue, and black.
When it’s over, I’ll need a few things.
I’ll need to learn how to breathe,
Someone to coach me to get my pulse
Back to where it was.
I tell you now
That I’m preparing
For the End.
When all I can hear is
The resounding “No.”
I won’t hear the “I’m sorry,”
Or the “See you tomorrow”
(Someone will need to teach me
What a tomorrow is too).
I won’t see the awkward smile,
Feel the uncomfortable hug,
Or remember our last dance.
A “no” to this
May well be a “no” to everything.
33

34
Glit tering In d u s t ry
James Fister
The glowing metropolis rests on the horizon
As I drive, slowly but deliberately, northwards.
Maybe it is my destination, the windy city,
White city, late bloomer in a modern world.
Where lights shine, businesses and families
Blinking in and out of view. A silhouette of modernity.

Joseph Qu i n l a n
35
Even where there is no light, the vaulting figures
Are clear to see, monoliths draped in a gown
Of a Hollywood sky. Hundreds of stars, in building shapes.
I can tell where the sky really begins—
I cannot see the real stars for the stars of
The Chrysler Smokestack and the Empire State Refinery.
I pass the industrial park, much less distant. Still
Spouting smoke, telling lies. I’m burning daylight.

36
Ph i l Na h l i k

Th e Co l u m b i a Su n
Conor Gearin
Ar b u t h n o t
Jim Arbuthnot gazed mutely at the wad
of papers on his desk. The wad was the Columbia
Herald, the student newspaper of Columbia
High School, and it was delivered
every other Monday during homeroom. The
other students in his homeroom had either
opened their newspapers or were reading the
story below the fold, but not Jim. Jim hated
the Columbia Herald.
Jim hated the Herald for a number of
reasons. When it was delivered every other
Monday during homeroom, students read it
in grim silence, killing the usual pleasant din
of conversation. This made homeroom as
lifeless as the carful of freshmen he drove to
school every morning.
Also, the Columbia Herald was written
almost entirely by students who never entered
the Herald’s office and who wrote news
articles in an impish, mock-stupid way they
thought was somehow satirical. Guest speakers,
new faculty, and deceased animals in biology
classrooms were reported on in articles
consisting of garbled syntax, buzzwords, and
run-on sentences struggling to make jokes
while simultaneously giving up a minimum
of fact.
“55 students came Saturday because they
had nothing else to do,” one reporter had
written. The sentence that was published,
though, read, “Fifty-five students came.” In
fact, the whole article had been purged of
facetious nonsense mixed with bland facts,
leaving merely bland facts. This purging was
the third thing Jim hated about the Columbia
Herald, because it was the fate of every
article. Jim knew this because he had once
been an editor of the Columbia Herald. In
fact, he had changed that sentence himself.
Jim despised that invisible reporter for making
him read his sloppy Dadaist news report
and forcing him to edit the article until it
was completely innocuous. The resulting article
left the reader feeling he or she could
have written it better in about ten minutes.
In fact, Jim was technically still an editor,
though he had resigned three months
earlier. However, the Columbia Herald was
so desperate that they refused to accept his
resignation. They even liked to pretend he
still worked for them actively. If he turned to
page two, he would see in the credits
NEWS EDITORS
James Arbuthnot
Al Brown
Ralph Griffard
but Jim would never open to page two. He
would not touch the wad of papers on his
desk. Other students had opened to the inside
of the paper or were reading the story
below the fold because that was where the
sports articles were. Sports articles received
a minimum of editing and retained their
original adolescent wittiness.
Jim would rather eat the wad of papers
than read it.
Ha rv e y
“You think you’re hard for beating up on
a book, Harvey?”
“Why d’you gotta be such a bitch?”
They tried to soften their taunts with
crooked smiles, but the malice came through
in their empty gazes. Tim Harvey’s lunch
table was angry with him.
They were angry with him because of his
last book review. Tim was the Columbia Herald’s
literary critic. His column was called lit
critic. No one read it. But that did not matter
much to Tim, who reliably placed a goodnatured
book review of around 800 words on
page five, the Herald’s human interest page.
Tim reviewed only books he read, and he
read only books he was certain to like. The
37

38
column was therefore guaranteed to be upbeat
and drily witty.
However, his last review, while drily
witty, was not upbeat. In fact, it was downright
malicious. He hated that book. Reading
it had been an experience of very deep and
profound betrayal. He had thought it would
be excellent: written in a genre he liked and
by an author imitating other authors Tim
liked. Yet Tim had found the book sentimental,
silly, and even boring. Tim, who had
built up an incredible immunity to boredom
through years of reading, had been bored.
No one bored Tim Harvey and got away with
it. Nemo me impune lacessit. In his review Tim
built up an effigy of seeming praise in paragraph
one, then set it aflame with burning,
angry sarcasm in paragraph two.
Ever since its publication that morning,
people he thought had never read his column
made fun of him for his review.
“‘Her ludicrous musings about existence
are exposed as nonsense by her own childish
characters’? What the hell does that even
mean?” said a girl in his homeroom who had
failed freshman comp.
“Man, you’re weird,” said a guy who sat
next to him in third-period AP English Lit.
“Why do you even care about that shit?”
Tim supposed that because they thought
reading books was pointless in the first place,
getting worked up over an already meaningless
thing was even worse.
Tim looked around his circular lunch
table.
“I didn’t know you guys read my reviews,”
Tim said.
The strange crooked smiles became bigger
crooked smiles. Sal snorted sarcastically.
Jen mouthed the word “what?” as if Tim had
just insulted her.
Tim was suddenly struck with inspiration.
“Do you guys even read the paper?” he
asked.
They replied with hostile silence until
Brett said, “Why d’you gotta be such a
bitch?” again. Apparently they knew precisely
what disgusted them about the review
without even having to look at it.
Tim decided to change the subject. “Did
you see that basketball won?” he asked, holding
up the paper and pointing to the story
below the fold.
Br o w n
“Hey Ralph, did Crowley e-mail that article
yet?” said Al Brown to fellow news editor
Ralph Griffard.
“Yep,” said Ralph. “I’m printing it out
now.”
A minute later the double-spaced rough
draft was in front of Al, under his hesitant
editing pen. He looked nervously across the
office to the Columbia Herald’s faculty censor
and advisor, Mr. Jenkins.
Mr. Jenkins was a grey-haired English
teacher who wanted nothing more than to
be a grey-haired English teacher. He wore a
tweed suit with a narrow ugly tie, and was
currently grading English papers with a frown
as he always did while in the Columbia Herald’s
office—except on Sunday afternoons,
when he saw the final draft of the Herald in
its entirety before it went off to the printing
company down the street. If Ralph and
Al had not bleached out all of the silliness in
the news articles in the name of professionalism,
Mr. Jenkins would look at them with his
lifeless grey eyes and say, “This paper needs
work. Editors, you should be catching these
things.” Then he would hand them back the
paper, which bled from a thousand marks
from the red editing pen, with whole paragraphs
completely rewritten. Then he would
lecture them on professionalism, something
which apparently required “tact and seriousness
and maturity.”
If Al did not heavily edit Crowley’s article
now, Mr. Jenkins would be furious. But

if Al did, Crowley would never write for the
Herald again.
Al knew this because Crowley had told
him. Crowley was the sort of kid who was obsessed
with movie directors and authors with
a cult following. Crowley was in every cult
there ever was. This, coupled with Crowley’s
fantastic ability to imitate his cult leaders,
made him a young snob
suspicious of anyone
who might not like his
writing and therefore
his cult leaders. He was
also a good writer—just
the sort of kid that Mr.
Jenkins hated.
“You know what?
I’m pretty sure you
took out all those adjectives
just because you
don’t know what they
mean,” Crowley had
said to Al after his first
article had been heavily
edited and published.
He had looked terrifying
behind his thin rectangular
glasses.
“Just because your
writers write better than
your editors doesn’t
mean you have to edit
until everything looks
like you wrote it. If this
happens again, I’m not
writing anymore.” Actually,
Crowley had sworn
at Al throughout the monologue, but Al had
edited those words from his memory.
Al wanted so much to put down his
pen, to beg Mr. Jenkins to let him leave the
cultural references and just edit Crowley’s
article for grammar, to tell Mr. Jenkins that
Crowley was their last decent reporter, and
that if Mr. Jenkins edited this one on Sunday
as he normally did, Crowley would quit. But
Al couldn’t do that. He couldn’t bear Mr. Jenkins’s
cold grey eyes looking at him like he
was an idiot, or being lectured on professionalism
again in front of all the other editors.
Al lowered his pen and removed the
subtle comparison of STUCO to the mobsters
of Miller’s Crossing
Ke v i n Ki c k h a m
in the first paragraph.
Ar b u t h n o t
Jim would not go into
the Columbia Herald’s
office for any reason.
Actually, if there were
girls in the office, he
might go in. But there
were never girls in the
office. Girls suspected
—correctly—that whoever
wrote the boring
news articles could
not possibly be someone
with whom they
would have anything
in common. The girls
who had once written
for the Herald had left
after Mr. Jenkins had
cut an entire review of
the first Twilight series
book two years ago by a
female sophomore. Mr.
Jenkins held that his
literary critics should
review only what he
called “serious works of literature.” The girls
correctly identified the incident as misogyny.
The ones that did not resign that week were
eventually pressured to by their friends.
So Jim would not go into the Columbia
Herald’s office for any reason. But this time
he did look in.
39

40
Through the open doorway Jim could
only see Tim Harvey, looking at something
or someone out of view in the office. His face
was red.
“No,” Tim said quietly. “I quit.”
Stieglicz
Jen Stieglicz was the best student in her
journalism class. Jen knew that only a few
people had realized that yet, though. Her
teacher didn’t know it because he was a little
crazy. At least, that’s what Jen thought.
Their teacher Mr. Kennedy had covered
the Vietnam War for a wire service and was
rather old now. He rarely talked about what
they were covering in the curriculum.
“Well, once again guys, your book reminds
you to keep opinion out of a news
article,” Mr. Kennedy said to his senior journalism
class with a wry smile. “Well obviously
the book’s editors weren’t in Vietnam. Hey
look, I understand as much as the next guy
that you can’t have an agenda when you’re reporting,”
he said, standing up. He was about
to plunge into one of his infamous tangential
lectures. “But you know, what I say is, if you
see shit, you gotta call it shit! You can’t always
be—well, you can’t be a real reporter if
you’re a robot. You know how I tell you guys
about the robotic journalist. This is a perfect
example!”
Jen’s cell phone went off, playing the
high-frequency ring tone Jen used during
school to avoid detection. Adult teachers,
with aged ears, could not hear it—
least of all Mr. Kennedy, who had been
embedded in an Air Cavalry unit for the
wire service during the siege of Khe Sanh.
Jen pulled the phone out of her pocket,
keeping it under her desk. The screen read,
1 new message from Jim A.
She opened it. It read,
Hey u want to start a newspaper with me?
Mo rg e n s o n
Principal Morgenson was a large man
just past middle age with small blue eyes
that were continually wincing, as if he were
continually being stuck with a fork. The two
newest forks in his life were Jim Arbuthnot
and the youngest English teacher, Mr. Jones,
and they now sat in front of Mr. Morgenson’s
desk in his dark office.
“See, this is the thing with these independent
newspapers, though,” Mr. Morgenson
was saying to them. “I’ve been in college,
I know what they do! And if you guys print
something inflammatory or tasteless, we
could have a situation that’s bad for everyone.”
“Right, right, and like I said,” replied
Mr. Jones, “I’m going to see the paper before
it gets published, just like Mark Jenkins does
with the Herald—”
“Yeah, about that. Jim mentioned to me
in his e-mail that he wants this new newspaper
to be ‘semi-independent’—do you mind
explaining what that means?” Mr. Morgenson
paused to enjoy the pain on Jim’s face. “Does
it mean you turn a blind eye every now and
then? What’s the system you have in mind?”
Jim opened his mouth but Mr. Jones
stopped him with a glance.
“Well, it really doesn’t mean much,” said
Mr. Jones. Jim winced, but Mr. Jones continued.
“All it means is that they can have a
little more leeway in the content, but still,
still, anything inflammatory or offensive will
be cut. And I will see every issue before it’s
published.”
“So then what exactly makes this paper
‘semi-independent’?” asked Mr. Morgenson.
“You’re asking for school funding, you’re going
to use our professional printers, so what
exactly makes you different from the other
paper?” Jim winced again. “Is it because
you’ve got the cool young English teacher as
your moderator? Really though, why did you
want to do this in the first place?”

Mr. Jones actually smiled at the last question.
He looked confidently at Jim. “I think
Jim should answer that question,” he said.
Jim looked down, smiling weakly.
Co l u m b i a Su n
One Tuesday students received a wad of
papers in homeroom. It was an unfamiliar
wad—an unfamiliar newspaper, in fact. The
top of the front page said “Columbia Sun” in
Old English lettering. Between “Columbia”
and “Sun” was a drawing of a sun that was
either rising or setting. Below this was an
editorial with the headline
WHY WE STARTED:
THE SUN’S PLATFORM.
The most compelling paragraph of the
editorial read:
“We, the editors, perceived a general disenchantment
among the student body with
the Columbia Herald, which is not to suggest
that anyone was ever enchanted with that
thing. That was why we started the Columbia
Sun: to give the student body a paper that,
while still publishing authentic journalism,
realizes who its audience is—teenagers. We
will serve the needs of this audience rather
than hold ourselves above them. We intend
to publish pieces that reflect the character
of the student body—articles that students
enjoy reading.”
The editorial went on to explain the format
of the paper. The paper would be sixteen
pages long and would come out every week
on Tuesday. There would be opinion on page
three, including a biweekly column by Jennifer
Stieglicz and book reviews by Timothy
Harvey. Sports would start on page seven.
Students could read the Sun online and access
additional content at www.columbiahs.
org/media/publications/not-the-herald. It
was actually just the Herald’s old website renamed,
courtesy of former Herald web editor
Joe Thompson, which was fine because no
one had known the Herald had had a website,
least of all the Herald’s other editors.
In homeroom S144, Jim’s homeroom,
the Sun’s deliveryman was met with shrill
cheers of victory. Jim narrowly survived an
attempt by his classmates to hoist him into
the air in triumph. At last, Jim was riding a
wave of public support, which was all he really
wanted in the first place.
“Oh, what’s this? Two papers in one
week?” asked well-meaning chemistry teacher
Mrs. Hobbes in senior homeroom S168.
The freshman conscripted at the last minute
to hand out papers was mortified.
“Uh, read and find out,” he suggested.
He began to turn around.
“Oh no, is this a misprint?” asked Mrs.
Hobbes, stopping him. “It says Sun instead
of Herald.”
At this, Herald news editor Ralph Griffard,
who maimed large adolescents as a
wrestler in his spare time, stood up as if to
charge. The freshman ran from the doorway.
In homeroom O98, upon seeing the new
paper, Brett turned around, looked at Tim
Harvey, and pronounced slowly and carefully,
“Bee-yitch.”
In homeroom E52, Jen Stieglicz opened
the door in with a bundle of newspapers
under her arm and then promptly turned
around, the bundle undiminished. E52 was
Mr. Jenkins’s homeroom. She pulled the
door closed behind her and began to stride
away quickly.
“Jen? Mr. Jenkins wants to see you,”
called a boy from the doorway. Jen walked
back in, her heart slamming.
“What is this?” asked Mr. Jenkins. Jen
handed him a newspaper. Mr. Jenkins looked
at it and walked briskly out of the room. Before
the door quite closed against the frame,
the studens heard Mr. Jenkins shout a phrase
from the hallway that would have been censored
in any newspaper.
41

Th e Ma n f r o m t h e De s e rt
Daniel Hart L’Ecuyer
42
the outsider came in the darkening quiet
on the dry and desperate highway to somewhere
that toils resolute
unbending to the will of the desert
the desert’s will is this: be gone
be dead and never be back
but if you do be beaten and burned
in the blazing savage emptiness
but still he came
through the desert with the dark
on foot through the realm of the savage sun
to this dirt road sand-scarred
time-frayed town
of the dry farm empty wallet
amble-minded people
from the tar
the sand
the wind
the sun
the heat
the empty sky
the circling birds
the wondering
is anything?
the wishing
that you were
the wanting—
the seeing
it all around
and at the end of the road
something better than here

So n n y Ha g a r
43

44
Th e Op e r at i o n
Conor Fellin
Y
“ ou’ll be okay,” Mike Wentz whispered
into his wife’s ear.
Sarah looked up from the yellow curb at
her feet to her husband’s face. His smiled,
but his eyes intently scanned her face.
“I will,” she said as she pushed open the
door and stepped into the lobby of Christian
Hospital Northwest.
In an instant, the pastel-blue wallpaper
of the lobby replaced the blank blue expanse
of the sky. Visitors and doctors filled the
space below as they shifted across the lobby
in every conceivable direction. Near the center
of the lobby, a cluster of families gaped at
the massive wheels of an old-fashioned bike
and the gaudy dress of a dozen antique dolls.
“Sure is a nice hospital,” Sarah commented
to Mike.
As she marched towards the main desk,
Sarah heard a hushed, curt voice behind her,
undoubtedly belonging to some father scolding
his son for losing control of himself and
crying over a toy he could not have. Two
bright polo shirts in front of her parted, revealing
a woman in her early forties with a
narrow mouth smothered in lipstick and a
stocky build wrapped loosely in a parka. The
woman shuffled towards her, intently focused
on a space just to the left of Sarah’s left ear.
After a second, her eyes slipped onto Sarah’s
face.
“Hey, nice to see you here of all places!”
she said. “How’s your baby Goomba doing?”
“Well…” Sarah began, browsing her internal
catalogue of faces. She suddenly found
it hard to believe how many people she had
told about her pregnancy.
“I’m sorry,” Mike interjected, “but I
don’t think we’ve met before.”
“I’m Jill. Remember, I work right across
the bridge from your office.”
“Oh, yeah, I remember,” Sarah said. She
didn’t.
“So what about the baby—you call it
Goomba, don’t you?” Jill insisted.
“Yes, we do,” Mike interrupted.
“Yeah, about that—” Sarah sighed, “the
pregnancy failed.”
“Oh …”
“Well, a couple of days ago, at work, I
had some bleeding. I called the doctor, and
he said that chances of miscarrying the baby
and keeping him were about even. Unfortunately,
I got the first option. I was disappointed,
but I’ve dealt with it relatively well
so far. I’m here to have a D&C.”
“Oh, how sad,” Jill murmured.
“Yeah, Mike and I were so excited when
we heard I was pregnant. It was definitely a
let-down. But don’t worry about me. I’m doing
fine.”
“Well, that’s…um…nice to hear—that
you’re doing well, I mean. I guess I’ll see you
soon.”
As Sarah and Mike continued out of the
lobby towards Outpatient Procedures, they
fell in pace with a small, t-shirted woman bellowing
some Michael Jackson lyrics that had
recently besieged the airways. Mike, chuckling,
covered his ears and hummed a distinctly
Knopfleresque tune louder. Sarah could not
suppress a laugh as she remembered Mike’s
uncompromising tastes in music. Even at
their wedding, he had insisted upon Graham
Nash’s “Simple Man” for music. Sarah’s father
had escorted her to the massive oak under
which Mike waited to that gentle rhythm of
a pleading whisper set against a moaning harmonica.
The female Unitarian minister had
spent most of her few comments dotingly
repeating the lyric, “I just want to hold you/
I don’t want to hold you down.” At the reception,
Sarah’s maid of honor, Debbie, had
begun an unusually moving toast with a joke
about Mike’s obsession with music.
Like everything else that day, Debbie’s

toast had reflected Sarah and Mike’s relationship
in its sheer elegance, and Sarah was
glad she had chosen Debbie to write it. Sarah
had known she wanted Debbie to give the
toast at her wedding ever since that time at
the deep-dish pizza place. That day, she and
Debbie had stopped at a local pizza place
for dinner after an afternoon of sightseeing
around Chicago. As Debbie’s first and only
boyfriend Jesse had recently proposed to
her, the conversation had naturally drifted
to dating. By that time, Sarah had finished
boasting about how romantic Mike was and
how many hours they had spent laughing together.
Debbie stared at Sarah for a couple of seconds
as she finished
swallowing the last bite
of a slice of pizza. “So,
how’s it with Mike?” Sarah
asked.
Debbie continued
chewing.
“Are you excited to
be engaged?”
“Yeah,” Debbie said,
“almost as much as Jesse.
He’s already trying to figure
out how many children
we’ll have and what
their names will be and
where we’ll take them on
our family vacations. You
know, I really love him.
I love the way he plans
something nice for me
when he can tell I’m having
a bad week and I love
the way he makes dorky
engineering jokes that no
one else thinks are funny.
And yet…” Debbie began
scrutinizing the near
edge of Sarah’s plate. Her
lower lip quivered slightly.
“Sarah,” she finally said, “do you ever wish
you could date men besides Mike? I mean,
not that you don’t love Mike, just to—just
to make sure you know what others are like,
just to make sure you’re making the right decision?”
Sarah immediately shook her head.
“Well … I do,” Debbie said.
Sarah probed her experience for an adequate
response. After several seconds of silence,
Debbie sighed and took a bite out of a
fresh slice of her pizza. She bit into a pocket
of cheese saturated with sauce, and the sauce
splattered into a long glob just above her upper
lip. Grease began to drain down from
the glob off her upper lip in a slow trickle. A
Joseph Wr i g h t
45

46
she hadn’t just met Debbie in college but had
known her since she had first learned to ride
a bike.
Not that she’s as close a friend as my husband,
Sarah reminded herself as she studied Mike,
now seated beside her in one of the Outpatient
Procedure Room’s aluminum chairs.
Across from them stood a dark-haired, hazel-eyed,
thirty-something nurse, dressed in
the green scrubs and plastic clogs she would
need for a procedure. Posed halfway between
sitting and standing,
Hazel-eye was
offering one-word
responses to the
queries of a doctor
halfway across the
room. Sarah’s eyes
drifted to a set of
supply shelves at
the opposite corner
of the holding
room. She wondered
what heroic
tasks the doctors
there were preparing
for. A Middle
Eastern doctor
sorted out some
pieces of equipment
that seemed
more suited to
sculpting clay than
creating incisions. At the adjacent sink, a
nurse with tufts of blond-white hair playfully
poking out from under her green hair net
filled a plastic cup with water. A crisp voice
returned Sarah’s attention to Hazel-eye.
“Now—Sarah, isn’t it?”
Sarah nodded.
“I have a few questions before we can
get you ready for the procedure. First of all,
when did you last eat?”
“I haven’t eaten since…about seven last
night, I think.”
“That’s correct,” Mike interjected.
“Good. Any high fever?” Hazel-Eye continued.
“Not in the last couple of days.”
“All right, how far along would it have
been?”
“The baby?”
“Yes.”
It? Sarah thought. It? Doesn’t she mean he
or the baby or Goomba—
Suddenly Goomba had left her womb
Cl ay t o n Pe t r a s and sat before her
on a high chair. He
had sky blue eyes,
a wide, flat face,
and slight tufts of
brown, curly hair.
And he had mashed
carrots smudged
across his cheeks.
She had tried to
spoon them into
his mouth, but he
had barely bothered
to open his
lips for them. She
was breathing a
long, low, deep
sigh—
Sarah cried.
Goomba was
now pouting and
banging his little
fists against the shelf of his high chair, as if
he somehow imagined his soft hands could
dent the hard plastic—
Sarah shook her head back and forth, as
if a slight jerk could somehow toss off the vision
that was driving its spurs deep into her
mind.
I’ve missed my chance for love. I’ve missed
it—What am I saying? I have a husband and
parents and friends … But Goomba was going be
different. Goomba was going to love me in a way
they couldn’t. Children give you finger paintings of

hearts that are cute and sloppy at the same time.
Goomba was going to be different …
When Sarah had finally recovered,
Hazel-Eye’s hand lay snug upon her own.
Mike’s eyes gaped open, dry. In the corner
by the sink, a surgeon was running his violetpatched
hands under hot water. The others
had left.
“Just whenever you’re ready,” Hazel-Eye
murmured.
Sarah’s gaze dropped to her lap. Forget it,
she told herself. Just forget it. Stop crying. Stoo-op.
Stop! Don’t make that nice nurse watch you
lose control. Don’t do it. Get control of yourself.
Get control of yourself.
After Sarah had finished whimpering,
she told Hazel-Eye that Goomba would have
been three months old. She gave the nurse
her height, weight, and age. After she had
answered enough questions, another nurse
guided her into a smaller room, where Sarah
changed herself into a hospital gown, and
laid herself upon a gurney. As she took a foot
off the ground to step onto the gurney, Sarah
felt cool air from the room’s vent trickle
up through the opening in her gown to the
space between her thighs. I wish Hazel-Eye
hadn’t seen me that way. I’m usually so grateful,
have so much self-control. Dad always said I was
good at putting my best face forward. If only she
had seen that.
The nurse began to wheel Sarah to the
procedure room. For most of the journey,
Sarah’s head lay limp against the gurney, occasionally
jarred upward by the soft jerks
and pushes of the nurse trying to navigate
her through the hospital hallways. Her eyes
focused on the ceiling lights slipping by her
one at a time. I am grateful, I am. I have a loving
husband and I have lots of devoted friends. I
have good parents. I’m not like those children in
Africa who have nothing to eat or drink. I can
get good healthcare. A streak of green with a
slit of pale passed through Sarah’s periphery,
assembling into a lime-garbed surgeon
for a second only to wane into the distance.
Maybe I’m not as grateful as I should be. And
she’s seen it. Sarah tried to discern a murmur
from behind her so intently that she almost
didn’t notice when her gurney stopped. A
second figure, this one a blob of pale above a
splotch of red, approached and stopped just
as it was beginning to gain definite lines. As
it began to crane downward, Sarah recognized
it as Hazel-Eye, wearing a rose t-shirt
instead of her work uniform. Hazel-Eye held
Sarah’s arm snugly. She opened her mouth as
if to say something and then shut it again.
Instead, her eyes just rested on Sarah. They
did not scrutinize her chest as it rose and fell
in short, shallow pulses. They did not count
the dark stripes left on her cheeks by tears.
They just took her in, quick breathing and
tear marks and all.
Sarah suddenly remembered Debbie
with the pizza sauce squirted over her lip.
She wondered if it had been the mess after all
that had made Debbie feel so close. She wondered
if Hazel-Eye saw her now as she had
seen Debbie that night. Hazel-Eye finally let
go. The cart began vibrating beneath Sarah,
and Hazel-Eye floated back to the obscured
horizon from which she had come. Sarah
turned her face to the side and let tears drop
from the ridges of her face into a crystalline
pool beneath her, a pool that shone silver
with the gurney’s aluminum.
47

Go o d Mo r n i n g
Mike Lumetta
48
Why does April smell like a supermarket?
The sun’s slowly rising,
Resting its girth on the horizon,
And its rosy red rays,
Recolored, recovered from the pale pink of winter,
The light pall above a leaden land,
Tinge all the tips of all the blades of grass.
The buildings shift in their sleep,
Dark clumsy things cutting off the sun,
And it all smells like a supermarket from the old days.
I remember how they used to work.
The doors would spring open,
No matter how I tried to trick them,
And I’d step out of the sweltering summer
Into a cool rush of air,
Into an oasis of lush fruits I never took
But always loved to look at in their high heaps.
You never knew how the doors worked,
But they always did.
I’d walk in and take a free cookie,
Choosing carefully, deliberately—
Sugar, M&M, or chocolate with powdered sugar.
I specialized in cookie taxonomy—
Could’ve had a degree in it.
Whatever I chose, I’d eat deliberately.
Anyone would—
The slow deliberate way to make it last,
Or the fast deliberate way to feel the rush
Of sugar to a limited brain
You never knew was limited,
Just like you didn’t understand
Why adults never took a cookie too.

And when mine was gone
I always felt disappointed (anyone would)
Even though the cookie was free.
But nothing cost anything anyway.
The cart I rode in front
Filled steadily with things I wanted
And things I didn’t,
But I didn’t care
Because I never paid a precious penny
And never had to.
And I’d always leave happy.
49
Nowadays, though,
They charge you for everything, even the cookies,
And someone’s gone and made a bunch of rules
Whispered by the fluorescent lights,
Their gleaming reflections on the tile floors
Someone’s worked so hard to mop,
The chilling breath of the AC
And the electric doors you finally walk out of.
I don’t go there anymore.
April rolls around every year, smelling,
In the morning, like the old supermarkets.
I don’t know why, and I don’t think
That they’re ever coming back.
But April rolls around every year.

50
Wh at If
Anonymous
Just an average day: Mom and Dad, running
around like madmen, getting their
lives in order, just to leave the house; all
the while, the two of them lashing back and
forth at each other.
“Has anyone seen my tie? Where in
the hell did I leave that tie?” Dad screamed
across the house.
“I don’t know, dear. Retrace your steps.”
Mom set down her purse on the kitchen table,
closing her eyes.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! I am losing
my mind! I can’t find anything in this goddamned
house!”
Finally, the Ford Windstar pulled out of
the driveway; calm at last. It was a different
world there in the minivan. I pulled my iPod
out of my pocket, unwinding the headphone
cord and plugging our ears. Kate and I sat
in the backseat, listening to our music and
watching people, cars, and buses fly by as
if they were in some sort of hurry. All the
while, Mom was telling Dad about some recent
happening with one of her homebound
patients, or Dad was going on about politics
or breaking news.
From time to time, something would be
said between the two of them and set Dad
off again. Every time his fuse seemed to get
shorter and shorter. Normally, Mom would
try (how wholeheartedly, I’m not sure) to
make amends, and Dad would refuse. That
woman that he married twenty-seven years
ago doesn’t understand him anymore. He did
everything for her, and she didn’t appreciate
any of it; no one did. Mom would make her
rebuttal and reassure him how much he was
appreciated. I looked over at Kate, saw some
sort of agreement in her face, and clicked the
volume button on my iPod up, muffling the
world around us.
While the music kept up, I tried to forget
about the world around me. I blocked
myself off from the world and tried to recreate
a better one inside my head: a patient
and caring father, and an understanding and
supportive mother—parents who loved each
other, or seemed to at least. I couldn’t wait
until we got to the party. At every party or
family gathering, Mom and Dad always put
up a façade to fit in with the others.
As we drove home that night, everyone
was too tired to care about the conflicts of
that afternoon. No one said a word. In a way,
that dark, silent, calming drive home was my
favorite part of the day.
As we pulled into the driveway and the
van came to a stop, I could hear the
sound of Dad’s door open and close, and
the creak of the hatchback rising. Dad unloaded
the trunk of the van, insisting on
carrying the laundry basket full of leftover
food and empty dishes himself, as if to make
a point of his sacrifice for the family. While
my eyes struggled to adjust to the light in
the car, I forced the sliding door open and
absent-mindedly found my way through
the front door, up the stairs, and into my
room. I began to wake up as I walked up
to my room, avoiding the squeaky spots in
the floor, stepping over boxes and clothes
strewn throughout the upstairs landing as
well as my own room. I shut the door closed
behind me, kicked piles of dirty clothes
aside, and sat down at my desk to begin the
weekend’s homework.
As I sat at the desk, rocking back and
forth in my black office chair and staring
blankly at my math problems, Mom and
Dad’s voices from their bedroom right next
to mine began to overpower the steady rainfall
outside my window. Yet again, as I found
myself doing so often, I retreated to my music.
I quickly shook the little white mouse,
waiting desperately for the computer to
awakem and iTunes to open. Soon enough,

the music began to play. I kicked the volume
up as far as I could and started on my homework
once again. “Soon enough,” I thought,
“Dad will be off to the airport again, and, for
a few days at least, there will be peace.”
It always got like this right before he
left for a trip. As I became more aware of it,
I realized the patterns of his behavior and
his need to get things done. The massive
white calendar on the side of the refrigerator
marked every day of his flying for the month,
as well as when he would leave that day, where
he flew to, and when he would return. Those
markings coincided with the days when Dad
had it set in his mind that he needed to save
the world and solve world hunger before he
could leave us for a week. He would be out
in the garage for hours, working on recurring
car problem, fixing odds and ends around the
house that had been left undone for years, or
upstairs in his office working on his slowly
increasing Childhood T.V. show or Turner
Classic Movies collection. And God help us
if you got in his way, especially as he threw
his bag together, ran around the house finding
his uniform, and got himself dressed for
work.
For a few days, maybe even a week if we
were lucky, Dad would be out flying
planes across the country, Mom would find
things to keep herself busy, and Kate and I
could live peacefully, more or less. That is,
until Mom just couldn’t bear it anymore
and started her nagging and complaining
that we hadn’t done just as she asked right
when she asked it. She made it a point to go
around the house, find everything we had
left lying around, and make piles for us on
the couch. Just as I sat down to begin the
night’s homework, she began.
“I am getting so sick of you two slobs
leaving your crap lying around the house!”
she said, pointing to the piles sitting on the
couch, as if they were giant mounds of crap
upon crap filling her home: two college envelopes,
a pair of socks, and a book. She had
impeccable timing, that woman. She knew
the most inconvenient time to nag someone
about something she didn’t feel was up to her
standards.
I soon found myself picking up the
things she had so kindly piled up, as well
as my school books, and I retreated to my
room, yelling all the way there that I had
more important things to do than sit around
and listen to her nag all night. After all, she
always said that homework was my first priority.
That Friday, I drove home from school,
listening to the radio, excited for the
weekend. It seemed to me that Friday was
about the only day I could keep myself
from dozing off at a stoplight as I made my
way home. It was a day when I actually had
something to look forward to: getting out
of the house and spending time with my
friends. I came to the last stop sign before
Sussex Drive, and the engine of the white
Saturn jumped as I pushed the pedal down.
Our house sat right at the end of Sussex
Drive, down a long, winding street. I drove
down that lengthy hill, making sure to avoid
the numerous neighbors who felt it necessary
to park their cars out on the side of the
street while their driveways sat empty. Right
as I made the last turn down the hill, I could
see the end of Sussex Drive, our house, and
Dad’s old maroon Toyota Cressida sitting in
the driveway. I pulled up next to it and listened
for the click as I shifted the car into
park. As I made my way up the sidewalk with
the load of books on my back, I found myself
dreading what I would find inside.
I shut the door behind me, pushing it
until the latch clicked, and carefully set my
backpack down next to the small table inside
the door. When I undid my laces and kicked
off my battered sneakers, I noticed
51

52
the statue of the Holy Family that Mom set
out on that table every Christmas. My eyes
traced the fine details of Mary and Joseph’s
smiling faces, which were gazing at the child
in Mary’s loving arms.
Dad was in the kitchen cleaning up the
mess from last night’s dinner.
“Hey, kiddo. How was school today?”
Dad asked, as he lifted the lever and let the
faucet run, masking the dirty dishes that lie
beneath the hot foamy water.
“Oh, it was fine. Nothing too exciting.”
I glanced at Mom’s giant calendar on the refrigerator
as
I reached in
the pantry
for a bag of
chips and saw
Mom’s pink
writing in
today’s box;
“Kate’s Mother/Daughter
Retreat. 6-10
p.m.”
The next
day, as
we loaded
the coolers
into the
trunk of the little white Saturn, I was not
looking forward to the drive ahead of us. I
loaded Mom’s laundry basket full of dishes
of baked beans and coleslaw, plates, napkins
and utensils, and slammed the hatch of the
van shut. That was the only way I could ever
get it to close. I lifted the latch of the door
and slid in next to Kate in the back seat, listening
for the thud of the door next to me.
The little car’s engine revved and jumped
as we accelerated onto the highway. I found
myself staring off at all the houses and trees
flying by, waiting for the inevitable. As I tried
to avoid the people around me and to lose
myself in anything else I possibly could, I noticed
something a little out of the ordinary.
As the car puttered along the bridge over
the Missouri River, I stared out my window
and saw a man standing at the ledge of the
bridge. I couldn’t help but wonder what that
man might do. My heartbeats quickly became
overwhelming, and I felt a tear start to
form in my eye.
“Dear? Did you see that man there on
the bridge?” Dad’s voice suddenly brought
me back to reality. “That reminds me of one
time, when we were stationed in Indiana. I
Joseph Wr i g h t
remember
the one day,
driving home
from training
and passing
a man on the
bridge there.
I really didn’t
think much
of it at the
time, until
that night.
I remember
hearing on the
news about a
man who had
jumped off
a bridge and
drowned in the river. It just makes you wonder,
I guess. It made me wonder … What if
that man on the TV was the same one that I
had passed on the bridge? What if? ... What
if I had stopped and done something?”
I glanced up from the dirt and trash
on the car floor and saw Dad’s face in the
rearview mirror, tears streaming down his
rough face. The mud from my old worn
shoes began to harden on the carpet beneath
them. Some movement caught my eye, and I
saw Mom’s hand reach over and rest itself on
Dad’s lap. I couldn’t help but wonder.

Odysseus’ En d
Greg Fister
Where now, O man so ridd’n with strife? Where now?
The suitors dead and gone who wooed your wife,
You now sit on your throne, content but how
is your end complete to a hard-won life?
In your heart you know you must be alone,
Out on the sea as you were those long years.
You’ll not die in a cage with bars of stone—
So out you sail weighed not by any fears
The sea feels different, your heart not in pain.
Though oft the water and its god were foes,
It seems a fitting place you to remain,
A place to bury all your earthly woes.
The sea is calm, Poseidon slumbers on.
By dawn’s red fingers is your curtain drawn.
53
Ke v i n Ki c k h a m

54
Th e Re d Pe n
Joseph Quinlan
This better be it! I handed Dad the essay.
I was almost afraid to provide the
red pen, but after thirty-plus drafts it had
become automatic. We had been at it for
hours, tearing up this stupid research paper
and putting the pieces back together over
and over and over again, and I was tired.
Dad wore his look of tireless concentration,
his lower lip pushing up his upper, and
squinting his tired eyes as he started each
new paragraph. He looked so damn old. He
wore his reading glasses shamelessly on the
tip of his slender nose, which he would rub
with his palm now and then.
Did he really have the balls to send me
back downstairs with another marked-up paper?
It was late, and I had other homework
to do, but every time I tried to leave, he’d
call me back in case he had questions. I felt
enslaved to the Jazz Age. I had chosen a good
topic though. It’s better than being enslaved
to a research paper about the Holocaust.
If he put a single mark on my masterpiece,
so help me God … I don’t know what
I’d do. Killing Dad actually did come to my
mind twelve drafts earlier. Hah! No. That
would have been ridiculous … twelve drafts
ago. Now the gold metal lamp stood ominously
on the end table. Or the hardcover
of Speakeasies: The Underground World of Jazz.
Or the pitchfork beside the fireplace. Or the
bust of Abraham Lincoln.
No. There’s just no way. Anyway, I lacked
the creative juice left to make it a good attempt.
And even if I did succeed …
He turned to the last page. Almost
there. I looked at the clock. One thirtyseven.
Screw the other homework. I wanted
to get to bed. He stroked his chin again. His
pen flinched once or twice but never found a
landing. Holy crap, this could be it! Leave it,
or I’ll kill you.
“Perfect!” His voice rang out. I snagged
the paper from his hands in an instant.
“Swell! Good night, Dad.” I hugged him
and at last ran up to bed.

Co m m e Il Fa u t
Michael Tynan
W
“ hat does comme il faut mean?” I texted
to Tess.
Tess had studied French for a few years,
so I was always asking her bits and pieces of
the language I came across in this or that
book, so much that
I could speak almost-passable
broken
French if the
opportunity arose.
The opportunity
arose mostly when
I wanted to impress
girls who never paid
attention in their
language classes.
“It’s an idiom,”
she responded. “It
basically means
expected or proper.
Why do you ask?”
“I was just reading about corporate executives
for whom it is comme il faut to boast
about sexual encounters with the company’s
younger, more attractive personnel.”
“Bâtards,” she replied
“Oui, mademoiselle.”
I slipped my phone back into my pocket,
dropped my book on the ground, and
leaned my head back against the top of my
black leather(-looking) chair, closing my eyes
together tightly. After I tried to rub out the
numbing affect of four hours of pale airport
light, I dropped my hands to my lap and
looked around at the collection of humanity
around me.
Overweight families surrendered their
natural mobility to the moving sidewalks.
They passed, casting glances behind cheap
sunglasses, looking like products floating
along a factory floor. Other travelers walked
briskly beside them, checking their watches
anxiously, and yielding to the occasional men
in loose-fitting suits or torn jeans sprinting
past and nearly dropping their luggage with
each hasty pump of the arm. Girls walked leisurely
in prides. Lionesses crowded around
each other to laugh at this and that on cell
phone screens, adjusting their Coach(-looking)
purses, and sipping coffee past their
Sa m McCa b e luminous pink
lips.
My acquaintances
in
gate B6 surrounded
me
in the same
uniform black
chairs, most of
them businessmen
tapping
on laptops and
Blackberries. I
kept glancing
back at a man
sporting a threepiece
pinstriped suit while reading the Wall
Street Journal. He crossed his legs at the knee,
revealing his argyle socks and gleaming black
leather shoes. His chin rested near the knot
of his regal purple tie as he peered through
square-framed glasses discerningly at the
bottom of his page. He raised his eyebrows
slightly and gave a subtle nod of the head every
few seconds, as if he had come across an
interesting point in his article. The elegant
man often rested one half of the open newspaper
on his leg, freeing one hand to adjust
his glasses or smooth his lapel, and the last
time he did so before he gathered up his belongings
and rushed out of the gate avoiding
eye contact with any fellow travelers, his
other hand slipped off the page, causing the
whole paper to fall off his lap, accompanied
by the copy of Penthouse magazine he had
been hiding in the “Marketplace” section.
55

56
I hadn’t thought of that trick since 5 th
grade, when I hid The Spectacular Spiderman
behind my Math textbook, but I forgave the
man as I watched him scurry away. Life is
dull at O’Hare International, and it drives us
all to different extremes. Though I wondered
how the rest of his escape plan would unfold.
He had to come back to the gate, after all,
unless missing his flight was worth avoiding
the shame.
“Did you see that?” I said, laughing and
turning to Drew.
“See what?” he said, looking up from
Good as Gold. His independent reading project
was due in two days.
“That guy. That guy with the porn.”
“What?”
“There was a guy hiding porn behind a
newspaper.”
“Huh,” he said nonchalantly, finding
his place back in the middle of a long paragraph.
“You should really put the book down
for a second or two. There’s some funny stuff
around here.”
Drew had invited me to go along with
him to Detroit to see a concert. His
parents gave him tickets for Christmas and
told him to bring a friend. Traveling without
my family freed me to indulge in small
luxuries like laughing openly about pornography
and eyeing college girls with “PINK”
printed across the back of their sweatpants.
Three such girls were walking the rows of
black chairs in B6, looking for a place to
drop the luggage they were dragging behind
them, approaching the row directly
in front of Drew and me. Their t-shirts fit
snugly, and their hair bounced slightly as
they placed one flip-flopped foot in front of
the other toward the three open chairs in
front of us.
“Play along,” I said close to Drew’s ear,
as they approached.
They turned into our row, and I immediately
defaulted to one of my few reliable
moves.
“Ton arrivée passe inapercue, mais ta tete
toutes les lumieres sur toi se ruent. L’image se bloque
mais toi tu continues. La soirée n’avait pas d’sens
mais tu es venu. Tu vis dans un clip de rap tout te
reussit et tu claques, mais ce soir en rentrant chez
toi tu seras seul devant ton mac.”
I laughed after the last words and Drew
mirrored my amusement at the apparent
joke, though he looked uncomfortable.
I have no idea what I said. They were
lyrics to a song by some French pop artist.
Tess put the song on a CD for me, and gave
me a rough translation. Something about rap
videos and night clubs.
The girls turned to each other and
smiled.
One said her friend, “Meg, you took
French, what are they saying?”
Meg said, “I don’t know, he said it really
fast … and I dropped that class junior year of
high school.”
“They’re kinda cute,” the other one
said, “Are you sure you don’t remember anything?”
“Shut up,” she said, laughing.
“Talk to them,” the others urged.
“No!”
They argued for a moment while I
turned to Drew, taking his book from him
and hiding it behind his chair so our native
language could remain hidden.
“Mon café besoins un peu de sucre,” I said
with a wink.My coffee could use some sugar.
“What the hell are you doing?” Drew
said through his teeth.
“Où est la gare?” I responded. Where is
the train station?
Drew leaned in closely. “Cut that shit
out. I don’t know what you’re saying.”
“Neither do they.”
“You don’t really think this is going to
work, do you?”

“Ne vous inquiétez pas, l’amant. J’ai perdu
mon passeport.” Never mind, lover. I lost my
passport.
“God damn it,” Drew said as he turned
back to the girls.
“Oh my God, I can’t believe you guys,”
Meg still argued, “I’m not doing it.”
Her friend turned to me abruptly and
said “Hi! My friend wants to talk to you.”
Meg stared at her, and turned to me,
blushing.
“Bon jour.”
“Salut,” I replied. “Parlez-vous français?”
“Un peu.”
“I speak some English too,” I replied
slowly with a heavy accent. “Prefer to you?”
“Sure, yeah,” she said. “Are you here on
vacation?”
“Yes, we are from Nice. I am Jean. He is
Gervais.”
I turned to Drew, whose hands clasped
the arms of his chair like vise grips. He stared
at me as the girls waved at him.
“Hi, Gervais.”
He stood up and walked briskly out of
the gate. I turned to the girls and said “Je
suis désolé,” before following him into a coffee
shop.
“What happened to you?” I asked.
“I can’t do a French accent.”
“I was doing the talking anyway.”
“I can’t lie to people either.”
“Oh c’mon, I was just having some fun.”
“Whatever, let’s just hide out for a second
until our flight leaves.”
“Like the porn guy?”
“Shut up.”
B6 was boarding, so we walked back to
the gate. We waited in line for a moment,
and while Drew was looking around
apprehensively for the girls, I was watching
a small blond boy smile up at his mom with
his shirt tucked in and an arm around his
younger brother. Having been a seven- or
eight-year-old boy at one point myself, nothing
in the world made less sense than the
scene in front of me. The mother rubbed
the blond boy on the head, and he gave her
another toothy smile. She turned to the
man scanning tickets at the door, and while
she watched the green light flash over her
three tickets, the blond boy took the opportunity
to punch his brother in the gut. The
brother cried, and as the mother turned to
him, the blond boy gave his brother a consoling
embrace. I couldn’t help smiling a bit.
This scene was more of the attitude I remembered
at that age.
My phone buzzed in my pocket as I
walked down the carpeted tunnel to the
plane.
“How’s the layover treating ya?” Tess
said.
“Might be better if Drew knew French.”
“Did you try that bullshit on some poor
girl again?”
“Three poor girls actually.”
“Bâtard.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
Drew and I took our seats in the center
of the plane, with an aisle on both sides of
us. As all the people chasing their destination
prepared to appear calm and relaxed,
civilized and informed, courteous and prepared,
I spotted a little blond boy helping his
brother with his seatbelt across the aisle on
my left, a man in a regal purple tie reading
the paper across the aisle on my right, and
directly behind me, I could hear girls chattering
about two strange Frenchmen, who
weren’t at all what they appeared.
57

Pr o d i g a l So n g
James Fister
58
In the hall music is playing,
But the younger is discontented.
To throw it all away and
Leave. But not throw away,
Seize and make the best of.
Leave the monotony, the dirge.
His father hears
But doesn’t understand.
I am trapped—too young, too large
For my own mind to handle.
In a distant land music plays,
And he is happy; but how long?
I’m in the wrong key;
I need to be modulated.
And then swine, muck, deep
In his own filth, his humiliation.
This is my day to day. I want to be
Outside of this house, this city.
Poorer than the hogs of the field,
Wealthier than death, he crawls.
I can pick up the pace.
I can make better time.
Of course open arms wait,
Not all are as selfish as he.
I am blameless, there is no
Fault in being unhappy.
A new beginning, that is
What I will call it.
Isn’t that how it always ends?
Loose women, fine foods, pearls.
In the hall, music is playing
But the older is discontented.
“He was lost and is found.
Everything I have is yours.”
Gr e g Fi s t e r

No t h i n g
Collin McCabe
went to the coffee shop with my friend
I Alice that night to visit my buddy Conor,
a cashier there, who often gave us free
drinks. It was a Thursday night in mid-September
my senior year, an unusually cold but
still tolerable evening beginning a three-day
weekend. I had agreed to tag along only because
I had few plans for the weekend, and
I’d decided that my homework wasn’t really
important, considering I had a random day
off the next day. Alice said that she would
drive, and she picked me up a few minutes
later.
As we pulled up front, I could see a girl
opposite the towering plate-glass window.
She was the only person in the shop. She had
a blueberry scone in her hand, the only flavor
this shop offered, and was reading something
from her laptop screen. She looked eerily familiar,
and I paused as Alice locked the ’92
Camry, wondering where I had seen her before.
I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Alice
ended up throwing a pinecone from one of
the planters outside the shop at me to break
my stare, and just as I started walking away
the girl looked out the window. I didn’t make
eye contact.
“Who’s that?” Alice asked me as we
walked inside, thinking I knew the girl. “She’s
pretty.”
I looked back at the girl to verify this.
Alice was right—she was beautiful. The girl
was a blonde, her wavy locks flowing down
her back and ample chest and parting at her
shoulders. Her rosy, prominent cheekbones
contrasted with her round face, and her
eyes were a deep blue. Not wanting to get
caught, I didn’t spend too much time looking
back. She appeared to notice me anyway
and cracked a smile in my direction without
looking up.
“You didn’t answer my question,” Alice
said. “Do you know her?”
I was quick to answer this time. “Nope.
I’ve never seen her in my life.” I opened the
door for Alice and we walked inside.
Alice was not my girlfriend, but sometimes
we acted like we were dating. She would
call me on weeknights and we would talk for
hours, but I didn’t think she wanted anything
out of our friendship. We had met each other
freshman year after we both joined District
Band—she plays viola, I play violin—and almost
immediately became friends. I often
had considered dating her, but for the most
part we just hung out as friends, cracking
jokes, laughing at movies like Tommy Boy,
and helping each other with schoolwork.
When we needed something to do, we called
each other and planned something. It never
crossed my mind that people thought we
were dating until junior year, and even then
I didn’t really do much; I had girlfriends that
weren’t Alice, and that was enough proof for
me—nothing else seemed necessary.
Alice wasn’t as gorgeous as the coffeeshop-window
girl, but she certainly was pretty.
She had straight brown hair that often
featured a streak of a bright color—tonight’s
color of choice was purple—that reached to
her shoulders and a round face that elongated
at her chin. Her eyes were a pretty shade
of gray-blue, and she wore a pair of black
plastic-frame glasses. Alice didn’t think she
was pretty, but Conor and I disagreed.
Alice and Conor had dated briefly junior
year. Their relationship had started as nothing
extraordinary; the three of us hung out as
a group most of the time, but a few months
into junior year they started hanging out privately.
At first they were very secretive about
it, not bothering to even consult me. When I
found out, I was upset; I didn’t want to start
getting left out of our shenanigans, and I
didn’t want things to get awkward when they
broke up (a development that I considered
59

60
inevitable). They disregarded my campaigning
for nearly a month, and I found myself
getting more and more worried about the
possibility of their relationship continuing.
Near the end of their relationship, Alice
had called me on a cold December Friday afternoon
after school, inviting me over for a
movie night at her place, and I was hoping
it would be just us. I showed up a little after
seven, like always, and her mom let me in and
sent me downstairs.
As I came down the stairs, I heard a
movie playing, but when I reached the bottom
I didn’t see Alice on the couch. This
didn’t faze me–sometimes she would lie on
a bed of throw pillows on the floor–but as
I walked over toward the couch, Alice and
Conor came into view. They were on the
floor, Alice on top of Conor, his hands on her
lower back, their lips pressed tightly together,
their eyes closed. I stood there for what
seemed like an eternity. Then Alice opened
her eyes for a split second and saw me.
“Gabe!” She immediately rolled off
Conor and got up, brushing herself off. Conor
was a bit bewildered, but Alice blurted out a
rehearsed-sounding response. “I didn’t know
you were going to be here so early.”
“Really?” I said, doubting her. “Because
this is the time I always come by.”
Conor chimed in. “What time is it?” He
wouldn’t look me in the eye. A lump was rising
in my throat.
I looked at my watch. The only sound
was the movie playing in the background. “It’s
seven twelve.” I paused again and looked up
to see Alice staring down at her shoes, unsure
of what to say, finally looking up as I broke
the silence again. “I didn’t know Conor was
coming over.”
“He wasn’t.” Silence again.
Conor finally broke the silence. “I’d better
go,” he said, and started toward the stairs,
but I beat him to the bottom step.
“No, I think I should,” I said sarcastically.
“You two have fun now. I’ll see you on
Monday.”
Alice said nothing as I left. She broke up
with Conor only days later.
Alice sent me up to the counter to convince
Conor to give us some free coffee.
“He’ll listen to you,” she said. “He’ll
only mess with me.”
Conor was waiting when I reached the
counter. We had a way of making it look to
his manager that I was actually buying something
rather than Conor giving it to me, but
he told me to give him fair warning each
time: I’d texted him that we were coming before
Alice picked me up.
“How may I help you, sir?” Conor asked
in his smart-ass tone.
“Well, I’d like two white-chocolate mochas,
please. That’ll be it.”
“Alright, your total is three twenty-seven,”
said Conor, taking the ten and change
I gave him, putting it in the cash register,
taking out two fives and giving me the same
handful of change back. It was perfect.
“Thank you” I winked at him as I took
the money. “When will these be ready?”
“Shortly,” he responded. “Can I have
your name?”
“Free.” I hadn’t used this name before.
Conor looked at me, obviously thinking it
was a bold choice.
I walked over and sat down next to Alice
while we waited for Conor to make our
drinks. The only people in the shop were
Alice, me, the girl in the window (who kept
glancing across the room in my direction),
and a mid-twenties guy writing in a notebook
at one of the tables. Alice had picked
the booth in the back corner, the furthest
from the door and the window-girl. After I
sat down opposite her, Alice jumped up and
sat down on my side of the table.
“So,” she said, staring down at her hands
as if trying to think of something to start a

conversation, “I think we should have a movie
night tomorrow. It’s been a few weeks.”
She paused. “I’ll supply the popcorn,” she
added, as if she needed to convince me.
“I like that idea,” I replied eagerly. “What
would we watch?”
“I dunno. We could decide later.” She
paused as if she was contemplating something.
“I wish I had the day off tomorrow
like you. Then we could just watch movies all
day. That would be quite fun,
wouldn’t it?”
I cracked a smile, saying,
“Indubitably.” Alice and I often
used words that were far
beyond our normal vocabulary.
We thought it was fun to
use words that most people
don’t, like indeed, quite, and
the like.
Suddenly the kid with
the notebook knocked his
hand into his cup of coffee,
sending it toppling to the
floor, and watched it explode;
it had been nearly full.
He looked down at it, pausing
for a moment as if debating
whether or not he should
clean up the mess, then picked up his coffeestained
things and made for the exit. Alice
and I stared for a moment then erupted in
laughter.
“Did you see that?” Alice said, holding
back tears. “He just ran out of here like he
killed somebody!” She kept laughing.
My reaction wasn’t much different.
“That was awesome. I have never seen anyone
bolt like that. I mean, it’s just coffee. He
should’ve cleaned it up, though. I feel bad
for Conor. He’ll probably have to clean that
up.” And indeed he did; he started walking
over toward us with a mop, giving us his typical
death-stare when he saw us laughing and
pointing to the mess. He wasn’t supposed to
talk to us while on the job after the last time
we were there—Alice and I distracted him
while he was on coffee-duty by balling up
napkins and tossing them at him. Not only
did he get behind on drink orders, but when
he threw the napkins back he hit an old lady
in the face, causing her to drop her coffee.
Instead of firing him, they demoted him to
cashier.
Alice, still laughing quite hard, looked
Pe r ry May over at the girl in the
window and caught her
looking at me.
“I think you know
her,” Alice said, pausing,
calming down. “That
or she knows you. She
keeps looking over here.
It’s weird.”
“Alice,” I said, “I
can assure you that I
have never seen her before.
She’s gorgeous,
though.”
Shouldn’t’ve added
that, I thought.
Alice decided this
was a perfect place to
pounce. “So you like the
way she looks, huh? Well,” she pushed her
glasses down her nose a bit, looking over
them, and put her index finger up to the corner
of her mouth, trying to be faux-seductive,
“what’s she have that I don’t? Hmm?”
“Nothing,” I said, trying to fix my
mistake. “But what do you have that she
doesn’t?
“Brains, of course.” We both cracked a
smile, and I saw that Conor was chuckling,
too. Alice wasn’t too fond of blondes; she
thought they were all ditzes.
A shout came from the other end of the
shop:
“Two white-chocolate mochas for
‘Free?!’”
61

62
As I got up to go get our coffee, Alice
began to laugh uncontrollably in the
corner booth, something I expected. But I
didn’t expect to see the window-girl looking
in my direction. I looked over, grinning
at my mischief, and looked directly into her
eyes. She winked at me and motioned for
me to come over with her right index finger.
I didn’t want to leave Alice alone, but she
seemed content for the moment reading
the banners on the wall, so, both mochas in
hand, I went and sat down
opposite the window-girl.
“So, I’m guessing your
name isn’t ‘Free,’” she said.
“So what is it? I’m Hailey.”
She smiled at me in a devious
way, as if she knew
something I didn’t.
“I’m Gabe.” I took a
drink of my mocha, glancing
over at Alice. “You
seem familiar. Do I know
you?”
“I work here,” Hailey
said. “My shift ended
a couple of hours ago, but
I’ve got nowhere to go and
nothing to do, so I stuck
around. I usually make your
drinks,” she said, nodding to my mocha.
“Thanks. They’re delicious,” I could see
Alice getting antsy. She wanted her coffee,
but I wasn’t finished yet.
“Oh, you’re quite welcome.” Hailey was
smiling at me. She paused, then looked in Alice’s
direction. “She’s not your girlfriend, is
she?”
Alice and I had for quite some time answered
the “are you two dating” question
from strangers with “yes,” just to throw them
off. We then would act like we thought the
world’s cutest couple might, including obscure
pet names—I would call her “gooberschnitzel”
and she would call me “monkey
buns”—never letting go of each other, and
always sitting on each other’s laps. It was
usually quite fun, but Hailey didn’t ask if
we were dating. She was making sure Alice
wasn’t my girlfriend. I liked where this was
going.
“No, she’s not. Just a really good friend,”
I said. Alice had finally stopped reading all
the banners and started staring at me, sticking
her tongue out, contorting her tongue
and lips, crossing her eyes, waving for me to
Er i c Mu e t h
come over there. I ignored
her gestures.
“Ah. I see. You
don’t really seem like
her type anyway,” Hailey
said. She still had that
devious look in her eyes.
“So, tell me about yourself.”
I did. I told her all
about the music I was
so passionate about and
how I planned to major
in music wherever
I decided to go to college,
even though I had
no idea yet where—or
even if—I might go. I
told her about my band
Crescendo Grand Finale, about the fanbase
we were finally building and the clubs around
town we had played. I found myself talking
too much, almost bragging, trying to impress
her. I soon found out how I knew her; she
played the lead in my all-male high school’s
most recent musical, for which I had played
the stand-up bass. Hailey seemed generally
interested in everything I had to say, closing
her laptop and actually making an effort to
listen. She was a junior at a nearby all-girls
school, and she already knew exactly where
she wanted to go to college (University of
Missouri), what she was going to major in
(broadcast journalism), and what she wanted

to do with her degree. She obviously knew
what she wanted to do, and she gave me
the impression that she always got what she
wanted. I wanted to go back over to my table
with Alice, but I couldn’t resist staying with
Hailey for one more minute, which became
two more, which became five, which became
ten. Every few moments I would look over
at Alice. Her funny faces were no more; now
she simply stared at her phone, occasionally
typing something, checking her watch,
a glum look across her face. We had come to
the coffee shop to hang out, to screw around
like we always do, but now I wanted nothing
other than to keep talking to Hailey. Girls
like Hailey didn’t usually talk to me—I was
the quintessential band geek, obsessed with
music in all its forms and focused on little
else, keeping to myself and my small group
of close friends—and I just wanted it to keep
it going. She’s talking to YOU, I thought. This
doesn’t happen! I didn’t want to let this chance
get by; I wanted to at least try and make
something—anything—happen.
As Hailey and I continued our conversation,
Alice got up from the booth. We three
were the only people in the coffee shop, and
it was relatively silent except for my voice
and Hailey’s. Alice started walking around
slowly, almost pacing, waiting for me to get
up and come over and give her the mocha
she had asked for. And at that moment it became
obvious to me as I watched her stare at
the ceiling, waiting as patiently as she could
for me: she wasn’t waiting for me to come
over there. She was waiting for me to realize
that she wanted to be mine. I could see her
jealous glances every time Hailey laughed,
every time I cracked my crooked smile that
made Alice blush.
But I didn’t want her to be mine, at least
not anymore. I had wanted to date her for a
while after I first met her, but it didn’t work
out. Then, she had had a boyfriend, J.J. He
was everything I wasn’t, and I didn’t think
he was her type. He was a lacrosse player,
the star and senior captain of his school’s
state-winning team. He lived in a suburb and
attended a private school nearly twice the
price of mine, one that competed with mine
on every level (and usually won). He was the
epitome of the clichéd, better-than-thou
jock, and he knew it. He carried himself as
if he were the king of everything, and whenever
the three of us would hang out he pulled
Alice as close as possible and refused to let
me get near her, as if I were a threat. One
could easily set off his temper, and he didn’t
like how close Alice and I were.
The last time I had seen J.J., Alice and I
had been listening to some music and playing
video games in her room when he showed
up out of nowhere, threw open her door,
jacked me in the face right below my left
eye, and knocked me to the floor. Alice and
I had gone bowling with some District Band
friends (but without J.J.) a few nights earlier.
He called and texted her a few times while
we were out, but she ignored him until she
got home. When she finally called him after
midnight that night, he was really upset and
forbade her from seeing me anymore, but
she didn’t think he was serious. He thought I
was trying to steal her from him, and he was
right—but Alice didn’t know that.
“What the hell, J.J.? Gabe is my friend,
and nothing more,” she said. “Our relationship
means nothing. What is your problem?
Oh, God, Gabe, your eye.”
Nothing. The word echoed in my ears after
she said it. Nothing. I didn’t say a word. I
didn’t know what to say. Nothing. Alice and
J.J. were still arguing, but I wasn’t listening to
them. Nothing was all I heard. Grabbing my
backpack, I picked myself up and walked out
of the room, taking my jacket off the doorknob
and gaining speed as I headed downstairs.
J.J. came out of the room and began
yelling at me to come back upstairs, calling
me names, threatening me, but I ignored
63

64
him, never once turning to face him, never
saying anything back. Alice’s mom, somewhat
stupefied and bewildered at the situation,
said something as I walked toward the
door, but I didn’t hear her; nothing was still
bouncing around in my ears.
Alice began to walk over toward the table
where Hailey and I were sitting, slowly
at first, sort of meandering throughout the
shop, but then deliberately, as if she were on
a mission. She paused every few steps, occasionally
turning around for a split second,
taking a step back to the booth in the corner,
but then turning back around, working
up the courage to come and say something,
anything. I never saw her gaze lift from the
floor, and after what must have been five
minutes she finally came all the way up to
the table.
“Hey Gabe?” she said timidly, “Can I
have my coffee? It’s been nearly fifteen minutes,
and I really don’t want it to get cold.”
For a moment I stared at her blankly,
forgetting that I had her coffee at the table.
“Oh, sure,” I said, handing her the cup. It
wasn’t hot anymore. “I’m sorry about that.
Meant to bring it over there. Kinda forgot.”
I was lying. She knew.
“Oh, it’s OK.”
She was waiting for me to invite her to
sit down and talk with me and Hailey, but
the invitation never came, and the three of
us just stayed there in awkward silence for a
few moments. Alice looked down at her feet.
Then, quietly:
“Gabe. I love you.”
I had no idea where this came from, and
I was shocked. Hailey was too, apparently,
and just looked at me, asking with her stare:
and your response is?
Alice was my friend. We had been
friends since we first met in District Band,
and we had been inseparable since that day
we first sat next to each other in the string
section. I thought she was beautiful that day;
she didn’t look like any of the other girls I
knew, and she had a sort of “whatever” air
about her. She didn’t take anything seriously—and
that’s what I had loved about her.
She had never cared if I would bring my
girlfriend along with me to an outing, never
showing any interest of dating me. But this
had changed, and I hadn’t noticed. Why now?
I wondered. Why do you say this now, after so
long? Couldn’t there have been a better time?
Hailey was embarrassed, and as she began
to gather her laptop and books she muttered
quickly, “I should go.” She seemed flustered,
a bit upset and confused. I still said
nothing, and I let her leave without even saying
goodbye. Alice sat down in Hailey’s seat,
but I stared through her.
“Well?” she said, hoping I would utter
those three words back to her, suddenly
cracking a smile. “Something seems wrong.
What is it?” She reached across the table and
grabbed my hand, looking straight into my
eyes. “What are you feeling?”
But I couldn’t say it. Her sudden profession
of love hadn’t changed anything. I had
loved her, but she had told J.J. our relationship
meant nothing, and she had said nothing
when I walked out on her and Conor. As I sat
at that table for what seemed like an eternity
of silence, mulling over my response, nothing
bounced around in my head, reminding me
that I wasn’t nearly as important to her as
she was to me, that although we might last
for a little while together, nothing would resurface
eventually. Nothing would be forever
between us. As I gently pulled my hand out
of her grasp, leaving her wispy fingers to curl
upon themselves, I finally spoke.
“Nothing,” I said. “I feel nothing.”

An g e l Ma i n t e n a n c e
Ben Minden-Birkenmaier
Even Seraphim, sailing smoothly
above this dusty earth,
must finally fail, and fall.
Like a pond collecting crumpled beer cans,
Like a carcass being slowly devoured,
their wings grow chips,
cracks spider across their faces,
and into those cracks slip fear, anger, despair,
and that most insidious, jealousy,
and at last they fall.
Why else would He have sent His only son?
No, Judas never did it for the silver.
65
Eva n Or f

66
De e p Bl u e Se a
Steven Dyke
The water from the sea trickled up onto the beach, wetting the
sand and turning it a dark brown. She sat just above the borderline
of damp earth, her head tucked in between her knees. She
wrapped her arms around her shins and stared out to sea. The sun
was just dipping below the horizon, as if it were an orange slowly falling
into the ocean. In one hand she held her mother’s old necklace, a
worn golden chain softly reflecting the light of the setting sun. The
waves tumbled onto the shore, roaring deeply under the breath of the
wind. The breeze caught the girl’s hair, softly flipping it into the air
and tangling it into light ivory webs. The sun was departing, letting
its light glimmer one last time over the horizon. It sank below the
depths of the ocean, and the girl closed her eyes. A lone tear trickled
down her face, and she gripped the necklace tighter. She sat listening
as the waves kept rumbling. She breathed in the scent of the ocean
air. Cracking her eyes open one final time, she saw the orange horizon
darkening, dimming the reflection against her streaked cheeks. She
let her eyes slip closed again, and from that spot in the sand, she let
her mind drift off. She let the rumbling waves pull her thoughts into
the waters—out there to float away into that deep blue sea.
Gr e g Fi s t e r

Th e Ax i s o f Ex i s t e n c e
Daniel Hart L’Ecuyer
He toils by day in his fields of wheat
That rustle in the evening wind
And tell him what they used to be
Then, so very long ago, before the light of day
When he walks amongst them quiet and slow
And listens to the twilight whispers.
67
He clutches the fence with his withering hand
A sprawling spine from some dead something’s skeleton
Whose bones came to dust and dust to dirt
And from dirt to the fields of wheat that he harvests
When the winds of the fall bring it all to the ground.
His eyes are set hard in his rough weathered face
And stare past the fields and over the trees
Beyond the horizon of the land of the living
On his wife of the past in the clouds of the sky
That ever are slurring to all the same gray,
That ever are shifting and drifting away.
His cold flat lips sit stooped and hunched
A rock in a rainstorm that’s seen them before
Jagged only at its broken side
That, given time, will wear down too.
Her body is buried past the garden
Beneath the stone that bears her name and time
The letters’ little curls and subtleties fading
Her winding life seamed up and covered,
Her story scrawled on scraps and writ in stone
With charcoal sticks and mason picks.
But through the windy, ever-ebbing tides of spring and fall
Through the scorching snow and cloudy drought
Through death and life and death his callused heart beats on.
For the leaves that die are always later leaves again,
The wheat will come again, he knows,
And his sons will harvest that
When he is gone and sweat is spent and blood dried up
And the meek inherit his tears.

Ea s t e r Risings
Bill George
68
On April sixteenth, two thousand and six,
a mother, whom I do not know,
bequeathed to me and others
whom she did not know
living fragments of her dead child.
In the terror of the night,
beneath the blank stare
of a hospital’s pitiless light,
she opened the tomb of her heart,
her grief dropping like cerements
that we might rise with the sun.
In March of two thousand and ten,
two callow widows
clutched to their breasts a grief
honed by a vengeance born
when their Chechen husbands died.
In the dark one terrible night
they saw in it the right
to pierce untold others
with fragments of their hearts of stone.
Sweet mother of God,
as you cradled your dead child
against your heaving breast, did
vengeance grapple with your heart?
Or did you, like my savior,
envision Easters
in Jerusalem and Gaza,
Dagestan and Belfast,
St. Louis and all hearts
that salved your roiling ache?
April 25, 2010